by Mike Lawson
It took DeMarco five minutes to run to Wallace’s house and when he got there he was breathing like he was two seconds away from a heart attack and his feet hurt from running without shoes on the hard sidewalk. He pressed down on Wallace’s doorbell and then started hammering on the door with his fist. Wallace had no social life and DeMarco was positive he was home sleeping.
Finally, Wallace answered the door. He was dressed in purple pajamas constructed from enough cotton to build a circus tent and he was naturally surprised to see DeMarco standing there on his porch, semi-naked. “What the hell?” he said.
DeMarco pushed his way into the house and closed the door. “Perry, I need clothes, shoes, and your car—and I can’t tell you why,” he said.
“What?” Wallace said.
“Perry, wake the fuck up! I’m being chased by some of the scariest guys you’ve ever seen in your life, and I need—”
“What guys? And where are your clothes?”
“It involves Mahoney, Perry, and I need you to do what I’m telling you. And I need you to move fast.”
DeMarco had invoked Mahoney’s name because he knew by doing so Wallace would be more inclined to help him. Wallace also knew that Mahoney often asked DeMarco to do things that Wallace knew were in his own best interest not to know about, and the fact that Mahoney was lying in a hospital bed did not mean DeMarco had stopped working for him.
While Wallace was getting the clothes, DeMarco peeked out the front window and saw a black SUV driving slowly down the street—the kind of SUV that Alice drove. It was dark outside and the windows in the SUV were tinted, so he couldn’t tell who was driving, but his gut told him it was Alice or one of her gun-toting friends.
Wallace came back with a pair of sweat pants and a sweat shirt. The sweat shirt had an XXXL label and the tennis shoes were a size smaller than DeMarco wore. DeMarco had no idea why Perry Wallace owned sweat clothes as he had never—judging by his waistline—exercised in his life. Wallace refused to give him the keys to his good car, but he also owned a beat-up Mazda pickup that had about two hundred thousand miles on it.
As he was leaving, DeMarco said, “If anybody asks you about me, you haven’t seen me.”
“You got that right,” Perry said.
34
Dillon was shoeless, standing on the carpet in his office, tapping golf balls at a drinking glass using a long-handled putter, a belly putter. When Claire entered his office, he glanced over at her and said, “Have you ever used one of these before? I know Vijay Singh used one for a while. I rather like it.”
“The name of the man who was driving the Cadillac last night is John Levy,” Claire said.
Dillon sighed, leaned the putter against a wall, slipped his feet back into his Gucci loafers, and took a seat behind his desk. “And what do we know about Mr. Levy?” he asked.
“He enlisted in the army at age eighteen and twenty months later showed up at Fort Myer.”
“The Tomb of the Unknowns?”
“Correct. He was there at the same time that Charles Bradford was base commander. After Fort Myer, Levy spent time at Fort Benning, Fort Lewis, Bosnia, and Iraq One. Typical noncom’s career. He was assigned to Washington about the same time as Bradford got his second star and just before Martin Breed did his first job for Bradford, the one in Turkey.”
“Hmmm,” Dillon said.
“A couple months after being posted to Washington, Levy resigned from the army, which is odd because by then he had more than ten years in the service and appeared to be having a stellar career in uniform based on his fit reps. And then he started job hopping. He did a stint with the DIA, a few years as civilian with CID, and currently he’s the deputy director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. When Bradford was posted overseas, whatever agency Levy worked for would transfer him to the same location.”
When Dillon didn’t respond, Claire continued, “So it appears that the same year Bradford recruited Martin Breed, he also recruited John Levy. Two like-minded men who were incredibly dedicated to Bradford and believed completely in what he was doing. He allowed Breed to stay in the army and advanced his career and used him for certain assignments. For other assignments, particularly the stateside ones, it appears that he used Levy. Apparently he didn’t want Levy attached to a military unit, because he’d have less freedom to do whatever Bradford wanted.”
