Quantico Rules Read online

  “That’s what I thought on Friday, but I was wrong. I came in Saturday to dictate and that’s when I caught the problem. It’s a bad one. We can’t let it go … not after what happened with Grady.”

  My back teeth began to grind. Christ, I was sick of Supreme Court nominees. The Josephine Grady fiasco hadn’t happened on my watch, but it was the reason the supervisor’s job was open when it came time to promote me. My predecessor was working out of Butte, Montana, these days, but his failure had stayed behind with the squad I’d inherited. As far as the Hoover Building was concerned, a second Supreme Court disaster would be counted as my second failure, and two failures were deadlier than anthrax. I reached for my briefcase and opened it.

  “Go ahead,” I told Lisa Sands. “I can listen while I get ready to leave.”

  She shook her shoulder-length brown hair from side to side. “There are twenty days missing, boss”—in the bureau, the term survived despite the PC involved—“and I don’t know how to find them.”

  I looked at her and grunted. You can explain away a day or two, but not twenty of them. Not to the Oval Office you can’t. SPIN cases were boring as hell for the most part, but could be fatal when the White House was involved. Suddenly my trip to Connecticut didn’t seem like such a hot idea. I glared at Lisa, then reminded myself it wasn’t her fault.

  “How long ago?” I asked.

  “Nineteen seventy-two.”

  “Seventy-two? Thirty years?”

  My spirits lifted. Maybe my plans for the night weren’t ruined after all. I removed an airplane ticket from the briefcase and slipped it into the inside pocket of my suit jacket, lifted my black leather credential case with the imbedded gold badge from my shirt pocket and put it in the briefcase.

  Lisa consulted the yellow legal pad in her hands. “Brenda Thompson graduated Cal-Berkeley, on June 17, 1972. Left the Bay Area immediately, reported to Yale Law School on July 8. But her SF-86 doesn’t account for her whereabouts in between.”

  “Twenty days … less than three weeks, three decades ago. That’s asking a lot, even for us.”

  “If it were easy we’d hire ribbon clerks, isn’t that what you keep telling me?”

  “What I’m saying is that even the bureau can’t know everything.”

  But I was wrong even to think such a thing. Knowing everything is exactly what we do, and the only reason the SPIN Squad exists in the first place. Impossible or not, we’re expected to verify every word on the SF-86, the personal security questionnaire each and every nominee submits as part of the investigatory process.

  Lisa pulled her chair closer. Her eyes got even darker and more intense. “That’s not the worst of it. The problem’s not the missing days … not exactly anyway.” She glanced at the metal coatrack to the right of my desk. “You might want to hang up your suit jacket. This could take a while.”

  I shook my head. “Finnerty’s waiting for me. I don’t have a while. Just tell me what’s going on as quickly as possible.”

  “As soon as I discovered the gap,” Lisa said, “I called Judge Thompson. At first she said I must be wrong, that she’d gone straight from Berkeley to Yale, but I gave her the same dates I just read to you. Surely, I told her, it couldn’t have taken three weeks to get back to law school. She was quiet for a few moments, then laughed. It had taken three weeks. She’d stopped on the way in a small town in Virginia—Brookston, Virginia—to care for a dying aunt. Spent two or three weeks with the aunt before the elderly woman died. Never considered it a real residence—still doesn’t as a matter of fact—so she didn’t include it in her questionnaire.”

  My fingertips began to drum on the top of the desk as I pictured my waiting boss’s face upstairs.

  “Lisa, please, if there’s a problem, I’m not seeing it. The judge made a mistake on the 86. Happens all the time. Add a paragraph to the administrative section of your report, explain what you just told me. Business as usual.”

  I opened a second hidden compartment in my briefcase, removed a plain white business envelope half an inch thick, put it next to the wallet in my pocket. I started to get up, to fetch my raincoat, but she stopped me.

  “There’s more,” she said. “Stop trying to get out of here. Wherever you’re going, it can wait five minutes.”

  I stared at her. For an agent not yet finished with her probationary year, Lisa Sands was damned pushy. I remembered something from her personnel file, her interview with the recruiting agents in El Paso, and her audacious statement that she planned to become the first woman director of the FBI. A commendable goal, but someone needed to tell her it would take more than a year to get there.

