Mike Lawson - House Divided

“I guess,” the impersonator said. He could imitate almost anyone, including most females. At Christmas parties, after a couple of drinks, he’d do an impression of the president and his wife talking after sex that was so funny that even Claire laughed. At this point she didn’t know what she wanted him to tell Hopper but, when she did know, she wanted the impersonator to be ready.

“Go practice some more,” she said.

Claire needed to spook Hopper.

She needed to make him run, literally, to whoever was controlling him and the best way she could think to do that and keep the agency’s involvement secret was to use DeMarco. If she could get Hopper to meet his boss, that would be ideal. The other possibility was that Hopper would call his boss and his boss would decide to do something about DeMarco. They-whomever Hopper was working with-had already killed Russo and most likely the reporter, Hansen. They’d kill DeMarco, too, if they had to. So she would put people on DeMarco and when they tried to kill him or snatch him, she’d follow whoever was assigned-and try to protect DeMarco as best she could.

DeMarco. Again, records could only tell you so much, but the impression she had was: average guy, maybe below — average guy. He was a lawyer and had passed the Virginia bar, but had never practiced law. He was a GS-13-a rank that wasn’t all that impressive in D.C.-and had been one for a long time, meaning that his career had most likely stalled. He had an office in the subbasement of the Capitol-the location of his office another indicator that he wasn’t a power player-but he wasn’t on the staff of any member of the House or Senate. So she couldn’t figure out exactly what he did but finally decided it didn’t really matter. He was just some sort of low-level legal weenie stuck in a dead-end job.

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.