President's assassin

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

We took the same helicopter, though the pilots had changed out while we were in the building. The new pilot jocularly informed us he was named Jimbo, the flight time to Fort Belvoir would be approximately twenty-five minutes, so we should sit back and enjoy the ride. A stewardess would be making the rounds after takeoff, offering a selection of fine wines, snacks, and reading materials.

I grabbed Jennie's gun and shot him. Just kidding.

About two minutes after takeoff, Jennie's cell phone went off. She answered, "Margold," then listened for a minute. "Yeah, good. Hold on." To me, she said, "It's Chuck Wardell. Meade Ever-hill was found at home, in bed, unharmed. They're moving him to FBI headquarters." She returned to her conversation with Wardell, and they began chatting about the protection screen being set up around Townsend.

It was a little odd that Wardell had called Jennie. But in chaotic situations, people migrate toward competence, and through good luck, good timing, and, if I say so myself, a bit of deductive brilliance, Jennie and I were the heroes of the hour. I reminded myself that nothing has a shorter half-life than a hero.

I whipped out my cell, called the Pentagon switch, and asked the operator to put me through to the CID duty officer. She did and he answered, "Major Robbins. CID."

I identified myself and informed him I worked for the Director of the FBI, which was partly true and certainly more impressive than the whole truth. I said, "You've already gotten a request for assistance regarding some lost and stolen munitions. Right?"

"About two hours ago. An agent… uh, hold on"-he apparently checked his duty log-"Meany… George Meany, asked for assistance. He gave me a list of the purported thefts. I already faxed requests for assistance to the CID offices in the locations where the thefts occurred."

"He explained this was high priority?"

"Yes. I categorized them high priority."

"Well… explain what that means."

"It's SOP to code our requests. High priority means the receiving stations have seventy-two hours to respond."

"Seventy-two?… Is there a higher priority?"

"Of course. Urgent. You have twelve hours to respond."

The Army invented the word "procedures," and Major Robbins had done what he was asked, in a manner both timely and efficient-given his half-assed knowledge of what was going on here.

I didn't want to overwhelm Major Robbins with the facts, so I explained, "Perhaps Meany failed to emphasize the importance of this. So listen closely We are dealing with a… huge… fucking… emergency here. Somebody's trying to murder the President with those weapons. If this President dies, his Vice President is going to hunt down whoever failed to stop it and play croquet with their balls on the Rose Garden lawn. Major, do you understand?"

"Uh… got it."

"I'm in a helicopter, fifteen minutes out from Belvoir. During that fifteen minutes, you will call Major General Tingle. You will tell him to meet me in his office. You will tell him to have transportation meet me in the Post Exchange parking lot. You will tell him to round up whatever experts on these cases he needs. Got that?"

"Got all that."

"Repeat it back to me," and he did, word for word.

I pulled a pen out of my pocket. "Give me the case numbers of the thefts Meany gave you."

He did that, too, and I jotted them down on my palm. I thanked Major Robbins and punched off.

Jennie said to me, "You were pretty rough on that poor guy."

"Nonsense. Soldier talk."

"Define soldier talk."

"A simple statement of mission, basic steps to accomplish said mission, and the pain I will cause you if you fail."

She shook her head.

"Look, what if I had been all nice and polite? And what if he got it all wrong? Then I'd feel really bad."

She shrugged. "Well, you can't really blame George. To outsiders, the Army is a very foreign world."

"Exactly. That's why he should've called me and asked for help."

"Maybe if you had a more positive and nurturing relationship with George, he would have."

I was about to toss Agent Margold from the helicopter when I saw she was laughing.

For the remainder of the flight, she briefed me on the unfolding plan to use Director Townsend as a decoy to lure Jason Barnes out into the open. The concept, as I understood it, was to encase Townsend in three tons of body armor and have him move around in public all day, flanked and followed by a screen of handpicked agents, armed to the teeth with guns, bad attitudes, and Jason Barnes's photo. It sounded well put together, it probably was well put together, and try as I might, I thought of no more than ten things that could go completely wrong. But that wasn't my problem.

Two military police humvees with flashing blue lights awaited us on the tarmac when we set down. I regarded this as a good omen. I thanked Jimbo the pilot for not crashing, and informed him the in-flight movie sucked. He laughed.