  “I called the Cobb County clerk’s office in Brookston,” she continued, “to check out the death certificate.”

  “Same deal,” I told her. “Routine business. Have the county clerk send a copy, certified and exemplified. Do an insert for the report, I-A the copy, and attach it to the file.”

  “Not that simple, I’m afraid. Thompson told me her aunt Sarah Kendall fought the cancer as long as she could but finally died on the second day of July 1972. Thompson left for New Haven the day after the funeral.”

  “And you verified it, you dictated your report … yada, yada, yada.”

  “Not exactly. The lady died all right, no question about that, but she didn’t do it in 1972. Or ’73 or ’74, either.” Lisa smiled, mock sweetly. “Bless her heart, old Sarah Kendall hung on till 1991.”

  I felt my eyebrows lift.

  “And what’d the judge have to say about that?”

  “Give me some credit. I wasn’t about to go back to her until I talked with you first.”

  I had to smile. Lisa might be new, but she was a quick study. Presidential appointees are best approached with extreme caution, and not at all when the possibility of lying exists.

  “How about the rest of the report? What else did you find?”

  “Nothing. Except for her miraculous aunt, Brenda Thompson’s about as exciting as Mister Rogers.” She glanced at the notebook in her lap, then looked at me again. “I almost wish I hadn’t noticed the residency gap. I’ll never make the bureau deadline now. Ten days isn’t nearly enough time to sort this out.”

  I nodded. “Prepare a delay letter asking for a new buded”—the acronym for bureau deadline—“and get it ready for me to sign. I’ll run what you just told me by the ADIC and we can talk about it again tomorrow morning.”

  At the door to Assistant Director-in-Charge Kevin Finnerty’s outer office on the top floor, I straightened the knot in my tie, pulled the door open and went through. The ADIC was a Hoover man first, last, and always, and the retro look of his office had been calculated to make that clear to his visitors. With its museum-quality furniture and musty air of old carpet and velvet draperies, the place reminded me of the set for the Maltese Falcon. One of these days, I was sure, Humphrey Bogart would step out from behind the heavy maroon drapes, his fedora pulled low, snub-nose in hand, looking for the fat man.

  Finnerty’s secretary was the perfect complement. Her mouse-brown bun of hair, crimson smear of lipstick, and high-shouldered floral dress made Betty Swenson look like a Norman Rockwell painting. The last of a long line of bureau old maids stretching back to Hoover’s fabled Helen Gandy, Betty was proud as a battleship and tougher than the Bismarck to get past in one piece. Her head came up as I approached. She glared at me over the top of her frameless half-glasses.

  “He’s been waiting for fifteen minutes,” she growled. “You better get in there.”

  I tapped on the door. “Puller Monk,” I called, then went through and headed across a dozen yards of gray carpet toward the assistant director in charge, enthroned at the far end of the room behind an aircraft carrier of a desk laden with stacks of files and other paperwork. Flanking him, twin flags stood like sentinels. Behind the ADIC, floor-to-ceiling windows admitted gray light from another in a long series of drizzly January afternoons.

  The ADIC’s strong chin and clear gray eyes
, his perfectly tailored navy blue suit and crimson tie, radiated enough power to light the entire building. Power dangerous enough that I’d made it a point years ago to learn his tell—the nonverbal warning that always preceded his wrath. When he began to straighten up his paperwork, it was time to duck and cover.

  I moved to the nearest of the leather chairs in front of his desk and sat. He said nothing, but I didn’t expect him to. The bureau is like a dog pound. Everyone knows where he stands, but the top dog is the only one who has to keep proving it. Kevin Finnerty wouldn’t acknowledge me until I knew exactly who was in charge. If it weren’t for the mess, he’d lift his leg and piddle against the desk to drive home the point. I grinned at the image, and he caught me red-handed.

  “Perhaps you’d like to share the joke, Mr. Monk.” He glanced toward the window overlooking the street. “Or maybe you’re still amused by that display outside.”

  “That was no joke, boss. I made a very serious point to those people.”

