“Detective Thierrot’s sensitivities notwithstanding,” Sam went on, “I didn’t ask you here to interfere with your investigation, or even comment on it. As I started to say, we think the good Monsignor was slightly less than good, from a national security perspective. We think he worked for some nasty folks, who gave him the code name Curmudgeon. I’d like to ask you to let us peek over your shoulder at the evidence.”
Everyone at the table knew it wasn’t really a request.
Bruised, Thierrot was first to reply. “Absolutely. Just as soon as the court order comes through.” In theory, a magistrate’s approval was required before the intelligence apparatus could gain access to information and evidence in cases involving US citizens, or incidents occurring on US soil.
There were 30,000 National Security Agency employees who might argue that things worked quite differently in practice.
Every usable lead in the Monsignor Worthington case would go stone cold during the eons it would take to jump through the bureaucratic and legal hoops involved in obtaining such a court order, but Thierrot’s parry didn’t faze or anger Sam. She wasn’t afraid to bend the rules.
She smiled and nodded, then picked up the phone in the conference room. She pushed the appropriate auto-dial button as the rest of the room watched her, and after a brief pause, they overheard a male voice on the other end. “Larry, dearest, I seem to have misplaced a phone number. Would you be a sweetheart and look for it in that disaster of an office of yours? Bill Nichols is the name. Washington Times, I believe.”
“The-hell-you-will!” Thierrot was instantly red-faced and wild-eyed, and he nearly leapt out of his chair.
Sam put on a look of mock surprise, which morphed into an amused smile.
Bill Nichols had personally named Thierrot in a police brutality incident several years earlier. Thierrot had paid him an uninvited midnight visit, but Nichols had refused to be intimidated. An old-school journalist, Nichols valued his integrity over his kneecaps. He had filed a civil suit against Thierrot, which had settled out of court.
Sam thought that Nichols might enjoy printing an expose’ on lax crime scene discipline and sub-par police investigative work, particularly once the journalist learned the identity of the lead investigator responsible for the beleaguered department’s most recent debacle.
She bet that Thierrot couldn’t stand the heat of another onslaught from the press. His apoplectics told Sam that her shot had found its mark.
She stared at him wordlessly. A long silence ensued.
A profane surrender from Thierrot eventually ended the standoff. Then he got up and stormed out.
Sam spoke sweetly into the phone. “Thanks anyway, Larry. Looks like we figured it out on our own.”
She worked out the details of the information exchange with Thierrot’s minions, who agreed to keep her apprised of all new developments in the Monsignor Worthington murder investigation. Thierrot wasn’t a likeable guy, and his understudies had enjoyed watching their cranky boss get his ass kicked by a thirty-something pinup model.
“Problems. Need to chat,” typed Thierrot. He sent the text message, then started the engine of his unmarked car.
He flashed his badge at the parking garage attendant on his way out. The gate rose just fast enough to miss the headlight, and barely cleared the windshield as well. Thierrot wasn’t in a waiting mood.
Seconds later, he felt the familiar vibration of his phone, and held it far enough away from his face to allow his eyes to focus on the answer to his request. He saw just one word: “No.”
Sonuvabitch. He gripped and twisted the steering wheel, but he was too angry to yell.
If his secretary had been in the car with him, she would have recognized the signs of serious trouble. When Thierrot became too upset to raise his voice, too mad to scream and carry on, he was in a state of sufficient rage to make ill-advised decisions with life-altering consequences.
That was the chief reason Thierrot was the oldest division chief in the DC police department. Despite his occasional investigative “irregularities,” he was too brilliant and effective to be fired, but he was too unpredictable and irascible to be promoted.
He put his phone back in his jacket pocket, and drove on in irate silence.
He had no idea how long he had been driving when he arrived in Old Town Alexandria, but it had to have been a good thirty minutes. Traffic wasn’t heavy by DC standards, but it had taken him long enough to arrive that his rage had coalesced into a dark, determined state of mind.
He slid the sedan into a recently vacated parking spot along the one-way street, pushed the button to pop open the trunk, and walked to the back of the car.
He opened the trunk, moved the emergency traffic markers to one side, flung aside the dark cloth covering the spare tire compartment, and lifted the particleboard partition.
He reached into the corner of the compartment and retrieved a small vinyl bag containing the jack, tire iron, and lug key.
The bag also contained Monsignor Worthington’s wallet.
Thierrot ignored it, and the cognitive dissonance reprised by its presence. He didn’t lie to himself about his moral shortcomings, but neither did he relish staring down the evidence of his complicity.
Thierrot dumped out the contents of the tire kit, then reached a corpulent hand into the empty vinyl bag. He felt a thin, hard, rectangular object taped to the side of the bag near the bottom seam. He gently pulled away the tape and brought the plastic rectangle out of the bag and into the light.
It was a cell phone SIM card, the small electronic wafer that permitted a cell phone to function. It also broadcast the owner’s identity, represented as a series of digits, to the enormous wireless network.
This was no ordinary SIM card. It was designed to operate seamlessly in the American cell phone network, and its shape and markings made it indistinguishable from any other card of similar function. But the card in Detective Thierrot’s hand was neither designed nor manufactured in the United States, and it had been handed to him weeks ago by someone whose citizenry was anything but American.
