Swamp nodded. “Yeah, but they were bugging the recovery room. My guess is that it was both insurance and a shot at a little extortion. For that, they had to know who it was they were working on.”
“Yes, sir, they may have known, but if it were me, I’d never write that down. I’d give the guy a code number, show him that’s what I was doing in the records, and keep the name to myself. Or in some secure off-site storage place.”
“Off-site, yeah. Okay. Here’s what I want you to do: go back to the D.C. Arson evidence locker and go through those records. You’re looking for anything that could tie the docs, either one of them, to an off-site storage system. Like those companies on the Web that will store all your files as backup? I’m going to go get paper to search their homes, any PCs they may have had at home.”
“Got it,” Gary said. “But those records…” he shook his head.
“Yeah, I know. They looked like the Dead Sea Scrolls. But spend an afternoon. See what you can find. Anything that might lead us to the code list. Any other transcripts that could lead us to a name. We need a way into this hair ball.”
Gary left ten minutes later, after making the arrangements with Carl Malone. Swamp then began the paperwork to get a warrant for searching the homes and personal property of the two deceased doctors. He retrieved their names and addresses from the D.C. Arson files, then generated the forms for a search warrant. This was a process that could take weeks in a routine case, but these were not routine times, and he was able to use his position in the Department of Homeland Security, plus some connections at the Justice Department, to get the package together in an afternoon. He had it couriered over to the Washington federal district court after making sure his morning calender for the next day was clear for the hearing. He then called Carl Malone and asked him to be available for a possible probable-cause hearing in the morning. There’d been some bitching from the clerk’s office until Swamp invoked the standard Secret Service mantra about presidential security. Everything smoothed right out after that, and Swamp went back to studying the case file Malone had given him.
Gary White came back into the office just before six o’clock, looking tired. Swamp was asking Malone some questions on the phone. Gary dropped his briefcase on his desk and went to get some coffee. Swamp wrapped it up with Malone and joined Gary at the coffee machine.
“I did find a partial duty roster, the one that lists which nurses worked which nights. It confirmed Connie Wall was off that night. Here’s the good news: The roster also had the code numbers for the patients who’d be worked on. From that, I found that patient two-oh-oh-three-four-one was up for a one-hour procedure on the night of the fire.”
“And?”
“The patient code number on the “bomb, bomb, bomb” transcript was two-oh-oh-three-four-one. That would put our transcript firefly in the clinic the night of the fire, assuming the roster is correct.”
“Nice. Very nice, and also significant. What do you make of those numbers?”
“Calender year 2003, patient number forty-one?”
“Yeah, that works. But 2003? He’d been going there for a year?”
“It gets better. I found a partial invoice from an on-line file-storage service called NetZDocustorage.com. It’s a site where companies can store their backup stuff. There was a single account number on the invoice, which I’m assuming was the clinic. If you’ve got a warrant coming down…”
“Absolutely, I’ll work up an amendment tonight. Maybe that damned code list will be in there. Hopefully, that company will have a password-recovery system.”
“Even without the code list, maybe we’ll get lucky and see what kind of work patient forty-one had. Although I’m not sure how that helps.”
“It helps if it looks like a total identity change,” Swamp said. “That plus the German plus talking up bombs and the State of the Union makes this whole deal look less and less like a firefly. And it’ll help at the hearing.”
“But with just a number, how do we find his ass?”
“First things first. Let’s get our warrants, do the searches. I also want to know lots more about the head doc, that Khandoor guy, before I go back to PRU. See if he’s connected to anybody of interest.”
“Read me his card again,” Cat Ballard told her. “I want to make sure I got the right guy.”
Connie picked it up and read off Swamp Morgan’s business card: Special Agent T. Lee Morgan, United States Secret Service, retired, Office of Special Investigations, United States Department of Homeland Security. She had to turn on a light because it was getting dark outside. She had just finished cleaning up after the security system people when Cat finally called her back.