Five minutes later we pulled up to the entrance of the headquarters of the United States Army's Criminal Investigation Division. A CID officer in mufti awaited us. He escorted us swiftly inside, and down a hallway, and up a stairwell, then down another hall to the door of Major General Daniel Tingle, fuhrer of the Army's equivalent of the Gestapo.

Understand that as a military lawyer, I worked with lots of criminal investigators, and when it comes to flatfoots, in my professional view, none are better. Most CID foot soldiers are former enlisted MPs promoted to the rank of warrant officer, a sort of halfway station between sergeants and commissioned officers, which affords them the best of both worlds. They are accorded the full privileges and respect of an officer, just none of the bullshit. They can go to the NCO club-where the liquor's cheaper-or the officers' club, where young lieutenants' wives are usually cuter, lonelier, and more gullible. In general, CID types tend to be highly intelligent, arrogant, sneaky, diligent, treacherous, and disrespectful. Essentially they are detectives, though, unlike their civilian counterparts, CID agents are highly trained in all arts and aspects of criminology and criminality, from interrogations through forensics, from rapes through murder, and with rare exceptions, they handle the A to Z of whatever case they're assigned.

Often their work takes them undercover. Arriving incognito, they report into a unit, they work hard to fit in, they create friendships and build strong bonds of trust, and then they bust everybody who farted outside the commode. It is this part of their duties, I think, that makes them beloved to the rest of the Army

Guys and gals like this need strong adult supervision, and that odious task falls upon a corps of commissioned military police officers. General Tingle was the current top sneak, a guy the rest of the Army's generals try hard to get along with because he has the dirt on everybody

So we entered the office where General Tingle was seated behind his desk, and he stayed seated behind his desk. On his left flank stood a large, heavyset black officer in battle dress uniform, the crossed pistols of an MP on one collar, the spread eagle of a full colonel on the other collar, and a nametag that read Johnson. On the general's right flank stood two middle-aged men in civilian clothes; from their sneaky faces, presumably both were senior agents. General Tingle, I noted, was attired in pale gray Army sweats, and although mostly bald, his few surviving strands were disheveled, nor had he shaved, nor was he smiling. Obviously he had been dragged out of bed, and from his expression he seemed to be pondering why, and by whom.

This might be a bad moment to mention my military rank, so I said, "Good morning, General. I'm Sean Drummond with the Central Intelligence Agency. This is Special Agent Jennifer Margold, the Senior Agent in Charge for National Security from the Washington office."

We stepped forward and shook his hand. He said, with remarkable prescience, "Well, I won't say it's nice to meet you. But would you care to sit?"

A pair of Rotarian chairs were in front of his desk, and we chose to sit. Without further ado, I informed him, "We're dealing with an emergency. I'll cut to the chase. I have bad news."

He smiled grimly "Oh… I'm counting on that."

I did not smile back. "Perhaps you heard on the evening news that Merrill Benedict was murdered on the beltway. And a few minutes later, a Supreme Court justice was slain on his own doorstep."

"I heard. And the White House Chief of Staff was massacred in his house yesterday morning. The city's going nuts-I got it." He pointed at me and said, "What I don't get

is what this has to do with Army CID."

"That would be the part you didn't hear on the news-Merrill Benedict was murdered with a LAW and Phillip Fineberg with a Bouncing Betty mine, modified into a command-detonated device."

Long silence. Eventually, the general said, "Shit."

"Enough to bury everybody. Don't worry about it."

But he obviously was worried about it. "You're positive these were U.S. military munitions? Russian and French hardware often find their way inside our borders. Both countries produce weapons analogous to the LAW and the Bouncing Betty."

"Traces of Composition A5 were on Fineberg's corpse-the distinctive propellant used with Bouncing Bettys." I allowed him a brief moment to mull that, then added, "As I hope your duty officer informed you, the killers vowed to assassinate the President. So you might say we're a little concerned about how they got these weapons, and about their access to other military munitions-types, quantities, and so forth."

General Tingle was a cool customer and took this understatement in stride. He stared at me. "All right. So this is… serious. Now, tell me why you-the CIA-are involved?"

"Because there's some chance this involves foreign terrorists."

He nodded. "Time line?"

"If they're true to their word, they'll try to kill the President within the next twenty-four hours."

"You believe this is credible?"

"They just filled two morgues. Don't you?"

He turned to Colonel Johnson. "Al, how long will it take you to scrub the files?"

