High Treason

CHAPTER NINE

“All of her enemies are accounted for,” Venice said. It was just shy of 10:00 A.M. “Everyone in the database who is identified as a subject of the FBI investigation is still in prison, due largely to the testimony delivered by Yelena Poltanov. What’s your next theory?”

Behind him, beyond the glass wall, the door to the Cave crashed open, announcing Boxers’ arrival. “Have we decided who to shoot yet?” he quipped. It was his way of saying good morning.

Jonathan caught him up in a two-minute soliloquy. It doesn’t take long to relay that there’s nothing to tell.

“What about her friends?” Big Guy asked.

“What about them?” Venice replied.

“Well, if her enemies are all accounted for, what about her friends? Maybe they have something to do with this.”

Jonathan scowled. “What are you suggesting?”

Boxers shrugged with one shoulder. “Wasn’t it Sherlock Holmes who said that when the unlikely is all that is left, then it is probably the answer?”

“No,” Venice said. “The quote is that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“Welcome to English class,” Jonathan said. “Big Guy’s larger point is worth looking at.”

“Why would the First Lady’s friends be trying to kill her?” Venice asked.

“Why would she be in a bar meeting with enemies?” Jonathan countered. “Maybe the kidnapping was secondary to a happy meeting with friends.”

“Or maybe friends and relatives of the people she put in jail are looking for revenge,” Venice said.

“Mine is quicker to research,” Jonathan said. “The clock is ticking here.”

“I didn’t know we had a clock.”

“There’s always a clock, Ven. You know that. Mrs. Darmond has been missing for nearly thirty hours now, and still there’s been no word. That’s concerning at multiple levels, and we’re still one hundred percent in the dark. Let’s swing at the easy pitches first, shall we?”

Clearly annoyed that Jonathan had taken Boxers’ side against her, Venice turned back to her keyboard and got lost in the keystrokes.

Boxers capitalized on the silence to ask, “Have you given any thought to the resources we might need if this thing goes hot?”

Jonathan sighed. It was always in the back of his mind, but until there were details to pin on the possibilities, weapons and equipment were hard to specify. “At this point, I think we prepare for the worst,” he said. “The normal complement of small arms, a couple of claymores, some grenades, and GPCs.”

Boxers nodded. He appeared to agree with Jonathan’s assessment. “Okay, then. I’m gonna head down to the armory and start assembling the go bags. I need something to do anyway, and this has the feel of an op where the balloon’s gonna go up fast.”

Jonathan couldn’t disagree.

The armory for the covert side of Security Solutions lay underground in a tunnel that ran the length of the yard and parking lot that separated the firehouse from the basement of Saint Kate’s, and contained enough weaponry to sustain an invasion of Mexico. Jonathan considered it a sanctuary of sorts — a place to relax, enveloped in the aroma of gun oil while smithing weapons to improve their function or merely to erase the signatures of previous operations. For Boxers, the armory was less about the poetry than the practicality, but Jonathan envied his escape.

As Big Guy exited the War Room, Jonathan turned back to Venice, whose face at once showed annoyance and amusement. “What?”

“I hate it when Boxers is right,” she said.

“What’ve you got?”

“One of the guys in the photos you looked at — Albert Banks — lives out in Warrenton, Virginia. I took a look at him because he’s local, and guess where his cell phone was night before last?”

Jonathan felt a tingle of hope in his spine. “Southeast DC?”

Venice smiled. “I can dial it in even closer than that. He was within two hundred feet of the Wild Times Bar.”

When Venice continued to grin, Jonathan knew there was more. She loved savoring her Big Reveals. “You look like you have a gas pain,” Jonathan said.

“Steve Gutowski was in the area, too.”

Another name from the FBI’s list of friendly contacts. “Interesting,” Jonathan said.

“The question is why would her old friends be out to kidnap her?”

An idea bloomed in Jonathan’s head, triggering a smile. “Maybe it was a reunion,” he said. “And the shootings were an attempted three-fer.”

“An attempted what?”

“Three-fer. One more than a two-fer. Revenge times three. If word got out to bad guys that the old friends were out reliving their past lives, what better time to take them all out?”

“That would mean a big leak in the Secret Service. If Boxers’ theory is right, maybe they were there to help her get away from Washington.”

“And the shooting?”

“Random coincidence?” Venice read the expression on her boss’s face for what it was and quickly added, “They do happen, Dig. I know you don’t like to admit that, but sometimes they do.”

