House Divided (36 page)

“Claire, the Starbucks has a back exit that leads to a shopping mall, and I found his clothes in one of the men’s rooms. Everything except for his shoes. And there’s an empty plastic bag that used to hold a set of coveralls. It looks like he bought the coveralls at that auto shop.”

“Son of a bitch!” Claire said. “So we have no devices on him?”

“No,” Alice said. She hesitated, then said, “Claire, the Gallery Place metro station is one floor below the mall level. He could be on the metro.”

Claire called out to the techs in the operations room. “I want live feed from all of metro’s surveillance cameras. Look for a man in coveralls. Start at Gallery Place and expand out from there.”

“If he’s underground,” Alice said, “we can’t follow him by satellite until he surfaces again.”

“I know that,” Claire snapped. “What color were those coveralls?”

“The bag didn’t say. Just coveralls.”

Shit.

“He’s going to be hard to spot in the crowds coming off the subway,” Alice said.

“Goddammit, quit telling me things I already know!” Claire screamed.

Claire paced the op room, hovering over her technicians. Ten of them were now looking at surveillance camera images from metro stations trying to spot a man in coveralls. The problem was that from the Gallery Place metro station DeMarco could have gotten on either the Green, Red, or Yellow lines. And one station away was Metro Center, where he could switch to the Orange or Blue lines. He could be headed in any direction, to any place in the District, Virginia, or Maryland—and he could get off at any one of eighty-six metro stations.

But what the hell was he doing? Claire wondered. Where was he running to? Or
who
was he running to?

“Alice,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Go back to that liquor store and question the clerk. There was something funny about DeMarco going there.”

“Roger that,” Alice said.

Fifteen minutes later, Alice called back. “We got a problem,” she said. “The clerk at the liquor store is the son of a guy DeMarco works with at the Capitol. When DeMarco went to the store after seeing Bradford, he had the clerk copy the digital recordings to a flash drive.”

“Aw, Jesus. Did the clerk listen to the recordings?”

“No.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Yeah. He told me the truth.”

Claire wondered what Alice had done to the clerk.

“And today,” Claire said, “DeMarco went back to the store and got the copy, didn’t he?”

“Yes. He’s taking the recordings to somebody. Maybe you should focus on the metro stops near the
Post,
and I’ll head on over there now. But what do I do if I find him?”

“Tackle him. Taser him. Hit him with your damn car. I don’t care. Just get that flash drive.”

DeMarco waited as the train approached the next station. He’d switched trains a couple of times to see if he could spot anyone following him, and he thought his tail was clear. They couldn’t hear him and they couldn’t see him underground with their damn satellites, but he bet they could monitor the surveillance cameras in the stations. Nothing he could do about that.

The station he wanted was coming up next, and once he left the station it was gonna be a foot race.

The metro driver announced the next stop: Union Station.

He put the Nationals baseball cap on his head. He’d paid a kid, one of the metro riders, thirty bucks for the cap. Goddamn thief. The kid could tell he was desperate for the cap.

The train pulled into Union Station. He walked calmly toward the exit, keeping his head down, the bill of the ball cap—he hoped—hiding his face.

“Claire,” a tech said, “I think I’ve got him.”

Claire ran over to the tech’s monitor. “Where is he?”

“You see that guy?” the tech said. “Coveralls. Ball cap.”

“Blow up the picture,” Claire said.

The technician did. Claire couldn’t see the man’s entire face because of the bill of the cap, but she could see his chin. Yeah, that was DeMarco’s stubborn chin.

“That’s him,” she said. “Where is he?”

“Union Station.”

Dillon walked into the operations room. Claire had called him as soon as she learned DeMarco had made a copy of the recordings.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Claire muttered to herself.

“The Capitol?” Dillon said. “To see a congressman he knows?”

“Then why didn’t he get off at the Capitol South Station? That’s closer to the House offices.”

“Then maybe it’s a senator he wants to talk to. The Senate Office Buildings are three blocks from Union Station.”

“We have him on the satellite, Claire.” It was one of the techs speaking, his little nerd eyes shining. “He’s running.”

