Friendly Fire (7 page)

“The one for which there is no longer any record,” Dom said. He looked like he may have been on the verge of understanding.

“Exactly,” Venice said.

Dom looked at Jonathan. “Can someone actually do that? Make all traces disappear? I mean, that must involve hundreds of thousands of records, and then there's the tangents off of those primary records. How could anyone do that?”

“Not just anyone could,” Jonathan said. “But we both know someone with the skill set and resources to make it happen.” He kept his glare burning on Dom.

“Wolverine?” the priest guessed aloud.

“The one and only,” Jonathan said. “Give her a call for me, will you? Let her choose the meeting spot, but don't tip your hand too far.”

“Since when don't you trust Wolverine?”

“I trust her just fine,” Jonathan said. “I just think that if she knew where my head was taking me, she might refuse to show up.”

Chapter Seven

I
n the hierarchy of Catholic cathedrals, Saint Matthew's in Washington wouldn't fall into anyone's top ten. It wasn't even the most majestic in the Nation's Capital, dwarfed as it was by the Washington National Cathedral in the Upper Northwest. Jonathan often wondered how the Vatican sat still while the Episcopalians won the contest for the most beautiful house of God in town. Still, a cathedral was a cathedral, and this dark stone structure on Rhode Island Avenue was impressive, but it had a dreary look about it. Perhaps its most famous moment occurred on November 25, 1963, when the cathedral served as the setting for President John F. Kennedy's state funeral. Fifty years was a long intermission between big moments.

Or so the public thought. If walls could talk, right? The Our Lady Chapel inside the cathedral was in fact one of the spookiest—read
clandestine
—locations in all of Washington. Some years ago, Irene Rivers, director of the FBI and affectionately known to Jonathan as Wolverine, had spent hundreds of thousands of unaccounted-for taxpayer dollars to make the chapel a black hole for surveillance teams. DC was a town of alphabet agencies that didn't trust each other. Irene believed that Bureau headquarters had been infiltrated years ago by the CIA and the NSA, with listening devices in every corner. For the most part, that didn't matter—more times than not federal agencies pulled on the same oar in more or less the same direction—but some things and some assignments were so secret that the information needed to be one hundred percent contained.

Accordingly, Jonathan had spent a fair amount of time here in the chapel, learning the details of things he wished he didn't know, all under the watchful glare of the Blessed Virgin.

Jonathan was what Dom D'Angelo liked to call a convenience Catholic. Raised in the faith by a single father who was now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison, cynicism ran like blood through his veins. He found comfort in the thought of a God who created the universe and sent His Son to die for mankind's sins, but often his faith was strained by his up-close familiarity with all the evil that escaped God's notice. On those occasions when Jonathan was dispatched to set things straight—often dispatched from this very chapel—he felt confident that he was doing the work of the angels, but the Rite of Confession gave him reassurance. Still, given the number of people who had died at his hand—irrespective of the fact that they were evil and needed to die—his disdain for hypocrisy would not allow him to attend Mass anymore. He hoped that God understood.

The chairs in the Our Lady Chapel served as a kind of penance in their own right. Wooden and wobbly, the blond bentwood chairs provided no support for your arms, and felt like they might collapse at any moment. Jonathan considered standing, but realized that while awaiting the arrival of a famous personality for a clandestine meeting, it was best not to look too anxious.

Jonathan had met Irene Rivers a long time ago, back during her days as a special agent. She'd had a family emergency, and she'd reached out to Dom for assistance. Dom, in turn, reached out to Jonathan, and bad things happened to the bad guys. Since then, as Irene advanced through the ranks in the Bureau and all of her communications were subject to public review, Father Dom had become their communications pipeline. Even the director of the FBI was afforded privacy when it came to communications with her priest.

Wolverine leaned on Jonathan frequently to do jobs that no government could ever confess were necessary, and for which the legal penalties were huge. Jonathan trusted her with his life not just because she had proven herself to be scrupulously trustworthy, but also because their shared dirty laundry was of a nature and scope that would bring both of them down if either betrayed the other.

