While Wallace was getting the clothes, DeMarco peeked out the front window and saw a black SUV driving slowly down the street-the kind of SUV that Alice drove. It was dark outside and the windows in the SUV were tinted, so he couldn’t tell who was driving, but his gut told him it was Alice or one of her gun-toting friends.
Wallace came back with a pair of sweat pants and a sweat shirt. The sweat shirt had an XXXL label and the tennis shoes were a size smaller than DeMarco wore. DeMarco had no idea why Perry Wallace owned sweat clothes as he had never-judging by his waistline-exercised in his life. Wallace refused to give him the keys to his good car, but he also owned a beat-up Mazda pickup that had about two hundred thousand miles on it.
As he was leaving, DeMarco said, “If anybody asks you about me, you haven’t seen me.”
“You got that right,” Perry said.
34
Dillon was shoeless, standing on the carpet in his office, tapping golf balls at a drinking glass using a long-handled putter, a belly putter. When Claire entered his office, he glanced over at her and said, “Have you ever used one of these before? I know Vijay Singh used one for a while. I rather like it.”
“The name of the man who was driving the Cadillac last night is John Levy,” Claire said.
Dillon sighed, leaned the putter against a wall, slipped his feet back into his Gucci loafers, and took a seat behind his desk. “And what do we know about Mr. Levy?” he asked.
“He enlisted in the army at age eighteen and twenty months later showed up at Fort Myer.”
“The Tomb of the Unknowns?”
“Correct. He was there at the same time that Charles Bradford was base commander. After Fort Myer, Levy spent time at Fort Benning, Fort Lewis, Bosnia, and Iraq One. Typical noncom’s career. He was assigned to Washington about the same time as Bradford got his second star and just before Martin Breed did his first job for Bradford, the one in Turkey.”
“Hmmm,” Dillon said.
“A couple months after being posted to Washington, Levy resigned from the army, which is odd because by then he had more than ten years in the service and appeared to be having a stellar career in uniform based on his fit reps. And then he started job hopping. He did a stint with the DIA, a few years as civilian with CID, and currently he’s the deputy director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency. When Bradford was posted overseas, whatever agency Levy worked for would transfer him to the same location.”
When Dillon didn’t respond, Claire continued, “So it appears that the same year Bradford recruited Martin Breed, he also recruited John Levy. Two like-minded men who were incredibly dedicated to Bradford and believed completely in what he was doing. He allowed Breed to stay in the army and advanced his career and used him for certain assignments. For other assignments, particularly the stateside ones, it appears that he used Levy. Apparently he didn’t want Levy attached to a military unit, because he’d have less freedom to do whatever Bradford wanted.”
“ Apparently, ” Dillon said. “It appears, ” he added, the words dripping off his tongue like bitter fruit. Before Claire could object, he said, “I don’t disagree with your analysis, Claire, but it would certainly be nice to have some facts to support all this.”
“How many damn facts do you want?” Claire said. “We know Levy tried to kill DeMarco last night. We know he killed Russo and we know the tomb guards helped him. And we know what Breed said on that recording. I don’t care how doped up and sick he was, some of what Breed said had to be true.”
Dillon nodded as if conceding the point.
“So now what, Dillon? What do we do now that we know John Levy is Bradford’s man?”
Dillon didn’t answer her question.
Instead he said, “Where’s DeMarco, Claire?”
“What the hell happened, John?” Bradford spoke calmly, suppressing the anger-and the panic-he was feeling. Generals don’t panic.
“It was an ambush,” Levy said, and proceeded to tell Bradford what had happened at the baseball field in Falls Church.
“My God,” Bradford said. “This is-”
He opened a drawer in his desk and began to reach for a bottle of Chivas Regal he kept there for special occasions-then slammed the drawer shut. He never drank during the day, and he wasn’t about to start now. “Do you have any idea how many people were with DeMarco last night?” he asked.
What he really meant was: How many more people now know our secret?
“No, sir. But there was more than one shooter. Maybe two or three.”
“Why in hell didn’t you take a team with you, for Christ’s sake?”
“I was afraid to use the sentinels again since someone was already curious about them. I figured I could handle it myself. I didn’t expect DeMarco to have so much support. Or any support, for that matter.”
“Who do you think was helping DeMarco?”
“I don’t know. I keep coming back to whoever identified Witherspoon through his fingerprints. It’s somebody in the government, but I have no idea who.”
“Goddammit, John, I need answers!” Bradford shouted.
“I know that, sir, and I’m doing the best I-”
“Where’s DeMarco now?” Bradford said.
“I don’t know. That’s what I’ve been doing, trying to find him.”
“John, you must find him. You need to find out what he knows and who’s working with him. This… this is a damn disaster!”
“Maybe not, sir. Keep in mind that the only thing DeMarco seems to know is that Russo was meeting with a reporter and that you visited General Breed before he died. I think, if he knew more, he would have said so when he talked to Hopper.”
“I can’t take that chance. Find him, John. Find him and find out what he knows and kill him.”
DeMarco was in a room at a motel called the Day’s Inn, and the motel was located in Crystal City, a shopping and office complex near Reagan National Airport. He was lying on the bed in the baggy sweat clothes he’d borrowed from Perry Wallace and watching the morning news to see if the newscasters would mention that the body of an FBI agent had been found in the woods near Tuckahoe Park. Of course, they didn’t mention any such thing.
When DeMarco had left Perry Wallace’s place, he knew he couldn’t go home. He needed to find a place where he could hunker down for a while and figure things out. He picked the Day’s Inn because it wasn’t too expensive and because it was near the Crystal City shopping mall, where he could buy some clothes. The other thing was, the motel had an underground garage where he could park Perry’s truck. He was worried about the truck because he was guessing that by now the NSA knew he was driving it.
Last night, when he abandoned his car and his clothes, Dillon and his friends would have quickly concluded that DeMarco couldn’t stay on the streets and would most likely go to the home of someone nearby to hide. They’d look at his phone bills to see if he knew anyone in the area and, if that didn’t work, they’d start looking at people who worked for Congress. They might even know that he worked for Mahoney, although, and because of the things he did for Mahoney, he wasn’t an official member of Mahoney’s staff. If they knew he worked for Mahoney, they’d immediately zero in on Wallace. Whatever the case, they’d figure out pretty quickly that Perry Wallace worked for Congress and lived half a mile from where DeMarco had dumped his car and then they’d send someone to question him. They’d probably tell Wallace that DeMarco was a fugitive and that he’d broken some law, and if Wallace didn’t cooperate he would go to jail with DeMarco-at which point, Perry would sing like a canary and Dillon’s spies would then have the license plate number and make of Perry’s old pickup and start searching for it.