“
Washington Enquirer
,” he said as he snatched up the receiver. “This is David.”
“Yo,” a familiar voice said. “This is DeShawn. Have you got a few minutes?”
David rolled his eyes. DeShawn Lincoln was one of David’s bar buddies. He was also a disgruntled rookie in the Metropolitan Police Department, which made him a reliable source for the kind of salacious news that city editors publicly decried yet secretly loved because it sold a hell of a lot of newspapers.
“Hi, Deeshy,” David replied. “What’s up, man? I’ve always got a few minutes for you.”
The usual smile was missing from DeShawn’s voice. “What’s up is my bosses’ heads. Completely up their own asses.”
David’s Spidey-sense tingled. “Are you calling because I’m a friend, or because I’m a reporter?”
“Can I choose both?”
“Absolutely.” As he spoke, David donned his telephone headset and pushed the button to connect it. This way, David’s hands were free to type notes. “Does this mean you have a lead for me?”
“Lead, no,” DeShawn said. “Whole friggin’ story, yes. It’s not for the phone, though.”
“Ooh,” David said in his spooky voice. “Sounds scary.” DeShawn’s criticality sensor was dozens of degrees out of phase with David’s.
“It
is
scary, David.” Deeshy was rattled. David could hear it in his voice. “Do you want to meet with me or not?”
The elevated angst got his attention. He closed his e-mail screen to reduce distraction. “When and where?”
“You know where the merry-go-round is on the Mall?”
“Of course. And I believe they call it a carousel.” Located outside the original Smithsonian Castle, it was also known by locals as one of the most sublime ripoffs in Washington.
“Whatever. Meet me there at eight o’clock tonight.”
“Oh, Christ, Deeshy. It’s cold and windy, and that’s like the coldest and windiest spot in town.”
“Don’t be a pussy. See you there at eight?”
David groaned. The problem with DeShawn Lincoln was that he became a cop to break huge cases—the kind that only came up once or twice in a thirty-year career—or every week on network television. This was Deeshy’s fourth imagined career-maker in eight months. When his bosses pushed back, Deeshy turned to his newspaper pal for support. Even in as corrupt a town as DC, sometimes the smoke you thought was a fire was really a cigar that was really a cigar.
“Give me a hint,” David said. “You’re talking about pulling me out of a warm apartment when I could be devoting my evening to Internet porn. What’ve you got?”
DeShawn hesitated. David imagined that he was checking his surroundings to determine if he could speak freely. Finally, he said, “What I’ve got is what Washington’s best at: a cover-up.”
David’s neck hairs rose. “Of what?”
The answer came as a whisper. “Murder. I think the Secret Service is involved, and that means it goes to the very top.”
David felt blood drain from his head. “Say that again.”
“Did you hear about the shooting last night at the Wild Times?”
David prided himself at being a devoted reader of the newspaper that employed him. “Yeah. Secret Service was there. They lost a couple of people.”
“And what is the Secret Service doing in force at a bar in the middle of the night?”
“Was the first family there?”
Deeshy paused. “I’ll see you tonight.” The line went dead.
David laid the receiver in its cradle, but his hand stayed in place for a long time.
“Are you all right?” The question came from Becky Beckeman, a fellow graduate of Radford University’s journalism school, though she one year before he.
“I’m fine.”
“You just got bad news on the phone,” Becky pressed.
“No, really.”
Becky’s desk was directly opposite his, and when she stood, her untethered boobs swayed behind her blouse, threatening to drown out any sound she might make with her mouth. “Is it about the attack?” she asked. She was an earthy Birkenstock gal.
The directness and the accuracy of the question startled him until he realized that she was speaking of the East-West Airlines attack at O’Hare. One hundred seventy-three dead people.
David shook his head. “No, it has nothing to do with that.”
But did it? He hadn’t connected those particular dots, but if there was an unreported attempt on the first family’s life last night, just a week after the airline attack, couldn’t they be related?
“Kirk!” Charlie Baroli’s voice boomed like a cannon across the vast expanse of the newsroom. “You! My office! Two minutes ago!”
Eighty pounds overweight, with an alcoholic’s nose that looked like it might have been chewed by a dog, Baroli was certain to stroke out one day. David just prayed that he could be present when it happened.
David killed his monitor and pushed himself away from his workstation. As he stood, Becky gave him a look acknowledging the torture that lay in his future, and that she was on his side. Becky was always on David’s side. He knew about the crush she had on him—everyone within twenty feet knew about it whenever they saw her look his way—but she wasn’t his type. He preferred his women less . . . free-spirited. He’d tried not to encourage her. Except sometimes, when she had a tidbit of a source and wanted to get his attention with it. On those occasions, it maybe was possible that he gave her a mixed message. Or maybe a wrong message. Maybe.
