As for his personal life, nothing leaped out at her. He’d been married once, divorced about six years ago, and the divorce had cost him a bundle. He lived in a townhouse on P Street in Georgetown; the house wasn’t all that big but the mortgage was enormous. He drove a mid-sized Japanese car, didn’t appear to cheat on his taxes, and didn’t gamble online or spend hours looking at porn sites on the Internet.
The only thing unusual about him was his father. Gino DeMarco had been a button man for Carmine Taliaferro, an old-time Mafia guy in Queens. Taliaferro died from cancer a few years ago, and Gino DeMarco died from lead poisoning—three bullets in the chest. She supposed it was possible that Joe DeMarco, like his father, could have connections to organized crime, but based on his bank statements and his lifestyle, she didn’t think so.
She looked at his photo again. He was a good-looking guy: a full head of dark hair, a prominent nose, blue eyes, and a big square chin with a dimple in it. Good-looking, yet at the same time hard-looking. It was most likely her imagination, and probably because of what she knew about his father, but she could picture him in a Scorsese movie playing a knee-breaker working for a loan shark. And there was something in his eyes: toughness, stubbornness,
something
that made her think, If you pushed him, he’d push back.
Then she laughed, thinking that if the NSA was doing the pushing, it wouldn’t matter how hard he pushed back.
Another of Claire’s agents—a guy, skinny, droopy-eyed like he was always on the verge of falling asleep—was slumped in a chair in front of Claire’s desk, sitting more on the base of his spine than on his butt. Claire thought about telling him to sit up straight, but she wasn’t his mother—or anyone else’s mother—and never would be.
“I want this guy’s house and car bugged and I want a GPS tracking device installed on his car,” she said, handing the agent the slim file on DeMarco. “But I also want
him
bugged, and I want it done tonight. He’s got a cell phone, and he probably has it on him all the time. So bug the phone and put a GPS chip in it, too, so we always know where he is. And his belts. Bug them.” She paused for a beat, then said, “Use the gas.”
A few years ago, Chechen terrorists invaded a theater in Moscow and took a few hundred people hostage. The Russian government responded by shooting nerve gas into the theater, the idea being that the gas would knock everybody out—the Chechens and their hostages—and then the Russians could just walk in and scoop up the bad guys. The only problem was that the gas killed more than a hundred people, mostly hostages.
The United States, not to be outdone in any sort of weaponry, had a similar gas. There were, however, a couple of problems. The first was that the gas wasn’t particularly fast-acting, taking about ten minutes before it incapacitated the gasee, which wasn’t really a problem when it came to DeMarco. Claire’s droopy-eyed agent would wait until DeMarco was in bed, slip into his house wearing a gas mask, release the gas, then wait ten minutes and do what he needed to do. The next morning, DeMarco would wake up with the mother of all hangovers but would be otherwise healthy. Unless, of course, he was allergic to one of the ingredients in the gas, which about one person in ten thousand was, and if this was the case he wouldn’t ever wake up. That was the second problem with the gas.
But when directed to gas an American citizen with a chemical that might turn that citizen into either a brain-dead vegetable or a corpse, all Claire’s agent said was, “Okay, boss.”
When Dillon decided to spy illegally on American citizens, he and Claire had discussed the likelihood of their employees becoming a problem—that is, telling the media or Dillon’s bosses what they were doing. But Dillon had told Claire not to worry, their employees wouldn’t betray them, and the reason for this had to do primarily with the
culture
of the NSA.
The NSA, though staffed with many civilians, is primarily a military organization, and in military organizations people tend to follow orders. NSA employees assume, if they’ve been directed to spy on someone, that their mission is lawful and their bosses have the proper warrants and authority. The employees, in other words, typically act without questioning their orders because they know it’s the bosses who’ll get in trouble if they’ve been directed to commit an illegal act.
