Conspiracy db-6 Page 2

  As Amanda straightened, the restraint imposed by the Ser vice training began to slip away. She felt many things: Shock and grief and fear. Panic. Her heart raced.

  Why would he do this?

  Why didn’t I realize he was suicidal?

  Is it my fault?

  Is it really suicide? How can that be?

  His eyes gaped at her, as if they were accusing her of something.

  I have to get away, she thought, and for the next sixty seconds the trained Secret Service agent shared the body of a panicking, guilt-stricken woman. She backed from the room, carefully making sure not to touch anything. She took a hand-kerchief from her pocket, opened the door, closed the door, walked swiftly down the hall toward the elevator, then came back and ducked into the stairway instead. Amanda descended all the way to the bottom floor, where the stairwell opened to the outside. She turned and pushed the crash bar with the side of her hip, then walked around to her car.

  Amanda didn’t begin to cry until she was almost to her hotel. The tears slipped down her cheeks in ones and twos.

  Then, as she waited to turn into the parking lot, they burst from her eyes in a steady downpour.

  The driver behind her laid on the horn. Startled, Amanda went straight instead of turning, accelerating and then hitting her brake to pull into the lot of a Friendly’s restaurant. She left the car running but leaned her head on the wheel to weep.

  Why did he kill himself? Why? Why?

  Why did he have her wait for him?

  Why? Why?

  And why had she snuck away, as if she were guilty of something? As if she were the killer?

  She couldn’t leave him like that. She should call the police.

  But they’d want to know why she was there. And then everyone would know why she was there. It would be one more thing that would hurt his sons.

  And the police would want to know why she didn’t report it in the first place. They’d want to know why she let herself in and then left. It would look like she was a murderer.

  She could go back, she thought. Do it all over. No one had seen her.

  She should do that for him. Not let him lie there for hours until he was found.

  Amanda did her best to dry her tears. She decided she would go back, get into the room, and make the call. Everything would be more or less as it had really happened—

  except she wouldn’t mention that she had left.

  And she’d put the keys back, the room key and the car key. She’d completely forgotten about them.

  Her resolve melted when she saw two police cars in front of the hotel, their red lights tearing up the night.

  Now what should she do?

  She looked back at the road just in time to see a policeman flagging her down. She slammed on the brake and jerked to a stop right in front of him.

  Were they looking for her? Did they suspect her?

  God, no one would believe her if she told the truth.

  Why did you run if you had nothing to hide? You panicked? What professional law enforcement officer, what Secret Service agent, ever panics?

  She hadn’t panicked.

  Yes. Yes, she had.

  Amanda reached to roll down her window, waiting for the inevitable question, waiting for everything that would follow. Then she realized that the policeman was simply stopping traffic. There was an ambulance coming from the other direction, siren on and lights flashing.

  It’s too late. Much, much too late.

  I should follow it in, she thought. But when the officer pointed at her and waved her on, she complied.

  6

  “So, Mr. Rubens, you don’t believe that the National Security Agency should spy on Americans?”

  William Rubens took a slow breath before answering, very conscious that he was being set up.

  “Our job is to provide intelligence, Senator,” the NSA’s deputy director said. “We have strict guidelines for gathering and disseminating information, and we follow them.”

  “But you believe that Americans should be spied on.”

  “Senator, my role is to follow the law regardless of what I believe,” said Rubens. “And no, as a personal matter, I do not believe that.”

  Senator Gideon McSweeney smiled broadly, looking around the committee room as if he had just scored some massive point.

  “And was the law followed in the so-called American Taliban case?” McSweeney asked.

  “Speaking for my agency’s actions, absolutely.”

  “Without qualification?”

  “The law was absolutely followed. No qualifications.” The senator paused, looking down at the papers in front of him.

  “Did you obtain subpoenas before gathering your intelligence?” McSweeney asked finally.

