Claire approached Dillon’s office but didn’t enter because he was talking with his boss, the deputy director.
The building was buzzing with an operation in progress. One of Dillon’s other divisions-Claire’s organization was just a small part of his domain-had intercepted several cell phone calls from Yemen indicating there was something onboard a ship that would soon dock in Long Beach. But whether the cargo was a bomb or a biological weapon, or something mundane like drugs or illegal aliens, wasn’t clear. The NSA was trying to get more information so the Coast Guard would have a better idea of what they were dealing with before they stopped the ship. However, and because of the deputy director’s body language, Claire suspected they weren’t talking about the California-bound vessel.
The deputy director was simultaneously nodding and frowning. The nods implied that he agreed with everything Dillon was saying, but the frowns indicated that he didn’t like anything he was hearing. This meant, Claire was fairly sure, that they were discussing Dillon’s budget. Dillon’s attitude toward his authorized annual budget-a budget that totaled several hundred million dollars and which he agreed not to exceed each year-was that what he was doing was so important that if more money was needed, Congress could either raise taxes or take the money from some other federal agency that was less important. In other words, not an attitude the deputy director appreciated, since he was the one who would have to crawl up to Capitol Hill and beg for the money. And judging by the deputy director’s simultaneous nods and frowns, Dillon was telling the man the significance of everything he was doing and providing a reasonable explanation as to why it all cost so much-but he was also saying there was no way he could reduce his spending.
But Claire knew the real reason why Dillon could never meet his budget-and it had nothing to do with any mismanagement on Dillon’s part. The real reason was that Claire’s organization was not included in the budget and was being secretly funded out of Dillon’s other operations. This, however, was not a fact Dillon could share with his boss.
The deputy director left five minutes later, still frowning, while Dillon appeared completely unperturbed. “That poor fellow,” Dillon said, “is going to give himself an ulcer.”
Claire didn’t care. “The grassyknoll hit,” she said. “I have data now.”
Dillon’s smile widened. “I love data,” he said.
“That night three men in the D.C. area were shot at approximately one A.M.”
“Only three?”
“It was a quiet night in Dodge. One guy had his face blown off by a convenience store clerk who was staunchly defending the fifty-six dollars in his till. The second man, poor bastard, was shot by his wife when he lost his house keys and broke into his own home.”
“And the third person?”
“A man named Paul Russo was found shot in the head near the Iwo Jima Memorial.”
“Could that be the monument we heard mentioned in the intercept?” Dillon asked.
“Probably. And it gets better. Russo’s body was discovered at approximately one fifteen and, as you might expect, the Arlington cops were called to the scene. I had a tech take a peek into Arlington’s computers this morning, and, lo and behold, before the body was even loaded into the coroner’s wagon, an FBI agent by the name of David Hopper shows up and takes over the case.”
“At one in the morning?” Dillon said.
“Closer to two, actually. But that’s not all. As you heard on the intercept, Transport failed to show. Now, assuming Transport’s function was to remove the bodies, how might one go about that? Well, I discovered that at almost exactly the same time as whatever occurred, an ambulance was in a traffic accident two blocks from where Mr. Russo’s body was found.”
“Why would they use an ambulance?”
“An ambulance is an ideal vehicle for picking up and transporting dead bodies. And if traffic is jammed up or you’re in a hurry, you can use lights and sirens.”
“I agree, but what makes you think, other than the time, that this ambulance accident is related to Russo?”
“I don’t know for sure that it is. The accident was just an interesting coincidence which became even more interesting after I learned the ambulance had been stolen from a company in Fairfax and the driver, though dressed like a medic, did not work for the company and had no ID on him. The driver is currently a John Doe car thief in a coma at Arlington Hospital.”
“Now that is a fascinating… anomaly,” Dillon said, his choice of the word a reminder to Claire that she shouldn’t confuse anomalies with relevant facts until she had supporting data-a reminder Claire didn’t need or appreciate.
“But we missed an opportunity,” Claire said. “Messenger, we assume, was removed from the scene. But how did Messenger get to the scene?”
“Damn it,” Dillon muttered. “His car.”
“Right. His car. Based on what we heard, Messenger must have parked fairly close to where Russo’s body was found, so I sent agents to the memorial and had them get license plates on every car within two blocks of the kill site. All cars currently in the area belong to people who are alive, which means the shooters must have removed Messenger’s car last night, maybe even while the cops were still at the scene.”
“Nervy,” Dillon said.
“Not just nervy but connected. Very connected. Who could get the FBI to show up at two in the morning to take a case away from the Arlington cops?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?”
“At this point, no.”
“So what are your next steps?” Dillon asked.
“I’ll see if I can figure out who Messenger is. I’m checking missing persons reports and watching to see who shows up dead in the next few days.”
“Good. What else?”