Then there’s the fear factor. From the minute an employee is hired, it’s beaten into his or her head that you do
not
talk about your job—not with anyone, for any reason. One safeguard taken to ensure that NSA employees understand this golden rule is that they are annually briefed—the word briefed being a thinly disguised euphemism for threatened—by a man who works in counterintelligence. The man who does these so-called security briefings has white hair, Nordic features, and unblinking, pale-blue eyes, and everyone who meets him instantly envisions a reincarnated Gestapo officer. The briefer, in a voice devoid of emotion, warns the employees during these annual chats that if they ever divulge classified information to anyone without a need to know—and everything they work on is classified—they will be incarcerated in a federal prison and gang-banged to death by huge tattooed sadists. That is, if they are lucky they’ll go to prison. Another possibility, implied but never directly stated, is that they might simply disappear.
However, as effective as these yearly pep talks were, Claire felt she could not rely solely upon a sinister warning. She took things one step further.
NSA employees, depending on the nature of their work and the classification level of their jobs, are randomly and periodically poly-graphed. Random and periodic was not good enough for Claire, however. All her people were polygraphed monthly—and they all knew they’d be polygraphed. Only one question was asked during these electronic truth-seeking sessions: Have you discussed anything you’re working on with anybody outside of the division? So far no one had answered this question in the affirmative; if anyone ever did … well, the white-haired counterintelligence officer would be brought in to finish the questioning.
Claire’s agents wouldn’t talk—and they did what they were told.
DeMarco took two more Tylenol, which made a total of six that he’d taken since he had gotten out of bed. His head ached so badly his hair actually hurt. It felt like every little follicle was a wood auger boring a hole in the top of his skull.
He couldn’t understand it. After he played eighteen holes yesterday afternoon, he sat around the clubhouse and had a couple of beers with the guys he played with, but he only had a couple. And last night, he had dinner at a steakhouse and a glass of wine with his meal, but that was it. No martini before dinner, no brandy after dinner, and no booze when he got home. So why did his head hurt so damn much? He wondered if he was coming down with the flu.
Anthony McGuire, Paul’s old boyfriend, lived on a block in Fairfax where all the homes were one-story brick boxes that had obviously been built from the same set of boring architectural plans. The only thing that distinguished one house from another was the color the owner selected to paint the trim and shutters. McGuire had chosen hunter green.
DeMarco rang the bell and a man he assumed was McGuire opened the little peephole installed in the front door and asked DeMarco what he wanted. A cautious guy, had been DeMarco’s first impression. DeMarco introduced himself, said he was Paul’s cousin, and wanted to ask a few questions about Paul’s will. To this McGuire had responded by saying, “How do I know you’re related to Paul?”
Speaking to the brown eye in the peephole, DeMarco said, “Well, let’s see. I knew his mother when she was alive. Her name was Vivian. I know his Aunt Lena, and Paul was pretty close to my mom. He called her Aunt Maureen, although she’s not really his aunt. And when Paul first came to Washington, I took him around and showed him some apartments.”
“Oh, you’re
that
guy. The one who works for Congress.”
“That’s right,” DeMarco said.
“Paul didn’t like you very much.”
That embarrassed DeMarco. “Well—uh, we didn’t really get a chance to know each other. And from everything I’ve heard about him, I regret that. Now could I please come in and talk to you?”
McGuire finally opened the door but didn’t immediately allow DeMarco to enter. He looked up and down the block, as if he was looking to see if anybody was with DeMarco or maybe watching his house. The guy was really paranoid, which made DeMarco wonder if he’d been robbed before, maybe the victim of a home invasion.
As DeMarco entered the house, he noticed two matching suitcases and a laptop case sitting in the foyer. “Taking a trip?” he asked.
“Uh, yes. I’m visiting a friend in … who lives out west. The airport shuttle will be here in a couple of hours, so I don’t have much time to talk to you.”
They took seats in McGuire’s living room which, unlike DeMarco’s living room, was as neat as a pin and smelled of furniture polish. DeMarco couldn’t recall ever using furniture polish. McGuire was also as neat as a pin: pressed jeans, pressed long-sleeve shirt, and tennis shoes so white they looked as if they’d just come out of the box. He had curly dark hair, was short and slim, and had eyelashes long enough for a Maybelline commercial. He sat on the edge of his chair, bouncing a knee, giving DeMarco the impression he was nervous, although he couldn’t imagine why.
“How did you know Paul and I were friends?” McGuire asked.