David didn’t dawdle on his way to the city editor’s desk, but he didn’t hurry, either. If you internalized Baroli’s perpetual angst, you’d end up beating him to the grave.
Baroli’s office was little more than a cube with real walls, and was decorated in Early Ceiling Collapse. Think hoarder. Think roaches. Think Taco Bell wrappers that were older than David. Baroli had already closed the door before David could arrive.
The door thing was a power play, a requirement to knock. David gave three quick raps with the knuckle of his forefinger.
Baroli made eye contact through the glass panel that ran the length of the door and motioned him in with his middle finger. His way of flipping off employees while maintaining plausible deniability.
David opened the door. “You needed me, sir?” In his mind, it was treacly irony, but he had every confidence that Baroli would miss it.
“Come in and close the door.”
He did, in that moment thanking the Holy Things for the fact of the window and the witnesses it created. If the two guest chairs had not been stacked with meaningless crap, David might have sat down. As it was, he remained standing.
Baroli filled his seat with flesh to spare. He pushed himself away from his desk and simulated crossing his arms across his ample man-boobs. “You know that if it was up to me we never would have hired you, right?”
“I believe that you might have mentioned it, sir. Sixty or seventy times in the last fifteen months. Sir.”
“You’re here because your father is a major shareholder.”
“Again,” David said. “Seventy-one times now.” In reality, his father would have been more than delighted to see him crash and burn, but Baroli wouldn’t care. David was supposed to be in law school now, on his way to a Wall Street job that would add to the Kirk family’s billion-plus-dollar legacy. “But I disagree,” David said. “I like to think that I’m here because I’m a talented journalist.”
Baroli laughed. “A journalist,” he mocked. If he’d been tasting the words, they’d have been long on sulfur and garlic. “You’re so green you’re still wet.”
David waited for the rest. He was in fact new to his profession, but he was damn good at it. He met his deadlines and was ahead of the curve on developing sources. He sensed that the trouble he was in had nothing to do with his job skills.
“Grayson Cantrell was in my office about a half hour ago,” Baroli said. Grayson owned the choice stories from the city beat. “He told me that when he contacted Malcolm Sanderson to get a quote on the DC City Council’s decision to walk away from school vouchers, Councilman Sanderson told him that he’d already spoken to a reporter named Kirk. He was disinclined to repeat himself.”
David gave the smug smile that he knew pissed Baroli off. “I’ve known Mr. Sanderson my whole life,” he said. “Peter Sanderson, his son, and I were best friends from elementary school through high school.”
“How special for you,” Baroli said. “But that was not your story. That story belonged to Grayson Cantrell.”
“Grayson Cantrell is lazy.” The words were out before David could stop them. He was like that sometimes when it came to stating the truth.
Baroli recoiled. “Grayson Cantrell was working sources before you were a viable sperm.”
“Yet I didn’t make my call to Councilman Sanderson until eight hours after the announcement,” David said. “The story is up on my screen now, if you want to take a look at it.”
“I want you to delete it,” Baroli said. “I want you to concentrate on the job you were hired to do.”
“I’m doing the Sanderson story on my time. If you don’t want to print it, I can put it on my blog. Mr. Daniels told me that he reads my blog regularly. I’m just sayin’ . . .” Preston Daniels owned the
Washington Enquirer
, having inherited it from three previous generations of Danielses.
Somewhere below the layers of facial flesh, a muscle twitched in Baroli’s jaw. “You signed a noncompete,” he said.
David shrugged. “My words for you are work for hire. My words for me are mine to do with as I please. If it makes you feel better, I don’t pay myself very well.”
But his advertisers did.
Kirk Nation
, David’s blog, had just north of 172,000 subscribers now, and was viewed by well over a million people every day. He had influence peddlers lined up at the door to throw money at him in return for visibility on his masthead. David worked at the
Enquirer
for the 401(k) plan and the health insurance. And it didn’t hurt to pad your résumé with time served on one of the most read and most influential newspapers on the planet. He was in the Big Leagues.
Baroli would have made a shitty poker player. His eyes grew hot and his jowls trembled. A poster child for the old generation of editors who no longer understood the realities of their own jobs, he clearly couldn’t think of anything to say.
Baroli blurted, “Get out of my office.”
C
HAPTER
T
HREE
A
bout five miles into the drive, Jonathan began suspecting that he knew where they were headed. As they drove through Virginia’s Piedmont, the relentless farmland was spotted with shacks and mansions, all of this in the vicinity of George Washington’s birthplace on the banks of the Potomac River.
