High Treason

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Lover of drama that she was, Venice kept them in suspense until they wandered back to the third floor of the firehouse and gathered around the conference table.

“Good thing we’re not in a hurry,” Boxers grumped as he pulled a seat out for himself.

“I’ll do the easy stuff first,” Venice said, her fingers already pounding the keys. “Eyes on the screen, gents.”

At the far end of the room, the massive screen switched from dark to blue, and then two faces appeared. They looked vaguely familiar, but before Jonathan could process them, Venice said, “Those men in the apartment were not Secret Service agents. I found both of their fingerprints in the Interpol computers. Here are their names.”

The screen displayed Vasily Alistratov and Pyotr Zabolotny. “I’ll let you figure out how to pronounce the last names. Vasily served six years at hard labor about fifteen years ago for assaulting a police officer. He was elevated to Interpol’s list in 2002 when he disappeared from view. Nine-eleven paranoia was running at its fevered height back then, if you recall, and it was easy to move from petty criminal to public enemy without a lot of justification.

“Pyotr, on the other hand, didn’t serve any jail time that I can see, but does have some spotty history of petty crimes. Nothing serious and nothing violent.”

“So why is he listed on Interpol?” Jonathan asked.

“I have no idea. He is, however, listed as a potential terrorist.”

“Now that’s interesting,” Boxers said. “How did that happen?”

“Again, no idea. But both are listed as known to be in the company of the other, and both are on all the no-fly lists.”

“Yet here they are,” Jonathan said.

Venice chuckled. “You’ve got to love it. The TSA pokes every nook and crevice of Granny’s wheelchair, but suspected terrorists somehow get in.”

“Granny needs better handlers,” Jonathan said. “You know, people who can give her a fake identity to sneak her in and out.”

“I bet a First Lady could figure out how to pull those strings,” Boxers said. “I’m not the only one who caught the Iron Curtain connection, am I?”

“It was subtle,” Venice said, her voice dripping with irony, “but yes, I managed to catch it.”

“This is really helpful, Ven,” Jonathan said. “I’m sure Irene has our friends in custody by now. She’ll certainly have all of this. I wonder what else she’ll come up with.”

Venice shifted in her chair and gave a coy smile. “I have something else,” she said. “On the files from Banks’s computers.”

Jonathan’s jaw dropped. “You couldn’t possibly have read through all the files already. You only had them for a little over an hour.”

“It helps to be brilliant,” she said.

Her boastfulness was way out of character, prompting an exchange of glances between Jonathan and Boxers.

A subtle smile bloomed as she added, “It also helps to be really lucky. Look at the screen.”

At the far end of the room, the 106-inch screen filled with lists of files.

“After I transferred all the data from all the files on all the disks you brought in onto a single drive, I decided that the best bet to find what we’re looking for was to search the files that were accessed most recently, and then to work backwards.” She glanced over at Jonathan. “I’m extrapolating from ‘manual methods first.’ ”

Jonathan recognized the reference to one of his most inviolable philosophies: that the simplest, most elegant explanations were most often the correct ones.

Venice continued, moving the cursor on the screen to highlight her points as she spoke. “There are tons of correspondence and assorted other details that I haven’t had a chance to look at yet, but my attention was first drawn to these files here.” The arrow-point cursor stroked a list of ten or twelve files that all ended in a similar suffix.

“Note the dates,” she said. “These were all opened yesterday, and they all came from one of the thumb drives.”

She said this stuff as if people could read her mind and understand the implications. Jonathan feigned patience and waited, confident that a sensible explanation was on the way.

“But if you look here,” she continued, clicking to a different screen that to Jonathan’s eye showed more files that looked essentially the same as the others, “you’ll see that the same files were erased from the computer’s hard drive just today.”

Jonathan raised his hand, as if in a classroom. “If they’ve been erased, how can we be looking at them?”

Venice gave him a look of pure disappointment. “Come on, Dig. You’re not new at this. You know that no file is truly erased. Not if they don’t use a magnet or a shredder. If you know what to look for, you can search for recently erased files. You might not be able to pull up the files themselves without some extra work, but the file names will still be there.”

“Let me guess,” Boxers said. “You did the extra work.”

She beamed. “You said that you thought Banks was in the process of erasing files when you crashed his place. Building on that, I went to the erased files and entered today’s date, and I got this.”

She switched back to the first screen. “I searched on the file names. You see that they’re kind of weird? That ‘dot pic’ suffix? Well I copied and pasted, this is what I came up with. The backup file from the thumb drive.”

Jonathan felt a tingle in the small of his back. He sensed that something big was on the way. “Albert Banks hadn’t gotten to the backup yet to erase it.”