Thierrot tucked the card into his pocket, slammed the trunk closed, and walked unhurriedly across the street to the trinket shop.
“Is there a way that I can be helpful today?” The shopkeeper asked as Thierrot walked in the door. The question sounded stilted, but it was, in fact, a code.
“I suspect so.” Thierrot’s reply used a trigger word, suspect, which communicated something specific to the shopkeeper. Thierrot held his breath and tried to remain calm as he awaited the shopkeeper’s coded reply.
The shopkeeper’s eye lingered on Thierrot. Finally, he said, “Might I suggest the gentleman start with our sale items? There are many options.”
“Thank you. I’ll have a look.” Thierrot felt relief at the successful exchange. These things were always dicey. It was a dangerous game. Very careful people were routinely caught and killed. Only the paranoid survived, and usually not indefinitely. Espionage was more bad habit than career.
Thierrot wandered through the store for a few minutes, then left quietly without as much as a nod or wave.
There are many options, he repeated silently as he walked to his car. T-A-M-O. Terrett Avenue, Main Office.
Even with traffic, it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to get there. There were many other places the shopkeeper could have sent him, all of which were further away than the shabby apartment complex in Alexandria, VA. He was silently glad for the sudden stroke of good luck.
He was long overdue, he noted sullenly.
10
Capitol Hill, Washington DC. Friday, 12:03 p.m. ET.
Senator Frank Higgs, one of Nevada’s two Democrats in the US Senate, mulled his options.
The loss of Curmudgeon was a potentially debilitating blow. The Intermediary had said that the agent “was retired.” The euphemism didn’t mean that the priest-cum-spy had decided to write his memoirs. It meant that they might or might not find his
body.
It was unusual for a member of the legislative branch to become so deeply involved in operational intelligence matters, but Frank Higgs wasn’t an ordinary senator.
At the same time, he wasn’t an intelligence insider, one of those guys who had held a string of cover jobs working in various branches of the government while pursuing their “real” career in the CIA, DIA, NSA, or other covert agency, many of which had been rolled up into the Homeland Security behemoth over the past decade.
Those guys weren’t terribly difficult for Higgs to spot nowadays, a result of his long years dealing with people who kept big, gnarly secrets.
Higgs was a lawyer by training, but hated practicing law. Intellectual property had been his specialty. It paid well, but required a life of endless pedantry. He lasted long enough to make partner, spent a couple of years enjoying the perks of his new position in the law office pyramid scheme, and then took a sabbatical to explore more engaging career options and indulge his appetite for altered states of consciousness and interesting sex partners.
He took up residence in Las Vegas for more focused debauchery. He made a few new intriguing acquaintances. They frequented sex clubs, offbeat bars, and out-of-the-way restaurants. They were fitness fanatics, but had a penchant for vices like booze and cigarettes. He never heard anyone use anyone else’s last name, and their stated occupations seemed strangely beneath their obvious intelligence.
They disappeared for weeks at a time, then reentered the hangout scene without missing a beat.
Higgs had made the mistake of asking once where a particularly boisterous member of “the regulars” had made off to, as the man hadn’t graced the usual haunts in several weeks. Higgs had received hard stares and nearly unfriendly “Not my week to watch him” remarks in reply. Nobody really talked about what anybody else did.
Stranger still, nobody really talked about not talking about it.
Higgs wasn’t slow on the uptake, though, and his gruff disposition melded nicely enough with the edgy crowd of acquaintances who made the Vegas rounds with him. Without any real intention of doing so, he slowly found himself gravitating toward insider status.
One of the older and brawnier gentlemen finally formalized Higgs’s position by casually inquiring whether Higgs might not mind a brief bit of lawyer work of a slightly sketchy nature. “Mostly-legal legal work,” the man had called it.
Never having sat for the Nevada bar, Higgs didn’t much mind undertaking work that might have gotten him disbarred. He charged an appropriate risk premium, of course.
It turned out that many of the people in the seedy coterie were independent contractors who often did quasi-temporary work for the same small group of employers.
Higgs’s introductory task was to make sure that the financing for a future foray—third-world countries seemed de rigeur—was sufficiently laundered through a string of special-purpose legal entities.
His job was to obfuscate the financial links between the operational arm, called Global Solutions LLC, and a financial intermediary called Greater America. Greater America was undoubtedly a cutout as well, but Higgs had the good sense not to ask too many questions about it.
One thing had led to another, and Higgs soon found himself with a steady stream of one-off jobs that paid extremely well. It wasn’t long before his income exceeded what he made as a partner at his old law firm, and the fact that he was working just a few hours per week was icing on the cake.
He didn’t much mind operating at the fringes of legality. In fact, he was rather used to it, as most of his intellectual property clientele had been looking for ways to exploit loopholes that would allow them to swipe, or defend the prior swiping of, someone else’s bright ideas.
Over time, Higgs’s sharp political instincts had garnered the notice of his employers, who had developed a prickly problem.