“Apparently,” Dillon said. “It appears,” he added, the words dripping off his tongue like bitter fruit. Before Claire could object, he said, “I don’t disagree with your analysis, Claire, but it would certainly be nice to have some facts to support all this.”
“How many damn facts do you want?” Claire said. “We know Levy tried to kill DeMarco last night. We know he killed Russo and we know the tomb guards helped him. And we know what Breed said on that recording. I don’t care how doped up and sick he was, some of what Breed said had to be true.”
Dillon nodded as if conceding the point.
“So now what, Dillon? What do we do now that we know John Levy is Bradford’s man?”
Dillon didn’t answer her question.
Instead he said, “Where’s DeMarco, Claire?”
“What the hell happened, John?” Bradford spoke calmly, suppressing the anger—and the panic—he was feeling. Generals don’t panic.
“It was an ambush,” Levy said, and proceeded to tell Bradford what had happened at the baseball field in Falls Church.
“My God,” Bradford said. “This is—”
He opened a drawer in his desk and began to reach for a bottle of Chivas Regal he kept there for special occasions—then slammed the drawer shut. He never drank during the day, and he wasn’t about to start now. “Do you have any idea how many people were with DeMarco last night?” he asked.
What he really meant was: How many more people now know our secret?
“No, sir. But there was more than one shooter. Maybe two or three.”
“Why in hell didn’t you take a team with you, for Christ’s sake?”
“I was afraid to use the sentinels again since someone was already curious about them. I figured I could handle it myself. I didn’t expect DeMarco to have so much support. Or any support, for that matter.”
“Who do you think was helping DeMarco?”
“I don’t know. I keep coming back to whoever identified Witherspoon through his fingerprints. It’s somebody in the government, but I have no idea who.”
“Goddammit, John, I need answers!” Bradford shouted.
“I know that, sir, and I’m doing the best I—”
“Where’s DeMarco now?” Bradford said.
“I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been doing, trying to find him.”
“John, you must find him. You need to find out what he knows and who’s working with him. This … this is a damn disaster!”
“Maybe not, sir. Keep in mind that the only thing DeMarco seems to know is that Russo was meeting with a reporter and that you visited General Breed before he died. I think, if he knew more, he would have said so when he talked to Hopper.”
“I can’t take that chance. Find him, John. Find him and find out what he knows and kill him.”
DeMarco was in a room at a motel called the Day’s Inn, and the motel was located in Crystal City, a shopping and office complex near Reagan National Airport. He was lying on the bed in the baggy sweat clothes he’d borrowed from Perry Wallace and watching the morning news to see if the newscasters would mention that the body of an FBI agent had been found in the woods near Tuckahoe Park. Of course, they didn’t mention any such thing.
When DeMarco had left Perry Wallace’s place, he knew he couldn’t go home. He needed to find a place where he could hunker down for a while and figure things out. He picked the Day’s Inn because it wasn’t too expensive and because it was near the Crystal City shopping mall, where he could buy some clothes. The other thing was, the motel had an underground garage where he could park Perry’s truck. He was worried about the truck be
cause he was guessing that by now the NSA knew he was driving it.
Last night, when he abandoned his car and his clothes, Dillon and his friends would have quickly concluded that DeMarco couldn’t stay on the streets and would most likely go to the home of someone nearby to hide. They’d look at his phone bills to see if he knew anyone in the area and, if that didn’t work, they’d start looking at people who worked for Congress. They might even know that he worked for Mahoney, although, and because of the things he did for Mahoney, he wasn’t an official member of Mahoney’s staff. If they knew he worked for Mahoney, they’d immediately zero in on Wallace. Whatever the case, they’d figure out pretty quickly that Perry Wallace worked for Congress and lived half a mile from where DeMarco had dumped his car and then they’d send someone to question him. They’d probably tell Wallace that DeMarco was a fugitive and that he’d broken some law, and if Wallace didn’t cooperate he would go to jail with DeMarco—at which point, Perry would sing like a canary and Dillon’s spies would then have the license plate number and make of Perry’s old pickup and start searching for it.
