The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  Essentially, she was going to kill herself. Living alone like that, and with no coworkers or bosses to wonder where she was, it might even be days before anyone found her. By then, the milk would have spoiled entirely, and since the products of its decomposition would create acids that would in turn destroy the nerve agent in the ant poison, there would be no problem with loose ends. Messy, given what havoc a cholinesterase inhibitor wreaks on the central nervous system, but, at those concentrations, extremely effective.

  He had told Mutaib that she would be useful to the deception plan, but after the princeling started talking about taking care of her with his own assets, Heismann had become suspicious. As Mutaib had observed, they could not be certain what she knew. Well, Heismann thought, that works both ways, does it not, Your Slipperiness? Better for me that she just goes away. Out of the equation altogether. That would leave him with one loose end instead of two. The light changed, and off he went, nodding to himself in satisfaction.

  Connie Wall kept a polite expression plastered on her face while she controlled the urge to slap senseless this middle-aged Lothario wanna-be posing as an HR administrator. He’d spent the entire time he was supposedly interviewing her trying to get a better look up her skirt. The interview chair had been carefully positioned right in front of the desk, with him sitting to one side of the desk for a better viewing angle.

  “And you live in the District itself, Ms. Wall?” he was asking. He was in his fifties, pasty-faced, with a potbelly and half a dozen gray hairs plastered back to front along the sides of his forehead to cover his bald spot. Birth-control glasses. Trousers too short, black nylon socks too short, revealing really yummy oyster white shins. As a bonus, there was even a red spot of what looked like catsup on his straining white shirt. At least six pens in his shirt pocket, and one of them was leaking. Mr. Perfect.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “Close to the Metro, too. No commuting hassles.”

  “How nice for you,” he murmured, looking over the top of the file folder. She turned almost sideways in the chair, trying to make it as obvious as she could that she was absolutely not flattered by his lecherous interest.

  “It was my parents’ house,” she said. “Long before there was a Metro. Is there shift work involved in this position?”

  “Normally not,” he said, putting down the folder and straightening in his chair, apparently giving up on his periscope act for the moment. “You stated here that your last employer could not provide a reference because he was deceased. Do you have any performance evaluations from before that you can show us?”

  She fished around in her briefcase, trying not to bend over too far. This guy might get really excited if he could see down her blouse as well as up her skirt. She pulled out a folder. “Right here,” she said. “Those are copies, of course. The originals were lost in the fire.”

  “Fire?”

  She explained what had happened at the surgery, and he said yes, he remembered that.

  “Why at night?” he asked. “The paper seemed to indicate there were two sets of doctors using that clinic, one days, one nights.”

  “Our patients were all men,” she said. “Important people, I think. My guess was that they did these procedures in the evenings for confidentiality purposes. The clientele during the daytime were mostly women. I occasionally worked for those doctors, too. Copies of their evaluations are also in that file, and they can give me references.”

  “Right, good. Well, look, you’re technically qualified for the position. Maybe even overqualified. I’m going to forward your medical credentials to the department head. If Dr. Calvin wishes to proceed, I’ll call you back for a second interview. That would be a technical discussion, you understand, with Calvin’s people. And if he wishes to proceed with the hire, there will be a personal-background check. National agency screen. No problems there, I assume?”

  “You assume correctly,” she said. “Three traffic tickets in the past three years, but I drive a ’68 Shelby GT.” She shrugged. “Cops see one of those, they just assume you’re speeding, you know?”

  “I drive a ten-year-old diesel sedan,” he said, pursing his lips, undoubtedly waiting to see if she would guess he had a Mercedes. “So, no, I wouldn’t know. But I think this might work out just fine, Ms. Wall, subject to our internal checks, of course. I’ll get your package over to Dr. Calvin this afternoon. When could you start?”

  “Whenever you want,” she said, gathering her things. “I prefer not to work weekends, as I like to go out of town on weekends. But otherwise…”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “NIH is a government operation. We prefer not to work weekends, either. The due-diligence process takes about two weeks. Thank you for coming in.”

