Back Blast

8

After dark, Andy Shoal lived on cans of Red Bull and cups of convenience store coffee. He wasn’t a night owl by design but, over time, he had created a chemically structured superhuman version of himself that got him through the nighttime hours, allowing him to excel at his job as a crime reporter for the Washington Post.

As “on” as he was when most people were tucked away in their beds, there was a price to be paid — the physical crash came each day with dawn. He was usually back in his apartment in Arlington by eight and asleep by nine, but by four thirty p.m. he was on his way back to his tiny cubicle in the Post’s office on 15th Street NW, just a few blocks from the White House.

He told himself he wouldn’t have to do this forever. Andy was ambitious, and he was four years into his five-year plan to get out of Metro and into something higher profile, a position on the national desk or on an investigative team that wouldn’t necessitate him being a zombie every damn day, so he worked hard, he got along with his editor, and he didn’t bitch.

All that taken into account, Andy still figured he must be doing something seriously wrong, because why else was he the one driving out to the shittiest ward in the District in the middle of this cold misty night to report on a double homicide?

Tonight’s assignment didn’t sound terribly interesting — the Watergate break-in this wasn’t. From the info he picked up over the police scanner in his car it seemed to be a shooting at a crack house or something. Not anything new and exciting, as Andy had filed countless stories like this already, but there were bodies and there were injured and this was his job, so as soon as he finished a piece he was working on at his desk, he climbed into his Ford Festiva and headed out into the dreary night.

With luck, he told himself, he could get six column inches out of this shooting.

Now he followed the last instructions of his GPS and turned off 4th Street SE and onto Brandywine Street.

Even though he knew the depressing crime statistics for Ward Eight, Andy never really felt unsafe around here. He was from Philly and had been raised lower middle class, so he was no stranger to rough streets. He’d been mugged once in D.C., but that was just three and a half blocks from the Capitol building, so he didn’t ascribe much more threat to the so-called bad parts of town.

As Andy pulled into the neighborhood he heard over his police scanner the crime scene was a possible meth stash house run by the Aryan Brotherhood, and as he parked and looked around he thought that possibility to be highly likely. He couldn’t imagine this property in front of him being anything other than a drug house. It was basically a boarded-up ramshackle single-story with a pickup truck adorned with a rebel flag decal in the driveway out front. The front door was a big black iron monstrosity and the fence around the back of the property was high and ringed with barbed wire.

The entire property was surrounded by police tape, and a few locals stood around in the rainy night. In the street a dozen squad cars idled, all with their headlights facing the home, and many with their lights flashing. A pair of fire trucks were parked end to end out front, and a single ambulance sat in the driveway, the EMTs leaning against their vehicle.

Just another night.

Other than Animal Control wrangling a big pit bull in the parking lot of an apartment building three doors down, there was no sense of urgency to the scene, which told Andy this ambulance was here to pick up dead bodies, not injured victims.

As he parked he noticed a gray four-door Nissan that he knew belonged to a homicide detective he’d become friendly with during his time as a cops reporter. He grabbed his backpack, stuffed with a camera, notebooks, an iPad, and a digital recorder, and he climbed out of his car, locking it before heading across the street.

He’d gotten less than halfway to the police tape when a patrolman standing at the perimeter shone a flashlight in his face. The light clicked off quickly, and Andy recognized the burly black officer.

“How’s it going, Mike?”

The cop held his hand up and said, “Not yet, Andy.”

Andy stopped in the street. “What’s that?”

“Can’t let you in just yet.”

“Really?” They always let Andy in, or at least up to the porch to take a quick peek. “Why not?”

“Dunno.”

“Who’s the detective in charge? Is it Rauch? Tell him I’m here, he always lets me poke a head in. Won’t take but a minute.”

“Rauch isn’t in there.”

“Why are you breakin’ my balls tonight, Mike? I saw his Altima back there.”