Jonathan had arrived at their appointment twenty-five minutes early—not because he'd planned to, but because the vagaries of traffic between here and his home in Fisherman's Cove made more specific planning difficult. More times than not, he wound up being as much as twenty minutes late. He'd considered killing time out on the street for a while, but between the chill, his lack of hunger, and the fact that he was already pretty tweaked on coffee, he decided it was better just to sit and wait.

When he heard the massive front door open behind him at precisely two o'clock, he knew that Wolverine had arrived. She was a precise kind of lady. He fought the urge to stand and greet her because, again, this was supposed to be a meeting that never happened. The church wasn't full, but it wasn't empty, and reunion scenes attracted attention.

Besides, some choreography was so carefully scripted that it needn't be watched to be seen. Wolverine would be preceded and followed into the church by her security detail, all in dark suits with pigtails cascading from their ears and expressions that hinted at constipation.

Jonathan listened as the footsteps grew near. Then they stopped.

“Excuse me, sir,” a stern voice said from behind.

Jonathan turned in his chair to look up at exactly the image he'd been expecting. “Hi,” he said.

“I need to see some identification,” the agent said.

Jonathan hated this element of the law enforcement community. He was tougher than they would ever be, and had endured more life-threatening situations than they could imagine even in their wettest dreams, but he understood that his role was to be deferential. More specifically, his role was to appear intimidated, but that was a step too far. The deference soothed their ego, and at the end of the day made everything go more smoothly.

Jonathan reached to his back pocket, withdrew his wallet, and produced a driver's license that identified him as Richard Horgan. A different pocket held a set of FBI credentials that were as real as his missions for Uncle Sam, but it was never a good idea to flash them in the presence of agents whose creds were official all the time.

The agent took more time than was necessary to review the driver's license, his eyes dancing back and forth between the picture and Jonathan's face. It was another intimidation move.

And Jonathan had had enough. “Are you having trouble with the big words?” he asked.

Cue the icy glare. Good lord, these guys were predictable.

“Are you carrying a firearm, Mr. Horgan?”

Jonathan shifted his eyes from the questioner to his partner, who looked familiar. They'd danced this tune together in the past. “Really?” Jonathan said.

“It's all right, gentlemen,” said a familiar voice from beyond the guards.

“Forgive me, Director Rivers,” the first guy said. “But I saw something under his jacket that looked like the printing of a firearm.”

Irene Rivers smiled in a tolerant way. Jonathan recognized it as her tell for being about to lose it. “He is the man we're here to meet,” she said. “That means you show him all the courtesy and consideration that you would show me.”

Security-boy looked wounded. An aspect of government service that Jonathan did not miss was the ease with which a single oh-shit could wipe out a lifetime of attaboys. Even the gentlest rebukes could end up derailing a career.

“I know you're just doing your job,” Irene said, backing off on the sharpness of her tone. “Rest assured that Mr. Horgan is a friend of mine.” She sealed it with a smile. “Now, take your positions, both of you.”

In unison, the security detail turned their backs and took on the posture of toy soldiers, standing close enough to block others from entering the space, but far enough away that the discussion would not be overheard. Jonathan found it significant that Irene trusted her security detail little more than she trusted the general public.

Jonathan stood as she crossed the threshold into the Our Lady Chapel. In a different circumstance, he'd have greeted her with a friendly hug, but where the wall had eyes, a professional handshake was a better choice. “Hi, Wolfie,” he said. “It's been not nearly as long as either of us would like.”

The words brought the laugh he'd been trolling for. “Truer words,” she said. She indicated the chairs as if they belonged to her—and at one level he supposed they did. “Let's sit down for a little devotional.”

Irene led the way to a spot as far away as possible from the threshold and sat. She crossed her legs and somehow managed to look comfortable. Jonathan had always found something undeniably hot about Wolverine, and it wasn't just the fact that as FBI director she still kicked the occasional door. He knew better than to guess her age, but he suspected that she was older than she looked. The strawberry blond hair looked natural enough to his eye, and she had terrific legs. Unfortunately for her, cameras deeply disliked her, projecting the image of a nineteenth-century schoolmarm, cursed with whatever is the obverse of hotness.

He selected a chair two away from hers and twisted ninety degrees so that he could speak to her directly.

