Veil of Civility

Chapter Fourteen

Senator David Kemiss buttoned his suit coat as he stepped out of the rear door of the black Lincoln Town Car driven by his government appointed chauffeur. Pushing his thick-rimmed glasses up on his nose like an aging Clark Kent, he prepared for a media onslaught as he walked towards the front door of the non-descript four story building that housed most of the federal offices in Lynchburg. In the twenty hours since the bombing outside of a Liberty University building and the subsequent murder of Abaddon Kafni, the mostly vacant building on the corner of 12th and Court Streets had become a hub of activity. Federal law enforcement officers from every agency under the banner of the Department of Justice and a legion of national news media had descended upon the quiet downtown block like a squadron of flying monkeys.

Kemiss sucked in a deep breath as several reporters took notice of him and ushered their camera men in his direction.

"Senator Kemiss! Senator Kemiss!" a top-heavy blonde said, as she ambled towards him in high heeled shoes and a red pants suit, dragging an obese camera man behind her. "Stacey Courtney, ABC News. Sir, as one of the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, what can you tell us about the attack last night? Are the bombing and the murder of Dr. Kafni connected in any way?"

"Dr. Kafni was the keynote speaker at the grand opening of the building that was bombed. Of course there's a connection," he answered as he brushed past her. "Excuse me. I really can't discuss this now."

"Senator, why are you here? Has the FBI called you?"

"No," he answered severely. "Why would the FBI call me? I'm a policymaker, not an investigator. I'm here for the same reason as everyone else. I've lived in this region for more than thirty years and I'm a concerned citizen here to make sure our federal government is doing everything within its power to apprehend the men responsible for these events. Now, excuse me."

He pushed past the throng of reporters crowding behind the journalist and entered the building through a glass door that was held open for him by two black-suited federal agents. The two men quickly closed the door behind Kemiss and began blocking off the reporters.

Inside the well-traveled entrance, the building smelled of wet carpet. Aging wallpaper lined the narrow hallway leading to the building's rear entrance; the walls studded with glass doors bearing the logos of several federal agencies.

"FBI?" he asked a man in a white button-down shirt who was walking towards the front entrance.

"They've taken over the fourth floor," the man said, grudgingly. "The elevator's on the left at the end of the hall."

The elevator pinged as it arrived on the fourth floor, and the doors hissed open. Kemiss stepped out and looked around; behind a set of glass doors directly in front of him men in suits buzzed around a hastily prepared office suite. What had probably been a sleepy field office housing only half a dozen agents yesterday had been transformed overnight into a veritable command center. Pulling one of the doors open, he walked inside. Several of the agents looked up from their desks and two men standing in front of an oversized map stretched over a large white board near the back of the room turned around. Kemiss flashed Seth Castellano a knowing look and the agent immediately excused himself from the man he'd been talking to and began making his way towards a corner office.

The entire scene made Kemiss nervous. Under normal circumstances he would have been proud and possibly even a bit excited at the sight of the law enforcement apparatus of the United States working so diligently to solve a terrible crime, but the circumstances he was here under were anything but normal. Thankfully, Castellano was in charge and would hopefully see to it that no link between him and the events being investigated was uncovered. It was in Castellano's best interest to do so, for both personal and professional reasons.

Castellano held the door open as Kemiss entered, then quietly closed it behind him. Inside the square room was a desk piled high with papers. The pictures in the office weren't of anyone Kemiss recognized; he figured it had belonged to the agent who had been in charge of the field office until the previous night and who was now probably sharing a cubicle outside.

"What's the latest?" Kemiss asked, touching Castellano's shoulder briefly after the agent shut the door.

"State Police found the SUVs near a farm in Spotsylvania County. Both of them were burned down to the axles, just as he was instructed."

Kemiss nodded. "Good. And there's no way to trace them through the rental company?"

