Support and Defend (22 page)

J
UST AS
D
OM
had suspected, Ethan Ross’s fairy godmother
had
spotted the men on his tail. Harlan Banfield had sat in the food court, at a bench alongside a creperie ahead of Caruso but out of his view on the other side of a support column.

The moment he saw the men, Banfield ID’d them as FBI. This was confirmation bias. Ross thought the Feds were on to him, someone was, in fact, onto him, so Banfield presumed it was the Feds.

He was in constant communication with Ethan, but he did not tell him he was being followed. Instead, Banfield told Ethan to begin walking back to his car in Chinatown, and he would tell him what to do next. Once Ethan was out of the bathroom and taking the stairs out of the basement, Harlan headed to the staircase closest to him, rushed past a young man in a motorcycle jacket, and climbed up. A pair of D.C. police were heading down, but Banfield didn’t pay any attention to them, he was already thinking about what to do next with Ethan Ross.

A
S HE HEADED BACK
to his motorcycle in Chinatown, Dom fished through his pocket and pulled out the card the Mossad officer gave him the previous morning. He dialed the number, and David answered on the first ring.

“Mr. Caruso, so good of you to call. How can I be of service?”

“Do you have surveillance on someone here in D.C.?”

David chuckled. “That is a vague question. Of course we have someone under surveillance. Syrian diplomats. Palestinian radicals. Egyptian military attachés. Your capital city is a surprisingly hostile environment. I presume, however, you are referring to someone specific?”

“Someone who might have been involved in the NSA breach.”

David answered unequivocally. “Absolutely not. As I told you, we are hoping you might help us with that. We have other feelers out, of course, but so far nothing solid. If you are telling me you already have a suspect, I will be most impressed.”

“Well I
do
have a suspect, and he’s got a tail.”

“FBI?”

“The FBI says no.”

“That’s interesting. Some other actor is following him?”

“It appears so.”

“What is this man’s name? I’ll look into it on my end.” Dom hesitated. No, he wasn’t ready to get the Mossad involved in this. They were just one more moving part to a situation that was quickly becoming extremely complicated. Dom decided it was better he kept them at arm’s reach—for now, anyway. “It’s just a hunch. I’ll let you know if I find out anything more.”

“If you say this man is under surveillance, then that makes him more than a hunch. Involve us, Dominic, and we can use our resources to vet him.”

“I’ll call you back.” Dom hung up the phone and kept walking. David was right, Ethan Ross was more than a hunch. But for now, all Dominic could do was try to think of a way to convince Special Agent Albright of this fact.

A
FTER AN HOUR
of Ross browsing through several malls and chain stores in a very natural-looking dry-cleaning run, Banfield saw no more sign of any surveillance on his whistleblower. Still, it was clear to Banfield that the FBI was, at least, attempting to monitor Ross’s movements.

At three-thirty in the afternoon he called Ethan and told him to go to an underground parking garage in Columbia Heights. Here, Ethan climbed into Banfield’s car, and together the two men drove through rush-hour traffic to the Ritz- Carlton on 22nd Street, where they parked in the underground lot below the hotel.

While Ethan waited in the car, Banfield went alone up to Gianna Bertoli’s two-room suite, checked the area and the route up a back stairwell, and then returned to shepherd Ethan up with him.

The three turned the volume in the television high and they ran the water in the bathtub and the shower and then sat close together on chairs in the living room of the suite. Bertoli had no real suspicion she was under surveillance, but as the director of the International Transparency Project, she’d learned to take a number of necessary steps to ensure her privacy.

Only when they were all seated with wine from the minibar in their hands did Banfield inform Ross he was, without a doubt, under surveillance by the FBI.

Ross’s eyes glazed over.

Bertoli asked, “You’re certain, Harlan?”

“Yes. I identified at least three men following him through Union Station. We slipped away from them after that, and he was clean by the time I picked him up. But the tail was real.”

“Shit,” mumbled Ethan.

Banfield turned to Ethan and brightened a little. “That’s the bad news. The good news is I checked with another of my whistleblowers, this person has access to U.S. federal employee files. I had her look into NSC employee records, and there are no new flags or security holds on badges or computer access of any staff member. That makes me think the surveillance on you is very preliminary. They are suspicious, and they’ll keep digging, but for now they don’t have enough to go on to do anything more than put a tail on you.”

As far as Ethan was concerned, Banfield was just sugarcoating it. Ethan felt his entire life slipping away from him. His family would not understand. While his parents would be sympathetic with the ideological reasons behind his actions, they were ex–government hacks, and they would think him a traitor like the rest of the world.

He leaned back in the chair and stared into space.

Bertoli knelt on the floor next to the young NSA staffer, hugging him in sympathy, as if the two had known each other for years.

