High Treason

CHAPTER TEN

“Please tell me you’re calling from a secure line,” Irene said.

“Encrypted satellite phone,” Jonathan assured. He and Boxers were in the Batmobile, on their way back to the Cove.

“You killed him?”

“He pulled a weapon on me. I had no choice. I thought you should know.”

“How thoughtful. I presume the body is still in the house?”

“Yes. He’s not dead an hour yet. Can you, uh, take care of that for me? As far as I know, he lived alone.” A small but very profitable slice of the covert world dealt with the surreptitious disposal of bodies. The contractors were good enough at their jobs that many of their projects remained listed as missing persons forever.

Wolverine’s sigh came through the speakerphone loud and clear. “Good God, Scorpion. Yes, I’ll take care of it. Did you kill Gutowski too?”

“Haven’t yet had the chance,” Jonathan said. “He’s next on our list to visit.”

“Don’t bother,” Irene said. “He’s already dead.”

Boxers and Jonathan exchanged looks. “When?”

“His body was found this morning in his house.” Irene spoke as if she were describing a household event. “His fingers and toes were broken. A needle had been inserted in his right eye.”

“Suicide?” Boxers asked with a chuckle. Ever the king of bad timing.

Jonathan silenced him with a raised hand. He wanted to think this through.

“Is anyone there?” Irene asked after the long silence.

“I’m thinking,” Jonathan said. “People are tortured to deliver information, Wolfie. The more important the info, the more brutal the torture. Banks was out-of-his-head terrified. He said, ‘I’m not going to let you do that.’ Somehow, I think he knew about Gutowski’s torture. That would certainly explain the suicide. Anything’s better than death by torture.”

“You’re suggesting that they shared a secret?”

“I think so, yes. We pulled the hard drives out of his computer and made off with a bunch of data storage. We’ll start plowing through that stuff and get back to you when we know something. Meanwhile, what’s happening on your end? Any developments?”

“The White House press corps is beginning to sniff around Mrs. Darmond’s absence, but that hasn’t reached critical mass yet.” Irene cleared her throat.

Jonathan had learned that that was a tell. “But there’s more, right?”

“Well, yes, there is. I’ve been made aware of a disturbing blog post by a young man named David Kirk. Have you ever heard of Kirk Nation?”

“Um, no.” A glance to Boxers confirmed that he hadn’t heard of it, either.

“Well, it’s fairly influential among some of the, shall we say, more paranoid sector of the commonweal. It’s got thousands of followers, and Mr. Kirk posted this afternoon that a DC cop named DeShawn Lincoln was killed last night by the Secret Service in the middle of the Mall.”

“Which mall?”

“The one in Washington. Across from the Smithsonian Castle. He said that Officer Lincoln was killed to keep him quiet about the details of the shooting at the Wild Times Bar.”

“Uh-oh.”

“You bet, uh-oh. But it gets even more interesting. David Kirk is in fact the District’s primary suspect in the murder.”

“So, they’ve got him in custody.”

“Not yet. He seems to have disappeared.”

“You’re the FBI,” Boxers growled. “You got phone records to work with, credit cards, God knows what else.”

“Thank you for a lesson in my capabilities,” Irene said. “We’re searching for him. But between us, not necessarily for the same reason.”

Jonathan got it. “You’re thinking protective custody.”

“Exactly. At least until we can sort out fact from fiction. Paranoia from truth.”

“This is Washington,” Boxers said. “Paranoia and truth are the same thing.”

Irene continued, “According to Kirk Nation, Officer Lincoln called Kirk in a panic, saying that he had to meet with him ASAP to reveal something about the Secret Service’s role in the shooting of other Secret Service agents at the Wild Times.”

“Sounds to me like this Kirk kid is aching to get himself whacked,” Boxers said.

“Apparently they already tried,” Irene said. “His blog entry this morning read like he’d lost his mind. He talked about going to meet his friend — he referred to him as Deeshy — but when he wasn’t at the appointed place and he wouldn’t answer his cell phone, he went looking. Then he tells about two men emerging from behind the carousel — apparently the place where the officer’s body was found — and they approached him to kill him.”

“Can’t say much for the talent they’re using,” Jonathan said. “How’d they miss?”

“I don’t know. The blog entry said that the bad guys had a knife. Maybe he just outran them. In any case, Kirk took a cab from Constitution Avenue and dumped his cell phone with the cabbie.”

