Act of Treason

47

POTOMAC PALISADES, WASHINGTON, DC

K ennedy finished loading the dishwasher and dried her hands on a towel hanging from the refrigerator door handle. The clock on the microwave read 10:29. Her son was in bed, and a pot of coffee was ready to go. They would want coffee, even at this late hour. Kennedy walked through the dining room to the formal living room. She looked out the window to see if they’d arrived. A man was out walking his golden retriever. Kennedy recognized the dog before the owner. It was Rookie and Mr. Soucheray, her neighbor.

Even though Kennedy loved her neighborhood, she had considered moving. Potomac Palisades was, in her biased opinion, the nicest area in Washington, DC. It wasn’t the most expensive, or the most exclusive, but that was part of what made it one of the nicest. It was old. Good-sized homes with bigger than normal city yards. Yards that people mowed themselves. Kennedy didn’t mow her own lawn, but instead of hiring a service she had one of the neighborhood boys handle the chore. In another year or two Tommy would be able to take over. Potomac Palisades was not a bedroom community. People knew each other.
Her mother lived less than a mile away in the Foxhall Village neighborhood. Kennedy had tried to get her to live with them, but the woman wanted her independence, and Kennedy respected that. The Palisades ran along the eastern edge of the Potomac river. With its rolling terrain and luscious growth it felt like a sanctuary far from the nation’s center of power. In truth it was a straight three-mile shot from the White House. Four if you wound your way down the Potomac. The only reason she considered moving was out of respect for the quiet neighborhood and the nice people who lived there. The CIA made a lot of people nervous. In Washington the institution tended to be less polarizing. Pretty much everybody knew somebody who worked for the CIA or had worked for the CIA. When you saw those people pulling up to a soccer game or the grocery store in their minivan it took a lot of the mystique out of the job.
Being the director of the CIA was a slightly different matter, though. Shortly after she took over the top job, Langley replaced all the windows in her house with bulletproof glass and installed steel doors and door frames with overlaid wood veneer. They wanted to do even more, like installing a ten-foot privacy fence in back. She put her foot down and told them no. Instead, they landscaped, putting in pressure pads and laser and microwave sensors. A panic room had been built in the basement and the home was swept twice a week for listening devices. A bomb tech and his German shepherd checked her car every morning before she left for work. Next to the panic room in the basement they’d also built a security shack that was the nerve center for the extremely expensive security system. The house was as secure as they could make it without tearing it down and starting over.
After all the security precautions were implemented, another group at the CIA took it upon themselves to do a threat assessment on Kennedy. At the top of their list was the suggestion that she move to a location with a long driveway. The current house was a scant forty feet from the street. Any terrorist with a couple thousand dollars and a rudimentary understanding of chemistry could simply drive down her street and level her house. Welcome to the post-9/11 world. She was a high-value target and her neighbors were understandably uneasy that their peaceful neighborhood might become ground zero.
Kennedy’s response was to shelve the threat assessment. She thought of the risks her father and stepmother had taken. Her dad had also worked for the CIA. He’d been the station chief in Beirut back in 1983 when a car bomb leveled the place. Her stepmother worked for the State Department. Kennedy’s parents divorced when she six. Her mother, it turned out, wasn’t cut out for the world of international espionage. Kennedy spent a significant portion of her teens and early twenties overseas. She’d lived in Cairo, Damascus, Baghdad, and Beirut before everything fell apart. Having walked the streets of Beirut with machine-gun fire in the distance and mortars going off only blocks away it seemed ludicrous to think that such violence could come to the tranquil streets of Potomac Palisades.
When President Hayes decided not to seek reelection, Kennedy put the decision to move on hold. When Alexander and Ross won the race, she banished any thought of moving. Kennedy was an exceedingly civil person. Always polite and rarely confrontational. She was a woman in a man’s world, and she knew her mere presence could be threatening to the insatiable egos of the men who were drawn to work in Washington. Thomas Stansfield, her mentor, had warned her often about the perils of working for men who needed to constantly prove that they were right. Kennedy avoided most of the frays by staying respectful, but firm. She also avoided gossip and politics. She had tried to do the same with Ross, but there had always been signs that there was an agenda lurking beneath the surface. Nothing big, just little things, but the little things often spoke volumes about people.
For example, Ross was habitually late for every meeting. Kennedy remembered Stansfield telling her once that when someone is constantly late, they fall into three categories. The first, he called idiot savant. The type of person who is so smart in his or her field of expertise that their mind is literally elsewhere. In layman’s terms he explained that these people were smart in school and dumb on the bus. The second category was made up of perfectionists, people who were incapable of letting go of one task and moving on to another. These people were always playing catch-up, rarely rose to any real position of power, and needed to be managed properly. The third category, and the one to be most wary of, were the egomaniacs. These were the people who not only felt that their time was more important than anyone else’s, but who needed to prove it by constantly making others wait for them.
