I
wanted nothing more than to run. To find the basement door and get down there immediately.
But I forced myself to backtrack down the hall to Vogel’s office. There I looked around quickly and yanked the power cord from the desktop computer. The cord was six feet long and sturdy. Then I grabbed a couple of USB cables.
I returned to the safe room and looped the power cable around the door lever and looped that up to the mount for the CCTV camera. Pretty quickly I’d knotted the cables securely.
He wasn’t going to get out of that safe room any time soon, and not without help.
I turned and raced back down the hall in the general direction of the front door. I flung open door after door, finding closets and bedrooms and bathrooms.
And finally the right one. The basement. I dropped the empty Glock and descended the stairs.
The air felt cooler. I smelled a dank odor as I descended the dimly lit wooden stairway. Lights were on downstairs. I heard low voices.
The basement appeared, on first glance, to have roughly the same footprint as the floor above. Bare concrete walls segmented it into a number of open rooms. It seemed to go on forever. It was, for a basement, relatively high-ceilinged: around nine feet. On the ceiling were soundproofing tiles.
The voices were a little louder, and I could tell they were coming from a TV in one of the open rooms. In the closest alcove were steel shelves that held white boxes marked with dates and letters. The Centurions’ client files, probably. All along one wall were garden tools, neatly hanging from hooks on a long expanse of pegboard.
I sidled along the wall of tools toward the source of the TV noise, which seemed to be coming from the next alcove. There I saw what at first looked like chain-link fence. When I got closer—though still about twenty-five feet away—I realized I was looking at a holding cell. A twelve-by-twelve-foot standalone cell whose walls and ceiling were made of welded wire mesh. The sort of cage you might see in a small police detention unit. In one corner, a bare steel commode. In another, a sleeping bag on the floor and a steel bench.
And on that bench sat Mandy Seeger.
She was slumped, in a hooded sweatshirt, and looked weary and alone. She didn’t see me.
About ten feet from the holding cell sat a very large guy in a chair staring dully at a TV mounted on the ceiling. He wore a white short-sleeved polo shirt and a shoulder holster. He looked to be around three hundred pounds, much of it fat.
He didn’t see me either. He was watching some reality show about deep-sea fishing.
The basement was soundproofed, and he was watching TV, but he still must have heard the bomb. And the shot I’d taken at Vogel. But he
must have been ordered not to leave his post. He had a prisoner to watch.
“Yo!” I shouted, walking toward the fat guy. “Vogel sent me down here.”
The fat guy turned to look at me, a guy in a brown UPS uniform. He whipped a Glock out of his shoulder holster and aimed it in my direction. “Who the hell are you?”
“Man, there’s eighteen feds with windbreakers upstairs. You want to get out of this, follow me.” I came closer. “Get her out of there and let’s go.”
“Huh? Feds? Where?”
Then a cell phone began ringing.
His.
With his free left hand he pulled out a phone. Then, with the thumb of his gun hand, he hit the answer button, a neat little move. He must have done it before.
He answered it. “Yes, sir.”
I knew who it was.
Slowly I drew the Ruger out from under my shirt and held it at my side.
As he listened, his eyes roamed the basement.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
Mandy, in the cage, was watching me, frightened.
“Got it,” he said.
Then he pocketed the phone.
“Stop right where you are,” he said. His gun was trained on me. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Okay.” I took another step.
“I said, freeze,” the fat guy said.
In one fluid motion I pulled the Glock up directly in front of my chest.
But the fat guy leveled his Glock and fired first.
Directly at me, from around twelve feet away.
Mandy screamed.
It felt like someone had slammed me in the gut with a baseball bat. I doubled over. The pain was immense. The wind was knocked out of me. I tumbled backward, against the wall of tools, grabbing my chest, gasping, as the Ruger flew out of my hands and went skittering across the floor toward the fat guy. All around me tools clattered to the floor. Something had gashed my neck.
The light body armor I was wearing was only 6.5 millimeters thick, weighing less than two kilograms, and it had saved my life. But it sure felt like I’d broken a few ribs.
