House Justice: DeMarco 5, page 38
“All right,” he finally said. “I don’t need to spend the next year sitting in hearings. That wouldn’t be good for the Company.” Then it was his turn to jerk his blunt chin toward the statue. “Unlike John Paul, I know when it’s time to quit.” He smiled then, a bitter smile but nonetheless a smile. “I was thinking about getting out when the president’s first term was done anyway. Harvard said they’d like to have me and I was thinking that maybe I’d teach a course called Ethics in Government.”
Mahoney didn’t laugh at LaFountaine’s lame joke. He looked at the monument again and said, “I wonder if it was...I don’t know, cleaner back in his day or if they pulled the same kind of stuff we do.”
“It was no different,” LaFountaine said. “You know they had some bastards just like us back then, guys that did things they didn’t ever want included in the history books. But if those guys hadn’t done those things, this country wouldn’t be what it is today.”
Mahoney wasn’t so sure about that.
Chapter 55
Angela got off the phone and turned to face DeMarco. “There’s a team coming out here from Langley. For real, this time. They’ll be here this afternoon and they’ll take over for us.”
“What’s going to happen to Kharazi?”
“I can’t tell you. But I can tell you that Mahoney knows what we’re doing and he can live with it.”
DeMarco felt like saying there were a lot of things John Mahoney could live with that he couldn’t, but he didn’t see the point. Mahoney would tell him later about whatever agreement he had reached with LaFountaine.
“And what about us?” he said.
She looked at him for a long time before she answered. “I don’t know. I’m going to divorce Brad; that’s long overdue. Then I’m going to sit down and think about you and me. I like you. I like being with you. But I’m not sure you’re going to be able to accept what I do. LaFountaine’s going to give me the job he promised, and I’m going to stay at Langley, but later on, if they offer me an overseas posting, I’m going to take it. Can you live with that?”
DeMarco didn’t say anything for a moment, then he smiled.
“Why don’t we cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Author’s Note
It is a fact that three journalists, including Judith Miller of the New York Times, were jailed for contempt in the Valerie Plame leak case, just as Sandra Whitmore was jailed for contempt in House Justice. However, I don’t actually know if press shield laws have been revised since 2003 to provide additional legal protection for journalists attempting to protect the identity of their sources. A recent article I read indicated that the laws are pretty much the same as they were in 2003.
The idea for Marty Taylor’s company came from a short article I saw on the Internet about a big defense contractor who makes missiles and missile-guidance systems entering into a research agreement with a small company that makes computer-gaming peripherals like wireless mouses (or is that mice?).
There is no Glendon Hills Golf Course in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The golf course described in House Justice is a combination of a place where I play—badly—in Washington and a golf course I played on in Myrtle Beach.
While a .500 S&W Magnum will penetrate some bulletproof glass, I’m sure it will not penetrate all bulletproof glass. I just liked the idea of Mikhail having a great big handgun, and when I saw a picture of the .500 S&W and read that some suicidal fools actually buy these pistols for hunting bear, I said: That’s the one.
There was an article in the Washington Post in 2005 saying there were over thirty-four thousand registered lobbyists in D.C. I have no idea if the article is accurate or if there are that many lobbyists there today. I do know that whatever the number is, it’s a whopping big number.
I also know many Iranians today are struggling to improve democracy and human rights in that country and they do not support terrorism and would never condone torturing people, spies, or otherwise, as I have depicted in House Justice.
Lastly, history books be damned, I’m sure John Paul Jones never said, “I have not yet begun to fight.” I’m convinced it was something akin to “kiss my ass” as Jake LaFountaine says in the book.
Mike Lawson
House Divided
A Joe DeMarco Thriller
MIKE LAWSON
House Divided
Epilogue
“Okay, Calvin, I’ll see your three Marlboros,” Clarence Goodman finally said, and tentatively put three Salems down in the center of the card table like they were hundred-dollar chips.
George Aguilera, smiling like he’d already won, immediately added a small can of smoked oysters to a pot which consisted mostly of cigarettes but also a John Grisham paperback and a five-year-old Playboy. “I’ll call your three and raise you three,” Aguilera said.
“Wait a damn minute,” Calvin Loring said. “I thought we agreed yesterday that the oysters were worth five cigarettes, not six.”
The debate ensued—and Dillon closed his eyes.
In the minimum security section of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex at White Deer, Pennsylvania, cigarettes were the gold standard and other commodities for bartering and wagering were based on their value. The value of a cigarette, however, changed periodically, owing to availability of supply and other more esoteric factors. Dillon was thinking about writing an essay on the subject, explaining how the prison economy in black market goods and services was eerily parallel to that of the outside world—there was inflation, price-fixing, insider trading, and market fluctuations due to disasters—although the disasters themselves were unique to prisons, such as lockdowns or retribution from the guards.
Dillon and the three men playing poker with him were dressed identically: blue jeans, white T-shirts, white socks, and plain-toed black lace-up shoes. Dillon’s jeans, however, had been tailored by another inmate, a man incarcerated for identity theft but who was quite skillful with needle and thread.