“So, tell me,” Irene said, taking the lead. “When did you start drinking on the job?” A harsh question delivered with a twinkle of humor.

“Excuse me?”

The twinkle grew to a smirk. “Of course. Plausible deniability. Well suffice to say that a certain congressman is wildly impressed and deeply grateful to have his daughter back.”

Jonathan kept his poker face.

“He wanted me to tell whoever this Scorpion guy is, the congressman considers himself indebted, and both willing and anxious to confer whatever repayment he can offer.”

“If I had any idea what you were talking about, I would of course be thrilled to hear the news,” Jonathan said.

Irene leaned in closer. “Would it have killed you to clue me in?” she whispered. “Hypothetically, of course. He's a congressman, for heaven's sake.”

“One who hypothetically does not trust the Bureau,” Jonathan said. “Rules are rules, Madam Director.”

“You put me in a very awkward position, Digger. Good thing this had a happy ending.”

“My hypothetical operations always deliver happy endings. You know that.” Jonathan shifted his position in his chair. “How did you know it was me?”

Irene rolled her eyes with a dramatic flourish. “Oh, please. A guy named Scorpion who has a friend the size of a sequoia. Some dots are easy to connect.” She glanced at her watch. “I believe this is your meeting.”

“I believe you're right,” Jonathan said. “Did Mother Hen send you a name and a picture?”

“Indeed she did.”

“And what did you discover when you ran him?”

Irene inhaled noisily through her nose and glanced to the floor. Jonathan sensed that she'd been searching for a way to say what was on her mind, but hadn't yet decided on a strategy.

“Tell you what,” she said at last. “Why don't you tell me what you're looking for specifically?”

“Is that really better than just dealing the cards from the top of the deck?” Jonathan's tolerance for bullshit was limited on a good day. When it came to government-sponsored bullshit, his reservoir had overflowed years ago.

“In this case, yes,” Irene said. He saw a flash of anger. “And friendship notwithstanding, it wouldn't hurt you from time to remember just who the hell you're talking to.”

Jonathan reared back in his seat. “Whoa. Where did that come from? We're always on the same side, you know.”

“No, we're not,” she snapped. “Your world is vastly less complicated than mine. While you're venturing the save the world one injustice at a time, I'm balancing about a million of them every second of every day. The fact is that I am entitled to know things that I can never share with you or anyone else.”

This was new territory for the two of them. Jonathan had for a while been questioning Irene's wisdom when agreeing to a second ten-year stint as FBI director, and now it seemed that his concerns were justified. It was not in his nature to cower, however. “So, why are we here? You knew what I wanted to talk about, but you could have blown me off to Dom over the phone.”

Her back stiffened as he drew in another big breath, and gathered herself. “Jonathan Grave, we have known each other for a very, very long time. You ask me over and over again to trust you. And I do. How about you return the favor this once and trust me? Tell me why you need to have information on Mr. James Stepahin.”

Fair enough. “He was the focus of an op we conducted over a decade ago—”

“You mean a hypothetical op, right?” Her eyes danced.

Jonathan smiled. The previous tension had been defused. “Yes, of course. He showed up on our radar again, and when I try to run his background, we find that he literally never existed. That feels to me like the involvement of your shop.”

Irene stood and rubbed a spot on the small of her back. “These chairs are killers,” she said. She was looking up at the Blessed Virgin when she asked, “In what context did the alleged Mr. Stepahin appear on your radar?”

It felt ungentlemanly to sit while a lady stood, but he sensed that she preferred it this way. The lack of eye contact was another tell. “Well, let's start with the fact that he's dead.”

Irene's head whipped around. “What? Where?”

“A little south and west of here. In Braddock County. He's a John Doe. Killed yesterday in what the local PD is calling a murder.”

Irene opened her mouth to speak, but then closed it. The furrow in her brow spoke of multiple levels of confusion. “Who killed him?”

“A kid. Twenty-three.”

“Was it a professional job?”

Now there's a clue to what she's not telling me
. “Hardly. The killer is a coffee shop barista.”

Irene stifled a laugh, brought a hand to her forehead. Whatever pieces she was waiting for were apparently not falling into place. “Wait. How do you know the identity of a John Doe? Especially if he, as you say, never existed?”