  Rubens leaned back in the chair. Ordinarily his boss, NSA Director Admiral Devlin Brown, would be sitting in this chair, doing his best not to tell the senators what he really thought of them. But Brown had suffered a heart attack three weeks before, leaving Rubens to take the hot seat while he recovered.

  “We followed the law, as always,” said Rubens.

  “Did you obtain subpoenas?” McSweeney asked again.

  “Where necessary.”

  “And where were they necessary?” Rubens had been instructed by the President not to be specific about the intelligence gathering in the case, which had involved a misguided young man from Detroit who had unfortunately gotten himself involved in a plot to destroy a crude oil receiving station in the Mexican Gulf.

  Much of the information had come via a high-ranking al Qaeda operative who had come to the United States to make contact with sympathizers. Deep Black had implanted a bugging device in his skull; the device was still there, continuing to transmit valuable information to the NSA. Describing the subpoenas could, conceivably, lead to information about the operation itself, and Rubens had no intention of revealing anything that had not already been made public.

  “I can only say, Senator, that the law was followed,” Rubens said.

  “A law in which there are no checks and balances, since the subpoenas are handed down in secret and need never be revealed.”

  “There is a system in place,” said Rubens. “I can elaborate if you wish.”

  McSweeney had no intention of letting Rubens take up the rest of his allotted time with an explanation of how the in de pen dent but secret judicial panel did its job, an explanation that would include the fact that more than 30 percent of the requests for subpoenas were turned down and that roughly 85 percent of the subpoenas resulted in an arrest or a documented disruption of a terrorist plot. Instead, McSweeney gave a short speech that invoked everyone from Thomas Jefferson to John Sirica as he discoursed on the need to uphold basic American values in the continuing war against terrorism.

  Neither Rubens nor anyone in the room could have possibly disagreed with McSweeney, but his unspoken implication that the administration did not follow the law nettled. Rubens felt like asking if the senator thought the government should have let terrorists blow up the offshore oil port, with the sub-sequent loss of perhaps a third of the country’s petroleum import capabilities.

  But as satisfying as that might have been momentarily, it was entirely the wrong thing to do. Senator McSweeney was running for his party’s presidential nomination. The purpose of his speech was not so much to make the present administration look bad — though he certainly didn’t mind doing that — as it was to make him appear both concerned and informed. Appearances to the contrary, he had no personal animosity toward the NSA and in fact had supported supplemental bud get allocations for the agency several times in the past. As long as Rubens allowed himself to be used as a punching bag, McSweeney would still consider himself a friend when the supplemental bud get came up for a vote in a few months.

  Make McSweeney look like a fool, however, and there would be no end of trouble.

  Rubens pressed his thumb against his forefinger, digging the nail into the fingertip, to keep himself quiet. />
  “Time, Senator,” said the committee aide keeping track of the allotted time.

  “Of course, I hope that my remarks will not be interpreted as a criticism of the National Security Agency, which has done and continues to do an excellent job,” said McSweeney quickly, throwing Rubens and the agency a bone for being a good punching bag. “I would extend that praise to you as well, Mr. Rubens. I know you to be a man of the highest personal integrity.”

  Somehow, the remark irritated Rubens more than anything else the senator had said.

  Finally dismissed, Rubens tried hard to make his thank-yous seem something other than perfunctory, rose, and walked swiftly to the door at the back of the room. The sparse audience was about evenly divided between congressional aides and media types. The latter swarmed toward the door, eager to ask follow-up questions. Unlike the senators, there was no need to accommodate the reporters, and Rubens merely waved at them with the barest hint of a smile, continuing swiftly into the hall.

  “Sorry, sorry,” he said, head tilted forward, his pace picking up. “Already very late. You’re interested in the senators, not me.”

  He succeeded in distancing himself from the pack, and was so focused on getting out of the building that he nearly ran over Jed Frey as he turned the corner toward the side entrance. Frey, a short but athletic man in his late fifties, caught Rubens with both hands as he veered back in surprise.

  “William, how are you?”