His suspicions were confirmed when Shrom directed Boxers to pilot the Batmobile through the open gate in the stone wall that defined Meadowlark Farms, a sprawling spread owned by a freelance spook named Griffin Horne, with whom Jonathan had worked a few times in the past.
Boxers shot his boss a knowing look in the rearview mirror, but he said nothing. If Irene Rivers was in fact here to meet them, she would not want her Fibbie minions to know that Jonathan and the Bureau used the same freelancers. That was especially true of the likes of Horne, whose allegiances had everything to do with good guys versus bad, and less than nothing to do with the alphabet soup that defined inside-the-Beltway rivalries. Jonathan had no doubt that Horne had worked for the FBI against the CIA or State, and then switched teams to work the other way around. Inside the government, where everyone claimed to be on the side of God and country, the border between good guys and bad guys was more of a blurry stripe than a fine line.
Boxers pulled to a stop just inside the gate. “Where to?” he asked. It was a bluff, of course. Horne conducted all of his business in the same place.
“To the barn,” Shrom said. “They said it would be easy to find.”
Easier for some than others
, Jonathan didn’t say.
Easily fifty feet wide and seventy-five feet long, Jonathan suspected the barn was visible from a low orbit. The last time Jonathan conducted business here, Horne had left the huge double doors open for them. This time, they not only were closed, but they were guarded by clones of Agent Kane.
“Well, shit,” Boxers said, noting the guards. “Now I’m all scared and stuff.”
“Stop the vehicle,” Jonathan ordered when they were still fifty yards from the barn. “Time for all government employees to walk.”
“What’s going on?” Kane asked, indignant. Jonathan was beginning to think that indignant was the only trick Kane knew.
Jonathan explained. “You’re getting out and walking ahead. You’re going to tell the gentlemen with the squiggles in their ears to open the big doors and step aside. Tell them to keep their hands neutral, and assure them that if I see anything that looks remotely threatening, I won’t hesitate to kill them.”
Kane objected, “Who do—”
“Don’t,” Jonathan interrupted. “I’ve got eggs in my refrigerator older than you. You want me, you play by my rules. None of this is negotiable.” He paused a few seconds, waiting for them to read the subtext. “Including the part where you get out of my truck.”
Shrom poked his protégé in the arm. “That’s our cue to leave.” He tried to open the door, but it was locked.
Jonathan saw Boxers’ eyes looking for confirmation, and then the Big Guy released the locks from the front seat. The FBI agents slid out, pushed the doors shut, and started walking toward their doppelgängers at the barn door.
With the locks reset, Boxers drilled Jonathan with a glare in the rearview mirror. “Does any of this feel right to you?”
“Nope.” And being at Horne’s place didn’t improve things. The fact that his loyalties shifted so easily with the source of the paycheck made it dangerous to be the last to arrive at the party.
“Worst case,” Jonathan said, “we back out through the doors and run over a few people getting out of Dodge.” The Batmobile was as heavily armored as any government limousine, capable of deflecting armor-piercing ammunition. Combined with run-flat tires and massively reinforced bumpers, there was no fear of getting caught in a kill zone.
As additional insurance, Jonathan lifted a patch of carpet at his feet and revealed a push-button keypad. He entered the code, lifted a hatch, and revealed a cache of weapons. He lifted two collapsed M4 assault rifles and four loaded thirty-round magazines of 5.56 millimeter ammunition. He loaded and chambered both, and then wended his way past the middle row of seats to place a rifle and mag on the passenger seat next to Boxers. He then settled into the seat previously occupied by Agent Shrom and laid the second rifle across his lap.
They waited until Shrom and Kane finished palavering with the guards and the barn doors were wide open before Boxers started moving. “What do you think?” the Big Guy asked. “Slow or fast?”
“Split the difference, but with attitude.”
Boxers brought the Batmobile up to about twenty-five miles an hour approaching the opening—fast enough to make the guards think twice about getting in the way, but not so fast as to overcommit to the unknown. It helped that they both knew what the barn looked like inside.
As soon as they crossed the threshold, Jonathan relaxed. The first face he saw belonged to Irene Rivers. She stood with two men who looked vaguely familiar, but whose faces he couldn’t quite place. Irene’s posture, with her weight shifted to one foot and her arms crossed, told him that she wasn’t surprised by the drama of his entrance, and her smirk told him that they had nothing to fear from this meeting. “Okay,” Jonathan said. “We’re cool.”
Boxers hit the brakes and they jerked to a stop. “Who are the suits?” Big Guy asked.
“Ask me in five minutes.”
“Isn’t the tall one a White House guy?”
