by Mike Lawson
“Father, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I’m Paul Russo’s cousin.”
Father Richard Porter was in his thirties, a good-looking guy with rimless glasses and brown hair touching his collar. He’d been on the church’s grounds pruning bushes with an electric hedge trimmer when DeMarco had driven up, and DeMarco had been surprised that the young guy dressed in jeans and an old Duke sweatshirt was not only a priest but pastor of the church.
“I was so shocked to hear about Paul,” the priest said. “He was a wonderful man.”
“Yes, he was,” DeMarco said. Why tell the priest that he barely knew his cousin? “The reason I’m here is I’m trying to settle Paul’s estate and I can’t find his will or the name of his lawyer. I was told he was close to people at your church and I was hoping one of them could help me.”
“Well, let’s see,” the priest said. “Your best bet would be Mary Albertson. She and Paul worked together a lot. And Mary’s the motherly type. If Paul confided in anyone, it would have been her.” The priest placed his hedge trimmer on the ground. “Come up to the rectory and I’ll give you her phone number.”
As they were walking away, DeMarco looked down at the extension cord attached to the hedge trimmer to see if the cord was wrapped with black electrical tape in a couple spots like his was. About every other time DeMarco used his hedge trimmer, he cut the cord; it looked like the padre was a more careful trimmer than he was.
The priest gave DeMarco Mary Albertson’s phone number and asked if there was anything else he needed. After a moment’s hesitation, DeMarco said, “Were you Paul’s confessor, father?”
“Yes.”
“I know you can’t tell me anything Paul told you in confession. I’m Catholic too”—an extremely lapsed Catholic, but there was no point bringing that up—“so I understand that. But can you think of anything Paul might have told you, uh, indirectly, that could give me—and the FBI—some reason as to why he was murdered.”
“I’m afraid not,” Father Porter said. He smiled sadly, remembering Paul. “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but Paul’s idea of a major transgression was losing his temper if a clerk in a store was rude to him or cursing—mildly, I might add—when someone cut him off in traffic.”
Once again, the FBI’s theory that Paul had been dealing drugs sounded more far-fetched than ever.
Mary Albertson ran a church program that served breakfast to the poor and homeless on weekends, and Paul Russo was always there with her, dishing out bacon and eggs to the needy.
Mary was a big lady in her sixties: six foot, easily two hundred and fifty pounds, cheerful brown face, warm, caring brown eyes. She teared up when DeMarco said he wanted to talk about Paul, but smiled when she talked about him. She’d known him ever since he joined the congregation four years ago and had worked with him on many a church committee. He was one of the few people, she said, who seemed to actually enjoy feeding the poor.
“Most folks, they serve these people and they act all happy and hardy, but they’re really not. They don’t like being near them, the way they look, the way they smell. But not Paul. He realized they were human beings and, but for the grace of God, he could have been the one getting served instead of doing the serving. I appreciated that because there was a time when I was on the other side of that serving line.”
DeMarco’s attitude toward street people was that the majority of them were pain-in-the-ass drunks, but Mary Albertson’s comment made him squirm a bit and she noticed, wise woman that she was.
When DeMarco asked her if she knew if Paul had a lawyer, Mary said she didn’t. She’d never heard him speak of one.
“Shit,” DeMarco muttered and then mumbled, “Sorry,” when he noticed the look Mary gave him. He thanked her for her time and started to leave, but then something occurred to him. “There’s one other thing I’m curious about,” he said. “Do you have any idea who Paul’s last patient was? The lady at the hospice where Paul worked couldn’t give me his name because of medical confidentiality rules, but she did say that something was bothering Paul the last time she saw him at this patient’s house. I really want to talk to the man to see if he knows anything related to my cousin’s murder.”
Unlike Paul, the occasional small white lie—in this case, that DeMarco already knew that Paul’s last patient was dead—didn’t bother DeMarco all that much. For that matter, telling whoppers didn’t bother him all that much either.
“Yes, he was really down about something the last time I saw him too,” Mary said.
“Do you have any idea why?”
She shook her head. “No. When Paul talked about the people he was caring for, he’d usually say there was something beautiful in watching how they accepted that the end was near, how it was inspiring—that’s the word he used—the way they readied their souls to meet their God. This last one, though? All Paul said was that the poor man was tormented, as if he was already burning in Hell, and Paul was trying to help him make peace with himself.”
“You mean he was trying to convert him to Catholicism?”
“Oh, no. Paul wasn’t the type to ram his religion down someone’s throat. But if a person asked for help, spiritual or otherwise, he would have given it.”
“Huh,” DeMarco said. “So do you know who this man is? Like I said, I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Well, I’m afraid you’re too late for that, Mr. DeMarco,” Mary said. “They held the funeral for him yesterday, paid him the honor he was due. Paul’s last patient was General Martin Breed.”