Venice nodded. “That, or he didn’t know that a backup had been made. You’re welcome, by the way, for forcing you to buy all that memory and storage space. It helps to be able to load all these files simultaneously.”

“Have I ever denied you anything?” Jonathan asked. One of the advantages of owning limitless funds was the ability to have it all. He never said no to a technology request from Venice. Most of the time, he didn’t even know what he was saying yes to.

“I’d be even more impressed if the files were open and we knew what they were,” Boxers said.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Venice said, oblivious to Big Guy’s sarcasm. “And let me tell you, I had to search for a while to figure out a way to open them. It turns out that the files were done in a partially encrypted program that I’d read about a couple of years ago. It’s used for the transmission of large documents, often architectural drawings.”

She clicked again, and the screen filled with a detailed drawing of what appeared to be a bridge. It was a skeletal view, revealing structural members in both plan and elevation views. Venice clicked again, and the screen revealed what looked to be a small part of the larger drawing shown in cross-section.

“Engineering sketches?” Jonathan wondered aloud.

“That would be my guess,” Venice said. “There are dozens of drawings like this within the file. Maybe hundreds.”

“What am I missing?” Boxers asked. “Banks was an engineer. Shouldn’t he have lots of this kind of stuff in his computer?”

“Ah, you weren’t paying attention,” Venice said. She clicked back to the first image. “What are we looking at?”

Jonathan held up his hand. “Ven, please. I know you groove on this, but is there a way to cut to the chase?”

“Look, Digger,” Venice insisted. “Look at the lower right-hand corner. Look at the name of the bridge.”

Then he saw it. “The Brooklyn Bridge? The original? Wow, I thought the drawing looked old. But why is that significant?”

“Because it was built over a hundred years ago. You said it yourself, it’s an old bridge. Engineers design new things, not old things.” Her eyes narrowed. “On the other hand, what group of people can you think of that would want to see detailed drawings of existing structures?”

Jonathan felt a chill. “Terrorists?”

She smiled.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Boxers said. “At what point did I become the voice of reason? You can’t conclude something like that from the presence of a drawing. Maybe he just likes old bridges.”

“You saw how feverishly he was trying to erase the files when we got to his house,” Jonathan said. He looked to Venice for confirmation. “That’s the timing, right?”

“I checked my record of your phone call after the shooting at Banks’s place. Just about a perfect match.”

Jonathan could tell that Boxers was close to being convinced, but didn’t want to be.

“But there’s more,” Venice said. She had the most stunning smile when she thought she’d come up with something big. She started clicking more files, and more drawings popped up on the screen. “This is the file on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge,” she said. “And here is the Holland Tunnel. The Sumner Tunnel in Boston. New York’s Penn Station.” She stopped there. “There are more, but from what I can tell, they’re all major commuter routes. Can you think of a better terrorist target than a place that is guaranteed to have thousands of people at risk for the initial blast, and then millions more inconvenienced for years to come? Think of the economic consequences.”

Jonathan sat back in his seat, rubbing his face vigorously with his hands. He knew that she’d found the pulse of the plot they’d been looking for, but the ramifications made him feel a little dizzy. He held out his hands as if to stop the onslaught of ideas.

“Okay, let’s hang on a second. Let’s take a step back. We’re about three steps away from proclaiming that FLOTUS is a terrorist. Is that where we’re going here?”

Even Boxers looked shocked. “I believe that’s exactly where we’re going.”

Venice said, “It’s perfectly consistent with her past. Maybe this has been her plan all along.”

Jonathan scoffed, “Okay, that’s a step too far. Not even the president knew he wanted to be president until after they’d married.”

“She didn’t have to be First Lady to pull off an attack,” Venice said.

Jonathan liked that. “And maybe the reason why she didn’t pull the trigger before was because of her trajectory toward the White House. Whether she was biding her time for the perfect moment or delaying so that she wouldn’t screw things up for her husband, either way would explain the long leash on her plan.”

“Might explain why the Secret Service was shooting at each other,” Boxers offered. “Word got out that she was trying to pull the trigger and they decided to take her out.”

Therein lay the glitch in the theory that Jonathan just couldn’t embrace. “Come on, folks. Even my cynicism has limits. If that hit last night was truly executed by the Secret Service, that means killing each other. Box, could you have opened up on a unit operator?”

“If I thought he’d turned to the other side? You betchum, Red Rider. Without flinching.”

Jonathan let it go, but it sounded like more talk than truth. Soldiers and cops and firefighters developed a brotherhood of shared fear and sacrifice that made them a family. Fratricide would be no easier among them than it would be among brothers born of the same mother.

Still, some crimes were so egregious that all the old rules needed to be disposed of. Could this be one of those?

