“Darrell, were you all right a minute ago?” Maria asked.
“Sorry?”
“You went away from me.”
“Yes,” her husband said. “I was thinking, that’s all.”
“What about?” Maria asked.
“The pork barrel,” he said with a little laugh.
“Is that a restaurant?”
“In a manner of speaking,” McCaskey replied. He loved his beautiful, sweet, Spanish wife. She was so worldly, so tough, and so very linear. “A person of influence takes a lunch tray to his senator and gets plates full of federal funds. It’s another name for patronage.”
“I see,” Maria said. “It is the same as what bookmakers in Madrid call el roulette del amigo.”
“That’s exactly what it is. The roulette wheel of a friend,” McCaskey said. “The fix is in, the outcome predetermined.”
“Why were you thinking about that?”
“Because Op-Center was a victim of pork barrel politics. Maybe Paul is right, doing what he’s doing. If we had played the system better, we would have more people looking for a killer. And that should be our bottom line, should it not? Protecting law-abiding citizens.”
“That is my religion,” she said simply.
“Well put.” McCaskey looked out the window again. He noticed they were nearing Lafayette Park. “We’re near the Hay-Adams. Why don’t we go back there? Walk around, see if there is anything we may have overlooked.”
“All right,” she said.
That was the beauty of having married a cop. He might have to explain colloquial English to her, but he did not have to explain the intangibles of their lives and work. She got that.
They drove to the hotel, its tawny facade gleaming warmly in the morning light. They parked and decided to walk along Farragut North. The White House shone through the trees of Lafayette Park. McCaskey could see the press corps gathered in tents on the east side. The president was probably heading to the airport. It was too early in the week for Camp David. He remembered when the press looked for stories instead of handouts. There was a time when someone would have sniffed out the new relationship between the White House and Op-Center, exposed it, and not been afraid to write about it. Access to news-makers. A different kind of pork barrel.
McCaskey took his wife’s hand. She gave it an encouraging squeeze. She seemed to sense the frustration he was feeling with this case and with the situation at Op-Center.
“We’ll get her,” Maria said.
“Thanks. I believe that,” McCaskey replied.
Maria stopped suddenly. She looked ahead. “No, I mean we will get her.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I was just thinking about the assassin, what I would do if I had just killed someone at the hotel,” Maria said. “I would be undistracted by conscience or the late hour. My only concern would be getting away quick and clean. That means I would be parked as close to the hotel as possible, on a relatively dark street.”
“Of course.”
“I would also have parked where there are the fewest eyeballs,” Maria said. “Where would that be?”
“The side of the hotel by Lafayette Park,” her husband said, “near where we parked.”
“Yes. Darrell, do you think any of the White House reporters might have been there? Maybe one of them doing a live report for CNN?”
“Very possibly,” he agreed. “But they would have been facing the White House, not the park.”
“Perhaps they turned on their cameras early.”
McCaskey looked in that direction. He did not think there was a chance of that, though he could not rule it out. Then something occurred to him. Something that made the pact with the devil suddenly seem more inviting.
“We may not need them,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because if the killer came this way, someone else may have gotten a good look at her,” McCaskey said.
Without saying anything else, he borrowed Maria’s cell phone and walked briskly toward the park.
THIRTY-NINE
Yuri and Svetlana Krasnov might have imagined their own fate. They possessed the genetic Russian quality of dissatisfaction, inherited from their peasant parents. What they could never have imagined was the destiny of their son.
The young couple moved to the United States during the Cold War. They lived in Arlington, Virginia, and worked in the Soviet embassy. She was a stenographer, and he was a translator. Svetlana was also a cryptographer and helped to interpret intercepted military and governmental communiqués. Yuri translated messages from American-born spies. One morning, three months after arriving, they were approached by a CIA officer. He offered them a chance to work with the Agency. The agent wanted to know who was giving them intelligence so that the CIA could distribute disinformation to the Kremlin. In exchange, when it came time for the Krasnovs to be rotated back to the Soviet Union — after eighteen months, to make sure they did not become overly comfortable with the American way of life — they would be given asylum if they chose to stay. If their collaboration were ever discovered, the Krasnovs would immediately be taken into protective custody and relocated.
The couple had learned a great deal about the United States since moving here. They liked what they saw. What’s more, they had a six-year-old daughter and four-year-old son and wanted them to grow up in a land of opportunity. A land without breadlines or restrictions on what they could say and think.
The Krasnovs were found out seven months later. A floater agent, one assigned to spy on spies, read a mole’s report and resealed it before it was turned over to Yuri for translation. The deception was discovered. The Krasnovs fled. The family was relocated to Wisconsin and given the new last name Brown, chosen by Svetlana. She was a big fan of the Peanuts comic strip.
Young Fayina and her brother Vladilen grew up American, and no one could have been more of a patriot than Vlad. He joined the marines as soon as he turned eighteen and proved to be remarkably skilled with the M-14. His proficiency was the result of the years he had spent hunting with his father in the woods. Implicitly, the elder Brown wanted to be ready in case the KGB ever came looking for them. Fortunately, the collapse of the Soviet Union made that unlikely.
Vlad was so good with weapons that the Marines appointed him to a special reaction team at the Marine Corps Air Station in Iwakuni, Japan. As part of his assignment he was sent to Camp Foster, Okinawa, to train with the new Designated Marksman Rifle. The DMR was an urban combat rifle. Before being certified, Vlad had to be able to make a moving head shot from two hundred yards and hit a stationary thumbnail-size object from the same distance.
He placed number one at the base, and among the top 1 percent of all Marine marksmen nationwide. Shortly before the Iraq War, Captain Vlad Brown was reassigned to special duty at the White House. Along with two other men, Vlad spent his nights on the roof with infrared glasses, watching for potential attackers. His DMR was worn across his back in a loose leather sling. He could have the rifle unshouldered and aimed in less than three seconds. His orders were to report any suspicious movement within three hundred yards of the White House. Vlad wore a three-ounce video camera on his left shoulder, where it would not get in the way of his DMR. The camera relayed images to Secret Service On-site Command based in the West Wing. If the SSOC determined a threat was real, Vlad would be ordered to neutralize it.
The post was quite a journey for the son of Russian defectors, unthinkable a quarter century before. The young man took some ribbing because of his very Russian name, but not too much. That was the one area where Vlad Brown was self-conscious and extremely sensitive. Though the captain passed the monthly psych evaluations, which were required for armed individuals with presidential access, his fellow marksmen sensed his name was an area to avoid. There were some things team members picked up on that psychologists did not.