As DeMarco was walking back to his car, he thought maybe that explained why the FBI had taken Paul’s case away from the Arlington County cops. Maybe there was some connection between Paul’s death and a two-star army general, a man who would have access to a lot of classified information. And maybe that’s why Hopper had searched Paul’s apartment and taken his computer. Yeah. Maybe.
The next thought he had was that if Paul’s death was connected in any way to a Pentagon heavyweight like Martin Breed, he’d be smart to keep his big nose out of it. He should just do what he was supposed to do: find a lawyer to deal with Paul’s four-thousand-buck estate and then go play golf like he’d originally planned.
Yep, that definitely sounded like the smart thing to do.
16
Claire returned to her office, still embarrassed that she had overlooked the Post reporter, Robert Hansen, as the man Paul Russo might have met with. She didn’t know for sure that Russo had met with Hansen, but it sounded right. It felt right. It sang to her.
Russo, this gay altar boy, just didn’t strike her as the type who would have been involved in anything illegal or even underhanded. But what if General Breed—a man privy to the Pentagon’s dirty little secrets—had told Russo something before he died? He might have even told Russo something while under the influence of whatever drugs he was being given, maybe delirious, not even knowing what he was saying.
But what about Martin Breed? The man had been an absolute poster boy for the United States Army. Handsome, charming, articulate, a born leader of men. He’d risen up through the ranks at a meteoric pace and had been involved in all the recent wars. In Afghanistan, he’d even managed to get himself wounded, which is quite hard for a general to do, so he got a Purple Heart to go along with all his other medals.
But there had been nothing in Breed’s career to indicate he was anything other than a good soldier. There’d been no financial scandals—no awards of huge army contracts to pals in big business—and his marriage had been rock solid, as far as anyone knew. Nor had he shown any desire for public office, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have compromised his principles to get himself elected after he retired. Breed’s only known ambition was to reach the pinnacle of his profession: to replace General Charles Bradford as the army’s chief of staff.
Assuming Russo had learned something significant from Breed—which was a hell of a big assumption—what could it have been? What could have been so important that someon
e would want to kill Russo because of what he’d heard or seen? And then there was the question of how Russo’s killers would have known that Breed told Russo anything?
Too many questions—not enough answers. Insufficient data, as Dillon would say.
Claire called Gilbert and two other technicians into her office and proceeded to issue orders, giving them four hours to do what she knew would take them twice as long.
The first thing she had them bring her was Martin Breed’s medical records, which had been easy to obtain. Breed had been a high-ranking army officer so Claire assumed, correctly, that he’d been treated by someone over at Walter Reed. His oncologist was a Dr. Stanley Fallon and Dr. Fallon’s notes, entered into his computer, stated that Breed had died from brain cancer, a particularly aggressive, fast-moving form of the disease. The last entry regarding Breed recommended that the general call in a hospice, as he was not expected to last more than a month, six weeks at the outside.
This gave Claire pause. Martin Breed died only three weeks after the doctor made his final entry on his patient. Did this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. She doubted a physician could predict exactly how long a patient would last, and three weeks was pretty close to a month. Still, it made her wonder.
What she really wanted to know was who, besides Paul Russo, had talked to the general as he lay dying. That is, could General Breed have told one of his last visitors that Russo posed some kind of threat? General Breed’s phone records didn’t point to any logical person—his last calls had primarily been to family members—and the only other way Claire could think of to get the answer to her question was to ask General Breed’s grieving widow, an idea she instantly rejected. Talking to people always posed a risk because it left a human trail, and Claire was not ready to go down that path just yet. She much preferred to gather information through purloined records—and eavesdropping, if necessary.
Claire was frustrated, and not just because she wasn’t making progress on the Russo intercept. What was really frustrating her was that she might be wasting her time investigating Russo at all. Claire’s organization had been established by Dillon to spy within the country’s borders for the purpose of preventing attacks which could make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. wouldn’t just kill thousands of people; such an event could destroy the economy and cripple the very infrastructure needed to safeguard the nation. If Claire’s technicians had just heard Russo being murdered in some mundane way for some mundane reason, she wouldn’t have spent any time on him at all. But because his death might be linked to rogue elements of the U.S. military and a dead two-star general, she needed to know what the hell was going on—and she was getting nowhere.
Claire had a four-hundred-calorie lunch and then went to the gym to kick and hit the heavy bag for half an hour. She liked hitting the heavy bag. She had so much aggression in her that it sometimes seemed like hitting the bag was her only outlet. It was either hit the bag or hit Dillon.
As she was walking to the locker room, a guy waved to her—a good-looking guy maybe a year or two younger than her. She pretended she didn’t see him. She knew he was working up the nerve to ask her for a date, and she dreaded the prospect of turning him down, as she knew she would.
She’d been on a total of six first dates in the last ten years and she never saw any of the men again. They had all been decent guys—men that most single women her age would kill for. She even had sex with one of them—or tried to—because she thought having sex might jump-start her emotions. God, what a disaster that had been. Now, instead of sex, she worked and she exercised—and cleaned. She had to have the cleanest condo in Laurel, Maryland.
