He didn’t actually have to identify himself; she’d have recognized the prissy enunciation anywhere. Kalmbach was the FBI’s Assistant Director who oversaw the hundreds of agents in D.C. and Virginia who worked out of the Washington Field Office as well as her satellite office in Manassas, Virginia. She’d met Kalmbach a few times, enough to recognize his type: the worst kind of kiss-up, kick-down bureaucratic infighter. A paper-pushing rattlesnake.
Kalmbach had no reason to call her directly. At least, no good reason. And why was he calling from the FBI’s national headquarters, instead of from his office on Fourth Street?
“Yes, sir,” she said. She sounded blase, but she felt her stomach clench. She watched the brushed-steel elevator doors glide shut in front of her. The two halves of a giant fingerprint, etched on the elevator doors, came together. The fingerprint had been some government committee’s idea of art, which was precisely what it looked like: art by government committee.
“Agent Connolly, who is Jozef Padlo?”
Ah ha. “He’s an inspector with the Polish National Police and he’s working a triple homicide in Warsaw that-
“Agent-Marion, if I may-”
“M. T., sir.”
But he went on smoothly, ignoring her: “-Our legat in Warsaw just emailed me a letter rogatory from the Polish Ministry of Justice, requesting that we grant immediate entry into the U.S. to this… Jozef Padlo. He says you personally guaranteed him clearance. Our legat is understandably ticked off.”
So this was what he was calling about. She hadn’t gone through channels, so some junior FBI paper-pusher, who’d picked the short straw and had ended up assigned to the American Embassy Bureau in Warsaw, had gotten bent out of shape.
“Obviously there was some translation problem,” she said. “I didn’t guarantee anything to Inspector Padlo. He’s provided invaluable assistance to us in a case at Dulles involving the murder of one, possibly two, cops. Since it seems to be connected to his triple homicide, he-”
“It ‘seems to be connected,’” Kalmbach interrupted. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Trying to conceal her annoyance, she explained as crisply as she could. “Padlo was able to ID the shooter at Dulles as a Serb national and a war criminal who-”
“Excuse me, Agent Connolly. He ID’d the shooter based on what?”
“Surveillance video taken at Dulles.”
“Ah. So Inspector Padlo viewed the video, then?”
She faltered. “No. I did. But Padlo made a positive ID based on my verbal description to him.”
“Your… verbal description,” Kalmbach echoed softly. Condescension dripped from every word.
“In fact-” she began, but Kalmbach cut her off.
“Do you understand how complex and involved the process is by which a foreign law enforcement official is granted entry into the United States? It involves weeks of legal findings and sworn affidavits by the DOJ’s Criminal Division, the Office of International Affairs. It’s a cumbersome and extremely sensitive legal affair and not one to be taken lightly. For one thing, there must be absolutely incontrovertible evidence of dual criminality.”
Oh, for God’s sake, she thought. The guy lived and breathed paperwork. It was a wonder he hadn’t already died of white lung. “Sir, if Padlo’s right then, those three homicides in Warsaw are tied to these police shootings at Dulles Airport and we’ve got a clear-cut case of dual criminality.”
“A case built on a verbal description over the telephone, Agent Connolly? I hardly think that constitutes a finding of dual criminality. This is an awfully slender reed. I’m afraid we’re not going to be able to grant a visa to Inspector Padlo.”
Yeah, she thought. If Jozef wanted to get into the country quick and easy, no questions asked, he should just join Al Qaeda and enroll in flight school. We’d let him in without a second look.
But she said, “So you’re saying that if we had a clear-cut ID of the shooter-connecting the Warsaw homicides to the Dulles ones-you’d have no problem letting Padlo in?”
“We don’t have that, do we?” Kalmbach said acidly.
“No, sir,” she said. “Not yet.”
“Thank you, Agent… Marion.”
“M. T.,” she said.
But he’d hung up.
She’d been M. T. since the age of thirteen.
She’d always hated her given name, “Marion.” Her father had also been Marion; but then, as he was always proud to point out, that was John Wayne’s real name. In Gulfport, Mississippi, where Dad had been a part-time deputy in the Harrison County Sheriff ’s Department, the Duke was up there with Jesus Christ. Bigger, to some folks.
But to her, “Marion” was either a librarian or a housewife in a TV sitcom, and neither fit her self-image. She was a tomboy and proud of it. As tough as any boy, she had even beat up the seventh-grade class bully for daring to call her adored younger brother Wayne a “sissy.”
So she insisted on being called by her initials, which to her ears sounded tough and no-nonsense and the exact opposite of girly-girl. Maybe even a little enigmatic.
Over the years, she’d learned about makeup, and she’d developed a pretty damned nice figure, and she worked out every morning at five for at least an hour. When she wanted to look hot, she could. And she knew that when she put on that slinky red jersey halter dress from Banana Republic she always drew appreciative glances from men.
At work, though, she downplayed her femininity as much as possible. The FBI was still a boys’ club, and she was convinced that the guys took you a lot more seriously if you didn’t arouse their libidos.
Like the guy who sat across from her right now. His name was Bruce Ardsley, and he was a forensic video analyst with the Bureau’s Forensic Audio, Video, and Image Analysis Unit. The main FBI lab was in D.C., in the Hoover building, but they’d recently installed an outpost here because of all the demand on the Bureau since 9/11.
Ardsley wore thick aviator-frame glasses and had greasy hair and long bushy sideburns that might have been modish in the Swinging ‘70s, and he was notorious for trying to hit on all the female agents and administrative assistants. But he’d given up on her long ago. Now they got along fine.
His office, in the basement of the new resident agency building, was no bigger than a closet, jammed with steel shelves heaped with video monitors and digital editing decks and CPUs. Taped to one wall was a mangled poster of a man running up stadium steps. Above his blurred figure was the word PERSISTENCE. At his feet it said, “There is no GIANT step that does it. It’s a lot of LITTLE steps.”
She handed Ardsley two disks. “The one marked Dulles is from Dulles Airport,” Connolly said.
“Clever.”
She smiled. “The other has the photos from Warsaw.” As he promised, Padlo had emailed her photos of Agim Rugova’s henchmen. One of them was Dragan Stefanovic, the man Padlo thought might be the Dulles shooter who’d tried to kill Harold Middleton. Stefanovic had served under Agim Rugova, which made him a war criminal at the very least. After the war, Padlo said, he’d become a mercenary and had gone into hiding.
“High-def, I hope.”
“I doubt it,” she replied.
“Well, all I can do is my best,” Ardsley said. “At least one thing in our favor is the new networked digital-video surveillance system at Dulles. The airports authority dumped a boatload of money on this a couple years ago. Bought a bunch of high-priced Nextiva S2600e wide-dynamic range IP cameras with on-board analytical software- based solutions.”
“Translation, please,” said Connolly.
“Meaning the facial-recognition software is still crap and the images are still fuzzy, but now we can all feel good about how much money we’re throwing at the terrorists.”
“And that’s in our favor… how exactly?” she asked.
He pointed to the steel shelves lined with video monitors. “Once the Bureau realized how crappy the facial- recognition system is, they were forced to sink more money into toys for boys like me to play with. Remember the
