Mike Lawson - House Divided

Claire had a four-hundred-calorie lunch and then went to the gym to kick and hit the heavy bag for half an hour. She liked hitting the heavy bag. She had so much aggression in her that it sometimes seemed like hitting the bag was her only outlet. It was either hit the bag or hit Dillon.

As she was walking to the locker room, a guy waved to her-a good-looking guy maybe a year or two younger than her. She pretended she didn’t see him. She knew he was working up the nerve to ask her for a date, and she dreaded the prospect of turning him down, as she knew she would.

She’d been on a total of six first dates in the last ten years and she never saw any of the men again. They had all been decent guys-men that most single women her age would kill for. She even had sex with one of them-or tried to-because she thought having sex might jump-start her emotions. God, what a disaster that had been. Now, instead of sex, she worked and she exercised-and cleaned. She had to have the cleanest condo in Laurel, Maryland.

Following her workout, Claire had a brief unproductive conference with her technicians. They were striking out everywhere. They still couldn’t identify the cell phone owner who had called Hopper, and they could find no link via phone records or e-mails connecting Russo, Martin Breed, and the Washington Post reporter, Hansen.

The whereabouts of the reporter was another dead end. Neither his body nor his car had been found. And his damn bosses at the Post-based on statements they had given to the D.C. Metro police, and which the police had helpfully entered into their computers-were clueless as to what Hansen had been working on before he disappeared. All Claire could tell was that Hansen had been a political firefly, constantly flitting from story to story, investigating anything involving Congress or the administration that smacked of scandal or corruption. But he didn’t normally work the military side of things.

She also had a tech hack into the Post ’s computers to look for anything Hansen might have filed that seemed relevant. Zip again. The last story he submitted had been written two weeks before he disappeared and was about a sixty-two-year-old congressman using a corporate jet for a trip to the Bahamas with a thirty-four-year-old ex-Redskins cheerleader. A story, in other words, as old and tired and tawdry as Washington itself.

The tech did find one interesting thing while poking through the Post’s electronic files. A GS-11 analyst at Langley had leaked a story about the CIA giving money to a psychopath in Hamas, the analyst apparently having some pro-Israeli bias. Claire couldn’t tell from the Post’s files why the CIA was funding a Hamas murderer and she finally decided she didn’t care. It just made her furious when low-level government employees leaked things to the media; leaking information was a management prerogative. She anonymously e-mailed the name of the CIA tattletale to a heartless prick at Langley she knew, confident that the leaker would soon be stationed in Greenland.

She looked up at the clock. It was seven P.M. and she could feel the onset of a migraine, so she turned off the lights in her office to see if that might make her headache go away. As she sat there in the dark, she reflected on the fact that the day had been a total waste. Goddammit, she needed to go proactive on this thing. She needed to stop looking at records and make something happen. She needed…

Two of her male technicians were slinking toward the door. They had their coats on.

“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” she said quietly.

The techs practically jumped out of their skins. With the lights out in her office, they thought she had left for the day. Fat chance.

“Uh, home,” one of the men said.

Claire didn’t say anything.

“Geez, Claire, we’ve been here like twelve hours. We’re tired.”

Twelve hours. Big deal. She thought about their current assignments. They weren’t involved in the Russo op, but what they were working on was important. Hell, it was all important-but she couldn’t afford to burn them out.

“Good night,” she said.

The two men looked at each other, surprised, and moved quickly toward the door.

Claire closed her eyes again.

She could see him: her fiance, Navy Commander Mark Daniels. He had called her on her cell phone to tell her he’d just been summoned to a meeting over at the Pentagon and he didn’t know when he’d be home that day. At the time they were sharing an apartment in Annapolis, not sure when they’d get married, just knowing marriage was inevitable and that life was perfect the way it was.

She remembered being annoyed by the call. Of course he’d be late, she’d thought at the time. She’d be late, too. Half the people who worked in Washington, D.C., would be late that night because thirty-seven minutes earlier the second plane had struck the World Trade Center. So when Mark called, she’d been practically sprinting down a hallway toward a conference room because things were going crazy at Fort Meade. Half the bosses at the NSA were trying to figure out what had happened, and it seemed like the other half were already working on a story to exonerate the agency.

He’d been wearing his dress blues that day because he’d had some sort of ceremony to attend that morning. She could see him: tall, dark-haired, beautiful physique; two gorgeous dimples formed in his cheeks when he smiled. He wouldn’t have been smiling when he called, though; he would have looked serious, his eyes flashing, worried and angry, yet still courteous enough to call and let her know that he’d be late. And she could see herself, all impatient, no time to chat, striding down the hallway, irritated that he had called when he did. And then she heard him scream. She’d never forget that sound.

She could see him-and hear him-as he was incinerated by thousands of gallons of exploding aviation fuel as American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon.

She’d never see him again-and she’d always see him.

Levy watched Alberta Merker enter her house. It was nine P.M. Merker put in a long day, doing whatever it was that she did.

Merker’s house was in a quiet middle-class neighborhood and her next-door neighbors appeared to be at home. He could see people moving about in one of the houses and lights were on in the other. The houses across the street from Merker’s, all except one, appeared to be occupied as well.

He would have to wait until her neighbors were asleep.

He wondered if he was doing the right thing. He could have followed Merker tomorrow when she went to work to see where she would lead him, but he didn’t have time for that. He needed to know immediately what she was doing and who employed her.

He closed his eyes and thought, as he often did at quiet moments, about the last time he’d seen his brother. When his father had left he’d been too young and he didn’t really have a clear memory of the man. But his brother he remembered vividly: standing there in his uniform, his pant cuffs tucked into the top of his combat boots, the green beret on his head, the broad smile on his face-and then his brother vanished. Forever.

He also thought back to the day he met Charles Bradford for the first time. Bradford had been a colonel then and his commanding officer. It was midnight and Levy was sitting alone in the sentinels’ changing room, only nineteen years old, feeling totally alone and more depressed than ever. Bradford sat down next to him and asked how he was doing, and he was shocked to find Bradford knew about his father and brother. And when Bradford spent an hour with him, talking to him about the army, about the country, about patriotism, Levy was moved to tears. He never forgot that night. He didn’t speak to Bradford again for ten years, and when he did, he was astonished Bradford remembered him.