“Not in the least. We can’t all get the good gigs like the national security beat.”
The comment barely registered with Catherine. She was still looking at the picture of Jordan Mayes. She said, “Mayes’s purview is one hundred percent outside of the U.S. Denny Carmichael holds Mayes’s leash.”
“Who?”
“Carmichael runs the show at CIA.”
“Director?”
“Directors don’t run the show, Andy. Directors are political hires. Sent in to watch over, but to keep their hands clean. No, Denny Carmichael is head of the National Clandestine Service. He’s the top spook in spook land. He does all the dirty things around the world.”
“He’s bad?”
“Depends on your perspective. He’s done a lot of good I’m sure, but I’ve watched while Denny has grown his fiefdom to the point where he makes his own rules over at Langley. I’m not crazy about that.”
“Are you going to ask Carmichael what his assistant was doing in Washington Highlands?”
Catherine thought this over. “No. That’s not the right play here. I’d rather probe into Mayes a little. Figure out who this woman is with him at the crime scene. If I go to Carmichael as clueless as I am now, he’ll know he can sell me anything. Once I have some facts, just enough to scare him into thinking I know more than I really do, I’ll confront him.”
Andy didn’t respond to this. Finally Catherine said, “Did I lose you?”
There was obvious amazement in his voice. “That’s genius.”
“I talk to men and women who lie for a living. You develop techniques to mitigate some of the BS along the way. Will you keep me posted on anything you learn about the Highlands incident?”
“Of course I will. What would you say to the two of us sharing a byline?”
Catherine smiled at the phone. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Andy. I don’t know there is a story there just yet. I get five ‘can’t miss’ earth-shattering leads a week that turn into nothing. For now, let’s just pull this thread from both ends and see what turns up. That sound good to you?”
“Sounds great. I’ll let you know what I find.”
Catherine King hung up the phone, pulled off her glasses, and lay back down on the bed. But after thirty seconds she rolled back up, climbed to her feet, and headed downstairs to her home office.
Whatever was going on that involved spooks from the CIA, the Aryan Brotherhood, and a double homicide was much more important to her than a few hours’ sleep. She’d sit at her computer and dig around on Mayes, Carmichael, and the mystery woman, and see what she could find.
9
Arthur Mayberry was nearly seventy, and he looked it. Weatherworn black skin, a silver mane of hair, and Coke-bottle glasses. He had been 11-bravo, army infantry, back in Vietnam, and then he came home and drove a bus for Washington Metro Transit for forty-one years while his wife worked her way up to food services manager at a hospital in Falls Church. Arthur sired four kids along the way, which made him a man rich in many blessings, but not in much else. Now he and his wife were grandparents and empty nesters, retired and living frugally in a large but rickety two-story home in Columbia Heights.
Prices in the District had skyrocketed in the past few years as the federal government became one of the few growth industries in America, and for this reason Mayberry’s property taxes had shot through the roof. Even though his street was one of the edgiest in Columbia Heights, which was one of the lower-end neighborhoods in the heart of the District, Arthur and his sixty-eight-year-old wife Bernice could barely afford their mortgage, so they’d taken to renting out a tiny and not exactly up-to-code basement bedroom for two hundred fifty a month. They’d recently lost their last tenant when he was arrested on a possession charge, so when the knock came at their front door first thing after church on Sunday morning, Arthur found himself hoping it was someone who’d seen the For Rent sign stuck in the tiny front yard.
This street was seventy percent African American, and twenty-two percent Hispanic. There were as many Asians as there were whites, and the vast majority of the whites who lived around here were elderly, so Arthur’s hopes that he’d get a new tenant today were effectively dashed when he looked through the peephole and saw a clean-shaven white man in a blazer standing alone on his stoop.
Bernice came up beside him in the entryway. She was still wearing her hat from church. “Who is it?”
“Some man.”
“He’s here about the room,” she said confidently.
“I doubt it.”
“Why do you say—”
Arthur opened the wooden door, but left the storm door and its iron grating alone.
“Oh,” his wife said, seeing the youngish Caucasian face on the other side of the storm door.
“Yeah?”
The white man spoke through the bolted door. “Good morning.”
“Yeah?” Arthur repeated, the suspicion obvious in his voice.
“I saw your For Rent sign. Can I take a look at the room?”
What the hell? Arthur had no intention of renting to a white man. It wasn’t that he was racist, but he was a realist, and no young white man in this area with a job would want to live in a tiny basement on this street.
“Sir?” the man said after waiting ten seconds for a response.
“You from around here?”
“No, sir. Just in from Michigan. My uncle had a place in Petworth, but he passed away. I’m in town for a couple of months getting the house ready to sell.”
Arthur softened just a little. “Sure sorry to hear about that.”
“Thanks. What are you asking for the room?”
A pause. “Three hundred.”
“Really? I saw the notice you put on the board at the Giant up the street. It says two fifty.”
Arthur stiffened right back up now. “Then why’d you ask?”
A little smile from the white man. “I guess just to see if you’d rip me off.”
Everyone stood awkwardly for a moment in the doorway till Mayberry said, “Well, now you know. Price went up. Take it or leave it.”
“Can I see it?”
Arthur could feel an icy stare from his wife, standing just next to him. Bernice was generally more suspicious of people than was Arthur, and considering Arthur didn’t really believe this man’s story, he assumed his wife was ready to kick the door shut in the man’s face.
But Arthur was thinking about the three hundred bucks now, as well as the fact this guy could go and get a lawyer and make trouble if some black landlord refused to rent to him.
Mayberry snatched his keys off the wall and headed out onto the porch. Bernice followed close behind silently, but Arthur felt her misgivings. He knew if he rented the room to the man she’d tell him he was a fool, because the man was probably out of work and on drugs.
With a fatalistic sigh he led his wife and the white man down to the driveway.
Court almost didn’t give a damn what the inside of the room looked like, because the outside was as close to perfect as he could hope to find from an operational security perspective. The entrance to the basement room was off the driveway, just six steps down to a tiny patio with a storm door that looked substantial, and on the other side of that was a wooden door that looked sturdy enough. There was just a small slit window at eye level, but it afforded a full view of the driveway and, since this was a corner lot, he could use the window to see a good distance to the south, east, and north.
Court and the Mayberrys stepped into the basement room, and with three people there was little space to move around. It occurred to Court that there would be a bit more room to move if the heavyset lady took off her huge hat, but he made no mention of it. Instead he checked the space over quickly. It was just ten feet by ten feet with a tiny bathroom off the back, a kitchen counter that ran across the rear wall, and a knee-high refrigerator taking up floor space.