Murder at the Opera (37 page)

He sank into a red leather recliner and processed what had just transpired on the phone. Josephson sounded ancient, his voice feeble. He said he had “evidence.” What evidence could he possibly have? Whatever it was, Pawkins could handle it, and him, the old Englishman.

Mackensie and Annabel Smith were another matter.

THIRTY-TWO

T
his morning was not unlike most other mornings for Joseph Browning III.

He awoke before sunrise and took a cup of coffee and the newspaper to the small brick patio outside the kitchen of the Alexandria, Virginia, home he shared with Christine, his wife of thirty-two years. He’d been a Washington bureaucrat for twenty-seven of those years. Possessing a freshly minted Yale law degree, he’d gravitated to the nation’s capital as a young attorney for the Department of the Interior before progressing through a succession of jobs, each with a higher GS rating and increasingly involving intelligence functions—State, Justice, the FAA, and now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Cynics might view his career as one in which he was incapable of holding a steady job. But Joe knew better. Surviving changing administrations was a talent unto itself, and Browning took pride in still being gainfully employed after seeing a string of presidents join the ranks of the unemployed.

The summons to assume a post at the newly created DHS represented, at least to family and friends, an important step up in his career. The safety and security of the United States of America, and the fate of its citizens, necessarily took center stage after 9/11. Being in the forefront of protecting the republic would be a heady experience, one that he’d attack with purpose and dedication.

But as DHS morphed into a larger and more unwieldy entity, assimilating twenty-two separate intelligence agencies under its umbrella, he found his enthusiasm waning. It wasn’t that DHS’s stated mission of protecting America had dimmed. Far from it. It was the way that mission was becoming increasingly compromised. This took some of the spark out of getting up in the morning, donning a cape and shield, and doing battle with the terrorists who’d so callously wiped out more than three thousand innocent American lives.

He’d ended up second in command of DHS’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate (IAIPD), which was to coordinate interagency counterterrorism efforts with members of the “Big 15,” the fifteen major agencies comprising the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC)—the FBI; the CIA; the Defense Department’s National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA); the State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR); the intelligence agencies of the army, navy, air force, and marines; as well as lesser known, shadowy, and seldom understood intelligence agencies, such as the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office (DARO), the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), the President’s Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), the Pentagon Force Protection Agency (PFPA), and the intelligence community’s internal overseer, the Defense Security Service (DSS). Add to that jumble of acronyms the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC), a CIA task force of analysts with plans to integrate with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center (CTC) and the FBI’s counterterrorism division; plus the latest, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX)—and Lord knew how many others that had sprung up under the now wider national security umbrella (even Browning didn’t know, and he was an insider). Intelligence reports were modified for distribution to local law enforcement agencies around the country, including Washington’s police department.

This had spawned another acronym among Browning and his colleagues, spoken only in private: BON, “Bureau of Noncoordination.”

The truth was, Browning had learned that, despite all the promises, all the lofty rhetoric, and all the potential of creating a Department of Homeland Security as the first line of defense against further terrorist attacks—and despite the acknowledgment that a failure of sharing information had played a major role in the September 11 attacks—these agencies, and more, simply would not cooperate, and refused to cede turf and budgets, no matter how high the stakes for the nation and its trusting citizens.

Which was why Browning, in concert with his superior and others at DHS, had elected lately to deal directly with the British and Canadian intelligence services and not funnel such sources as Milton Crowley through the CIA and FBI. Crowley was but one of many sources whom Browning and his people had begun to deal with directly. The FBI had forged an agreement with DHS under which it was required only to provide the agency with summaries of its intelligence gathering, not the raw material. The FBI had hired two hundred new agents to do nothing but wade through hundreds of thousands of recorded phone calls and computer intercepts under the Patriot Act, using “trap-and-trace” surveillance techniques favored by the NSA. In addition, the FBI itself had begun monitoring the web-surfing habits of Internet users, resulting in thousands of “captures” that also needed to be analyzed each day.

Meanwhile, the CIA had long ago abandoned its mandate to conduct operations only outside the country, and had launched an aggressive campaign of domestic spying and eavesdropping on Americans.

This all resulted in a massive intake of information, most of it useless, but which had to be analyzed nonetheless.

Intelligence gathered by the FBI remained in the House That Hoover Built until someone got around to writing a report to send it to the Department of Homeland Security.

The CIA’s treasure trove of intercepted communications remained in Langley, its importance to national security left in the hands of those who’d obtained it.

And information that a Toronto talent agency, Melicamp-Baltsa, might be sympathetic to terrorist aims, joined thousands of other bits of information that was eventually shared with the FBI.

Joseph Browning III finished his coffee and went back inside the house to shower and dress for the day.

“Good morning,” Christine said as she came down the stairs to get her own coffee.

“Good morning,” he said, accepting a feathery kiss on the cheek.

“Heavy day lined up?” she asked.

“The usual,” he said, truthfully. It would be business as usual at DHS, and that was the problem. His frown said as much.

She disappeared into the kitchen as he started up the stairs.

“Oh, before I forget,” she said, reappearing, “Rosie and George wonder if we’d like to go to the opera with them. They have two extra tickets—friends of theirs had to cancel.”

“The opera?” he said from the landing, a smile on his face. “Chris, I appear in an opera every day I go to work.”

“It’s
Tosca,
” she said. “We never go to the opera. I’d love to. The tickets are for opening night.”