He turned off the morning news but continued to lie on the bed looking up at the ceiling. What the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t hide in a motel room forever. What he wished, more than anything else, was that he still had the recorder he’d found in the church—but thanks to Alice and her Taser, he didn’t have it. If he had the recorder, he would have some leverage over Dillon, and the press would be more likely to believe him. Without the recording, however, he strongly doubted that anyone was going to believe him when he started babbling about the NSA and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a dead FBI agent whose corpse couldn’t be found.
But he needed help and he needed someone who would buy his story, and the two people who could help him most—Emma and Mahoney—were unavailable. He supposed he could track Emma down. It wouldn’t be impossible to find out which cruise ship she was on, but tracking her down would involve a bunch of phone calls—and the NSA had made him leery of talking to anyone on the phone. Then it occurred to him that contacting Emma could be dangerous for her, possibly even fatal. He’d already unintentionally gotten Angela embroiled in his problems and the people he was dealing with were extraordinary adversaries—people with military-trained killers at their disposal and the most sophisticated technologies the government possessed. No, he wouldn’t get Emma involved.
But he needed somebody. He needed somebody who could deal with the Pentagon, somebody with federal muscles, huge federal muscles. What he needed was somebody in the damn FBI. The Bureau was the right organization to deal with this.
The problem with going to the Bureau, however, was he couldn’t just pick up the phone and call them. Not without any proof. So he needed to contact somebody at the FBI he could trust, somebody who would not only believe him but be able to steer him to people who had the power and the guts to deal with something as big as this.
And he knew such a person. He just didn’t know if she would help him.
About three years ago, he and Emma had been sucked into an investigation at a naval shipyard on the West Coast. It started out as a little whistleblower incident—somebody complaining how the government’s money was being squandered—but then the investigation mutated dangerously into a case involving espionage and a psychotic Chinese spy. During the case, DeMarco had a brief fling with an FBI agent named Diane Carlucci. The fling might have amounted to more but Diane was transferred from Washington, D.C. to LA, and out of DeMarco’s life.
But she was back in Washington now. He hadn’t known she was back until he ran into her on the street in Georgetown one day. She was with a rugged, good-looking, gray-haired guy a few years older than DeMarco, whom she introduced as her husband. She and DeMarco had stood there for a moment, both feeling a bit embarrassed. They couldn’t talk about the good times they once had—not with her new husband standing there—so DeMarco mumbled a few words about how good she looked, which she did, and how great it was to see her again and then walked away thinking about what might have been.
But Diane was the right person to call. Unlike Hopper, DeMarco knew she was honest. And she’d been with the Bureau long enough that she’d be able to put him in touch with the right big shot to talk to about this whole NSA mess.
So that was DeMarco’s new half-assed plan: meet with Diane Carlucci and convince her to introduce him to a heavy hitter at the Bureau, a big honcho near the top who would know how to proceed with a case of this magnitude, involving people at the highest levels in the Department of Defense.
“Where’s DeMarco, Claire?” Dillon asked.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “We never expected him to bolt, but while Alice’s people were all following Levy and removing Hopper’s body, that’s just what the bastard did. He abandoned his car, took off all his clothes, and dumped everything that had listening and tracking devices installed in them. After we located his car, we identified people in the area he might know and found a guy named Perry Wallace, who’s John Mahoney’s chief of staff.”
“Mahoney? Is DeMarco connected to Mahoney?”
“I don’t know. He isn’t a member of his staff. He probably just knows Wallace because they both work in the Capitol. Anyway, Alice paid Wallace a visit, scared the livin’ shit out of him, and he admitted he loaned DeMarco a vehicle, but said he had no idea what DeMarco was doing or where he was going. And knowing how Alice can be, I believe him. But right now, we have no idea where DeMarco is.”
