The blast from the snake gun had blown Heismann’s body back into the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, where it proceeded to create a large, wet, and still-spreading mess all over the kitchen linoleum. The driver was talking on his radio to the agents still gathered in the church parking lot.
“What is that thing?” Hallory asked, looking at the snake gun lying on the scorched sheet. Swamp explained it to him.
“On their way,” the driver announced.
Hallory stepped delicately through all the blood. “So, is that him?” he asked Swamp.
“Who could tell?” Swamp replied.
“Open his shirt,” Lucy said. “See if—”
“We shouldn’t disturb the body,” Hallory told her. “Technically, this is a crime scene.”
Lucy made a rude noise. “You want a scene?” she said. “Go to Capitol Hill. I need to know if this is what those cops saw.”
Hallory looked to Swamp as if seeking some support, but Swamp just shrugged. He wanted to know, too. They sure as hell weren’t going to get anything from the wreckage of this guy’s face. Lucy walked out of the dining room, going the long way around to the kitchen. She rooted through drawers until she found the cutlery. She took out a knife, then threw a pile of dish towels next to the body so she didn’t have to walk in all the blood. Bending over, she cut his shirt off from neck to waist, then pulled the material aside.
Swamp looked but couldn’t tell. The bottom half of the shotgun pattern had hit the man in the chest, and where any breasts would have been was now a field of tattered hamburger. It was possible. There was one rather pronounced fleshy pouch on the right side. Was that a gleam of plastic? A plastic sac? Yes, it was.
“Son of a bitch,” Hallory whispered.
“Got that right,” Connie croaked from the dining room. “Is he dead?”
Just before sunrise, Swamp took his seat at the folding table in the makeshift hearing room, which looked like a plain staff lunchroom. He was flanked at the table by Hallory and the director of the Secret Service. Sitting behind Swamp, their chairs against the wall, were the United States Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security. Some of their staffers were standing alongside. Swamp felt uncomfortable sitting at the witness table while cabinet officers were sitting behind him like support staffers, but that was the way they had wanted it. We’ll be behind you all the way, Mr. Morgan, the AG had said. Wa-a-y behind me, Swamp remembered thinking.
Seven tired and harried-looking legislators were facing him at a second folding table on the other side of the room. They were variously dressed—some in shirtsleeves, some with ties, others with no ties. Only the chairman had a suit coat on. The room was already hot and musty. Attempts to open some windows had failed as they were apparently painted shut. There were no thrones, no individual microphones, no raised dais—none of the accoutrements Swamp normally associated with a congressional hearing. Each legislator had been allowed one staffer, who had to stand right behind his principal, his back against the wall. The chairman, a white-haired senator, had a single yellow legal pad in front of him. The other legislators had a variety of folders, notebooks, coffee cups, and legal pads. Arrayed against one end wall was a bank of television cameras surrounded by portable stage lights. The reporters were trying hard not to stand on the snake’s nest of thick black cables littering the floor.
The chairman knocked an empty coffee mug against the table to bring the session to order. He said good morning to the cabinet officers and then addressed the director of the Secret Service. “Mr. Director,” he began, “I understand that you’ve brought us an eyewitness to what happened yesterday.”
“Yes, sir, that’s correct,” the director replied. “This is Special Agent T. Lee Morgan, U.S. Secret Service, retired. He was recalled to active duty in the Department of Homeland Security after nine eleven, and he now serves in the Office of Special Investigations, DHS.”
“Very well. Mr. Morgan, please stand to be sworn.”
As if upon signal, the floodlights came up and Swamp had to avert his face to avoid the sudden glare. The chairman himself, apparently used to bright lights, stood and administered the oath, and Swamp stood to solemnly swear that he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing already that he was about to do just the opposite. He had had one hour to read and reread his White House–prepared statement, an exercise that had required more coffee than he’d had in many months. Now his hands were jittery as he gripped the statement folder, which bore the gold seal of the Secret Service. Hallory scribbled something on his legal pad and then turned it so Swamp could read it. It said, “Relax—they think you’re a hero.”
“Mr. Morgan, we’ve not been given a copy of your statement, so if you’d like to just say what you have to say, we’ll proceed from there.” He paused to rub the side of his face wearily. “It’s been a long day and night for everyone, and I apologize for the rather Spartan setting. But the building is very full right now, as I’m sure you know.”
He proceeded to introduce the other members of the hastily convened Joint Committee on Intelligence for the benefit of the television cameras, then signaled for Swamp to read his statement. Swamp could almost feel the cameras swiveling to focus on him. One of the attorney general’s staffers got up and passed copies of the statement down the table to the legislators, while another gave some copies to the press representatives.
He read the statement, which consisted of ten pages of double-spaced fourteen-point text. The statement gave the antecedents of his original investigation, and then the sequence of events Swamp had experienced personally, up to and including the shoot-out at the bank. It ended with Swamp saying that he could unequivocally certify that the person who fired the mortar rounds was the same person he had met before during the course of his investigation: the managing director of the Royal Kingdom Bank. He closed his folder and waited for questions.
The chairman started it off. “Mr. Morgan, did you have the bank manager under surveillance after you and the District police interviewed him?”
