Executive Order

Thirteen

Jerry Bohannon, tie loosened, jacket folded up on the passenger seat, was fighting to stay awake. Every law enforcement officer in the world hated surveillance duty, and while this wasn’t technically that, it sure as hell felt like a stakeout.

Bohannon was parked in a Bureau Ford outside his fellow agent Trevor Ivanek’s place in Dumfries, Virginia. For a change, he didn’t have to worry so much about being spotted. All he was doing was waiting for Trevor to come home. There was even a convenience store nearby, so he didn’t have to monitor his liquid intake, and was sipping a coffee with cream and sugar right now. Of course, his boss, Patti Rogers, claimed a rogue element in government was up to no good, but frankly Bohannon found that a little hard to buy.

In fact, in this instance, he hoped Trevor would spot him, and also hoped he didn’t miss the guy if Trevor parked somewhere out of sight, the apartment building having no parking garage.

He got out the burner phone to text Evie that he didn’t know when he’d be home. She wouldn’t recognize the number, but she’d see his text: *A wn ts # Cs, J*, his personal shorthand for “answer when this number calls, Jerry.” The use of that shorthand would confirm it was him at the new number.

Evie was Evelyn Sullivan, the lovely brunette he’d met at a Georgetown bar a little over a year ago. Evie seemed the opposite of Carol, his ex-wife; this forty-something gal had a bawdy sense of humor and a go-with-the-flow attitude that included putting up with his weird work hours — all she ever asked was that she be kept in the loop. Not doing that had been a big factor in the breakup of his marriage.

As he waited, Bohannon sent his eyes up and down the street, which had been dead when he got here and still was. The apartment buildings had cars parked out front, and traffic was light. A couple was strolling at the other end of the block, and a dog across the street was barking at them. That was it for excitement.

Wishing Evie would call, he got out his tablet and went through the information he’d gathered on Secretary of the Interior Amanda Yellich. Her personal life was clean, her professional life exemplary, and the one thing he’d turned up was something of a happy accident.

Earlier in the day, he had visited Yellich’s condominium. The building’s doorman had told him the condo was empty, the Secretary’s things in storage in the basement waiting for some distant family member to claim them.

His FBI badge and a twenty had bought Bohannon ten minutes in the storage room with furniture, clothing, and boxes and boxes of books, the latter including a handwritten journal he almost missed. This he’d stuffed in his back waistband.

Bored in the Ford, he got out the journal and picked up where he’d left off. He took no pleasure out of paging through the dead woman’s private thoughts, which were frankly not terribly interesting much less revealing, and just cryptic enough to be irritating. One entry had caught his attention: JR hopeless case, still in love with his ex. Could JR be Joe Reeder, and was Reeder’s connection to the woman what sparked Rogers to send them digging into Yellich’s death?

Good God, was this shadow government Rogers imagined some offshoot of Reeder’s love life? Bohannon grunted a laugh.

Just then he came to an entry that made him sit up a little: My turn to sit out Camp David trip. Maybe I can kick back at home for a change.

So Amanda Yellich had been the designated survivor, left behind when the President and Vice President gathered with the cabinet at a single location. Now with Yellich dead, someone else would stay behind. Probably meant nothing, but the back of his neck was tingling — this was worth telling Miggie Altuve about.

He was about to send Mig a text when the phone vibrated — Evie was texting: *K* — okay. Quickly he switched screens and typed *AY not CD* and sent it to Miggie. He’d explain more fully as soon as he had a chance to call Evie and say that he’d be late, that in fact this case might tie him up for days.

That was when someone approached his window quickly, probably Ivanek.

Reeder and Rogers went over to Lawrence Morris, who was duct-taped in a chair on the kitchenette side of the big room; he wore a gray duct-tape strip over his mouth and a swath of black cloth over his eyes, the wire-frame glasses on the kitchen table nearby, his buy-two-for-the-price-of-one suit hardly rumpled.

Their guest appeared to still be out from the Mickey Finn that had been administered at the Mont Blanc bar by Reggie Wade, who watched nearby on another kitchen chair, looking loose-limbed in dark gray sweats.

“He really out?” Reeder asked.

