The Firefly

by P. T. Deutermann

  On the other hand…he’d probably be gone all day. Time enough to maybe start the process of getting some help from the Bureau. He still had some friends over there. If PRU wouldn’t investigate it, then OSI would. He’d do some “liaison” work. Right, he thought with a grin. Liaison—that’s my job description, isn’t it?

  One of the building’s night security guards stuck his head into Swamp’s office and asked how late he’d be staying. Swamp told him fifteen minutes, and the guard withdrew with a two-finger salute.

  Swamp looked at his watch. Eight o’clock. He checked his coffee cup, which was a quarter full of what looked like asphalt. He tilted the cup, but nothing happened. He sighed. It was asphalt, solidified after another standard five-to-eight day at the office. At least the guys over at PRU had an excuse. He, on the other hand, had a reason. The longer he stayed in the office, the less time he had to spend at the apartment over in Ballston.

  He called Caruso’s and told them he’d want his usual single in thirty minutes. That would give him a pleasant hour to hour and a half in the company of familiar waiters and Chef Ricci’s excellent food. By then, with the day’s edges worn down by a couple of glasses of Sicilian red, he could walk the one block to his apartment building and face the stark, silent apartment with some vestige of equanimity. Then when the black dog of depression came around, he would at least be ready.

  Who are you feeling sorry for? his conscience whispered. For you or for her? For us, he wanted to shout, but he knew that wasn’t true. Which was precisely why they’d been down on the Tidal Basin that day in the first place.

  “Mr. Morgan, sir?” It was the night guard again. “Fifteen minutes?”

  4

  CONNIE STOPPED ON THE WALK UP TO THE FRONT OF HER house and tried to decide whether to use the front door or the back. She’d taken the Metro just as soon as the cops told her she could leave the hotel, turning down their offer of breakfast and a ride out to the house. Jake Cullen had shown up as she was leaving and had returned her purse and keys, telling her he’d be out to check on her later in the morning. Warned her to lock herself in and said that the technical people would be calling to check the phone-tap system. Now, as she stood in front of the familiar facade, seeing the bare trees and the sloping, sleeping lawns almost as if for the first time, she wondered if it had been wise to come out here without an escort. Suppose he was already in the house? Waiting for her to unlock the door and step right into his—

  Oh for God’s sakes, she chided herself. It’s a Thursday morning in January, and there are cops watching somewhere nearby while you dither like some schoolgirl in a Hitchcock movie. And you want the front door because you don’t want to see the back porch just yet. So just do it.

  She walked up to the front door and unlocked it, then remembered the security system—was it set? She hadn’t set it, but had the cops? No, because they didn’t know the code. Right. She stepped through the door and locked it behind her. Then she turned on the hallway light. Everything looked familiar: the stairs rising to the second floor on her left, the living room to the right, the dining room beyond that, toward the back of the house, and the kitchen straight ahead. The furniture in the living room was right side up now, not like she’d left it after her struggle with—She stood there for a moment, her eyes closed, and tried to visualize her attacker. The monster face in the wedge of flashlight at the window. The smell of him—she remembered the cops asking about that. Wet wool. Sweat. Adrenaline, a scent with which she was all too familiar. And something else. She focused. Something medicinal. She held her breath, trying to force the thing into definition.

  Ointment.

  She opened her eyes. Yes! She’d recognized it. An antiseptic ointment they used at the clinic. That’s what it was. They gave it to their patients to put on exposed skin surfaces for six weeks after surgery.

  Son of a bitch.

  The big Secret Service guy had been right.

  This was about the clinic.

  She’d have to tell Jake. Or should she tell the government guys? Or should she keep her mouth shut for a change?

  She shook off the moment, walked down the hall into the kitchen area, and turned on the light. She put her purse, keys, and coat on the kitchen table. Her purse had been searched, but everything seemed to be there. Just to be sure, she emptied it all out onto the kitchen table and then rearranged everything back the way she’d had it. Even the three-pack of condoms. She could just imagine the cop comments. Three. Damn. Woman’s got some great expectations.

