Claire waited impatiently for one of her agents to pick the lock on the door to Aaron Drexler’s temporary office. Drexler was currently in the cafeteria eating lunch, and one of Claire’s people was watching him, but Claire knew he wouldn’t be there for long.
When Drexler arrived at Fort Meade, Dillon had helpfully provided him an office. And Dillon, having the foresight to know something like this might be necessary, gave Drexler an office that had a simple key lock on the door. Dillon claimed office space was tight-which was true-and he apologized that he didn’t have a room available with a more sophisticated lock-which was not true. Had he wanted to, Dillon could have put Drexler in an office like he and Claire had, one with both a cipher lock and a thumbprint reader.
But, Dillon said to Drexler the day he showed him his temporary office, he understood that Drexler needed to have a secure place in which to store information. So inside Drexler’s office was a very impressive-looking safe. It was six feet high, three feet wide, and three feet deep, and its walls were four inches thick. It had a massive combination lock, eight inches in diameter, and one that required five numbers-not the usual three or four to open it-and it was made from an alloy that Dillon claimed was impervious to diamond-coated drill bits. It was so heavy, Dillon said, that if they ever had to move it from the office they’d have to knock out a wall and use a construction crane. And this was all true. Dillon then provided Drexler with instructions on how to change the combination for the safe to one of his own choosing.
What Dillon didn’t tell Drexler was that any decent safecracker-and Claire had three at her beck and call-would be able to open the safe in about the same amount of time as it would take to smash a kid’s piggy bank. The safe belonged in some sort of bank robbers’ museum, and the only reason it was still at the NSA was because they really would have to knock out a wall to get the monster out of the building.
Claire was surprised to find that the safe was practically empty. The only things inside it were a classified personnel directory, an outdated (and also classified) NSA organizational manual, and a stack of file folders. There were maybe a hundred folders, certainly no more than a hundred and fifty. Claire looked at the tabs on the file folders and saw people’s names. She flipped open the first folder and saw it was the personnel file of a GS-15 lawyer who was attempting to find a legitimate legal defense for secretly monitoring the ever-increasing volume of seemingly innocuous conversations occurring on Facebook and Twitter.
The folders were in alphabetical order. Claire Whiting, GS-15 Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, was six folders from the bottom of the stack.
26
“Goddammit!” Claire said, and slammed a small fist down on her desk. She had just listened to the recording of Anthony McGuire telling DeMarco that Paul Russo might have hidden something at a church. The recording had been obtained via the listening devices planted in DeMarco’s belt and cell phone.
“When did this conversation take place?” Claire asked.
“About an hour ago,” Gilbert said. “Hey,” he added defensively, “you were gone. I left you a message.”
Jesus Christ! She had that bastard Drexler breathing down her neck and now this happens.
“Where’s DeMarco now?” she said. “At the church. We have an agent watching him and-”
“Shit! Is he-”
“Calm down. He’s just-”
“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!”
“He’s just sitting in his car outside the church. There’s a funeral service going on, and it was just getting started when DeMarco got there.”
Thank God for that. Claire did not want DeMarco searching that church before she did. She sat for a moment, thinking and then called the agent who had planted the bugs in DeMarco’s house.
“Start a fire at his house,” she said.
“What?” the agent said. Arson wasn’t one of his normal duties.
“Start a fire at his house. I don’t want the place burned down, just start a fire. Lots of smoke. Then call the fire department right away. Then call DeMarco, pretend you’re from the fire department, and tell him his house is burning.”
“Won’t he wonder how the fire department got his cell phone number?”
“If your house was burning down,” Claire said, “do you think you’d be thinking about something like that?”
DeMarco stood at the back of the church, thinking he shouldn’t be there at all.
What he should have done after speaking to Paul’s ex-boyfriend was call the Bureau and tell them what McGuire had said. The problem was that McGuire’s story was pretty farfetched-the part about the government having killed Paul’s patient, who DeMarco was sure was General Martin Breed. He didn’t think McGuire had lied to him; he believed Paul really had told McGuire that the G had killed Breed-but just because Paul had said this didn’t make it true.
DeMarco had always found government conspiracy theories hard to swallow, and the reason for this was because he worked for the government. Most government employees he knew-the exception being Mahoney-were not only incapable of organizing an effective conspiracy, they were, more importantly, incapable of keeping anything secret. And a conspiracy isn’t a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. The other problem he had with calling the Bureau was he didn’t trust them-or at least he didn’t trust that guy Hopper.
So if Paul really had hidden something in the church, it would be nice to know what it was before he started making outrageous claims about the government killing a two-star general. But that presented another problem: St. James wasn’t St. Peter’s in Rome, but it was still a good-sized structure. There were over a hundred rows of pews, and whatever Paul had hidden-most likely some sort of document-could be taped to the bottom of any one of them. There was also a big altar with lots of nooks and crannies, a choir loft, a pipe organ, confessionals, restrooms, and the place where the priests dressed before saying mass, whatever that space was called. It would take him a week to search the church by himself-and there was no way he was going to spend a week doing that.
But he figured there had to be some kind of clue. Certainly Paul hadn’t intended for the reporter to have to search the entire church. Maybe one of the statues was St. Paul. That is, he assumed Paul was still a saint; his knowledge of saints currently approved by the Vatican was rather spotty. He started to walk around the church, not sure exactly what he was looking for, when his cell phone rang.
His cry of “Son of a bitch!” echoed loudly throughout God’s house.
“You got any idea who might want to burn your house down, Mr. DeMarco?” the fireman asked.
“No,” DeMarco said, but what he was really thinking about was the mess the damn firemen had made-they’d caused more damage than the fire. He was also thinking about the upcoming battle he was sure to have with his fucking insurance company.
“Whoever did this,” the fireman said, “took a bunch of old magazines, put them against your back door, and doused them with gasoline.”
DeMarco wondered if he should tell the fireman that the old magazines were his. He’d put them outside by his garbage can intending to take them to one of those newspaper recycling bins they had in some shopping malls, but he’d never gotten around to it. But if he told the fireman the magazines were his, then his insurance company could probably come up with some reason for saying the fire was his fault, and then the bastards would try to deny his claim. Hell, they’d try to deny his claim no matter what the facts were.
“The good news,” the fireman said, “is somebody called us as soon as they saw the smoke and we got here in three minutes and it only took us a couple of minutes to put the fire out.”