House Arrest Page 11

  He looked for a place to sit, not knowing jailhouse cafeteria etiquette. If he sat down with the white guys, the black and brown guys would all assume he was a racist. Conversely, if he sat with the black guys, (a) that might provoke a fight because they didn’t like white guys, and (b) all the white guys would mark him as a someone who didn’t know whose side he was supposed to be on. Then he noticed a table full of old guys, a mixed white, brown, and black group. Yeah, they looked like the perfect breakfast companions. He began walking toward the old guys’ table, when a man came up next to him and said, “You sit with me.”

  The man speaking was enormous: at least six foot eight and weighing in at about 270 pounds. He had a shaved head, a face that hadn’t been shaved in a couple of days, biceps the size of cantaloupes, and a tattoo of an eight-pointed star on each side of his neck—like a pair of markers for the place where the bolt should be inserted. DeMarco’s first thought was: Oh, fuck me.

  Seeing DeMarco’s face, the guy said, “Relax. I’ve been told to make sure nothing happens to you.”

  “What?” DeMarco said.

  “Just follow me.”

  So DeMarco did, having no idea what the guy was talking about and at the same time not wanting to provoke a man the size of the Chrysler Building.

  They walked up to a table where four slender, vaguely effeminate Hispanic men were sitting together. They’d finished their breakfast and were bullshitting in Spanish. DeMarco’s new friend said, “You little bitches are done eating. Go.” The little bitches looked at him, looked at each other for a moment, then picked up their trays and left.

  DeMarco and the behemoth sat down, and the behemoth said, “The warden told me to make sure that no one fucks with you while you’re here.”

  “Why would the warden do that?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. For some reason, he wants you protected.”

  DeMarco’s immediate thought was: Mahoney. Mahoney got to the warden and told him to make sure that DeMarco didn’t become Shawshank Andy.

  “What do you get out of this?” DeMarco asked.

  “What do you care?”

  “I don’t. I’m just curious.”

  “This is not a good place to be curious. They’ve put me in the cell next to yours, and from now on, when you leave your cell, I go with you.”

  That sounded fine to DeMarco, especially the part about the guy not being put in the same cell with him. He didn’t want his cell becoming the Alexandria jail honeymoon suite.

  “What’s your name?” DeMarco asked.

  “Lazlo.”

  “Lazlo?”

  “Yeah, my parents were from Bosnia. You got a problem with that?”

  “No, no,” DeMarco said.

  Lazlo didn’t have an accent, so DeMarco assumed he had been in the United States for a long time or was born here. Not that he was going to ask.

  Lazlo said, “Eat your breakfast. Oh, can I have the fruit cup?”

  “Help yourself,” DeMarco said.

  18

  Emma could tell that Neil had not been happy to hear from her.

  He’d been at home, playing in a high-stakes video game against three competitors located in London, Tehran, and Tokyo. Emma thought it absurd that a man Neil’s age should waste his time on such an adolescent pastime but supposed it was no worse than DeMarco wasting his time playing golf. Men were essentially useless creatures. Women really needed to find a way to have children without a sperm donor.

  However, unhappy or not, when Emma called him from the Hoover Building and told him to be in his office in half an hour, Neil agreed. Of course he agreed. It was only thanks to Emma that Neil was currently not residing in a federal penitentiary. He owed her, and he knew it. And he was afraid of her.

  Neil’s office was on the fourth floor of a four-story building in Washington, D.C., on the banks of the Potomac River. He had a view of the Pentagon. If the people in the Pentagon had any idea of the number of times Neil had breached their databases they would have ordered a drone strike on his building. Neil owned the building, by the way. He may have been lazy, but he was a genius and he charged clients an exorbitant amount for his services.