It had long been a central underpinning of Jonathan’s life that when two or more unusual events occur simultaneously or in quick succession, they were directly related until proven otherwise. He’d seen too many people get hurt — hell, he’d seen too many wars start — when people ignore the proverbial elephant in the room.

“You said Albert Banks lives in Warrenton?”

Venice spouted off the address, as if Jonathan had memorized every street in the Union. “I’ll upload it to your GPS.” She had already figured out that he was planning to pay a visit.

On his way out the door, he called over his shoulder, “I’ll stay in touch.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Banks isn’t in the office today.” The voice coming through the speaker was young and far too chipper.

Jonathan didn’t understand why everyone wanted to sound like a cheerleader these days when they answered the phone. “When do you expect him? I have a very important matter to discuss.”

A pause as papers shuffled in the background. “I don’t see any appointments on his calendar,” Melinda replied. He thought that’s what she’d said her name was. Or maybe Belinda. Just Linda?

“I didn’t make an appointment,” Jonathan said.

“Was he expecting you?”

We’re done with this. “Let’s get back to when you expect him.”

“He won’t be in at all today.” The effervescence in her bubbly voice had dropped by half. “Who’s calling?”

“This is Special Agent Horgan with the FBI.”

Next to him, in the driver’s seat, Boxers fanned the fingers of his right hand and waved from a limp wrist. Hubba hubba.

“Oh, my goodness. Is everything all right?”

Jonathan went Joe Friday on her. “I prefer to be the one asking the questions,” he said.

“Oh, yes. Of course. I’m sorry. He called in sick today.”

“Do you know if he’s at home now?”

“I presume so. Is he in trouble?” All the bubbles were gone now.

“Ma’am, do you know what obstruction of justice is?”

“Excuse me?”

“Obstruction of justice. Ever heard of it?”

“It’s a crime, right?”

“A serious crime,” Jonathan clarified. “It comes complete with serious jail time.”

“Oh my God, is that what Mr. Banks did?”

“No. It’s what you will have done if I arrive at his home and find that he’s not there anymore because you warned him.”

“Oh, Mr. Horgan, I would never—”

“Agent Horgan,” Jonathan corrected. Hey, if you’re going to play a role, commit to it, right? “The very best thing you could do right now would be to pretend that this conversation never happened.”

“Oh, I will, sir. I wouldn’t dream of calling him or warning him. I won’t even tell Mr. Grossman about the call.”

As if he knew who the hell Mr. Grossman was. “Thank you for that.”

“Are you going to need me to testify?”

Jonathan brought the fingers of his free hand to his forehead. “We’ll see.” He was already finished with the conversation. Now he just needed a way to shut it down. “Thank you so much for your help.”

“Don’t you need my contact information?”

He took it and ignored it. After three phone numbers and two e-mail addresses, he said, “I have to move on now,” and he clicked off.

Boxers laughed. “That’s one of your very best G-man impersonations ever.”

Jonathan flipped him off. “We’re going to his house now. Not his office.”

“Works for me.” They were maybe ten minutes out.

Warrenton, Virginia, lay in the near part of Fauquier County, about an hour and a half west of Fisherman’s Cove. Twenty years ago, the sleepy little burg defined the leading edge of nowhere, but as people flooded to Washington, DC, and its suburbs in pursuit of government and computer jobs, there wasn’t much about Warrenton that was country anymore. Travel a mile beyond it, though, and you’d feel naked if you weren’t carrying a hunting rifle for food.

They’d taken the Batmobile. With Boxers at the wheel — Jonathan never drove when they were on an op together — the trip took fifteen minutes less than it should have. With a right foot made of lead, the Big Guy seemed empowered by the FBI creds in his pocket. If you drove like Boxers, the get-out-of-jail-free badge was a significant benefit of impersonating a cop.

“This guy’s a lawyer, right?” Big Guy asked. He weighted the word to reflect his disdain.

“Civil engineer,” Jonathan corrected. A much nobler profession, he thought, since engineers made their living building things that never were, while lawyers made theirs by sticking their hands into the pockets of others.

“How are we handling this?”

“Softly. We’re going to talk and to learn.”

“Suppose he doesn’t want to cooperate?”

Good question. Banks might very well have a critical piece of information, or he may have nothing. Jonathan didn’t mind twisting information out of someone he knew to be a bad guy, but he needed to be really sure before he resorted to physical persuasion.

“If it comes to that,” Jonathan said, “we’ll just have to wing it. For now, we’ll proceed on the assumption that he has Mrs. Darmond’s interests front and center in his heart.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t have a clue.”

