House Secrets (25 page)

“I need a man tailed,” she told them. “And you need to be careful,” she added. “He has a very nervous bodyguard.”

Tit for tat, Charlie, she said to herself after she finished giving Mike and Sammy their instructions.

Emma’s next call was to DeMarco. “What’s the name of your reporter friend, the one who works at the
Post
?”

“Reggie Harmon,” DeMarco said.

“Is he a good reporter?” Emma had asked.

“He drinks,” DeMarco said.

“Good,” Emma said.

Then Emma called four people she knew, four people who were not only friends but people who owed her in ways both personal and professional. What she asked of these four people she would never have asked had the stakes not been so high. One was a woman who worked for the president’s national security adviser. Another was a man who worked as a high-level analyst at the National Security Agency. Another was a senior FBI agent who attended daily joint-intelligence meetings with the CIA and Homeland Security. The fourth person was a CIA section head, a married woman with whom Emma had once had an affair when they were both young. The last phone call bothered Emma the most, and she suspected that after this the woman would probably never speak to her again. But she had to ask.

What she asked of these four people was this: she wanted a current item that, if made known to the public, would be embarrassing to the CIA but would not in any way compromise national security or any vital ongoing CIA operation. That’s all.

Reggie Harmon entered the church and looked around. He wasn’t a Catholic and he didn’t know what confessionals looked like or where they were located in the church. Then he saw the three small doors on the east side of the church. The doors were about halfway down the rows of pews and one of the doors had an unlit, amber-colored light bulb above it. He entered the door closest to the altar as he’d been told.

It was dark inside the confessional, dark enough that it made him nervous. He reached for the flask in his pocket and took a drink, the vodka a burning comfort as he swallowed. He’d just returned the flask to his pocket when a small panel slid open. There was a wire-mesh screen where the panel had been, and he could see the shape of a face on the other side of the screen but he couldn’t make out the person’s features.

If he’d been a Catholic, Reggie didn’t think he’d have liked the idea of confessing his sins in such a place.

“Mr. Harmon?” the person on the other side of the screen said.

“Yeah,” Reggie said.

“I have some information for you.”

“Who are you?” Reggie said. He couldn’t tell if he was speaking to a man or a woman. The person was using some sort of device to disguise his or her voice, and sounded the way people did who’d had their voice boxes removed. Reggie, a smoker as well as a drinker, didn’t like the sound at all.

“All you need to know is that I work for the CIA. In your story you can call me a highly placed official at the agency.”

“But how do I know you are?” Reggie said.

“Because of what I’m about to tell you,” the person said.

The following day, on page A3 of the
Washington Post
, was a one-paragraph article. According to the
Post
, “a highly placed source at the CIA” had informed
Washington Post
reporter Reginald Harmon that a CIA agent had been deported from Jakarta, Indonesia, the previous day for attempting to bribe a member of the Indonesian cabinet. When Mr. Harmon contacted the Indonesian ambassador in Washington, D.C., Mr. Yussef Kalla confirmed the story and stated that the Indonesian government was “extremely disturbed” that an American intelligence operative would do such a thing. Mr. Kalla said he would be meeting with the secretary of state to discuss the incident. White House press secretary Gerald Hoffman said that he was not aware of the incident until contacted by the
Post
but was certain the president would be discussing the situation with CIA director Colin Murphy.

Packy Morris was the chief of staff for the junior senator from Maryland. Unlike Abe Burrows and most other senior Senate aides DeMarco knew, Packy didn’t have a perpetually harried look about him. His casual air may have stemmed from a what-me-worry attitude toward life in general, but in all likelihood it was because his daddy owned half of downtown Baltimore. Packy Morris did not consider unemployment a significant threat.

Packy was six-seven and weighed over three hundred pounds, and the pounds were soft and flowing: if muscle was there, it was far, far below the surface. He had short dark hair that he combed forward and a fleshy, hooked nose. He always made DeMarco think of a jaded Roman emperor wrapped in an enormous white toga, thumb pointed downward, delightedly condemning a bleeding gladiator to death. Of late, Packy had taken to wearing red suspenders and bow ties, the suspenders looking like racing stripes on an eighteen-wheeler, the tie almost hidden by his many chins.

When DeMarco entered his office, Packy’s size-fourteen feet were resting on his desk and he was leaning back in his chair reading the sports section of the
Baltimore Sun
. He looked over the top of the paper at DeMarco and said, “I think the Ravens should invest their money in science. With the millions they’ve squandered on players, some egghead could have built them a bionic man by now. Like that
movie
Robocop
. They could make Roboguard or Roboend. Something that wouldn’t be on the disabled list half the fucking season.”

“Are you still betting on the Ravens, Packy?”

“I’m not betting; I’m donating. I’m declaring my bookie a charitable institution on my taxes this year.”

“Tell me about Abe Burrows, Packy.”

“Brother Abe, my colleague in legislative servitude?”