“Rauch is around, but not in the house. Hasn’t been inside yet. I think he’s on a canvass. Go talk to him.”

“What’s he doing on a canvass if he hasn’t even looked at the scene yet?”

The cop did not answer. He looked a bit uncomfortable, but he also looked resolute. Andy knew he could whine about it a little more, but he also knew he wasn’t getting in that house right now.

He noticed a flashlight’s beam shining through a small opening in a boarded-up front window. There was definitely someone inside. “What’s going on?” he asked.

Mike turned away. “Man, go talk to Rauch.”

Andy found Detective Rauch five minutes later, a half block away, stepping down from the stoop of a duplex. From the look of him he hadn’t gotten any good information from anyone inside.

“Hey, Bobby. How’s your night going?”

Bobby Rauch was a wiry, thin, and balding fifty-year-old who always looked like he needed a sandwich more than he needed the cigarettes he constantly smoked. He kept walking as he said, “It’s goin’, Shoal.”

“How come you’re not over there at the murder? Seen ten thousand, seen ’em all?”

Rauch took the young reporter by the arm and turned him away from the duplex, and together they started walking up the sidewalk towards the house next door. He said, “Do me a favor and go back over the river. Come back in the morning.”

Andy looked at his watch. In a tone that was much more good-natured than smart-ass, he said, “Twelve fifty-eight a.m. It’s morning. Here I am.”

Rauch sighed. “Sorry, but I can’t let you get any closer to that scene.”

“What’s the deal? You got a dead celeb in there or something?” Andy half chuckled as he said it, but he turned quickly serious when he saw Detective Rauch just give him an uncomfortable look.

“Oh man.” Andy got excited quickly. The prospect of this being a real story made him salivate. “Like a congressman’s kid? Who is it?”

Rauch shook his head. “Nah, nothing like that. Just some white trash dealers, from what they tell me.”

“Then what the hell is going on?”

Rauch stopped walking in the dark, and he leaned in closer, causing Andy to recoil at first. Quickly the Post reporter realized the detective wanted to whisper something. As weird as this was, Andy leaned in himself.

Rauch said, “Spooks.”

“Come again?”

“There’s a bunch of spooks in there. They won’t let us in till they are finished looking around.”

“What do you mean ‘spooks’? Like, CIA?”

Rauch shrugged. “They didn’t say that. But I was army, and they aren’t military intel. I ran into a few CIA when I was working Vice. A couple of guys in trench coats show up, not spit-shined like Bureau types, more scotch breath and chewed fingernails. They flash some general-looking Homeland Security credos and push past the PD like they own the fucking place. Same deal tonight, except one of the guys is a serious-looking woman in a trench coat.” Rauch shrugged his narrow shoulders inside his raincoat. “They’re definitely spooks.”

Rauch turned and looked back at the house, and Andy did the same, taking in the dilapidated property from a distance.

“This isn’t exactly Embassy Row,” Andy said. “What are they doing here?”

Rauch lit a cigarette, shielding the flame from the misty breeze. “In true spook fashion, they didn’t volunteer much information about their motives.”

“What else do you know?”

“Just what the responding officers and the EMTs said. Two DOA. One with his head blown half off from a rifle, the other skewered with some kinda ninja sword.”

“Damn. And the injured?”

“They transported four to Medstar Trauma. All Aryan Brotherhood. One dude took three AK rounds, another’s got a busted face, a third has a concussion and possible neck trauma, and some skank took two to the legs. I’ll go interview them as soon as I am allowed in to see my crime scene.” The annoyance was evident in Rauch’s voice.

“On the scanner they said it was one guy who did all this.”

“That’s what the injured woman told the responding officers.”

Andy thought for a second. This story was starting to get interesting. “How ’bout I wait at the tape so I can talk to the CIA guys when they come out?”

Rauch looked at Andy for an instant, then he shut down, like he just realized jawing with the reporter was the wrong call. “Look… I didn’t say CIA. You did. I said they were Homeland Security. Do me a favor and get out of here till they leave. Come back in the morning.”