Kennedy was worried. She looked out the window and checked for headlights. Rapp and Dumond had said they’d found some interesting stuff and they were on their way over. In the past she had always tried to keep her personal feelings separate from her job, especially when dealing with those who’d been elected to office. Ross was making that difficult. It was as if she’d seen him for who he really was, for the first time, this morning. The man had yet to take his oath of office. If he’d called and questioned her about the article, she would have understood. If he’d called for an appointment, she would have thought he’d had more important things to do, but would have accommodated him nonetheless. But showing up unannounced was peculiar. It was as if he needed to see her beaten down.
A pair of bluish white xenon headlights appeared at the far end of the block. A few seconds later a silver Audi came to an abrupt halt at the curb. Kennedy watched as Dumond and Rapp got out of the car and started up the walk. The younger man, Dumond, moved with a carefree gait, his attention focused on some small device he was carrying in his left hand. Rapp moved with an athletic grace. There was nothing herky-jerky or rushed about his movements. His head swiveled from left to right and then back, like a radar searching for potential threats. She remembered seeing that awareness when she’d recruited him all those years ago at Syracuse. Kennedy strode through the living room to the foyer and punched a code into the security panel on the wall. Somewhere behind the wall she heard the faint whirl of an electronic motor as it retracted three steel pins from the door.
Kennedy opened the door and immediately noticed a puzzled look on Dumond’s face. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m not sure. I’ll know more in a minute.” He stepped into the foyer and kept tapping the keys of a very small laptop.
Rapp closed the door and kissed Kennedy on the cheek. “Tommy in bed?”
“Yes. He has school in the morning.”
Rapp took off his coat and handed it to Kennedy. Dumond was too focused on his computer to bother removing his jacket and continued down the hall toward the smell of coffee. Rapp and Kennedy followed him.
“Would anyone like coffee?” Kennedy asked.
“Please.” Rapp backed up against the black soapstone counter and placed his hands on the edge. He looked at Dumond, who hadn’t answered Kennedy, and said, “Hey, dip shit?”
Dumond tore his eyes away from the small screen and said, “Huh?”
“Coffee?”
“Sure.”
“How about ‘please’?” Rapp prodded.
“Please,” Dumond said without taking his eyes off the screen. “With cream and sugar.”
Kennedy poured two cups and took the cream from the fridge. She handed one cup to Rapp. “So what have you learned?” She placed the other cup on the table next to the cream and slid the sugar bowl over.
“So far,” Rapp said, “nothing concrete, but we have a few interesting tidbits. Back in early October, Garret flew to Switzerland for a day.”
“Another October surprise.” Kennedy was referencing a conspiracy theory which held that the Reagan camp had met secretly with members of the Iranian government and conspired to delay the release of American hostages until after they beat Carter in the 1980 presidential election.
“All we have are the dates of his departure and return. We have no idea who he met with. He did call a bank in Geneva several times before and after the trip, but again we have no idea who he spoke with.”
“E-mails?” Kennedy asked.
“We’re still trying to track all those down. The guy has at least six different addresses and he must receive and send easily a hundred a day.”
“What about Ross?”
“He was in Switzerland last weekend for an environmental summit.” Rapp held his white coffee cup by the handle. “Rivera got me the list of the people he met with while he was over there. We cross-referenced it against some of the other data and one name got kicked out: Joseph Speyer.”
“Should I know him?” Kennedy asked with a furrowed brow.
“No, but he happens to be the president of the bank in Geneva that Garret called back in October.”
“What do we know about the bank?”
Rapp pointed at Dumond. “Marcus is working on that. Apparently it’s one of Geneva’s oldest and most secretive institutions.”
“And by far the most difficult one to hack into,” Dumond added without looking up.
“Is that what you’re working on?” Kennedy asked.
“No. Something else.” Dumond hadn’t touched his coffee. His two index fingers were busy tapping keys.
Kennedy’s stoic gaze shifted to Rapp. “What about our Belarusian friend?”
“Nothing yet. Hornig says she needs a little more time to soften him up.”
“When?” Kennedy asked impatiently.
“She thought maybe she could start in the morning.” Rapp could sense her frustration. “I didn’t think we were operating under any time constraints.”
“In two days we’re going to have a new president and vice president who might be guilty of murder and treason and god knows what else. Based on how Ross has been acting, I don’t think he’s going to waste any time getting rid of me. We need to get to the bottom of this while we still have the power to.”
“Yes,” Dumond said triumphantly. He looked up smiling. “That little bastard took me longer than I expected.”
“What little bastard?” Rapp asked.
“T-Mobile’s firewall. They must have brought in some new hot shot. It normally takes me a minute or less. This time it took me a full ten minutes.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Garret has two phones. One is a BlackBerry that he has with Verizon, and then he has a Motorola that he has through T-Mobile.” Dumond spun the small computer ninety degrees so Rapp and Kennedy could see the screen. “Here’s all of his calls.”
Kennedy looked nervous. “Marcus, I assume there’s no way this can be traced back to you.”