  The back kitchen door was closed, and beyond that…well, she still wasn’t quite ready for that yet. She went into the dining room, where her computer monitor was sitting on the table, disconnected, the glass screen looking like some gaping maw. There was a piece of plywood covering the window. Whatever had come through the window was gone, and the floor had been vacuumed. Someone had been through the piles of paperwork on the table, but it didn’t look like anything had been taken. There were smudges of what she assumed was fingerprint powder here and there, but otherwise, the cops had cleaned up after themselves. She could smell stale coffee in the sink, where there were half a dozen coffee mugs stacked. Well, almost cleaned up after themselves.

  She made herself go through the pantry area to the back door and look out the window. Everything looked different in the daylight, totally familiar, except for the black stains all over the back porch. And those two horizontal slots in the porch support posts. She thought she could smell Clorox, and sure enough, there were two bottles of it perched next to the back door. Nice try, fellas, she thought, but that stain’s never coming out. Or out of my sight. Those boards are going to have to come up.

  Poor damn Cat. Poor Lynn. Poor kids. Maybe literally so.

  Then the phone rang. She picked up the kitchen extension. “Hello?” she said.

  “Is this Ms. Wall?”

  She frowned. Who the hell was this? The police? Jake said they would be calling. “Yes, it is,” she said. “Who’s calling?”

  “I am with the Washington police,” the voice said. “I have a telephone number for you to call. Are you ready to write it down?”

  “Wait a minute,” she said automatically, looking for the pad of paper she kept near the phone. It was gone. She slid a blank envelope over, then had to hunt for a pen. The man was speaking with an accent, his W’s sounding like V’s—“Ms. Vall…Vashington police.” She picked up the pen and said to go ahead. He rattled off a phone number and she started to write it down, then stopped, a chill blooming in her stomach. It was the phone number for the clinic.

  “You call that number, Ms. Wall,” the voice said, dropping now to the whisper she’d heard before. “Or better yet, come down here. Where your friends are. Or bits of them anyway. Only this time, I will take your head right off. Right off! And soon, very soon, Connie Wall.”

  The dial tone came on and she replaced the handset on the wall mount. She jumped when it rang again, hesitated before answering. She didn’t want to hear any more of that shit. But the phone kept ringing, insistent, again and again. She took a deep breath and picked it up but didn’t say anything.

  “Ms. Wall, this is Sergeant Stafford, District police technical operations. Please don’t hang up—we overheard that last phone call, and that was not, I repeat, not us.”

  “No shit,” she said, finding her voice at last.

  “Yes, ma’am. But the tap was on. We got a phone number, and we have units en route to the trace point. It’s downtown, so you should be in no immediate physical danger. But please lock yourself in, and we’ll have a patrol unit out there ASAP. Don’t let anyone in unless he’s a uniformed police officer, okay?”

  She nodded, then realized she hadn’t said anything. “Got it,” she said. “Should I answer the phone?”

  “Yes, ma’am, if you don’t mind. I mean I know that’s some scary shit that guy’s talking, but the more he talks, the better shot we have of nailing him. So, yes, if you don’t mind…”


  “Okay. I need to go lock up now.” And use the damn bathroom, she thought.

  “Yes, ma’am. A black-and-white will be out front shortly.”

  She hung up and then checked all the doors and windows on the ground floor. She got out the instruction booklet for the alarm system and set that. She turned on lights in every ground-floor room, then answered a suddenly urgent call of nature.

  The patrol cops showed up ten minutes later, as she was making some coffee. They identified themselves, did a walk-through of the entire house, then the grounds. They came up to the door on the back porch, apparently oblivious of the dark stains all over the floorboards, and told her the place seemed secure but to stay in the house until the detectives called. She offered them some coffee, which they declined. Then she thanked them and locked herself in again. She fixed herself a cup and sat down at the kitchen table. She wondered if she ought to go down to the pound and get a dog.

