While his razor-cut hair was “Werewolves of London”-perfect, his navy suit coat was already draped haphazardly over the back of his desk chair, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up a couple turns. Formerly a pudgy nerd, Miguel Altuve had lost weight and ditched his wire-frame glasses, but inside this handsome, diminutive man a nerd still lurked. Right now his eyes were red-rimmed — likely his contacts had been in too long — and his dark complexion looked uncharacteristically sallow.
She lowered herself into the chair alongside his desk. “How long have you been up?”
“Twenty-four... uh, twenty-six hours.”
She almost felt guilty, having dropped Reeder’s suspicions on Miggie last night... using the burner phone of course. Almost guilty.
“No sleep at all?” she asked.
“I was working,” he said, as if that explained it, and actually it did. “I napped for an hour or two. Hey, I’m fine. My blood is thirty percent caffeine.”
“How far did you get?”
“I’m still on Tony Evans.”
Her eyebrows tried to join each other. “You spent all night tracing an alias?”
He leaned back in his swivel chair. “That was part of it. But I was also looking into the fascinating life and times of Anthony J. Wooten.”
“And just who is Anthony J. Wooten?”
With a sly smile, Miggie said, “He and Tony Evans are one and the same... at least according to the fingerprints from the DC Homicide morgue.”
She was on the edge of her seat, like a kid at a horror movie. “What do we know about the late Mr. Wooten?”
“Ex-military. Black ops stuff in Afghanistan.”
“So, he’s CIA?”
“Not so you’d notice. But clearly an asset.”
She shifted in the chair. “Okay, back up. How do you even know Wooten did ‘black ops stuff in Afghanistan’? That’s got to be classified.”
“Oh, it is. Way down deep.”
“Then you found out how?”
He folded his arms, shook his head. “We’re in that if-I-told-you-I’d-have-to-kill-you area. Or even worse, if-I-told-you-they’d-have-to-kill-me.”
“Or both of us?”
He sighed and thought for a moment. Rocking a little, he said, “Let’s just say I know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody who could get me the answers we wanted.” He stopped rocking. “Are you planning to take this to court?”
“Not in the immediate future.”
He started rocking again. “Then we’re on a need-to-know basis... and you don’t need to know.”
“For now... okay. So, Evans... or I should say Wooten... was, what? A mercenary?”
Nodding, Miggie said, “In that he got paid to do some bad shit, yes... but he was never open to the highest bidder. Never was a part of Air America or anything so mundane. He was, it seems, a contractor, but only for very specific employers.”
“Then we are talking CIA...?”
“Mostly... but also the occasional freelance job for employers within the government.”
“What kind of employers?”
“Highly placed ones. Generating the kind of classified activities that don’t get talked about even in congressional hearings.”
She processed that for a while. Then: “And this CIA asset, this governmental handyman, is who befriended Glenn Willard, to gain access to Secretary of the Interior Yellich... to assassinate her?”
“Sure seems that way.”
She stared past him at Washington, DC, out his window. “You’re saying... we’re saying... that someone within the United States government dispatched Wooten to kill Yellich. That simple.”
“That simple,” Miggie said. “That terrible.”
Her eyes went to his. “You’ve shared this with no one else.”
“Of course not.”
She nodded toward the monitor on his desk. “Is there a government computer that has any record of your searches?”
He made a face. “You don’t have to be insulting.”
She twitched the tiniest smile and rose. “We need to tell Hardesy.”
Miggie looked up at her in surprise. “He’s in Reeder’s inner circle on this?”
“He is. And with you, that makes four of us.”
She fetched Lucas from the bullpen, where he and the others were trailing in, and led him into Miggie’s office to hear what the computer expert had learned.
When Miggie finished, Hardesy — in the chair Rogers had vacated — was shaking his shaved head, making the overhead light reflect. “Un-fucking-believable,” he said.
Standing next to him, arms folded, looking down at him like a teacher checking a student’s paper, Rogers said, “You don’t buy it?”
Hardesy’s smirk was humorless. “No, I don’t want to buy it.” His sigh was deep and sounded like somebody had opened a distant boiler door. “So, there’s a rogue element in the government? This shadow group that Reeder posits?”
Rogers said, “Looks that way.”
“And they assassinated a member of the goddamn cabinet?”
“Yeah.”
He turned up both hands. “To what end?”
“It would be nice to know,” Rogers said.
“And nice to know,” Miggie added, “who in this rogue group put the Yellich murder in motion. Have to be somebody pretty high up.”
“Maybe as high up,” Rogers said, “as someone capable of getting CIA agents sent to Azbekistan.”
The color had drained from Hardesy’s face and wasn’t coming back very fast. “Do we think this case is tied to Reeder’s presidential mission?”
Her shrug was barely perceptible. “You tell me — or do you still think it’s a coincidence, dead CIA agents here and abroad, a mercenary taken out with extreme prejudice, and an assassinated cabinet secretary?”
“You had me at dead CIA agents,” Hardesy said dryly. “Okay, let’s say I’m convinced. Where do we go from here?”
She let a grave look travel from Hardesy to Miggie and back again. “I go to AD Fisk with what we know,” she said, “and with what we suspect... and ask her to assign our task force to this case.”
Miggie asked, “Do we empty the entire bag on her desk?”
“We hold nothing back,” Rogers said, nodding.
Hardesy frowned. “Should we run all this past Reeder first?”
She shook her head. “We’ll fill him in at the next opportunity. But Wooten’s identity only confirms what Joe’s already thinking — he knew coming into this investigation that there must be some kind of government involvement, when the President’s own directive was ignored. Those four CIA agents didn’t just suddenly decide to check out Azbekistan as a vacation spot on the eve of a Russian invasion. No, Reeder’s already got a mission from the President, and he’s staying off the grid as he carries it out. Meanwhile, we need to get the Bureau to stand behind us on our side of it.”
Rogers made a quick call to AD Fisk’s office and learned that the Assistant Director was in a meeting, but should be free momentarily.
Soon, seated in Fisk’s reception area, she checked the burner phone to see if a text had come through from Reeder — it hadn’t — then got out her other phone, which had a text from Kevin about seeing her tonight. The AD’s inner-office door opened and a tall man with dark hair came out. Pleasant enough looking, he had a Cost Cutters haircut and generic gray Men’s Wearhouse suit that screamed government drone. He gave her the nod that was a stranger’s hello and strode out.
Two more minutes passed before the AD’s male secretary interrupted her perusal of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin on her cell phone, to say, “Ms. Fisk will see you now.”
Rising, Rogers took in a breath, let it out. She strode into the inner office to find Margery Fisk staring past her, her expression cold. Not welcoming.