“What happened to him?”
“Don’t know,” the nurse said. “He was in a coma but doing fine, when all of a sudden his blood pressure dropped like a rock and we lost him. Pathology will have to tell us why.”
The man thanked the nurse and walked back toward the elevators. He checked to make sure no one was nearby and then muttered into his wrist. He concluded by saying, “There’re too many people up here. We’re gonna have to go to Plan B. I’ll let you know when they take him down to the morgue.”
He walked over to the nurses’ station. From there he could see the entrance to room 5116. He looked for the nurse he’d been talking to-she was kinda cute-but she wasn’t there. He started to chat up one of the other nurses, a little blond who looked like Renee Zellweger from the waist up-and like a Budweiser Clydesdale from the waist down.
The black woman quickly left the hospital and returned to a van parked in a loading zone. She stepped into the back of the van and stripped off the scrubs, tossing the hospital ID badge into a gym bag. Beneath the scrubs she had on a white blouse and dark blue pants. She put on a jacket that matched her pants, ripped the blonde-streaked wig off her head, and put on one that was henna colored. She replaced her Elton John jumbo frames with serious black-framed glasses. She needed to look the part. From the gym bag she pulled out another ID, this one in a badge case.
She was waiting by the elevator when the doors opened to let off a man pushing a gurney. On the gurney, covered by a sheet, was a body.
“Hold it,” the woman said. She snapped open the badge case. “Arlington P.D.”
“What?” the man said.
“I said, Arlington P.D. Is this the John Doe from ICU?”
“Uh, yeah. I’m takin’ him to-”
“I need to get his fingerprints. We’re still trying to ID him.”
“Well, can’t you wait until I get him to the morgue?”
“No.”
She didn’t want to take the fingerprints in the morgue; there were likely to be more people in there and she wanted to minimize the number who saw her. Before the gurney pusher could say anything else, she pulled the corpse’s right hand from beneath the sheet and pressed the hand down on an inkless fingerprint pad. She flipped the pad over, repeated the procedure with the other hand, put the fingerprint pad into a plastic bag and into her purse, then pulled down the sheet, exposing the man’s head. She used her cell phone to snap a picture of his face, although it was horribly bruised and swaddled in bandages.
“Thanks,” she said to the gurney pusher, and walked away.
When the black woman arrived back at the van the white man was already sitting behind the wheel waiting for her. He no longer had a mustache or a goatee. She climbed into the van, told her partner to get going, and opened her cell phone.
“Claire, it’s Alberta,” she said. “I got his fingerprints and a photo that probably won’t do us much good, and I’ll transmit everything in two minutes to that freak, Lorene. But the guy was dead when we got to the hospital.”
“Dead?” Claire said.
“Yeah. A nurse told Darryl he was doing fine when all of sudden he flat-lined on ’em.”
“Claire, I got an ID on that guy.”
Lorene was one of Claire’s few female technicians. Her hair was dyed jet black, chopped off at the ends as if it had been trimmed with gardening shears, and she used a white makeup base that gave her the pallor of a day-old corpse. Her fingernails and lipstick matched the color of her hair.
Claire couldn’t even imagine what people would think if they knew that this woman-though not in person-routinely provided information to the secretary of Homeland Security.
Claire took the printout from Lorene and looked at it. “Jesus,” she muttered. She didn’t know what she’d expected, but this sure as hell hadn’t been it.
Lorene said, “Uh, if you don’t need me…”
“Be quiet,” Claire said. “And quit snapping that gum.”
Claire’s eyes fixed on an unseen horizon as she tried to comprehend the information she’d just been given. Refocusing her gaze on Lorene, she said, “I want you to get into the Pentagon’s personnel records for the Third Infantry Regiment stationed at Fort Myer and…”
“We may have a serious problem,” Levy said.
Bradford looked up from the report he’d been reading on the new Chinese mid-range missile, a missile with a guidance system almost identical to a similar American missile. He was convinced that every defense contractor in the country was infested with Chinese spies. He was also convinced-he was absolutely positive-that someday the United States would go to war with China. He was sure whatever problem Levy thought he had wasn’t as serious as his problems with the Chinese, but Levy wasn’t a man given to hyperbole.
“What problem?” he said.
Levy sat there flexing his big hands, the expression on his face solemn as it always was. Bradford knew Levy’s family history, but did the man always have to look so grim? Charles Bradford rarely smiled, but even he smiled more than Levy.
“Gilmore called me,” Levy said.
Gilmore was a colonel stationed at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia, and he commanded the Third Infantry Regiment. Charles Bradford had personally selected him for the position. Other army personnel were not surprised at the interest Bradford had taken in selecting the regimental commander of the Old Guard because Bradford had once held that position for a short time. People would be very surprised, however, if they knew how Bradford had changed the Old Guard’s mission.
“He said he received a call from a woman,” Levy said, “a Staff Sergeant Marian Kane over at the Pentagon. She was calling about the two men I used on the Russo problem.”
“You mean the men you shipped out?”
“Yes, sir. Sergeants Pierce and Gannon. Anyway, Kane knew that Gannon and Pierce had been reassigned and she said her boss wanted to know who had authorized the transfer. According to Sergeant Kane, her boss was upset because these men were not supposed to be rotated out of Fort Myer for at least a year. Gilmore naturally said he couldn’t help her, that he didn’t get involved every time some low-ranking soldier was reassigned, and then he called over to the Pentagon to see if a Sergeant Kane really works there. He discovered that there is a Sergeant Marion Kane in personnel-but that’s Marion spelled M-a-r-i-o-n, and Sergeant Kane is a male. Whoever called Gilmore screwed up.”
“I don’t understand,” Bradford said. “Why would anyone be asking about those two soldiers?”
“I did some backtracking after Gilmore called me. I discovered that after Sergeant Witherspoon-uh, died, that-”
“Witherspoon?” Bradford asked.
Levy didn’t speak for a moment and Bradford could sense Levy’s disapproval. “Sergeant Witherspoon,” Levy said, “was the soldier driving the ambulance, the man who was-”
“Oh, yes,” Bradford said. “I’m sorry, John,” he added, and he truly was. He was embarrassed he’d forgotten Witherspoon’s name, a man who died in the service of his country.
“I found out that someone claiming to be from the Arlington Police Department took Witherspoon’s fingerprints before his body was taken from the hospital,” Levy said.
“So what?” Bradford said. “He was a John Doe and the police wanted to identify him.”
“That’s possible. But if the cops had taken his fingerprints, they would have drawn a blank. Witherspoon’s fingerprints are not in any criminal database, and if Arlington tried to access military fingerprint files, they still would have come up empty. As you know, Witherspoon’s prints are flagged, I would have been contacted, and his name wouldn’t have been released to the police without my approval.”
“John, I’m confused,” Bradford said. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying the only way the Arlington cops could have identified Witherspoon through his fingerprints was if they had contacts at the Pentagon or the ability to hack into a military data base and override the don’t-release tag on Witherspoon’s name. The detective who was assigned to the case before Hopper took it away from him is ex-military, but he was just a grunt in the marines more than twenty years ago. I think it’s highly unlikely, sir, that this detective or anyone associated with him could have identified Witherspoon. So the big question is this: How did they make the leap?”