Wade shrugged. “Could be. Johnnie Walker and roofies make one sweet cocktail.”

“Know anything that might bring him around?”

Another shrug. “Light a match behind his ear, maybe.”

A micro-expression passed over Morris’s face at the prospect, though with the blindfold, it was hard to be sure, his chin down, touching his chest.

“Well, let’s try this,” Reeder said, and ripped the duct tape gag off.

Their guest howled. It rang off the brick walls.

Reeder pulled around another chair. “That was your wake-up call, Lawrence.”

The man was breathing hard now, chin up, obviously awake. Reeder left the blindfold on the man.

Rogers, standing just beside Reeder, a hand on the back of his chair, said, “Joe — maybe we made a mistake grabbing him.”

“How so?”

“What if he doesn’t know anything? What if he’s too lowly a grunt for the other side to trade Nichols?” She was smiling at Reeder in a way that didn’t go at all with her tone.

“Good point,” Reeder said, voice solemn, smiling back. “That puts us in a bad place. I don’t want to end up with this son of a bitch on our hands.”

Reggie, amused, put plenty of nasty into his voice as he said, “That’s what they dig holes in the forest for, bossman.”

“I know things!”

Morris had joined the conversation.

“The only thing that really matters right now,” Reeder said, “is where our friend Anne Nichols is. Who has her, and what we have to do to get her back.”

“I don’t know anything about Agent Nichols.”

Rogers said, “You know she’s an agent.”

The blindfolded man nodded, still breathing hard. “But that’s all. I’m what you’d call... middle management. I don’t know every move. There are cells working various aspects.”

Reeder and Rogers exchanged looks.

She asked, “Aspects of what?”

Morris strained at his bonds, leaning forward. “I’m valuable to them! They’ll trade for me.”

Reeder asked, “Who will trade for you, Lawrence?”

Nothing.

Wade said, “You want me to get the shovel, bossman?”

“The board!” he blurted.

Immediately their captive’s face drained of blood; his mouth was hanging open like torn flesh. He had said too much and he knew it.

Reeder said, quietly, “What board would that be, Lawrence?”

“They’re... they’re powerful people. And they, they value me. That’s all you need to know.”

Reeder scooched his chair closer, the feet making a fingernails-on-a-blackboard scrape. He got the anonymous nine mil from his waistband and he racked the weapon, letting the mechanical music of it sing to the captive.

“You and your people,” Reeder said, “have sacrificed at least six Americans to whatever this cause is, and whoever these powerful people are. Do you think that hypothetical hole in the forest that my friend here mentioned couldn’t become very damn real?”

Lawrence shook his head. “I don’t... I don’t doubt you. But you people aren’t the only ones who can dig a hole.”

“Maybe not,” Reeder said pleasantly, “but we seem to be first in line.”

Reeder tore the blindfold off and the accountant blinked rapidly as his vision adjusted to the loft’s muted lighting. Morris’s eyes moved from face to face.

“You were saying, Lawrence,” Reeder said. “The board? Would that be a board of directors of some kind?”

Morris drew in a deep breath and let it out shudderingly. He was shaking. He seemed near tears. The information this minor figure had was clearly major.

Very quietly, he said, “A board of directors oversees certain activities.”

“That, Lawrence,” Reeder said, “is just a little vague.”

He drew in breath. Let it out. “It’s a group of patriotic Americans. As I said, powerful ones. Movers and shakers, you might say. Captains of industry... no, generals of industry.”

Rogers asked, “A right-wing group?”

“No, no...”

Reeder asked, “A leftist group?”

“No, no, you misunderstand. You underestimate. They have their own interests, but those are the best interests of America. These men are above politics, and yet they are the inheritors of everything our founding fathers put in motion.”

A little hysteria was in Morris’s voice now, the tears ever closer. Reeder hoped the man wouldn’t piss himself.

Reeder asked, “Does this group have a name?”

“It’s... it’s rarely spoken...”

“Speak it anyway.”

Morris swallowed. Barely audible, he said, “The American Patriots Alliance.”

Disgust clenched Reeder’s belly. How many evil bastards in history had wrapped themselves in the American flag? Or any nation’s flag?

