Jesus, they knew about Angela and where she was. Who the hell was this guy?
“Please join Alice in her car, Mr. DeMarco.”
29
Alice was an athletic-looking young woman in her early thirties, wearing a black blazer over a white blouse, jeans, and running shoes. She had a cell phone gizmo in her ear. She was kind of cute, DeMarco thought: long black hair, brown eyes, a long straight nose, and a red-bronze complexion. Because of the nose and her coloring, DeMarco thought she might have some Native American in her, but the main impression he had of Alice was: serious.
Alice was as serious as a heart attack.
“Kneel on the seat,” Alice said. “I need to frisk you to see if you’re carrying a weapon.”
“I’m not carrying one,” DeMarco said. “I still need to pat you down.”
“Bite me,” DeMarco said.
Before Alice could respond to DeMarco’s childish comment, the man who had spoken to him previously, said, “It’s okay, Alice. I doubt Mr. DeMarco is armed. I’m sure I’ll be safe from him.” The man’s voice came from a speaker in Alice’s vehicle which was directly behind DeMarco’s head and he jumped in his seat when he heard the voice.
Alice stared at DeMarco for a few seconds-letting him know she wasn’t pleased that he’d interfered with her job-then said, “Buckle your seat belt.” She didn’t speak to him again for thirty minutes.
Alice drove onto the Memorial Parkway, crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge into the District of Columbia, and then got on 395. She stayed on 395 until she came to the Capitol South exit, took the exit, and then made a tour of Capitol Hill, turning frequently, backtracking occasionally. A couple of times she spoke to someone, saying, “Am I clear?” Apparently whoever she was talking to said she was. From Capitol Hill she took surface streets to reach the D.C. Beltway and then took the beltway exit to Silver Spring, Maryland, where she once again began driving through residential areas, this time dodging down the occasional alley, blowing through stop signs as if they didn’t exist, scaring the shit out of DeMarco. Finally, she stopped in front of a small house whose lawn was badly in need of cutting. There was a kid’s big-wheeled tricycle sitting on the grass near the front door.
DeMarco followed Alice into the house. The front door opened into a living room filled with inexpensive, mismatched furniture and smelled musty, as if the house had been locked up for some time. DeMarco stood in the living room for a moment, not sure what to do next, until a voice called out, “Mr. DeMarco, I’m in the kitchen.”
DeMarco entered the kitchen and saw a white-haired man in his sixties pouring coffee into two cups, and the guy was dressed like he’d just posed for the cover of GQ. DeMarco couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on his clothes. He bought the suits he wore for work at a Men’s Wearhouse in Alexandria and his casual clothes at outlet malls. He figured the guy pouring coffee had spent more on his tie than he had spent on his suit.
“I believe you take your coffee black,” the man said, as he handed DeMarco a cup.
DeMarco nodded. He wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew that.
The man sat down at the small kitchen table and gestured for DeMarco to take a seat. As soon as he did, DeMarco said, “Who are you?”
“Before we start,” the man said, “would you mind giving Alice the recorder you took from St. James?”
DeMarco looked over his shoulder. Alice was standing behind him, about four feet away, her face expressionless. He turned back to the white haired man and said, “I don’t think so.”
“Alice,” the man said, and because of the tone of voice he used, DeMarco glanced back at Alice again. This time she was holding an odd-looking plastic gun with a yellow hand grip.
“That’s a Taser, Mr. DeMarco,” the man said. “It won’t kill you but I understand being shot with one is rather uncomfortable. So, please, may I have the recorder?”
DeMarco thought for a moment about shoving his chair back into Alice and hopefully knocking her off balance long enough for him to wrestle the Taser away from her. Not a chance. If he tried he was just going to end up on the floor twitching like a guy with St. Vitus dance. He pulled the recorder from his pocket and slid it across the table to the white-haired man, and he tossed it to Alice.
“Thank you,” the man said to DeMarco. To Alice he said, “Alice, would you please wait in the living room until I’m finished talking to Mr. DeMarco.”
What the guy meant was, Stick around, Alice, in case I need you to shoot DeMarco.
After Alice departed, DeMarco asked for a second time, “Who are you?”
The man smiled slightly, this annoying Cheshire Cat smile. “Do you know what the NSA is, Mr. De-May I call you Joe, please? Mr. DeMarco is just too cumbersome, too formal.”
“Yeah, you can call me Joe. And what do I call you?”
“As I was saying, Joe. Do you know what the NSA is?”
“The National Security Administration.”
The man shook his head. “The National Security Agency, Joe. Not Administration. The NSA is the largest intelligence service in this country, both in terms of money and manpower, and yet you, like most people, don’t even know its proper name.”
DeMarco started to say that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the proper name, but the man asked, “And do you know what the NSA does, Joe?”
“I know you guys got caught bugging a bunch of telephones without warrants a few years ago.”
“That’s not quite accurate, but close enough. At any rate, the NSA has two primary functions. The first of those is cryptography. To keep it simple, we devise codes and encrypted systems to protect America’s secrets, and we break the codes of nations who may be unfriendly toward us. Our second mission is, in a word, eavesdropping. We eavesdrop in every way imaginable, Joe, on America’s enemies and our allies. We eavesdrop on cell phones and faxes and e-mails. We eavesdrop on satellite and microwave transmissions and undersea cables. There is virtually no form of communication that we can’t intercept and record.
“When you think of spies, Joe, you probably imagine Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a cynical man in a rumpled trench coat paying greedy communists for their secrets. Well, that’s not the way it works most of the time. Not in the twenty-first century. The NSA is the spies, Joe. Spying today, the largest part of it, the most effective part of it, is done by eavesdropping on our enemies.
“So you asked who I am. Well, I’m a spy. Think of me as Richard Burton, minus the bad trench coat.”
“What does this have to do with-”
“Unfortunately, when we’re listening to all these transmissions-these radio and telephone communications-sometimes, although not intentionally, we intercept transmissions here in this country. We don’t mean to but…”
“Bullshit,” DeMarco said.
“… but sometimes we do. And therein lies the problem, Joe. Our problem. Yours and mine. We overheard, quite by accident, a very disturbing conversation. And now I’m going to play that conversation for you.”
He took a small digital recorder from the inside pocket of his suit coat, a recorder similar to the one DeMarco had found in the church. He hit the PLAY button and DeMarco heard:
Alpha, do you have Carrier?
Negative. Monument blocking.
Bravo, do you have Carrier?
Roger that. I have him clear.
Very well. Stand by.
DeMarco sat, mesmerized, listening to the recording until the NSA man tapped the STOP button.
“Well, Joe, what do you think of that?”
“I think somebody popped Carrier and Messenger. And I think Carrier was my cousin and Messenger was a Washington Post reporter named Hansen.”
“Very good. And they were killed because of what General Breed said on that recorder you found in the church.”
“But what the hell does this have to do with me?” DeMarco said. “I mean, if you know all this stuff-”