“What else do you know?”
“Just what the responding officers and the EMTs said. Two DOA. One with his head blown half off from a rifle, the other skewered with some kinda ninja sword.”
“Damn. And the injured?”
“They transported four to Medstar Trauma. All Aryan Brotherhood. One dude took three AK rounds, another’s got a busted face, a third has a concussion and possible neck trauma, and some skank took two to the legs. I’ll go interview them as soon as I am allowed in to see my crime scene.” The annoyance was evident in Rauch’s voice.
“On the scanner they said it was one guy who did all this.”
“That’s what the injured woman told the responding officers.”
Andy thought for a second. This story was starting to get interesting. “How ’bout I wait at the tape so I can talk to the CIA guys when they come out?”
Rauch looked at Andy for an instant, then he shut down, like he just realized jawing with the reporter was the wrong call. “Look… I didn’t say CIA. You did. I said they were Homeland Security. Do me a favor and get out of here till they leave. Come back in the morning.”
Rauch tossed his cigarette in the gutter and headed up to knock on the next door.
Andy walked back to his car, then he stood there for a few minutes looking at the scene, awash in flashing red and blue lights. Finally one of the beat cops stepped up and asked him if he wouldn’t mind backing off a block or two. Normally Andy would have told the man to kiss his ass, but not this time. He climbed in his Ford, then drove around the corner, parked, and got back out with his camera. He walked between a pair of apartment buildings, squinted out the reflections of flashing lights, and made his way one block north of the crime scene.
On the street in front of him were two black Chevy Suburbans that clearly didn’t belong. Drivers sat behind the wheels, and each vehicle had a passenger in the front. Andy stopped in his tracks before the men saw him, then he retraced his steps back to the apartment buildings. Under a stairwell he found a place in the dark where he could keep his eyes on the vehicles, and there he waited.
Ten minutes later several figures in overcoats approached the Suburbans. One was a white-haired man in his early fifties, flanked by a pair of men Andy took immediately for bodyguards. Next to him was a woman in her thirties wearing eyeglasses, with her brown hair in a professional-looking bun. He snapped several pictures of both of them before they drove off, careful not to use his flash.
Back in his Fiesta he looked at the images on the digital display of his camera. He hadn’t expected to recognize either of them, even on closer inspection, and he did not.
But he knew someone who might. Sitting there in the shittiest part of the city, Andy looked up a number on his contact list and made a call.
A few miles west in Georgetown, a fifty-four-year-old woman slowly reached for the vibrating mobile phone on her nightstand. While doing so, she blinked the sleep from her eyes and checked the time on the phone’s screen.
It was a quarter after one.
She made no effort to perk up her sleepy voice. “This is Catherine King.”
“Ms. King? Andy Shoal here. I apologize for calling so late.”
“Who?”
“Andy Shoal. Metro desk.”
The woman sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes. “Metro? Sure,” she said, but she’d never heard of this guy. “What can I do for you, Andy?”
“Again, sorry about the hour, but I’m doing a story on a double homicide in Washington Highlands and I could use your professional opinion.”
Catherine lay back down on her right side. “The butler did it. Can I go back to sleep?”
Andy chuckled. “I can pretty much guarantee this dump didn’t have a butler. No, actually I’m calling because I was told the CIA was here, looking over the crime scene. I haven’t run into that before, so I thought I’d reach out to you.”
Catherine King sat back up. “Hold on. Are you saying Agency personnel are investigating a homicide in the District?”
“That’s the word I got. The dick who made the scene first—”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, the detective said he was told the men inside were Homeland Security. He didn’t outright say CIA, but that was his inference.”
“What’s the connection to Langley?”
“I don’t have a clue, and it doesn’t seem like the cops do, either. The crime scene is a suspected Aryan Brotherhood property, but I don’t know if that’s relevant or not. I do know you are the paper’s veteran National Security correspondent, so I thought maybe you could help, since nobody knows more about the intelligence community in this town than you do.”
King picked up on the platitude, and it told her something about this Andy Shoal. Cops reporters were usually either grizzled old vets or else they were young and ambitious. Shoal, it was clear, was the latter, and he was sucking up to her a little. She absolutely hated to be called a veteran reporter; she found this almost as bad as when she was referred to as an institution, which also happened on occasion. But she was too intrigued by Andy’s information to be either flattered or annoyed. “I can’t think of a soul on that side of the Anacostia who would be of interest to CIA. I suppose if they are counterintel officers and they caught one of their people visiting a drug house then that would rouse Langley in the middle of the night, but that’s just a guess.”
“It was one male, with bodyguards, and one female. I got pretty good pictures of both of them.”
“You did, did you? You need to be careful doing that with Agency personnel. They are camera shy as a species. Did they see you take their picture?”
“Absolutely not.”
“You want to send them to my phone?”
“On the way.”
Catherine reached for her eyeglasses, then turned on the light on her nightstand. While she waited she looked around her bedroom. She lived alone, and had no children, so the only disorder in the home was her own. An empty cereal bowl and a spoon on the nightstand, a pile of yoga tights and sweats on a settee in a far corner, a raincoat lying over a chair by the door to her closet.
She’d returned from a trip to Cairo three days earlier, where she’d been meeting with a source in Egyptian intelligence, and she’d yet to unpack fully, so a large rolling North Face duffel sat on a table in the far corner of the room, open with dirty clothes spilling out onto the floor.
Two images appeared on her mobile, and Catherine looked at them one at a time. She zoomed in on the first, a woman with light brown hair in a tight bun. She did not recognize her. She swiped down to the next image; this one was of a white-haired man in his early fifties. He seemed to have a two-man security detail shadowing him.
Interesting. If he was CIA this would be beyond odd. Other than the director and some division heads, CIA execs didn’t ordinarily move with bodyguards in the USA.
She blinked away more sleep, and quickly rubbed her eyes. She looked at the photo of the white-haired man again. After several seconds she said, “That makes no sense at all.”
Though she was talking to herself, Shoal asked, “Do you recognize them?”
“The gentleman with the white hair is Jordan Mayes. I haven’t seen him since Iraq. Six years ago. Back then he was a senior officer, but now he’s assistant director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.”
“Does that mean he’s a big deal?”
“Big enough to where I can’t think of a single reason he would be wandering through a crime scene in the middle of the night in the worst part of the city. Why would anyone do that?” With a little hesitation she said, “Hope that doesn’t offend you, Andy.”