Rogers asked, “Who exactly is on this board?”

Morris shook his head. “I have a sense of who they are, but not... exactly who they are.”

“No,” Reeder said, hard, his kinesics skills coming to the fore, “you do know them. Or some of them.”

Morris stiffened. “If I give you any names, I’m a dead man. And don’t threaten me with that hole in the forest again. Just go ahead and kill me. Because I would already be dead.”

Now when Reeder read the man, he knew Morris was telling the truth.

“If you don’t give us those names,” Reeder said, “what do you have to bargain with?”

“Your agent.”

Reeder, Rogers, and Wade exchanged looks. Back to square one...

“If I haven’t told you anything,” Morris said, “they’ll trade. If I talk, they’ll kill me, and you have no lever to get your agent back.”

“Portillium,” Reeder said.

Morris blinked. “What?”

“Portillium — hear of it? Know what it is?”

Morris shook his head. “No. It sounds made up.”

Shit, Reeder thought. He’s telling the truth.

“Well,” Reeder said, “it’s not a new additive in dishwashing powder. It’s a mineral, a very rare one, and almost certainly why the Russians went into Azbekistan.”

Morris squinted at Reeder, as if trying to get him in focus. “They... went to war for a mineral?”

“Does that strike you as unlikely? Haven’t we gone to war for oil? Someone on your board is responsible for sacrificing four CIA agents to that Russian invasion. Either your Alliance is in league with the Kremlin, or they’re trying to start World War III.”

Morris grunted something that was as close to a laugh as he could muster under the circumstances. “Make up your mind, Reeder! Is the Alliance in bed with Russia, or eager to go to war with it?”

“The frightening thing is, either is possible. Because as you said, these ‘powerful people’ do whatever it is that’s in their best interest.”

Another grunt of a near laugh. “You’re making all of this up. That mineral, portobello or whatever, you made it up.”

“Six Americans dead, Lawrence.”

He swallowed. “In war, sacrifices must be made.”

“We’re already at war,” Reeder said. “Your Alliance is at war with the rest of us. They’re calling it patriotism, Lawrence, but it’s treason. And you’re part of it. That’s how you’ll be charged — for treason.”

He could tell that Rogers wondered where he was going with this.

“Murdered Americans,” Reeder said almost offhandedly, “including an assassinated cabinet member... you’ll be executed.”

The color left Morris’s face again. “Try to scare me all you like... I can’t give you any names. That’s the only thing keeping me alive.”

“You think the CIA can’t get those names out of you, if I turn you over? They’ll waterboard your ass from here to Tuesday, and then drop you into a hole so black you’ll never see sunshine again.”

“You... you won’t do that.”

“Won’t I? I think the boys and girls at the Company would love to have some time with one of the conspirators in the deaths of five of their people.”

Morris stiffened. “I’m an American citizen. You kidnapped me. When that comes out—”

Rogers said, “Who says it will come out? Anyway, you’re an enemy combatant we apprehended. Under the Patriot Act, we can make you disappear.”

“I was just... all I want is to be a good American. A patriot.”

“Well, Lawrence,” Reeder said cheerfully, “you screwed up.”

“Sounds like... either way I’m dead.”

Rogers said, “We can protect you.”

Morris began to laugh.

He laughed until tears began to run and Reeder and the two FBI agents did not bother to hide their surprise and discomfort.

Finally Morris, jerking against his duct-tape bonds, said, “You have no idea!”

“No idea what, Lawrence?” Reeder asked quietly.

Morris, laughing near hysteria, was shaking his head. “What you’re up against!”

Rogers said, “Enlighten us.”

Only his head leaned forward now. “They’re bigger than you can imagine. Branches intertwining, growing, flowing. The Alliance is everywhere.”

“Conspiracies on that level,” Rogers said, “are the stuff of madmen and pulp fiction.”

Reeder nodded and said, “The late Carlos Marcello had a sign over his door that said, ‘Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

Morris had stopped laughing, although he came up with one last, “Ha! Wasn’t he in on the Kennedy assassination? Those who didn’t die kept as quiet as the ones who did.”

Rogers said, “It eventually came out.”

