President's assassin sd-5

by Brian Haig

  Mrs. Hooper insisted, "There was enough there… Look, people, this is Washington. Reality check. Barnes was a big boy He was warned he'd better be whistle-clean. Well… he wasn't."

  We all guessed there had been an argument in front of the President, and Mrs. Hooper had argued for the safer course, to immediately throw Barnes to the sharks. But at this stage it didn't matter whether Calhoun Barnes oozed with corruption or had the soul of a saint, though we now knew the latter was out of the question. What mattered-all that mattered-as Jennie knew, was who else had been involved in the decision, who else might be on Jason's list, and who might need a heavy dose of special protection.

  Townsend of course appreciated this point and said to Jennie, "So I think for your short list, you should include me, Mrs. Hooper, the Attorney General, the White House legal adviser, and Meade Everhill. Also, check your office records and see which agents were involved in the investigation."

  Jennie nodded.

  Thinking two steps ahead, Phyllis said to Townsend, "Mark, should we still be concerned about the bounty issue?"

  Interestingly, he turned to Jennie, who said, "We can't rule it out. We've confirmed that Barnes was informed of the bounty the morning after we discovered it. He had at least forty-eight hours to apply before the Internet site was shut down."

  I said, "But he's acting out of rage, not greed. Right?"

  "That's true. But why not kill two birds with one stone?" She added, "Also, consider the possibility that he recruited his coconspirators using the bounty. They're probably mercenaries, and this would certainly explain where he got at least the promise of money." She smiled at Phyllis and added, "I'm sorry. The Agency's not out of this thing yet."

  Charles Wardell of the Secret Service announced, "I have to make some calls. The President and Attorney General are already apprised. But I didn't know about Clyde Burns-the legal adviser-or Everhill. Somebody better… check on them."

  It was now 5:30 a.m. and we all wondered if the grim reaper had not already checked on Everhill and Burns. We'd been completely behind the curve, and it was a relief to play a little catchup. In fact, the mood in the room had begun to shift, and everybody thought we might even be getting a step ahead of Jason: We knew why and we knew who. What could go wrong?

  Again, I had this ominous foreboding that I-that all of us- were overlooking something important.

  Wardell stepped out of the room to make his calls. Moving to the next order of business, Townsend turned to George and asked, "Where are we regarding the military munitions?"

  George replied, "The lab reported back. Traces of Composition A5 were found on Fineberg's corpse. That's the same propellant used in the Bouncing Betty mine, and apparently, it's a distinctive trace. We're still waiting for confirmation about the antitank weapon." He paused a moment, then said, "We're assuming the weapons were stolen. Procedurally, the military has to report all domestic weapons and munitions thefts and losses to us. So we've accessed those files going back six months."

  George paused again to look at the faces around the table. Like many self-important types, he had a lot of irritating habits, but we had to endure this moment of I-know-something-you-don't before he informed us, "There have been a total of sixty-eight reported cases of theft and loss over this six-month period. So I ordered our people to screen all unclosed cases that included the theft or loss of both Light Antitank Weapons and Bouncing Betty mines."

  He then proceeded in laborious detail to describe this cross-examination, which was a curious waste of everybody's time, especially as it was George who had reminded the rest of us that we were running against the clock here. I began to wonder if he was running scared. Clearly, Jennie was the star of this show, and George was becoming like the supporting actor who speaks his lines a little too loud and overacts his limited scenes. Eventually, he wrapped it up, saying, "In the end, we found three possibilities. But unfortunately, our friends in the military don't work the same hours we do, so I haven't yet been able to question the Army's CID, that is, the Criminal Investigation Division."

  Townsend looked a little exasperated. After a moment he asked George, "Did you make an official request to CID?"

  "I… yes. I spoke with a night duty officer over in the Pentagon. A major named-"

  "When? What time?"

  "Uh… about two hours ago."

  It suddenly became real quiet.

  Phyllis looked at me and asked, "Sean, is there a better way to handle this?"

