Executive Order

Seven

Melanie Graham, the ex-Mrs. Joe Reeder, glared at the man she’d divorced, who still loved her.

“Jesus, Joe,” she said, “when is enough going to be enough?”

He guessed that was a rhetorical question.

Slender, she was wearing her brown hair very short these days, a change he regretted but hadn’t commented on. Her brown eyes burned into him and her teeth were bared, her upper lip curled back.

Okay, so she was pissed at him — at least she still cared.

“You’re a very successful businessman,” she said, biting off words, “and you’re not a kid, and yet you insist on getting yourself involved in these dangerous fixes and then everybody in your life has to uproot themselves for God knows how long until you sort the crap out and try not to get yourself killed.”

She didn’t get raving mad like this very often, but when she did, Reeder knew there was nothing he could say. He tried anyway: “I’m on a mission for the President—”

“The President! The President! How many years, how many damn decades, did I have to hear about one president or another whose life was more important than ours! Goddamnit, Joe, I’m still tied to you! We might as well still be married!”

He wouldn’t have minded that — normally.

She raved on: “How am I supposed to explain this to Donald? That we’re to pick up and pack up and go running somewhere and hide?”

The reference was to her current husband, Donald Graham, a lobbyist. Reeder was standing in what had been Graham’s house and was now Melanie’s as well. The framed landscapes that were scattered around the room, the floral sofa, the antique table lamps, were all touches his ex-wife had brought to what had been Graham’s male domain.

Firm but without anger, Reeder said, “We don’t have the luxury of this argument right now. I said this was serious.”

“It’s always serious!”

“Not this serious. Just hours ago, they killed Len Chamberlain right in front of me.”

About to speak, she froze, her mouth half-open as she processed that. Then: “Not Len... he was... CIA wasn’t he?”

“He was. Just a desk jockey these days, but he was doing me a favor. We were about to meet outside the main entrance to ANC when he got taken down by a hit-and-run. Do I have to say it was no accident?”

“Oh, Joe... oh my God, Joe...” Her eyes softened as her voice trailed off, the back of her hand at her cheek in a loose fist.

“Here’s the bad part.”

“The bad part?”

“Len and I talked only once on the phone, with no direct mention of where we were meeting. The only way someone could have known where we’d be was if they are tapping my phone, and know my habits.”

“That... that could have been you,” she said, her voice small. She took a tiny step toward him and he caught a whiff of her favorite perfume, Magie Noire. His favorite, too.

He put his hands on her shoulders, gentle though strong. “But it wasn’t me. In fact, they made no effort to get me, and I was right there for the taking. Len shouldn’t have been a threat to anyone these days, just playing out his string in Langley, waiting for retirement.”

Her eyes were narrow now in tightened sockets. “Why not go after you, if they had you in their sights?”

He dropped his hands from her shoulders. “I don’t really know. Possibly they’d already decided on Len, and knew that a hit-and-run death might be written off, whereas taking me down, too, would make it murder.”

She stared past him. “And now you’re on the run, keeping a low profile, which means...”

“Whoever-this-is might come after my family, whether for leverage or to make me mad enough to come at them straight on, which they’d be confident they could handle.”

Her eyes swung back to him, wide with alarm. “Tell me you at least had sense enough to handle Amy and Bobby first!”

Melanie meant their daughter Amy, a junior at Georgetown, and her live-in boyfriend, Bobby, who her middle-of-the-road Democrat dad considered half a communist.

He nodded. “She and Bobby are off to—”

She held up a hand. “Don’t tell me where, just that they’re safe.”

“They’re safe. An ability to make that happen is one of the perks of having real money.”

She sighed, calming herself. “And now you’re here. And Don and I get an unscheduled vacation.”

“All expenses paid,” he said, risking a little smile. “Look, Len and I were circumspect when we talked... but they were waiting for us, anyway. It doesn’t get more deadly serious than this, Mel. I need to know the people I love are safe. And, uh... I’ll need that package I left with you.”

