Washington Deceased (3 page)

The only problem, as he saw it, lay in two nagging CIA deficiencies: an ignorance of local geography—the CIA thought that the United States Department of State was located in Langley, Virginia; and a problem with arithmetic—the CIA thought that the United States had only one branch of government.

The remedy, Michaelson thought, was quite clear. Since the CIA was good at spying on other countries but not good at telling the State Department and Congress everything it found out, the efficient thing for the State Department to do was to spy on the CIA.

This Michaelson had proceeded to do at every duty post where he had enjoyed the requisite authority. He not infrequently tapped the spooks' phone lines, patched into their back channel transmissions, suborned their local operatives, or even stole their typewriter and cable-printer ribbons from the burn bag and held them up to mirrors to read them. More often, he did the less exotic, more tedious things that produce most real intelligence: observing whom the spooks lunched with, analyzing their purchase orders, tracking curious patterns in their personnel assignments and so forth. He'd stopped short at breaking into their embassy precincts and burgling their desks and file cabinets—he wouldn't have known how and, anyway, he never had to.

He was good enough at this that he ultimately spent seven years of his career in charge of the Interagency Liaison and Assessment Bureau, an office he had created for the purpose of generalizing his approach.

Michaelson made it a point to share the information he obtained. He shared it with his superiors, of course, but also with those of the people's elected representatives who weren't on the payrolls of foreign powers, knew how to keep their mouths shut when reporters were around, and had a decent shot at being president some day. The last criterion suggested to some that Michaelson wasn't wholly motivated in his disclosures by an idealistic commitment to democratic governance. He wasn't—but then, nothing in Washington is ever entirely unambiguous.

Chapter Four

As these events were taking place, the afternoon routine in Honor Cottage B-4 of the United States Minimum Security Correctional Facility near Fritchieburg, Maryland, was just getting underway.

Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Wesson Smith was preparing to leave the Building Security Office and take a walk through the Honor Cottage. (Honor Cottage B-4 didn't look anything like a cottage. It had a ground floor and a basement and was about the size and shape of a quonset hut—which, come to think of it, doesn't look anything like a hut.) He turned to the television monitor on his desk and flipped at random through the six closed-circuit video cameras in the building. Finding nothing worthy of note, he stepped in front of the full-length mirror bolted to the rear wall and looked himself over.

He saw razor-sharp creases on his light-brown-with-loden-green-trim uniform shirt and slacks, a gleaming brass buckle on his green web belt and shoes polished to a dazzling shine. Retired after twenty years in the Army, he was now seven years into his second career, with the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Satisfied, he opened the door and stepped out of his office.

This was at the front of the building, on the ground floor. At the back of the building, in the basement, inmate Larry Stepanski had just used a plastic card key to unlock the Supply Room. He led his fellow B-4 inmates inside to give them the things they'd need to do the work assigned to them that afternoon.

“Let's see,” Stepanski said in a blast furnace voice as he consulted a clipboard, “whadda you got today, Counsellor Squires?”

“The galley,” replied Norman Squires, a sandy-haired, round-shouldered man.

“Galley, right,” Stepanski said. “That's what normal people call the kitchen, isn't it?”

Squires reddened while Stepanski offered a good-natured, no offense, Counselor kind of laugh and handed Squires a sponge, a pad of steel wool and a small can of Ajax. Squires took them and left.

“Martinelli, pride of Miami,” Stepanski said then with another glance at the clipboard. “I got you down for windows, ground floor lounge.”

“Fuck you,” Martinelli said.

“Get in line, brother,” Stepanski grinned. He kicked in Martinelli's direction a bucket holding a plastic bottle of Windex and a wad of paper towels. “See if you can get 'em dirty this time.”

“Up yours,” Martinelli said.

“Just think where you'd be without your charm, Martinelli,” Stepanski replied, but Martinelli was already out the door.

“I'm down for the baseboards,” Leo Banich said.

“Baseboards it is,” Stepanski confirmed. He gave Banich a bucket and a white rag. “You don't need any cleanser for that. Just water and elbow grease.”

Banich nodded and started to walk out.

“Uh, Banich,” Stepanski said gently to him.

“Yeah?” Banich turned back in Stepanski's direction.

“That's a metal bucket, right?”

“Geez, I know it's a metal bucket for chrissake.”

“Right. So since it's a metal bucket you're going to empty it out in the john, not outside, okay?”

“Yeah,” Banich sighed.

