Dark Heart

by James Phelan

  “Okay,” Walker said. “We’ll move on Harvey and Lewis.”

  “Eight hours,” Somerville said. “Harvey will be all over this. He’ll have footage from the hotel of his guys being taken in by FBI agents, and we’ll all be ID’d, and then he’ll call my Director and demand answers—and his two men will walk. My bet would be that they’ll have a way to put all this on Acton, claim that he went rogue and killed his colleagues, and Harvey will come out of this a hero.” She looked at Walker for emphasis. “Eight hours, Walker. You better do this right.”

  62

  Somerville left the hotel room, and it was quiet for near-on a minute. Across the way, one FBI agent remained at the scene.

  “That was neat, right?” Muertos said. “Acton was the link that sold out Overton, and our Homeland threat is out of the picture. Two birds with one stone.”

  “Nice when things go your way.” Walker took a sip of coffee and went back to his mess of papers. “I learned early on that you gotta use the law to your benefit.”

  “The FBI knows who Almasi is,” Muertos said. “He’s on a watchlist, and when they make out that he entered the country via a false ID, passport, biometrics, the works, it’s got to point to someone inside Homeland, right? Maybe even directly to Harvey.”

  “We can hope, but all that might take time we don’t have,” Walker said, leafing through his notes on Senator Lewis. “Sure, Almasi’s prints and face will match immigration’s electronic records from when he landed in DC the other day. They’ll run his name and it’ll bounce up that it’s bogus. They might even trace some digital trail that leads back to Harvey, though I doubt it.”

  “But when they run Almasi’s prints and mug shot through global police databases and discover he’s really Tareq Almasi,” Muertos said, “a globally wanted human trafficker, and that he was until recently a person of interest to a joint taskforce in Syria, then all kinds of questions are going to be asked, like how’d we let this guy into the country when he was on a watchlist? And that’s got to lead to corruption at Homeland, because they run the borders.”

  Walker nodded, kept reading.

  “And then they’ll look at Syria again,” Muertos said, “and find out what really happened to my team, that the plane crash was bullshit.”

  Walker nodded. “A false passport is easy enough to get, but Harvey changing the biometrics in the system, something he’s doing for his well-heeled illegal immigrants too? There’s got to be a digital trail someone can trace, now that they’ve got Almasi as an example, highlighting the manipulations to the immigration database at the point where they’re fingerprinted and retina-scanned on entry.” Walker paused. He was seeing something in the mess of papers, but he wasn’t. Find the pattern, he heard Bloom say, years ago, more relevant now than ever. The careers and lives of Lewis and Harvey spread out in paper form at his feet, carpeting the suite. “The question remains: is Lewis in the know?”

  “I think so.”

  “Me too. But we need proof.”

  Walker looked to Muertos, who in turn was looking at the image of Harvey in his service record.

  “Harvey spent a lot of time in the Mid East,” Walker said. “He was working there for DoD, then for Homeland.”

  “He could be the US contact for Almasi,” Muertos said. “But like Somerville asked: why? More than money?”

  “He comes from old money,” Walker said. “Senator Lewis too. Harvey from old money in Boston. Lewis from Connecticut. Asset tests and listings are part of their security clearance. Harvey’s family trust runs into the tens of millions. Lewis is worth even more; he’s got two sisters, they’ve got a bunch of kids, extended family share in it, they’re collectively valued at around three hundred million. Both Lewis and Harvey have a lot of the same kind of stocks and companies. KBR and Halliburton types.”

  Find the pattern . . .

  “They’re both pedigree,” Walker said, seeing the family trees he’d mapped out on the paper. “Their connection goes way back. Harvey’s family were military all the way back to before the union. At least ten years’ service for every male. Then industry. They were in steel, and construction. Made fortunes in the two World Wars. All the wars, actually, since the Revolutionary. Seems the family business is geared toward all that. Same for Lewis, although his family have Navy ties. But they’re both part of families we’d think of as captains of industry. Both members of the Society of the Cincinnati.” Walker looked up at Muertos. “Did your husband ever serve?”

  “Yes,” Muertos said. She seemed a bit taken aback, as though her primary driving force—of finding out what happened to her husband—was relegated to running under the surface. “Steve was Army. Six years, before joining the Secret Service.”

  “Think he ever came into contact with Harvey?”

  “I’m not sure. I’d never heard his name. The Army’s a big place, right? There’s what, about half a million in active and reserve Army? Tens of thousands rolling in and out each year—”

  “Your husband was Army . . .” Walker was starting to see the connection.

  “Yes.”

  “What unit?”

  “Rangers.”

  “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Harvey had been Rangers, once, Acton mentioned that,” Walker said, taking the printed service jacket off Muertos and going back to the start. He started with Harvey’s enlistment date at West Point, a brief service in Military Intelligence, transferred to Airborne, went to Ranger school, was involved in a helicopter accident and went back to Intelligence. “When was your husband in the Army?”

  “He left about a year before we met, and after his last tour he transferred to stateside work with the Secret Service,” Muertos said. “That’d be . . . fifteen years this August.”