  There were three message slips on Swamp’s desk from Hallory’s office at Secret Service headquarters when he got to work. He noted the receipt times, which had begun half an hour ago. Gary White was talking on the phone in his cubicle; he waved as Swamp parked his coffee mug, sat down at his desk, and called Hallory. An assistant put him on hold, then came back and said Hallory would call him back in fifteen minutes. Swamp sighed, said he’d be there, and went over to Gary’s cubicle.

  “That was the District,” Gary said. “They have the nurse’s phone tapped and they’ve intercepted a death threat. Guy apparently posing as someone from the police told her he was gonna cut her head off. And soon.”

  “Lovely,” Swamp said. “So he’s still here in town?”

  “Yeah, or at least he was. Phone booth at Union Station. Maybe he took the train.”

  “Right. They faxing us a written copy of what they got?”

  “Yes, sir. What did Mr. Hallory want?”

  “Still waiting to connect,” Swamp said. Then he told Gary about his conversation with Lucy VanMetre late last night.

  “They’re gonna dump it? Really?”

  “I think that’s what he’s—hang on.” The office intercom light was blinking on Swamp’s desk. The secretary announced a Mr. Hallory on line four. Swamp picked up at Gary’s desk. “Morgan,” he said.

  “Yeah, this is Carlton Hallory, PRU. You keeping banker’s hours these days, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Pathetic, isn’t it?” Swamp said.

  “Touché,” Hallory said. “Lucy says you want to bring the Bureau into your firefly.”

  “That’s correct. I need an evidentiary response team. They’re the best in that business. I want them to—”

  Hallory interrupted. “No deal, Mr. Morgan. It’s a firefly, and I’m calling it that officially as of now. No further assets. We thank you for your investigation. But as of now, PRU does not consider that transcript to be indication and warning of a viable threat to presidential security. That clear enough for you, Mr. Morgan?”

  “Clear as a bell, Mr. Hallory.”

  “And if you want to run it up to the fusion committee, come at the DAD level, because that’s the pay grade you’ll be up against from our side of the table, okay?”

  “Not a problem, Mr. Hallory,” Swamp said. “I’ll see your DAD and raise you an undersecretary.”

  “In your dreams, Mr. Morgan. But then, that’s what retirement’s all about, isn’t it, happy dreams on the front porch?”

  “Are you going to put this in writing, Mr. Hallory?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Well, it would be nice to have, if the Capitol goes boom in about a month.”

  “I’ll bet you’d like that. Yeah, I’ll put this in writing. Lucy here will send something over. E-mail good enough, or you need it signed in blood at midnight?”

  “Since I definitely think it’s going to come back to haunt us, I’d prefer a memo.”

  The bantering tone went out of Hallory’s voice, “CYA forever, huh?”

  “I get that way whenever I encounter tunnel vision, Mr. Hallory. This is the same old hidebound attitude I used to run into when I was DAD Intel.”

  “Was is the operative word, Mr. Morgan. And, you might call it hidebound—I call it focus.”

  “You can’t even admit this is possible? That there’s more here than meets the eye, rather than automatically less?”

  Hallory sighed. “You’re the one with tunnel vision, Mr. Morgan. And since you’re outside the main show here, you’re becoming a distraction. I don’t need distractions right now.”

  “Then let us work it.”

  “No, Mr. Morgan, because I know what’ll happen. ‘Us’ means you. Your reputation precedes you. You’ll grab this thing like some damned terrier and shake it and shake it until a head comes off, somewhere. Enough. You’ll get your memo. Nice doing business with you. Happy trails and all that over there in OSI land.”

  Swamp put the phone down, shaking his head. “What a mule,” he said. He summarized the conversation for Gary, who whistled in surprise.

  “He came at you personally?” Gary asked. “Talking about your reputation?”

  “There were times,” Swamp said with a rueful smile, “when I tended to get up some senior noses. But it was always about business, not my career.”

  The secretary from the front office came in to deliver a fax folder. It contained the transcript of the threatening phone call to Connie Wall, courtesy of Detective Jake Cullen. They both scanned it, and then Swamp told Gary to read it out loud.

  “Sir?”

  Swamp went back to his desk, fished around in the stack of papers, and pulled out the copy of the original clinic transcript.

  “Read that aloud, slowly.”

