The next thought he had was that if Paul’s death was connected in any way to a Pentagon heavyweight like Martin Breed, he’d be smart to keep his big nose out of it. He should just do what he was supposed to do: find a lawyer to deal with Paul’s four-thousand-buck estate and then go play golf like he’d originally planned.
Yep, that definitely sounded like the smart thing to do.
16
Claire returned to her office, still embarrassed that she had overlooked the Post reporter, Robert Hansen, as the man Paul Russo might have met with. She didn’t know for sure that Russo had met with Hansen, but it sounded right. It felt right. It sang to her.
Russo, this gay altar boy, just didn’t strike her as the type who would have been involved in anything illegal or even underhanded. But what if General Breed-a man privy to the Pentagon’s dirty little secrets-had told Russo something before he died? He might have even told Russo something while under the influence of whatever drugs he was being given, maybe delirious, not even knowing what he was saying.
But what about Martin Breed? The man had been an absolute poster boy for the United States Army. Handsome, charming, articulate, a born leader of men. He’d risen up through the ranks at a meteoric pace and had been involved in all the recent wars. In Afghanistan, he’d even managed to get himself wounded, which is quite hard for a general to do, so he got a Purple Heart to go along with all his other medals.
But there had been nothing in Breed’s career to indicate he was anything other than a good soldier. There’d been no financial scandals-no awards of huge army contracts to pals in big business-and his marriage had been rock solid, as far as anyone knew. Nor had he shown any desire for public office, so it didn’t seem likely that he would have compromised his principles to get himself elected after he retired. Breed’s only known ambition was to reach the pinnacle of his profession: to replace General Charles Bradford as the army’s chief of staff.
Assuming Russo had learned something significant from Breed-which was a hell of a big assumption-what could it have been? What could have been so important that someone would want to kill Russo because of what he’d heard or seen? And then there was the question of how Russo’s killers would have known that Breed told Russo anything?
Too many questions-not enough answers. Insufficient data, as Dillon would say.
Claire called Gilbert and two other technicians into her office and proceeded to issue orders, giving them four hours to do what she knew would take them twice as long.
The first thing she had them bring her was Martin Breed’s medical records, which had been easy to obtain. Breed had been a high-ranking army officer so Claire assumed, correctly, that he’d been treated by someone over at Walter Reed. His oncologist was a Dr. Stanley Fallon and Dr. Fallon’s notes, entered into his computer, stated that Breed had died from brain cancer, a particularly aggressive, fast-moving form of the disease. The last entry regarding Breed recommended that the general call in a hospice, as he was not expected to last more than a month, six weeks at the outside.
This gave Claire pause. Martin Breed died only three weeks after the doctor made his final entry on his patient. Did this mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. She doubted a physician could predict exactly how long a patient would last, and three weeks was pretty close to a month. Still, it made her wonder.
What she really wanted to know was who, besides Paul Russo, had talked to the general as he lay dying. That is, could General Breed have told one of his last visitors that Russo posed some kind of threat? General Breed’s phone records didn’t point to any logical person-his last calls had primarily been to family members-and the only other way Claire could think of to get the answer to her question was to ask General Breed’s grieving widow, an idea she instantly rejected. Talking to people always posed a risk because it left a human trail, and Claire was not ready to go down that path just yet. She much preferred to gather information through purloined records-and eavesdropping, if necessary.
Claire was frustrated, and not just because she wasn’t making progress on the Russo intercept. What was really frustrating her was that she might be wasting her time investigating Russo at all. Claire’s organization had been established by Dillon to spy within the country’s borders for the purpose of preventing attacks which could make 9/11 seem insignificant by comparison. The detonation of a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. wouldn’t just kill thousands of people; such an event could destroy the economy and cripple the very infrastructure needed to safeguard the nation. If Claire’s technicians had just heard Russo being murdered in some mundane way for some mundane reason, she wouldn’t have spent any time on him at all. But because his death might be linked to rogue elements of the U.S. military and a dead two-star general, she needed to know what the hell was going on-and she was getting nowhere.
Claire had a four-hundred-calorie lunch and then went to the gym to kick and hit the heavy bag for half an hour. She liked hitting the heavy bag. She had so much aggression in her that it sometimes seemed like hitting the bag was her only outlet. It was either hit the bag or hit Dillon.
As she was walking to the locker room, a guy waved to her-a good-looking guy maybe a year or two younger than her. She pretended she didn’t see him. She knew he was working up the nerve to ask her for a date, and she dreaded the prospect of turning him down, as she knew she would.
She’d been on a total of six first dates in the last ten years and she never saw any of the men again. They had all been decent guys-men that most single women her age would kill for. She even had sex with one of them-or tried to-because she thought having sex might jump-start her emotions. God, what a disaster that had been. Now, instead of sex, she worked and she exercised-and cleaned. She had to have the cleanest condo in Laurel, Maryland.
Following her workout, Claire had a brief unproductive conference with her technicians. They were striking out everywhere. They still couldn’t identify the cell phone owner who had called Hopper, and they could find no link via phone records or e-mails connecting Russo, Martin Breed, and the Washington Post reporter, Hansen.
The whereabouts of the reporter was another dead end. Neither his body nor his car had been found. And his damn bosses at the Post-based on statements they had given to the D.C. Metro police, and which the police had helpfully entered into their computers-were clueless as to what Hansen had been working on before he disappeared. All Claire could tell was that Hansen had been a political firefly, constantly flitting from story to story, investigating anything involving Congress or the administration that smacked of scandal or corruption. But he didn’t normally work the military side of things.
She also had a tech hack into the Post ’s computers to look for anything Hansen might have filed that seemed relevant. Zip again. The last story he submitted had been written two weeks before he disappeared and was about a sixty-two-year-old congressman using a corporate jet for a trip to the Bahamas with a thirty-four-year-old ex-Redskins cheerleader. A story, in other words, as old and tired and tawdry as Washington itself.
The tech did find one interesting thing while poking through the Post’s electronic files. A GS-11 analyst at Langley had leaked a story about the CIA giving money to a psychopath in Hamas, the analyst apparently having some pro-Israeli bias. Claire couldn’t tell from the Post’s files why the CIA was funding a Hamas murderer and she finally decided she didn’t care. It just made her furious when low-level government employees leaked things to the media; leaking information was a management prerogative. She anonymously e-mailed the name of the CIA tattletale to a heartless prick at Langley she knew, confident that the leaker would soon be stationed in Greenland.