  What a complete el creepo, she thought five minutes later as she descended the vertiginous escalator at the Medical Center Metro station. Hopefully, the surgeons will be humans, even if their Human Resources manager is a pencil-necked geek. The NIH deal did sound like a good chance for her to go back to work. She wasn’t worried about the so-called technical interview. She had almost twenty years of work experience in operating rooms, and she also knew exactly how desperate most hospitals were for people with that much experience. Not that she was all that desperate herself—she could probably stop working now and live on the income from her investments, but she knew she’d go right out of her gourd just sitting around the house on Quebec Street.

  She waited impatiently on the platform. The trains grew sparser when it wasn’t rush hour, and the absence of anyone else waiting told her she’d just missed one. It had been six weeks since the fire. Everyone dying like that had freaked her out, and then the D.C. Arson cops with all their questions had actually made her feel guilty to have survived. She’d bailed out, finally, driving to the Valentine Hills ski resort, in West Virginia over the holidays just to get out of town.

  Her elderly cat, Buster, was waiting for her on the kitchen doorstep when she got home. She let herself in, hung up her coat, and then gave the cat a dish of milk. She went upstairs to get out of her interview clothes and back into jeans and a sweater. When she came out of the bathroom, she noticed what looked like a long brown bug on the rug right by the bedroom door. She looked again and realized that it was a lump of dirt or mud, and she chided herself for not cleaning her shoes properly. The bedroom needed picking up and vacuuming anyway, so she left the lump of dirt, humped all the dirty laundry together to take it down to the washing machine, and went back downstairs to get the vacuum cleaner. While vacuuming, she found another small lump of wet dirt right by the bed. She frowned, wondering what she’d gotten into, and where. She engaged in a minor cleaning frenzy for the next forty-five minutes and then took the vacuum back downstairs. Then she went to the dining room table, where her computer was set up, and checked through her E-mail. There were two more requests for interviews, a dozen annoying messages from the Internet advertising world, and a cop joke forwarded from Cat Ballard, her good friend on the D.C. Homicide squad. It was now dark outside, so she went to turn on some lights in the kitchen. Which is when she found Buster.

  Swamp Morgan was a list maker. He ended each day making up a short to-do list for the next day and leaving it taped to his office telephone. The first item on tomorrow’s agenda was to make contact with the senior agent at PRU, the man who had reviewed the original file transcript and declared it a firefly. The second was to set up an interview with the nurse who had survived the terrible fire at the clinic. He had spent a great deal of his career in and around the world of intelligence. He knew that the firefly call might be based on information he did not or could not have. The Protective Research Unit would have a bigger picture than he did, especially now that he was a reactivated agent working outside of the Secret Service. The entire case might just die a natural death after he talked to PRU. As it should, if it was a firefly.

  Gary White had already left for the day, and he would begin his day tomorrow doing new-guy transfer admin. But Swamp intende
d to make sure Gary went along when he went over to PRU. He liked the cut of Gary White’s jib. He seemed to be levelheaded, intelligent, and able to focus on the task at hand. His experience in the Homicide Division wouldn’t hurt, either, as those cops tended to view everything and everyone they encountered with immediate, unvarnished suspicion. He was glad to have the help, and more than willing to hold up his end of the new-agent bargain, namely to introduce White to the byzantine nature of federal law enforcement and to help him get ahead.

  The office had quieted down now that the day was over. For Swamp, it was a familiar silence, with the noise of traffic outside on Pennsylvania Avenue competing with the hum of lowest-bidder fluorescent lighting in the office. He was hardly alone in the OEOB—the National Security Council staffers often worked until eight or nine o’clock, and longer during days of crisis. He had a one-bedroom furnished apartment over on the northern Virginia side, in a building right above a Metro station. It was a place to sleep during the week, but little more.