  As for Neil’s profession, he called himself an information broker. What this meant was that if you wanted to know something about a person or an organization, and if that information was stored in a computer, Neil could most likely obtain it for you. He had the ability to slither through most firewalls, but these days he often didn’t need to do that. Now it was much easier for him to pay folks he’d met over the years who had access to the data he needed, such as people who worked at banks and telecommunications companies and law enforcement agencies. Neil honestly didn’t consider that what he did was criminal; it wasn’t as if he was stealing money intended for orphans. Neil, like DeMarco, had his own unique interpretation of ethical conduct.

  Neil was seated behind his desk when Emma arrived at his office. He was an overweight white man in his forties who dressed most often in Hawaiian shirts and baggy shorts, no matter the season. He persisted in tying what remained of his thinning blond hair into a short ponytail that hung to his collar. His office was like the command deck of the Starship Enterprise, filled with computer equipment and a zillion little blinking lights.

  “I suppose this is about DeMarco,” he said.

  “Yes,” Emma said. “We’re going to prove he’s innocent.”

  “It doesn’t sound like he’s innocent. Based on what I’ve read, the case against him looks pretty solid.”

  “Neil, do you seriously believe that DeMarco killed Lyle Canton?”

  “No, but maybe for a hundred grand …”

  “He wouldn’t have killed him for a million. And you know it.”

  Emma had met DeMarco more than a decade ago when, as she’d told James Foster, he’d saved her life. DeMarco hadn’t done anything overtly heroic; he’d simply been in the right place at the wrong time. The day it happened, Emma had just disembarked from a plane returning from Iran, knowing that two men from the Iranian secret police had been on the plane with her. As she walked through baggage claim, with the men not far behind her, she noticed a woman walking up to them and handing one of them a canvas shopping bag. Emma suspected there were weapons in the bag.

  The Iranians wanted a flash drive she was carrying. They also wanted her dead because of what she’d learned in Iran. They were in fact so desperate to kill her that she thought they might shoot her right there in baggage claim. Not bothering to collect her luggage, Emma stepped outside the terminal, looked for a cab, and saw a car idling at the curb, right in front of the door. She got into the car and told the driver, “Drive or we’re both going to be killed.”

  The driver, a puzzled Joe DeMarco, who had been waiting for a friend, said, “What? Who are you?”

  Emma screamed, “Go!”—and at that moment DeMarco saw two pissed-off-looking guys burst out of the terminal, one of them pointing at Emma. The other reached into a bag, and DeMarco saw what he thought looked like an Uzi coming out of the bag. So DeMarco, not knowing what the hell was going on, stepped on the gas—and the two guys piled into another car that had also been waiting at the curb. Not long after that, DeMarco was flying down the Memorial Parkway at about a hundred miles an hour while a guy in a car behind him was firing a machine gun at him.

  And that had been DeMarco’s introduction to Emma.

  Over the years that had passed since then, he’d found out a little—but not much—about who Emma was and about her career in the DIA, and he came to her sometimes for help, particularly when he needed information from the Pentagon or some local spy shop.

  Emma’s feelings toward DeMarco had always been ambivalent. One strike against him was that he worked for John Mahoney—a man as corrupt as any politician who’d ever occupied an office on Capitol Hill. She also knew that DeMarco was Mahoney’s bagman and the guy Mahoney used whenever there was some sort of skullduggery to be performed.

  DeMarco’s work
ethic—or lack thereof—was a second strike against him. DeMarco was lazy and unambitious, the type of man who gives civil servants a bad name. He did the minimum required of him, had no real interest in his job, and did it only because one day he’d get a pension. And although he didn’t like working for Mahoney, he had never made any real effort to find another job. The only reason he had a job with Mahoney in the first place was because his godmother, a woman who’d once had an affair with Mahoney, had blackmailed Mahoney into hiring him.

  Emma suspected that DeMarco’s idea of the perfect job would be managing a golf course. He’d be able to play every day, schmooze and drink with the other golfers, and have affairs with the lady golfers. Had DeMarco ever worked for her when she was with the DIA she undoubtedly would have fired him.

