Dunne hear the ping of a WhatsApp message on his mobile phone. Alicia’s phone made the same noise an instant afterward. Someone was sending them a message. They both ignored the alert at first, and then Alicia pulled the screen toward her.
Alicia clicked the green WhatsApp icon. Dunne leaned toward her and saw that a new message was highlighted. Pictures of someone you know, read the first few words. Alicia held the phone tight in her hand; as sick as she was, she was still burning with jealous rage and hurt.
“What else?” she screamed. “Você é o diabo!”
Alicia clicked the icon. The screen displayed a sequence of a pictures taken with a cell phone camera. The first showed a naked woman in bed, flawless gold skin, a radiant glow of love on her face. The second caught her from behind, as she was about to get dressed and looked back toward the camera. The third showed the woman sunning herself on a private beach, her skin oiled and glistening in the sun.
With each click, Alicia struggled for breath. Then came an enraged cry from the core.
“This is me! My body! Mã;e de Deus. How could you?” She moved to strike him, but she lacked the strength and instead collapsed on the table, sobbing.
Dunne tried to speak, but that roused her to greater fury, and now she was pounding his chest.
“You liar. You promised that you deleted these pictures. Did you sell them?”
Dunne tried again to speak, but he was so stunned himself, all he managed was to choke out the words, “I’m sorry.”
“Dirty pig liar. You promised me! Que Deus te destrua.”
From Alicia’s phone there was the sound of two more pings, as the phone registered new messages. Dunne reached for hers, but she was quicker.
Naughty Girl, read the subject line.
“Bastard. Bastard. Bastard,” she raged as she pounded the icon with her thumb.
Alicia gagged as she clicked on two more images. Dunne saw that these weren’t erotic pictures. They were raw pornography. The first showed the same honey-colored woman, the same sweet face, but now her lips were formed around a man’s penis. The second caught the woman atop the man, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes closed in a moment of ecstasy.
Alicia fell to the floor in a swoon. Her belly hit first. She was silent for a moment, as if mortally stricken, and then began a piercing scream that lasted until her breath gave out.
Dunne fell to the floor beside her. Her forehead was burning hot.
“Oh, my God, my God,” Dunne wailed.
“I want to die,” she groaned, hiding her face. “How could you do this to me? I have nothing left. Who will take care of my babies?”
Dunne choked back the vomit in his mouth.
“I didn’t take these. Baby, darling, please. These are fakes. Someone wants to ruin us.” He tried to stroke the back of her head, but she recoiled.
Her voice was a dark whisper, near the edge of consciousness.
“I don’t believe you. You only lie.”
“Please, Alicia, breathe.”
“Go away,” she whimpered. She was tightening in a ball, but the pressure increased the flow from her womb.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” said Dunne, reaching for arm.
“No!” she moaned. “No. Don’t touch me. I’ll get myself and my baby there myself. You have destroyed me. At least my new child will never know you.”
Dunne touched her belly. He felt kicks, but they were irregular. The V of her elastic pants, between her legs, was wet with blood.
Dunne took the phone.
“Let me call. Go away. Let me call,” Alicia moaned. She was too weak to stand.
Dunne called 911.
“I need an ambulance now,” he said. “I think my wife is going into labor. She’s bleeding. Something’s wrong. A miscarriage.”
“How many weeks pregnant is she, sir?” asked the dispatcher.
“Eight months.”
“It’s not a miscarriage. She’s having the baby. What’s your address, sir? Tell me slowly, number and street.”
Dunne gave the address. “Come quick,” he said. “Please. Right now.”
He put a cool washcloth on Alicia’s forehead and a pillow under her head, and made her lie flat and bring her knees up so he could clean underneath. She was so weak and feverish now that she didn’t resist. He ran upstairs and threw a fresh set of clothes and underwear into a canvas bag, along with her toothbrush, and then went back to his wife, who was half delirious on the floor.
“It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Stay with me.”
He felt her belly again. The kicks were less frequent, and feebler. A new pool of blood had formed beneath her.
