He turned off the morning news but continued to lie on the bed looking up at the ceiling. What the hell was he going to do? He couldn’t hide in a motel room forever. What he wished, more than anything else, was that he still had the recorder he’d found in the church-but thanks to Alice and her Taser, he didn’t have it. If he had the recorder, he would have some leverage over Dillon, and the press would be more likely to believe him. Without the recording, however, he strongly doubted that anyone was going to believe him when he started babbling about the NSA and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a dead FBI agent whose corpse couldn’t be found.
But he needed help and he needed someone who would buy his story, and the two people who could help him most-Emma and Mahoney-were unavailable. He supposed he could track Emma down. It wouldn’t be impossible to find out which cruise ship she was on, but tracking her down would involve a bunch of phone calls-and the NSA had made him leery of talking to anyone on the phone. Then it occurred to him that contacting Emma could be dangerous for her, possibly even fatal. He’d already unintentionally gotten Angela embroiled in his problems and the people he was dealing with were extraordinary adversaries-people with military-trained killers at their disposal and the most sophisticated technologies the government possessed. No, he wouldn’t get Emma involved.
But he needed somebody. He needed somebody who could deal with the Pentagon, somebody with federal muscles, huge federal muscles. What he needed was somebody in the damn FBI. The Bureau was the right organization to deal with this.
The problem with going to the Bureau, however, was he couldn’t just pick up the phone and call them. Not without any proof. So he needed to contact somebody at the FBI he could trust, somebody who would not only believe him but be able to steer him to people who had the power and the guts to deal with something as big as this.
And he knew such a person. He just didn’t know if she would help him.
About three years ago, he and Emma had been sucked into an investigation at a naval shipyard on the West Coast. It started out as a little whistleblower incident-somebody complaining how the government’s money was being squandered-but then the investigation mutated dangerously into a case involving espionage and a psychotic Chinese spy. During the case, DeMarco had a brief fling with an FBI agent named Diane Carlucci. The fling might have amounted to more but Diane was transferred from Washington, D.C. to LA, and out of DeMarco’s life.
But she was back in Washington now. He hadn’t known she was back until he ran into her on the street in Georgetown one day. She was with a rugged, good-looking, gray-haired guy a few years older than DeMarco, whom she introduced as her husband. She and DeMarco had stood there for a moment, both feeling a bit embarrassed. They couldn’t talk about the good times they once had-not with her new husband standing there-so DeMarco mumbled a few words about how good she looked, which she did, and how great it was to see her again and then walked away thinking about what might have been.
But Diane was the right person to call. Unlike Hopper, DeMarco knew she was honest. And she’d been with the Bureau long enough that she’d be able to put him in touch with the right big shot to talk to about this whole NSA mess.
So that was DeMarco’s new half-assed plan: meet with Diane Carlucci and convince her to introduce him to a heavy hitter at the Bureau, a big honcho near the top who would know how to proceed with a case of this magnitude, involving people at the highest levels in the Department of Defense.
“Where’s DeMarco, Claire?” Dillon asked.
“I don’t know,” Claire said. “We never expected him to bolt, but while Alice’s people were all following Levy and removing Hopper’s body, that’s just what the bastard did. He abandoned his car, took off all his clothes, and dumped everything that had listening and tracking devices installed in them. After we located his car, we identified people in the area he might know and found a guy named Perry Wallace, who’s John Mahoney’s chief of staff.”
“Mahoney? Is DeMarco connected to Mahoney?”
“I don’t know. He isn’t a member of his staff. He probably just knows Wallace because they both work in the Capitol. Anyway, Alice paid Wallace a visit, scared the livin’ shit out of him, and he admitted he loaned DeMarco a vehicle, but said he had no idea what DeMarco was doing or where he was going. And knowing how Alice can be, I believe him. But right now, we have no idea where DeMarco is.”
“You need to find him, Claire, and you need to find him before John Levy does.”
“I know that,” she snapped. It really irritated her when he stated the obvious. “What do I do after I find him?”
“Put him in a safe house with people who can make him stay there. I haven’t decided what to do about Mr. DeMarco yet.”
As deputy director of the Pentagon Force Protection Agency, John Levy had the resources at his disposal to pursue DeMarco. He called four senior agents into his office and gave them a photo of DeMarco and all the information he had obtained on the man.
“But you can’t use local law enforcement to help you,” he told his agents. “This agency needs to track this man down independently.”
“Why are we looking for him, sir?” one of the agents asked.
Levy knew the men who worked for him resented him. He’d been brought in from the outside, elevated immediately to a senior position, and had an incredible amount of power-power that was disproportionate to his position. But they’d follow his orders-they were afraid not to-and they’d accept whatever explanation he gave them.
Answering the agent’s question, he said, “DeMarco has been identified as a credible threat to Pentagon security. Why he’s a threat is classified. Just find him, but don’t approach him until you’ve talked to me.”
DeMarco decided not to call Diane Carlucci from his room at the Day’s Inn. He thought he could trust her but he wasn’t sure how she’d react to what he was about to tell her, and she might decide to trace the call. But what he was really afraid of was the NSA tracing the call. He didn’t know how they’d know about the call if he called from a randomly selected phone but he’d become so paranoid about NSA capabilities that he wasn’t willing to take any chances.
He walked over to the window and peered through a crack in the drapes. Across the street from the Day’s Inn, just on the other side of the Jefferson Davis Highway, was a Hyatt Regency. That would work.
The snooty-looking clerk at the Hyatt’s registration desk gave him a dirty look when DeMarco entered the hotel-which was not surprising considering his wrinkled, oversized sweat suit attire-but the clerk didn’t stop him when he walked over to a bank of pay phones.
“This is Agent Carlucci.”
“Diane, it’s Joe.”
“Uh, Joe, how are you doing?”
She was obviously surprised to hear from him and she also sounded somewhat guarded, maybe thinking that he was calling to try and rekindle their affair. She had no idea that sex was the last thing on his mind.
“Diane, I need to see you. Right away.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell you over the phone.”
She didn’t say anything. He was obviously going to have to tell her more to get her to drop whatever she was doing and come to him.
“Diane, this isn’t about us. All I can tell you is that I can’t talk about it on the phone, it involves the Bureau, and it’s serious. Really serious. And I need you to meet me. I can’t come to you.”
Diane still didn’t say anything. One thing he knew about her was that when it came to her career, she wasn’t going to take chances.
“Diane, you know me. You know I wouldn’t ask you to do something like this if it wasn’t important. And like I said, it involves the Bureau, and not in a good way.”
“All right, Joe. Where do you want to meet?”
DeMarco thought about that for a second. He didn’t want to meet her too close to where he was staying. “Rosslyn,” he said. “There’s a little coffee shop on Wilson Boulevard, close to the metro station, called the Java Hut. How long will it take you to get there?”