Mike Lawson - House Divided

DeMarco followed Alice into the house. The front door opened into a living room filled with inexpensive, mismatched furniture and smelled musty, as if the house had been locked up for some time. DeMarco stood in the living room for a moment, not sure what to do next, until a voice called out, “Mr. DeMarco, I’m in the kitchen.”

DeMarco entered the kitchen and saw a white-haired man in his sixties pouring coffee into two cups, and the guy was dressed like he’d just posed for the cover of GQ. DeMarco couldn’t afford to spend a lot of money on his clothes. He bought the suits he wore for work at a Men’s Wearhouse in Alexandria and his casual clothes at outlet malls. He figured the guy pouring coffee had spent more on his tie than he had spent on his suit.

“I believe you take your coffee black,” the man said, as he handed DeMarco a cup.

DeMarco nodded. He wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of asking how he knew that.

The man sat down at the small kitchen table and gestured for DeMarco to take a seat. As soon as he did, DeMarco said, “Who are you?”

“Before we start,” the man said, “would you mind giving Alice the recorder you took from St. James?”

DeMarco looked over his shoulder. Alice was standing behind him, about four feet away, her face expressionless. He turned back to the white haired man and said, “I don’t think so.”

“Alice,” the man said, and because of the tone of voice he used, DeMarco glanced back at Alice again. This time she was holding an odd-looking plastic gun with a yellow hand grip.

“That’s a Taser, Mr. DeMarco,” the man said. “It won’t kill you but I understand being shot with one is rather uncomfortable. So, please, may I have the recorder?”

DeMarco thought for a moment about shoving his chair back into Alice and hopefully knocking her off balance long enough for him to wrestle the Taser away from her. Not a chance. If he tried he was just going to end up on the floor twitching like a guy with St. Vitus dance. He pulled the recorder from his pocket and slid it across the table to the white-haired man, and he tossed it to Alice.

“Thank you,” the man said to DeMarco. To Alice he said, “Alice, would you please wait in the living room until I’m finished talking to Mr. DeMarco.”

What the guy meant was, Stick around, Alice, in case I need you to shoot DeMarco.

After Alice departed, DeMarco asked for a second time, “Who are you?”

The man smiled slightly, this annoying Cheshire Cat smile. “Do you know what the NSA is, Mr. De-May I call you Joe, please? Mr. DeMarco is just too cumbersome, too formal.”

“Yeah, you can call me Joe. And what do I call you?”

“As I was saying, Joe. Do you know what the NSA is?”

“The National Security Administration.”

The man shook his head. “The National Security Agency, Joe. Not Administration. The NSA is the largest intelligence service in this country, both in terms of money and manpower, and yet you, like most people, don’t even know its proper name.”

DeMarco started to say that he didn’t give a rat’s ass about the proper name, but the man asked, “And do you know what the NSA does, Joe?”

“I know you guys got caught bugging a bunch of telephones without warrants a few years ago.”

“That’s not quite accurate, but close enough. At any rate, the NSA has two primary functions. The first of those is cryptography. To keep it simple, we devise codes and encrypted systems to protect America’s secrets, and we break the codes of nations who may be unfriendly toward us. Our second mission is, in a word, eavesdropping. We eavesdrop in every way imaginable, Joe, on America’s enemies and our allies. We eavesdrop on cell phones and faxes and e-mails. We eavesdrop on satellite and microwave transmissions and undersea cables. There is virtually no form of communication that we can’t intercept and record.

“When you think of spies, Joe, you probably imagine Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, a cynical man in a rumpled trench coat paying greedy communists for their secrets. Well, that’s not the way it works most of the time. Not in the twenty-first century. The NSA is the spies, Joe. Spying today, the largest part of it, the most effective part of it, is done by eavesdropping on our enemies.

“So you asked who I am. Well, I’m a spy. Think of me as Richard Burton, minus the bad trench coat.”

“What does this have to do with-”

“Unfortunately, when we’re listening to all these transmissions-these radio and telephone communications-sometimes, although not intentionally, we intercept transmissions here in this country. We don’t mean to but…”

“Bullshit,” DeMarco said.

“… but sometimes we do. And therein lies the problem, Joe. Our problem. Yours and mine. We overheard, quite by accident, a very disturbing conversation. And now I’m going to play that conversation for you.”

He took a small digital recorder from the inside pocket of his suit coat, a recorder similar to the one DeMarco had found in the church. He hit the PLAY button and DeMarco heard:

Alpha, do you have Carrier?

Negative. Monument blocking.

Bravo, do you have Carrier?

Roger that. I have him clear.

Very well. Stand by.

DeMarco sat, mesmerized, listening to the recording until the NSA man tapped the STOP button.

“Well, Joe, what do you think of that?”

“I think somebody popped Carrier and Messenger. And I think Carrier was my cousin and Messenger was a Washington Post reporter named Hansen.”

“Very good. And they were killed because of what General Breed said on that recorder you found in the church.”

“But what the hell does this have to do with me?” DeMarco said. “I mean, if you know all this stuff-”

“Joe, your country needs you.”

“My country! What is this horse-”

“The NSA can’t admit that we overheard Paul being killed. I’m afraid that would cause us a major political problem.”

“Well you know something, Richard Burton? I don’t give a shit about your political problems.”

As if DeMarco hadn’t spoken, the man said, “It would erode the public’s trust in us, which in turn would make us less able to do our mission-which is to protect the country. So you see, we need you. We need you to pursue what you heard on that recording.”

“Pursue it how? What the hell am I supposed to do? You guys need to go to the FBI with what you have. Or somebody in Congress, somebody who has the clout to deal with this, not somebody like me.”

“Joe, clout is the least of our problems. We have clout. What we can’t do is involve more people in this issue, because the more people we talk to, the greater the likelihood becomes that what we’ve done will become public knowledge. But since you already know what we’ve done, and since you’re already involved in Paul’s murder, you’re the perfect person to help us.”

“Help you do what, for Christ’s sake!”

“We want you to help us find the man you heard directing your cousin’s execution. And then we need to bring that man and his boss to justice, not only for killing Paul but for doing the things that General Breed accuses Charles of doing on that recording.”

“And who the hell is Charles?” DeMarco asked. “And who’s Thomas?”

Dillon had directed Claire not to give DeMarco Paul Russo’s letter and to delete last names from the recording. So what DeMarco had ended up with was a recording that described all the things that Breed had done for Charles Bradford, but Charles Bradford and Justice Thomas Antonelli were identified only by their first names.

Answering DeMarco’s question, Dillon said, “Thomas is retired Senator Thomas Whitman. He was a former chairman of the Armed Services Committee and he worked closely with General Breed. He was incorruptible.”