  On the weekends, he took the train out to his hometown of Harpers Ferry and spent Saturdays and Sundays at the riverside inn his parents had run for many years. They’d maintained an owners’ apartment at the back of the inn. It was on the third floor, facing the river, and he had taken this over when they’d given him the property and retired to Florida. Ben and Lila Hardee, longtime friends and next-door neighbors, had expressed an interest in running the place, so he’d let them take it on. They got to keep the income from the business, and he had a free and familiar weekend retreat for as long as he wanted it. He took the train back into town each Monday, and he did not even keep a car in town.

  He pulled out the clean transcript file, the one retyped from the burned record, along with a legal pad. He went over the jumble of hallucinatory mutterings of patient number 200341. What kind of a clinic was this, identifying its patients with numbers? He made a note to touch base with the Bureau, see what they had and wouldn’t share with local law on those two Paki doctors. And find out who had set up the docs in business and gotten them visas.

  Then he wondered what he might reveal under anesthesia, when all inhibitions floated away in a cool stream of anesthetic. What he might say about Sherry, his former wife, and what she’d done to him on the day he retired from the Senior Executive Service. He could imagine his own stream of consciousness—or was it unconsciousness in this situation?—where he’d mumble, “Thank you, Mr. Secretary,” and then ramble on about cherry blossoms, the late afternoon on the Tidal Basin across from the Jefferson Memorial, and what his wife had said that day. “Let’s sit down right here, Lee, because there’s something I need to tell you. Which is that I’m leaving you, Lee. Yes, for Dr. Grant, my boss and my lover for the past five years, not that you ever noticed, did you? And no, there’ll be no discussion, no negotiations or pleading, not that you would ever plead, would you? No, not you, not big bad Swamp Morgan. But there it is: I’m divorcing you, marrying him, and Bob’s going to take care of everything from now on. We don’t even have to go to court or discuss settlements, alimony, any of that, because you know what? I want nothing from you. Bob’s going to take care of everything. He’s already set up a fund for the kids’ college, I’ll have a new home in Chevy Chase, and we’ll have our new life together.

  “And why do you look so shocked, Lee Morgan? We haven’t been really close for years, have we? Or rather, I haven’t. Because we both know you’ve been a lot more married to the Secret Service than to me, haven’t you? All those standard Secret Service five-to-nine days at the White House. Taking care of dear old POTUS. And then even more quality time at the office when you got to be deputy dog at headquarters. Well, I guess that’s all noble enough, but my life’s half over, Lee, just like yours, actually. Being an SES widow wasn’t good enough for me. I want a loving and close relationship with a nice man for the rest of my life, and I don’t think you can manage that anymore. So, yes, I stood up with you today, your very big, very important government gold watch day, but now I’m going away. Not very far away, actually, but a million figurative miles from you.

  “Here are the papers; they’re very simple, short, and sweet. Sign right by those little yellow arrows, mail them back, and you’re a free man, Lee. I’m leaving you the house, the cars, everything, even my old clothes. Do what you want with all of it. Trust me, you’ll be the envy of the divorced white male club, I promise you. And the kids? You know, they’re totally on board with this. Surprised again? Quick now, can you tell me how old each is without thinking about it, Lee? Didn’t think so. Look, you can see the kids whenever you want to, although they’ll be away at college most of the time. And they may or may not want to see you—you’ll have to work that out with them. They’re effectively beyond custody questions now, so you do your best—I won’t fight you, although seeing them may be tougher than you think. Besides, you’ve got a bigger problem. You have to figure out what you’re going to do with the next half of your life, now that I’m no longer in the picture.

  “No, no, don’t say a word, Lee, not a word. Because you can’t change my decision or how I feel about Bobby Grant. And you. One way or another, you’re single. And once you switch your brain back on, you’ll know this is as good a deal as any ex-husband ever gets. So don’t even think about fighting this, Lee. There’s nothing to win.

