by Clancy, Tom
They fell asleep instead. The days of youthful “forced march” crime-fighting were a thing of the past. The McCaskeys needed rest.
Maria got up at five-thirty the next morning. She showered, made coffee, then woke her husband. McCaskey was not happy to have passed out like that. He joined her in the kitchen at six-thirty. They had coffee and whole wheat toast. By seven o’clock, they were on the road.
McCaskey had not done patrol work since he was a debutant. That was Bureau slang for a first-year agent. He forgot how tiring it could be. Or maybe how much older he was. That aside, it was rewarding work made more so by Maria’s enthusiasm. She loved police work and had an eye for detail unlike anyone he had ever met. She had decided that the killer would have driven from the murder sites. A woman alone, on foot, after dark, was likely to stand out. She might have been noticed from a bar or restaurant or by a passing motorist. That could have helped police determine her direction. If she had taken the Metro, she definitely would have appeared on a security camera. A taxi or limousine service was out of the question. Drivers paid attention to the people who got into their cars. Part of that was fear and part of it was bragging rights in case they happened to pick up a celebrity.
Assuming the killer was driving, she would have done so slowly. She would not have wanted to risk being stopped by the police. They might ask where she had been. If the killer had shared a drink with Wilson, the police might have smelled it and insisted on a sobriety test.
There were a great many assumptions in their scenario. But experience, deductive reasoning, and good instincts could be as important to an investigation as facts, especially in a case such as this where there was very little hard data. McCaskey was thinking about that as they drove from site to site. His Op-Center ID got him access to the videotapes or digital records. None of them proved to be helpful. There was no sign of the cars they were looking for.
Maria was at the wheel. As McCaskey watched familiar storefronts and offices slip by, he had a troubling thought. A century ago, the booksellers, diners, attorneys, government offices, and banks would have been especially vulnerable to fire. Today, it was a new kind of fire that could destroy them. The kind that had crippled Op-Center. He wondered if there would ever be a time when people did not have to fear life as much as they feared death.
Not the way we do things now, he told himself.
Funds to fight these dangers were allocated by political need instead of by threat assessment. People like himself, Maria, and Detective Howell could not do the job America was counting on them to do.
“Do you think the killer might have rented a car?” Maria asked.
McCaskey looked at his wife. “I’m sorry?”
“The killer,” Maria repeated slowly. “Do you think she might have rented a car?”
“I would be very surprised if she did,” he said. “Assassins don’t like to leave a paper trail.”
“This assassin did not expect to be exposed,” Maria pointed out.
“That is true.”
“And she certainly would have gone in with a fake ID,” Maria went on. “An experienced killer would have several, I’m sure.”
“I suppose we can try that search if this doesn’t get us anywhere,” McCaskey said. “But there have got to be hundreds of rental facilities in the D.C. metro area. It will take days to visit them all, and what do we tell them when we do?”
“We show them pictures of all the women and see if they look familiar. Or better yet, we can see if any of them show up on security cameras. None of those women would have had a reason to rent a car.”
“Yes, we could do that,” McCaskey said.
That was another difference between today and his days as a rookie G-man. Twenty-odd years ago, at least a dozen agents would have been assigned to a case like this. Now there were two.
“Darrell, were you all right a minute ago?” Maria asked.
“Sorry?”
“You went away from me.”
“Yes,” her husband said. “I was thinking, that’s all.”
“What about?” Maria asked.
“The pork barrel,” he said with a little laugh.
“Is that a restaurant?”
“In a manner of speaking,” McCaskey replied. He loved his beautiful, sweet, Spanish wife. She was so worldly, so tough, and so very linear. “A person of influence takes a lunch tray to his senator and gets plates full of federal funds. It’s another name for patronage.”
“I see,” Maria said. “It is the same as what bookmakers in Madrid call el roulette del amigo.”
“That’s exactly what it is. The roulette wheel of a friend,” McCaskey said. “The fix is in, the outcome predetermined.”
“Why were you thinking about that?”
“Because Op-Center was a victim of pork barrel politics. Maybe Paul is right, doing what he’s doing. If we had played the system better, we would have more people looking for a killer. And that should be our bottom line, should it not? Protecting law-abiding citizens.”
“That is my religion,” she said simply.
“Well put.” McCaskey looked out the window again. He noticed they were nearing Lafayette Park. “We’re near the Hay-Adams. Why don’t we go back there? Walk around, see if there is anything we may have overlooked.”
“All right,” she said.
That was the beauty of having married a cop. He might have to explain colloquial English to her, but he did not have to explain the intangibles of their lives and work. She got that.
They drove to the hotel, its tawny facade gleaming warmly in the morning light. They parked and decided to walk along Farragut North. The White House shone through the trees of Lafayette Park. McCaskey could see the press corps gathered in tents on the east side. The president was probably heading to the airport. It was too early in the week for Camp David. He remembered when the press looked for stories instead of handouts. There was a time when someone would have sniffed out the new relationship between the White House and Op-Center, exposed it, and not been afraid to write about it. Access to newsmakers. A different kind of pork barrel.