“I’ll get a copy of Russo’s autopsy and learn more about the FBI agent who was dispatched to the scene. And I’ll find out everything there is to know about Mr. Russo himself. All I know at this point is that he was a nurse.”
“A nurse? Why would someone want to kill a nurse?”
“Wrong question, Dillon. The question is: Why would someone who has access to encrypted radios and possibly military personnel, and who is able to make the FBI take away a case from the local fuzz in the middle of the night, want to kill a nurse?”
“I stand corrected, my dear. Keep me apprised.”
DeMarco called his mother in Queens and told her Paul had been killed. She spent a few minutes saying things like “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. He was so young. He was so sweet.” She cried a bit and talked about how Paul had looked when he was a child. “Like an angel he was, with all that curly hair, those big blue eyes.”
Then, being a practical person, she got down to business.
“Well, Joe, you’re going to have to take care of the funeral. And you better find out where he lived and take care of his things, too.”
Aw, for Christ’s sake. He was sorry Paul was dead but he hardly knew the guy, and he could already see that dealing with his death was going to eat up a lot of time-time he had allotted for playing golf.
“What am I supposed to do with his things?” he whined to his mother.
“I don’t know. Give them to the Goodwill or something. And maybe he had a will. You need to see what his wishes were.”
Yeah, a will. A will was good. If Paul had appointed an executor, the executor could deal with all this shit.
“But didn’t he have any other relatives?” DeMarco said. “I thought Aunt Vivian had a sister-Tina, Lena, something like that.”
Aunt Vivian was Paul’s mother, and although she wasn’t literally DeMarco’s aunt, that’s what he’d always called her.
“Joe, what’s wrong with you!” his mother snapped. “Lena’s eighty-seven years old. You can’t burden her with this. It’s your responsibility. It’s the right thing to do.”
Sheesh.
“Agent Hopper, my name’s Joe DeMarco. I’m calling about Paul Russo.”
Hopper didn’t say anything.
“Agent, are you still there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. How did you hear about Russo, Mr. DeMarco?”
“The Arlington cops told me about him. They said they found a card in his wallet identifying me as the person to contact in case of an emergency. In fact, I’m kinda surprised you didn’t call and tell me he’d been murdered.”
“Well, we must have overlooked the card. Or maybe the Arlington cops removed it from his wallet when they found the body.”
Overlooked the card? This was the fucking FBI. They were supposed to be able to find gnat DNA on the head of a pin. How could they have overlooked the card? But DeMarco didn’t say any of this. All he said was, “I just want to know when I can claim the body.”
“Why would you want to claim the body?”
“Because I’m Paul’s cousin and his only living relative.” That was a lie but he didn’t want to go into a long complex explanation of his relationship to Paul and the fact that Paul’s real closest living relative had one foot in the grave herself.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this,” Hopper said, “but his body was cremated.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I apologize, but we don’t have a lot of room in the morgue we use, and when we found out Russo’s parents were dead and he didn’t have any siblings, after the autopsy, we-”
“You completed the autopsy already? He was only shot yesterday.”
“We’re pretty efficient,” Hopper said. “But like I was saying, after the autopsy when we couldn’t locate a next of kin, we cremated the body. I guess we really screwed up and I’m embarrassed. I hope cremation wasn’t against Mr. Russo’s religious beliefs.”
Actually, this wasn’t bad news, DeMarco thought. Now he wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a funeral. It seemed odd that they would have cremated the body so quickly, but he could understand how they might not have been able to locate Paul’s next of kin. Paul’s Aunt Lena’s married name was Hennessy, not Russo, and he wasn’t sure how the FBI would know that people named DeMarco were related to Paul-other than the damn card in Paul’s wallet.
“Where are his ashes?” DeMarco asked.
“Give me your address and I’ll send them to you.”
DeMarco gave Hopper his home address. “Can you tell me what you’ve learned about who killed him?”
“We’re still investigating and we don’t have any suspects yet, but
… well, I have to be honest with you, Mr. DeMarco. We think your cousin may have been dealing prescription drugs-illegally, that is. He was a nurse and he had access to things like OxyContin, and he may have been shot because of that. There are some pretty violent people in the world of drug trafficking.”
DeMarco felt like telling Hopper the same thing he’d told Detective Glazer, that the Paul Russo he had known hadn’t seemed like the drug-dealing type. But the fact was, he didn’t really know anything about Paul’s circumstances in the last three or four years. So all he said was, “Do you have any proof Paul was doing anything illegal?”
“No, it’s just a hunch based on the time he was killed and where he was killed. But like I said, we’re still investigating. I gotta go now, Mr. DeMarco, but I apologize again for not contacting you before we cremated the body.”
“Look, I’m not going to make a big stink about the fact you cremated him without talking to me, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep me in the loop on the investigation,” DeMarco said. And then he did something he didn’t normally do: he flexed what little political muscle he had. “By the way, I’m a lawyer who works for Congress.”