Dunne took Alicia’s hand. “Please, God.” He murmured a prayer, half aloud, the words set against her pants and moans.
A few minutes later, Dunne heard the siren of the ambulance, and then a ring at the doorbell. The emergency team moved Alicia tenderly onto a gurney and asked her questions, but her answers were only half coherent.
Dunne followed them out the door to ride with Alicia in the ambulance. She protested “No!” but Dunne and the technicians ignored her. As they loaded the gurney into the ambulance, Dunne took out his phone and stared at its toxic, radioactive face. He was about to hurl the device against the pavement, but the technician pulled him into the vehicle. The siren was already wailing, and the lights were blinking red.
* * *
Dunne’s son died that morning at Virginia Hospital Center. Alicia was severely dehydrated and had a high fever, so the doctor recommended that the dead baby be removed by cesarean section. Dunne consented. He sat in the waiting room for many hours, until the operation was done and his wife was out of the recovery room.
A nurse brought him a manila envelope. “Would you like a picture?” she asked.
“Of what?” Dunne answered.
“Of your baby boy. He’s with God now, but maybe you would like to see what he looked like.”
Dunne was numb. “What did my wife say? Did she want the photograph?”
“We haven’t asked her yet. She’s still recovering from surgery.”
Dunne took the envelope and pulled out a somber black-and-white image. The dead child was laid out in a plastic tray. He had a little cloth cap on his head. His mouth was open. The tiny eyelids were closed. Tears streamed down Dunne’s cheek. He handed the photograph back to the nurse.
“I don’t want to keep it. Maybe my wife will. When can I see her?”
“We’ll let you know when she’s ready,” said the nurse.
Dunne waited until late that night, asking every hour or so whether his wife was ready for a visit. Eventually a nurse came out and asked Dunne to join him in a private room. At first he thought he would see Alicia there, but that wasn’t it.
“Your wife doesn’t want to see you. She’s too upset. She asked me to tell you that. She has seen a priest, and a counselor, and her mother is on the way from Brazil. Your wife wants her mom to take care of your daughter when she arrives. She said that until she gets here, the child will stay with your neighbor.”
“Alicia said that? She doesn’t want me to be with Luisa?”
“She told me that you had already moved out of the house, Mr. Dunne.”
Dunne turned away to hide his emotion, then turned back with a tearful plea.
“Please, nurse. I need to see my wife. I need to tell her something.” Dunne was choking back sobs, trying not to give way yet to the black tide of grief.
“Not now,” the nurse said gently. “She needs to heal. You both do. Get some sleep. Would you like to see a counselor or minister? We can help with that. You’ve had a terrible loss.”
“No,” said Dunne. There wasn’t anyone he wanted to talk to, in truth, except Alicia.
“I’m sorry,” said the nurse. “I’ll keep the picture of your son for a few days, in case you change your mind.”
“Give it back to me,” Dunne said quietly. “I’ve changed my mind.” He took the man
ila envelope with the picture inside and clutched it in his hands.
29 Arlington, Virginia – December 2016
Michael Dunne moved into a studio apartment on Lee Highway in Arlington. It was a dreary home, but it suited his mood. He joined a CrossFit gym nearby and punished himself physically. The most pleasurable parts of his day were when he became so exhausted and depleted from exercise that he couldn’t think. He began drinking more heavily to get to sleep, but he was still waking up in the middle of the night, so he cut back on the booze and began taking pills, which didn’t help him sleep, either.
Alicia’s mother moved into the tidy house by the golf course in Arlington, and she guarded Alicia and Luisa ferociously. Dunne wasn’t welcome there, and he didn’t protest. He picked up Luisa every Saturday morning and played with her all day, but he returned her by dinnertime. He knew that his one-room apartment on a suburban street overlooking a tattoo parlor and a body-piercing studio wasn’t the right place for a four year old.