Nodding, her expression somewhat dazed, she said, “Donald’s study. Come along.”

He followed her out of the living room and down a corridor toward the back of the house, past the dining room to a closed door.

Melanie led him inside. No feminine touches here — the dark-paneled, book-lined study was strictly male: wall-mounted flat-screen that overpowered the small room, a two-seater black-leather sofa, a massive oak desk that a window must have been removed to get in.

To one side of the window behind the desk was a painting of the Capitol that at Melanie’s touch swung open on unseen hinges to reveal a wall safe. She twirled the dial and soon was withdrawing one of two side-by-side brown-paper-wrapped packages about the size of two bricks.

She handed it over to Reeder, who hefted the thing, then said, “You should take the other one for you and Donald.”

She pulled out a second bundle. “How much is there?”

“Two hundred each.”

“How far will that go?”

“Two hundred thousand.”

The dark eyes flared. “Four hundred thousand dollars, and you kept it in a wall safe in our house?”

He managed a weak smile. “Turned out to be a pretty good plan, didn’t it?”

She found her own small smile. “It’s hard to hate a man who has two hundred thousand dollars tucked away for you.”

“Here’s that rainy day,” he said. “How soon can you and Donald get out of here?”

“If I can get a hold of him... probably... three hours?”

“Make it faster, if you can. But leave the house casually, okay? Load up the suitcases in the garage, and no word to the neighbors.”

She nodded.

“Thanks, Melanie, and... I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

She glared at him, and then touched his cheek.

“I hate you,” she said.

But it sure sounded like, I love you.

Reeder, pondering his next move, had been back in the car maybe five minutes when the first burner phone made itself known.

Only one person had the number.

“We need to talk,” Rogers said.

When was a woman saying that to a man good news?

He said, “Something wrong?”

“Just meet us.”

“‘Us’ sounds like more than just you.”

“Hardesy’s with me.”

“Does he know what he’s signing on for?”

“Do we?”

Good point.

He said, “Where do you want to meet?”

“Falls Church. Mexican place named Los Primos on Lee Highway — know it?”

“I’ll find it.”

East of the Capital Beltway on Lee Highway, Los Primos was tucked away in a strip mall across the street from a warren of condos. The place looked to be less than half full, the dinner rush pretty much over.

Ceramic tile on the floor, Mexican music on the sound system, and a couple of cactus plants gave the place its contrived air of authenticity. Rogers and Hardesy were at a table toward the back. When the hostess smiled at him, Reeder nodded toward his friends and went on by her. She trailed him back to the table, one side of which Rogers and Hardesy shared. He sat opposite.

They declined menus and Reeder ordered Chiapas, black. Rogers already had coffee, Hardesy a Modelo. They waited in silence until Reeder’s cup came.

He had already noted, on the shoulder of Rogers’ jacket, the smudge of blood. Someone else might have thought she’d just spilled something on her navy-blue suit. Somebody had spilled something, all right.

“Whose is it?” Reeder asked her.

But Hardesy answered: “The recently late Tony Evans.”

The name meant nothing to Reeder and he said so.

Hardesy added, “He’s the delivery guy who brought Secretary Yellich the sandwich that disagreed with her.”

“Did he know that was what he was doing?”

Reeder’s expression said, Murdering her? This was a public place.

Rogers shrugged and said, “Too early to tell for sure, but we did find sesame oil in his apartment.”

Quietly Reeder asked, “How did his blood end up on your jacket?”

Just as quietly she told him.

The booths on either side of them were vacant, and the people at the table behind them were leaving. When they’d gone, Reeder asked, “A sniper was waiting?”

She glanced around the restaurant herself, then softly said, “Joe, they knew where we’d be, and that we were there to pick up Evans.”

Reeder considered the possibilities. “Who on our side knew where you were going?”

Hardesy said, “Only Altuve. Just Altuve.”

“Miggie’s true blue,” Reeder said, shaking his head. “But remember — he did get hacked in the J. Edgar Hoover Building last year. Maybe that happened again.” His eyes went to Rogers. “Or it could be the people who were tracking my cell were... are... also tracking yours.”