“Yeah, that’s him. Our deputy chief for intel knows him. Big, sorta ugly guy, right? Supposedly played front line at Notre Dame. Something of a legend around federal law enforcement.”
“Is that good news or bad news for me?” Connie asked. She had told Cat about the agents’ visit, that they were investigating the clinic fire, but that was all. She hadn’t mentioned the cryptic phone call from the man with the foreign accent.
“Morgan’s been around, Connie. He’s a senior G-man with a reputation for playing ball with local law whenever he could, the kind of guy who banked and returned a lot of markers. Secret Service, but he knows people on both sides of the river. Intelligence guy, as opposed to a street cop. Did an exchange tour with the CIA; did a tour over in Germany back when it was still East and West. A player, in other words.”
“And the answer is?”
Cat exhaled audibly. “The answer is, Connie, that this Morgan is a high-level, very experienced, very connected fed. If he’s looking at you, pay attention. And a guy like this? He doesn’t investigate fires.”
She didn’t say anything.
“So,” Cat said, “you ready to tell me what the fuck was going on at that plastic surgery clinic that’s got a daddy spook coming out to your house for coffee?”
“He said he was retired.”
“They brought back a whole grunch of senior people after nine eleven. Don’t let that retired bit fool you. I talked to Inspector Malone in Arson. Morgan’s the real deal, and he said not to let the Neanderthal face fool you—the guy’s got his brain switched in. So what’s going on, Connie?”
“Cat, he told me not to talk about it to anybody. I don’t think they’re after me—I just happen to be the lone survivor. Me and several boxes of badly burned records. I worked admin, remember?”
“Actually, I don’t remember that, Connie.”
She couldn’t think of an answer to that, and the silence grew uncomfortable. “Did you get anything back on that milk container?” she asked.
“Not yet. I couldn’t give it a high-pri number. There’s no active homicide case. Is there a hurry?”
She took a deep breath and then told him about the phone call, and he became very quiet. “Say the exact words again,” he ordered. She did.
“Did you buy a security system?”
“Yes. ADT. They said it would take a week. I told them I’d pay extra if they’d set it up today. As in this afternoon. They did.”
“Okay—don’t go out of the house. I’m coming over.”
“Cat? Should I be scared?”
“Yes. You’re sitting in too many crosshairs. Let me make a coupla calls; then I’ll come over. But you’re gonna have to talk to me, Connie, or I can’t help you. Think about that between now and then.”
“Cat…”
“Or you can call that Morgan guy. Hell, now that I think of it, you probably should call him.”
“I’ll wait for you,” she said, and then hung up.
Heismann shifted his position in the garage behind the nurse’s house so that he could see both the driveway and the back windows of the house. She was downstairs, in the dining room. She’d been talking on the phone; then she’d left the room for a few minutes, turned lights on and off throughout the house, and now was back in the dining room. He’d slipped in
to the yard just after dusk, coming up the hill from the park again. He’d spotted the ADT decals on the back door immediately, but there were none on the windows, so he’d have to do some snooping before trying any more break-ins.
The garage was a dusty, spidery place, filled with old furniture, boxes, yard tools, boards in the rafters, and one ancient riding mower that reeked of gasoline. There were single windows on either side, but they were so covered in dust, grime, and webs as to be useless. Down one side was a workbench with a row of power tools—drill press, a large band saw, a radial-arm saw, all draped in deep cobwebs. There probably hadn’t been room for a car in here for years, and hers was parked in the driveway, where it had been the last time. But there was room for him, right up at the front, where the two big side-hinged doors came together, a two-inch crack between them. He’d pulled two boxes over to the crack, blown most of the dust off, and sat down to watch.
He hadn’t made up his mind as to what he was going to do tonight, but he was going to do something. The day after tomorrow he had to occupy the house on Capitol Hill. After that, he would be busy putting the cover story in place and preparing the house for the weapon’s arrival. This woman was still a loose end. How important a loose end depended on who those men in suits were and what they wanted from her.