Claire looked up at the screen. Yeah, there he was outside Union Station, running. And he wasn’t jogging; he was
sprinting
. Claire bet DeMarco hadn’t run that fast since high school.

“Alice,” Claire said, “he just came out of Union Station. Do you have anyone near there?”

“I’ll be there in two minutes,” Alice said.

“Hurry, Alice,” Claire said. “Two minutes may be too late.”

One of the techs watching the satellite feed said, “He’s not going to the Senate Office Buildings. He just ran past them.”

Dillon closed his eyes. He knew where DeMarco was going.

“He’s going to the Supreme Court,” Dillon said. “He figured out who Thomas is.”

Alice could see DeMarco ahead of her; he was just starting up the steps of the Supreme Court. She couldn’t get any closer to the building in her car because concrete security barriers blocked the street in front of the court.

She stopped the SUV, opened up the tail gate, and took out the rifle. She heard a nearby pedestrian cry out in alarm.

DeMarco was now halfway up the steps.

She aimed at DeMarco through the scope, took a breath, and pulled the trigger.

DeMarco was almost there. He could see U.S. Capitol cops at the top of the stairs looking down at him. He could tell they didn’t like the way he looked—some wild-eyed guy running up the steps like a madman. He figured they were going to swarm all over him as soon as he made it to the top of the steps—and that was fine by him.

Then he tripped. He was winded running all the way from Union Station and his left foot hit one of the steps and he pitched forward. At that moment, just as he tripped, he saw a woman coming down the steps topple over. One minute she was walking, and the next second she dropped to the ground like her legs had turned to rubber. He didn’t know what had happened to the woman and he didn’t have time to find out. He got up and started running again.

“Damn it,” Alice muttered. The son of a bitch tripped and she missed him. She figured she had time for one more shot. She aimed again.

As DeMarco passed the fallen woman, he saw the dart sticking out of her chest. A fucking tranquilizer dart. Someone was shooting at him.

But he was almost there now, just a couple more steps to go. And the Capitol Cops were coming right at him, five of them.

DeMarco zigzagged to his left—not to avoid the cops but to throw off the shooter’s aim. But the cops thought he was trying to get past them, and one of them pulled out a gun. Oh, shit. The other four cops just kept coming at him but before they reached him, the one in the lead dropped to the ground. There was a dart in his neck.

And then the cops were on him, driving him to the ground, covering him with their bodies.

Thank God.

“How did he figure out that Thomas was Thomas Antonelli?” Claire said.

Dillon stood up. “I don’t know,” he said, “but he did.”

“Where are you going?” Claire said, when she saw Dillon walking slowly toward the door of the operations room.

“Where am I going?” Dillon repeated. “Well, Claire, I think I’m going to jail.”

And Dillon was right.

“Okay, Calvin, I’ll see your three Marlboros,” Clarence Goodman finally said, and tentatively put three Salems down in the center of the card table like they were hundred-dollar chips.

George Aguilera, smiling like he’d already won, immediately added a small can of smoked oysters to a pot which consisted mostly of cigarettes but also a John Grisham paperback and a five-year-old
Playboy
. “I’ll call your three and raise you three,” Aguilera said.

“Wait a damn minute,” Calvin Loring said. “I thought we agreed yesterday that the oysters were worth five cigarettes, not six.”

The debate ensued—and Dillon closed his eyes.

In the minimum security section of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex at White Deer, Pennsylvania, cigarettes were the gold standard and other commodities for bartering and wagering were based on their value. The value of a cigarette, however, changed periodically, owing to availability of supply and other more esoteric factors. Dillon was thinking about writing an essay on the subject, explaining how the prison economy in black market goods and services was eerily parallel to that of the outside world—there was inflation, price-fixing, insider trading, and market fluctuations due to disasters—although the disasters themselves were unique to prisons, such as lockdowns or retribution from the guards.

Dillon and the three men playing poker with him were dressed identically: blue jeans, white T-shirts, white socks, and plain-toed black lace-up shoes. Dillon’s jeans, however, had been tailored by another inmate, a man incarcerated for identity theft but who was quite skillful with needle and thread.