“No, sir.”
“Why not?”
“No probable cause, Senator. At the time of the interview, it appeared that their only connection to the German was essentially a money-changing operation. An entirely legal one, which they did report.”
“How about after you realized they had rented the town house to this German assassin?”
Swamp hesitated. The whole truth, as much as I can, he thought. In fact, both Hallory and the director of the Secret Service had coached him to channel all the questions, if he could, toward blaming the Secret Service for not listening to him. “Congressional hearings are always about blame,” the director had told him. “They’ll know the attack failed, but not why yet. We need twenty-four more hours of confusion to tie off all the loose ends.”
“By the time we—I—realized that there was a connection, and that the target might be the inauguration, not the speech to the joint session, I was no longer inside the system, Senator.”
“You’d been fired, I understand. They thought the whole thing was a firefly.”
The director raised his hands. “Special Agent Morgan wasn’t fired, Senator,” he said. “He was on recalled annuitant status, and he was simply relieved of his active duties.”
“With all due respect, Mr. Director,” the chairman said, “that’s a distinction without a difference. Mr. Morgan, did you feel like you got fired?”
“Yes, sir,” Swamp said, remembering his instructions.
“Yet you persisted, Mr. Morgan. You’d been a member of the SES, a high-level official at Secret Service headquarters. Surely you knew the rules.”
“I judged these to be highly unusual circumstances, Mr. Chairman,” Swamp said. “Just as the security precautions for the inauguration were unprecedented. It seemed to me that I had little to lose if I was all wrong, but the government had a lot to lose if this guy managed to bomb the inauguration.”
&nbs
p; “You got that goddamn right, Mr. Morgan,” the Senator said. Murmurs of agreement filled the room. “I was in the Army, in Vietnam, seems like a hundred years ago. I heard that mortar thump when it started firing. I knew what that sound was. I knew that it had to be a big-ass mortar, too. And when stuff started going off in the air above the Capitol, I was looking for my trenching tool.” There was some subdued laughter.
“I was in the room with him, Mr. Chairman,” Swamp said. “And with the mortar. I still can’t hear so well. But the main thing is, it was him. The manager of the Royal Kingdom Bank. He even taunted me. I think he wanted me to watch him do it.”
“So, Mr. Morgan,” the chairman said, his genial smile fading, “if the bank manager executed the attack, where the hell was the German during all this?”
Swamp just looked at him for a second. The smile was gone, and the Senator now looked like the prosecutor he had been. Shit, Swamp thought. He knows. He knows this is all bogus. Hallory cleared his throat gently, as if to nudge Swamp to respond. “All I can surmise, Senator,” Swamp said, “is that something happened right there at the end that necessitated the bank manager’s direct intervention. We think the German had had a year’s worth of identity changes at that clinic, which was owned in part by that bank. That may have been part of his payoff—he was known in the Interpol system as an associate of Muslim terrorist organizations. They used him to destroy his trail—to burn the clinic, to kill the one possible witness who was still alive and who might remember what he looked like when he was finished with the ID changeover. They used him to set up the town house for the attack. To receive the weapon. To set up the weapon.”
“And then what, they kill him right before the attack? Why would they do that?”
“I don’t know, sir. Perhaps they were cleaning up their last remaining loose end. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” the chairman stated, more than a hint of skepticism in his voice.
Swamp decided to just stay on message. “There’s a lot we don’t know here,” he said. “But what I do know is that the man I saw firing that mortar into the Capitol was Emir Mutaib. And when I confronted him at the bank, he ran.”
“And you just shot him?” This from another senator.
Swamp nodded. “That’s right, Senator. His security guards opened fire on me. I returned fire. When the smoke cleared, he was in the parking lot, about to get away. At that time, I had no idea the attack had failed. In fact, I was pretty much convinced that the attack had succeeded all too well. So, yes, I shot him down.”
“Was this man working for the government of Saudi Arabia?” another legislator asked.
“I don’t know, sir,” Swamp said.
“Does the government of Saudi Arabia own that bank?”
“I don’t know, sir,” said Swamp. “I would assume that the same people who run Saudi Arabia run that bank. That’s the way things seem to work over there. But technically, I don’t know.”
The chairman leaned forward intently. “So you don’t know for a fact,” he said, “that this man you shot, this Mutaib, was an agent of the government of Saudi Arabia?”
“What I know, Senator, was that this was the man who fired that big-ass mortar at you yesterday noon.”
There was a sudden silence in the room. But the senator then came right back at Swamp. “The fact that you were all on your own, both in that town house and, later, in that bank, indicates to me a pretty massive failure of the government’s intelligence operations, Mr. Morgan. Can you explain how that happened?”
“No, sir, I cannot. I can speculate, maybe.”
“Yes, by all means, speculate for us, Special Agent Morgan.”
Swamp resisted an urge to wet his lips. “I think that the entire security apparatus here in the capital was totally focused on the inauguration. You also have to remember that my theory of this so-called firefly was that the attack was aimed at the joint session. Mr. Hallory here was not convinced. He thought it was a firefly, and if it wasn’t, he had almost another month to deal with it. But the correct answer is, I don’t know.”
