Dillon walked into the operations room. Claire had called him as soon as she learned DeMarco had made a copy of the recordings.
“Where the hell’s he going?” Claire muttered to herself.
“The Capitol?” Dillon said. “To see a congressman he knows?”
“Then why didn’t he get off at the Capitol South Station? That’s closer to the House offices.”
“Then maybe it’s a senator he wants to talk to. The Senate Office Buildings are three blocks from Union Station.”
“We have him on the satellite, Claire.” It was one of the techs speaking, his little nerd eyes shining. “He’s running.”
Claire looked up at the screen. Yeah, there he was outside Union Station, running. And he wasn’t jogging; he was sprinting. Claire bet DeMarco hadn’t run that fast since high school.
“Alice,” Claire said, “he just came out of Union Station. Do you have anyone near there?”
“I’ll be there in two minutes,” Alice said.
“Hurry, Alice,” Claire said. “Two minutes may be too late.”
One of the techs watching the satellite feed said, “He’s not going to the Senate Office Buildings. He just ran past them.”
Dillon closed his eyes. He knew where DeMarco was going.
“He’s going to the Supreme Court,” Dillon said. “He figured out who Thomas is.”
Alice could see DeMarco ahead of her; he was just starting up the steps of the Supreme Court. She couldn’t get any closer to the building in her car because concrete security barriers blocked the street in front of the court.
She stopped the SUV, opened up the tail gate, and took out the rifle. She heard a nearby pedestrian cry out in alarm.
DeMarco was now halfway up the steps.
She aimed at DeMarco through the scope, took a breath, and pulled the trigger.
DeMarco was almost there. He could see U.S. Capitol cops at the top of the stairs looking down at him. He could tell they didn’t like the way he looked-some wild-eyed guy running up the steps like a madman. He figured they were going to swarm all over him as soon as he made it to the top of the steps-and that was fine by him.
Then he tripped. He was winded running all the way from Union Station and his left foot hit one of the steps and he pitched forward. At that moment, just as he tripped, he saw a woman coming down the steps topple over. One minute she was walking, and the next second she dropped to the ground like her legs had turned to rubber. He didn’t know what had happened to the woman and he didn’t have time to find out. He got up and started running again.
“Damn it,” Alice muttered. The son of a bitch tripped and she missed him. She figured she had time for one more shot. She aimed again.
As DeMarco passed the fallen woman, he saw the dart sticking out of her chest. A fucking tranquilizer dart. Someone was shooting at him.
But he was almost there now, just a couple more steps to go. And the Capitol Cops were coming right at him, five of them.
DeMarco zigzagged to his left-not to avoid the cops but to throw off the shooter’s aim. But the cops thought he was trying to get past them, and one of them pulled out a gun. Oh, shit. The other four cops just kept coming at him but before they reached him, the one in the lead dropped to the ground. There was a dart in his neck.
And then the cops were on him, driving him to the ground, covering him with their bodies.
Thank God.
“How did he figure out that Thomas was Thomas Antonelli?” Claire said.
Dillon stood up. “I don’t know,” he said, “but he did.”
“Where are you going?” Claire said, when she saw Dillon walking slowly toward the door of the operations room.
“Where am I going?” Dillon repeated. “Well, Claire, I think I’m going to jail.”
And Dillon was right.
Epilogue
“Okay, Calvin, I’ll see your three Marlboros,” Clarence Goodman finally said, and tentatively put three Salems down in the center of the card table like they were hundred-dollar chips.
George Aguilera, smiling like he’d already won, immediately added a small can of smoked oysters to a pot which consisted mostly of cigarettes but also a John Grisham paperback and a five-year-old Playboy. “I’ll call your three and raise you three,” Aguilera said.
“Wait a damn minute,” Calvin Loring said. “I thought we agreed yesterday that the oysters were worth five cigarettes, not six.”
The debate ensued-and Dillon closed his eyes.
In the minimum security section of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex at White Deer, Pennsylvania, cigarettes were the gold standard and other commodities for bartering and wagering were based on their value. The value of a cigarette, however, changed periodically, owing to availability of supply and other more esoteric factors. Dillon was thinking about writing an essay on the subject, explaining how the prison economy in black market goods and services was eerily parallel to that of the outside world-there was inflation, price-fixing, insider trading, and market fluctuations due to disasters-although the disasters themselves were unique to prisons, such as lockdowns or retribution from the guards.
Dillon and the three men playing poker with him were dressed identically: blue jeans, white T-shirts, white socks, and plain-toed black lace-up shoes. Dillon’s jeans, however, had been tailored by another inmate, a man incarcerated for identity theft but who was quite skillful with needle and thread.
None of his poker-playing pals were violent men. George Aguilera had been the president of a telemarketing company that specialized in bilking old ladies out of their savings. Calvin Loring was a physician who had supplemented his income by supplying OxyContin to teenage addicts via the Internet. Medicaid fraud charges against him were pending. Clarence Goodman had been a hedge fund manager-and the designated fall guy for looting a union pension fund. The depressing part for Dillon was not that he was incarcerated with such people but instead that these three men were the best poker players at Allenwood-and they were uniformly atrocious. None of them, including the hedge fund manager, appeared to have the slightest understanding of the mathematical odds of a particular hand winning or losing. After Dillon had won enough cigarettes to become the Donald Trump of Allenwood, he began cheating. He had always been a good card mechanic and in prison he had plenty of time to practice and become a truly stellar one. He didn’t cheat to win, however. When it was his turn to deal, he would give all the players, except for himself, outrageously good hands-four of a kind, flushes, full houses-and then would sit back and watch them go crazy betting against one another. It was one of the things he did to alleviate the perpetual boredom.
Boredom was, in fact, the worst thing about being in prison-although if he had been sent to some other federal facility he might not have been able to say that. He had almost ended up in a maximum security prison in Ohio, where he would have undoubtedly become the plaything of one of the psychotics who resided there. Fortunately, and thanks to information he had obtained while at the NSA, he was able to keep that from happening.
It had all gone pretty much the way he’d expected: DeMarco had delivered the recordings to Justice Antonelli-and Antonelli believed every word he heard. DeMarco had figured out that Thomas Antonelli was the Thomas on Breed’s recording when he saw a newspaper photo of Antonelli at General Breed’s funeral and the accompanying article that said Antonelli was related to Breed’s wife. And then Antonelli did exactly what Dillon had thought he would do: he went immediately to the president and told him that if he didn’t clean up this whole NSA/Bradford mess, he was going to go public with everything.
Fortunately, at least from Dillon’s perspective, Antonelli was wise enough to realize that the U.S. government couldn’t let the entire world know what Charles Bradford had done because no one would believe that Bradford had been acting independently and without the sanction of his government. If Bradford had only killed a few Muslim terrorists, it might have been different, but Bradford had executed members of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Chinese governments-and the president really didn’t want to piss off the Chinese. Nor did the president particularly want it known the NSA was-once again-intercepting the communications of U.S. citizens without the required warrants.