Day Zero (16 page)

“It’s fine, Adam,” Ross said, knowing he was a half a breath away from shooting the ID agent. “Stand down.”

“A courtesy call wouldn’t have worked?” the protective agent snapped. “You’re a presidential appointee, ma’am.”

Walter gave an insolent shrug. “The United States government isn’t really comfortable giving courtesy calls to suspected spies.”

Knight held the phone away from his face a bit so the general counsel rep could hear the conversation.

“You’re arresting her for spying?”

“Violation of the Espionage Act,” Walter said, almost as an afterthought. “I’m not at liberty to get into specifics. I will say it’s a pretty serious charge, considering you’re the director of what is arguably the world’s most powerful intelligence agency. I don’t understand how a woman of your standing could—”

“Shut your mouth,” Knight said, stepping in between them again, daring the ID agent to make a move.

Ross put an arm around his shoulder. “Calm down, Adam,” she said. “There’s no doubt that this is a bizarre situation, but if he’s got a warrant, we don’t have a choice.” She turned to Walter. “I’ll go with you,” she said, “but I’ll have to call the President first.”

“Oh, Virginia,” the gloating agent said. He shook his head like she was a small child that just didn’t understand the reality of the situation. “Do you really think I’d be here if he didn’t already know?”

 

G
arcia felt the phone buzz in the pocket of her running shorts and replaced the tiny bud back in her ear. She’d only planned to do five miles, but being followed gave her the extra adrenaline to run the entire ten-K loop through the park. Besides, her ex had often reminded her that running would keep what he called her “ghetto booty” from getting any larger than it already was. She preferred to think of herself as having breeder’s hips, but deadbeat son of a bitch or not, her ex happened to be right—at least on that aspect of her booty.

“Hello,” she said, slowing her pace some so she could hear over her own breathing.

“Garcia?” Winfield Palmer said.

“Yes, sir.” Ronnie slowed to a walk, confident there was an unmarked car a block or so away that she was driving crazy with her changes in pace. She owed Palmer her job—and more. As national security advisor to President Clark, he’d seen her for what she was, and plucked her from the obscurity of being a CIA uniformed officer and thrown her in to work with people like Quinn and Thibodaux. It was dangerous work, but, as Jacques often pointed out: What was the fun of livin’ if someone wasn’t tryin’ to kill you?

“Can you talk?” Palmer asked. Not one to check in and chat with subordinates, he didn’t really care if she was busy. He wanted to know if the line was secure.

“We’re okay,” Ronnie said. “I do have a tail, but the phone is good and I’m out on a run.”

“Outstanding,” he said, deadpan as if his news was anything but good. “An ID team just arrested Virginia Ross.”

Ronnie stopped altogether, leaning forward with her hands on both knees as if she was catching her breath. “The director?”

“Afraid so,” Palmer said.

“When?”

“Five minutes ago.”

Garcia put a hand on her head, walking in a slow circle while she gathered her thoughts. She wondered how he’d found out about it so fast, but then remembered she was talking to Win Palmer, the man who had contacts inside virtually every agency in the government.

“What did they charge her with?”

“Spying,” Palmer said. “Listen, I’m doing some research of my own, but I’m under a pretty fine microscope here. Is there any way you can use some of your contacts to dig into this? Find out where they’re holding her.”

“Why Ross?” Ronnie mused out loud. She didn’t voice it, but she wondered why Palmer was suddenly so interested in the director of the CIA.

“I had to talk the President out of replacing her a couple of times after her daughter died. But she’s a good woman. I’m thinking the new administration asked around and heard she was the same old stuffed-shirt bureaucrat. That’s why they kept her on. Look at what the taxpayers are getting for their buck. He’s kept Andrew Filson in place as Secretary of Defense because he’s a warmonger, but replaced the Sec State with Tom Watchel, one of the most self-serving dilettantes I’ve ever met in Washington. Last time he was on
Meet the Press
he kept calling North Korea North Dakota. Every other cabinet member and high-level position is being replaced with empire-building yes-men who care more about their careers than running the government.”

“From my lowly viewpoint,” Ronnie said, “that’s not much of a change in the status quo.”

“Touché,” Palmer scoffed. “I’m still trying to figure out their endgame. There are too many checks and balances in place to allow them to do anything drastic right away. Congress, the courts . . . and even the military would nip any overt action in the bud. But, they’re moving slowly to keep public opinion on their side. They’ve had nearly six months to lay the groundwork for whatever it is they plan to do.”

“What about the commission?” Garcia asked, referring to the bipartisan Rand Commission, chaired by Chief Justice William Rand of the Supreme Court.