  “You did nothing of the sort. We have a police department to handle such things. Your job was to arrest the perpetrator and take him to the U.S. Marshal’s office. What you chose to do instead—engage in some kind of baggy-pants comedy routine—is not acceptable, not for one of my people, especially not for one of my supervisory staff.”

  “He’d have been back on the street throwing eggs before I got back upstairs to start the paperwork.”

  “That’s not our concern. You made a fool of yourself, of this office, of me personally. I know you’re impatient to get into the counterterrorism program, but an incident like the one I just witnessed is a sure way to kill your chances. You will not get where you want to go by acting like a child. I will not warn you again.”

  I slid forward in my chair, the back of my neck starting to burn. ADIC or not, he was out of line. I opened my mouth to tell him so, but closed it again. The best I could do was change the subject.

  “I’ll exercise better judgment next time, Mr. Finnerty, you can count on that, but I do have something else to speak with you about.”

  He nodded for me to go ahead.

  “We have a problem with Brenda Thompson,” I told him. “She left out a three-week period of residence between college and law school, and may be lying about it.”

  “Lying?”

  “We went to her when we discovered the residency gap, but what she told us about it appears to be untrue.”

  “Woman’s what, fifty something? You’re talking about a long time ago.”

  “Fifty-three, and you’re right. It was a long time ago.”

  “What about the roommate, the missing roommate from the University of California? Won’t she be able to clear it up?”

  I glanced into his eyes. You had to hand it to the man. A few years past the mandatory retirement age of fifty-seven—exempted by special fiat from our director—Kevin Finnerty ran WMFO like an accountant, missed not a single detail of cases he considered essential to rebuilding the bureau’s dwindling reputation.

  “She might be,” I answered, “if we could find her.” I caught his scowl, a clear indication of what he thought about my answer. “We ran out of leads on the roommate,” I added, “and, to be frank, until this happened I hadn’t considered it a high priority to find her.”

  “But now …” he said, leaving the words hanging.

  “But now we’re looking for her again, of course.”

  We weren’t, but it was the whitest of lies. We sure as hell would be the instant I got back downstairs.

  “I think that’s a good idea,” he said in an FBI code that really meant, If you don’t find her, I will personally remove your testicles and watch you eat them.

  “Shall I send the delay letter directly to the Hoover Building,” I asked, “or would you prefer to see it first?”

  He shook his head. “There will be no delay. The director’s deadline is a week from Thursday. That will be sufficient.”

  “It’s a huge report, boss. Take us most of that time to get it through the typing pool, revisions and all. I’m not sure we can—”

  I stopped when I saw him reach for his paperwork.

  “Ten days, Mr. Monk,” he told me. His teeth showed for an instant in what I’m sure he considered a smile. “The whole universe only took six.”

  At the airport, I shuffled along in the one-hour line through the security-check system and boarded the US Airways jetliner as soon as they’d let me. I sat in the aisle seat of row 14 and tried not to think about Judge Brenda Thompson, even though I knew it was foolish to try. Like the man who was promised a million dollars if he could go thirty seconds without thinking about a hippopotamus, I didn’t stand a chance. The stopwatch had barely started when the lumbering beasts began to crowd the periphery of the poor bastard’s imagination. Ten seconds later they were tromping through the door like unwelcome relatives, another ten and they had set up housekeeping and ordered cable TV.

  So I gave in and started with Josephine Grady. To fully appreciate the Thompson problem, I first had to review the Grady debacle.

  Judge Josephine Ellen Grady had been the president’s first choice for his history-making appointment of a black woman to the Supreme Court. My predecessor had done a bang-up job of clearing her background—he thought—until the Washington Post uncovered the judge’s undocumented Guatemalan housekeeper, a housekeeper the SPIN squad had not even thought to ask about. The headlines were brutal. The president had dumped Grady quicker than medical waste, then summoned our director from the Hoover Building and chewed his ass raw. The director wasted not a moment before flinging the blame downward to Finnerty, who turned the bureaucratic double play by hurling the SPIN supervisor out to Butte and promoting me to replace him, then making my mission exquisitely clear: Do not let such a thing happen again. And that brought up a question I couldn’t help asking myself.

  With the stakes this high, what am I doing going to Connecticut?

