Venice answered first. “Loud and clear.”
Boxers gave a thumbs-up, and then said for Venice’s benefit, “Me too.” To his boss, Big Guy said, “I’ll find the back door and give you a shout when I’m in place.” Often as not, the back door man got a lot of action after the front door was knocked on.
Jonathan loitered on the lawn while Boxers disappeared around the back. The place had a startlingly unkempt look about it. Beyond the bald spots in the lawn, the shrubs along the front porch were untrimmed in the extreme, with one errant boxwood branch extending to within a foot or two of the porch roof gutter. Jonathan wondered if the scofflaw boxwood triggered apoplexy among the residents of Warrenton Woods.
Of greater concern to Jonathan were the drawn curtains on a sunny day. While the world was filled with people who preferred darkness to light, Jonathan’s experience had taught him that people who chose to live behind closed curtains did so because they had secrets to hide.
“I’m in place in the rear,” Boxers said in Jonathan’s ear. “To my eye, it’s shotgun construction.”
Jonathan understood that to mean that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back door. Translation: the front door and the back door were both located in the center of the building.
Jonathan thumbed his mike. “Roger that. Here we go.” He paused ten seconds to scan the environment behind him to make sure that there were no curious children or intrusive dog walkers who could screw things up. He mounted the three steps up to the porch and then walked two strides to the cheaply constructed red door. He pounded heavily with his fist. “Albert Banks! FBI! Open the door!”
He waited five seconds and then said the same thing.
No response.
“I’m kicking the door,” Jonathan said into his radio. He drew his Colt.
“Me too,” Boxers replied.
A big concern in kicking a light hollow-core door like this one was the threat of plowing all the way through and trapping your leg. Jonathan took careful aim at the strong part of the door, along the edge, and fired the sole of his boot into a spot just below the knob, where the tongue of the lock met the jamb. The door blasted open as if he’d used explosives.
He stepped into the foyer, half-crouched in an isosceles stance, weapon drawn and safety off, to find Boxers thirty feet away on the far side of the house, amid twice the amount of doorjamb shrapnel as that which surrounded Jonathan.
“Albert Banks!” Jonathan yelled. “Federal agents. Show yourself.”
Movement upstairs. Boxers heard it, too. They moved as one, Jonathan leading the way, first up seven steps to the landing, where he paused to scan what he could see of the second floor, and then up the remaining six steps to the top. “Albert Banks! Step out and show your hands!”
The second floor presented four closed doors that Jonathan could see at a glance: One at the far end of the house on his left, and then two on the front side on the left of what appeared to be a louvered door linen closet, and then beyond that, a door in a longer wall that he assumed must be the master bedroom.
“I need orders, Boss,” Boxers said from the landing, below and behind.
“Albert Banks, we are federal agents! Don’t make us—”
Jonathan heard movement—sounded like the shuffling of papers—behind the door directly ahead, just to the left of the linen closet. “Cover the hall,” he said to Boxers, and he darted forward. He covered the ten feet of distance in two long strides. He tried the knob on the door and was surprised to find it unlocked.
As the door swung inward, Jonathan brought his pistol to bear, again gripped with both hands, his finger poised just outside the trigger guard. The room was clearly intended to be a home office, but with all the trash and papers and assorted junk on the floor it had a ransacked look about it. At first glance, the closed closet doors concerned him, but when he realized how much crap was stacked in front of them, he all but eliminated the possibility of someone hiding inside. If they couldn’t get the doors open, they couldn’t pose much of a problem.
The more immediate concern was the terrified man on the far side of the desk. He was pounding frantically on his keyboard, his eyes never straying from the screen. Jonathan recognized the features he’d seen in the old photographs, but they hid behind folds of jowls. This was a man who needed to stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets for a while.
“Mr. Banks,” Jonathan warned, “I’m a federal officer. Step back from the desk right now and show me a set of empty hands.”
