Support and Defend (20 page)

D
IRECTLY DOWNSTAIRS,
Dominic slipped off his sneakers, then tied the laces together quickly so he could hang them around his neck. In his stocking feet, he scooted along the floor of the downstairs hallway so as to stay as quiet as possible, and he moved to the back of the house. He entered the covered porch— he was in front of the lens of the security camera in the pantry, but he knew it wouldn’t matter now that Ross was home. The wireless camera wouldn’t send an alert to his phone if his phone was connected to the same network, because it knew he was home.

Dom first planned to make his way out the back door, climb the fence, and clear the scene, but the fact Ross was home gave him an opportunity Dom could not pass up.

He took a knee by the messy coffee table on the closed in porch and he recorded all the paperwork there with the video function of his camera phone. He found more papers in a magazine rack next to the couch, and this he pulled out and sifted through quickly, careful to record each sheet.

While he worked he kept his ears tuned to the footfalls directly above him. He could hear Ross moving into and out of his closet, and then he heard a muffled voice.

It was only Ross speaking, so Dom presumed he was talking on the phone.

Dom didn’t know if he was using the mobile phone by the bed or another mobile, but he sure as hell wasn’t using the landline in the house, because Dom had disconnected the wire in the box outside.

Dom couldn’t make out anything said until the very end of the one-sided conversation, when Ross all but shouted, his voice agitated, “I mean today! Right the fuck now!”

Dom thought this sounded highly suspicious. He finished his work on the porch and headed for the door. It had a serious exposed slide lock and a massive deadbolt. Dom unlocked the deadbolt, but just as he reached for the sliding lock, he jerked to a stop. Behind him in the hallway came the sound of creaking stairs—Ethan Ross was on his way down.

Shit.

On the other side of the back door was a screen door, and Dom imagined it would be a noisy proposition to open this in a hurry. He turned away from the exit and scooted in his stocking feet back to a hallway closet by the entrance to the porch. He pushed himself inside, hiding behind the array of thick coats hanging there. He just needed a place to stay out of sight until Ross left the house. He’d peeked in the closet earlier, and now he decided it was his best possible option.

But Murphy’s Law kicked in. He heard Ross’s shoes squeak on the hallway floorboards when he turned at the stairs and began walking in Dom’s direction. Dom realized Ross was heading for this very closet. Dominic rolled his eyes, pushed his backpack hard against the wall, and fought the urge to yank his Smith & Wesson out of his shoulder holster.

The closet door opened, Dom remained pressed flat against the cedar back wall, he didn’t move a muscle, and he held his breath.

Son of a bitch.

Ross fumbled with his coats for what seemed to Dominic to be an eternity. He yanked out a suede riding jacket, then put it back in favor of a camel-wool three-quarter-length coat, and then finally he settled on a high-tech red North Face synthetic down ski jacket. When he pulled it out Dom was exposed at the back of the closet, but Ross had already turned away. He shut the door and headed toward the front of the house, and Dom blew out a long, silent sigh.

As Ross entered the living room, his mobile phone rang. Dom heard him answer, and he managed to pick up the majority of the conversation because Ross’s voice carried down the hallway.

“Hey, Mom. No, I left early. I told you. Dentist appointment. Taking the rest of the day off.”

Next came some grumbling from Ross that Dom couldn’t understand, then he said, “I’ll do it later. I don’t have time right now.”

After several more seconds of frustrated complaining, he said, “I’m walking out the door. It’s up in my office. I’ll call you later and—” A long hesitation and an almost childish sigh Dom could hear even through the closed closet door. “All right! Wait a minute.”

Dominic heard Ross running back upstairs; he sounded annoyed and hurried. When Dom knew Ross had stepped into his second-floor office, Dom pushed his way out of the closet and walked in his stocking feet to the back door. There he carefully unlocked the wooden door and opened it, then slowly pushed open the screen door. As he suspected, it squeaked upon opening, but Ross was talking on the phone upstairs, giving his mother someone’s name and e-mail address.

Dom walked through the tiny backyard, staying close to the wall of the house in the offhand chance Ross was looking out a second-floor window right now. He made it to the driveway, knelt to put his shoes back on, and then he turned to head around to the front of the property.

Dom found the red E-Class parked in the drive. He reached into his backpack as he walked up to it, and he barely broke stride when he knelt down and placed a slap-on GPS receiver under the rear bumper.

He reattached the phone line at the junction box, and then closed it up, and he headed toward the street. With a quick glance to the front door of the Ross row house to confirm he was in the clear, Dom stepped out onto 34th and began walking north.

As he walked away he heard Ross open and then shut his front door. Dom didn’t look back, even when the Mercedes pulled out of the drive into the street and screeched off to the south, again with heavy music blasting from its speakers.

Dom relaxed for the first time in an hour. He’d done it, he didn’t think he’d gotten much for his troubles, but he had collected some data he could analyze, and he had a way to see where Ross was heading. He suspected he was not going to the dentist. Whoever he was meeting with, Ross seemed to think it was an emergency.

Dom wouldn’t try to track him to his meeting, it was too risky. Instead, he decided he’d go home and sit at his laptop and watch his movements in real time him while he loaded all the data he’d picked up into the analytical software.