  “So, sixteen years ago . . . Here. Harvey had just made Major, in Military Intel. Was posted to Afghanistan the better part of the year, then he left to go to Homeland, but was still based in Afghanistan and the Mid East for the best part of the next decade.”

  “You think that my husband knew about Harvey’s involvement with Almasi?”

  “He may have. Maybe he suspected something, and that was enough to put him in their crosshairs.” Walker looked again at Muertos. “When we confront Lewis and Harvey, we need to know more, to be prepared.”

  “Okay. How are you going to get to them?”

  “Just like his Homeland guys, Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber over there,” Walker said, motioning to the suite. “I’m going to make them come to us.”

  63

  For Lewis and Harvey to come to them, Walker had to find the pattern, and it emerged twenty minutes later. It had been front and center the whole time and he’d read over it without really giving it much thought. It all came down to communications. Covert communications. The type of thing that Intelligence officers would do in the field to contact agents. Like the Georgetown dead-drops he’d played around with as a kid. It was the ways and means of Lewis and Harvey’s communication.

  Walker was flipping through pages and Muertos poured more coffee when it clicked. It was all about contact. Making contact, out of plain sight. Walker thought about how a guy like Harvey might reach out to a guy like Lewis. Not just for a casual hello, but to collude, to be in regular contact, because there was nothing on paper, nothing in their security-clearance forms, to suggest that they were friends or connected. They wouldn’t use phones or email or any electronic communication, because that was the easiest way to get caught. Washington is the most surveilled city in America.

  “Lewis and Harvey,” Walker said. “If they’re part of something together, they need to communicate on a regular basis—and they can’t do it in public.”

  “So?”

  “So, what about doing it not in public?” Walker suggested. “Behind closed doors. Somewhere off the grid where no one can see or hear.”

  “You sound like you’re onto something,” Muertos said, passing Walker a coffee.

  Walker nod
ded. He wasn’t yet ready to articulate it. The ideas were still forming. Senator Lewis and Deputy Secretary Harvey were both old money, old family, always positioning themselves to be the beating heart of the US economy. He could track that all the way back to when there were thirteen colonies, and each family, the Lewises in Connecticut, and the Harveys then in Rhode Island, were major stakeholders in what were then chartered colonies, which meant that even when they arrived in the New World from England they’d brought with them wealth and power. Those chartered colonies, systems of government separate to that of the thirteen, were granted rights by the British King to self-govern. It was ingrained in these two families from dozens of generations back that they could and should rule over all that they surveyed, that there was none equal to them and what and where they came from. The very originators of corporate America, where money and profit rules.

  First the gold, then the railroads, and steel, and construction; and war: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War and then, in a big, big way, the wars of the twentieth century—they had stayed in the business of war for over a century. Their economic advantage was built on the back of planes and tanks and munitions and ships and bases and bombs and rations, from the World Wars to Korea and Vietnam and then the Gulf War and then the big one: the War on Terror. Never had so much money been spent on a war, and they made hay. They had fingers in every pie, supplying and producing the constituent parts of the machinery of the US military for over a hundred years, and they kept their family in and around government to ensure that the family businesses always thrived.

  They wanted war. War eternal. And they still self-governed. Stoked the fires. Rubbed their hands together as the world burned.

  And they had to talk. In secret. In person, in places where the NSA couldn’t snoop. And in all the biographical notes he’d read, there were no obvious or unusual instances where the two titans of their families connected. The Senator’s father, a Senator himself, had recommended Harvey for admission into West Point, although it was on the surface a mere formality, as the Harvey family were an institution there, and were among the campus’s biggest benefactors since its inception. The family home on the Palisades along the Hudson had served as an unofficial officers’ mess for Christmas parties and the birthdays of successive Commandants for as long as anyone could remember.

  In isolation, each man was a part of something elite and almost unfathomable—instigators of an America shaped by the powerful. Together, they formed a pattern. Collusion. Conspiracy.

  But there was one place that correlated between the two men. Each was part of a club. An exclusive club. Right here in Washington. The center of power. A club of wealthy and influential plutocrats within the club of wealth and influence that was the Capital.

  The Society of the Cincinnati.

  The Lewises and the Harveys were more than founders of the United States, they were owners of the United States. Always there, in the background and foreground, impervious, omnipresent, eternal. An immovable object.

  The Walkers also had a long tradition, and as much as Jed was unsure of his father, he was sure of one thing: for hundreds of years, for many generations, the Walkers of the United States were good at setting things right. In the background and the foreground, they unraveled and destroyed armies and networks and conspiracies and injustice. An unstoppable force.

  And sometimes an unstoppable force met an immovable object.

  64

  They left the Homeland agents’ SUV and took a cab. Walker had a note from the concierge and gave the directions to the driver. Two addresses, two stops. Muertos had a folder from the hotel stuffed with all the papers, and Walker paused at the cab’s back door and looked sideways at her.

  “I’m not staying behind,” she said.

  “You can’t get into this club,” Walker said. “It’s a gentlemen’s club. Guys only. Not my rules.”

  “Fine. I’ll watch from outside.”

  “We need to blend in,” Walker said.

  “I know,” Muertos said. “I’ll figure it out. I’ve done some field work.”