  I avoided George's eyes and replied, truthfully, "CID does maintain a duty officer in the Pentagon. But CID headquarters is located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. We should call Major General Daniel Tingle, the CID commander."

  Phyllis looked at George, then at Townsend. She suggested, "Mark, it might be advisable to use Drummond on this."

  Townsend looked at me. "You ever work with CID?"

  I nodded.

  "Then do it." He added, but I think not for my benefit, "Do I need to remind everybody that every hour lost can be counted in lives? We cannot… be Sitting around… with our thumbs up our-"

  "Up our noses," Phyllis helpfully interjected. "And you're absolutely right."

  "I think I should go with Drummond," Jennie suggested.

  Townsend looked at us both and asked, "Why are you still sitting here?"

  And we weren't.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We took the same helicopter, though the pilots had changed out while we were in the building. The new pilot jocularly informed us he was named Jimbo, the flight time to Fort Belvoir would be approximately twenty-five minutes, so we should sit back and enjoy the ride. A stewardess would be making the rounds after takeoff, offering a selection of fine wines, snacks, and reading materials.

  I grabbed Jennie's gun and shot him. Just kidding.

  About two minutes after takeoff, Jennie's cell phone went off. She answered, "Margold," then listened for a minute. "Yeah, good. Hold on." To me, she said, "It's Chuck Wardell. Meade Ever-hill was found at home, in bed, unharmed. They're moving him to FBI headquarters." She returned to her conversation with Wardell, and they began chatting about the protection screen being set up around Townsend.

  It was a little odd that Wardell had called Jennie. But in chaotic situations, people migrate toward competence, and through good luck, good timing, and, if I say so myself, a bit of deductive brilliance, Jennie and I were the heroes of the hour. I reminded myself that nothing has a shorter half-life than a hero.

  I whipped out my cell, called the Pentagon switch, and asked the operator to put me through to the CID duty officer. She did and he answered, "Major Robbins. CID."

  I identified myself and informed him I worked for the Director of the FBI, which was partly true and certainly more impressive than the whole truth. I said, "You've already gotten a request for assistance regarding some lost and stolen munitions. Right?"

  "About two hours ago. An agent… uh, hold on"-he apparently checked his duty log-"Meany… George Meany, asked for assistance. He gave me a list of the purported thefts. I already faxed requests for assistance to the CID offices in the locations where the thefts occurred."

  "He explained this was high priority?"

  "Yes. I categorized them high priority."

  "Well… explain what that means."

  "It's SOP to code our requests. High priority means the receiving stations have seventy-two hours to respond."

  "Seventy-two?… Is there a higher priority?"

  "Of course. Urgent. You have twelve hours to respond."

  The Army invented the word "procedures," and Major Robbins had done what he was asked, in a manner both timely and efficient-given his half-assed knowledge of what was going on here.

  I didn't want to overwhelm Major Robbins with the facts, so I explained, "Perhaps Meany failed to emphasize the importance of this. So listen closely We are dealing with a… huge… fucking… emergency here. Somebody's trying to murder the President with those weapons. If this President dies, his Vi
ce President is going to hunt down whoever failed to stop it and play croquet with their balls on the Rose Garden lawn. Major, do you understand?"

  "Uh… got it."

  "I'm in a helicopter, fifteen minutes out from Belvoir. During that fifteen minutes, you will call Major General Tingle. You will tell him to meet me in his office. You will tell him to have transportation meet me in the Post Exchange parking lot. You will tell him to round up whatever experts on these cases he needs. Got that?"

  "Got all that."

  "Repeat it back to me," and he did, word for word.

  I pulled a pen out of my pocket. "Give me the case numbers of the thefts Meany gave you."

  He did that, too, and I jotted them down on my palm. I thanked Major Robbins and punched off.

  Jennie said to me, "You were pretty rough on that poor guy."

  "Nonsense. Soldier talk."

  "Define soldier talk."

  "A simple statement of mission, basic steps to accomplish said mission, and the pain I will cause you if you fail."

