Mike Lawson: House Divided

“The body’s on the sidewalk,” Glazer said. “My sidewalk.”

Hopper looked down at the body. “It’s half on the sidewalk. And the rule is-”

“Rule? What fuckin’ rule?”

“The rule is like football. Wherever the runner’s knee goes down is where they spot the ball. His knee went down in the park.”

“I’ve never heard of any-”

“Come on, Glazer. I’m tr-”

“How do you know my name?”

Irritation flicked across Hopper’s face. “They gave it to me when they called me. Probably got if off the scanner, too. Why are you giving me a hard time here? I’m doing you a favor. This is one less murder on Arlington’s books. It’s one less case you have to clear. You oughta be thanking me, not arguing with me.”

Glazer already knew he was going to lose this fight-and anybody looking at the scene, not knowing a single thing about criminal jurisdictions, would know he was going to lose it, too. In one corner you had this confident six-foot-two, handsome as Mel-fucking-Gibson federal movie star. In the other corner you had Jack Glazer: five-ten, a stocky, strong-looking guy, a guy tough enough to have maybe played linebacker for a small college team but not big enough or fast enough for a big-name school. It was the neighborhood mutt squaring off against the government’s Rin Tin Tin-and nobody would have put their money on the mutt.

But still-even knowing the feds were going to win this jurisdictional tug-of-war-this guy pissed him off. And something was seriously out of whack.

“Yeah, well, we’ll have to settle this later, when it’s daylight,” Glazer said, shifting his position slightly, blocking off Hopper’s path to the body. “I need to check with my boss. But for now-”

Glazer’s cell phone rang. He looked at the caller ID. What the hell?

“Glazer,” he said into his phone. He listened for a few seconds, said, “Yes, sir,” and hung up.

Glazer looked at Hopper for a moment and then slowly nodded his head. “That was my boss. He said this is your case.”

Gilbert swiped his badge through the bar-code reader, punched in a six-digit security code, and pressed his thumb against the pad. When the annex door lock clicked, he pulled the door open, nodded to the no-neck security guy who had a small desk on the other side of the door, and went to his cubicle. He tossed his backpack on the floor, spent ten minutes bullshitting with another technician about how his new cell phone was a piece of shit, then proceeded to the coffee mess, where he poured the first of a dozen cups he would drink that day.

Back in his cubicle, he booted up all the machines, spent fifteen minutes on one of them looking at e-mail, then turned to the machine that provided him with an annotated description of transmissions intercepted in his sector in the past twelve hours. He tapped the SCROLL DOWN key as he studied the screen, sipping his coffee, then stopped. “What the hell?” he muttered.

He tapped on a keyboard, routed the transmission he’d selected to a program that would deencrypt it, and for forty-five minutes did other work. Then he put on his headphones.

Alpha, do you have Carrier?

Negative. Monument blocking.

Bravo, do you have Carrier?

Roger that. I have him clear.

Very well. Stand by.

When the recording stopped, Gilbert muttered “Holy shit,” played it again to be sure, then copied the transmission to a CD.

The label on the CD said NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. There were a lot of other words printed on the label as well and, when taken collectively, these words indicated the CD was classified at the highest level and whoever listened to it would rot in a federal prison until their teeth fell out if they didn’t have the proper clearance. There was nothing unique about the label, however. Every CD in the annex, including the one that contained forms for purchasing office supplies, had the same label.

CD in hand, he walked through a maze of cubicles, nodding to folks he passed, but didn’t stop until he reached her office. She was sitting at her desk, head down, reading something, and when he knocked on the doorframe to let her know he was standing there, she looked up with those frosty eyes of hers.

“Yes,” she said.

No good morning, how-are-you, how’s-it-going? It was always business with her, never a moment wasted on mundane social interactions.

“I think you need to hear this,” Gilbert said, holding up the CD. “I think two guys got killed last night.”

Other than a slight elevation of one blonde eyebrow, she showed no emotion. She took the CD from him and slipped it into one of the three computer towers beneath her desk.

“Password?” she said.

She wasn’t asking if the disc was password-protected; of course it was. She was asking for the password because if she tried to open the CD without it everything on it would turn to gibberish.

“Grassyknoll, lower case, one word,” Gilbert said.

She typed the password and listened to the recording with her eyes closed, giving Gilbert a chance to study her. She was at least ten years his senior, getting close to forty, he guessed, but she had a good long-legged body, a narrow face with a model’s cheekbones, and those incredible scary blue eyes. He couldn’t understand why such a good-looking woman didn’t have a husband or a lover, but since she worked about sixteen hours a day and was the least approachable person he’d ever met, maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

“When did this take place?” she asked.

“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.”