Ethan spoke into the softness of her curly hair. “What am I going to do?”

She put her arm on his shoulder and held it firmly. “For now, you need to act naturally.”

“Albright is going to talk to Eve, and he is going to lean on her. She’ll tell them she told me about specific system vulnerabilities, and then they will arrest me.”

Bertoli said, “You are in a serious situation, I do not want to minimize it. But it is not dire. Not yet. The problem is, when it
becomes
dire, it will be too late for you to help yourself.”

“What does that mean?”

“There is something you need to do, and you need to do it now.”

“You are talking about the damn scrape again?”

“Yes. Harlan just said you still have access to your system. Go in to work tomorrow morning and download the files, then secure them whatever way you think is best. Just in case you need your ace in the hole.”

He shook his head. “I’ll just dig my hole deeper. Better I take my chances now. If they arrest me, I’ll get the best lawyer money can buy, and I’ll make as much noise as I can. Maybe if I’m lucky—”

Bertoli put her hand on Ethan’s cheek. “My poor, naive Ethan. If they catch you, you won’t be famous. There won’t be a big trial for you to air your grievances.”

Ethan said, “This is America. They’ll
have
to put me on trial.”

She shook her head. “No. They will psych you.”

“
Psych
me?”

“Deem you a security risk, and then put you in a psychological facility, fill you up with meds, give you sort of a chemical lobotomy. They will forget about you. Everyone will forget about you.” With a rueful smile she said, “The worst part is . . .
you
will forget about you.”

Ethan had heard rumors along these lines, but he’d never believed them. But Bertoli seemed utterly credible. He found it impossible to doubt her.

“What do you propose?”

Banfield said, “You make your scrape, then you get out of town. Someplace far away so you can avoid arrest and set things up on your terms. Not theirs.”

“I could go to my mom’s in San Francisco.”

Bertoli shook her head. “No, Ethan. I am talking about going abroad. I’m talking about asylum.”

He put his head in his hands. “
Asylum?
No.
God,
no.” He mumbled to himself, his eyes distant like a victim of shock, as the weight of his predicament crashed down upon him.

The NASCAR drive appeared in her hand, and she folded it into his. He did not resist. Once again she said, “If you wait until you need it, it will be too late.”

Banfield leaned closer, too. “Through my contact, I will know if your access is blocked. That will be our indication that the FBI is planning on making an arrest. But again, it will be too late then.”

Ethan put the crawler in the pocket of his jacket and stood up. “I don’t know. I need to think about it.”

Bertoli let the worry on her face show, but she said, “Okay. I understand.”

Harlan and Ethan left Gianna a few minutes later, slipping out the back stairs and down to the parking lot.

As the two men drove out of the neighborhood on the way to drop Ethan at a taxi stand in Petworth, Ethan decided he would talk to Eve to get a feel about just how bad things were. If she had been interviewed by Albright, if the situation seemed utterly hopeless, then he would go in to the office tomorrow morning and steal secrets to use as a bargaining chip.

But he’d do it only if he had to. He told himself
he
was still in control, not Banfield, not Bertoli, not Albright. He would do what was best for him. Ethan believed in nothing more than he believed in his own intellect, and he still thought he could game this seemingly hopeless situation into something else. Not a victory for him, perhaps. That was too much to hope for. But maybe a draw. A détente between the parties.

Ethan Ross had faith in his brilliance. He’d get through this somehow and come out on the other end intact.

D
OM
C
ARUSO SAT
on his couch with a half-empty bottle of Harp beer in his hand. The TV was off, his computer was shut down and in another room, and he’d straightened his living room to some small degree, because he expected company soon.

In the quiet of the moment he made a mental survey of his injuries. The headaches had gone away, he was thankful for that. He felt the tightness in his rib cage still; the pain had lessened greatly, but the spasm remained constant, and the ache of bruised tissue rose and fell with every breath. The cuts to his arm and chest were healing, he’d probably not rebandage them after his next shower, even though they would look pretty nasty for a few more weeks.

Dom had a little experience picking up knocks and dings. He was tough enough to shrug them off mentally long before they disappeared physically.

The knock at his door came about when he expected it to. Even the nature and temperament of the knocks, four thundering angry bangs, sounded just about as he had imagined they would. He didn’t get up from his couch at first. Instead he sipped his beer, leaned back on his sofa, and waited for the next set of furious knocks.

No sense in rushing what was to come.

After several more bangs he heard, “Caruso!”

“It’s open,” Dom answered back.

Darren Albright entered a moment later; he wore a dark blue suit with no overcoat, and his hands were empty. He shut the door behind him, saw Dominic sitting on the sofa, and all but stormed over to him.

“Have a seat.” Dom pointed to a leather chair, but Albright ignored it.

“We had a deal.”