A piece fell into place for Jonathan. “You said that he made calls to the decedent’s phone just before all the crazy stuff happened?”

Irene paused. In Jonathan’s mind, he could see it dawning on her face. “They didn’t have to chase him,” she said. “The fact of the phone call, combined with the kid’s decision to run, gave them everything they needed to get a warrant.”

“Who filed for the warrant?” Boxers asked.

“I’ll find that out,” Irene said. “Guys, I really want David Kirk put someplace safe.”

“Finding him is an important first step,” Jonathan said.

“I know where he is,” Irene said. “At least I know where he was about twenty minutes ago.”

Jonathan scowled and looked to Boxers. Got a shrug in return. “But you said—”

“I can’t find him legally,” Irene said. “It’s against the law to troll private conversations looking for key words. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done by certain resourceful people who make their living violating the law.”

Boxers chuckled. “I think she means us, Boss.”

“Last time I played with the NSA on domestic matters they got really cranky,” Jonathan said.

“Everybody at Fort Meade is cranky these days,” Irene said. “It helps to be connected.”

“You already have the address, don’t you?”

“In fact I do. Are you ready to copy?”

Jonathan keyed the mike on his portable radio. “Mother Hen, Scorpion.”

He had to wait an uncharacteristically long time for her to answer. “Scorpion, Mother Hen. Did you just call me?”

“Affirm. Everything okay?”

“It is, now that I’m out of the bathroom. Why are we on the radio all of a sudden? I had my phone with me.”

“We’re going hot,” Jonathan said. He knew she’d understand that to mean they had a new op. “I need you to find out what the physical security of Eastern Towers Apartments is like in Alexandria, Virginia. You need me to spell it?”

“Unless there’s something weird about the words ‘eastern’ or ‘towers,’ I would say no. Stand by.”

As Venice took care of the research, Boxers navigated the Batmobile toward the sprawling apartment complex. Finding a spot for the enormous vehicle was always a challenge, and here it proved to be particularly difficult. The beast took up two spaces if you wanted to open the doors all the way, and at this hour, when just about everybody was home, they had to drive out to the back forty to find a suitable spot.

“Okay, I’ve got it,” Venice said. “ProtecTall Security. This should be a cinch. I presume you want me to override their cameras?”

“Exactly,” Jonathan said. ProtecTall was one of Northern Virginia’s largest contractors for providing electronic security for offices, apartments, and individual residences. They were the people on the other side of the electrical impulses when someone opened a door they shouldn’t have or when a wisp of smoke passed in front of a smoke detector. More to the point for Jonathan, they also supervised hundreds if not thousands of unmonitored security cameras. When you saw grainy images of missing persons or wanted fugitives on the evening news, chances were good that the recording came from ProtecTall.

Because they were so ubiquitous, Venice had long ago learned the codes to override their systems. Now, it was only a matter of knocking out the cameras for the next ten or fifteen minutes to make sure that there would be no electronic trail of images. If possible, she’d even go back a little on the recordings to erase the footage of Jonathan and Boxers arriving in the parking lot.

“We doin’ the straight FBI thing again?” Boxers asked as they started the hike toward the main entrance.

“It’s been working well so far, don’t you think?”

“It’s been an exciting day, I’ll give you that,” Boxers said. “I say he’s not here. This feels too easy. Or if he is here, he’s ready for a body bag.”

Jonathan didn’t respond. What could he say? Irene had talked someone at the NSA into breaking about a dozen laws to scan cell phone traffic in a radius of fifty miles from the center of DC looking for a short list of key words that would connect David Kirk to either the Wild Times Bar, the First Lady, or DeShawn Lincoln. There’d of course been thousands of hits — this was an ongoing criminal investigation, after all — but when they filtered them through the list of Kirk’s known associates, they came up with two. One belonged to Charlie Baroli, Kirk’s boss at the Enquirer, and Becky Beckeman, a coworker at the paper. The playback from Becky’s featured a voice that was four-nines consistent with the voice of David Kirk.

Jonathan felt no guilt about stealing three-quarters of one second of taxpayers’ computing time. Like Boxers, however, he worried that the solution was so obvious that that the bad guys would think of it, too.

The stroll to the front of the building took all of two minutes. Jonathan switched his radio to VOX, which meant that every word he spoke would be transmitted. That kept him from having to press a transmit button — a gesture that never failed to draw attention. “Are we ready to go yet, Mother Hen?”

