Mike Lawson - House Divided

The last thing the news guy said was the reporter drove a yellow Volkswagen bug, last year’s model, and if anyone saw one abandoned someplace, they should call the DC cops.

Volkswagen bug. What man would drive one of those? DeMarco wondered. They were cute cars. Cute was, in fact, their defining quality. They were the cars rich daddies bought their college-age daughters when they sent them off to school.

The news gal who was paired up with the news guy-for some reason they always worked in pairs, like it takes two people to read a teleprompter-was now talking about some brand of pet food that was making cats sick. This had happened before and the public was going nuts and it sounded to DeMarco as if the FDA was spending more money on the problem than they would have spent if people were dying.

His mind switched lanes again, back to his cousin. If Paul wasn’t mugged and if he wasn’t selling drugs, why was he killed at one in the morning? He could have been meeting someone-maybe a lover like he’d told Jane, the hospice boss-and they had some kind of lethal spat. But that didn’t sound right either, not from everything he’d heard about Paul. And why meet your lover at a public park at one in the morning? No, it was something else.

Paul was a nurse who helped people die. What if one of his patients had told him something? What if some guy on his deathbed had gasped out I did this terrible thing or I know this horrible secret about so-and-so. Then what? Paul tries to blackmail somebody? Nah, he wouldn’t do that. But what if he’d decided to tell a reporter about something he’d learned from a patient? That was a stretch, but possible. The problem with that bright idea was the time. Why the hell would he be telling a reporter something at one in the morning? And why even meet with a reporter? Why not just call the reporter?

Whatever the case, there was something he really wanted to know: the name of Paul’s last patient. Good ol’ Jane had refused to tell him.

He picked up the remote to change the channel, to watch something less depressing than the news, when the female newscaster said, “This just came in. Speaker of the House John Mahoney is reported to be in a coma at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Speaker Mahoney was admitted to the hospital two days ago for a routine gallbladder operation, but-”

DeMarco turned off the television and immediately called Mahoney’s chief of staff, a man named Perry Wallace. Wallace was bound to know more than the press. Wallace said that after they removed Mahoney’s gallbladder everything looked fine, but then he got some kind of infection, something called gram-negative septic shock, and went into a coma.

“They think they might have nicked his appendix when they took out his gallbladder,” Perry said. He paused before he added, “He could die, Joe.”

DeMarco couldn’t imagine Mahoney sick, much less dead. The man was just too robust, too full of life, too ornery and mean to die. He thought about calling Mahoney’s wife, Mary Pat, but decided not to. She was probably at the hospital at her husband’s bedside or in the hospital chapel praying. He’d give her a call tomorrow and see how things were going.

Then another thought occurred to him, one which made him feel small for even thinking it: What would happen to his job if Mahoney died?

Dillon was speaking to someone on the phone and laughing when Claire entered his office. He hung up, still chuckling, and said to her, “There’s a Nigerian cabdriver in Pittsburgh. He wasn’t considered high risk, but we’ve been monitoring him periodically. Last night he called his mother and asked her to take care of his dog if something should happen to him. Mama, naturally, asks, Why would anything happen? Our cabbie’s evasive, but mama persists, and he eventually blurts out that he’s decided to become a martyr.” Dillon paused for a beat. “The man had turned his cab into a rather sizable bomb. The federal courthouse was his target. My God, these people! Why didn’t he just take the damn dog with him? They could have both been martyrs.”

“You think this is funny?” Claire said. “It sounds like it was only dumb luck that we caught this guy.”

Dillon shrugged. “Luck’s an ingredient in any game, Claire, including ours. Maybe more so in our game.”

They had had this discussion before. Dillon maintained that you had to approach the spy business as a game because if you didn’t-if you allowed yourself to dwell constantly on the enormity of the task and the consequences of failure-it would drive you mad.

Dillon had been playing the game for over thirty years. He began his career at the tail end of the Cold War, at a time when the world had been continually on the brink of Armageddon. And he was still playing, but now he watched religious fanatics more than communists; now it was trying to keep the Chinese rather than the Russians contained; now he worried more about the Russians selling their nuclear warheads to terrorists than launching them.

The game just went on.

Dillon, cynic that he was, believed the human race was incapable of any sort of lasting peace, that there would always be some tribe determined to destroy some other tribe because of greed or ideology or religion or bigotry. And when it came to solving conflicts with words rather than weapons, he maintained that we hadn’t advanced since the days when we killed each other with clubs and stones. Today’s stones were just radioactive.

There was no way all of America’s spies and warriors could keep the country totally safe. There just wasn’t enough time in the day. There weren’t enough people, money, and machines to keep the enemy constantly at bay. All you could do, he said, was come to work each day and take your seat at the table of the most fascinating game on the planet-a game that never ended and where just being alive to play was prize enough.

Well, it wasn’t a damn game to Claire Whiting.

“I’ve got something new on Russo,” she said. “Something potentially very big.”

“Yes?” Dillon said, the mirth still in his eyes.

“Russo was a hospice nurse. His last patient was Martin Breed.”

“General Martin Breed?”

“Yes, that Martin Breed.”

“I’ll be damned,” Dillon muttered, recalling how he and his poker buddies had been discussing Breed the other night. “So what’s the significance of this?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Okay. Continue.”

“The FBI falsified Russo’s autopsy report-I don’t think they even did an autopsy-and then they immediately had the body cremated.”

“How could they falsify the autopsy report?”

“The doc who supposedly performed the autopsy is a man named Lee. Dr. Lee visits the casinos in Atlantic City quite often and the day after Russo died, his checking account increased by three thousand dollars. That could be a coincidence, but I doubt it. Anyway, the autopsy report said Russo was killed at close range, most likely with a 9mm handgun, and we know he wasn’t.”

“This isn’t really new information,” Dillon said. “I mean, we already suspected the FBI was involved in some sort of cover-up when they took over the case.”

“That’s true, but claiming that Russo was killed with a handgun supports the story they’re dishing out that Nurse Russo was dealing meds and his death was drug-related, further obfuscating what really happened.”

Dillon’s mouth twitched, a gesture that Claire knew meant I am not yet impressed.

“The third item is that Hopper, the FBI agent, is on the take. Someone is feeding money to him from a phony trust fund.”

“But I take it you don’t know who’s behind the trust fund.”

“No. Next is the person who called Hopper the night Russo was killed. This person used a cell phone that was one of three hundred bought for personnel stationed at Fort Myer, but the owner of the phone is only identified as being the Fort Myer public works department and not a specific individual. When we contacted the public works department, they had no idea who the phone had been given to. They just pay the bill.”