The Ammies could always get lucky. If you could believe the papers these days, the FBI, CIA, and a host of other law-enforcement bureaus and agencies were actually talking to one another. But as best he could tell, the American government, supposedly at war with terrorism, was still making the most basic error of military planning: They were hell-bent on determining their enemy’s intentions, when every good planner knew that you focused on the enemy’s capabilities. That’s what made the fanatics in Al Qaeda, the Base, so dangerous—they did target surveillance for as long as two years, but they never set a date for action. They built up their capabilities to act, developed opportunities and only when they saw such an opportunity would they seize it, which is what rendered the Ammie predilection for focusing on plans useless.
Headlights flared in the driveway. He ducked back from the big crack between the doors. Peering through a smaller crack between two boards, he saw the nurse’s car silhouetted for an instant by a car behind it, and then its lights went off. He moved back to the larger crack and watched as a tallish white man got out of the new arrival and walked up the drive to the back porch. He was wearing a suit under an open trench coat. He looked to be about her age, early forties. Handsome, well built, in shape. He watched her come to the door and let him in. Then he saw them exchange a quick kiss. Okay, her lover. For a moment, he couldn’t see them anymore, until they both appeared in the brightly lighted dining room, to the left of the kitchen, whose windows gave on to the backyard.
He pulled a pair of minibinoculars from his pocket and studied the man’s face. A hard, serious face, skeptical eyes. Policeman perhaps? Another federal agent? This damned nurse seemed to be a magnet for police. He put the binoculars back in his coat pocket and sat down, tapping his fingers impatiently. He’d wait until they were busy doing something and then slip down to check the car. Maybe they’d go upstairs. That would make things a lot easier.
Then he had a bad thought: If this man was a policeman, he might be here because of that menacing phone call he’d made earlier. In which case, he might have to take action much sooner than he’d wanted to, perhaps tonight. He had hoped she would just bolt and solve his problem, but now he cursed his impetuousness. Here was a prime example of his not doing his homework. He should have known about the boyfriend. Now he might have two loose ends. He swore out loud in the darkness, startling some rodent in the furniture into skittering flight across the concrete floor.
“You get the whole enchilada here with this ADT system, or just doors?” Cat asked.
“Doors. Now I just have to remember another damned password, a system number, and a name for when I accidentally set the thing off and have to call them. It’s off right now, until I reread the instructions.”
He grunted. “Those signs on the doors are the best part of the system,” he said. “Your average burglar sees that, he’ll just go creep the house next door, one that doesn’t have a system. Got any coffee?”
“I thought you were cutting back on caffeine?” she said as she went back out to the kitchen to make a fresh pot. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and she’d taken a moment to run a brush through her hair. Then she remembered that the caffeine bit had been Lynn’s idea. She found it amusing that Cat’s wife, who was at least fifty pounds overweight, would be hectoring lean and mean Cat Ballard about his diet. But wives did that, she supposed.
“I tried,” he was saying from the dining room. “Found myself falling asleep at my desk by four. Having withdrawal headaches. Just like some damn hype. Recognized my jones when I saw it, gave up that decaf plan for Lent.” He came to the kitchen doorway. “Listen, I can’t stay long. Bobby’s birthday—we’re going to something called Chunky Cheese.”
“Chuck E. Cheese,” she said. “Kids love it. You’re probably gonna hate it.”
“It’s a place for some ‘quality time,’ as she calls it.” He sighed. “So, we gonna talk or what?”
She brought his cup of coffee in and sat down at the opposite side of the dining room table. She raised an eyebrow. “‘Or what’?”
“C’mon.”
“The clinic?” she asked.
“Yeah, Con, the fucking clinic.”