  “Right.”

  “And if you find it’s where Harvey and Lewis meet, then what? You wait for them to show? Eavesdrop on their conversation? Beat them up? Where’s that get us?”

  “Let’s get moving,” Walker said, and Muertos slid across on the back seat and Walker sat in close next to her. “We need to know conclusively that these two are connected to what happened in Syria, right?”

  “Almasi was using the Senator’s home. And don’t tell me you think he didn’t know about it,” she finished, raising her eyebrow at Walker.

  “I’m not saying he didn’t,” Walker replied. “It’s too big a deal for it to be something on the side on Harvey’s part, without the Senator’s knowledge.”

  “And we know he and Harvey go way back.”

  “But we need to hear it from them,” Walker said. “You heard Somerville. Because there is the slim chance that Harvey’s in on something and the Senator’s in the dark, we need Harvey or Lewis to confirm it.”

  “And your father?”

  “I’ll get answers. And you’ll get answers about your husband.”

  Muertos was silent for a moment while she nodded and looked out her window, then she asked, “How are you going to do this?”

  “It won’t be with Harvey,” Walker said. The cab driver was slowing down and checking street numbers outside on the strip mall. “He’ll stonewall. But a Senator is a politician, and by definition always vulnerable to scandal—so, I’ll exploit that.”

  “This is your first stop,” the cab driver called over his shoulder.

  “Five minutes,” Walker said, and went into the menswear store, the cab double-parked out the front with the meter running and Muertos waiting. Walker took a black suit off a rack and found a shirt in his size and was headed for the tie section when his phone rang. Paul.

  •

  Harvey called Lewis with an update from the field.

  “All these years and no phone calls, always meeting in person,” Lewis said into his prepaid phone. “Now these calls are becoming a distraction. What happened to the operational security you so steadfastly put in place all those years ago?”

  “We should meet.”

  “Tonight, as planned.”

  “Okay. And you’re right,” Harvey said. “This has to come to an end.”

  There was a pause, then Lewis asked, “What now?”

  “My last guys were picked up at the Watergate, by the FBI.”

  “Even Krycek?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will that be a problem?”

  “They won’t talk, if that’s what you mean,” Harvey said. “And I’ll have them back out on the street soon enough, but there are procedures to follow. But Walker is still out there. Rachel Muertos too.”

  Lewis swore under his breath, then said, “What can they do?”

  “Walker will come for us.”

  “Do you have another asset you trust to do what the others failed to?”

  “I’ll do it myself.”

  “Okay. How will you find him?”

  “He’ll make contact.”

  “This is really the end of the line, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I say we move forward then. We’ve waited long enough. Zodiac ran better than I ever thought it would. It’s time to take the next step.”

  65

  Walker had his cell phone to his ear.

  “Your Senator?” Paul said. “Lewis? There’s some weird shit going on with him.”

  “Weird,” Walker said, moving the phone to rest between his ear and shoulder as he put his new clothes on in the change room.

  “His original security clearance was redacted. I think that’s the word. No, actually, it’s not redacted, as that’d be an official omission of sensitive information. But the guy tasked with doing the background check found some stuff that, if I’m right, got him killed, though it was officially li
sted as suicide by firearm. That security clearance was then cleaned of whatever he found, and that’s what was entered in the database, minus a whole lot of data.”

  “How’d the clearance get through?”

  “Beats me, but someone up high doctored it.”

  “How do you know this happened?”

  “Okay,” Paul said. “The dead guy’s wife? She brought it up a bunch of times, how her husband died in an apparent suicide, gunshot to the side of the head, through and through, with his own service side-arm.”

  Walker’s mind filled with an image of Overton in her apartment.

  “This woman, the wife, she was pregnant at the time. She couldn’t believe he’d do it, and she said so for years to anyone who would listen, like the FBI, but there was nothing more they could say to her. I’ve seen the reports from the scene, and it seems a legit investigation was carried out by the OPM, his employer, along with the local county crime scene. That was three years after nine-eleven, when your then Junior Senator Lewis had to go through a more thorough security check to get onto the Armed Services Committee and soon thereafter Intelligence Oversight, which meant OPM checks and then DoD’s Adjudications Facility granted the final clearance.”

  “Who’d the wife go to?”

  “The Office of Personnel Management,” Paul said, “where the husband worked, and when she got nowhere she went to the FBI, and the Department of Justice. Got nowhere with them. She then tried lawyers, reaching out to some ambulance-chaser firms, got nothing from those either. Tried the traditional media, from national newspapers to her local TV news outlet. Nada. Got nowhere with any of them. Then she started reaching out online. She must have got the interest of someone who knows their way around the digital world, and she ended up doing a couple of hours of verbal interviews with a guy who runs an anti-government conspiracy-type site on the deep web.”

  “Nut job?”

  “With a lot of stuff, but seeing as these are raw interviews with the widow, I listened to them all. She was dead sure that her husband was killed for what he found, and she convinced me. And you know what else? The guy that runs this site? He had a heart attack and died in a car wreck not long after the interview went online. The site’s been kept alive since by online friends of his, their own way of sticking it to the government for killing one of their own.”