“Why track Patti’s cell?” Hardesy asked.

Reeder said, “Who else would I get in touch with in a tough spot? Who else do I trust?”

“Okay,” Hardesy said, frowning, “so you two are tight. But what made a target out of our suspect?”

“Somebody tidying up, maybe,” Reeder said. His eyes traveled from Hardesy to Rogers. “Could the shooter have meant to hit one of you instead?”

Rogers shook her head and so did Hardesy.

“Trust me,” she said. “That sniper hit the bull’s-eye.”

Reeder thought for a moment. “What do you know about your suspect?”

She filled him in.

After she’d finished, he said, “With DNA results from the shooter’s blood, and/or fingerprints on the shell casings, we may soon know more.”

Rogers sipped coffee. Hardesy swigged Modelo.

She asked, “Just what the hell is going on here, Joe?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “What do a poisoned Secretary of the Interior, four dead field agents, an assassinated delivery boy, and a murdered CIA desk jockey add up to?”

Hardesy had no answer, but he did have a question: “Who has the high-tech capability and inside knowledge to tap your phone and/or hack Miggie’s computer?”

Rogers took that one. “Someone in the government,” she said. “That’s what happened last year — a mole who was part of that would-be coup.”

“You’re right,” Reeder said. “And we stopped that coup, but there could be other moles. A lot more.”

Rogers cocked her head, which was a question in itself.

“Suppose,” Reeder said, “we’re dealing with a shadow government. A faction, a large one, within the government.”

Hardesy grunted a laugh, then looked across at Reeder and saw the man wasn’t laughing. Not at all.

“Since last year,” Reeder said, “when that mole hacked Miggie, our cyber-defenses have been improved. But we’re still at our most vulnerable to... who was it said, The Enemy Within?”

Though Rogers was slowly nodding, Hardesy was shaking his head. “This is crazy,” he said. “That mess last year has softened your skulls. You’re talking conspiracy-nut nonsense.”

She said, “The Secretary of the Interior was murdered, as we’ve established. But till we waded in, there’d been virtually no investigation. Did somebody make sure of that?”

Hardesy kept shaking his head.

Reeder said, “Someone sent four top CIA agents to die in a country on the brink of war where the President himself had made it clear he did not want any American presence.”

“Come on, Joe,” Hardesy said, but he was weakening. “You know over at the Company the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.”

“But does the far right?” Reeder asked. “Or for that matter, the far left?”

Her eyes on Hardesy, Rogers said, “Then there’s what happened with Joe’s all-but-retired CIA friend... not to mention the suspect who got blood on my jacket. Face it, Lucas, only someone with real power could do that... someone on the inside.”

“Not one someone,” Reeder corrected. “A group.”

Hardesy held up his hands in what was not quite surrender. “Wait, guys, wait... what if there’s no real connection between these events? What if it’s all just a coincidence? Isn’t it possible we’re rushing to make the evidence fit a theory?”

Rogers smirked. “How many dead bodies add up to a coincidence in your book?”

Reeder said, “No, Patti, your friend Lucas here is right. We can’t just jump to conclusions.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You think that’s what we’re doing? Somebody assassinated a CIA agent right in front of you, and shot a suspect right next to me? And we’re jumping to conclusions?”

“Easy, Patti,” Reeder said, giving her the faintest smile. “We’re both a little rattled by everything that’s gone down today. We need to get our feet under us again.”

She let out a breath, and nodded.

“If, for instance,” Reeder continued, “Amanda was killed for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s going on with the CIA... and we try to shove the two cases together... we could wind up chasing our tails, or worse.”

“Worse?” she asked.

He nodded. “We could add to a climate leading to, no exaggeration, another world war.”

That sent Hardesy’s eyebrows up, but despite what Reeder had just said, Rogers seemed calmer now.

She said, “All right — you’re the consultant, the voice of experience, the great American hero — what should we be doing?”