Packy was a magnet for gossip; he gathered it to his bosom like a miser collected gold.

“Yeah. What’s your take on him?”

“Why are you asking?

“Just curious.”

“Just curious?” Packy repeated, his shrewd eyes narrowing. When Packy’s eyes narrowed, they disappeared into creases of fat.

“Yeah,” DeMarco said.

“Are you going to tell me
why
you’re curious?”

“No.”

“Gee, what a sweet deal. I help you—you tell me shit. How can I refuse?”

DeMarco didn’t say anything.

Several years ago, an unscrupulous lobbyist—an oxymoron, to be sure—had been hired to prevent Congress from passing a particular law. The lobbyist decided that one way to better ensure that he met his client’s objective was to blackmail certain legislators who were undecided on how to cast their vote. He hired several young women who were much better-looking than your average curbside hooker to lure the chosen lawmakers to their beds, and then used a hidden camera to photograph them in positions they wouldn’t want their wives to see.

DeMarco had been assigned by Mahoney to extricate one congressman who had been trapped in the lobbyist’s snare, and in the course of doing so, he came across photographs of Packy Morris. In the photos Packy was naked—a sight that still gave him nightmares—and he was sandwiched between two nude women whose faces
had been made up to look like the actors’ in the musical
Cats
. DeMarco didn’t know why the lobbyist had compromising photos of Packy but he suspected it had to do with the fact Packy’s father was absurdly rich. He gave the negatives to Packy—and made no comments on sexual fantasies involving felines—but Packy had never been quite sure that DeMarco hadn’t kept a set of the pictures for himself.

“Okay,” Packy said, “but let me ask one thing: Whatever you’re working on, does it have anything to do with my favorite senator from Maryland?”

DeMarco raised his right hand—a gesture made by perjurer and truthsayer alike—and said, “I swear, Packy, I am doing nothing that will touch your boss.”

Packy’s eyes narrowed again as he attempted to measure DeMarco’s capacity for deceit. Skeptical, but apparently satisfied, he said, “The Cisco Kid and Pancho. Morelli’s the hero, of course, but he needs his Pancho, and Abe Burrows plays a very nasty Pancho.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve seen Morelli—all sweetness and reason, nary a harsh word for anyone. Well, before Morelli ever gets to the bargaining table, Abe runs around town stabbing people in the back and banging them over the head. We all play hardball up here, Joe, but Abe’s a pitcher that doesn’t just brush back the batters—he throws right at their heads and likes it when he beans ’em.”

“What’s their personal relationship? Are they close, are they friends? Is Burrows loyal to Morelli—I mean in more than an employer-employee sort of way?”

Packy thought for a moment, his lips moving as he speculated, as if he were chewing something very small with his large front teeth.

“Are they friends? No. But Burrows loves Morelli.”

“Loves him? You mean he’s gay?”

“No. Abe loves him platonically. He worships the ground Morelli walks on, and Morelli doesn’t even know Abe’s alive.”

“Do you have some basis for this insight, Packy?”

“Nothing empirical. Just a feeling I get when I see them together. You don’t think of senator and aide—you think of husband and subservient, adoring wife. And there’re stories,” Packy added, eyes twinkling, now enjoying his role as gossip spreader.

“What stories?”

“Oh, like once in New York, before Morelli became mayor, a cop stopped his car one night because the car’s all over the road. Burrows paid a thousand-dollar fine and lost his license for being under the influence. The cop who made the arrest said Burrows was driving, but the cop’s partner, six months later, said that Burrows was sober as a judge and Morelli was so shit-faced he could hardly talk.”

“So Burrows took the fall for his boss?”

Packy shrugged.

“How far would Burrows go for Morelli, Packy?”

“I thought I made that clear.” Packy hesitated a beat then added, “Abe would die for him.”

“Look,” Reggie said, “do we have to keep meeting here? This place gives me the creeps.”

“It’s a
church
,” the person on the other side of the confessional screen said. “How could a church give you the creeps?”

“I don’t know, but it does. It seems, I dunno, sacrilegious or something doin’ this here.”

“Humph,” the person said. “Is your tape recorder on?”

“Yeah,” Reggie said. “It’s too fuckin’ dark in here to take notes”—and then immediately wished he hadn’t cursed inside a church.

A front-page article in the
Washington Post
reported that the CIA had announced the discovery of an al-Qaeda training facility in Nigeria three months ago. Nigerian president Joseph Mbanedo vehemently denied that his country was harboring terrorists, but the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations had pressed for economic sanctions against the West African nation. Yesterday, a highly placed official at the CIA informed
Washington Post
reporter Reginald Harmon that closer analysis of satellite photos by the National Reconnaissance Office revealed that the suspected terrorist-training facility was in fact a soccer field used by members of a Methodist missionary church located a mile away. CIA spokesperson Marilyn Seely said that the
error had already been reported to the President’s national security adviser, Stephen Martell, and that diplomatic efforts were underway to address the error.