Conspiracy (3 page)

“Jerry?” she said. The light was on. “Why are you—”

She stopped in mid-sentence. Her lover sat in the chair across from the door, a good portion of his mouth and head blown away by a bullet from the old-school .357 Magnum that sat on the floor below his open hand.

 

CHARLIE DEAN PULLED
the strap of his bag over his shoulder and stepped out of the plane, ambling down to the concrete runway. A narrow man with thinning hair near the terminal bent toward Dean as he approached.

“Mr. Dean?”

“I'm Charlie Dean.”

“Red Sleeth.” The man stuck his hand out. “How are you?”

“When your girl said there would be a driver waiting, I didn't expect it to be the guide himself,” said Dean.

“We're a one-man operation,” replied Sleeth. “One man, one woman—the girl was my wife. I don't think she'd be offended,” added Sleeth, reaching for the bag.

Dean insisted on carrying it himself. He followed Sleeth as he walked toward a parking lot on the side of the terminal.

“I'm glad you had an opening,” said Dean. “I know this was kind of last-minute.”

“Happy to have you. Customer who canceled will be happy, too. We refund his deposit if we find someone else to take the slot.”

Sleeth's battered Ford Bronco looked a few years older than the nearby mountains. Dean paused a few feet from the vehicle and looked around. The sun had already set, but he could see the tall shadows in the distance. It was beautiful country; you stood in a parking lot and thought you were at the edge of the world.

“Never been to Montana, have you, Mr. Dean?”

“No, sir. Beautiful land.” Charlie swung back to the truck.

“Yes, it is,” said Sleeth. “Ready to get yourself a mountain lion?”

“Ready.”

“Good. It'll be the greatest experience of your life. There's nothing as exciting as hunting a mountain lion. Everything else you've ever done will pale in comparison.”

Dean knew that wasn't true but smiled anyway.

 

DURING THE SIXTY
seconds immediately after she saw her lover's dead body, Amanda Rauci acted like the trained Secret Service agent she was. Unholstering her pistol, she checked the rest of the room and made sure there were no intruders. She then went to him, squatting just close enough to make sure he was dead.

There was no question. Blood, skull, and brain material from the gunshot's exit wound had splattered on the curtain behind him. The back of the seat and floor were covered with thick red blood.

As Amanda straightened, the restraint imposed by the Service 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 handkerchief 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.

 

“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 independent 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 subsequent 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 budget 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 budget 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 Treasury 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.