  On the other hand, DeMarco was bright and likable, and when he took an interest in an assignment he could be as tricky and stubborn as he had to be to get results. The other thing was that when Emma helped DeMarco, it wasn’t always just because she owed him. She’d helped him several times when—as odd as it might sound—DeMarco had actually been on the side of the angels. The first case on which she’d assisted him had involved a Secret Service agent who appeared to be conspiring to kill the president. On another case, DeMarco had unwittingly stumbled into a nest of Chinese spies, and Emma had wanted to be part of that one. And that had been the second time DeMarco saved her life.

  The upshot of all this was that Emma most often acted toward DeMarco the way an older sister would act toward an annoying younger brother—one who frequently needed a sharp kick in the ass. She’d force him to do the ethical thing as opposed to the expedient thing. She’d do her best to make sure that if he didn’t stay on the right side of the law he at least didn’t do any real harm when he stepped over the line.

  And one thing she was sure of was that DeMarco would never murder a man for political reasons or for money.

  Joe DeMarco was hardly a saint—but he wasn’t his father.

  “So, what do you want me to do?” Neil asked. He knew that whatever Emma wanted, he was going to do it, whether he liked it or not.

  “Before we get to that, I’m going to tell you everything the FBI has.” Emma then gave him a succinct synopsis of what she’d learned in the last six hours at the Hoover Building. When she finished, Neil said, “Sounds to me like DeMarco’s ass is cooked.”

  Emma ignored that comment; she was in no mood for pessimism. She said, “Now, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to make an assumption. We know that the person who killed Canton had to have access to the Capitol. He knew where all the security cameras were. He had to be able to get into DeMarco’s office to plant the evidence found in the ventilation grille. He had to be able to get a gun past the metal detectors. Last, he had to spend a lot of time in the Capitol planning and arranging everything. This wasn’t a crime committed on the spur of the moment; it took days, if not weeks, of preparation. Taking all those factors into account, and since we know DeMarco didn’t do it, we’re going to assume that the person who killed Canton was in fact a real Capitol cop.”

  “Okay,” Neil said, his tone saying, Well, if you say so.

  “I like a Capitol cop for the killer because in addition to having unlimited access to the building and knowing about the cameras, he’d also be familiar with all the other security measures, such as where the guards are during their shifts, when they tour the building, and so forth. And after Canton was killed, a real cop would be able to blend in with all the other cops running around searching for the killer. If he was seen in the Capitol either before or after the shooting, he wouldn’t stand out in any way; he’d blend in like the furniture.”

  Neil said, “There are a lot of other people who know the Capitol, including about six hundred politicians and all the people who work for them. Then you have contractors—like the guy who was fixing that senator’s computer the night Canton was killed—who also know the building pretty well and would have a legitimate reason for spending a lot of time there.”

  “That’s true,” Emma said, “but we’re going to start with the Capitol cops because they’re the most logical group of suspects.”

  “What about the fake insignia patch?” Neil said. “A real cop wouldn’t need a fake patch.”

  Emma said, “I believe the fake patch was calculated misdirection. The killer had an imperfect patch made knowing it would be picked up by the cameras and therefore make the FBI think it was someone other than a real Capitol cop.”

  Neil countered with, “Or if the killer wasn’t a Capitol cop, he had the fake patch made so he could pretend to be a cop.”

  “No,” Emma said emphatically. “It’s Occam’s razor. It would have been easier for a real cop to get a fake patch than it would have been for a fake Capitol cop to commit the crime.”

  Before Neil could debate the issue further, Emma handed him a flash drive. “That contains the personnel files of the thirteen hundred people employed by the Capitol police. I want you to eliminate anyone who isn’t a white male approximately DeMarco’s weight and height. Then what I want you to do is see if any of those people have any connection to Sebastian Spear or Spear Industries. Just as a Capitol cop is the most likely person to be the killer, Spear is a logical suspect for hiring someone to murder Canton. But the FBI is not investigating Spear, because all the evidence points to DeMarco and Mahoney.”