“Put Altuve on it. Once Mig realizes he may have been hacked, and can use other means to follow up, have him find out everything he can about Amanda... then you two chase down every lead. You may even learn that there’s some other reason she was taken out.”

Rogers was nodding. Then, after a beat, so was Hardesy.

“What’s your next move?” she asked Reeder.

“The police’ve had enough time to look at what happened to Len Chamberlain and go through his effects. I want to know if they found anything. And are they viewing it as a traffic fatality or a murder.”

“And if we do come up with something?”

“You go to AD Fisk and get your task force assigned to the case.”

Rogers gazed at him with narrowed eyes. “I have Fisk. But you have the President. That’s one hell of go-to-guy.”

Reeder nodded. “He’s promised me help, but so far all I can tell him is that someone I talked to on the phone got hit by a car. Not exactly the smoking gun he wants me to find.”

“Okay,” Rogers said, heaving a sigh. “For now, we dig separately.”

Reeder said, “One more thing.” He got in his suit coat pocket and handed her the other burner phone. “Use this.”

“How scared do you want to make me?” she asked, only half-kidding.

“Very goddamn scared,” he said, not kidding at all. “Because if we’re right, and there’s something big and nasty going on, killing us is easier than dealing with whatever we might find.”

He finally sipped his coffee. It was stone cold.

An hour later, Reeder stood in the cool nighttime shadows beside an attached garage in Burke, Virginia. After leaving his car parked three blocks over, he’d taken a circuitous route through backyards and alleys, and felt sure no one was trailing him.

Pretty sure.

His clothes were all dark, a black watch cap concealing his distinctive white hair. Leaning against the side of the garage, he rubbed his hands and wished he’d brought gloves. There were stars, a lot of them, and no clouds, with the cooler temperatures they indicated. Finally he jammed his hands into his jacket pockets as he waited. He had no gun but was carrying his ASP telescoping baton, retracted to its 6.3-inch length, its diameter under an inch.

The quiet of the houses around him was broken by a dog’s indignant barking up the block, then silence. Had the dog been roused by someone else on foot? But no one came along. He could see his breath, and was shifting from foot to foot when he saw headlights.

He moved deeper into the shadows. A few seconds later, the mechanical hum of a garage-door opener announced the rising of the door, and a black Chevy turned into the driveway. The vehicle slowed and eased inside next to a Toyota. Reeder stepped out of the darkness and inside, as the door lowered itself, its mechanics whirring, a single overhead light going on, automatically.

The garage was neatly arranged — a workbench along the right side wall, hanging yard tools opposite, shelves of boxed belongings at the far end on either side of an aluminum door to the backyard; three bikes hanging from the rafters, one each for the parents and one for a grown son now in college.

Reeder knew the owner, and this space, very well. He and his friend had often sat at the workbench talking sports, shooting the shit, and sipping beers out of the mini-fridge in a nearby corner. Now it held only Cokes.

Balding, beefy Carl Bishop, detective with the Homicide Bureau that covered the entire DC area, stepped out of his Chevy and reared back a little.

“Jesus, Peep!” Bishop said, finding Reeder right in front of him. “You wanna give me a heart attack, maybe get yourself shot?”

Bishop, a friend for over two decades, had for all that time used the nickname bestowed upon Reeder by his peers at the Secret Service, due to the then-agent’s kinesics-schooled ability to read people. Reeder didn’t like the moniker much, but pointing that out to longtime friends who used it seemed less than gracious.

“Tell you the truth, Bish,” Reeder said, “getting shot is something I’m trying to avoid.”

The homicide cop stood there, hands on his hips, in an unmade bed of a suit, his tie a loose noose the hangman hadn’t tightened yet. The end, obviously, of another long day.

He said, “Skulking around dressed like a burglar, especially around an armed detective’s domicile, does not seem like the best way to stay un-shot, Peep.”

Reeder took off the watch cap and shrugged. “You call it ‘skulking.’ I call it waiting.”