Rauch tossed his cigarette in the gutter and headed up to knock on the next door.

Andy walked back to his car, then he stood there for a few minutes looking at the scene, awash in flashing red and blue lights. Finally one of the beat cops stepped up and asked him if he wouldn’t mind backing off a block or two. Normally Andy would have told the man to kiss his ass, but not this time. He climbed in his Ford, then drove around the corner, parked, and got back out with his camera. He walked between a pair of apartment buildings, squinted out the reflections of flashing lights, and made his way one block north of the crime scene.

On the street in front of him were two black Chevy Suburbans that clearly didn’t belong. Drivers sat behind the wheels, and each vehicle had a passenger in the front. Andy stopped in his tracks before the men saw him, then he retraced his steps back to the apartment buildings. Under a stairwell he found a place in the dark where he could keep his eyes on the vehicles, and there he waited.

Ten minutes later several figures in overcoats approached the Suburbans. One was a white-haired man in his early fifties, flanked by a pair of men Andy took immediately for bodyguards. Next to him was a woman in her thirties wearing eyeglasses, with her brown hair in a professional-looking bun. He snapped several pictures of both of them before they drove off, careful not to use his flash.

Back in his Fiesta he looked at the images on the digital display of his camera. He hadn’t expected to recognize either of them, even on closer inspection, and he did not.

But he knew someone who might. Sitting there in the shittiest part of the city, Andy looked up a number on his contact list and made a call.

A few miles west in Georgetown, a fifty-four-year-old woman slowly reached for the vibrating mobile phone on her nightstand. While doing so, she blinked the sleep from her eyes and checked the time on the phone’s screen.

It was a quarter after one.

She made no effort to perk up her sleepy voice. “This is Catherine King.”

“Ms. King? Andy Shoal here. I apologize for calling so late.”

“Who?”

“Andy Shoal. Metro desk.”

The woman sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. “Metro? Sure,” she said, but she’d never heard of this guy. “What can I do for you, Andy?”

“Again, sorry about the hour, but I’m doing a story on a double homicide in Washington Highlands and I could use your professional opinion.”

Catherine lay back down on her right side. “The butler did it. Can I go back to sleep?”

Andy chuckled. “I can pretty much guarantee this dump didn’t have a butler. No, actually I’m calling because I was told the CIA was here, looking over the crime scene. I haven’t run into that before, so I thought I’d reach out to you.”

Catherine King sat back up. “Hold on. Are you saying Agency personnel are investigating a homicide in the District?”

“That’s the word I got. The dick who made the scene first—”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sorry, the detective said he was told the men inside were Homeland Security. He didn’t outright say CIA, but that was his inference.”

“What’s the connection to Langley?”

“I don’t have a clue, and it doesn’t seem like the cops do, either. The crime scene is a suspected Aryan Brotherhood property, but I don’t know if that’s relevant or not. I do know you are the paper’s veteran National Security correspondent, so I thought maybe you could help, since nobody knows more about the intelligence community in this town than you do.”

King picked up on the platitude, and it told her something about this Andy Shoal. Cops reporters were usually either grizzled old vets or else they were young and ambitious. Shoal, it was clear, was the latter, and he was sucking up to her a little. She absolutely hated to be called a veteran reporter; she found this almost as bad as when she was referred to as an institution, which also happened on occasion. But she was too intrigued by Andy’s information to be either flattered or annoyed. “I can’t think of a soul on that side of the Anacostia who would be of interest to CIA. I suppose if they are counterintel officers and they caught one of their people visiting a drug house then that would rouse Langley in the middle of the night, but that’s just a guess.”

“It was one male, with bodyguards, and one female. I got pretty good pictures of both of them.”

“You did, did you? You need to be careful doing that with Agency personnel. They are camera shy as a species. Did they see you take their picture?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You want to send them to my phone?”