“Huh,” Dumond laughed. “Anyone with half a brain can hack into a system. When I do it, there’s no trace I was ever there.”
“Anything to Switzerland?” Rapp asked as he bent over to look at the screen. All it showed were the numbers that he had called or had called him. No names. There appeared to be no international calls. “Can you get us a reverse directory on these phone numbers?”
“No problem.” Dumond spun the computer, made a few keystrokes, and then spun it back. “Here’s the names associated with numbers he dialed and the time and date.”
Rapp leaned in close so he could read the tiny print. The calls were listed in descending order with the most recent one at the top of the screen. Rapp scanned the column, and halfway down the first page a name jumped out at him. “Why, I’ll be damned.”
“What?” Kennedy asked. She didn’t have her reading glasses with her.
“Our little buddy Tom Rich from the Times called Garret right in the middle of your press conference this afternoon.”
“That seems like a bit of coincidence,” Kennedy replied.
Rapp scrolled down to the previous day’s calls. “Look here. Garret called Ross three times yesterday. And Ross called Garret five times. Look here. He called Garret at seven-oh-nine last night. I remember looking at my watch when we were in your office. It was seven-oh-four. He got off the phone with us and must have called Garret right away.”
Rapp grabbed his phone, opened it, hit talk, scrolled down to the number he wanted, and hit talk again. A few rings later Agent Rivera was on the phone. “How are the logs coming?”
“Slowly.”
“Have yesterday’s logs been filed?”
“Yes, but I don’t have them in front of me.”
“Can you get them?”
“Yes. I can pull them up on the computer.”
Rapp backed away from the kitchen table and waited.
“I’ve got them up on the screen. What are you looking for?”
“Who did Ross meet with yesterday?”
Rivera started reading a long list. Within fifteen seconds, Rapp lost his patience and asked, “Did he meet with Tom Rich?”
“The reporter?”
“Yes.”
“Mitch,” she said uncomfortably, “I’m not sure I should be giving you that kind of information.”
“I don’t have time for this right now, Maria. Trust me when I tell you it’s important.”
There was a long moment of silence, and then Rivera said, “They met yesterday evening in Ross’s suite at the Willard.”
“Thanks. I’ll call you later.” Rapp closed his phone and pointed at Dumond’s computer screen. “These calls match up perfectly. Garret set up the interview and Ross was the high-level source who fed Rich the story. Look.”
Kennedy bent forward and squinted, but before she could begin reading a new screen popped up and covered the T-Mobile page. Some type of ominous law enforcement shield sat in the middle of the screen. “Whoa,” Kennedy said, fearing their unlawful intrusion had been discovered. “Marcus, you’d better take a look at this,” she said as she backed away.
Dumond quickly set his coffee down and grabbed the computer. He spun it around, studied the screen for a split second, and then began hitting keys.
“What is it?” Rapp asked with no real worry in his voice. Dumond was the master of his own little universe. He would never initiate an incursion that could be traced back to him.
“Customs and Immigration web site. When I was in their database earlier today I put a flag on Garret’s passport.”
“A flag?” Kennedy said in a slightly alarmed voice.
“Not the normal kind of flag. I set it up so I would receive an alert if he tried to leave the country. I also tapped into the airline’s reservation system while I was checking his travel.” Dumond typed in several commands. The screen changed as quickly as his fingers flew. “Well, I’ll be damned.” Dumond stopped typing and stared at the screen.
“What?” Rapp asked.
“Garret just checked in for an Air France flight from Dulles to Geneva.”
Rapp and Kennedy looked at each other, their thoughts passing without words.
“When does his flight leave?” Kennedy asked.
“Twelve twenty.”
“I’ll call Jose and have him put his best people on it,” Kennedy said.
Rapp checked his watch. “There’s a chance I can get there first. Besides, I don’t think we want to use embassy people for this. Tell him I want NOCs only.”
“You’re probably right.” Kennedy watched Rapp punch numbers into his mobile phone. NOC stood for Non Official Cover. They were Langley’s most coveted operatives. “Are you sure you should go?”
“You have any better ideas?”
“Not at the moment.”
Rapp could tell she still wasn’t sold on the idea. “Like you said, Irene. We have less than two days. If these guys were involved in any way in that attack, I’m willing to bet the answers are in Switzerland.” Rapp looked away from Kennedy and spoke into his phone. “Scramble the boys. We need to be in the air by midnight.” Rapp listened for a second and said, “Across the pond. Mostly surveillance, but you never know. I’ll see you in thirty.” Rapp closed the phone and looked at Kennedy. Her expression radiated concern. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine.”
Kennedy frowned and said, “I’m not worried about you.”
“Then who in the hell are you worried about?”
“Stu Garret.” Kennedy shook her head. “I know how you think, Mitch. I don’t want you slapping him around.”
“Irene…come on,” Rapp said as if he was complaining.
“Well…at least not until he gives you a reason.”