“Sometimes, I really hate my job,” he said.

“I’ve got a question for you,” Boxers said. “If FLOTUS is planning the destruction of mankind as we know it, where does that put POTUS? More to the point, if we’ve really stumbled upon the truth here, where does that put us? We know a bunch of shit that they’re not going to want us to know.”

“We’ve made a living knowing shit that Uncle didn’t want us to know,” Jonathan said.

“Not at this level,” Boxers said. “A president willing to kill his own wife is a guy prone to scorching the earth.”

“You’re assuming he’s an accomplice,” Venice said. “That might not be the case.”

“I’m assuming nothing of the kind,” Jonathan said. “Stipulating that all of this impossible shit is true in the first place, I think that we could call President Darmond an ally. We all want to stop her.”

“It’s a little different, Dig,” Boxers said with an eye roll. “He killed innocents at the Wild Times. We’re not talking about a stable man.”

“We’re talking about a panicking man,” Venice said. “There’s a difference between killing in a panic and being a murderer.”

Jonathan smiled. “Tell that to the mourning families,” he said. Venice had campaigned damned hard to get Darmond elected. She would be the last constituent to abandon him.

After a brief silence, Boxers said, “Holy shit, Boss. What have we gotten into?”

Jonathan shook his head. “Scary, huh? Even scarier when you think that Mr. Chief of Staff Winters invited us to the party. I’ve got lots of alarm bells sounding right now. Think of the damage we’ve done to this administration,” Jonathan said. “We kicked his SecDef in the balls and we stirred the Agency pretty good.”

Venice’s jaw dropped. “You don’t think they know about Trevor Munro, do you?”

Jonathan wished he’d never told her about the way he’d settled that score. “The absence of handcuffs would say no,” he said.

“Maybe that’s because you saved Darmond’s sorry-ass life,” Boxers said.

“He shouldn’t know about that, either,” Jonathan said. “But facts are facts. From this point on, we double down on OpSec. We need to assume that we’re under siege.”

Boxers cocked his head. “Don’t we still have a PC to find?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I’m beginning to look at that cargo as less and less precious.”

“But we made a deal, Dig. The official version is that FLOTUS is in danger, and we have to snatch her away from it. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to have to call the White House and tell them that you’re walking away.”

Another bell rang in Jonathan’s head. It was a church bell, actually. A gong. “Back up,” he said. “Why did they bring us in?”

The question stopped conversation. Drew stares from both of them.

“Don’t look at me that way. Think about the order of events. There’s a shoot-out at the Wild Times bar and a bunch of people are killed, mostly Secret Service. We hear rumors of a cleanup operation, where a homeless guy only one guy saw is carted off. No official record of that. There’s a lot right there to make me uncomfortable. Can we agree on that?”

“I don’t remember the last time I was comfortable,” Venice said.

Boxers made an undefinable noise that Jonathan interpreted as agreement.

“If this was a hit on the First Lady to shut down her terror operations, why would Douglas Winters contact Irene Rivers to have us brought into the case? Why wouldn’t they just let it run its course?”

As soon as the question had left his lips, he saw the answer. “Oh my God,” he said. “We’re pawns. We’re being used. They don’t want us to find her and bring her back. They want us to find her so they can finish the job of killing her.”

Boxers saw it too. “They turned to us because legitimate law enforcement would leave a paper trail,” Boxers said.

“And what happens when we do find her?” Venice asked.

Jonathan let the question hang in the air. He hoped that the answer was obvious.

“They’re going to kill her?” Venice gasped. Realization hit her hard.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “Hell, we don’t know anything. We’re just trying to feel our way through this mess. But a commitment to kill is a commitment to kill, isn’t it?”

“Sweet system,” Boxers said. “We hand over the victim and then we all get popped. I seriously cannot wait until I see Doug Winters again. I’ll pull his brain through his nose.”

“We’re missing something,” Jonathan said. “The stuff that makes sense only makes sense till it doesn’t. That always means we’re missing something.”

“But the basics are solid,” Boxers said. “Can we agree that FLOTUS was up to no good?”

Jonathan’s cell phone rang, displaying the name J. Edgar, his little joke to himself. It was Irene Rivers’s phone number. He pressed the connect button. “This is Scorpion.”

He was startled to hear a male voice say, “Arc Flash is ready.”

Jonathan recognized the voice as that of Paul Boersky, Irene’s longtime confidant and body man. Her Clyde Tolson, but without the sexual overtones.

“Good to know,” Jonathan said. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because we thought you’d want to ask some questions.”

“You mean because you don’t want to be the one asking them,” Jonathan corrected, but the line went dead.

He looked to Boxers. “We’ve got to go.”