“On the way.”

Catherine reached for her eyeglasses, then turned on the light on her nightstand. While she waited she looked around her bedroom. She lived alone, and had no children, so the only disorder in the home was her own. An empty cereal bowl and a spoon on the nightstand, a pile of yoga tights and sweats on a settee in a far corner, a raincoat lying over a chair by the door to her closet.

She’d returned from a trip to Cairo three days earlier, where she’d been meeting with a source in Egyptian intelligence, and she’d yet to unpack fully, so a large rolling North Face duffel sat on a table in the far corner of the room, open with dirty clothes spilling out onto the floor.

Two images appeared on her mobile, and Catherine looked at them one at a time. She zoomed in on the first, a woman with light brown hair in a tight bun. She did not recognize her. She swiped down to the next image; this one was of a white-haired man in his early fifties. He seemed to have a two-man security detail shadowing him.

Interesting. If he was CIA this would be beyond odd. Other than the director and some division heads, CIA execs didn’t ordinarily move with bodyguards in the USA.

She blinked away more sleep, and quickly rubbed her eyes. She looked at the photo of the white-haired man again. After several seconds she said, “That makes no sense at all.”

Though she was talking to herself, Shoal asked, “Do you recognize them?”

“The gentleman with the white hair is Jordan Mayes. I haven’t seen him since Iraq. Six years ago. Back then he was a senior officer, but now he’s assistant director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.”

“Does that mean he’s a big deal?”

“Big enough to where I can’t think of a single reason he would be wandering through a crime scene in the middle of the night in the worst part of the city. Why would anyone do that?” With a little hesitation she said, “Hope that doesn’t offend you, Andy.”

“Not in the least. We can’t all get the good gigs like the national security beat.”

The comment barely registered with Catherine. She was still looking at the picture of Jordan Mayes. She said, “Mayes’s purview is one hundred percent outside of the U.S. Denny Carmichael holds Mayes’s leash.”

“Who?”

“Carmichael runs the show at CIA.”

“Director?”

“Directors don’t run the show, Andy. Directors are political hires. Sent in to watch over, but to keep their hands clean. No, Denny Carmichael is head of the National Clandestine Service. He’s the top spook in spook land. He does all the dirty things around the world.”

“He’s bad?”

“Depends on your perspective. He’s done a lot of good I’m sure, but I’ve watched while Denny has grown his fiefdom to the point where he makes his own rules over at Langley. I’m not crazy about that.”

“Are you going to ask Carmichael what his assistant was doing in Washington Highlands?”

Catherine thought this over. “No. That’s not the right play here. I’d rather probe into Mayes a little. Figure out who this woman is with him at the crime scene. If I go to Carmichael as clueless as I am now, he’ll know he can sell me anything. Once I have some facts, just enough to scare him into thinking I know more than I really do, I’ll confront him.”

Andy didn’t respond to this. Finally Catherine said, “Did I lose you?”

There was obvious amazement in his voice. “That’s genius.”

“I talk to men and women who lie for a living. You develop techniques to mitigate some of the BS along the way. Will you keep me posted on anything you learn about the Highlands incident?”

“Of course I will. What would you say to the two of us sharing a byline?”

Catherine smiled at the phone. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Andy. I don’t know there is a story there just yet. I get five ‘can’t miss’ earth-shattering leads a week that turn into nothing. For now, let’s just pull this thread from both ends and see what turns up. That sound good to you?”

“Sounds great. I’ll let you know what I find.”

Catherine King hung up the phone, pulled off her glasses, and lay back down on the bed. But after thirty seconds she rolled back up, climbed to her feet, and headed downstairs to her home office.

Whatever was going on that involved spooks from the CIA, the Aryan Brotherhood, and a double homicide was much more important to her than a few hours’ sleep. She’d sit at her computer and dig around on Mayes, Carmichael, and the mystery woman, and see what she could find.