“Decades later. Special Agent Rogers, that’s the kind of thinking the Alliance depends on. You think they don’t, they couldn’t, exist — so they don’t exist. In fact, the Alliance teaches its recruits that if someone accuses them, simply laugh it off, using your line of conspiracies-are-nonsense logic.”

Reeder could see Rogers still wasn’t buying it, and he said to her, quietly, “Nonsense, not necessarily. Skull and Bones, the Bilderberg Group, the Freemasons, the Ku Klux Klan — secret societies, one and all.”

She gave Reeder a hint of a smirk. “What next — the Illuminati?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “You’ve heard about these secret societies, you might even think you know something about them... but can you name a single member? Tell me their goals? Explain their infrastructure? We guess, but we don’t know, because... they’re secret. The Alliance could be the same kind of thing.”

Rogers was frowning. “In this day and age?”

Their prisoner joined in the conversation again. “The Alliance began as a response to the Cuban Revolution in 1959.”

That surprised even Reeder.

Morris said, “Recall your history, and the Bay of Pigs? Run in part by the budding Alliance. Kennedy took all the heat when it went south, but that was the first action taken by the American Patriots Alliance.”

Reeder said, “To what end?”

Looking at Reeder as if that were a question more worthy of a child, Morris said, “To keep America free of Communism, back in the day. Now? Now, the goal is to restore America’s greatness. To put the power back in the hands of the people who know how to properly run things.”

Frowning, Wade said, “You mean white people?”

Reeder was shaking his head. “Your loyalty, Lawrence, is to an Alliance playing very dangerous games with Russia. You really think a third world war, in the nuclear age, will make America great again? And if the Russians get all the portillium out of Azbekistan, they’ll have weapon-making capabilities beyond the imagination.”

The accountant’s expression revealed doubt breaking through the rote history lesson drilled into him by his masters.

Rogers asked, “Who is on the board, Lawrence?”

“Even if I gave you the handful of names I do know, it wouldn’t do you any good. They are too well entrenched, with their followers spread throughout every level of government. The Alliance is everywhere. You think you can protect me when you can’t even protect yourselves. Already they have one of yours.”

“Who you will help us get back.”

“In exchange for what — protective custody? I wouldn’t last an hour. Hand me over to your FBI friends or the CIA to get information out of me, and see how long it takes for you to get the phone call that I had a heart attack in the earliest stages of interrogation.”

Reeder said, “Your people will trade for you.”

“Will they? Or, once they know I’ve been captured, will they just kill me, too? I’ll be tainted, understand? Sacrifice, remember? You, Agent Rogers, and your whole team, will be eliminated. Mr. Reeder, you’ll merely have your life destroyed, your family dead and yourself possibly in prison. That suicide you encouraged last year could easily become a murder.”

Rogers looked at Reeder in alarm.

Reeder, coldly, said to their prisoner, “Then maybe it’s in our best interest for you just to disappear into that hole in the ground.”

“If you kill me, they will find you, all of you, and kill you.”

“Big talk from such a small cog.”

His upper lip peeled back over his teeth in a rictus smile. “You think you’re up against a small cadre of the powerful, but in reality there are thousands of us in government — department heads, middle management, worker bees — a grass roots army working to save America from itself.”

“Okay,” Reeder said, “then just give us that handful of names you do know, and we’ll release you. No one the wiser. You can’t betray us without betraying yourself, right?”

“Those names, those few names, are my only leverage. I give them to you, maybe I do wind up in the forest. But... if you let me go, I will — as you say — have to keep my mouth shut to save my own skin. And if you people just drop all this, and go about your business, it will all be over in a matter of days.”

Morris meant that the country would either be at war or not.

“If we go head-to-head with Russia,” Reeder said, “we might all be over.”

Morris said, “I’m sure the President will have done the right thing by then.”

That gave Reeder a sudden chill — did Morris know some big-picture thing that they didn’t? Did the cog know where the wheel planned to roll?

Miggie, who’d been working at DeMarcus’s desk in the office area, caught Reeder’s attention with a wave.

“Give him something to drink,” Reeder told Wade, standing, nodding toward the captive. “If he needs a bathroom break, walk him down there.”