“Pretty much.”

Boxers’ laugh made a low rumbling sound. “Just sidearms?”

“Yes.” Jonathan made sure the answer sounded emphatic. The weapons and explosives locked in the compartment under the cargo bay weren’t the kind of hardware you could carry out on the street. Jonathan would make do with the Colt 1911 .45 on his hip, and Boxers with his ever-present 9 millimeter Beretta.

“Our cover is just the FBI thing,” Jonathan said. “We’re there to ask him questions about why he was downtown last night.”

“Suppose he denies it?”

“Then we’ll know he’s a liar.” Effective planning was defined by baby steps.

Venice had loaded both the work and home addresses into Jonathan’s GPS, so the shift in targets meant little. The residential neighborhood where Albert Banks lived might as well have been Levittown after a deep breath. The lots and houses were two or three times the size of those 1950s suburbs, but the sameness of the construction was nearly identical. Two stories instead of one, colonials instead of ramblers, but still the worst that suburbia had to offer. The yards were an equal shade of green, and even cut to a uniform length. Jonathan didn’t begin to understand what compelled people to live in a place where every house had the same floor plan.

“That’s his up there,” Boxers said, pointing past the windshield. Banks’s iteration of the ubiquitous colonial sat on a corner before a cul-de-sac. Red brick, green shutters. His lawn had bald spots, though, which no doubt made him a pariah of the community.

Boxers nosed the Batmobile into the driveway and parked it diagonally, blocking the whole thing in case Banks tried to make a run for it in the Subaru that sat parked outside the garage. A ridiculously heavy vehicle when it rolled off the factory floor, the Batmobile was so massively armored that the Subaru would shred itself if it tried to ram it. And it wouldn’t even scratch the Hummer’s paint.

They climbed out of the vehicle and closed the doors quietly. Boxers thumbed the button on the key fob and the locks seated without a honk of the horn.

Jonathan produced an earbud that looked remarkably like an invisible hearing aid and pressed it into his ear canal. It was a wireless transceiver mated to a radio on his belt. He pushed the transmit button on the radio and said, “Radio check.”

Venice answered first. “Loud and clear.”

Boxers gave a thumbs-up, and then said for Venice’s benefit, “Me too.” To his boss, Big Guy said, “I’ll find the back door and give you a shout when I’m in place.” Often as not, the back door man got a lot of action after the front door was knocked on.

Jonathan loitered on the lawn while Boxers disappeared around the back. The place had a startlingly unkempt look about it. Beyond the bald spots in the lawn, the shrubs along the front porch were untrimmed in the extreme, with one errant boxwood branch extending to within a foot or two of the porch roof gutter. Jonathan wondered if the scofflaw boxwood triggered apoplexy among the residents of Warrenton Woods.

Of greater concern to Jonathan were the drawn curtains on a sunny day. While the world was filled with people who preferred darkness to light, Jonathan’s experience had taught him that people who chose to live behind closed curtains did so because they had secrets to hide.

“I’m in place in the rear,” Boxers said in Jonathan’s ear. “To my eye, it’s shotgun construction.”

Jonathan understood that to mean that you could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would exit the back door. Translation: the front door and the back door were both located in the center of the building.

Jonathan thumbed his mike. “Roger that. Here we go.” He paused ten seconds to scan the environment behind him to make sure that there were no curious children or intrusive dog walkers who could screw things up. He mounted the three steps up to the porch and then walked two strides to the cheaply constructed red door. He pounded heavily with his fist. “Albert Banks! FBI! Open the door!”

He waited five seconds and then said the same thing.

No response.

“I’m kicking the door,” Jonathan said into his radio. He drew his Colt.

“Me too,” Boxers replied.

A big concern in kicking a light hollow-core door like this one was the threat of plowing all the way through and trapping your leg. Jonathan took careful aim at the strong part of the door, along the edge, and fired the sole of his boot into a spot just below the knob, where the tongue of the lock met the jamb. The door blasted open as if he’d used explosives.

He stepped into the foyer, half-crouched in an isosceles stance, weapon drawn and safety off, to find Boxers thirty feet away on the far side of the house, amid twice the amount of doorjamb shrapnel as that which surrounded Jonathan.

“Albert Banks!” Jonathan yelled. “Federal agents. Show yourself.”

Movement upstairs. Boxers heard it, too. They moved as one, Jonathan leading the way, first up seven steps to the landing, where he paused to scan what he could see of the second floor, and then up the remaining six steps to the top. “Albert Banks! Step out and show your hands!”