  “But Spear can’t be the only person on the planet who might have wanted Canton dead,” Neil said.

  “Probably not,” Emma said. “But he was at the top of the FBI’s list until DeMarco was dropped into their lap, and so now he’s at the top of my list. So I want you to look for connections to Spear.”

  “Okay,” Neil said, “I can write a program to—”

  “After you’ve done that, I want you to see if anyone employed by Spear has the sort of skills you do.”

  “Skills to do what?”

  “If Mahoney isn’t lying—and, for once, I don’t think he is—then someone hacked his phone to send a text message to DeMarco. So I want to know if someone connected to Spear could have done that.”

  “I already know who Spear would use,” Neil said.

  “You do?” Emma said, although she wasn’t completely surprised. Almost all of Neil’s friends were people like him: people who spent almost all their waking hours with their fingers on a keyboard, people who wandered the Dark Net in the wee hours looking for excitement, people who thought that hacking into a private server was the best game ever invented.

  “Yeah,” Neil said. “His name is Nikki Orlov, but he calls himself Nick Fox.”

  Neil explained how he knew Orlov—he explained in his long-winded, meandering way, making Emma just want to scream. When she’d worked for the DIA, she’d demanded that her people brief her concisely, quickly getting to the point—but she knew screaming at Neil wouldn’t shorten the story.

  Neil said that about five years earlier, a mid-level Russian computer guy named Dmitri Sokolov, who’d worked for the GRU, had defected to the United States. After the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI had squeezed him dry, a process that took over a year, Dmitri settled in the D.C. area, found a job on the Geek Squad at Best Buy, and eventually got into gamer circles, which is where Neil met him.

  Neil said, “Dmitri’s a good guy, and I like him, but the truth is that when it comes to computers, he’s pretty mediocre. I mean, he’s probably a Geek Squad superstar, but he doesn’t have the skills of a top-notch cyber operative, and I imagine he didn’t know anything that the FBI and NSA didn’t already know about the Russians. If he had known something, the Russians would have whacked him before the FBI ever got their hands on him.”

  “What does this have to do with—”

  “I’m getting there,” Neil said.

  Two years ago, Neil had attended a trade show in Las Vegas along with about a hundred thousand other people. He’d gone with Dmitri and another man so they could split the cost of a room. Neil was
a tightwad. The trade show was one where Apple and Microsoft and Google showed off all the new, whiz-bang toys they were developing, and nerds from all over the globe flocked to Vegas like Muslims to Mecca. One night, while Neil and Dmitri were having a drink in one of the casinos, a handsome young guy walked into the lounge accompanied by a statuesque blonde who looked like a Vegas showgirl. When Dmitri saw the man, he said, “Jesus Christ, it’s him. He’s alive.”

  After recovering from the shock of seeing a ghost, Dmitri told Neil that the man’s name was Nikita Orlov. When Dmitri had defected to the United States, he said, Orlov had already been working for the GRU, though just a teenager. The guy was a genius and basically a Green Beret when it came to cyber warfare. Dmitri said, “Nikki Orlov is the best the Russians have. Or did have.”

  “What’s he doing here?” Neil asked.

  Dmitri said the better question was: What’s he doing alive? Dmitri had kept in touch with friends back in Russia after he defected—via encrypted e-mails—and he’d heard that Orlov had disappeared because he’d screwed the wife of some Russian general. “The guy was a legendary pussy hound,” Dmitri said. “But all my friends over there said he’d disappeared, and they figured he was probably dead. And if the GRU knew he was here in the United States, they’d definitely kill him. He knows so much about the Russian cyber program that they couldn’t afford to let him live.”

  “So what was he doing in Vegas?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t know,” Neil said. “Maybe he figured he was safe. It was a huge convention, and the chance of bumping into someone from the Russian government was small. But he was taking a big risk, because I know the Russians had some of their top people there. Every spy shop in the world had people there.”