“'Cause if you try to take that metal bucket through an outside door, the metal detector's gonna go off like a four-alarm fire and probably give CO-2 Smith even more indigestion than he usually has by setting off that godawful buzzer in his office, right?”

“Right,” Banich conceded listlessly. And walked out.

“Okay, Senator,” Stepanski said then, “whadda you have?”

“Toilet,” Desmond Gardner said cheerfully.

“Right you are, Senator. Better watch it, though. CO-2 Smith says we should call it the latrine.”

“CO-2 Smith can call it what he likes,” Gardner said, saluting toward the camera mounted near the ceiling in the corner of the room where the door was. “I call it the toilet.”

Stepanski and Gardner laughed at this modestly spirited defiance as Stepanski gave Gardner a pair of soiled, white-and-blue work gloves and a collection of appropriate implements.

Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith didn't like to be called CO-2 Smith. The correct form of address for someone of his rank was Officer. The approved abbreviation for the rank was CO/2nd,
not
CO-2. Naturally, all of the inmates called him CO-2 Smith.

Smith wasn't sure whether this spurious title, with its gaseous allusion, referred to his penchant for platitudinous rhetoric or to his tendency to flatulence. Whichever it was, he didn't appreciate it.

Gardner left and headed for the back stairs, which would take him up one flight to the shower room and toilets near the back of the main floor. He didn't wait to see Terry Lanier and Tommy McCutcheon receive the wherewithal for their assignments.

On the floor above Stepanski, Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith completed his tour and found nothing amiss.

***

Stepanski, having finished the assignments for everyone else, poured a mixture of potassium phosphate and calcium into a small plastic drum, sealed it, and attached a plastic hose and spritzer to a valve in the lid. He left the Supply Room, checking after he was out to make sure that the door was locked. He hung his clipboard on a hook near the door. He turned left down a short hallway that intersected the basement's central corridor just before the Supply Room. He went out a side door at the end of that hallway, mounted a flight of iron, outside stairs, and looked for brown patches on the modest lawn around the building to fertilize. He always saved the outside jobs for himself.

***

Two minutes later, Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith started down the back stairs to the basement. He thought he heard a voice. He stopped and listened. He couldn't make out the words, but he was sure he could hear a male voice, coming from the basement.

He went down the stairs as quietly as he could. Someone deaf as a stone probably wouldn't have heard him. He reached the well lit basement and stepped into the central corridor. He couldn't see anyone.

He walked down to the intersecting hallway and looked in both directions. He still couldn't see anyone.

He backtracked to the door of the Supply Room. He listened. He couldn't hear anything. He tried the door. It was locked. Smith was sure he had the only key except for the one that he let Stepanski keep because Stepanski could run the work detail smoothly without hassling Smith. And he knew Stepanski was outside because otherwise the clipboard wouldn't be hanging on the hook by the door.

He took the clipboard off the hook where Stepanski had hung it and briefly examined the duty roster clipped there. He listened some more. He still didn't hear anything. He shrugged and began walking again down the basement corridor toward the front of the building, methodically completing his rounds.

One thing you had to say for Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith: He was dumber than a box of rocks.

***

Desmond Gardner scrubbed ferociously at a mixture of scaley-white and brownish crust on the inside of a toilet bowl. When he had cleared it away, he poured Sani-Flush in the bowl's water until it turned blue. Then he squirted a thin, pink stream of Lysol under the rim of the bowl and quickly swabbed the liquid evenly around the porcelain.

Desmond Gardner enjoyed cleaning toilets. Stepanski knew this and gave the task to him for that reason. When you cleaned toilets, you worked for an hour or so and when you were through you stepped back and saw the tangible results of your efforts. After six years in both state legislative bodies and the United States House of Representatives, eleven years in the United States Senate, two marriages, two divorces and one felony conviction, Desmond Gardner found it gratifying to see in blue water and sparkling porcelain evidence that an hour of his labor had produced unambiguously positive results.

Back upstairs, Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith stepped into the Building Security Office. He was frowning at a report from Stepanski stuck on the clipboard behind the duty roster. The report disclosed the disappearance from the Supply Room of a spool of one hundred yards of two hundred-pound test Stren monofilament fishing line. This disappearance vexed Smith, who would now have to beg, borrow or requisition something else to do the work of binding twine and baling wire and—most critical with summer coming—a replacement cutting surface for B-4's weed eater.

Smith closed the door of the office and automatically checked himself in the mirror. The image wasn't quite as perfect as it had been when he'd checked it fifteen minutes earlier. A smear fogging part of the mirror marred the otherwise stirring reflection.