E
THAN FOUND HIMSELF
back in Fort Marcy Park for the third time in four days. He hadn’t driven here himself; instead, he’d parked his car in a lot near Washington Circle, and from there he took a cab into Arlington/Shirlington. He walked through The Village at Shirlington, an upscale outdoor mall, then caught a bus that took him to within a half-mile of the park, and he came the rest of the way on foot.

The long transit wasn’t his idea. Harlan Banfield instructed him to take a circuitous route during their brief phone conversation, after first telling him to leave his primary mobile phone at home. This all seemed like a lot of silly spycraft to Ethan, he’d looked over his shoulder several times and hadn’t noticed anyone tracking him, but Banfield insisted, and the old newspaperman seemed like he knew what he was talking about, so Ross reluctantly tossed his main phone on his bed, took his new phone, and left his house to begin something Banfield dramatically referred to as a “dry-cleaning run.”

He’d run around for forty-five minutes, it was the noon hour now, and as soon as he walked into the park Ethan saw he and his collaborators would not have the place to themselves as they had on their earlier meeting. In addition to Banfield’s Volkswagen, several other vehicles were parked in the little lot, and Ethan saw men and women eating sack lunches behind the wheel of their cars. A school group of twenty-five or so fourth-graders skittered around the Civil War–era gun emplacement, led, more or less, by a teacher and a park ranger, and a young couple wearing military fatigues—after all these years in the NSC Ethan still had trouble distinguishing the different branches by their utility uniforms—walked hand in hand on the trail.

For a moment he worried that everyone in the park—with the possible exception of the fourth-graders—were working for the FBI and were here only to catch him in the act. But he pushed this out of his head. He didn’t have anything incriminating on him, and Banfield had told him he’d wave him off if he didn’t feel comfortable with their level of privacy when he arrived.

Banfield and Bertoli stood by the cannon, in the exact same spot he saw them standing two days earlier. Ethan looked for a signal from Banfield—he had a newspaper under his arm that he would drop to the ground if he wanted Ethan to pass them by and keep walking, but he kept the paper under his arm as Ethan approached.

Banfield spoke as soon as Ross was close. “Do you absolutely
know
you weren’t followed?”

“Of course I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think so. I didn’t notice anyone, but I’m a White House policy maker, not some low-rent private detective.”

Bertoli waved the worry away. “What has you so upset today, Ethan? Yesterday’s polygraph?”

Ethan said, “The poly seemed to go okay, but the examiner asked me if I was taking medicines to keep me from sweating.”

Banfield winced. With a grave expression he said, “You told him, no, of course.”

“Of course I did. But I don’t think he bought it.”

“Might just be a fishing expedition,” announced Banfield, but Ross couldn’t tell for sure if he believed it.

“And then today. Special Agent Albright. He just showed up and questioned me, over and over. I asked if I needed to lawyer up and he backed off, but they are suspicious. At least I think they are.” He ran his hands through his blond hair. “I mean . . . shit. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just losing it.”

Banfield said, “They might be doing this to everyone who had access to the file.”

“Maybe. But he said he was going to interview Eve to see if she might have told me about techniques in passing that were used in the peace flotilla download. She would never betray me intentionally . . . but Albright is good. He could twist her up. Get her to say something that makes him more suspicious.”

The three of them stood quietly in the park for a moment, weighing the situation. Banfield said, “We can find out if you really are a person of interest, or if the FBI agent was just trying to rattle your cage.”

“How?”

“If you are a POI, they will put a surveillance package on you. Hopefully they haven’t done so already, but the drycleaning run I sent you on would have shook them off if they
were
tailing you.”

“Again, I didn’t see anything.”

“It wouldn’t be obvious, son. There would be a number of cars rotating in and out when you are in your vehicle. Half a dozen men and women, probably more than that, when you are on foot. They’ll tap your home and office phone, use a court order to get access to your mobile.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Calm down,” said Gianna. “Harlan, that would be a worstcase scenario. Let’s not make things more stressful than they have to be.” She turned to Ross. “We don’t know that they are watching you yet.”

Banfield said, “Here is what we’ll do. I’ll run you around town a little bit, just have you go from here to there without a care in the world.”

“And?” asked Ross.

“And I watch out for anyone following you.”

“Will you be able to—”

“Of course I will. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. As I told you before, this isn’t our first time dealing with this sort of thing. How soon can we run a little test?”

Ross looked at his watch. “I am off for the rest of the day. I have a dentist appointment at one.”

“Good. You’ll buy a headset so we can stay in communication via your new phone, go back to your car, and go to your appointment. If there is surveillance on you and they lost you, they’ll know that’s where they can pick you back up. Once you’re finished, I’ll direct you to a location where I’ll be waiting to identify any FBI personnel following you.”

Ethan nodded distractedly, but Gianna stepped forward and gave him a hug. “Hopefully everything is fine,” she said. To Ethan, this was a massive understatement. “But if there are reasons for concern, we will take the steps necessary to keep you safe. Please, you must relax and trust me.”

Ethan looked into Bertoli’s eyes. He thought of his mother, even though Bertoli was twenty years younger. “I do.”

Banfield said, “You’re going to have to hurry to make your dentist appointment.”