Dunne didn’t contest the divorce. Alicia asked for sole custody of their daughter, and Dunne didn’t fight that, either. He knew that Alicia’s lawyer could present evidence of his gross infidelity and whisper to the judge how the father had cruelly allowed dissemination of X-rated pictures of his wife; but it wasn’t simply that. After what Dunne had been through, he wasn’t sure that he merited custody rights. His actions had destroyed the happiness and stability of his family. They had led unintentionally to the death of his unborn child. He didn’t deserve anything.
Dunne was technically on leave from the agency, suspended with pay pending resolution of the FBI criminal investigation. He sent most of the money to Alicia. He had lost his badge and his clearances, so he couldn’t go to the agency, and none of his old colleagues would see him, except Roger Magee. The two would go drinking, and talk about sports and, occasionally, politics. Magee loved Donald Trump, and when Trump won in November, the two men stayed up until three a.m. election night drinking tequila shots. Dunne couldn’t get drunk enough to stop thinking about what he had done to his wife – and what others had done to them both.
Dunne’s remorse deepened after the first weeks into a gnawing hunger for revenge. He brooded over every step he had taken along the path to personal and professional ruin. His mind became a slow-motion, stop-frame video, starting from his first conversation with Sarah Gilroy all the way to the labyrinth of destruction constructed by Jason Howe and the Quark Team of hackers. Dunne had penetrated the bandit lair of Fallen Empire and become its victim. How had that happened?
Mark Walden gave Dunne a small windowless cubicle at the offices of Warren and Frankel downtown, where he could plug in his computer and do research about his case. He sat there in anguished retrospection day after day, trying to reconstruct the catastrophe that had surrounded the operation with the anodyne name, European Special Collection. He reviewed the Fallen Empire websites and message groups he had examined a few months before with his team, Adrian White and Arthur Gogel. He saw the same babble of competing message platforms, each trying to outdo the other in outrage. He remembered his talks with Jason Howe in Italy, and the glimpse Howe had offered of his technical suite. What were they building? Whose hand was on the switch? Dunne didn’t understand now any better than he had two months before.
At the heart of this puzzle was the most grotesque mystery of all. Who would assault his wife with the most intimate and embarrassing photographs, first real and then doctored, in a way that had caused her to have a breakdown and lose a baby? It was an attack on Dunne, but to what end? And who would be capable of such cruelty?
As much as he disliked George Strafe, it was hard for Dunne to imagine a colleague stealing images from an old cell phone, unconnected to the Internet – and then sending them to Dunne and his wife at a moment of maximum vulnerability. Harder still to imagine a deliberate manipulation of the images of this flawless, blameless woman. That required a viciousness that Dunne associated with criminal syndicates in Latin America or Eastern Europe. He had never seen those qualities in his CIA colleagues, not even Strafe.
As for Veronika Kruse, someone had set Dunne up. But if it had been Strafe, why had he used the blackmail material when he did? What was the leverage people wanted on him? Had they been saving it for later? The questions knocked around Dunne’s brain like pachinko balls, but they didn’t come to rest.
Dunne looked for new electronic traces of the Quark Team networks, but after the election, the wires began to go cold. Fallen Empire’s posts were mostly rote repurposing of items found on other left-wing websites. He read a story online, from Wired, that said the NSA had secretly replaced all its malware implanted abroad, after discovery that hackers had tampered with its beacons.
Jason Howe, Lorenzo Riccci, and the other Quark Team technicians Dunne had met during his foray in Urbino seemed to have vanished. Had they been caught, or disbanded, or recruited for something else? Or maybe they had never existed in the first place. Digito Urbino, too, had vanished from the web. Like an electronic Brigadoon, it had disappeared in the mist.
After the election, the newspapers couldn’t stop talking about Russian hacking. Dunne wondered why reporters didn’t ask about the “citizen journalists” who had helped the Russians turn the global information space into a free-fire zone. These Wiki-crusaders had fronted for the Russians, carried their messages, acted as their cutouts. Dunne made a cold call one day using an encrypted Signal line to a reporter at the New York Times who was famous for his scoops about cyber war.