Boxers appeared in the doorway behind Jonathan, filling the frame. “Floor’s clear.”
Banks never looked up from his screen. If he thought he was pretending not to hear, he needed to work on his poker face.
“Banks!” Jonathan shouted it this time. “What could possibly be more important than getting shot?” He took a step forward.
“No,” Banks said. “Please don’t.”
“We just need to talk to you, sir.”
The speed of his typing seemed to pick up, as if that were even possible. “Please stay away,” Banks said. He never made eye contact, and his hands remained concealed behind the stack of crap and his computer monitor.
“Mr. Banks, you need—”
“I said please!” Banks yelled. When he finally looked up, his hand held a big chrome-plated .357 magnum.
“No!” Jonathan shouted.
Banks brought the revolver to his own temple. His eyes burned wild, as if he’d been pushed past anything that resembled reality and reason.
“Mr. Banks, don’t,” Jonathan said.
“I won’t let you do that to me,” he said.
Jonathan’s hands never moved from his weapon, and his eyes never left Banks. “Suicide doesn’t solve anything,” he said. “Just put—”
Banks’s face hardened. He started to lower the weapon from his head, but Jonathan didn’t buy it. He prepared for—
Banks jerked the gun up and pointed it at Jonathan.
The .45 barked twice, as if by reflex, sending two bullets through the same hole into Banks’s heart and dropping him in a heap into his chair. As the echo cleared, the man looked as if he might have fallen asleep at his desk.
“Goddammit!” Jonathan spat. “Really?”
“That went well,” Boxers said.
“He’s a moron. He pointed a weapon at me.”
Boxers’ hand touched his shoulder. “You had no choice, Boss. Suicide by cop.”
Jonathan kicked the front of the desk. “Shit.”
“I don’t think we should be dawdling here,” Boxers said. “In case the neighbors heard or get curious.”
Jonathan didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t going to let this be a total bust. He holstered his weapon and walked around to Banks’s side of the desk. He rolled the chair and the body out of the way and examined the computer screen. It showed lists of files. Jonathan figured he must have been trying to erase them. If they were worthy of being erased, they were worthy of being read.
Jonathan pulled his Leatherman tool from the pouch on his belt and tossed it to Boxers. “Pull the drives out,” he said, nodding to the CPU that sat among the detritus atop the desk. While the Big Guy took care of that, Jonathan scanned the assembled crap for anything that looked relevant. There wasn’t enough time to scour thoroughly, but his attention was drawn to the stack of ancient five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that seemed to have been staged at the edge of his desk. He hadn’t seen any of those in years—since, say, the early nineties, just about the time when Banks would have been hanging out with his revolutionary buddies.
There were also a dozen or so thumb drives and a couple of CDs. Jonathan pulled the plastic liner out of the trash can, dumped the garbage onto the floor, and loaded the bag with the disks.
A minute later, Boxers held two hard drives in his hand. He gave the Leatherman back to Jonathan, and then it was time to go.
CHAPTER TEN
“Please tell me you’re calli
ng from a secure line,” Irene said.
“Encrypted satellite phone,” Jonathan assured. He and Boxers were in the Batmobile, on their way back to the Cove.
“You killed him?”
“He pulled a weapon on me. I had no choice. I thought you should know.”
“How thoughtful. I presume the body is still in the house?”
“Yes. He’s not dead an hour yet. Can you, uh, take care of that for me? As far as I know, he lived alone.” A small but very profitable slice of the covert world dealt with the surreptitious disposal of bodies. The contractors were good enough at their jobs that many of their projects remained listed as missing persons forever.
Wolverine’s sigh came through the speakerphone loud and clear. “Good God, Scorpion. Yes, I’ll take care of it. Did you kill Gutowski too?”
“Haven’t yet had the chance,” Jonathan said. “He’s next on our list to visit.”
“Don’t bother,” Irene said. “He’s already dead.”
Boxers and Jonathan exchanged looks. “When?”