“There’s an awful lot you don’t know, Mr. Morgan,” the senator said.
“I’d have to agree with that assessment, Senator,” Swamp said. “I suspect there will be the mother of all investigations into this one once the smoke clears.”
“You all can count on that, sir,” the senator said, then sat back in his chair, his lips pressed together. Swamp didn’t know what to say to that, but it was clear that some, if not all, of the legislators knew or at least suspected that they were being had. He was saved by the attorney general, who announced from behind Swamp that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which, unfortunately, had not been brought into this matter, had already launched an in-depth investigation into all aspects of this breach of homeland security. To Swamp’s surprise, the secretary of Homeland Security echoed those sentiments, choosing to ignore the AG’s cheap shot. Or was he reading from his own carefully prepared script?
“This is all passing strange, Mr. Attorney General,” the chairman said. “But as for me, I’m presently satisfied that the actions now being taken against the government of Saudi Arabia as a result of this incident are justified. Especially given the fact that we have an eyewitness. And, for my esteemed colleagues’ information, yes, there will be a great deal of sorting out to be done in the days ahead by the new Congress. Gentlemen, I’m exhausted. I see no purpose to prolonging this little…exercise. Do I hear a motion?”
The representative to his right moved to adjourn, and this was seconded immediately by another senator. The television lights hissed off and the media people began a scramble to get through the door at the same time.
“Good job,” the attorney general murmured as he brushed past Swamp on his way over to talk to the chairman. Hallory said the same thing, then indicated that they should leave through the room’s other door to avoid any media ambushes. They succeeded in doing that and made their way down to the congressional subway, which would get them back to one of the House office buildings.
“I felt like I was standing in front of a campfire, kicking up smoke and ashes,” Swamp said.
“Exactly so,” Hallory replied. “Trust me, some of them knew it was Kabuki. But now the whole world knows we have an eyewitness to what they were trying to do. Consider yourself the smoking gun.”
Swamp had a thought. “This was really all about the OPEC thing, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The Al Qaeda prisoners—they were the bonus, not the other way around.”
Hallory didn’t say anything as the two-car train pulled quietly alongside the platform. “That’s well above my pay grade, but I think you may be right,” he said finally. “I mean, hell, what’s the Persian Gulf always been about, Swamp? Bombs and oil. Bombs and oil. That’s all those people seem to be good for.”
“Why do I know I’ll be coming back here for the entire next year?” Swamp asked as they waited for the doors to open.
“Not necessarily,” Hallory said. “I will, for damn sure, and lots of folks senior to me, too, especially when the full scope of this becomes known.”
“How about Lucy?”
“What about Lucy?”
“She was kind of intimately tied up in this thing, wasn’t she?”
Hallory looked at him with a tired smile. “Two things you don’t know about Lucy, Swamp. One, she doesn’t work for me. She works for Bertie. She’s his direct liaison officer to the Homeland Security fusion committee. And, two, this whole goddamned thing was her idea.”
Swamp was stunned. “She works for Bertie? She told me she was your deputy.”
Hallory shrugged. “I guess she lied,” he said. “She does that, you know. All those people across the river do that.”
Union Station was starting to fill up with nervous travelers at ten o’clock that morning as Swamp and Bertie sat in the Amtrak passenger lounge, having a cup of coffee. The city had been unsealed at 7:00 A.M., and there’d been a government announce
ment on all the television channels that the national emergency was over. The new president had come on the air to give a reassuring speech, accompanied by his principal cabinet officers. He said that details of the terrorist attack on the Capitol would be forthcoming later in the day. And then he declared the capital and all members of the government were safe and that the conspiracy, which had originated in Saudi Arabia, had failed. He hinted broadly that what people had seen on their televisions might not have been entirely accurate. Swamp had watched the news back at Secret Service headquarters, including three minutes of his own testimony before the hastily assembled Joint Intelligence Committee, and then he’d grabbed a quick nap in Hallory’s office. A while later, Bertie’d showed up from Langley to announce that they were going to Union Station. Swamp had cleaned up in one of the office bathrooms.
On the drive over in the Agency limo, Bertie had explained that the government wanted their eyewitness out of sight and out of town for the next few weeks. The airlift of over two thousand Al Qaeda suspects was almost complete, and all Americans were either out of Saudi Arabia or safe at the Prince Sultan Air Base there. The Saudis, along with the rest of the world, were going to learn over the course of the weekend the full extent of the American deception. All this would be clear once the government restored the phones and the airwaves to civilian control.
“There’s going to be medium chaos in the network news departments,” Bertie’d said. “Not to mention some pointed questions in certain diplomatic channels. You know, why the governments were not given a heads-up last night at the White House.”
“Pointed questions.”
“Well, you know how they get,” Bertie had replied with a weary smile. “This is going to be a really interesting weekend here in Fun City.”
Swamp had tried to stifle a yawn but failed. “Where’s Ms. Wall?”
“That cop you were working with? Detective Sergeant Cullen, was it? Word is that he’s taking her in.”
“Is that smart, legally speaking?”
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