I sprung to my feet, and I saw the fat man reaching down to grab the Ruger.
A stupid move. Maybe he thought I’d been seriously wounded or was even dead. But it gave me a couple of seconds that I needed.
I reached for the closest tool at hand, a long-handled pair of garden shears with its jaws open. Grabbing it by one handle, I hurled it at the fat man like some ninja hurling a throwing star.
He yelped as one blade of the shears sank into the side of his neck. He fell to his knees, reaching for the shears, and I grabbed a large garden spade.
The fat guy fired at me again, but the round clanged against the steel blade. I pulled it back and swung it at the guy, hard. Though I was intending to land the blow on his chest, hoping to knock him to the floor, he had suddenly tipped forward and the shovel blade slammed into his ear.
There was a geyser of blood and I knew it had sunk in deep. The man collapsed onto the floor, the blood pulsing from an opening in his skull.
I grabbed the key from the retractable reel on the left side of his belt and yanked it off. I felt the spray of hot blood.
Mandy was screaming, and my ears were ringing, and I staggered toward the cage.
Even with the soundproofing, I could hear the faint distant warble of police sirens.
T
he beaten-earth yard around Vogel’s compound was crowded with a fleet of police vehicles, mostly from the local Maryland force. Kombucha was standing next to his unmarked car in a black overcoat. He waved when he saw us emerge from the compound.
I was glad to see him. I never thought I would be.
“You look like you need medical assistance,” he said, approaching.
I shook my head. “I’m good,” I said. “Thanks.”
I was in a lot of pain, but only when I breathed. I knew the wise course of action was to get to a hospital and get checked out and make sure I hadn’t also injured my spleen or my lungs. I’d been shot while wearing a ballistic vest before. I knew what could happen.
The wise course of action wasn’t what I chose, and Mandy couldn’t persuade me otherwise.
She was okay, she insisted. She hadn’t been injured or abused, beyond the discomfort of having to sleep on the floor in what was, after all, a cage, and the degradation of being forced to use a commode in front of a guard. I noticed Vogel’s backup hadn’t arrived after all. Maybe they were scared off by the police presence.
“Rasmussen?” I asked Kombucha.
He nodded. “Giving us the probable cause we need to search the compound.”
“I think client files are in the basement,” I said. “Will you excuse me a minute?”
Merlin was in the back of the UPS truck, and he looked antsy. “Nick,” he said, “I need to return this thing.”
“The truck?”
“The stingray.
And
the truck.”
“Hold on. Help me up.”
He extended a hand, and helped me up into the cargo bay of the truck. I was gritting my teeth and moaning as I climbed up.
“You get shot?” Merlin said, noticing the hole in the shirt of my uniform.
I nodded.
“Shit,” he said. “I can’t return it with a hole in it.”
“How about, ‘You okay, Nick?’”
“You okay, Nick?”
I nodded my head. I was still amped from all the adrenaline. But that was all right. It was probably keeping me from feeling much of the pain from the bruised ribs.
Merlin had been closely monitoring the stingray. I’d given him Vogel’s mobile number, so he knew which of the many numbers the stingray had logged—including even distant neighbors—to lock onto. Once he did, he watched the list of numbers Vogel called grow.
“Seven numbers,” he said. “Check it out.”
I scanned the list of phone numbers.
One of them I recognized, as I was afraid I would, and I felt sick.
M
andy wanted to come with me, but I needed to do this alone.
Merlin gave me a ride back to his house, where I’d left the rented Chrysler. On the way we barely talked. I was tired. Vogel’s men had worn me out.
I stopped at a Dunkin’ Donuts and tanked up on caffeine, popped a couple of Advil, and drove to DC.
On the way I played a tape-recording of Mandy’s interview in Anacostia. She’d recorded it on her iPhone and then sent me a link that, by means of some kind of iPhone wizardry, allowed me to play it.
I hit the
ON
button and put it on the seat next to me.