Lawyers, in general, can be a pain but a congressional lawyer could be a significantly larger pain to Hopper because there’s nothing employees in the Legislative Branch of government enjoy more than twisting the nuts of those employed by the Executive Branch. If Hopper was impressed, however, by the fact that DeMarco worked on Capitol Hill-along with several thousand other lawyers-he kept his awe hidden quite well. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and hung up.
Claire Whiting in motion: long-legged strides, staring straight ahead, intense, unsmiling, her heels striking hard on the linoleum floor. She was always in a hurry-a woman forever at war against the clock.
She entered a room containing thirty cubicles, and in each cubicle sat two technicians, most wearing headsets, all pecking away at keyboards and studying the monitors on their desks. Large plasma screens were mounted on the walls of the room and fiber-optic cables snaked in thick bundles, invisible beneath the floor. The cables were connected to large Cray computers and rack upon rack of servers in nearby buildings. The room was always somewhat chilly because the temperature was set to meet the rigid needs of the machines and not for the comfort of human beings.
The room was part of the Net.
The word Net was not shorthand for Network, as one might assume. It was instead exactly what the name implied: a device for capturing things, in this case the whispers of a planet. The mesh of the Net consisted of acres of computers, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, fleets of satellites orbiting the globe, vast arrays of dish antennae on desert plains-and much, much more.
The Net never slept. It was always awake-and always listening.
It recorded, analyzed, and transmitted.
It translated and interpreted.
There were some who believed it might even be able to think.
The Net was the heart, if not the soul, of the NSA.
Claire strode over to Gilbert, the technician who had brought her the intercept of-she was sure-Paul Russo being killed. Gilbert had tubular arms, straw-in-the-manger dirty-blond hair spiking up from his head, and nails chewed to the bloody quick. He was addicted to caffeine and sugar and, even sitting, was in constant motion-fingers tapping, right knee bouncing, nose twitching. Because his eyes were now closed and he was absorbed completely in whatever he was listening to, Claire used a polished fingernail to tap on one of the headset earpieces, causing a burst of noise to explode in the technician’s ear. She preferred to touch the headset rather than him.
“Fuck!” Gilbert said, ripping his headset off and spinning around to confront his tormentor. Then seeing it was Claire and not the man he shared the cubicle with, he sat up a bit straighter and said, “Oh, it’s you. Look, I’m still working on that software problem, but I haven’t found-”
“I want you to get into the Bureau’s system and get me the autopsy report on Paul Russo. I also want you to get me every record you can find on Russo himself: tax returns, employment records, scholastic history, credit reports, et cetera, et cetera. I want you to do the same thing for an FBI agent named David Hopper.”
“Okay,” Gilbert said.
Okay. That’s all.
That Claire had just asked him to invade several federal, state, and private record-keeping systems, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s heavily protected computer network-to obtain information on two American citizens-didn’t faze Gilbert at all.
He’d done it before.
Claire summoned an agent to her office.
Claire’s technicians manned the machines and, in general, matched all the nerdy stereotypes: fingers grafted to keyboards and the social skills of bright, obnoxious twelve-years-olds, more comfortable in online chat rooms than at office parties.
Claire’s agents-many of whom were women-did the fieldwork Claire and Dillon needed done and, like her technicians, they shared certain common characteristics: they had the intelligence to understand the high-tech gear used by the NSA but they were also cocky and aggressive and physical. And they carried weapons. They rarely got to fire their weapons-but they all wanted to.
This particular agent was dark-haired, slim, and wiry and was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that hugged his body. One advantage to being an agent was that the dress code was flexible. That is, what the agents wore to the office was irrelevant, but there were certain standards regarding appearance. The first of those was that the ideal agent was blessed with a face that no one would remember: no albinos, Jimmy Durante hooters, or tattoos of writhing snakes encircling their necks. The other requirements were short hair-bald was acceptable-no facial hair, and no glasses, contacts only. The reason for these requirements was Claire’s agents had to be able to change their appearance often and rapidly and it was best-when required to don wigs or mustaches or any other type of disguise-to start with a relatively blank canvas.
The other thing about agents-and she often had to remind Dillon of this when he wanted to fire one-was that they were expensive. Not their salaries but their training. They had to know how to break into buildings with sophisticated alarm systems; how to follow a subject and not be seen; how to plant listening devices that would not be detected. The agents didn’t have to know how the listening devices worked-that was knowledge only the technicians were given-but they did have to know enough to install the gizmos.
Yes, agents were expensive and therefore not casually discarded, so when one of them misbehaved or acted rashly, he or she wasn’t usually fired. Instead, the agent was disciplined and Claire was the one who decided upon the appropriate punishment-and Claire could be quite cruel and quite inventive.
