Incentive for Death, page 5
“Sure. Got a preferred day?”
“Let’s do it tomorrow night, if that works for them.”
“I’ll talk to them tomorrow.”
“She still at that accounting firm?”
“Think so. Still a CPA doing the exciting stuff accountants do. If you’re in town for a while, want to catch a Nationals game?”
“Sure. Too bad it’s not football season.”
“I’ll check the schedule and let you know when the home games are.”
“Okay,” she said, then moved back to the oven and, using mitts, pulled the casserole out and set it on one of the unused stove burners to settle and cool. She tested the rice, decided it was ready, and drained it through a sieve in the sink.
Mags scooped the basmati rice onto the plates, added a large pat of salted butter, and covered it with a sizable helping of chicken divan, which had a browned cheese crust on top. I’ve never been a fan of broccoli, but this dish made me reconsider my lifelong aversion to it. I even had seconds.
After we’d eaten, I cleaned up the kitchen and loaded the dishwasher. As usual, when we were both in residence, we then sat down and watched MSNBC or CNN. We each added color commentary to the news stories.
Eventually, we gave up and headed to bed. She didn’t even hesitate, and tonight was to be one of those with benefits. It is an unusual relationship, but we both still like each other a great deal. Most of the time.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ON WEDNESDAY MORNING I arose early and showered. Then I went downstairs in my bathrobe, ground the coffee beans, and put on a large pot of coffee. Mags can’t start her day without two cups.
I opened the refrigerator to see that Mags had stocked the larder with essentials for a real breakfast: half-and-half—which she has to have with her coffee—bacon, eggs, English muffins.
I heard her stirring upstairs. My signal to start cooking breakfast. I don’t do a lot of cooking at home but am quite proficient at making the most important meal of the day, as my mother used to say.
After putting my square cast iron skillet on a burner to warm up, I pulled out the package of thick-sliced bacon and started frying one of life’s true delicacies.
Knowing Mags would have coffee before getting ready, I put some half-and-half in a coffee cup and nuked it. I also set out the dish of brown turbinado cane sugar, which she prefers.
The batch of bacon was draining on the paper towel I had placed on a dinner plate when she made her appearance. She nabbed a semi-crisp rasher and rendered a verdict that it was perfectly prepared with a simple, “Mm-hmm.”
“Thanks for heating the cream, McDermott.” She made her cup of coffee and moved to the breakfast table.
I said, “Morning.” A long-standing rule is that Mags doesn’t like to respond to questions first thing in the day. Early on, when I would ask her questions in the morning, she would respond with “Why are you torturing me?” So, I learned that simple declarative statements that did not call for answers was the best way to initiate morning conversations.
I dropped two English muffins into the toaster and got out the eggs. While I may not be much of a cook, I had long ago perfected the art of breaking an egg with one hand, which is better at keeping the yolk intact. We both like our eggs over medium with the yolk still runny.
I buttered the muffins and flipped the eggs. Fried eggs cooked in bacon grease do not take very long. After plating the eggs, bacon, and muffins, I set a plate in front of her, which received a nice smile but no verbal comment. After pouring myself a glass of orange juice, I joined her at the table and dug in.
After she had eaten, Mags prepared another cup of coffee. Once she was situated across from me again, she showed a contented grin that meant she had now returned to the human condition. “Springtime in D.C.”
“Yep,” I added to the non sequitur observation.
“Time to make the donuts,” she said.
“Meaning?”
“I need to get going. Need to get ready and head in to work.” No details on where “in” was. I didn’t even ask anymore.
She finished her coffee, put her cup in the sink, and headed upstairs. I cleaned up the kitchen and then followed her upstairs.
On her way out, she stopped to kiss my cheek and then said, “See if the Shaws want to have dinner tonight.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied crisply as I clicked my heels and followed her down the stairs from the deck to the garage. She put the top down on her Speedster and cranked the engine, which purred like a contented large cat. She backed out and headed west down the alley, while I then headed east down the alley to pick up my partner.
Maggie Hampton drove west toward the Capitol Building. The sky was robin’s egg blue with only wisps of clouds. She thought it was a perfect day for a convertible. When she reached Independence Avenue SW, she made a right turn along the south end of the Capitol and traveled along the south side of The Mall, savoring having the top down.
At 14th Street SW, she turned left and absorbed the beauty of the Jefferson Memorial and the cherry trees on her right. Maggie crossed what used to be called the 14th Street Bridge, but now was known as the George Mason Memorial Bridge. At the south end of the bridge, she turned the Speedster onto the exit ramp for the George Washington Parkway and headed northwest along the Potomac River. She was now in Northern Virginia between the Pentagon and the river.
Maggie smiled as she cruised up the GW Parkway. She passed Theodore Roosevelt Island in the middle of the Potomac and continued northwest, getting some thumbs-up from other drivers admiring her classic automobile. She rolled past the Francis Scott Key Bridge connecting Virginia to Georgetown.
After that, most of the heavy traffic was headed in the opposite direction toward Arlington and D.C. Once she was past the Chain Bridge Road interchange, she moved to the right lane to prepare for her exit.