“You need to find him, Claire, and you need to find him before John Levy does.”
“I know that,” she snapped. It really irritated her when he stated the obvious. “What do I do after I find him?”
“Put him in a safe house with people who can make him stay there. I haven’t decided what to do about Mr. DeMarco yet.”
As deputy director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, John Levy had the resources at his disposal to pursue DeMarco. He called four senior agents into his office and gave them a photo of DeMarco and all the information he had obtained on the man.
“But you can’t use local law enforcement to help you,” he told his agents. “This agency needs to track this man down independently.”
“Why are we looking for him, sir?” one of the agents asked.
Levy knew the men who worked for him resented him. He’d been brought in from the outside, elevated immediately to a senior position, and had an incredible amount of power—power that was disproportionate to his position. But they’d follow his orders—they were afraid not to—and they’d accept whatever explanation he gave them.
Answering the agent’s question, he said, “DeMarco has been identified as a credible threat to Pentagon security. Why he’s a threat is classified. Just find him, but don’t approach him until you’ve talked to me.”
DeMarco decided not to call Diane Carlucci from his room at the Day’s Inn. He thought he could trust her but he wasn’t sure how she’d react to what he was about to tell her, and she might decide to trace the call. But what he was really afraid of was the NSA tracing the call. He didn’t know how they’d know about the call if he called from a randomly selected phone but he’d become so paranoid about NSA capabilities that he wasn’t willing to take any chances.
He walked over to the window and peered through a crack in the drapes. Across the street from the Day’s Inn, just on the other side of the Jefferson Davis Highway, was a Hyatt Regency. That would work.
The snooty-looking clerk at the Hyatt’s registration desk gave him a dirty look when DeMarco entered the hotel—which was not surprising considering his wrinkled, oversized sweat suit attire—but the clerk didn’t stop him when he walked over to a bank of pay phones.
“This is Agent Carlucci.”
“Diane, it’s Joe.”
“Uh, Joe, how are you doing?”
She was obviously surprised to hear from him and she also sounded somewhat guarded, maybe thinking that he was calling to try and rekind
le their affair. She had no idea that sex was the last thing on his mind.
“Diane, I need to see you. Right away.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone.”
She didn’t say anything. He was obviously going to have to tell her more to get her to drop whatever she was doing and come to him.
“Diane, this isn’t about us. All I can tell you is that I can’t talk about it on the phone, it involves the Bureau, and it’s serious. Really serious. And I need you to meet me. I can’t come to you.”
Diane still didn’t say anything. One thing he knew about her was that when it came to her career, she wasn’t going to take chances.
“Diane, you know me. You know I wouldn’t ask you to do something like this if it wasn’t important. And like I said, it involves the Bureau, and not in a good way.”
“All right, Joe. Where do you want to meet?”
DeMarco thought about that for a second. He didn’t want to meet her too close to where he was staying. “Rosslyn,” he said. “There’s a little coffee shop on Wilson Boulevard, close to the metro station, called the Java Hut. How long will it take you to get there?”
“An hour. I can’t make it any sooner.”
“Okay, see you in an hour,” DeMarco said, and hung up before she could change her mind.
He didn’t know what Diane would do after he talked to her but at least someone else would know what the hell was going on. And once he told her Hopper had been killed, she’d do something—DeMarco didn’t know what—but something.
He started to leave the phone booth, but then something else occurred to him. Last night he’d been desperate to escape from Dillon’s thugs and running to Perry Wallace had been the best, most expedient solution. But this morning he also remembered that he’d called Perry just a couple of days ago to ask about Mahoney’s condition and that phone call, more than anything else, would have led the NSA right to Perry’s doorstep. The consequence of all this was that to save his own hide DeMarco had selfishly gotten Perry involved in this whole, deadly NSA affair and he wondered if Dillon’s goons had Perry’s wide-bodied frame in a little room somewhere, twisting his nuts to make him talk.