Dagon Rising(14)
By then, Clark had disappeared.
On July 7, 2006, during the clean-up operations and the search and destroy missions that were taking part up and down the East Coast, Clark Arroyo had given his exit interview with the Director of the Secret Service. Before he was killed in the slaughter in the White House, Ken White had sent an email via Blackberry to key personnel advising them of Clark’s dismissal. That dismissal was rescinded during his exit interview. Clark didn’t even have to think about it. “I’m done,” he’d said. “Consider me retired.”
And with that, he’d become a civilian for the first time in almost thirty years.
And it hadn’t been easy.
His wife, Lisa, had been upset, of course. His surviving daughter even more so. He’d laid low for the first month or two until he was able to receive his retirement annuity. Once received, he’d called Scott Baker, an old high school buddy of his who worked at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He’d met Scott for lunch and drinks at his comfortable suburban home one Saturday afternoon and, while Scott’s wife Melanie was out, he’d told his old friend everything.
Scott had listened, then gave Clark the kind of advice he’d hoped to receive. “There’s talk of Augustus Livingston running for President in 2008. If he wins, he will no doubt use his power to crush the last of Tyler’s Administration. In fact, I wouldn’t put it past him to have some of those guys detained at Guantanamo Bay or another Federal institution. If that happens, you can bet loyalists to the Tyler Administration and those who hold to the same ideology will do everything they can to dig up anything they can find on Tyler’s death. If they connect you to it—and I believe they will, although it will be purely on circumstantial evidence—they will make your life hell. You don’t want to be around for that.”
“So what should I do?” Clark had asked.
“Disappear,” Scott had said, and from the tone of his voice Clark could tell his old friend was deadly serious. “Make plans to disappear now. Have you told anybody else what you just told me?”
Clark told him he hadn’t.
“Good. Don’t. Let me help you. Give me two weeks and I’ll have everything set up for you.”
Two weeks later, Scott followed through on his word. He’d presented Clark with a package during their next meeting. “If I were you, I’d transfer as much of your annuity into the offshore account I’ve opened for you. Paperwork on the account is in this package.”
With that, Clark began thinking about what to do if the time to disappear ever came. In a perfect world, he’d enjoy his early retirement with Lisa. But he couldn’t count on that. Not after what had happened.
Because if somebody got too nosy and found out what really happened in that secret tunnel in the White House…
It was Lisa who put his plans on disappearing into overdrive. Two months after his retirement, she told him she wanted a divorce.
And she wanted half of his retirement funds…
…and furthermore, she knew what he’d really done to President Jeffrey Tyler…
It was that revelation that blindsided him. It had also been the first time he’d almost hit a woman. At first he’d said it was because she was distraught over the death of their daughter. Lisa insisted that it wasn’t. In the twenty minutes or so that followed these announcements—mostly through angry shouts—Clark learned three things. One, Lisa had been having an affair for the past two years with a member of the RNC; two, her lover, who he later learned idolized President Tyler, had convinced her irrevocably that Clark had shot President Tyler in cold blood; and three, she and her new boyfriend were going to get married…as soon as the ink was dry on the divorce papers and her share of Clark’s retirement funds was in her bank account. He hadn’t transferred those funds into his offshore account, for fear that she’d have been able to follow the trail. Besides, he didn’t need the money she was legally entitled to anyway, especially where he was going once the RNC uncovered the truth about what he’d really done.
That was the night Clark learned that a 9mm slug had been pulled out of Special Agent Nathan Walpow’s brainpan. One of the casings found in the ruins of the White House conference room where his body (and the eviscerated remains of various members of Tyler’s cabinet had convened during the storm) was matched to the slug, which, in turn, matched Clark’s Sig Sauer. Clark had not mentioned in any of the interviews and statements he’d given to investigators that he’d shot and killed Agent Walpow. Sure, he’d shot the guy, but he wasn’t going to tell them that. All they needed to know was that it had been a chaotic scene. That was more than enough to lead investigators to believe that if Walpow was shot by Clark Arroyo’s gun, it had been an accident.