A pause.

“Mother Hen?”

“I need another minute or two.” Her voice sounded stressed. Maybe even angry. Jonathan knew better than to press her for information before she was ready to offer it.

An apartment complex of this size — there had to be a thousand units, distributed among several buildings — was like its own little city, teeming with people. The front doors never stayed closed for more than a few seconds as residents and visitors arrived and departed. Jonathan was struck by the fact that the mean age seemed ten years older than he would have expected. Back in the day, these roach mills were the domain of youngsters new to their careers. What he saw today were forty- and fiftysomethings. He wrote it off as another sign of the economic nightmare that would be the legacy of the Darmond administration.

“I don’t like standing here like this,” Boxers said. “People are beginning to notice me.”

He spoke the truth. It came with the territory when you were six-foot-huge.

“I’m gonna wander,” Big Guy said. “I’ll be back when Mother says she’s set.”

Jonathan didn’t object. It was probably just as well that they not be seen together. If things went really south, those were the kinds of details that people would remember.

Ten seconds later, Jonathan’s earbud popped and Boxers’ voice said, “Hey, Boss, look to your one o’clock. The guys climbing out of the black Chevy sedan. They look like feds to you?”

Dark gray overcoats, cut just a little bigger than they should, dark glasses and matching high-and-tight hairstyles. They were missing the curlicue from their ears, but even the Secret Service was getting away from those unless they wanted to be identified as who they were.

“Mother Hen?” Jonathan whispered.

The two men, trim but not especially muscled, walked with purpose toward the front doors where Jonathan was standing. As they passed within ten feet of him, the taller of the two — by only an inch or two — clearly made note of Jonathan through his dark glasses. The glasses and the scowl were well practiced to intimidate, so Jonathan made sure to smile and offer up a little finger-wave with his left hand. All of his fingers, not just the one.

“Big Guy, come back. Mother Hen, I need information now. What’s our status?”

Venice’s voice had a panicked edge. “Go,” she said. “Stop them.”

Jonathan spun and pulled open the doors to step inside.

“I thought I was coding things wrong,” Venice explained. “I couldn’t shut down the videos because it had already been done. I’m sorry, Scorpion.” The bad guys had beaten them to the punch.

And none of that mattered now because none of it could be changed.

Somehow, the inside of the lobby looked less crowded than the outside. Must have been the choke point of the doors. The place was done in the simple style of the early 1960s, and apparently not much freshening up had been done since the original construction. A fifty-by-fifty-foot sea of white tile floors melded with blond paneling whose plainness was broken only by a waist-level strip of stainless steel that ran the entire interior perimeter, except for the six-foot section that was missing near the elevators.

The very elevators into which Mutt and Jeff disappeared before Jonathan had taken five steps inside the front door.

“Shit,” Jonathan spat. “They’re on their way up. Big Guy, I need you here now.”

“Right behind you, Boss,” Boxers said off the air. It was easy to forget how quickly Big Guy could move when he had to. So long as it wasn’t for great distances.

“Stairs,” Jonathan said, pointing to the sign next to the elevators.

“Not another elevator?”

“Suppose it’s a local and stops at every floor?” Jonathan asked.

“Ah, damn,” Boxers said. “My leg hates stairs.” Years before, Boxers had had a significant hunk of his femur replaced with a titanium rod. Shoulda seen what the other guy looked like.

Jonathan went first. He always went first. He moved faster, but even more important, he couldn’t shoot over Boxers’ head. “Mother Hen, I need you to call this Beckeman chick’s cell phone. Tell her what’s happening and tell not to open the door for anyone but me.”

“I might be able to stop the elevator,” Venice said.

“But you might not. Call.”

As Jonathan climbed the stairs two at a time, he heard Boxers’ effort to keep up, but by the third floor, Big Guy was already half a flight behind.

David couldn’t believe the numbers. “Holy shit, Becky. The story’s not two hours old, and I’m already at three hundred thousand hits. This is amazing.”

“It’s scary,” Becky said. She’d never been on board with this broadcast plan. “A few dozen of those three hundred thousand want you dead.”

David pretended not to hear. “At this rate, I’ll be at a million by midnight. God knows what it’ll be by six a.m. tomorrow.” He clicked away from Kirk Nation to the Google Diagnostics page. “Look at this. Twenty-seven countries. Christ, what time is it in Austria now? Two in the morning? And I’ve got over three hundred hits just from there. This is friggin’ huge.”