McCaskey took his wife’s hand. She gave it an encouraging squeeze. She seemed to sense the frustration he was feeling with this case and with the situation at Op-Center.
“We’ll get her,” Maria said.
“Thanks. I believe that,” McCaskey replied.
Maria stopped suddenly. She looked ahead. “No, I mean we will get her.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I was just thinking about the assassin, what I would do if I had just killed someone at the hotel,” Maria said. “I would be undistracted by conscience or the late hour. My only concern would be getting away quick and clean. That means I would be parked as close to the hotel as possible, on a relatively dark street.”
“Of course.”
“I would also have parked where there are the fewest eyeballs,” Maria said. “Where would that be?”
“The side of the hotel by Lafayette Park,” her husband said, “near where we parked.”
“Yes. Darrell, do you think any of the White House reporters might have been there? Maybe one of them doing a live report for CNN?”
“Very possibly,” he agreed. “But they would have been facing the White House, not the park.”
“Perhaps they turned on their cameras early.”
McCaskey looked in that direction. He did not think there was a chance of that, though he could not rule it out. Then something occurred to him. Something that made the pact with the devil suddenly seem more inviting.
“We may not need them,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because if the killer came this way, someone else may have gotten a good look at her,” McCaskey said.
Without saying anything else, he borrowed Maria’s cell phone and walked briskly toward the park.
THIRTY-NINE
Washington, D. C. Wednesday, 11:54 A.M.
Yuri and Svetlana Krasnov might have
imagined their own fate. They possessed the genetic Russian quality of dissatisfaction, inherited from their peasant parents. What they could never have imagined was the destiny of their son.
The young couple moved to the United States during the Cold War. They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and worked in the Soviet embassy. She was a stenographer, and he was a translator. Svetlana was also a cryptographer and helped to interpret intercepted military and governmental communiqués. Yuri translated messages from Americanborn spies. One morning, three months after arriving, they were approached by a CIA officer. He offered them a chance to work with the Agency. The agent wanted to know who was giving them intelligence so that the CIA could distribute disinformation to the Kremlin. In exchange, when it came time for the Krasnovs to be rotated back to the Soviet Union—after eighteen months, to make sure they did not become overly comfortable with the American way of life—they would be given asylum if they chose to stay. If their collaboration were ever discovered, the Krasnovs would immediately be taken into protective custody and relocated.
The couple had learned a great deal about the United States since moving here. They liked what they saw. What’s more, they had a six-year-old daughter and fouryear-old son and wanted them to grow up in a land of opportunity. A land without breadlines or restrictions on what they could say and think.
The Krasnovs were found out seven months later. A floater agent, one assigned to spy on spies, read a mole’s report and resealed it before it was turned over to Yuri for translation. The deception was discovered. The Krasnovs fled. The family was relocated to Wisconsin and given the new last name Brown, chosen by Svetlana. She was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip.
Young Fayina and her brother Vladilen grew up American, and no one could have been more of a patriot than Vlad. He joined the marines as soon as he turned eighteen and proved to be remarkably skilled with the M-14. His proficiency was the result of the years he had spent hunting with his father in the woods. Implicitly, the elder Brown wanted to be ready in case the KGB ever came looking for them. Fortunately, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that unlikely.
Vlad was so good with weapons that the Marines appointed him to a special reaction team at the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan. As part of his assignment he was sent to Camp Foster, Okinawa, to train with the new Designated Marksman Rifle. The DMR was an urban combat rifle. Before being certified, Vlad had to be able to make a moving head shot from two hundred yards and hit a stationary thumbnail-size object from the same distance.
He placed number one at the base, and among the top 1 percent of all Marine marksmen nationwide. Shortly before the Iraq War, Captain Vlad Brown was reassigned to special duty at the White House. Along with two other men, Vlad spent his nights on the roof with infrared glasses, watching for potential attackers. His DMR was worn across his back in a loose leather sling. He could have the rifle unshouldered and aimed in less than three seconds. His orders were to report any suspicious movement within three hundred yards of the White House. Vlad wore a three-ounce video camera on his left shoulder, where it would not get in the way of his DMR. The camera relayed images to Secret Service On-site Command based in the West Wing. If the SSOC determined a threat was real, Vlad would be ordered to neutralize it.
The post was quite a journey for the son of Russian defectors, unthinkable a quarter century before. The young man took some ribbing because of his very Russian name, but not too much. That was the one area where Vlad Brown was self-conscious and extremely sensitive. Though the captain passed the monthly psych evaluations, which were required for armed individuals with presidential access, his fellow marksmen sensed his name was an area to avoid. There were some things team members picked up on that psychologists did not.
Vlad was rarely called to the White House during the day. Marksmen required seven or eight hours’ sleep to be their sharpest and, besides, he did not like to be out much during the day. After seven months on the job, his eyes were accustomed to night, his body to the pleasant night air, his ears to the sounds of the evening and early morning. He did not want to do anything to upset that balance.