Clandestine operations were never well understood on the Hill, and a string of high-profile failures had caused public uproar and outrage over the “secret wars” the US government was waging. Congressional support for intelligence agencies with voracious budgetary appetites waned, and Higgs was installed first in the House of Representatives, and later in the Senate, to counterbalance his queasier Congressional counterparts.
He had been coached through the campaigns, and had never once worried about raising funds. The real insiders put him in place to wage quiet guerrilla warfare with the aim of winning back the funding to continue doing “God’s work” in troubled spots on the earth.
Higgs never had any illusions about the work he was doing. His viewpoint was that much turmoil in the world was in fact produced by American intervention. He believed that it frequently caused more damage than it averted, probably by a long shot.
But he also felt that if American interests weren’t exerting influence in other spots on the world, other interests certainly would be. With thuggery as a given, our thugs were probably better than their thugs, he reasoned.
Higgs couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t answered to a handler of some sort. Since that first money-laundering gig in Vegas twenty some-odd years ago, he had been beholden. He was bound by complicity, and was keenly aware of expectations for him to behave as his masters desired, more or less, though he always seemed to carve a little more latitude than most others in his situation by virtue of his large personality and his unique role.
He also took advantage of mutual guilt to exert leverage of his own, when necessary. Nobody was clean, and Higgs had demonstrated that he wasn’t afraid to incite a public hanging when he needed to. With the power of senatorial investigations behind him, he had sacked prominent figures in both government and industry who had worn out his patience or presumed too heavily upon him.
But the Facilitator had him by the balls.
Curmudgeon had been a key link to key relationships at home and abroad, and Higgs badly needed to remain in the good graces of many of the power players in the priest-cum-spy’s rolodex.
One didn’t spend two decades in the shady side of public service without accumulating a few radioactive skeletons, and Higgs had manipulated Curmudgeon’s access on more than one occasion to help relieve the pressure applied by the Facilitator and his crowd of prime movers and pipe swingers.
Any one of a dozen situations was potentially scandalous enough to bring about Higgs’s downfall. Some were serious enough for long federal prison sentences, so Higgs faced ever-mounting pressure to keep the many disagreements endemic to covert operations from getting out of control.
Higgs was long ago treed by his own culpability, and the Facilitator kept forcing him out onto ever-thinner limbs.
In addition to the operational problems Curmudgeon’s loss created—the priest was Higgs’s only access into a few extremely important “markets”—his death also created a bit of a personal crisis for Higgs. It had removed most of his ability to manipulate the Facilitator’s interests, which had allowed him to ease the pressure the dictatorial bastard apparently enjoyed applying.
Who killed you, you crooked cleric? Higgs knew that the problem wasn’t a lack of likely suspects, but the opposite. The dead spy was in the middle of a gaggle of people who didn’t get along with each other. As a result, the priest had been very valuable. He had also been vulnerable, as it turned out.
Senator Higgs pondered his next move, wondering how best to play his upcoming wire-brushing at the hands of the Facilitator’s right-hand man. It wasn’t likely to be pleasant.
His secretary knocked and entered. “It’s about time to head out, Senator. Sergio’s on his way to pick you up.”
11
Crystal City, Virginia. Friday, 12:44 p.m. ET.
The black Suburban moved easily with traffic. Its blacked-out windows and slightly oversized antenna gave it away as an executive vehicle, conveying someone of significance in the US government.
It wasn’t an ordinary SUV under its dark exterior, either. It had two thousand pounds of additional armor, bulletproof windows, an
d tubeless tires to prevent the possibility of being stopped by a flat.
Stalwart watched it pass, confirmed the number on the license plate, then turned to walk through the revolving door of the Langston Marlin Global Vigilance Center on Crystal Drive.
He pulled a disposable cell phone out of his pocket, typed the words “on schedule,” and sent the text message to a number with a 702 area code. Las Vegas. Strange spot for an international cabal to set up a branch of their US operations, but he supposed that even ideologues weren’t immune to the desires of the flesh.
Stalwart stepped into the men’s room and stooped briefly to confirm all the stalls were empty. He held the disposable cell phone under the sink’s sensor and tap water flowed over the phone. He ripped off a paper towel and wiped the phone thoroughly as he walked into a bathroom stall.
He opened the back of the phone, taking care to keep his skin from producing prints on the still-wet plastic. He used a ballpoint pen to remove the SIM card, which he threw into the self-flushing toilet. He watched the SIM card disappear down the drain, then left the stall.
He shoved the phone, now wrapped in a small, loose bundle of paper towel, deep into the full wastebasket on his way out of the bathroom.
“Hi, Sarah,” he said with more pep than usual as he walked confidently into the Langston Marlin offices. He felt great, despite the vague knowledge that while his role in the day’s operation was decidedly non-violent, there was a good chance that someone was going to get hurt as a result of the text message he had just sent.
It didn’t faze him in the least—people got hurt every day, for far less admirable causes.
“Good afternoon, sir. They’re waiting for you up on the second floor, north conference room.” She was a recent college graduate, long on brains and even longer in the leg department. She had a way of putting the clientele, predominantly middle-aged, slightly overweight male bureaucrats and over-confident military operators, in a really good mood.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 116