In an unincorporated area of Fairfax County known as Langley, Maggie took the exit and curled back under GW Parkway to a smaller roadway with large signs about restricted access. She pulled up to the security gate and presented her identification and authorization to enter the campus of the Central Intelligence Agency. She knew McDermott was curious to know where she worked for certain, but he had never gotten any indication from her directly or otherwise. The guard recognized her and the Speedster, but still gave her papers a close review. A German shepherd sniffer dog on a leash with another guard circled her vehicle.
Eventually, Maggie was waved through and into the 250-acre campus of the CIA. She proceeded to the huge parking lot on the north side of the Original Headquarters Building. Most employees thought OHB stood for Old Headquarters Building. Built during the second term of Eisenhower’s presidency, this seven-story structure contained one and a half million square feet of office space.
Maggie put the top up on the Speedster manually and latched it into the windshield frame. Porsche did not make electrical convertible tops until much later than 1959, when her prized vehicle had rolled out of the factory in Stuttgart.
Although she worked in the New Headquarters Building on the south side of the CIA campus, Maggie liked to occasionally enter the impressive main entry of the old headquarters, where she cleared security and crossed the famous lobby mosaic.
The reason she came through the main entry today was both nostalgia and her need for coffee. She stopped at the coffee shop in the food court on the ground floor. Maggie always required a large coffee to take to her desk in the new building. Due to secrecy reasons, the baristas are not allowed to ask for customers’ names. Each person just volunteers a letter or number for the order-taker to put on the cardboard sleeve.
She then took her coffee and traversed the tunnel that connected to the new building. As she walked, Maggie thought back a decade and a half to her first trip through these buildings. Back then, she had also parked in the big surface lot north of the OHB and found her way through the buildings along this same route.
Maggie earned her MBA from the Wharton School of Business fifteen years ago. One of her seminar professors had recommended her for a job, and she was summoned to an interview at The Study Hotel near Penn’s campus in Philadelphia.
The well-dressed man who met with her gave a name, which she suspected immediately was not his birth name. He had gray hair and wore a bespoke charcoal suit with a chalk stripe.
He knew her father had been a colonel in the Army who had died in Afghanistan several years earlier. He said that he was meeting with her on behalf of the Political Action Group—PAG—which was a section of the Special Activities Division of the CIA. When she responded that she had no interest in politics, he explained that PAG had nothing to do with politics in the United States.
He told her that the Special Activities Division has two divisions, both of which are clandestine. The largest part of the Special Activities Division, he explained, is referred to as Ground Support or the Special Operations Group. These were the covert paramilitary operations for which the country could deny responsibility, even though it was completely behind those efforts. Maggie pointed out that she had no skills appropriate to that arena.
The gentleman held up his hands. “No, no. That’s not why I am here. The much smaller Political Action Group is responsible for covert activities related to political influence, psychological operations, business conspiracies, economic warfare, and cyber warfare. It’s the latter areas we want to focus on with you. Business, economic, and cyber.”
Maggie paused. “What would I be doing?”
“This will not be a normal desk job. Your missions will vary from day to day, week to week, and month to month. The world is not a static place. We need intelligent people who can tap dance and adjust when the music changes.”
“Will I be trained as a spy?”
“Not in the sense of Jason Bourne. But everyone in the Special Activities Division goes through our standard training at Camp Peary in Virginia. Many call it ‘The Farm.’ There is a more intense program for the paramilitary people coming into the Ground Support operation. They usually come from Delta Forces or Special Ops.
“For the Political Action Group, we have a different program that focuses on tradecraft, firearms, technical support, and skills, such as piercing business and financial transactions, as well as unraveling and tracking money. For those headed for the psychological and political side, there is a somewhat different agenda, which you will not get. We have you in mind for a specific area utilizing your finance and information technology training. You will also receive specialized language training.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Kind of sounds like a desk job to me. Probably at a lot lower pay than I can make in the private sector.”
“I won’t kid you about the pay. It’s decent, but not what you can pull down in the business world. But you will never have more of a sense of doing something so worthwhile for the benefit of your country. There will be some travel outside the country or even within the country. You will be assigned to headquarters in Langley, Virginia. But periodically you will be working with others in the Agency to assemble in-depth analyses and take the steps designed to protect America. You will not be bored.”
They talked for another two hours. He wasn’t interviewing anyone else at Wharton. She asked for two days to think it over. At the end of that time, she called the gentleman back and accepted.
Maggie’s initial assignment was to the CIA Career Training Program at a large military reservation near Williamsburg, Virginia. She was subjected to polygraph, psychological, drug, and every other type of testing.
She was then transferred to Camp Peary, the CIA’s training facility on the same military reservation. In addition to a substantial amount of physical training, she learned a variety of small firearms, self-defense, surveillance detection routes, and tracking. She also had extensive classroom and hands-on probing of financial records at banks, businesses, and other locations. She was educated by the Agency’s best hackers in accessing financial and corporate data.
When she finished this course of training, she was issued her final Agency identification and a Glock 19, a small 9-millimeter pistol.