None of his poker-playing pals were violent men. George Aguilera had been the president of a telemarketing company that specialized in bilking old ladies out of their savings. Calvin Loring was a physician who had supplemented his income by supplying OxyContin to teenage addicts via the Internet. Medicaid fraud charges against him were pending. Clarence Goodman had been a hedge fund manager—and the designated fall guy for looting a union pension fund. The depressing part for Dillon was not that he was incarcerated with such people but instead that these three men were the best poker players at Allenwood—and they were uniformly atrocious. None of them, including the hedge fund manager, appeared to have the slightest understanding of the mathematical odds of a particular hand winning or losing. After Dillon had won enough cigarettes to become the Donald Trump of Allenwood, he began cheating. He had always been a good card mechanic and in prison he had plenty of time to practice and become a truly stellar one. He didn’t cheat to win, however. When it was his turn to deal, he would give all the players, except for himself, outrageously good hands—four of a kind, flushes, full houses—and then would sit back and watch them go crazy betting against one another. It was one of the things he did to alleviate the perpetual boredom.
Boredom was, in fact, the worst thing about being in prison—although if he had been sent to some other federal facility he might not have been able to say that. He had almost ended up in a maximum security prison in Ohio, where he would have undoubtedly become the plaything of one of the psychotics who resided there. Fortunately, and thanks to information he had obtained while at the NSA, he was able to keep that from happening.
It had all gone pretty much the way he’d expected: DeMarco had delivered the recordings to Justice Antonelli—and Antonelli believed every word he heard. DeMarco had figured out that Thomas Antonelli was the Thomas on Breed’s recording when he saw a newspaper photo of Antonelli at General Breed’s funeral and the accompanying article that said Antonelli was related to Breed’s wife. And then Antonelli did exactly what Dillon had thought he would do: he went immediately to the president and told him that if he didn’t clean up this whole NSA/Bradford mess, he was going to go public with everything.
Fortunately, at least from Dillon’s perspective, Antonelli was wise enough to realize that the U.S. government couldn’t let the entire world know what Charles Bradford had done because no one would believe that Bradford had been acting independently and without the sanction of his government. If Bradford had only killed a few Muslim terrorists, it might have been different, but Bradford had executed members of the Saudi, Pakistani, and Chinese governments—and the president really didn’t want to piss off the Chinese. Nor did the president particularly want it known the NSA was—once again—intercepting the communications of U.S. citizens without the required warrants.
The president assigned a special prosecutor—one of the few people in Washington actually capable of keeping a secret. The prosecutor questioned people in camera—meaning that none of his meetings were open to the public—and the records of those meetings were sealed for fifty years. The president figured that whoever was president half a century from now could decide if he or she wanted to declassify this god-awful debacle and let the world of the future know about it.
DeMarco was questioned several times by the prosecutor, and one time he was questioned with Dillon present. The prosecutor wanted to see if Dillon would deny any of DeMarco’s accusations—which Dillon didn’t. Dillon admitted that he had David Hopper and Colonel Gilmore killed but only to protect the lives of DeMarco and John Levy. He also admitted he planted bugs in Charles Bradford’s office and manipulated John Levy to kill Bradford. That is, he freely admitted he did his very best to rid the United States government of Charles Bradford while trying to keep secret everything Bradford had done. In other words, he admitted that he tried to do exactly what the president was now trying to do.
What Dillon refused to do was provide the names of anyone at the NSA who had helped him, and the only people DeMarco could identify were Alice and the three men who guarded him at the farmhouse in Maryland. But DeMarco didn’t know anyone’s last name, and Alice and the guards had disappeared. The one thing Dillon lied about was that he’d intercepted the transmission of Paul Russo being killed intentionally. He explained, in complex technical language, how the intercept had been inadvertently obtained due to “satellite malfunction.”
The president’s special prosecutor didn’t believe him.
Admiral Fenton Wilcox and his deputy director were fired and a new director was appointed to the NSA. The new director was a bright fellow, a three-star air force general who had previously worked at the agency, and he was told by the president that his first task was to ensure that the NSA was eavesdropping in accordance with all the rules. To assist the general in this task, seventy independent inspectors descended upon Fort Meade to review everything the agency was doing. Naturally, almost all the inspectors were former NSA employees because the new NSA director couldn’t find other people with the appropriate security clearance and the technical knowledge to do the review.
After six months of grueling work, the inspectors found a few minor compliance and procedural problems but failed to uncover the true nature of Claire Whiting’s secret division. One reason for this was because the day after DeMarco gave the recordings to Justice Antonelli, Claire’s personnel all began to perform legitimate—albeit less useful—functions, and the only American communications they intercepted while the inspectors were conducting their review were those permitted by FISA warrants. Claire’s ability to hide her true role in Dillon’s organization was also made easier by the fact that after Dillon was incarcerated, the new NSA director, deciding he needed to raise the glass ceiling at Fort Meade and have a few more women in high-ranking positions, concluded that Claire was the best person to fill Dillon’s former position at the agency.