Following her workout, Claire had a brief unproductive conference with her technicians. They were striking out everywhere. They still couldn’t identify the cell phone owner who had called Hopper, and they could find no link via phone records or e-mails connecting Russo, Martin Breed, and the Washington Post reporter, Hansen.
The whereabouts of the reporter was another dead end. Neither his body nor his car had been found. And his damn bosses at the Post—based on statements they had given to the D.C. Metro police, and which the police had helpfully entered into their computers—were clueless as to what Hansen had been working on before he disappeared. All Claire could tell was that Hansen had been a political firefly, constantly flitting from story to story, investigating anything involving Congress or the administration that smacked of scandal or corruption. But he didn’t normally work the military side of things.
She also had a tech hack into the Post’s computers to look for anything Hansen might have filed that seemed relevant. Zip again. The last story he submitted had been written two weeks before he disappeared and was about a sixty-two-year-old congressman using a corporate jet for a trip to the Bahamas with a thirty-four-year-old ex-Redskins cheerleader. A story, in other words, as old and tired and tawdry as Washington itself.
The tech did find one interesting thing while poking through the Post’s electronic files. A GS-11 analyst at Langley had leaked a story about the CIA giving money to a psychopath in Hamas, the analyst apparently having some pro-Israeli bias. Claire couldn’t tell from the Post’s files why the CIA was funding a Hamas murderer and she finally decided she didn’t care. It just made her furious when low-level government employees leaked things to the media; leaking information was a management prerogative. She anonymously e-mailed the name of the CIA tattletale to a heartless prick at Langley she knew, confident that the leaker would soon be stationed in Greenland.
She looked up at the clock. It was seven P.M. and she could feel the onset of a migraine, so she turned off the lights in her office to see if that might make her headache go away. As she sat there in the dark, she reflected on the fact that the day had been a total waste. Goddammit, she needed to go proactive on this thing. She needed to stop looking at records and make something happen. She needed …
Two of her male technicians were slinking toward the door. They had their coats on.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” she said quietly.
The techs practically jumped out of their skins. With the lights out in her office, they thought she had left for the day. Fat chance.
“Uh, home,” one of the men said.
Claire didn’t say anything.
“Geez, Claire, we’ve been here like twelve hours. We’re tired.”
Twelve hours. Big deal. She thought about their current assignments. They weren’t involved in the Russo op, but what they were working on was important. Hell, it was all important—but she couldn’t afford to burn them out.
“Good night,” she said.
The two men looked at each other, surprised, and moved quickly toward the door.
Claire closed her eyes again.
She could see him: her fiancé, Navy Commander Mark Daniels. He had called her on her cell phone to tell her he’d just been summoned to a meeting over at the Pentagon and he didn’t know when he’d be home that day. At the time they were sharing an apartment in Annapolis, not sure when they’d get married, just knowing marriage was inevitable and that life was perfect the way it was.
She remembered being annoyed by the call. Of course he’d be late, she’d thought at the time. She’d be late, too. Half the people who worked in Washington, D.C., would be late that night because thirty-seven minutes earlier the second plane had struck the World Trade Center. So when Mark called, she’d been practically sprinting down a hallway toward a conference room because things were going crazy at Fort Meade. Half the bosses at the NSA were trying to figure out what had happened, and it seemed like the other half were already working on a story to exonerate the agency.
He’d been wearing his dress blues that day because he’d had some sort of ceremony to attend that morning. She could see him: tall, dark-haired, beautiful physique; two gorgeous dimples formed in his cheeks when he smiled. He wouldn’t have been smiling when he calle
d, though; he would have looked serious, his eyes flashing, worried and angry, yet still courteous enough to call and let her know that he’d be late. And she could see herself, all impatient, no time to chat, striding down the hallway, irritated that he had called when he did. And then she heard him scream. She’d never forget that sound.
She could see him—and hear him—as he was incinerated by thousands of gallons of exploding aviation fuel as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.
She’d never see him again—and she’d always see him.
17
Levy watched Alberta Merker enter her house. It was nine P.M. Merker put in a long day, doing whatever it was that she did.
Merker’s house was in a quiet middle-class neighborhood and her next-door neighbors appeared to be at home. He could see people moving about in one of the houses and lights were on in the other. The houses across the street from Merker’s, all except one, appeared to be occupied as well.
He would have to wait until her neighbors were asleep.
He wondered if he was doing the right thing. He could have followed Merker tomorrow when she went to work to see where she would lead him, but he didn’t have time for that. He needed to know immediately what she was doing and who employed her.
He closed his eyes and thought, as he often did at quiet moments, about the last time he’d seen his brother. When his father had left he’d been too young and he didn’t really have a clear memory of the man. But his brother he remembered vividly: standing there in his uniform, his pant cuffs tucked into the top of his combat boots, the green beret on his head, the broad smile on his face—and then his brother vanished. Forever.