  “Look at me, Lee.

  “Say good-bye, Lee.”

  And then, before getting up and walking away, she’d smiled and patted the back of his hand, as if to say, No hard feelings, right? He didn’t even have to close his eyes to still see her, a forthright, intelligent, physically attractive woman, her back straight and heels clicking purposefully through the carpet of fallen cherry blossoms blowing along the sidewalk. Who’d left him sitting there so shocked, he’d almost forgotten to breathe. So filled with astonishment, mixed with the growing recognition that he should have seen this coming, his hand clutching an envelope with engraved lawyer lettering in the top left-hand corner. And this less than an hour after his retirement and award ceremony in the office of the director of the Secret Service, with everyone he knew and valued, and even the Secretary of the Treasury in attendance, standing tall and beaming at him.

  She’d done a perfect Pearl Harbor on him, and, like one of the doomed battleships on that terrible day, he’d felt his entire psyche rolling over and subsiding into the lagoon without a sound, trapping the memories of some twenty-one years of marriage inside dark submerging decks.

  He blinked, gasped in a breath of air, and looked around the empty office. He dimly heard voices down the hall and the shrill sound of an encrypted telephone demanding to be picked up right now. He wondered how many other middle-aged men were staying late in the office just like he was, and for the same basic reason: They had nowhere else to go on a January night in Washington. What had happened next completed the Pearl Harbor analogy: Sherry a hundred feet away. The two black guys in full urban hoodlum costume—baggy pants, knit caps, huge sneakers—suddenly flanking her, one grabbing her hair and pulling her backward, the other tussling for her purse. His own instinctive reaction, bolting off the park bench and sprinting down the side of the Tidal Basin, screaming obscenities at the hoods, seeing them look back at him while he fumbled for the badge and the gun he no longer had, the gut-wrenching realization that he was no longer a federal cop, just another outraged middle-aged white guy, as the smaller of the two thugs flashed a knife, jabbed it twice into Sherry’s throat, and then took off with his buddy with a triumphant shout, her purse in his bloody hand, while Sherry stepped one step sideways and then sagged onto the concrete as a clutch of tourists stared in disbelief from the other side of the Tidal Basin. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life—no gun, no badge, no radio, no authority, no backup, no nothing—as he knelt in the small lake of bright blood, trying to hold the big vein shut with slippery fingers, knowing, knowing…

  He raised an open hand and brought it forcefully down on the desk blotter with a loud smack to
banish the black thoughts. He heard someone in the next office ask, “What was that?” He exhaled forcefully, then inhaled, exhaled again. Then he composed himself. He was strong and alive and there was that next half of his life, as Sherry had pointed out, still there to be lived. He’d been through the entire gamut of feelings endlessly—anger, bitterness, guilt, embarrassment and then, ultimately, resignation. He’d been amazed at the range of people’s reactions, from the sympathy and quiet encouragement of his professional contemporaries to the drunk who’d told him that he was the luckiest divorced son of a bitch on the planet, because what Swamp had now was the perfect opportunity. “You ready for this, chief? You get to have seconds!” the bum had told him.

  He took another deep breath, shook out his arms, and focused again on the transcript. His palm was stinging from hitting the desk. It almost felt good.

  Sherry was gone. His own two kids, both in college now, not so discreetly blamed him for what had happened. “She wouldn’t have been there if she hadn’t had something to tell you, would she?” No answer for that one. Except maybe if she hadn’t taken up with Dr. Bob, she wouldn’t have been there, either. Several friends had told him after the funeral that the kids would either grow up and solve the problem on their own or they wouldn’t, and that his best move was to let them work it out, and that was what he had elected to do.

  But he was still here. He had an important job to do. There was a war on, and more than enough bad guys to chase. This day was drawing to a close. One day at a time. Litany complete. The text of the transcript slowly swam back into focus.

  Tomorrow, he’d find out how far this firefly was going. Then on to the next one.