“Don’t even get me started on that,” Palmer said. “Not on the phone at least. Can you get rid of your tail long enough to do some checking on Ross?”

“Of course,” Garcia said, jogging again. “Any word on Miyagi?”

“Just find Ross for me,” he said, avoiding the question. Anyone who knew Palmer well knew he had a soft spot for the Japanese woman.

“Will do, sir.”

“Ronnie,” Palmer said before she could end the call. He always called her Garcia and the personal touch caught her off guard. There was a catch in his voice she’d not heard before. “You watch yourself.”

“I’ll do some checking and get back with you,” Garcia said. She’d be careful, but if the IDTF had killed a woman as tough as Emiko Miyagi and carted the director of the CIA off to jail, there wasn’t a whole lot for her to depend on but dumb luck.

R
onnie bumped her front door shut with a hip and twisted the dead-bolt lock. She reset her alarm on the panel just inside, next to a framed photograph of her Russian father and smiling Cuban mother. She kicked off her shoes and peeled away her sweaty shirt and sports bra, grateful for air-conditioning and the chance to have a shower. Her confrontation with Agent Walter had made her feel dirty and being followed all day by people who surely worked for him made it even worse.

She set the fanny pack with her gun and phone on top of her bedroom dresser and stepped out of her running shorts. Naked, she caught a glimpse of herself in the closet mirror and laughed out loud at the bruises that mapped her body. Her defensive tactics instructor at Langley was no Emiko Miyagi, but he was a skilled practitioner of Krav Maga and jujitsu. The daily sessions allowed her to work off some aggression, but turned her forearms, ribs, and thighs into mottled purple punching bags—with bruises dark enough to show through even on her dark complexion. She’d inherited her father’s long sprinter’s thighs along with his broad shoulders and keen eye for his surroundings. From her mother she’d gotten a bawdy sense of humor, the full-figured curves that required a sports bra a small man could use as a two-room tent, and her tendency toward the ghetto booty. Garcia had always thought she had the sort of body that teetered between female boxer and hooker, depending on what she wore. Jericho seemed to appreciate it—and she was comfortable with that.

Garcia leaned in closer to the mirror on her dresser and pulled her hair back. The tiny lines around her eyes showed in horrifying detail that she was on a collision course with her thirtieth birthday. Her chosen career had a way of smiling on attractive and intelligent women in the early days—and then sneaking up when they weren’t looking to turn them into old and spent intelligent women well before their time. She let her hair fall and sighed. There was nothing she could do about it now.

Unwilling to be far from her pistol under the circumstances, she carried it into the bathroom and put in on the counter, within reach from the shower. Over the past year and a half she’d killed half a dozen people, been blown off the side of a mountain in Afghanistan, stabbed in the back by a psychotic little kid, and shot at more times than she could count. Keeping a gun next to her shower curtain was a far cry from needless paranoia.

Ronnie liked her showers hot enough to pink her skin. She stood for a long time with her hands on the wall, letting the water scald her back and chase the stiffness of defensive tactics class out of her joints. The pinpricks of pain were her way of relaxing and doing penance at the same time.

She washed her hair before the hot water ran out, never knowing when she might have the chance again, using the laurel conditioner Jericho said he liked. She turned off the shower and stood dripping in the tub for a long moment, thinking about Jericho and wondering how he was. Wrapping a towel around her head like a turban, she spread another towel along the edge of the tub and sat on it, still soaking wet. She took her time shaving her legs—another task she might normally put off for a week or more since Jericho was out of town—and hummed
“Drume Negrita
”—“Sleep My Little Black Baby”—a Cuban song her mother used to sing to her at bedtime.

The handprint on the mirror didn’t catch Ronnie’s eye until she was standing at the sink brushing her teeth. Spitting, she glanced up, thinking at first that she had to be imagining things. Out of instinct, she forced herself not to stare directly at the thing, instead scrubbing her teeth as if she wanted to start a fire by friction.

High in the right corner of her bathroom mirror, not far from the ceiling, the perfect imprint of a man’s palm stood out clearly against the condensation from her hot shower. Jericho had sometimes left little notes for her with his fingertip on the glass so the words would show up in the steam—but as far as she knew, he’d never climbed up on her counter. Whoever had left this handprint had likely caught himself while accessing the air vent above the medicine cabinet on the wall adjacent to the vanity.

Fighting the urge to throw on a robe—which would broadcast the fact that she knew she was being watched—Ronnie replaced her toothbrush in the holder beside the sink and reached for a tube of face cream from the cabinet. Piles of laundry and dirty dishes testified to the fact that she was a horrible housekeeper, but even that didn’t explain the tiny chips of paint on the counter. They had to have been knocked loose when someone had reattached the vent to the ceiling.