“Shit,” he muttered. “What the hell?”

Smith rubbed ineffectually at the smear with his right sleeve. He repeated the expletive. He looked through the open window a foot away but didn't see Stepanski. He stepped over to his desk and flipped on a microphone that would send his voice over loudspeakers located around the building and on both of the long outside walls.

“Attention,” he barked. “Inmate Stepanski, report to Building Security immediately. That is all.”

***

Banich scoured baseboards.

***

Lanier opened the door of the Supply Room from the inside, glanced cautiously in both directions down the basement corridor, then stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He made sure it was locked. Then he hurried toward the back stairs.

***

When he had finished cleaning the eight toilets, Gardner carried his paraphernalia around a tiled partition into the shower room. He scrubbed the tiles with nothing but soap and water, putting his back into it and trying to bring a sparkle to them. Then he used a toothbrush to scour the grouting in between the tiles, brushing grime away from the gray-white cement.

He heard the door to the latrine open and close. He stopped what he was doing and listened to steps move across the floor on the other side of the wall. He waited philosophically for the sound of urination, which would symbolize the transience of the work he had just finished. He was surprised when he heard only the very different sound of tap water running in a washbasin.

The latrine door opened and closed again. Gardner couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard a startled gasp from the first man who had come in. The first voice he heard came from the second man. It was Martinelli's.

“Don't worry, Squires, it's just me, not that dumbshit Smith. I won't take away your nose candy.”

“Watch what you accuse me of.”

This can't be trouble, Gardner thought. If he had anything obnoxious in mind, Martinelli would at least have glanced around the partition to see if anybody else was in here.

“You hurt my feelings, Squires. You stood me up last night.”

So much for that theory, Gardner noted mentally. Familiarity breeds contempt. Martinelli's gotten familiar enough with the rest of us not to bother with even elementary precautions anymore.

“We didn't have a date,” Squires told Martinelli.

“We have a date when I say we have a date, Squires.” Martinelli's voice was low and jovial, but redolent with menace all the same.

“I don't do it with boys.”

“You don't understand, Squires. I'm not selling, I'm telling. When I knock on that door tonight, you'd better open up.”

“Now listen, you cheap hood—”

“Look who's gettin' tough,” Martinelli laughed. “Cheap-ass shyster, toughest thing you've ever done is crack an egg. You know what your problem is, Squires? You need to get creased up a little bit, that's what your problem is.”

Gardner heard the sound of feet moving swiftly across a tile floor and he didn't hesitate. He picked up his bucket and supplies and scurried noisily around the corner.

“Afternoon, gentlemen,” he called out.

Martinelli, who held a generous piece of Squires' shirt, glared over his shoulder.

“Take a hike, Gardner.”

“I'm not through in here.” Gardner put the bucket down.

“I say you are through in here. Take a hike.”

“Not 'till I'm finished.”

Martinelli let go of Squires and turned around to look at Gardner. Martinelli was hirsute, five-ten and looked like he weighed a solid one hundred-eighty pounds. Gardner was pushing fifty but like many successful politicians he had a surprisingly imposing body. He topped six feet and his build was big but without much fat.

Martinelli turned back to Squires.

“Don't forget what I said,” he instructed the cringing former lawyer. He walked out of the latrine.

***

“What's this I'm looking at, Stepanski?” Correctional Officer/Grade 2 Smith asked.

“I don't know.”

“It's your report about the missing fishing line.”

“Oh.”

“What would anyone want with fishing line?”

“I don't know.”

“We're all in this together.”

“Yessir.”

“One guy can screw it up for everybody.”

“Yessir.”

“Pass the word.”

“Yessir.”

“I don't want any more theft.”

“Nosir.”

“A word to the wise.”

“Yessir.”

“I want the Lounge and the first floor policed up better tomorrow, and I mean not just swept but dusted.”

“Yessir.”

“There's too much dust and dirt floating around here.”

“Yessir.”

“Look at what's happened to my mirror.”

Stepanski glanced at the massive mirror mounted on the wall behind Smith. His glance lingered and he appeared to examine it carefully. He noted the opaque cloud that now covered most of the upper third of the mirror.

“Looks like some kind of smear has formed,” he said.

“Be sure someone cleans it,” Smith instructed Stepanski.

“Can I suggest something?”

“Carry on.”

“I think what's happened is that steam from the coffee maker on the shelf there near the door has gotten in between the mirror and the silver. You're not going to get rid of it by rubbing the outside. To do it right, we should take the mirror down and clean the inside. Then you should move the coffee maker.”