After she finished her language training in Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and Urdu, she was ordered to report to the Financial Analysis Section of the Political Action Group at the New Headquarters Building in Langley.
On her first day at the Agency, Maggie had walked this same route through the buildings. Back to today, she thought. She took the elevator to the third floor of the New Headquarters Building where the Political Action Group is housed.
Maggie navigated the hallways toward the southwest corner of the massive building. Like most doors at CIA headquarters, the door bore a number but there was no signage stating what section or division was behind any given door.
She used her smart reader card to enter. Once inside, Maggie approached the two uniformed security officers next to the bio-metric scanner and metal detector. Even though she knew both of them, she presented her identification, which they scanned. After a second, the guards received a green light followed by yellow text stating “Access Authorized.” After passing through the metal detector, which also did a full body scan, the third guard monitoring the screen waved her on.
Maggie then faced two more doors, which each required a smart reader card. The left door only admitted people who worked in the PsyOps part of the PAG. Her smart card unlocked the other door and granted access to the Financial Analysis Section of the PAG. Access to the much larger Special Operations Group was on the other side of the third floor. In all, the Special Activities Division occupied the entire floor.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JUST AS I REACHED the end of the alley, my cellphone rang. I stopped at the crosswalk and answered. “Burke here.”
“Mac, this is Corporal Beverly Gray.” Chief Whittaker’s assistant. “I’ve got your search warrant in hand for the Van Damm residence.”
“Thanks for expediting it. I’ll swing by and get it, as soon as I pick up Oliver.”
“I’ll leave it on your desk.”
I stayed put at the end of the alley and dialed Brady Pollard, head of our CSI crew. He answered on the second ring.
“Brady, good. You’re in early. We just got a search warrant for attorney Van Damm’s house. Can you get a crew there in forty-five minutes or so?”
“Oh, sure. I was just sitting here waiting for some detective to call me before my first cup of coffee. And, voila, who but Mac Burke should reach out to me? As fate would have it, though, we currently have nothing happening this morning. Give me the address.”
I did so and asked him to line up a locksmith as well.
When I pulled up in front of Oliver and Jewell’s house, Jewell was just getting in her car to go to work. I did not block their driveway as usual but did hop out and wave them down to convey Maggie’s request for dinner. They agreed and suggested Pascal Manales, which they knew Mags liked as well. It is the best New Orleans-style restaurant in D.C. That agreed, Oliver and I boarded my vehicle and headed for MPD headquarters.
On my desk was a 9 x 12 envelope—the search warrant for the Van Damm property. We headed back to the parking lot and drove to Weldon Van Damm’s house on Riggs Street NW.
I knew from experience that most of the wealth in D.C. is congregated in the northwest part of the city. Predominantly west of 16th Street NW. There are, however, some pockets of pricey and historical homes east of 16th Street. Van Damm’s house was located in the Shaw area—one of the prosperous pockets east of 16th Street—just a little north of Logan Circle, where Rhode Island and Vermont Avenues merged in a roundabout at 13th Street NW.
We took Massachusetts Avenue around Mt. Vernon Square. Just before the start of Embassy Row, we exited onto Vermont Avenue, which took us to Logan Circle. In the center of the circle stands a large bronze statue of General John Logan mounted on horseback atop a substantial granite pediment. I’m sure most people have no idea who Logan was. But I’m a history buff who looked it up. Logan was the Union general in charge of the Army of Tennessee late in the Civil War. Now a park for over a hundred years, the Circle is surrounded by stately row houses, most of which are probably on the Historic Register.
Heading counterclockwise around Logan Circle, we exited onto 13th Street NW, which we followed north for five blocks before turning left on Riggs Street. The street was shaded by sweet gum trees on both sides, which formed a canopy that enveloped the entire street.
We spotted the white and blue crime scene van several houses up Riggs Street. Next to it was a smaller red van with ARMSTRONG LOCKSMITH in gold lettering on the side—Brady Pollard’s locksmith of choice when we needed to execute search warrants and have keys made to accommodate the current search and for future reentries.
Van Damm’s residence was a three-story row house. The brick had been painted a cream color. The eight metal steps and wrought iron railings leading to the main entry at the second level were painted black.
The short porch landing faced double wrought iron doors adorned with a heavy metal mesh of concentric squares in both the top and bottom panels on each of the doors. The locksmith went to work on the lock that held the heavy metal doors secured. He had them unlocked in less than two minutes.
The locksmith then worked on the lock and dead bolt that secured the double teak doors that were the main entry. Again, within a few minutes, he had both of those locks opened. No alarm sounded because Brady had already notified the alarm company that we were making an authorized entry. He had identified the alarm company by the sticker on the outside doors.
We put on booties and gloves and went inside. The locksmith returned to his red van to make sets of keys for us. The main entry was on the second floor, as was the case with many row houses, including mine.
The entryway was about eight feet across with a red and blue oriental runner on top of an old hardwood floor that had turned dark with age. There was a narrow side table on one wall with a marble top. Next to a vase of slightly wilted agapanthus blooms, there was a small antique dish, which was sitting empty. Probably where he deposited his keys when he came in the front doors.