  “Jed. I’m sorry. Are you here on business?”

  “In a way. Do you have a few minutes?” Frey was the director of the Secret Service. A lifetime government employee, he had held a number of jobs in the Trea sury and State Departments after beginning as a Secret Service special agent.

  “I’m due back at Fort Meade,” said Rubens, referring to the NSA’s headquarters, often called Crypto City.

  “Perhaps I can ride with you awhile.”

  “Naturally,” said Rubens, starting toward his car. “President still giving you fits?”

  “Hmmmm,” said Frey noncommittally.

  Even more so than his recent predecessor, President Jeffrey Marcke seemed to delight in overruling or even ignoring the advice of the Secret Service. Marcke never saw a crowd he didn’t want to plunge into, much to the dismay of his bodyguards, and liked to point out that during George Washington’s day and for many presidencies afterward, anyone could walk into the executive mansion. Rubens knew of at least a dozen times when Marcke had gone places despite warnings from the Secret Service; Frey surely knew many more.

  But the director did not like criticizing his boss, and changed the subject. “You spoke at the hearing without an aide?” he asked Rubens.

  “I see no purpose in wasting someone else’s time as well as my own.”

  Though Frey laughed heartily, Rubens did not mean this as a joke. In fact, he had only taken a driver rather than driving himself because he knew he could get some work done on the way.

  Frey called his own driver, then joined Rubens in the backseat of Admiral Brown’s Lincoln.

  Rubens liked Frey; he was consistently honest and unpretentious. He also tended toward the laconic, a quality Rubens shared. In nearly every other way, however, the men were exact opposites. Frey’s father had been a policeman in Detroit, and Jed had grown up in one of the city’s tougher neighborhoods. The street still clung to him; though he was short and relatively thin, Frey had a way of dominating a space and did so now, shoulders squared and head pushed forward.

  His biceps bulged in his shirtsleeves as he folded his arms in front of his chest. The light gray hair on his forearms matched the color on his head.

  “This involves one of my agents, a man named Gerald Forester. You know about him?”

  Rubens shook his head.

  Frey’s entire body rose and fell as he took a deep breath.

  “Supposedly it’s suicide. But I don’t buy it.”

  7

  Senator McSweeney ducked out of the committee room and began looking for his aide and driver.

  “Jimmy Fingers, where the hell are you?” McSweeney’s voice boomed in the hallway.

  “Behind you, Senator. Watching your back. As always.”

  “We’re late.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  James Fahey — alias Jimmy Fingers — caught up to his boss and began walking beside him. Fahey had earned his nickname as a young political aide in the state capital; a rival had claimed he had his fingers in everything. The nickname hinted of connections to the old-line Irish political machine as well as the Mob; it was meant as a slur, but Fahey took it as a compliment and somehow it stuck.

  “Quick stop at the Swedish embassy, fund-raiser at Brown’s Hotel, meeting at the Savoy, followed by dinner with Dr. and Mrs. Fox. Heavy rollers.”

  “You don’t have to tell me who Dr. Fox is, Jimmy. I’ve been at this almost as long as you have now.” political columnists liked to style Jimmy Fingers and his boss as the “Original Odd Couple of Politics.” Born to a family of what the commentators politely termed “in de pen dent means,” McSweeney had rugged good looks augmented by impeccable tailoring and lightly moussed hair. Jimmy Fingers, about the same height but far more slender, looked frumpy and wrinkled no matter how fresh or expensive his suit. His hair, thinning rapidly, made a haystack look neatly ordered. And those who said he had a face only a mother could love were being far too kind.

  But the men were a matched set where it mattered — politics. Jimmy Fingers was often called the senator’s hatchet man, and one writer had even declared Fingers was the “dark genius behind the throne.” It was true that in local races Jimmy Fingers had generally favored tactics suited to X-Treme Box-ing. But he could be subtle as well, just as McSweeney could use the knife when necessary.

