“About one A.M.”
“Where were they?”
“I don’t know, exactly. Somewhere in the District or Northern Virginia. For some reason, that’s best location we could get. I need to take a look at the software to see if it’s got some kind of glitch, but it could have been the com gear these guys were using.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment. She just sat there staring at him like it was his fault the fucking software didn’t work, but then she nodded and he exhaled in relief.
Claire Whiting scared the hell out him. She scared everyone. Well, maybe not Dillon, but everyone else.
Dillon Crane was on the phone when Claire entered his office.
Dillon was sixty-three years old, tall and slender-and the subject of infinite office speculation. His short white hair was trimmed each week by the same barber the president used, and his suits were handmade by a Milanese tailor who now resided in Baltimore. The suit he wore today was light gray in color, and his shirt was also gray, a darker gray than the suit. Claire had no name for the color of his tie-something with maroon and charcoal black and dark blue all swirled together-but whatever the color, it matched the suit and shirt perfectly.
Dillon never wore white shirts and simple ties to work. He’d remarked once that a white shirt, accompanied inevitably by the ubiquitous striped tie, was the uniform of a bureaucrat, and even though he was one he refused to dress like one. And since the hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year he earned from the National Security Agency was a pittance compared to the annual income from his trust fund, he could afford to dress however he pleased.
He smiled when he saw Claire in his doorway-that annoying ain’t-life-droll smile of his-but continued with his phone call. “Clark,” he was saying, “all I can do is relay to you what we intercepted. It appears — and I can’t be any more definitive-that a certain opium-growing warlord is about to assassinate an Afghani politician who has grown contrary of late.”
Claire realized Dillon was talking to Clark Palmer, deputy to the president’s national security advisor. Dillon, on one occasion, had said to her, “Clark’s a rock-only not so smart.”
He listened for a moment, rolled his eyes for Claire’s benefit, and said into the phone, “No, Clark, I won’t send you a memo. The entire conversation was two sentences long, and I’ve just given you the NSA’s translation and interpretation of those sentences. Have a nice day.”
Dillon hung up the phone and smiled at Claire again. “You look lovely today,” he said.
She ignored the compliment as she always did.
“We picked up something that could be important.”
“I’m sure it’s important, Claire, or you wouldn’t be here. But is it interesting?”
Dillon, as she well knew, was easily bored. And she knew exactly what he meant by interesting. A White House lackey leaking a memo to the Post; a colonel at the Pentagon whispering bid specs to a contractor; an undersecretary at State calling her lover at the Israeli embassy-those things could be important and they often were-but they weren’t interesting. They were business as usual.
The CD in Claire’s hand was not business as usual.
“Yes, Dillon,” she said, “it’s interesting.” She handed him the CD. “The password’s grassyknoll, lower case, one word.”
“Grassy knoll?” Dillon said, but he didn’t say more and took the CD from her and slid it into the drive of his computer.
Alpha, do you have Carrier?
Negative. Monument blocking.
When he had finished listening to the recording, he said, “Now that is interesting. What do we know?”
“What do we know?” Claire repeated. “We know nothing. But would you like me to speculate?”
“Oh, please do, Claire. Speculate away.”
“First,” she said, “I think these guys were military.”
“Logic?”
“These people were on radios, not cell phones, and the radios were something special. They weren’t using walkie-talkies from RadioShack. They were using encrypted AN/PRC-150s.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Claire said. “They had hard-to-get, encrypted, military com gear. Then you have the lingo: roger this, roger that, return to jump-off. And the discipline. When Transport didn’t respond, the guy-in-charge never lost his cool, and when the two males showed up, instant damage assessment. Told his guys to beat feet and they did, no backtalk, no nothing. We’re talking serious discipline here, the kind that gets pounded into soldiers.”
Dillon waggled a hand, exposing a monogrammed cuff link. “Maybe,” he said, “but not definitive. What else?”
“Well, just the obvious. This was a hit. They knew Carrier was meeting Messenger. They may have been following Carrier. They went high-tech on the radios because they were afraid someone might intercept their chatter, maybe somebody like us, which further indicates they could be military or part of the G.”
Dillon nodded. No disagreement so far.
“This conversation took place at approximately one A.M., and I think this means that the meeting between Carrier and Messenger was intended to be secret. It was two people, for whatever reason, sneaking around in the dark. And now I’m winging it here, going totally from my gut, but I think Alpha and Bravo took long shots. I’m seeing snipers with night-vision scopes, sound suppressors, the whole enchilada.”
“Could be,” Dillon said.
Dillon, as Claire knew quite well, didn’t place much stock in gut feelings, even hers. He may have acted perpetually flippant but he preferred data.
“After they made the hit,” Claire said, “they were planning to take the bodies but Transport didn’t show. They got Messenger’s body but not Carrier’s, so for some reason getting Messenger was sufficient. If it hadn’t been, I think they would have popped the two males.” Claire stopped and took a breath. “And that’s it. End of speculation.”
“Do you have a location for this event?”
“Just the greater D.C. area. We couldn’t get anything better.”
“Why not?”
“We’re looking into that. We could have a software problem.”
“I don’t see how the software-”
Before Dillon could say more, Claire interrupted him. She didn’t have time to get embroiled in some nerdy technical discussion, and sometimes Dillon could be as much of a geek as her technicians. “Look, I’ll deal with the location issue, but do you want me to follow up on the intercept or not?”
Dillon hesitated and she knew why. Two people may have been killed, but solving homicides wasn’t his job-or hers. They could have solved a lot of homicides had they wanted to, but simple murder, at least from Dillon Crane’s perspective, wasn’t really all that important. On the other hand, the fact that these particular killers had been using encrypted radios and might be U.S. military personnel put a whole different spin on things. It could mean some other agency was keeping something from his agency.
And that was a no-no.
“Yes, let’s follow up on it,” Dillon said.
4
DeMarco got a bucket of balls and carried his clubs over to a slot on the driving range between two women in their fifties. His plan was to spend the next two hours whacking golf balls, concentrating particularly on his pitching, because he couldn’t pitch for shit. He was gonna play a lot of golf in the next seven days, and as he hadn’t played since last fall, he wanted to get the kinks out of his swing before he played an actual round.
Normally, he wouldn’t have a week to devote solely to golf, but he did at the moment because the two most important people in his life-and, therefore, the two people who most often prevented him from doing what he wanted to do-were both out of town. The first of those people was his boss.