Game’s over, she thought. She collected her thoughts for a moment. “There was this one patient,” she said. “A European guy. Medium-medium. They did the full Monty on him over the course of the last year or so.” She told him that she’d assisted at several of his procedures, and that this guy had paid to change out damn near everything. A new face, taken, as she remembered, from a picture of someone else. Subdermal smoothing grafts on fingertips and toes. Tonal changes to his vocal cords. Altered eye color. Reshaped ears. Permanent dye job on his hair—all his hair. A dentist in three separate times to alter his teeth. If they could have swapped out his DNA, he’d probably have wanted that done, too.
And then there was the SRS angle: the inflatable boobs. He’d kept the rest of his equipment, with the exception of having a pouch opened up in his groin that would allow him to bind his genitals practically out of sight. But from the waist up, he would damn well startle the good folks in church if he ever lifted his shirt. Then, switching gears, she told him about the taping system, and the transcripts. That had been her job, for which she was paid extra. Except for her, only Dr. Khandoor had handled the tapes. And finally, she told him that there had been one tape—she didn’t know who it was—of a guy talking about bombs and shit.
Cat just listened, staring at her, his coffee long forgotten. “Bombs? You tell the feds all this?” His voice was rising. “You tell this to the Secret Service?”
“I played ignorant,” she said. “But I think that Morgan guy was being coy. Asked if people talked in their sleep. I sloughed it off. Tried to change the subject. But…”
“But?”
“He looks like a big dumb…caveman. There’s no other word for it. But he isn’t. You can see it when he gives you that goofy smile. I felt like he was looking right through me.”
Cat rubbed his chin. “You think they maybe retrieved some of this shit from the fire scene?”
“Something tells me they might have that one transcript. Heaven knows how, but I think that’s why it’s Secret Service coming around.”
“You know who it was that actually said that shit about bombs?”
“No. Khandoor wouldn’t give me a tape until it was full. He ran the machines, dictated the code numbers before each procedure. My job was to type up what I heard on the tape. It would be his voice saying the code number, then the patient’s voice in the recovery room. Sometimes there wasn’t anything, and I’d type the code number and then ‘nothing spoken.’”
“But this one guy?”
&nbs
p; “Whoever it was, he kept saying ‘bomb, bomb, bomb,’ and then some shit in German—‘Heil Hitler,’ Nazi stuff. If that guy, whoever, whatever he is, found out about the tapes and somehow knows I did the transcripts, then that’s why he’s been in my house.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Cat?”
“What?”
“I think I need to get out of here.”
He nodded distractedly, then suddenly shook his head, as if coming to his senses. “No, hell no, you can’t just rabbit. There’d be red rockets all over town, you go disappearing.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong, Cat,” she said, almost shouting. “I just worked there, okay? I typed those damned things. The doctors were the ones recording their own patients.”
“Doesn’t matter, Con. I think you need to call that guy Morgan back and lay this all out for them—the Secret Service, I mean. Hell, the inauguration’s in what—ten days? The whole police department is jumping through its ass for that. Did you know they’re gonna lock down the whole downtown government area starting next week?”
“I read the papers,” she said. “But how can I spill my guts to federal agents without getting into trouble, Cat? I didn’t do anything but my job—you know, ace surgical assistant. But you know how it’s gonna look. Identity changes on foreigners?”
He eyed her across the table, suddenly looking every inch the Homicide cop now. “This guy talking about bombs—he get an identity change?”
Shit, she thought. “I don’t know! Like I said, we had no way of knowing. Each tape had several patients on it. I just fucking typed.”
But Cat was shaking his head. “Some lunatic gets an identity change, talks about bombs? Suppose this is the same asshole who’s creeping around your house, making death threats, killing your cat because you gave him the milk instead of putting it in your coffee?”
“But why me? I don’t know who any of those people were!”
“Maybe it’s just like this fuck told you on the phone, Con: Everyone’s dead except you. He doesn’t know what you know or don’t know, but everyone else at that clinic is dead. Except you. That would do it for me.”
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