  Both men were equally committed to one goal: furthering McSweeney’s political career. And they had shared that goal for more than twenty years, since Jimmy Fingers had taught McSweeney how to use direct mail to attack his opponent in an assembly race.

  McSweeney’s Secret Service bodyguard edged a little closer as they walked outside. The protection was optional, but since the campaign had received an e-mail death threat, McSweeney had opted for it.

  “When’s Wilson meeting me?” said McSweeney as they walked toward his car.

  “He’ll be upstairs at Brown’s Hotel.”

  “Let’s blow off the Swedish embassy reception,” said McSweeney. “I’d like more time to talk to Wilson.”

  “Svorn Jenson is going to be at the embassy. He and his pals will be good for a hundred thousand in the campaign. All you have to do is smile at him and leave. He’ll be thrilled.”

  “Oh, all right. What’s Wilson going to tell me, anyway?”

  “What he always does. The numbers are bad, but they’re improving. He needs to justify the money you’re spending on him.”

  “The numbers better start moving soon,” said the senator.

  “Or he’s going to have to find a real job.”

  “Worry about the primaries, not the polls,” said Jimmy Fingers. He opened the door but didn’t get in.

  “Aren’t you coming?” asked McSweeney.

  “I have to pick up some dry cleaning before we head back to the district. I figured this would be a good time — the Swedes didn’t invite me to the reception.”

  “You could go in my place,” said McSweeney.

  “Maybe next time, Senator,” said Jimmy Fingers, pushing the door closed.

  * * *

  One thing Gideon McSweeney had to give Jimmy Fingers — the guy was never wrong when it came to potential donors.

  Svorn Jenson’s face lit up the second he saw McSweeney enter the reception; McSweeney pumped his hand, then went off to pump a few more before ducking out the side door. Even though he was in the embassy for no more than five minutes, he had made a friend — and campaign donor — for life.

  Brown’s Hotel, his next stop, was located in suburban Virginia, a few miles from the Beltway. McSwe
eney spent the ride there calling potential campaign donors. Running for President took an incredible amount of money, and raising it took an incredible amount of time, especially when you were the second or third favorite candidate in the upcoming Super Tuesday primary. Despite his upset victory in New Hampshire and his efforts since, McSweeney’s campaign was faltering, and privately he felt he’d need a miracle to make it through the next month.

  He was about a quarter of the way through his list of calls when they reached the hotel. McSweeney took his time getting out of the car. A knot of people gathered on the opposite sidewalk. They were gawkers rather than well-wishers; McSweeney could tell from their expressions that they didn’t recognize him. That was a disappointment — his television spots had been in heavy rotation in the state for a week — but he didn’t let on, waving enthusiastically and urging them to remember him in the upcoming primary.

  Turning back toward the building, he began striding toward the lobby door. Each step stoked his confidence, and by the time he reached the edge of the red carpet in front of the glass, he felt invincible.

  Number three? Two? No way. He was going to surprise everyone. It was New Hampshire all over again.

  Something caught his attention and McSweeney turned his head to the right. He saw a figure in black clothes standing beyond a knot of tourists.

  The man had a gun.

  “Get down!” yelled someone. In the next moment, McSweeney felt himself falling to the ground.

  8

  There was nothing in Frey’s description of the agent’s death that convinced Rubens it was anything but a suicide. The man was going through a painful divorce that promised to separate him from his children. Even Frey admitted that Forester could occasionally be moody and was most likely disappointed that he hadn’t advanced rapidly up the Secret Service hierarchy, despite early promise. And while Forester had handled literally hundreds of investigations during his career, he didn’t seem to have generated any enemies from them. The cases he had been working on before his death were typical ones as far as the Secret Service was concerned. The most serious involved an e-mailed death threat against a candidate for President — ironically, the candidate was Senator McSweeney, who had just finished grilling Rubens. Forester hadn’t closed out the inquiry, but Frey’s cursory review of the case made it appear there wasn’t much there.