The second floor presented four closed doors that Jonathan could see at a glance: One at the far end of the house on his left, and then two on the front side on the left of what appeared to be a louvered door linen closet, and then beyond that, a door in a longer wall that he assumed must be the master bedroom.

“I need orders, Boss,” Boxers said from the landing, below and behind.

“Albert Banks, we are federal agents! Don’t make us—”

Jonathan heard movement — sounded like the shuffling of papers — behind the door directly ahead, just to the left of the linen closet. “Cover the hall,” he said to Boxers, and he darted forward. He covered the ten feet of distance in two long strides. He tried the knob on the door and was surprised to find it unlocked.

As the door swung inward, Jonathan brought his pistol to bear, again gripped with both hands, his finger poised just outside the trigger guard. The room was clearly intended to be a home office, but with all the trash and papers and assorted junk on the floor it had a ransacked look about it. At first glance, the closed closet doors concerned him, but when he realized how much crap was stacked in front of them, he all but eliminated the possibility of someone hiding inside. If they couldn’t get the doors open, they couldn’t pose much of a problem.

The more immediate concern was the terrified man on the far side of the desk. He was pounding frantically on his keyboard, his eyes never straying from the screen. Jonathan recognized the features he’d seen in the old photographs, but they hid behind folds of jowls. This was a man who needed to stay away from all-you-can-eat buffets for a while.

“Mr. Banks,” Jonathan warned, “I’m a federal officer. Step back from the desk right now and show me a set of empty hands.”

Boxers appeared in the doorway behind Jonathan, filling the frame. “Floor’s clear.”

Banks never looked up from his screen. If he thought he was pretending not to hear, he needed to work on his poker face.

“Banks!” Jonathan shouted it this time. “What could possibly be more important than getting shot?” He took a step forward.

“No,” Banks said. “Please don’t.”

“We just need to talk to you, sir.”

The speed of his typing seemed to pick up, as if that were even possible. “Please stay away,” Banks said. He never made eye contact, and his hands remained concealed behind the stack of crap and his computer monitor.

“Mr. Banks, you need—”

“I said please!” Banks yelled. When he finally looked up, his hand held a big chrome-plated .357 magnum.

“No!” Jonathan shouted.

Banks brought the revolver to his own temple. His eyes burned wild, as if he’d been pushed past anything that resembled reality and reason.

“Mr. Banks, don’t,” Jonathan said.

“I won’t let you do that to me,” he said.

Jonathan’s hands never moved from his weapon, and his eyes never left Banks. “Suicide doesn’t solve anything,” he said. “Just put—”

Banks’s face hardened. He started to lower the weapon from his head, but Jonathan didn’t buy it. He prepared for—

Banks jerked the gun up and pointed it at Jonathan.

The .45 barked twice, as if by reflex, sending two bullets through the same hole into Banks’s heart and dropping him in a heap into his chair. As the echo cleared, the man looked as if he might have fallen asleep at his desk.

“Goddammit!” Jonathan spat. “Really?”

“That went well,” Boxers said.

“He’s a moron. He pointed a weapon at me.”

Boxers’ hand touched his shoulder. “You had no choice, Boss. Suicide by cop.”

Jonathan kicked the front of the desk. “Shit.”

“I don’t think we should be dawdling here,” Boxers said. “In case the neighbors heard or get curious.”

Jonathan didn’t disagree, but he wasn’t going to let this be a total bust. He holstered his weapon and walked around to Banks’s side of the desk. He rolled the chair and the body out of the way and examined the computer screen. It showed lists of files. Jonathan figured he must have been trying to erase them. If they were worthy of being erased, they were worthy of being read.

Jonathan pulled his Leatherman tool from the pouch on his belt and tossed it to Boxers. “Pull the drives out,” he said, nodding to the CPU that sat among the detritus atop the desk. While the Big Guy took care of that, Jonathan scanned the assembled crap for anything that looked relevant. There wasn’t enough time to scour thoroughly, but his attention was drawn to the stack of ancient five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that seemed to have been staged at the edge of his desk. He hadn’t seen any of those in years — since, say, the early nineties, just about the time when Banks would have been hanging out with his revolutionary buddies.

There were also a dozen or so thumb drives and a couple of CDs. Jonathan pulled the plastic liner out of the trash can, dumped the garbage onto the floor, and loaded the bag with the disks.

A minute later, Boxers held two hard drives in his hand. He gave the Leatherman back to Jonathan, and then it was time to go.