CHAPTER 109
Two days later …
IT’S A CLOSED-DOOR CONGRESSIONAL hearing, and I’ve got a front-row seat. Actually, a side-row seat. Right next to Aiden Phillips.
CIA director Alvin Crowell played the national security card to keep the proceedings under wraps. I can’t blame him. He’s trying his best to protect the Company—and his own job. Nobody at Langley wants this mess aired in public.
Fortunately for Crowell, he has a friend in Representative James Halpin of Missouri, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who agreed to the secret fact-finding session.
Everybody here, from the recording clerks on up, is sworn to secrecy. Including me. I can’t tell anybody what happens here. Not even my best friend, Alex Cross. Not ever.
The conference room we’re in has none of the pomp of the House chamber. No walnut paneling or marble sculptures here. Just rows of standard-issue meeting-room furniture, with armed guards outside the doors.
No unauthorized spectators. No press. We’re two hundred feet underground, sheltered by walls designed to withstand a nuclear blast.
Phillips and I have both given our testimonies under oath. Now it’s J. T. Polermo’s turn. The prime witness. The whistleblower of all whistleblowers. He’s sitting at the center of the table in a civilian suit. His lower jaw is still a bit purple. My knuckles are still a bit sore.
It’s a good hurt.
Polermo will be indicted for the murders of Roland Perkins and Anna Rizzo as well as the other victims killed in the DC bombings. But that’s not what this is about. This inquiry is about Polermo providing testimony against a career CIA officer.
His old handler, former station chief Tom Walsh.
Walsh sits at the far end of the table, glowering. His attorney, a balding guy with a walrus mustache, is beside him.
The preliminaries are out of the way. Polermo has been sworn in. Junior committee lawyers have put his résumé on the record: Dates of service and promotions. Deployments and duties. Medals and commendations. The picture of a perfect soldier. At least on paper.
Now Halpin steps up. He doesn’t waste any time.
“How long after you returned to civilian life were you contacted by Mr. Walsh?” Halpin asks in his down-home Missouri accent. His reading glasses rest halfway down his prominent nose.
“About two years,” says Polermo.
“You were adjusting well at that time?” asks Halpin.
“I had some bumps,” says Polermo, “but I guess I was doing about as well as could be expected.”
I suspect that Polermo is sugarcoating the past. Like a lot of vets, he probably doesn’t want to talk in public about the nightmares or the flashbacks. I’m pretty sure he has them. Most of us do, whether we admit it or not.
“You saw a lot of action during your deployments,” says Halpin.
“Yeah. I did.”
“And when did you first meet Tom Walsh?”
“Not until after the airlift in August 2021.”
“And where did you meet?”
“We were assigned to the same unit in Pakistan.”
“The secret base in Guldara Baghicha.”
Polermo looks at his lawyer, who gives him a slight nod. “That’s correct,” says Polermo, turning back to Halpin.
“Did you expect to hear from Mr. Walsh again after you left Pakistan?”
“No. I had no interest in hearing from him again. I thought we were done. I figured what was in the past was in the past.”
“What did Mr. Walsh say to you when he contacted you?”
“He said we had unfinished business to take care of. For both of our sakes.”
“Did you understand what he meant by that?”
I see Polermo stiffen in his chair. “I did.”
“And what did he mean?”
“He meant that the Pakistan operation had to be locked down once and for all. Nobody could ever know that he’d supplied military intelligence to the Taliban.”
“And were there others who knew that secret?”
“Yes. There were three others who knew, not counting myself.”
A clerk puts an image up on the large screen at the front of the room. It shows the piece of paper Phillips had been about to hand to Perkins—the one I’d stuffed into my pocket after he was shot.
The paper is wrinkled and spattered with dark brown spots.
On it are three handwritten names. Beside the image of the paper on the screen are three photos.
Two men, one woman. All in their early twenties.
All posed in their official military portraits, in dress uniform, in front of the American flag, looking proud and determined. Ready to take on the world.
The same way I looked right after basic.
“Are you familiar with these individuals, Mr. Polermo?”
“I am. I served with all of them.”
“Right,” says Halpin. “And then you killed them.”
Polermo sets his jaw and stares straight ahead. “Yes.”
“You killed them with bombs you set in Washington, DC.”
“That’s correct.”
“You killed them to protect Tom Walsh’s secret.”
Walsh’s lawyer stands up. “We object, Mr. Chairman!”
“Save your objections, Counselor,” Halpin drawls. “This isn’t a trial. It’s a fact-finding session.”
Walsh and his lawyer put their heads together and mumble out of mic range. Polermo turns to face front again.
“Walsh knew that I’d smuggled home a supply of C-4. And I knew that he could hang me up with that. I also knew that he could probably have me killed, no questions asked.”
“So you weren’t just saving Tom Walsh,” says Halpin. “You were saving yourself.”
“That’s what I believed, yes.”
From one chair away, I can feel Aiden Phillips tense. Halpin looks over at the screen and reads off the three names.
“Former army corporal Ray Kilbourne, twenty-six, killed in the Thirteenth Street bombing. Former army sergeant Stacy Fine, twenty-eight, killed in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial bombing. Former army specialist Jean Baptiste, thirty, killed in the Montgomery building bombing.”
Halpin turns his gaze from the screen to the witness table. “Can you tell us what all these bombing victims had in common, Mr. Polermo?”
“They all worked at the base in Guldara Baghicha.”
“And all three had TS/SCI clearances?” asks Halpin.
“Correct.”
“Meaning that, like you, they had access to confidential weapons system codes and operating software.”
“Yes.”
“Information that Tom Walsh was selling to Taliban operatives for his own profit.”
“Yes.”
I’ve heard all this before, during Phillips’s questioning. But hearing it from Polermo’s mouth—straight from the killer himself—makes me furious all over again.
The Washington, DC, bombings were not terrorist attacks after all. They were disguised assassinations, aimed at just three people. The other victims were all collateral damage—a smoke screen of human carnage. With the troubled vet sitting beside me framed for all of it.
None of us focused on the individual victims killed in the bombings.
That three working-class military folk were killed in three separate explosions hadn’t raised any immediate red flags.
Veterans are everywhere in DC—in government offices, hospitals, businesses, stores, restaurants.
It was the perfect cover. Nobody had made the connection.
Not me. Not Ned Mahoney. Not Roland Perkins.
Nobody but Aiden Phillips.
And then Anna Rizzo had too. According to Phillips, that’s what she’d been coming to my house to tell me.
Halpin puts down his notes and pulls his glasses off.
He rubs his face and stares at the witness table.
“You were a U.S. Army soldier, Mr. Polermo. A decorated combat veteran. And you killed three of your own, along with a lot of other innocent people, in your nation’s capital and framed another decorated vet for your crimes.
Do you have any regrets about what you did? ”
“Yeah, I do,” he says. Polermo’s lawyer puts his hand over the mic. Polermo shoves it away and leans forward.
“I should have just blown up Tom Walsh.”