But before Johnson could reply, I said, "Our FBI friends already did that. We have good reason to believe the weapons were acquired within the last six months, and our other assumptions are fairly obvious. There are three cases that meet our parameters."

I read the case file numbers and dates off my palm to Colonel Johnson, who left to gather the files. Apparently reading my mind, the general ordered coffee, and an aide left to scrounge a pot from the duty officer. The general looked at me and said, "Do you have military experience, Mr. Drummond?"

"I… yes, some."

"Then let me put this in perspective. Right now, we have two wars going on, Afghanistan and Iraq. The Army is shipping equipment and munitions at rates not seen since Vietnam. Visit the port at Galveston

… it's like wandering through the aisles of some military Wal-Mart. Thousands of tons of artillery shells, main gun tank rounds, track pads, and spare parts pass out of that port every month."

"Meaning we… you have security problems?" I was having a little trouble with my pronouns.

"We have a security nightmare. Three-quarters of the Army's active, reserve, and National Guard MPs are in Iraq. Nearly all the Army's logistics specialists and security specialists are there, or Afghanistan. We're outsourcing security to civilian firms. They're hiring guys off the street, paying them $8.90 an hour, and begging them not to let their cousins walk through and filch a few Ml6s."

"But these are mines and LAWs," Jennie noted.

The general nodded. "Let me be frank. We don't really know how much is getting ripped off, or lost, or misplaced. And for obvious reasons we can't halt the train to find out. Sometimes, nobody discovers anything missing until the shipping container gets to Iraq or Afghanistan and it's opened and inventoried. Sometimes the guy doing the inventory arbitrarily decides it's just a bookkeeping error. Or he's lazy and doesn't feel like doing the paperwork to report the missing item. And when it's discovered missing overseas, there's always the questions of how, where it was stolen, and when-here, en route, or over there." He paused, and then added, "So what gets detected, and what gets reported to us, and what we choose to report to the FBI, could be a fraction of what's missing."

I traded glances with Jennie. Not good. The weapons could provide us a lead we desperately needed, and we definitely needed to learn what kind of nasty surprises Barnes might have in store. A lot of things go boom in the night, but some booms turn night into day.

But the general had another point to make. "During peacetime, our accountability, and our follow-up to thefts and losses, are exceptionally good. But what's seriously important in times of peace often becomes trivial when people are fighting and dying. So don't get your hopes up."

Incidentally, I found it both instructive and disconcerting to be on the other side of the table, observing the behavior of military officers through civilian eyes. The military is a brotherhood, or, these days, I guess, a brother-sisterhood. Even though most of the men in this room dressed like civilians, and even looked like civilians, they did not think or act like civilians. Jennie and I were here to stick our noses into an institutional embarrassment, and from their aloofness, shifty gazes, and occasional conversational hesitations, clearly we were not part of the tribe, nor were our efforts appreciated. Nobody was going to lie or deliberately misinform us, but getting the full truth could prove difficult.

I kicked Jennie under the table. She looked up at me, and I twirled my finger through the air. It took a moment before she got it. She reached into her pocket, withdrew her tape recorder, and placed it on the table. The officers all stared at it. She did not turn it on, but it sat there, a warning that only truth better be spoken inside this room.

Jennie smiled at them and said, "A completely harmless formality."

It didn't go over particularly well.

Anyway, we chitchatted a while about the murders, and I offered them a condensed version of the Jason Barnes story while we waited for Colonel Johnson to return with those three files. The coffee came and my mood brightened.

Despite his job title, General Tingle, it turned out, was a fairly amiable and even charming guy, with a good gift for gab, and he even tried out a few jokes on us, though his timing was off and they came off a little flat. You could tell he was a little unfocused and stressed, thinking ahead about how it was going to look for Uncle Sam's Army when word got out that weapons intended to kill Al-Qaeda assholes and bad Iraqis had been used to exterminate important members of the U.S. executive and judiciary branches.

For some weird reason, I thought of the inscription on the side of the directional Claymore mine that reads, "Point this side toward the enemy." Yet in every conflict there is always the guy who's exhausted or nervous or hurrying, and the enemy moves into his sights, and he squeezes the triggering mechanism, and ten thousand tiny pellets fly up his own ass.

Despite the best precautions and the best intentions, sometimes shit just happens.