“To get shot,” Bishop said, but he was already over his surprise and annoyance. “You want to come in and have a beer? I keep a few cans for my friends who aren’t on the wagon.” He shut the car door. “Stacy would love to see you.”

Reeder doubted that — it was Melanie who’d been tight with Bishop’s wife. The petite blonde was nice enough, but he hadn’t seen her since the divorce.

“Not a good idea, Bish. This isn’t a social call.”

Bishop frowned, nodded, and ushered his friend to the workbench, where high-backed stools awaited. They sat facing each other, swung sideways at the bench, Bishop leaning an elbow and folding his hands.

Almost shyly, Reeder said, “I probably shouldn’t even be here... but I needed to talk to you, away from your desk, and phones are out of the question right now.”

“Just tell me, Peep.”

“This is probably outside your sphere, but I need you to check up on a hit-and-run out at Arlington.”

The detective’s eyes widened and it didn’t take a kinesics expert to read them. “You’re shitting me.”

Shaking his head, Reeder said, “No, there really was a hit-and-run out there, and—”

Raising a traffic-cop hand, Bishop said, “Peep, I know. I know. It’s been all over the news.”

“It has?”

“The hit-and-run itself didn’t attract attention. But tourists got cell phone footage of FBI and Homeland agents at the site — two federal agencies send their people to a hit-and-run? That’s news. No one is saying who got killed but—”

“Len Chamberlain,” Reeder cut in.

The name meant nothing to Bishop. “You knew the guy?”

Nodding, Reeder said, “I saw it happen. He was CIA. The real deal, but lately just riding a desk. He was coming to Arlington to give me information about the slain US citizens in Azbekistan.”

“Hell you say.”

“Hell I say.”

Bishop’s expression would have seemed blank to most people, but not Reeder.

The detective said, “What can I do to help? You’re talking high intrigue. I’m just a simple DC gumshoe. You were there — what did you tell the cops?”

“Nothing. I left. What could I give them that a dozen witnesses couldn’t? And if Len was worth killing, then maybe I was a target, too.”

Bishop’s eyes were wide again. “Jesus, man. What about Melanie and Amy? These don’t sound like people who would stop at much.”

“They’re safe.”

“Good. Good.” He took some air in, then let it out. “So... we’re back to the beginning. What can I do to help?”

Reeder held Bishop’s gaze. “I’m curious as to what evidence the cops took from the scene.”

“And you want me to find out what that might be.”

“If they found anything,” Reeder said. “But be goddamn careful, Bish — the forces in play may already be responsible for the deaths of seven people.”

A deep sigh. “Consider your point made, Peep. Look — was this guy Chamberlain bringing you a package? Is that what you hope to find?”

Reeder shrugged. “I hope to find anything that gives me some small piece of daylight. We set up the meeting textbook careful, yet Chamberlain is still wearing tire tracks. Whether he had something to tell me, or to give me, I have no idea. But us setting up a meet got somebody’s attention enough to warrant killing Len.”

Bishop grunted a non-laugh. “Great. Any advice for me?”

“Yeah. Watch your ass.”

They just sat there for a moment.

Then Bishop said, “With the feds already on this, I may not be able to get you a damn thing, you know.”

Reeder shook his head dismissively. “Don’t sweat that. I’ve got people at the FBI who’ll help me on that end. But I want to know if the local cops got anything before the feds shut them out.”

Bishop was nodding. “I’ll take care of it, Peep... and I’ll watch my ass. Anything else I can do for you? We’re full service here at Bishop Motors.”

“Sure.” Reeder slid off the stool. “Lock the door behind me. I’ll go out the back and through the neighbors’ yards.”

As Reeder headed that way, Bishop followed, saying, “Fine, but be careful. The Smiths, three houses down, have a mouthy little blue heeler. It’s penned up, but you might soil yourself if you’re not expecting that kind of welcome.”

“Yeah, I heard him earlier. Sounded like a bigger dog.”

“No, just a little son of a bitch, but a big pain in the ass.”

Reeder shot his friend an over-the-shoulder grin, his first in many hours, and ducked out into darkness.