  She shook her head.

  "Look, what if I had been all nice and polite? And what if he got it all wrong? Then I'd feel really bad."

  She shrugged. "Well, you can't really blame George. To outsiders, the Army is a very foreign world."

  "Exactly. That's why he should've called me and asked for help."

  "Maybe if you had a more positive and nurturing relationship with George, he would have."

  I was about to toss Agent Margold from the helicopter when I saw she was laughing.

  For the remainder of the flight, she briefed me on the unfolding plan to use Director Townsend as a decoy to lure Jason Barnes out into the open. The concept, as I understood it, was to encase Townsend in three tons of body armor and have him move around in public all day, flanked and followed by a screen of handpicked agents, armed to the teeth with guns, bad attitudes, and Jason Barnes's photo. It sounded well put together, it probably was well put together, and try as I might, I thought of no more than ten things that could go completely wrong. But that wasn't my problem.

  Two military police humvees with flashing blue lights awaited us on the tarmac when we set down. I regarded this as a good omen. I thanked Jimbo the pilot for not crashing, and informed him the in-flight movie sucked. He laughed.

  Five minutes later we pulled up to the entrance of the headquarters of the United States Army's Criminal Investigation Division. A CID officer in mufti awaited us. He escorted us swiftly inside, and down a hallway, and up a stairwell, then down another hall to the door of Major General Daniel Tingle, fuhrer of the Army's equivalent of the Gestapo.

  Understand that as a military lawyer, I worked with lots of criminal investigators, and when it comes to flatfoots, in my professional view, none are better. Most CID foot soldiers are former enlisted MPs promoted to the rank of warrant officer, a sort of halfway station between sergeants and commissioned officers, which affords them the best of both worlds. They are accorded the full privileges and respect of an officer, just none of the bullshit. They can go to the NCO club-where the liquor's cheaper-or the officers' club, where young lieutenants' wives are usually cuter, lonelier, and more gullible. In general, CID types tend to be highly intelligent, arrogant, sneaky, diligent, treacherous, and disrespectful. Essentially they are detectives, though, unlike their civilian counterparts, CID agents are highly trained in all arts and aspects of criminology and criminality, from interrogations through forensics, from rapes through murder, and with rare exceptions, they handle the A to Z of whatever case they're assigned.

  Often their work takes them undercover. Arriving incognito, they report into a unit, they work hard to fit in, they create friendships and build strong bonds of trust, and then they bust everybody who farted outside the commode. It is this part of their duties, I think, that makes them beloved to the rest of the Army

  Guys and gals like this need strong adult supervision, and that odious task falls upon a corps of commissioned military police officers. General Tingle was the current top sneak, a guy the rest of the Army's generals try hard to get along with because he has the dirt on everybody

  So we entered the office where General Tingle was seated behind his desk, and he stayed seated behind his desk. On his left flank stood a large, heavyset black officer in battle dress uniform, the crossed pistols of an MP on one collar, the spread eagle of a full colonel on the other collar, and a nametag that read Johnson. On the general's right flank stood two middle-aged men in civilian clothes; from their sneaky faces, presumably both were senior agents. General Tingle, I noted, was attired in pale gray Army sweats, and although mostly bald, his few surviving strands were disheveled, nor had he shaved, nor was he smiling. Obviously he had been dragged out of bed, and from his expression he seemed to be pondering why, and by whom.

  This might be a bad moment to mention my military rank, so I said, "Good morning, General. I'm Sean Drummond with the Central Intelligence Agency. This is Special Agent Jennifer Margold, the Senior Agent in Charge for National Security from the Washington office."

  We stepped forward and shook his hand. He said, with remarkable prescience, "Well, I won't say it's nice to meet you. But would you care to sit?"

  A pair of Rotarian chairs were in front of his desk, and we chose to sit. Without further ado, I informed him, "We're dealing with an emergency. I'll cut to the chase. I have bad news."

  He smiled grimly "Oh… I'm counting on that."