“David, look at me.” Becky’s tone was identical to one his mother used just before something really bad happened to him.

“Please don’t speak to me that way.”

Becky’s jaw dropped. “Really? That’s your comment to me? Don’t speak to me that way? You let Grayson talk you into a bad idea.”

David gaped. How could she be this far out of touch? This was the twenty-first-century Watergate, and he was Woodward and Bernstein combined. How could she not see the significance? “I’m reporting fact, Becky. When this all settles out, I’m going to be famous.”

“Jack the Ripper is famous, David. Erik and Lyle Menendez are famous. Jeffrey Dahmer, Lee Harvey Oswald, and John Wilkes Booth are all famous.”

He felt as if he’d been slapped. “What are you saying?”

Her face red, she leaned forward and planted her hands on her hips, her shoulders out. The posture reminded David of a chicken. “I’m saying that fame for fame’s sake is a fool’s errand. You’ve invited millions of people who’d otherwise never have known about this stuff to join the rabble that’s calling for your head.”

David shook his head emphatically. “No,” he said. “I’m the voice of reason here. I’m the one who’s telling the truth here.”

She looked stunned. “The truth?”

He waited for it.

“At what point in your life did the truth become the driving element of media coverage?”

David didn’t know where she was going, so he didn’t know what to say.

“Jesus, David. What we do isn’t about discovering the truth. It’s about telling compelling stories that happen to be true. Well, within the sleeve of being true. There is no absolute value to truth.”

Something tugged in his gut. “What are you saying?”

“Nixon,” Becky said. “He ended the war in Vietnam, he opened China to the West. What’s he remembered for? Watergate. Clinton. He balanced the budget, he ended genocide in the Balkans. What’s he remembered for? Boffing trailer park trash. Both sides are true, but only one side is the good story. You’re dishing up conspiracies, and the government is dishing up simple cause and effect. Which one do you think is going to resonate more loudly with the average citizen?”

“I don’t get it,” David said. “Which side are you on?”

“I’m on—” Becky’s cell phone rang. She pulled it from the pocket of her jeans. “Does an 804 area code mean anything to you?”

“Richmond?” David offered. It was a guess.

Becky pressed the button to dump the call to voice mail.

At the seventh-floor turn, Jonathan felt the first sign of fatigue in his legs. This is the kind of shit he used to be able to do without limit, and the tingling in his thighs pissed him off. Big Guy had dropped three half-flights behind now.

“Scorpion, Mother Hen. They’re not answering.”

“Keep trying,” Jonathan commanded. “It’s all we’ve got.”

“I disagree,” David said. “Is it a risky strategy? Yeah, but it’s the only one that—”

Someone knocked at the door.

He shot Becky a concerned look. “You expecting someone?”

“I never expect anyone who knocks at my door. Including the one who turned out to be on the run from police.” When her little joke turned out to be not funny, she winced. “It’s usually Jehovah’s Witnesses, Girl Scouts, or—”

Her cell phone rang again.

“Jesus, when it rains it—”

Another knock. This one sounded more like a pound. “Federal officers. Open the door, Ms. Beckeman.”

David felt the blood drain from his head. “How did they find me?” He spoke at a whisper.

“Dammit, David,” Becky spat. “I told you this would happen.” She checked the number on the ringing phone and dumped it again. “Same number.” She plowed her fingers into her hair. “Oh, Christ, what am I going to do?”

“You’re going to ignore them,” David hissed. “You sure as hell can’t open the door.”

Another pounding. “Ms. Beckeman, this is your last chance. Open the door before we open it for you.”

“I have to, David.” Becky’s face was a panicked mask. Her cheeks were red even though her lips had turned pale. Tears balanced on her lower eyelids. “I cannot go to jail for you. I don’t mind helping, but I just can’t.” She started walking toward the door.

David launched himself from the sofa to get between her and the door. “Please don’t. Please just give me a chance.”

“To do what? You can’t run from here, David. You know, we have laws for a reason. Maybe if you just—”

The phone chirped again.

“God damn it,” she said. She pushed the connect button while she undid the bolt on the door. “What?”

“Don’t open the door,” a woman’s voice said. “No matter what you do, don’t—”

It was too late. The instant the knob turned, the door exploded open. It hit Becky hard in the face, sending her tumbling to the floor.

David recognized these men the instant he saw them. They were the men from the carousel last night.

Only now they carried guns.