Dunne used a fake name. He said he was a former CIA officer with damaging information about a group called Fallen Empire and a hacking operation in Italy called the Quark Team. The reporter chuckled. “You mean the Dunne case?” he said. “Yeah, we’ve looked into that. What an asshole. Otherwise, we don’t think there’s much there.”
Dunne’s dislike for journalists grew the more he dealt with them. They knew everything and nothing.
Dunne tried contacting former friends in the agency, despite Walden’s admonitions not to do so. Most had changed their numbers. Adrian White and Arthur Gogel, the members of Dunne’s team, had disappeared completely. The few who answered texts or Signal calls said they couldn’t talk.
Dunne was too hot to touch. He had violated regulations. He had wandered into a sex trap. His wife had divorced him. The agency had cut him loose. His former colleagues knew what everyone knew. Talking to Dunne was like drinking an Ebola cocktail.
When Dunne listened to supporters of the new president-elect talk about the “deep state,” the conspiracy of intelligence officers who really ran the country, he wondered if maybe they were right. His friend Roger Magee had started wearing a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat when they went drinking on Old Dominion Drive. But when Dunne pushed him about whether the new administration might review his case, Magee waved him off.
“This is all bullshit,” he said. “Cop a plea. Do your time. Forget about it.”
Alicia decided in November to move to Los Angeles. She applied for a job teaching Portuguese at the University of California at Irvine, starting in the fall term of 2017. Until then, she would do part-time tutoring and translation work for a Brazilian aircraft company that had offices in Los Angeles. California was on the other side of the country, which meant that Dunne wouldn’t be able to see his child, but he didn’t try to talk her out of the move. She planned to leave in January.
They put the house on the market in early December. It sold within a week for the asking price. The house had nearly $500,000 equity. Dunne said that his ex-wife and daughter could have nearly all of it. Money couldn’t remove the pain he had caused, but it would help pay the bills. Dunne kept $50,000 in the bank for emergencies. He had a legal insurance policy that was paying his lawyer’s bills at Warren and Frankel, for now.
A week before Christmas, Mark Walden summoned Dunne to his corner office downtown. He said he had just received a formal notification from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Alexandria that Dun
ne was the target of a grand jury investigation, and that he would be named in a sealed indictment early in the new year unless he accepted a negotiated plea. The initial offer from the prosecutors was that Dunne must plead guilty to three felony counts, with a sentencing recommendation of three to five years in prison.
“Are you kidding me?” responded Dunne. “How can they squeeze three counts out of a nothing case?”
“They’re claiming that you lied to the FBI about Strafe and your instructions. That’s two counts. The other one is for criminal violation of agency regulations.”
Dunne shook his head. “No way. Strafe is the one who’s lying. This is bullshit.”
“I think I can bargain it down,” said Walden. “I’m going to ask for one count, with a sentencing recommendation of community service.”
“Can you get that?”
“Probably not. They’ll want you to do some jail time. The media will crucify the Justice Department if it goes easy on someone who attacked the press, and so will the oversight committees.”
“But it’s all crap. Can we fight it?”
“You can try, but you’ll probably lose. And your legal insurance probably won’t cover a trial, if you decide to reject the settlement. It will be expensive. I strongly recommend that you take the plea agreement, if I can bargain it to one count.”
“And if I want to take it to trial? Will you represent me?”
Walden looked at Dunne, and then glanced away, out the window to the Louis Vuitton store across the courtyard.
“I don’t think so. I’ve given you my best recommendation. If you reject it, you would be wise to seek alternative counsel that sees the case the way you do.”
“You’re all I’ve got, Mark. I’ve been fucked by everyone. Come on.”
“I’m giving you the best advice I can. Let me settle this case. That’s in your best interest, and your family’s.”
Dunne thought about it overnight. When he made his decision, he slept well for the first time in several months.
The next morning, he called Walden and told him to begin settlement negotiations. If the prosecutors would agree to a single felony count, Dunne would plead guilty.
The Paladin Page 18