  I’d told Lisa Sands we couldn’t do anything more today about Judge Thompson, but I’d been lying. I could be in the judge’s chambers right now, taking care of business, but I was heading for Connecticut instead, and the truth was I was going because I couldn’t not go. There’d be plenty of time for Brenda Thompson when I got back. No matter what it cost, no matter who might end up paying for it, I wasn’t about to cancel what awaited me up north.

  And speaking of Lisa Sands, I still didn’t quite know what to think about the woman who was the latest addition to my squad.

  She was an FOA—a first office agent—but an unusual one. Thirty-five, for starters, at a time when most new agents were ten years younger. She’d been an assistant district attorney in El Paso and knew the law-enforcement ropes pretty much cold before she came to Washington. Sharp as a pit-boss, Lisa didn’t need me to hold her hand, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t like to. It was a very pretty hand, as was the rest of her. I pictured her long legs and gorgeous smile and felt a twinge of disappointment. We were both single, but I was her boss. In these days of corporate rectitude her magnificent body was a thousand miles off-limits, so I ordered her out of my mind. Like the hippos, however, she loitered, as I tried to concentrate on warming up for Connecticut.

  I sank deeper into my seat and began the counting-backward ritual that seemed to work for me. From one hundred by sevens, to start with. One hundred, I mumbled, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine … Then by elevens. One hundred, eighty-nine, seventy-eight … Then by fourteens, and so on until my brain felt limber as a gymnast. I laid my head back, closed my eyes, and thought good thoughts until the announcement to buckle up for landing brought me upright again. On the ground in Hartford we rolled to the terminal and hooked up with the flexible tunnel that jutted like an overeager lover toward the plane. I got off and headed for the Avis desk.

  “Mr. Bland,” the thin woman with the red jacket said as I walked up. “How nice to see you again. Your car is waiting. You can expect the usual discount.”

  “Thank you, Judy,” I
told her. “You take very good care of me.”

  “Same time tomorrow, sir?”

  I shook my head. “Earlier. Quick turnaround this trip.”

  “I’ll be on the desk in the morning. See you then.”

  I scribbled my John Bland on the rental form and headed out the doors to the Avis depot on the left side of the covered parking garage. I could feel Judy watching my back, and my neck began to tingle. Relax, I told myself, she’s not working for the bureau. She’s just friendly, is all … might even have other designs, and why not? I had my own hair and teeth, a decent topspin backhand down the line. Why shouldn’t she cop a peek if she wanted to?

  In the rental—a blue Ford Taurus that smelled like cigar smoke and Lysol—I followed Connecticut Route 2 south toward Norwich. My wipers swept at the latest rainstorm pounding against the windshield. I drove through grassy expanses green enough to make you blink, past scarlet barns and white farmhouses, and half an hour later crossed the Thames River at Norwich, continued south on 2 for another twenty minutes, through the Pequot reservation and the town of Mashantucket, and pulled up the tree-lined driveway to the Foxwoods Resort and Casino. It sat waiting for me. The twenty-story hotel’s central tower looked like a hand raised in welcome, the building’s two jutting side wings like arms stretched out to embrace me.

  My stomach began to flutter with the rush that kept me coming back to a place where I dared not be seen. I accelerated toward the front doors, pulled up at the valet parking stand. A young man I’d never seen before opened my door, pulled a ticket from under his rain-shiny poncho and handed it to me as I got out of the car. I headed into the palace with the sweeping golden facade. The twenty-foot-tall doors slid open and the casino lay defenseless before me.

  I reached into my pocket for my lucky ring, a yellow glob of gold I never go to the tables without, a ring I never wear anywhere else. I slipped it on the pinky finger of my left hand, stepped through the doors, and stood there for a moment.

  The noise hit me first, a cacophony of bells and whistles, shrieks of hope and despair, a slap of sound that stopped me in my tracks. Then came the smells—sweat and perfume, whiskey and cigarettes—and finally the stunning spectacle itself. Two and a half green-carpeted acres of self-indulgence … four thousand slot machines to my right, stretching away into the gloom … on my left, table after table of blackjack, roulette, baccarat … all for the taking.