The small conference table in Claire’s office was piled with paper, stacks of paper, all the records she’d asked her people to pull on Russo and Hopper. And because she didn’t know what she was looking for, she couldn’t tell her techs to go through the papers and find whatever it was she needed to find; she had to do it herself, and the task was taking forever. She was just burning time and it was really pissing her off.
That damn Dillon. If he would just let her use DeMarco like she wanted.
The records provided a fairly complete picture of Russo: he was heavily involved in his church, donated much of his salary to charities, had no expensive hobbies, ate lunch at Subway almost every day. One thing she couldn’t find from the records, however, was a person Russo was particularly close to-somebody he might have confided in, somebody who might have been able to explain what he was doing at the Iwo Jima Memorial. Based on his phone bills for the last six months, this person didn’t exist. There wasn’t anyone he called every day or every other day, the way a husband might call his wife or a guy might call his girlfriend.
“I want Russo’s house searched,” Claire said. “Really searched.”
Claire was speaking to her favorite agent, a young lady in her thirties named Alice. Unlike most of the people who worked for her, Alice wasn’t afraid of her. Alice sat there impassively, saying nothing.
Alice was very good at her job, but she had the emotional range of cork.
The reason Claire was talking to Alice was because she knew one thing to be absolutely true: Men can’t find anything. This was an axiom as certain and valid as any law of physics.
One night-she remembered it like it was yesterday-Mark had decided he wanted peanut butter after they finished making love. God knows why he wanted peanut butter at one in the morning, but he did. She was still lying in bed, feeling kinda sore between her legs but sore in that good way, and he yelled out to her, Hey, where’s the peanut butter? Top shelf of the cupboard, she yelled back, right next to the stove. A minute later, he yelled again: I can’t find it. So she had to get up, put on a robe, go into the kitchen, and there he was, buck-naked, staring helplessly into the cupboard. Claire remembered thinking at the time how absolutely perfect he looked and what a lucky girl she was. I thought you said it was on this shelf, he said. It is, she said, and she moved one box out of the way- one box — and there was the peanut butter.
Mark may have been perfect but he was still a man-and men can’t find anything.
So when Claire wanted a place searched she assigned a woman, in this case Alice. She would have assigned Alberta because Alberta had more patience than Alice, but Alberta was dead.
Claire still couldn’t believe it. Alberta had only been thirty-seven. One of the agents who knew her well said her mom had died of a coronary at forty-two, and it looked as if the same thing had happened to Alberta. They were holding a wake for her tomorrow night but Claire didn’t plan to attend. She wanted to go but she knew her presence at the event would make Alberta’s co-workers uncomfortable.
“An FBI agent has already been in there,” Claire said. “He took Russo’s computer and I’m guessing he searched the place as well. So if Russo hid something and it’s still in his apartment, it’s not going to be in any of the usual places.”
“What am I looking for?” Alice asked.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “Anything he thought was important enough to hide really well, and in particular anything associated with an army general named Martin Breed.”
“Breed?” Alice said.
“Yeah,” Claire said, but she didn’t tell Alice anything more and Alice didn’t ask.
“How many guys can I take with me?” Alice said.
“One. Russo’s place can’t be that big.”
“Okay,” Alice said.
“And one other thing,” Claire said. “Russo lived in a duplex and his landlord is the old lady who lives next door. I don’t want the old woman hurt. I don’t want her to have a stroke or something. So you need to figure out a way to deal with her if she wakes up and hears you while you’re searching.”
“Sure,” Alice said, with an indifferent shrug.
22
“Admiral,” the Attorney General said, “this is Aaron Drexler. Aaron works for me now, but before coming to Justice he was on the legal staff at the Pentagon. He has a top secret security clearance.”
Robert Scranton was a large, hearty, gregarious fellow. Add a fake white beard and he’d make a good Santa. He hailed from the president’s home state and, before being made the country’s top lawyer, had been a mediocre district attorney in a fair-sized city. The fact that it had taken him three tries to pass the bar exam apparently bothered no one-or at least it didn’t bother the fifty-eight senators who had voted to confirm him. Scranton had more important qualifications than intelligence and experience; he was rich, had contributed hugely to the president’s campaign, and was arguably more loyal than a golden retriever.
Admiral Fenton Wilcox brusquely shook Drexler’s hand. He had no idea why he’d been summoned to the Attorney General’s Office-but he had been summoned. Nor did he know why he was being introduced to Drexler, a whip-thin six-footer dressed in a dark suit. Drexler had short black hair and hooded eyes and he just sat there staring at Wilcox, seeming not at all impressed by a man who wore three stars and directed the largest, most secretive intelligence organization in the country.
There was a palpable arrogance about Drexler that instantly annoyed Wilcox.
“Aaron,” the Attorney General was saying, “graduated from MIT with a degree in computer science and then obtained his doctorate of law from Harvard.”
Maybe that explained Drexler’s arrogance: his education. MIT and Harvard weren’t the easiest schools in the country to get into. But just to put the guy in his place, Wilcox said, “I know a lot of bright guys, Mr. Scranton. They work for me. Why are you introducing me to Mr. Drexler?”
“Admiral, Aaron specializes in Internet fraud here at Justice because he knows his way around a computer. In other words, with his Pentagon background, his work experience, and his education, he’s capable of understanding a lot of what you folks do in the dark over there at Fort Meade.”
Scranton smiled after he said that. His “do in the dark” comment was intended to be humorous, but Fenton Wilcox, a man with a small sense of humor to begin with, didn’t smile back. He looked at his watch. “Mr. Scranton,” he said, “what does this-”
“The president has asked me to audit your operation for compliance to FISA and I’ve assigned Aaron.”
“Audit! What the hell is this all about?”
“Aziz,” Scranton said.
“Goddammit,” Wilcox muttered. Then, more loudly: “Aren’t we ever going to get beyond that? The damn guy was guilty, and my people didn’t do anything illegal.”
“Well, the president wants to make sure of that, sir. There were rumors that you knew more about Dr. Aziz than you could have learned from the authorized wire taps.”
“Rumors! What rumors?” the admiral said.
Ignoring the question, Scranton said, “Because of these rumors, the president is concerned you folks might be illegally spying on our citizens again, and he won’t stand for a repeat of what happened in 2005. So he’s asked for a small, independent look to make sure you’re doing things by the book.”
The admiral’s eyes bulged and his complexion turned an unhealthy shade of crimson. “My agency is doing no such thing! I’ve testified to Congress about that. Under oath.” Testifying under oath may not have meant much to crooks and politicians but it meant something to the admiral. “The kind of crap that happened back in 2005 is not happening on my watch.”