“Sure,” he said. “Let’s do it. I could use some original make-believe.”

THIRTY-THREE

“S
o, how’d it go?” Willie Portelain asked Sylvia Johnson.

They sat in an interrogation room at headquarters, awaiting the arrival of Carl Berry and others. Their brief assignment to the Aaron Musinski murder was over, now that Grimes had been brought in and the contents of his office had been secured, his computer in the hands of forensic technicians capable of finding things on its hard drive that long ago had been assumed to have disappeared into the ether. They were back on the Lee case, joining the newly formed task force.

“How did
what
go?” she asked.

“Your date last night. Who is he?”

“Willie!”

“Just curious, lady. You have a good time?”

“As a matter of fact, I did. We had dinner at Georgia Brown’s, and caught the last set at Blues Alley.”

“He pay?”

“Of course he—How are you feeling?”

“Pretty good.”

“You taking your medicine and cutting down on the calories?”

“What are you, my mother? Who’d you see at Blues Alley?”

“A young pianist, Ted Rosenthal, and his trio. He was wonderful.”

“So, tell me about this dude.”

The door opened, to Sylvia’s relief, and Berry and the other detectives joined them.

“Okay, what’ve we got?” Berry asked.

They went around the table, each detective reporting.

“We’ve talked to every student in that opera school they run out of Takoma Park,” one said.

“Not for the first time,” said another. “We compared reports of the previous interviews with them with what they had to say this time around. Nothing new.”

“What about Christopher Warren?” Berry asked.

“Yeah, we talked to him again, too. Surly bastard.” He punched Willie in the arm and laughed. “He’s the one you coldcocked, huh?”

“Ran into my arm, that’s all.”

“Yeah, right.”

Another detective said, “There’s one student who doesn’t have an alibi.”

“Warren.”

“No, besides him.” He consulted his notes. “A Korean named Lester Suyang. He was alone all night, he says, like he said in previous interviews. Nothing there. He doesn’t strike me as the murdering kind.”

“What is ‘the murdering kind’?” Berry asked.

“You know what I mean.”

“A couple of the other students say Suyang didn’t like the deceased, that they had a few shouting matches.”

“That’s new,” Berry offered. “What’s he say about it?”

“He denies it, says he and the deceased were good friends.”

“He’s big, man,” another detective said, “must go two-fifty, two-sixty. Got a voice like a one-man gang. If he doesn’t make it as an opera singer, he can always become a sumo wrestler.”

“Even bigger than you, Willie,” one said. “But not as pretty.”

The discussion continued. Eventually, it came around to Charise Lee’s agents, Philip Melincamp and Zöe Baltsa.

“Willie and Sylvia have interviewed them a couple of times. Ray Pawkins—he’s working as a PI for the Opera company—says Melincamp and his partner have a shady reputation back in Toronto.”

“How shady?” someone asked.

“They run a smarmy operation, according to Ray. He says—”

The door opened and a uniformed officer working desk duty in the Detective Division entered. He handed Berry a piece of paper. “Thought you might want to see this,” he said.

Berry read it and passed it to Sylvia.

“What’s up?” Portelain asked.

“Joey pulled this from the latest intelligence report from Homeland Security,” Berry said as it was passed around.

“Interesting,” Sylvia said, “but what does it have to do with the Lee case?”

“Probably nothing,” Berry said. “Any ideas?”

There weren’t any.

“I want to run this by Cole,” Berry said, picking up the intelligence report and ending the meeting.

Carl Berry’s meeting may have just ended, but Annabel Lee-Smith’s was just getting started.

Everyone on the Opera Ball committee gathered for a final run-through of the “Battle Plan,” a thick book in which—hopefully—every conceivable base had been covered, and every possible contingency accounted for. Annabel willed herself to concentrate on the business at hand, but was unable to keep her thoughts from straying back to the dinner with Marc Josephson and what had come out of it. She still wanted to believe that there was something wrong with Josephson’s claim, and his behavior with Mac on the phone that morning helped her in that regard. The man was certainly skewed; hopefully, his claim and alleged supporting evidence was, too. But try as she might to take umbrage in that thought, she knew down deep, felt it in her heart and bones, that Ray Pawkins had stolen the musical scores from Aaron Musinski’s home and…

Conceivably had murdered Musinski.

“You okay, Annabel?” someone asked as they prepared to break for an hour’s lunch.

“Oh, sure. I’m fine. I never dreamed putting on a fund-raiser of this magnitude involved so much planning and detail. You all deserve a medal.”

“
We,
you mean. It couldn’t have been done without you. It’s so good that you agreed to act as liaison with the White House. Isn’t it wonderful that the president and first lady will be at the ball?”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Annabel said. As far as she knew, her meetings with the various security forces involved had gone well, and all was in place to ensure a safe visit by President and Mrs. Montgomery.

“Grab a bite?” Genevieve Crier asked Annabel as they filed from the room.

“Sure,” Annabel said. “I’m famished.”

“Meetings like this always make me hungry,” Genevieve said, punctuated by her lilting laugh. “The tension eats away at your stomach lining.”

Annabel laughed, too. “I hadn’t quite thought of it that way, but I think you’re right.”

They popped into the nearest luncheonette and found a vacant booth, where both ordered salads and iced tea. Genevieve, always verbose, was especially talkative this day, and entertained Annabel with a succession of stories about her life, first as an actress in London and Hollywood, and more recently her job with the Opera.