The president’s special prosecutor also questioned the two young soldiers who had killed Paul Russo and the reporter, Robert Hansen. They sat there, shell-shocked, saying how they’d been told by John Levy that the men they had killed were foreign terrorists, and the prosecutor had no doubt the soldiers had been duped by Levy and the late Colonel Gilmore. The soldiers, however, knew nothing regarding Levy’s connection to Charles Bradford.
The prosecutor realized that there were probably ten or twenty soldiers out there, present and former members of the Old Guard at Fort Myer, who had committed assassinations under Bradford’s orders. He was sure all these dedicated young men had no idea that they had done anything illegal, and he was equally sure they had all been sworn to secrecy. And he was confident that Charles Bradford and Martin Breed had selected only men who could keep a secret. The prosecutor decided—and the president concurred—that it would be in everyone’s best interest to probe no deeper into the activities of the Old Guard. Without a Charles Bradford to lead them, the sentinels who guarded the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier would go back to being nothing more than exceptional sentinels.
Charles Bradford, as Dillon had expected, presented the president with an impossible dilemma. There was no direct evidence proving Bradford had ordered Martin Breed to assassinate anyone—and Bradford, when questioned by the prosecutor, denied giving Breed any such orders. Bradford said he may have supported in principle what Breed had done, but he would never have acted in such a unilateral, illegal, and dangerous manner. And he noted that, at the end of his life, Martin Breed had been afflicted by a terrible case of brain cancer, and the last time he saw Breed, the man had been unable to distinguish reality from fantasy.
The prosecutor did have in his possession the recording DeMarco had given to Thomas Antonelli, the recording in which Breed admitted to carrying out thirteen assassinations for Charles Bradford. The prosecutor was sure that Breed’s admissions on the recording, combined with DeMarco’s testimony, would be sufficient to convince any reasonable jury of Charles Bradford’s guilt. When he told Bradford this, Bradford’s response had been: So try me.
Bradford knew the last thing that the president wanted was a public trial or a court-martial. Bradford also knew that when the public heard about who Breed had assassinated—mostly people with known links to terrorists—a large segment of the population would consider Charles Bradford a hero for what he had allegedly done. The rest of the world would, of course, have a different view of his actions—and it was really the rest of the world the president was trying to keep in the dark.
The president considered convening a secret military tribunal; after Bradford was found guilty he would be locked away in a maximum security prison in total isolation. He was afraid if he did this, however, someone on the tribunal, someone sympathetic to Bradford, would talk to the press. Someone always talked to the press. He also considered simply having Bradford killed and wondered if he could do as King Henry II had done with Thomas à Becket—Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?—and hope that someone on his staff would show some damn initiative for a change. In the end, though, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. He wanted whatever he did with Charles Bradford to have at least the appearance of being legal.
While the president was deliberating, Chief Justice Thomas Antonelli was leaping up and down in his black robes, demanding that the president do something, and do something soon! Antonelli had knowledge that crimes had been committed, and this knowledge weighed heavily upon his conscience. And he pointed out that Bradford hadn’t just assassinated foreigners, he’d also killed a number of U.S. citizens, including Paul Russo and a member of the press.
Thomas Antonelli didn’t see the big picture either.
Then the president’s devious, brilliant, special prosecutor found a solution.
The right of habeas corpus—basically, the constitutional right to be tried before one is imprisoned—had been overturned several times by past presidents via executive order. Lincoln issued an executive order to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War. Japanese Americans were interned during World War II because of an executive order issued by Roosevelt. In more recent times, executive orders had been issued to suspend habeas corpus in the case of folks like the terrorists in Guantanamo.
Well, okay, the president said. If it was good enough for Lincoln and Roosevelt, it was good enough for him, so he had his special prosecutor write up an executive order saying, in flowery legal language peppered with historical precedents, that it was okay for him to toss a guy into a cell without a trial when the guy had committed extraordinary crimes and when public disclosure of those crimes could do grave harm to the United States. The president figured he might be able to convince Justice Antonelli to play along if he promised to limit his executive order to Charles Bradford and shredded it immediately thereafter. If Antonelli didn’t play along, at some point he would have to admit that he had remained silent while the president struggled with the Bradford dilemma.
Yes, the president liked the idea. There were still a few details to be ironed out, but the basic concept was solid. He’d sign the executive order and then Bradford would be whisked off to a cell by a few extremely tight-lipped folks and be kept in isolation until he died. Exactly where the cell would be and who would do the whisking were a couple of those details that needed to be nailed down. To explain why Bradford had suddenly disappeared, he would appear to die while piloting the Cessna he owned. But then—just when the president was on the cusp of discussing his plan with Justice Antonelli—something happened, something that made Dillon Crane, a lifelong agnostic, reconsider his views regarding the existence of a Divine Being: Charles Bradford was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He would be dead in less than a year.