  Gary shrugged and began reading. When he got to the phrase “Head right off…right off!” Swamp repeated it out loud. And the same with “Soon, very soon.” Gary stopped reading.

  “We’ve heard this before, Gary,” Swamp said. “The phraseology is identical. The guy calling Ms. Wall is the guy in the bomb transcript.”

  Gary looked at the words again. “I guess that’s…possible,” he said. “You going to call Hallory back with this?”

  “Hell with him. He had his chance. We’ll take it from here. But I do want you to follow up on that memo. Hallory will drag his feet on that.”

  Gary had a frown on his face. “What?” Swamp asked.

  “Uh, I’m new here, but if the boss initiating a case calls it off, then, in my experience that’s it. I mean, how do we keep working it?”

  “Technically, you’re right. But OSI can generate a case, too. As soon as Tad McNamara gets back, I’ll brief him, and I’m sure he’ll let us run with it.”

  “Even if the Secret Service is dropping it? The guys who asked us to look at it in the first place?”

  But Swamp was staring down at the transcript. “You know what? We may not need Bureau assets after all. I think I know this guy’s name.”

  Gary’s skeptical expression spoke volumes, but Swamp was shaking his head again. “No, look, I think it’s right here. In the original transcript. The five H’s: Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler, Hess, all the superstars of the Third Reich. And then the one we didn’t recognize—Heismann. I think this guy’s name is Heismann. He’s hallucinating under the anesthetic about becoming part of the Nazi pantheon.”

  “Um…”

  “Yeah, I know, but it’s at least plausible.”

  Gary politely erased the skeptical expression on his face. “So what do we do next?”

  “We run the name Heismann on NCIC. And if that comes up empty, we go to Interpol. We need to listen to the tape of that phone call, see if there’s an accent. And I’ll call some folks I know across the river, see if the Agency CI folks have anything on a Heismann.”

  “Fax here says there was an accent—V’s becoming W’s, and vice versa.”

  “That’s German. So is Heismann.”

  “And you don’t want to take this back to Mr. Hallory?”

  “No—you hea
rd the way he was being this morning.”

  “Actually, I didn’t.”

  Swamp blinked. “Right, you didn’t. Suffice it to say, he was sarcastic. Resentful of the fact that I’m even in the picture. Seems to have forgotten they called us, not the other way around.”

  “Yes, sir, but, with all due respect, if we do get a solid line on this Heismann guy, I think it needs to go back to PRU. Insist they look at it. If it’s true, security for the speech before the joint session is a Secret Service responsibility.”

  Swamp smiled. “You’re absolutely correct. But first I want that memo from Hallory, declaring the original transcript a nonissue. If this Heismann thing turns up empty, we’re done. If he turns out to be real, then I’ll definitely go back to the Service, but probably not to Mr. Hallory.”

  “And if it solidifies,” Gary said, “you’ve got that memo.”

  “And?”

  “Which would mean you’ve got Hallory.”

  Swamp beamed. “You’re catching on there, young man. Now, let’s run that name through the system. You start with NCIC. I’ll take care of the Agency query.”

  Jäger Heismann stood in the front parlor of the brownstone town house. Actually, he didn’t stand as much as lean on the armrest of a truly ugly upholstered chair. Doing the walk-through with the real estate agent had been painful and tiring, especially going up and down those steep stairs. But now it was done and he was officially “in possession.” The agent had talked about activating the telephone, but Heismann had demurred. He had no intention of having a telephone in this house.

  He looked around at the small room, eyeing the motes of dust revealed by the sunlight streaming through the side windows. The layout was simple: The front doors of the duplex were side by side in the middle of the building, three steps up from the sidewalk, with no front yard. There was a tiny front hall, stairs up to the left, living room to the right. Straight ahead, a short hallway to the kitchen, with the dining room behind the living room. Upstairs were three bedrooms. One, the master, was at the back, over the dining room and kitchen; it had a skylight, bath en suite, and two windows overlooking the backyard and the alley. The other two bedrooms were much smaller and side by side across the front, with a shared bathroom between them.