Mike Lawson - House Divided

Actually, this wasn’t bad news, DeMarco thought. Now he wouldn’t have to deal with the hassle of a funeral. It seemed odd that they would have cremated the body so quickly, but he could understand how they might not have been able to locate Paul’s next of kin. Paul’s Aunt Lena’s married name was Hennessy, not Russo, and he wasn’t sure how the FBI would know that people named DeMarco were related to Paul-other than the damn card in Paul’s wallet.

“Where are his ashes?” DeMarco asked.

“Give me your address and I’ll send them to you.”

DeMarco gave Hopper his home address. “Can you tell me what you’ve learned about who killed him?”

“We’re still investigating and we don’t have any suspects yet, but

… well, I have to be honest with you, Mr. DeMarco. We think your cousin may have been dealing prescription drugs-illegally, that is. He was a nurse and he had access to things like OxyContin, and he may have been shot because of that. There are some pretty violent people in the world of drug trafficking.”

DeMarco felt like telling Hopper the same thing he’d told Detective Glazer, that the Paul Russo he had known hadn’t seemed like the drug-dealing type. But the fact was, he didn’t really know anything about Paul’s circumstances in the last three or four years. So all he said was, “Do you have any proof Paul was doing anything illegal?”

“No, it’s just a hunch based on the time he was killed and where he was killed. But like I said, we’re still investigating. I gotta go now, Mr. DeMarco, but I apologize again for not contacting you before we cremated the body.”

“Look, I’m not going to make a big stink about the fact you cremated him without talking to me, but I’d appreciate it if you could keep me in the loop on the investigation,” DeMarco said. And then he did something he didn’t normally do: he flexed what little political muscle he had. “By the way, I’m a lawyer who works for Congress.”

Lawyers, in general, can be a pain but a congressional lawyer could be a significantly larger pain to Hopper because there’s nothing employees in the Legislative Branch of government enjoy more than twisting the nuts of those employed by the Executive Branch. If Hopper was impressed, however, by the fact that DeMarco worked on Capitol Hill-along with several thousand other lawyers-he kept his awe hidden quite well. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said, and hung up.

Claire Whiting in motion: long-legged strides, staring straight ahead, intense, unsmiling, her heels striking hard on the linoleum floor. She was always in a hurry-a woman forever at war against the clock.

She entered a room containing thirty cubicles, and in each cubicle sat two technicians, most wearing headsets, all pecking away at keyboards and studying the monitors on their desks. Large plasma screens were mounted on the walls of the room and fiber-optic cables snaked in thick bundles, invisible beneath the floor. The cables were connected to large Cray computers and rack upon rack of servers in nearby buildings. The room was always somewhat chilly because the temperature was set to meet the rigid needs of the machines and not for the comfort of human beings.

The room was part of the Net.

The word Net was not shorthand for Network, as one might assume. It was instead exactly what the name implied: a device for capturing things, in this case the whispers of a planet. The mesh of the Net consisted of acres of computers, thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, fleets of satellites orbiting the globe, vast arrays of dish antennae on desert plains-and much, much more.

The Net never slept. It was always awake-and always listening.

It recorded, analyzed, and transmitted.

It translated and interpreted.

There were some who believed it might even be able to think.

The Net was the heart, if not the soul, of the NSA.

Claire strode over to Gilbert, the technician who had brought her the intercept of-she was sure-Paul Russo being killed. Gilbert had tubular arms, straw-in-the-manger dirty-blond hair spiking up from his head, and nails chewed to the bloody quick. He was addicted to caffeine and sugar and, even sitting, was in constant motion-fingers tapping, right knee bouncing, nose twitching. Because his eyes were now closed and he was absorbed completely in whatever he was listening to, Claire used a polished fingernail to tap on one of the headset earpieces, causing a burst of noise to explode in the technician’s ear. She preferred to touch the headset rather than him.

“Fuck!” Gilbert said, ripping his headset off and spinning around to confront his tormentor. Then seeing it was Claire and not the man he shared the cubicle with, he sat up a bit straighter and said, “Oh, it’s you. Look, I’m still working on that software problem, but I haven’t found-”

“I want you to get into the Bureau’s system and get me the autopsy report on Paul Russo. I also want you to get me every record you can find on Russo himself: tax returns, employment records, scholastic history, credit reports, et cetera, et cetera. I want you to do the same thing for an FBI agent named David Hopper.”

“Okay,” Gilbert said.

Okay. That’s all.

That Claire had just asked him to invade several federal, state, and private record-keeping systems, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s heavily protected computer network-to obtain information on two American citizens-didn’t faze Gilbert at all.

He’d done it before.

Claire summoned an agent to her office.

Claire’s technicians manned the machines and, in general, matched all the nerdy stereotypes: fingers grafted to keyboards and the social skills of bright, obnoxious twelve-years-olds, more comfortable in online chat rooms than at office parties.

Claire’s agents-many of whom were women-did the fieldwork Claire and Dillon needed done and, like her technicians, they shared certain common characteristics: they had the intelligence to understand the high-tech gear used by the NSA but they were also cocky and aggressive and physical. And they carried weapons. They rarely got to fire their weapons-but they all wanted to.

This particular agent was dark-haired, slim, and wiry and was dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt that hugged his body. One advantage to being an agent was that the dress code was flexible. That is, what the agents wore to the office was irrelevant, but there were certain standards regarding appearance. The first of those was that the ideal agent was blessed with a face that no one would remember: no albinos, Jimmy Durante hooters, or tattoos of writhing snakes encircling their necks. The other requirements were short hair-bald was acceptable-no facial hair, and no glasses, contacts only. The reason for these requirements was Claire’s agents had to be able to change their appearance often and rapidly and it was best-when required to don wigs or mustaches or any other type of disguise-to start with a relatively blank canvas.

The other thing about agents-and she often had to remind Dillon of this when he wanted to fire one-was that they were expensive. Not their salaries but their training. They had to know how to break into buildings with sophisticated alarm systems; how to follow a subject and not be seen; how to plant listening devices that would not be detected. The agents didn’t have to know how the listening devices worked-that was knowledge only the technicians were given-but they did have to know enough to install the gizmos.

Yes, agents were expensive and therefore not casually discarded, so when one of them misbehaved or acted rashly, he or she wasn’t usually fired. Instead, the agent was disciplined and Claire was the one who decided upon the appropriate punishment-and Claire could be quite cruel and quite inventive.