A very old man was speaking on the tape, an old man in a nursing home in Southeast Washington named Isaac Abelard. During the interview, she’d put the recorder on a bed tray next to the retired patrolman, she’d told me, with the result that her questions were hard to hear, but his answers were generally easier to make out.
Mandy:
When did this happen?
Abelard:
Oh, jeez, this must have been fifty, sixty years ago. Could
it be sixty? I suppose that’s right. Sixty. I was a young officer—in my midtwenties, must have been.
Mandy:
(inaudible)
Abelard:
Oh, I knew him from the neighborhood. He was a good kid. We all knew he was a good kid. I always thought he’d either end up doing great things or wind up getting killed. [Laughs]
Mandy:
(inaudible)
Abelard:
Oh, I had no idea.
Mandy:
Why are you willing to talk about it now?
Abelard:
Because I always knew I done a bad thing, covering it up. A wrong thing. I just thought I had a good reason to do it. (inaudible) Because his sister got raped. And when he found out about it, he went out and found the guy who did it and . . . he killed the man.
Mandy:
How?
Abelard:
A gun he must have bought on the street. It was easy to buy a gun on the street in those days, if you knew the right people.
Mandy:
But how did you find out about it?
Abelard:
His poor sister told her mother, and her mother told someone, and—I always had my ear to the ground. I had my sources, I had people in the community who’d talk to me, and . . . (inaudible) how I did my job . . . I tracked him down and I said, “Young man, is it true?” And he was crying and weeping and . . . he told me he didn’t think anyone would do anything about it. He didn’t think the rapist would ever be arrested. I told him he was wrong, he should have trusted the legal system, but . . . but when I thought about it some more I
realized, he was probably right. The rapist would probably have gotten away with it.
Mandy:
(inaudible)
Abelard:
Only his mother and his sister knew what he’d done. And I felt for the kid. And for his sister. The goddamned rapist had a rap sheet longer than his cankered dick. Pardon my French. Really bad news. So I made a decision. It would go no further. If he didn’t tell anyone what he’d done, it would be like it never happened. Well, his mother died, and his sister died. I’m the only one left who knows. And I don’t have much time. And I just—I just want to do the right thing.
I didn’t have an appointment, so I had to wait on one of the sharp-edged white leather sofas in the hard and glassy waiting area for almost fifteen minutes.
He came out to meet me himself, not his receptionist, which was unusual.
“Gideon,” I said, “we have a lot to talk about.”
T
he whole point was to discredit Mandy Seeger, wasn’t it?” I said.
I’d laid out everything I had on him, and now we were talking man-to-man. I wasn’t wearing a wire; I’d given him my word on that. I made it clear that his best chance was to talk me through what had gone down.
Gideon looked visibly deflated, and ten years older.
He hesitated. “And Slander Sheet
.
”
“You knew she was about to open that box. So you fed her a juicier story. Which was poisoned bait.”
“Dear God, Nick, I didn’t think—this is not the way it was supposed to play out. What they did to that girl—I had no idea. It sickens me.”
“How did you know Mandy was about to talk to that old cop?”
“I still know people in Anacostia, Nick. I lived in fear of it coming out. I didn’t even know Officer Abelard was still alive. He must be close to ninety.”
“But there must have been rumors.”
“There were always rumors. People knew my sister Olivia was raped when I was a teenager. I—I had such a temper back then. And you have
to understand the times. When Olivia told me what had happened, I was sure he’d get away with it. He was a white man, after all. Is Mandy—Nick, is she going to use this story?”
“Of course she is. Ellen Wiley is paying her, and it’s going to run in Slander Sheet. The whole story, beginning to end. Starting with the man you killed when you were sixteen. Are you going to deny it?”
“What if I did? You know how people are. They’ll always believe the accusation against the so-called great man. That’s what our society has come to. That’s our culture. I never intended anything bad to happen to that poor girl. I never—
never
—thought anyone would be killed. My reputation—my honor—is vitally important to me.”
“I understand. You know, Mandy didn’t realize it was you.”