"It won't take long for the men outside to trace the vehicles back to the rental company, but all they'll find when they get there is that they were rented by a man working for the Turkish embassy using a diplomatic fleet account and were reported stolen from a parking garage at 5 p.m. yesterday."

"What about the witness? What did you say his name was?"

"Declan McIver. I interviewed him this morning."

"And?"

"Well, it appears that Kafni was much better informed then we realized. Apparently he knew Baktayev was free. He told McIver that Baktayev had escaped from prison and that he might be coming after them both. It seems McIver killed Baktayev's older brother in ninety-seven while he was working for Kafni as a security guard."

Kemiss brought a hand to his head and stroked his clean-shaven face in frustration. "This is what I was afraid of," he said. He turned away from Castellano and looked out of the window to the city block below. "How the hell could Kafni have known about Baktayev being free?"

"Abaddon Kafni has a long history and most of it, prior to his immigration to the States, is a closely kept secret, but we need to relax, David," said Castellano. "Baktayev's involvement in this whole situation will be exposed eventually anyways. The fact that someone knows of him isn't that big of a deal. What we have to be concerned with is the timing. We have to keep his presence here quiet until after everything is over and done with."

"And how exactly are we supposed to keep this man McIver quiet?" Kemiss hissed over his shoulder. "He's not exactly a known entity that we can keep a close watch on day in and day out. He's a wild card!"

Castellano nodded, as if he'd seen Kemiss' reaction coming. "Yes. Yes he is."

"And we can't afford to have wild cards running around right now! What do we know about him? Everyone has skeletons in their closet. I want you to find them."

Placing his hands in his pockets and rattling the change he found there, Castellano walked around the side of the desk and sat down. Leaning into the black leather chair he said, "I already have."

He pulled a folder off the top of the desk and opened it. "Declan Scot McIver, born 1969 in Galway, Ireland. No parents listed. The file says he was raised in an orphanage in Ballinasloe and then nothing until he showed up here in the U.S. in ninety-seven. He applied for citizenship in o-two and on the INS forms he listed his former occupation in Ireland as 'fisherman'."

"So he dropped off the face of the earth until he turned twenty-eight? Why don't I believe that?"

"Probably because this immigration file is about as thin as they come. Somehow Mr. McIver went from being a fisherman in Ireland to being a bodyguard in the United States. He did a two month stint in a Massachusetts prison for his involvement with a violent series of events leading up to an assassination attempt on Dr. Kafni and his family, in which McIver intervened and saved their lives. According to the records I dug up on that event he was released from prison after Kafni brought the entire matter to the attention of Adam Ryan, who was the governor of Massachusetts at the time. Kafni claimed McIver was there under his employ and that the proper paperwork from Israel was misplaced by state officials."

"So he went from Ireland to Israel to America?"

"It would appear that way, but there's no documentation to back that up. It seems Governor Ryan was a staunch ally of the Israeli government and had an established diplomatic relationship with then Prime Minister Asher Harel."

"Great. So Ryan back-doored the entire thing and now we're going to pay for it."

"Well, if you ask me, the only place you find these kinds of gaps in a person's history is when you're dealing with some kind of military, but there's no record of any military service anywhere. In fact, there's nothing from the Republic of Ireland at all. Not even a birth certificate."

"What are you suggesting?"

"I'm suggesting that this immigration file is a complete fraud and that Declan McIver is hiding something pretty serious. All we need to do is find it and exploit it."

Kemiss placed his hands in his pockets and stared out the window.

"I don't like that. It could take months to uncover that kind of information and it could very well turn out to be nothing. Even if it is some kind of a whitewash there are plenty of people with secret clearances that do nothing but shine a seat with their asses, and let's say he is some kind of Military Intelligence or Special Forces, how exactly does that help us? If anything it makes him more of a threat."

"Then we'll just have to go with plan B."

Kemiss looked over his shoulder at Castellano with a raised eyebrow.

"Our friends from the security company last night wouldn't argue with additional employment, I'm sure," Castellano said.

"Make it happen."