None of his poker-playing pals were violent men. George Aguilera had been the president of a telemarketing company that specialized in bilking old ladies out of their savings. Calvin Loring was a physician who had supplemented his income by supplying OxyContin to teenage addicts via the Internet. Medicaid fraud charges against him were pending. Clarence Goodman had been a hedge fund manager—and the designated fall guy for looting a union pension fund. The depressing part for Dillon was not that he was incarcerated with such people but instead that these three men were the best poker players at Allenwood—and they were uniformly atrocious. None of them, including the hedge fund manager, appeared to have the slightest understanding of the mathematical odds of a particular hand winning or losing. After Dillon had won enough cigarettes to become the Donald Trump of Allenwood, he began cheating. He had always been a good card mechanic and in prison he had plenty of time to practice and become a truly stellar one. He didn’t cheat to win, however. When it was his turn to deal, he would give all the players, except for himself, outrageously good hands—four of a kind, flushes, full houses—and then would sit back and watch them go crazy betting against one another. It was one of the things he did to alleviate the perpetual boredom.

Boredom was, in fact, the worst thing about being in prison—although if he had been sent to some other federal facility he might not have been able to say that. He had almost ended up in a maximum security prison in Ohio, where he would have undoubtedly become the plaything of one of the psychotics who resided there. Fortunately, and thanks to information he had obtained while at the NSA, he was able to keep that from happening.

It had all gone pretty much the way he’d expected: DeMarco had delivered the recordings to Justice Antonelli—and Antonelli believed every word he heard. DeMarco had figured out that Thomas Antonelli was the Thomas on Breed’s recording when he saw a newspaper photo of Antonelli at General Breed’s funeral and the accompanying article that said Antonelli was related to Breed’s wife. And then Antonelli did exactly what Dillon had thought he would do: he went immediately to the president and told him that if he didn’t clean up this whole NSA/Bradford mess, he was going to go public with everything.

Fortunately, at least from Dillon’s perspective, Antonelli was wise enough to realize that the U.S. government couldn’t let the entire world know what Charles Bradford had done because no one would believe that Bradford had been acting independently and without the sanction of his government. If Bradford had only killed a few Muslim terrorists, it might have been different, but Bradford had executed members of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Chinese governments—and the president really didn’t want to piss off the Chinese. Nor did the president particularly want it known the NSA was—once again—intercepting the communications of U.S. citizens without the required warrants.

The president assigned a special prosecutor—one of the few people in Washington actually capable of keeping a secret. The prosecutor questioned people in camera—meaning that none of his meetings were open to the public—and the records of those meetings were sealed for fifty years. The president figured that whoever was president half a century from now could decide if he or she wanted to declassify this god-awful debacle and let the world of the future know about it.

DeMarco was questioned several times by the prosecutor, and one time he was questioned with Dillon present. The prosecutor wanted to see if Dillon would deny any of DeMarco’s accusations—which Dillon didn’t. Dillon admitted that he had David Hopper and Colonel Gilmore killed but only to protect the lives of DeMarco and John Levy. He also admitted he planted bugs in Charles Bradford’s office and manipulated John Levy to kill Bradford. That is, he freely admitted he did his very best to rid the United States government of Charles Bradford while trying to keep secret everything Bradford had done. In other words, he admitted that he tried to do exactly what the president was now trying to do.

What Dillon refused to do was provide the names of anyone at the NSA who had helped him, and the only people DeMarco could identify were Alice and the three men who guarded him at the farmhouse in Maryland. But DeMarco didn’t know anyone’s last name, and Alice and the guards had disappeared. The one thing Dillon lied about was that he’d intercepted the transmission of Paul Russo being killed intentionally. He explained, in complex technical language, how the intercept had been inadvertently obtained due to “satellite malfunction.”

The president’s special prosecutor didn’t believe him.

Admiral Fenton Wilcox and his deputy director were fired and a new director was appointed to the NSA. The new director was a bright fellow, a three-star air force general who had previously worked at the agency, and he was told by the president that his first task was to ensure that the NSA was eavesdropping in accordance with all the rules. To assist the general in this task, seventy independent inspectors descended upon Fort Meade to review everything the agency was doing. Naturally, almost all the inspectors were former NSA employees because the new NSA director couldn’t find other people with the appropriate security clearance and the technical knowledge to do the review.