“His body was found this morning in his house.” Irene spoke as if she were describing a household event. “His fingers and toes were broken. A needle had been inserted in his right eye.”
“Suicide?” Boxers asked with a chuckle. Ever the king of bad timing.
Jonathan silenced him with a raised hand. He wanted to think this through.
“Is anyone there?” Irene asked after the long silence.
“I’m thinking,” Jonathan said. “People are tortured to deliver information, Wolfie. The more important the info, the more brutal the torture. Banks was out-of-his-head terrified. He said, ‘I’m not going to let you do that.’ Somehow, I think he knew about Gutowski’s torture. That would certainly explain the suicide. Anything’s better than death by torture.”
“You’re suggesting that they shared a secret?”
“I think so, yes. We pulled the hard drives out of his computer and made off with a bunch of data storage. We’ll start plowing through that stuff and get back to you when we know something. Meanwhile, what’s happening on your end? Any developments?”
“The White House press corps is beginning to sniff around Mrs. Darmond’s absence, but that hasn’t reached critical mass yet.” Irene cleared her throat.
Jonathan had learned that that was a tell. “But there’s more, right?”
“Well, yes, there is. I’ve been made aware of a disturbing blog post by a young man named David Kirk. Have you ever heard of Kirk Nation?”
“Um, no.” A glance to Boxers confirmed that he hadn’t heard of it, either.
“Well, it’s fairly influential among some of the, shall we say, more paranoid sector of the commonweal. It’s got thousands of followers, and Mr. Kirk posted this afternoon that a DC cop named DeShawn Lincoln was killed last night by the Secret Service in the middle of the Mall.”
“Which mall?”
“The one in Washington. Across from the Smithsonian Castle. He said that Officer Lincoln was killed to keep him quiet about the details of the shooting at the Wild Times Bar.”
“Uh-oh.”
“You bet, uh-oh. But it gets even more interesting. David Kirk is in fact the District’s primary suspect in the murder.”
“So, they’ve got him in custody.”
“Not yet. He seems to have disappeared.”
“You’re the FBI,” Boxers growled. “You got phone records to work with, credit cards, God knows what else.”
“Thank you for a lesson in my capabilities,” Irene said. “We’re searching for him. But between us, not necessarily for the same reason.”
Jonathan got it. “You’re thinking protective custody.”
“Exactly. At least until we can sort out fact from fiction. Paranoia from truth.”
“This is Washington,” Boxers said. “Paranoia and truth are the same thing.”
Irene continued, “According to Kirk Nation, Officer Lincoln called Kirk in a panic, saying that he had to meet with him ASAP to reveal something about the Secret Service’s role in the shooting of other Secret Service agents at the Wild Times.”
“Sounds to me like this Kirk kid is aching to get himself whacked,” Boxers said.
“Apparently they already tried,” Irene said. “His blog entry this morning read like he’d lost his mind. He talked about going to meet his friend—he referred to him as Deeshy—but when he wasn’t at the appointed place and he wouldn’t answer his cell phone, he went looking. Then he tells about two men emerging from behind the carousel—apparently the place where the officer’s body was found—and they approached him to kill him.”
“Can’t say much for the talent they’re using,” Jonathan said. “How’d they miss?”
“I don’t know. The blog entry said that the bad guys had a knife. Maybe he just outran them. In any case, Kirk took a cab from Constitution Avenue and dumped his cell phone with the cabbie.”
A piece fell into place for Jonathan. “You said that he made calls to the decedent’s phone just before all the crazy stuff happened?”
Irene paused. In Jonathan’s mind, he could see it dawning on her face. “They didn’t have to chase him,” she said. “The fact of the phone call, combined with the kid’s decision to run, gave them everything they needed to get a warrant.”
“Who filed for the warrant?” Boxers asked.
“I’ll find that out,” Irene said. “Guys, I really want David Kirk put someplace safe.”