“But it was only a matter of time before she found out.”
I nodded. On the drive, I’d thought about what I was going to say. I’d put most of it together, but not all.
Two months ago, Mandy had heard a rumor about how some grand poobah, some Washington insider, had killed a man decades ago, but the murder was covered up. It sounded like a story for Slander Sheet
,
but it could also have been nothing, a waste of time. She made some calls. Located the source, a long-retired policeman now dying in a nursing home.
But she never got the chance to talk to the old cop, because a far more exciting story had presented itself. A story about a Supreme Court justice and a call girl. The story was false, of course, but it was made to withstand normal fact-checking by any good journalist.
It was also designed to fall apart when a dedicated, high-powered investigator dug into it. The story was made to collapse, to discredit both the journalist and the website. That had been my role. To undermine the story.
So that no one would ever believe anything this journalist ever wrote again. Or anything that appeared on this website.
It had almost worked.
“So what happened, Gideon? One night you and Jeremiah Claflin put away a bottle of Old Overholt between you, and it comes out. Anacostia. This incident from all those years ago . . . ?”
He stared impassively. A pause. “WhistlePig.”
“Sorry?”
He spoke almost mechanically. “It wasn’t Old Overholt. That’s not my brand. The bottle in my office, that was a gift.”
“And a few years later, Claflin’s now the golden boy. He’s the one being put up for the top job. You’re not in the inner circle of consideration any longer. How’d that happen? Did Claflin whisper to one of the kingmakers that Gideon Parnell had a dark spot on his biographical X-ray?”
I waited. Gideon was silent for a long time. At last he said, his deep voice hushed, “I can’t be sure. I’ve always wondered.”
“And it ate at you, I’m sure. Which is why Claflin’s name had to be dragged through the shit before he was vindicated. In your campaign to bring down Slander Sheet. And you know, the thing is, Gideon—you’re probably too old to be named to the court. After all that.”
Gideon just looked wounded. I thought of what my father had said.
It’s always your friends who do you in
. Maybe that wasn’t about himself after all.
“Vogel had probably done investigations for the firm, right?”
Gideon nodded. But his mind was somewhere far away. “The evil that men do lives after them,” he said. “The good is oft interred with their bones.”
I’d heard that before. “If you mean killing your sister’s rapist, I think
people will understand why you did what you did. You did a bad thing for a good reason.”
“Do you know who Wilbur Mills was?”
“Yeah, vaguely. A congressman. A stripper named Fanne Foxe, the Tidal Basin, a sex scandal.”
“And all anyone remembers about him is the sex scandal that ended his career. Then there’s Clark Clifford.”
Wearily, I said, “The BCCI scandal.”
“John Edwards.”
“The mistress, the kid. The wife with cancer.”
“John Tower.”
“Uh, Texas senator with a drinking problem.”
“Yes. The list is long. All of them men who accomplished things. But how they’re remembered? For some small-time scandal.” He slid open a desk drawer and looked at whatever it contained. “A lifetime spent doing good works—to end up a figure of disgrace?” He drew out from the drawer a handgun, a nickel-plated revolver with a short barrel.
“You’re not thinking straight,” I said.
But he put the gun to his temple.
“Oh, for God’s sake, Gideon!”
He closed his eyes. “How this story ends—how my story ends?” he said. “It’s in your hands. And mine.”
“Don’t!” I jumped out of my seat and tried to grab his gun, but it was too late.
I saw everything as if in slow motion.
I saw the revolver, like a toy in his giant hand. Saw his manicured fingernails. Saw his index finger squeeze the trigger.
I saw the hammer pull back into the cocked position. Saw the fractional rotation of the cylinder as it lined up a new bullet.
Heard the metallic click. Saw the hammer slam forward, the firing pin striking the primer at the back of the bullet casing.
I saw the muzzle flash, the tongue of flame, and then the cloud of smoke as the gun recoiled.
Heard the explosion, so immensely loud yet not nearly loud enough for what it signified.
And I felt something moist and hot mist my face.