In general, Garcia was not a prudish sort of girl. She was perfectly content with her body and had never been uncomfortable on a clothing-optional beach. CIA operatives had to go through several iterations of training designed to snuff out as much of the natural embarrassment reflex as possible. Long surveillances often called for the use of a soda cup urinal while another agent sat just a few feet away. There was nothing quite as embarrassing as strip-searching a fellow classmate to look for contraband, and ordering them to lift and separate the various folds and crevices of the human body. But all that said, the thought of some sleazebag peering at her through a hidden camera in her own bathroom added a whole new level to the term “creepy.”

She did her best to ignore the air vent, taking the towel off her head and wrapping it around her torso, tucking it under her armpit. Agent Walter had likely sent in a black bag team while she was away on her run. They wouldn’t know that her normal routine was to walk around naked until she was completely dry, so covering herself now with the towel wouldn’t raise any alarms. Ronnie seethed inside at the thought that these pervs had actually put a camera in her bathroom. There was not a lot of useful intelligence to be gained from watching someone shave her legs and pee.

It took just a moment for the shock of finding the camera to wear off and Ronnie’s sense of self-preservation to kick in. Fighting the urge to flip the bird at the vent, she decided to use the camera to her advantage. She let the towel fall to the floor, thinking, “
Get a load of them apples, you sick bastards
.”

She spent the next five minutes standing in front of the mirror and putting on makeup as if to go out for a night on the town. She went so far as to hike up one foot at a time, resting it on the vanity counter so she could touch up the paint on her toenails. That would give them the show they were looking for. The more radical hormones they had flowing through their brains, the less likely they would be thinking straight when she did what she planned to do next.

A
block away from Ronnie Garcia’s house, backed into the driveway of a vacant house, IDTF agent Gene Lindale hit the button on the driver’s seat of his forest green Ford Expedition to lay it back as far as it would go. He shot a glance at his partner, a bruiser named Kevin Maloney.

“This ain’t bad duty,” Lindale said, peering at the open laptop computer on the console between them.

“This is dope!” Maloney grinned. “I hope we get to arrest her ass before this is over.”

“Yeah,” Lindale said. “I could give that a thorough pat down. . . .”

Before being tapped for work in the Internal Defense Task Force, both men had been agents for Homeland Security. Both their files had noted severe Giglio issues. That is, they were both known to be liars. In
Giglio v. the United States
, the Supreme Court had decided that defense counsels and juries in any trial where such liars testified had to be made aware of that fact. Such a record made it virtually impossible for a federal law enforcement agent to do his or her job. When they’d come aboard, the supervising agent, a guy named Walter, had told them not to worry about it. He didn’t expect them to spend much time on a witness stand.

“Looks like she’s going out for a drink or something,” Lindale said, rubbing his eyes. The dim light from the computer screen gave the men’s faces an eerie, otherworldly glow in the darkness of the vehicle. Dark tint on the side windows made them invisible to nosey neighbors.

“Look at that,” Maloney said, leaning forward so he could get a better look. “She carries that little pistol in a holster that hangs from her bra. I’ve heard about those.”

“I’ll make a note of that,” Lindale chuckled. “Don’t want to get my fingers shot . . .” His voice trailed off. “What the hell is she doing?”

The men watched as Ronnie Garcia walked to her kitchen wearing only jeans, a black sports bra, and a pistol. She knelt in front of her oven, screwdriver in hand, and opened the oven door to remove both metal racks so she could lean inside.

“You think she’s going to gas herself?” Lindale mused.

“It’s an electric oven, dipshit,” Maloney said. “So I’m thinking no.”

A moment later, Garcia backed out of the oven and set a metal plate on the linoleum beside her. She went in again and, after a moment wrestling with something at the back of the oven, brought out a desert tan duffel bag.

“You need to put the panel back on, sweetheart,” Lindale said to the computer screen.

“You just want to see her bend over one more time.” Maloney rubbed his eyes again. “How do you suppose that bag keeps from burning up in there?”

Lindale scoffed. “Does this bitch really look like a Suzy Homemaker to you? Even if that plate isn’t some sort of heat shield, I’m betting she doesn’t do a hell of a lot of baking—”

“I’ve lost her,” Maloney said a few moments later. He moved the computer mouse so he could click through a screen menu. “Did we put cameras in the garage?”

The garage door rumbled open in answer to his question, throwing a shaft of light onto her driveway. Garcia’s black Impala backed out a moment later. She turned west, thankfully moving away from the green Ford.

Maloney punched a speed dial number in his cell phone. “Mr. Walters . . . Sorry, I mean Walter,” he said when the other end picked up. “You wanted us to tell you if she moved.”