“Finding him is an important first step,” Jonathan said.
“I know where he is,” Irene said. “At least I know where he was about twenty minutes ago.”
Jonathan scowled and looked to Boxers. Got a shrug in return. “But you said—”
“I can’t find him legally,” Irene said. “It’s against the law to troll private conversations looking for key words. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done by certain resourceful people who make their living violating the law.”
Boxers chuckled. “I think she means us, Boss.”
“Last time I played with the NSA on domestic matters they got really cranky,” Jonathan said.
“Everybody at Fort Meade is cranky these days,” Irene said. “It helps to be connected.”
“You already have the address, don’t you?”
“In fact I do. Are you ready to copy?”
Jonathan keyed the mike on his portable radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”
He had to wait an uncharacteristically long time for her to answer. “Scorpion, Mother Hen. Did you just call me?”
“Affirm. Everything okay?”
“It is, now that I’m out of the bathroom. Why are we on the radio all of a sudden? I had my phone with me.”
“We’re going hot,” Jonathan said. He knew she’d understand that to mean they had a new op. “I need you to find out what the physical security of Eastern Towers Apartments is like in Alexandria, Virginia. You need me to spell it?”
“Unless there’s something weird about the words ‘eastern’ or ‘towers,’ I would say no. Stand by.”
As Venice took care of the research, Boxers navigated the Batmobile toward the sprawling apartment complex. Finding a spot for the enormous vehicle was always a challenge, and here it proved to be particularly difficult. The beast took up two spaces if you wanted to open the doors all the way, and at this hour, when just about everybody was home, they had to drive out to the back forty to find a suitable spot.
“Okay, I’ve got it,” Venice said. “ProtecTall Security. This should be a cinch. I presume you want me to override their cameras?”
“Exactly,” Jonathan said. ProtecTall was one of Northern Virginia’s largest contractors for providing electronic security for offices, apartments, and individual residences. They were the people on the other side of the electrical impulses when someone opened a door they shouldn’t have or when a wisp of smoke passed in front of a smoke detector. More to the point for Jonathan, they also supervised hundreds if not thousands of un
monitored security cameras. When you saw grainy images of missing persons or wanted fugitives on the evening news, chances were good that the recording came from ProtecTall.
Because they were so ubiquitous, Venice had long ago learned the codes to override their systems. Now, it was only a matter of knocking out the cameras for the next ten or fifteen minutes to make sure that there would be no electronic trail of images. If possible, she’d even go back a little on the recordings to erase the footage of Jonathan and Boxers arriving in the parking lot.
“We doin’ the straight FBI thing again?” Boxers asked as they started the hike toward the main entrance.
“It’s been working well so far, don’t you think?”
“It’s been an exciting day, I’ll give you that,” Boxers said. “I say he’s not here. This feels too easy. Or if he is here, he’s ready for a body bag.”
Jonathan didn’t respond. What could he say? Irene had talked someone at the NSA into breaking about a dozen laws to scan cell phone traffic in a radius of fifty miles from the center of DC looking for a short list of key words that would connect David Kirk to either the Wild Times Bar, the First Lady, or DeShawn Lincoln. There’d of course been thousands of hits—this was an ongoing criminal investigation, after all—but when they filtered them through the list of Kirk’s known associates, they came up with two. One belonged to Charlie Baroli, Kirk’s boss at the Enquirer, and Becky Beckeman, a coworker at the paper. The playback from Becky’s featured a voice that was four-nines consistent with the voice of David Kirk.
Jonathan felt no guilt about stealing three-quarters of one second of taxpayers’ computing time. Like Boxers, however, he worried that the solution was so obvious that that the bad guys would think of it, too.
The stroll to the front of the building took all of two minutes. Jonathan switched his radio to VOX, which meant that every word he spoke would be transmitted. That kept him from having to press a transmit button—a gesture that never failed to draw attention. “Are we ready to go yet, Mother Hen?”
A pause.
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