Even the agents feared Claire Whiting.
“I want an FBI employee named David Hopper smothered,” she said to the agent. “Twenty-four/seven surveillance. Landlines tapped. Cell phone monitored. Bugs in his house and his car.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the agent said.
Paul Russo had lived in a duplex near the Court House metro station and his landlady had been his next-door neighbor, a sweet old woman in her eighties with snow-white hair and Dresden-china blue eyes. The landlady’s name was Betty.
DeMarco explained to Betty that he was Paul’s cousin-it was easier to say cousin than second cousin-and he was dealing with Paul’s estate. That is, he was dealing with it until he could find someone else to stick with the job.
“I need to get into his place,” DeMarco said. “I need to see if he had a will and try to figure out what to do with his things.”
He was surprised Betty didn’t ask to see proof that he was related to Paul but she didn’t. Maybe she was trusting and naive-or maybe she was just happy to have someone take care of Paul’s furniture so she could lease out his side of the duplex.
“I just can’t believe he’s dead,” Betty said. “He was such a wonderful young man. If I ever needed anything, he was always there for me. When that FBI agent told me he’d been killed, my heart almost stopped.”
“The FBI called you?” DeMarco asked, wondering why they’d called his landlord and not him.
“No, an agent came here and told me.”
“Do you remember the name of the agent?”
“Oh, what was his name? Whoever he was, he was a very handsome man but very serious.”
“Was his name Hopper?”
“Yes, that was it. He said he had to look inside Paul’s apartment. For clues, I guess.”
“When did he come here?”
“Yesterday morning, about six. Fortunately, I’m an early riser. I don’t know what he did, but he spent a couple hours inside Paul’s apartment.”
It sounded to DeMarco like the FBI was really moving on Paul’s case. They perform an autopsy on him faster than you can dice an onion and then Hopper rushes right from the murder site to Paul’s apartment to search it. DeMarco didn’t know how the FBI normally did things, but he couldn’t help but think of what Glazer had said. If Paul had been somebody famous he could understand the FBI making his case a high priority, but he couldn’t imagine what made Paul so important.
DeMarco concluded his cousin wasn’t into material possessions in a major way. There was no big-screen TV or fancy audio system inside his apartment, and his furniture was inexpensive and mismatched, like stuff you’d buy at yard sales or from secondhand stores. He noticed a crucifix over the bed and one of those Sacred Heart pictures of Jesus in the living room.
The second bedroom in the apartment had served as an office, so DeMarco took a seat behind Paul’s small desk and spent some time looking through the file folders in the desk. He didn’t find what he was hoping to find: a will. He did find a bunch of pay slips from a hospice organization. A hospice? He’d always assumed that Paul worked at a regular hospital, and again he felt guilty that he hadn’t made a better effort to get to know the guy. He also found statements from a bank where Paul had his savings and checking accounts. As of two weeks ago, Paul had almost four hundred in checking and thirty-eight hundred in savings. If he’d been a drug dealer, it didn’t appear that he was a very successful one.
He sat back, trying to decide what to do next, when he noticed there was a printer and a monitor for a computer on the desk, but no computer. He wondered if Hopper had taken Paul’s computer or if the computer was being repaired.
His next thought was that the money in Paul’s bank account should go to somebody-probably his Aunt Lena-but how in the hell was he supposed to get access to the money if he couldn’t find a will? And if Paul did have a will, it might be in a safety deposit box at his bank, but how was he supposed to get into that? This whole thing was becoming a gigantic pain in the ass.
He decided he was probably going to have to talk to an estate lawyer to figure out what the procedure was if he couldn’t find a will-and it was gonna really piss him off if he had to spend his own money on the lawyer. As for Paul’s possessions, he’d do like his mother said and call Goodwill and see if they could pick up the clothes and furniture. He’d take Paul’s files over to his place and shred the paper, but he wasn’t going to do that right now.
What he wanted to do next was go to the place where Paul had worked. Maybe his boss or one of his coworkers would know if he had a lawyer and where his will might be. Or maybe he kept his will at work. Yeah, right, like he would ever get that lucky.
He knocked on Betty’s door again and told her he was leaving and it was going to take him a few days to figure out what to do with Paul’s things. She said that was all right, and started to go on again about what a fine young man Paul had been and how much she was going to miss him. Then she said, “Even if he was gay, if I had a son, I would have wanted him to be just like Paul, to be as decent as he was, I mean.”
“He was gay?” DeMarco said.
“Yes. Didn’t you know?”
“Uh, no. We weren’t close. Was he dating someone?” DeMarco was thinking that a lover might know about Paul’s will.
“No, not at the moment,” Betty said. “At least I don’t think so.”
“How ’bout close friends?”
“As far as I know, all his close friends were people at his church. He spent most of his free time there.”
“Which church is that?” DeMarco asked.