DeMarco said Paul’s landlady had told him, and then explained—for what seemed like the ten-thousandth time—that he was trying to find out if Paul had a will and where it might be. To his relief, McGuire said that Paul did indeed have a will. When your career was watching people die as Paul’s had been, and when the people dying were sometimes quite young, you learned very quickly you weren’t immortal. And since his financial life had been pretty simple, Paul had used an online form and had named St. James Church in Falls Church as the beneficiary of all his worldly possessions. He had kept his will in a safe deposit box at his bank.
DeMarco felt like leaping to his feet and cheering. “Who was the executor of his will?” he asked.
“I was. Or at least I was when we broke up a year ago. I don’t know if he changed his will after that, but I would assume he did.”
DeMarco was willing to bet that Paul hadn’t changed his will—people tended to put off things like that—but decided it didn’t really matter. He was going to tell the pastor at St. James that Paul had left him four grand and, if he wanted the money,
he
could go through all the hassle of getting the state to give it to him. He was through screwing around with this whole mess.
It occurred to DeMarco later that he should have left right then—but he didn’t. Instead he said, “I’m curious about something, Mr. McGuire. The FBI thinks Paul was shot because he might have been involved in a drug deal. What do you think?”
“I don’t know,” McGuire mumbled. “I have no idea why he was killed. Look, if there’s nothing else, I have to—”
Now that was
wrong
. No one who knew Paul believed he was dealing drugs. Everyone, in fact, was adamant he wouldn’t do something like that. So why wasn’t McGuire, the person who had possibly known him best, not equally adamant? And McGuire’s body language was off. He didn’t look DeMarco in the eye when he made the statement. He did what DeMarco called rabbit eyes: eyes darting away as if looking for a place to run to, a hole to crawl into. In DeMarco’s experience, rabbit eyes indicated a lie—a lie told by an incompetent liar—which made him wonder why McGuire was lying.
“Well, what do you think he could have been doing at the Iwo Jima Memorial at one in the morning?”
“I really don’t know,” McGuire said, but there it was again: the mumble, the rabbit eyes.
“Do you know something about Paul’s death, Mr. McGuire?”
“No. Why would I?”
McGuire didn’t say this calmly, however. He practically shrieked, Why would I? as if he was desperate for DeMarco to believe him, but then he added in a calmer voice, “We hadn’t seen each other in over a year.”
But DeMarco wasn’t buying it. “Mr. McGuire, Paul was my cousin,” he said. “He was your friend, your ex-lover. And he was murdered. Right now the FBI—”
“Oh, God, the FBI’s involved?”
Why in the hell would he say that?
“Yes,” DeMarco said, “and right now the Bureau thinks his death was drug related. But if you know it’s not—if you know what really happened—you need to tell the Bureau.”
McGuire held his hands palm outward at chest level, as if he was fending DeMarco off. If he hadn’t been sitting down, he would have backed away. “I’m
not
going to get involved in this,” he said. “And I want you to leave. Right now.”
“Are you leaving town because of what happened to Paul?”
“No, I’ve had this trip planned for months.”
Liar, liar, pants on fire
.
DeMarco stared at McGuire for a long moment, then said, “Mr. McGuire, I’m a lawyer and an officer of the court.” DeMarco actually had no idea if he was an officer of any court; that was just an expression he’d heard on TV. “And I think you know something about Paul’s death and if you won’t tell me what you know, then I have a legal obligation to contact the FBI and tell them that I think you’re withholding information in a homicide investigation.”
“You can’t do that!” McGuire shouted. “You could get me killed.”
“Get you killed?” DeMarco said. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Please, just stay out of this. You could get killed too.”
“McGuire, I wanna know what you know. Now tell me.”
“Oh, God,” McGuire said.
“Come on. Spit it out. You can either talk to me or you can talk to the feds.”
McGuire didn’t respond immediately. He just sat there, looking down into his lap, shaking his head—but he wasn’t shaking his head as a sign he was refusing to talk. Instead, it was as if he couldn’t believe this was happening to him.
In a softer, less threatening tone, DeMarco said, “Anthony, please, tell me what you know. You owe it to Paul.”