But the president’s chief of staff said it was important, so Captain Brown put off going to sleep, called up a staff car, and had himself driven from the Marine Barracks at Eighth and I to the White House. Upon arriving, he went directly to the SSOC office and was introduced to Darrell and Maria McCaskey of Op-Center. The former Russian citizen felt an immediate empathy with Mrs. McCaskey. Obviously, she was not a native to these shores.
Secret Service Agent Stephen Kearns—the son of Greek immigrants—offered Vlad a seat in the small office. He declined. Mrs. McCaskey was standing, and the officer would not sit in her presence. Her husband introduced himself to Vlad. He looked as tired as the marine captain felt.
“Thank you for coming,” McCaskey said. “Captain Brown, we are investigating the assassination of William Wilson at the Hay-Adams Hotel. I assume you’ve heard about it?”
“I have, sir.”
“We understand from Agent Kearns that you wear a small video camera equipped with night-vision capabilities,” McCaskey said. “We would like to look at the images from that night.”
“We believe the individual we are seeking walked past the park, past your observation post,” Mrs. McCaskey added.
“Agent Kearns, do you have any objection?” Vlad asked. Because of the cooperative arrangement between the Secret Service and the marines, dual releases were required before a third party could examine White House security tapes.
“Mr. and Mrs. McCaskey have been cleared by the office of the chief of staff,” Kearns informed him.
“Then you have my permission, sir,” Vlad told the Op-Center officer.
“Thank you,” McCaskey said.
Agent Kearns had booted the digital videodisc on which the images were stored. The SSOC officer swung the monitor toward the McCaskeys. The couple must have friends in high places to have been given access to these images. Few people even knew they existed.
The image was time-coded and bookmarked in fiveminute chunks. Kearns jumped directly to the times the McCaskeys wished to see. Vlad stood back while Darrell and Maria bent very close to the monitor and to each other. There was something touching about it.
A woman walked past the screen.
“Hold on!” Darrell McCaskey said. “Can you hold the image and enlarge it?”
Agent Kearns obliged. A blurry green image of a woman filled the screen. She was walking away from the hotel toward Pennsylvania Avenue. Mr. McCaskey pointed at the monitor with his pinkie. He traced what appeared to be a faint smudge of dress beneath the woman’s long jacket.
“See the line under the hem?” McCaskey asked his wife excitedly.
“Yes,” Mrs. McCaskey said.
“What do you think?”
“That could be satin,” she replied.
“Sir, if you give me a minute, I’ll extrapolate the color information and sharpen the image,” Kearns said.
“Please do,” Mr. McCaskey said.
No one spoke as the computer did its job. Though the image was entirely in tones of green, the image processor was capable of matching a color to each particular shade. The saturation of green corresponded to the comparative brightness of a color. By removing the green and matching the remaining light intensity to a color, the image could be accurately colorized. At the same time, the computer scanned the picture to differentiate between legitimate information and pictorial noise such as blurred motion, video snow, and other artifacts. It removed these flaws by replicating information from adjoining pixels.
Within two minutes, the woman looked as if she had posed for a profile picture in daylight. The McCaskeys studied it for a minute, then asked Agent Kearns to print the image. He obliged. He handed the eight-by-ten to Mr. McCaskey.
“Do you recognize the individual?” Kearns asked.
“Yes,” Mr. McCaskey replied. “Gentlemen, you have been of immeasurable assistanc
e. Thank you.”
Mrs. McCaskey smiled. It was formal but sincere. For Vlad, it was worth coming back to work. One day, when his assignment ended and the pressure of his job was behind him, Vlad hoped to find a woman like that. A woman with poise, intensity, and beauty.
The captain returned to his car and driver. Vlad had to admit it was encouraging how people from four nations had just worked together to solve the death of someone from a fifth country. There was probably a lesson in that for the United Nations and the world in general. But he was too tired to search for it. And maybe it was not worth analyzing. As Yuri used to say with a dismissive wave of his hand, “It’s politics. My keeshkee cannot take it anymore.”
Maybe the Krasnov gene pool and intestines were averse to chaos in general. It was lunch hour, and Vlad found the traffic disturbing. It was thick with growling buses, limousines, and Washingtonians who honked at tourists who slowed as they passed each familiar landmark. Vlad shut his tired eyes, and the comfort of darkness returned. Along with a troubling realization.
He shared a love of nighttime with someone else. Someone whose values were the antithesis of his own: the assassin.
Vlad nudged this thought from his mind. It was way beyond his pay grade. Besides, the gene pool that disliked chaos also gave him something else. Something with which there was no debating. A part of him that did not want to think about this: his keeshkee.
FORTY
Salt Lake City, Utah Wednesday, 10:17 A.M.
Mike Rodgers was changing planes when he checked the personal cell phone he had bought to join the twenty-first century. He never took the phone with him to work, so it had been unaffected by the electromagnetic pulse. There was a call from Maria McCaskey and plenty of time to return it. The connecting flight to San Diego did not leave for another sixty minutes.