  I did not smile back. "Perhaps you heard on the evening news that Merrill Benedict was murdered on the beltway. And a few minutes later, a Supreme Court justice was slain on his own doorstep."

  "I heard. And the White House Chief of Staff was massacred in his house yesterday morning. The city's going nuts-I got it." He pointed at me and said, "What I don't get

  is what this has to do with Army CID."

  "That would be the part you didn't hear on the news-Merrill Benedict was murdered with a LAW and Phillip Fineberg with a Bouncing Betty mine, modified into a command-detonated device."

  Long silence. Eventually, the general said, "Shit."

  "Enough to bury everybody. Don't worry about it."

  But he obviously was worried about it. "You're positive these were U.S. military munitions? Russian and French hardware often find their way inside our borders. Both countries produce weapons analogous to the LAW and the Bouncing Betty."

  "Traces of Composition A5 were on Fineberg's corpse-the distinctive propellant used with Bouncing Bettys." I allowed him a brief moment to mull that, then added, "As I hope your duty officer informed you, the killers vowed to assassinate the President. So you might say we're a little concerned about how they got these weapons, and about their access to other military munitions-types, quantities, and so forth."

  General Tingle was a cool customer and took this understatement in stride. He stared at me. "All right. So this is… serious. Now, tell me why you-the CIA-are involved?"

  "Because there's some chance this involves foreign terrorists."

  He nodded. "Time line?"

  "If they're true to their word, they'll try to kill the President within the next twenty-four hours."

  "You believe this is credible?"

  "They just filled two morgues. Don't you?"

  He turned to Colonel Johnson. "Al, how long will it take you to scrub the files?"

  But before Johnson could reply, I said, "Our FBI friends already did that. We have good reason to believe the weapons were acquired within the last six months, and our other assumptions are fairly obvious. There are three cases that meet our parameters."

  I read the case file numbers and dates off my palm to Colonel Johnson, who left to gather the files. Apparently reading my mind, the general ordered coffee, and an aide left to scrounge a pot from the duty officer. The general looked at me and said, "Do you have military experience, Mr. Drummond?"

  "I… yes, some."

  "Then let me put this in perspective. Right now, we have two wars going o
n, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army is shipping equipment and munitions at rates not seen since Vietnam. Visit the port at Galveston

  … it's like wandering through the aisles of some military Wal-Mart. Thousands of tons of artillery shells, main gun tank rounds, track pads, and spare parts pass out of that port every month."

  "Meaning we… you have security problems?" I was having a little trouble with my pronouns.

  "We have a security nightmare. Three-quarters of the Army's active, reserve, and National Guard MPs are in Iraq. Nearly all the Army's logistics specialists and security specialists are there, or Afghanistan. We're outsourcing security to civilian firms. They're hiring guys off the street, paying them $8.90 an hour, and begging them not to let their cousins walk through and filch a few Ml6s."

  "But these are mines and LAWs," Jennie noted.

  The general nodded. "Let me be frank. We don't really know how much is getting ripped off, or lost, or misplaced. And for obvious reasons we can't halt the train to find out. Sometimes, nobody discovers anything missing until the shipping container gets to Iraq or Afghanistan and it's opened and inventoried. Sometimes the guy doing the inventory arbitrarily decides it's just a bookkeeping error. Or he's lazy and doesn't feel like doing the paperwork to report the missing item. And when it's discovered missing overseas, there's always the questions of how, where it was stolen, and when-here, en route, or over there." He paused, and then added, "So what gets detected, and what gets reported to us, and what we choose to report to the FBI, could be a fraction of what's missing."

  I traded glances with Jennie. Not good. The weapons could provide us a lead we desperately needed, and we definitely needed to learn what kind of nasty surprises Barnes might have in store. A lot of things go boom in the night, but some booms turn night into day.

  But the general had another point to make. "During peacetime, our accountability, and our follow-up to thefts and losses, are exceptionally good. But what's seriously important in times of peace often becomes trivial when people are fighting and dying. So don't get your hopes up."