Mike Lawson - House Divided

Claire was surprised to find that the safe was practically empty. The only things inside it were a classified personnel directory, an outdated (and also classified) NSA organizational manual, and a stack of file folders. There were maybe a hundred folders, certainly no more than a hundred and fifty. Claire looked at the tabs on the file folders and saw people’s names. She flipped open the first folder and saw it was the personnel file of a GS-15 lawyer who was attempting to find a legitimate legal defense for secretly monitoring the ever-increasing volume of seemingly innocuous conversations occurring on Facebook and Twitter.

The folders were in alphabetical order. Claire Whiting, GS-15 Supervisory Intelligence Analyst, was six folders from the bottom of the stack.

“Goddammit!” Claire said, and slammed a small fist down on her desk. She had just listened to the recording of Anthony McGuire telling DeMarco that Paul Russo might have hidden something at a church. The recording had been obtained via the listening devices planted in DeMarco’s belt and cell phone.

“When did this conversation take place?” Claire asked.

“About an hour ago,” Gilbert said. “Hey,” he added defensively, “you were gone. I left you a message.”

Jesus Christ! She had that bastard Drexler breathing down her neck and now this happens.

“Where’s DeMarco now?” she said. “At the church. We have an agent watching him and-”

“Shit! Is he-”

“Calm down. He’s just-”

“Don’t you dare tell me to calm down!”

“He’s just sitting in his car outside the church. There’s a funeral service going on, and it was just getting started when DeMarco got there.”

Thank God for that. Claire did not want DeMarco searching that church before she did. She sat for a moment, thinking and then called the agent who had planted the bugs in DeMarco’s house.

“Start a fire at his house,” she said.

“What?” the agent said. Arson wasn’t one of his normal duties.

“Start a fire at his house. I don’t want the place burned down, just start a fire. Lots of smoke. Then call the fire department right away. Then call DeMarco, pretend you’re from the fire department, and tell him his house is burning.”

“Won’t he wonder how the fire department got his cell phone number?”

“If your house was burning down,” Claire said, “do you think you’d be thinking about something like that?”

DeMarco stood at the back of the church, thinking he shouldn’t be there at all.

What he should have done after speaking to Paul’s ex-boyfriend was call the Bureau and tell them what McGuire had said. The problem was that McGuire’s story was pretty farfetched-the part about the government having killed Paul’s patient, who DeMarco was sure was General Martin Breed. He didn’t think McGuire had lied to him; he believed Paul really had told McGuire that the G had killed Breed-but just because Paul had said this didn’t make it true.

DeMarco had always found government conspiracy theories hard to swallow, and the reason for this was because he worked for the government. Most government employees he knew-the exception being Mahoney-were not only incapable of organizing an effective conspiracy, they were, more importantly, incapable of keeping anything secret. And a conspiracy isn’t a conspiracy if everyone knows about it. The other problem he had with calling the Bureau was he didn’t trust them-or at least he didn’t trust that guy Hopper.

So if Paul really had hidden something in the church, it would be nice to know what it was before he started making outrageous claims about the government killing a two-star general. But that presented another problem: St. James wasn’t St. Peter’s in Rome, but it was still a good-sized structure. There were over a hundred rows of pews, and whatever Paul had hidden-most likely some sort of document-could be taped to the bottom of any one of them. There was also a big altar with lots of nooks and crannies, a choir loft, a pipe organ, confessionals, restrooms, and the place where the priests dressed before saying mass, whatever that space was called. It would take him a week to search the church by himself-and there was no way he was going to spend a week doing that.

But he figured there had to be some kind of clue. Certainly Paul hadn’t intended for the reporter to have to search the entire church. Maybe one of the statues was St. Paul. That is, he assumed Paul was still a saint; his knowledge of saints currently approved by the Vatican was rather spotty. He started to walk around the church, not sure exactly what he was looking for, when his cell phone rang.

His cry of “Son of a bitch!” echoed loudly throughout God’s house.

“You got any idea who might want to burn your house down, Mr. DeMarco?” the fireman asked.

“No,” DeMarco said, but what he was really thinking about was the mess the damn firemen had made-they’d caused more damage than the fire. He was also thinking about the upcoming battle he was sure to have with his fucking insurance company.

“Whoever did this,” the fireman said, “took a bunch of old magazines, put them against your back door, and doused them with gasoline.”

DeMarco wondered if he should tell the fireman that the old magazines were his. He’d put them outside by his garbage can intending to take them to one of those newspaper recycling bins they had in some shopping malls, but he’d never gotten around to it. But if he told the fireman the magazines were his, then his insurance company could probably come up with some reason for saying the fire was his fault, and then the bastards would try to deny his claim. Hell, they’d try to deny his claim no matter what the facts were.

“The good news,” the fireman said, “is somebody called us as soon as they saw the smoke and we got here in three minutes and it only took us a couple of minutes to put the fire out.”

Because his house was made of white-painted brick, there didn’t appear to be any structural damage. The bricks near his back door were all blackened, but they could be repainted. The only thing that had been destroyed by the fire was his back door, which was made of wood, but his door wasn’t the big problem. The big problem was the damn firemen had sprayed down the door with a hose that pumped about eighteen thousand gallons a minute and the water pressure had blown out the door’s window, turning his kitchen floor into a small lake with soot floating on top. His stove, which was directly in line with his door, looked as if it had been hit by a tsunami, and everything on the kitchen counter near his stove-his coffeepot, his toaster, and a never-been-used Cuisinart given to him by his mother-had been blown off the counter. He wondered if there was water in the electrical outlets and if the linoleum floor was going to curl up and have to be replaced.

But what good would it do to bitch to the fireman about all this?

After the firemen left, DeMarco stood on his back porch looking morosely into his kitchen. He was going to have to spend the day mopping up the room and figuring out what else had been damaged. He’d also have to get a piece of plywood to nail over the opening where his back door had once been until he could get a new door. And then he’d have to call up his insurance company and have a giant fight with them to force them to honor all the false promises they made when they sold him his homeowners policy.

The last thing on his mind was whatever Paul Russo had hidden at St. James.

Claire was going to have someone search the church before DeMarco had a chance to do so, but she doubted-now that she’d calmed down somewhat-that anything was hidden there. Since Russo had met with the reporter, it seemed logical that if he had some sort of document to show him, he would have brought it with him the night he met Hansen at the Iwo Jima Memorial-and whoever had killed Russo now had the document. But maybe not. Maybe Russo was afraid of being killed before he met with Hansen so he left the document-or whatever it was-in the church for the reporter to retrieve. Or maybe he took the original of whatever he had hidden and left a copy in the church as a backup. She didn’t know. All she knew was that there was a remote possibility something was hidden in the church and she had to search it before DeMarco did and before DeMarco called up somebody-like the FBI-and told the FBI what McGuire had said.