“I thought of it as more of a gentleman’s agreement.”

“And you’re not a gentleman?”

“There’s a time for that, sure. This just isn’t it.”

Albright heaved as if summoning the strength to continue talking to a disobedient child. He sat down and leaned forward. “I can’t have you interfering with the investigation. Ethan Ross is just one of many potential subjects in this, it’s going to take some time and some good fieldwork to narrow down the actual culprit. Anything that can jeopardize a good arrest is going to—”

“I think he’s your man.”

“If you know something that leads you to that conclusion, I’d like to hear it.”

Dom opened his mouth to speak, but Albright held a hand up quickly. “Unless, of course, what you say might compromise this investigation or make a successful prosecution impossible. I can’t know what you and your spook buddies have done to violate Ross’s Fourth Amendment rights, for example. If it’s inadmissible in court, which I guess is probably the case with every goddamned thing you guys do, then do me the favor of keeping me the fuck out of it.”

Dom closed his mouth. He had nothing to say now. Albright noted this. “Great. That’s just fucking great. I’m going to just play like I don’t know you and your people conducted some sort of unreasonable search and seizure.”

“‘Unreasonable search and seizure’? Reciting buzz words from the Fourth Amendment isn’t going to help you catch your man.”

Albright launched out of the chair. “But it will help me convict the guilty party! That’s all that matters to me. I can see it in your eyes, Caruso. This is personal. Very personal. But when an off-the-books spook makes things personal, law and order are the first things tossed out the window.”

“Who says I’m an off-the-books spook?”

“I’ve looked at the books! You aren’t on them. I’m an FBI agent. I draw conclusions. Look, you and I swore the same oath when we joined the Bureau. We affirmed that we would support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Last time I checked, the Fourth Amendment was still part of the Constitution.”

Dom said, “Yeah, well, our tactics are different, but we’re both after the same enemy.”

Albright fired back. “You’re after Ross. I don’t know that he’s the enemy.”

“You still have no idea who was tailing him in Union Station?”

“Yeah.”

Caruso brightened up quickly. “Who?”

“You!”

Now Caruso dropped back on the sofa and rolled his eyes. “Are we going to get past that? I’m telling you, someone else is interested in Ross.”

Albright seemed to take the idea seriously for the first time. “If he did have a tail, then maybe it’s the Israelis. They’ve got feelers out around the Hoover Building. They want answers. Maybe they found out he was one of the people we were looking at, so they are doing their own surveillance.”

Caruso shook his head. “No.”

“No?”

“You’ll have to trust me on that.”

“Right now I don’t trust you on much of anything.”

Dom thought about what he should say, and what he should leave out. Finally he spoke slowly, with obvious care. “The Israelis approached me the other day, asking questions. They lost a good man, and they are pissed. They wanted to see if I had any intel. I didn’t, but it was clear they didn’t, either.”

“How do you know they haven’t found out about Ross some other way?”

“Trust me, they are flailing. They don’t know about Ethan Ross. Whoever is following him is working for someone else. I don’t know who it is, but unless one of the other thirty or forty potential leakers in the NSC both gamed their polygraph
and
has a mysterious entity on their tail, then Ethan Ross just might be your best bet right now.”

Albright conceded the point with a slow nod. He said, “All right. Here’s what I’ll do. If you back off, and I mean back all the way off, then I’ll put a surveillance package on Ross.”

Dom asked, “When?”

“You are a pushy son of a bitch. I can get it in place by a.m. tomorrow.”

“Why not now?”

“Because it takes time! You are FBI, or at least you pretend to be, so you know that. If I was absolutely certain Ross was the man, if I
knew
he was in play with fresh intel, then yeah, I’d pull resources from everywhere and get surveillance set up in nothing flat, but I don’t know any of that. I’ll go back to the office right now and talk to SSG and Technology and everyone else I need to talk with to put the tap and tail in place.”

“They better be good, he’s already nervous.”

“Don’t worry about SSG. They are the best.”

That was debatable, Dom thought, but he didn’t say. They were good, that was not in doubt, but Dom suspected a few other American agencies had surveillance personnel who could give them a run for their money.

“Again.” Albright pointed a finger at Dom. “I’m not doing a thing until I get your word you won’t interfere. And not your word as a gentleman, because that ship has sailed, but your word as a guy who knows he’ll get his ass arrested if I see him anywhere around Ethan Ross. I don’t give a shit that your uncle is President. Your dad could be the Pope and I’d still frog-walk your ass if you pull any more of your shit.”

Dom stood and extended a hand. “I promise. I’m out of this. It’s up to you guys now.” Albright shook Caruso’s hand, reluctantly because he was still annoyed, and he headed out the door on his way to the Hoover Building.

He could see it on the FBI special agent’s face. Albright knew he was in for a long night.