“I’ll have to untie him,” Wade said. “He could piss in a bottle or something.”

Reeder shook his head. “We’ve got plenty of duct tape.”

Morris was listening to all this with the hangdog expression of the captive that he was.

Reeder and Rogers went over to Miggie, who looked up from his tablet at them in frustration. They spoke low.

“Something?” Reeder asked.

“Someone,” Miggie said, and his eyes went to Rogers. “Fisk. She’s wondering why we seem to’ve dropped off the edge of the world.”

“Shit,” Rogers said.

Reeder frowned at Mig. “She contacted us how?”

“She didn’t exactly contact us. I hacked my work e-mail, where she sent me a memo. Seems Ivanek’s checked in with her, and Bohannon, too... but she hasn’t heard from the rest of the team and that’s making her nervous.”

Amused despite the situation, Rogers asked, “You hacked your own e-mail?”

Shrugging, Miggie said, “You guys tell me be careful, I’m careful.”

She asked, “Can we get back to Fisk and not give ourselves away?”

“You don’t trust her?” Miggie asked.

“I barely trust myself.”

Reeder reached for a shelf and came back with another of DeMarcus’s untraceable burner phones; handed it to Rogers. “Get her on this, Patti. Best not mention our guest.”

“You think?”

With a dry chuckle, Rogers headed out onto the landing and shut the door behind her.

Reeder sat on the edge of the desk and asked Miggie, “Fisk say anything else about Ivanek?”

“Just that he checked in.”

“How about Bohannon?”

“Just that he said everything was cool. Jerry knows enough not to tell the AD he’s been sitting surveillance for us on Ivanek’s place... but whether he and Trevor have connected, I got no idea.”

Reeder let out a big sigh. “Our communication system leaves something to be desired.”

“Burner phones are better than tin cans and string,” Miggie said, “but just. Hey, when you wanna go sub rosa, things get harder. I did get a text from Jerry, though, on my burner.”

“And?”

“He’s been looking hard at Secretary Yellich. You told him and Wade to look for anything odd, remember?”

“And?”

Miggie handed his phone over. “And read this.”

Reeder did: *AY not CD*

“What’s this mean?” he asked the computer expert.

“No clue.”

Reeder curled fingers at Wade, who was duct-taping Morris back into the kitchen chair after a bathroom break. The big man came over and Reeder showed him the message on the burner.

“He’s your partner, Reg — what do you make of this?”

Wade read it, shook his head. “Typical Bohannon shorthand shit. Maybe a third of the time I have to ask him what the hell he means. ‘AY’ is probably Amanda Yellich.”

Miggie said, “I texted him for clarification but haven’t heard back yet.”

Reeder turned toward the nearby door. “Isn’t Patti done yet?”

Miggie glanced at the clock on his tablet. “It’s been a good five minutes, anyway.”

Reeder went outside, found the landing empty, and something cold traveled through him. From the top of the stairs, he quickly scanned the area, saw nothing and no one, then rattled down the metal stairs and started for Tenth Street.

Muttering, he walked at a hurried pace, hand over the butt of the nine mil in his waistband, and when he got to the corner, he turned it and about ran headlong into Rogers coming the other way.

“What the hell?” she asked, backing away.

He let out a breath. “Sorry. Panicked a little — worried you’d been gone too long.”

“It’s nice to know you care. But after I talked to Fisk, I figured I’d better ditch the phone.”

“What did you do with it?”

“Burial at sea.”

The Anacostia River ran past the Navy Yard, with access to the water just to the west.

They started back.

He asked her, “What did Fisk say?”

“Ivanek’s at his desk at the Hoover Building. We’ll leave him there, until we know where everybody is.”

“Ignorance is bliss, I guess. And Bohannon?”

“He’s headed back to the Hoover, too, she says.”

They were at the stairs now, and started up.

“So,” Reeder said, “for now we leave them on the bench.”

“For now,” she said.

They went inside. Miggie was at his tablet, Wade guarding the prisoner, who gestured to Reeder with an up-and-down motion of his head.

Reeder walked over and planted himself before the captive. “What?”

The accountant’s smile was a joyless thing, but it was there.

“I have a suggestion,” he said.