Of the two men, one stood a head taller than the other. With slicked black hair, white shirt, and thin black tie, he looked like he stepped off the set of a lawyer TV show, and yes, his face did look like one that was frequently featured on the evening news.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said. “That’s Doug Winters.”
“White House chief of staff, right?”
Jonathan and Boxers exchanged grins. Yeah, this was going to be interesting.
“Leave the long guns in the truck?” Boxers asked.
Jonathan laughed. “Yeah, I think that’s probably best.”
They exited the vehicle together, and as they stepped down to the ground Irene started toward them. They met about halfway in the cavernous space. She extended her hand. “Leave it to Digger Grave to enter big,” she said.
Jonathan grasped her hand and covered the handshake with his left. He’d always liked Irene, even beyond what was necessary for their business relationship. Tall for a woman—he pegged her at five-ten—she clearly worked hard to stay in shape, and her strawberry hair was somehow always perfectly coiffed. She had a kind of perpetual smirk that told the world that it would be useless to ply her with bullshit. She’d worked her way through the ranks of the FBI the hard way, and still occasionally crashed a door or two just to keep her skills sharp. What was there not to love?
“It’s always a pleasure, Director Rivers.” Because of the other personalities in the room, he kept it formal.
She smiled and offered her hand to the Big Guy. “How are you, Boxers?”
He grumbled something that probably meant “Fine.” Ever conscious of his size, Boxers occasionally looked awkward when he shook hands with people—as if he were afraid he might hurt them accidentally. This was one of those times.
“Is that the White House chief of staff?” Jonathan asked quietly.
She winked. “Come on over. I’ll introduce you.”
The inside of Horne’s barn looked more like a movie set for a barn than a working one. An old baling machine sat in the corner along with a John Deere tractor that might have been new in the sixties. Lots of sharp implements hung from the walls, but the rust on the blades made Jonathan wonder if they’d ever been used. Sixteen-by-sixteen-inch columns supported the network of eight-inch beams, which in turn held up the thirty-foot ceiling. Typical of every time Jonathan had visited the place, the sheer volume of space seemed to absorb all the available light, bathing everything and everyone in perpetual dusk.
Jonathan and Boxers followed as Irene led the way to the pair of men, who made no move to step forward to meet them. Jonathan wondered if maybe Irene had instructed them to hang back, so as not to spook the newcomers.
Irene gestured with an open palm to the man Jonathan recognized. “Douglas Winters, meet Jonathan Grave of Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia.” To Jonathan, she added, “And as you guessed, Mr. Winters is the president’s chief of staff.”
Winters flashed a politician’s smile and extended his hand. “It’s a pleasure,” he said.
Jonathan hated politicians’ smiles. They rang too many warning bells. But there was no reason not to shake hands. He said nothing, though.
The smile faltered. “I’m getting the feeling that maybe you didn’t vote for my boss,” Winters said.
“I don’t remember who I voted for,” Jonathan said, refusing to rise to the bait. “Far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter. Been sent to war by both parties, been lied to by both.” On the spectrum of species that Jonathan admired, politicians occupied a spot significantly south of the sand flea.
“And to think you were never a diplomat,” Irene said. “This is Jonathan’s business partner, Boxers.”
Winters’ eyes flashed. “Boxer? More like mastiff, if you ask me. You’re a big fella.”
This time, Boxers looked less concerned about hurting the hand he shook, and the corners of Winters’ eyes twitched from the pressure. Boxers didn’t like to be teased.
Irene next gestured toward the shortest of the suits, the one whose distended jacket spoke of a holstered pistol. “And this is Director Ramsey Miller,” she said. “My counterpart at the United States Secret Service.”
Miller nodded instead of shaking, and that was fine with Jonathan.
“Quite the high-level meeting,” Jonathan said. “Secrecy, too. You’ve got my attention.”
“Have you paid attention to the news this morning, Mr. Graves?” Miller asked.
“It’s Grave,” Jonathan corrected. “No
S
. Get to it.”
Every clandestine meeting Jonathan had ever attended—and there’d been hundreds of them over the years—presented a kind of tarantella that required early posturing. Such meetings always involved strong personalities, and all of the players wanted to be in charge. Jonathan thought of it as dick-knocking, and in this case, since he was clearly the one with the skills that others wanted, he got to be the obnoxious one.
“The news reported a drive-by shooting last night,” Irene said, hijacking the narrative. “Six Secret Service agents were killed.”
Actually, that did ring a bell. “At a DC nightclub, right?”
“Exactly.”
Jonathan gave another nod to Miller. “I’m sorry for your loss, sir.” He meant it, too. Losing a member of your unit felt like losing a member of your family.
Miller said, “Thank you.”
Jonathan said, “Not to get ahead, but the fact that we’re here leads me to believe that maybe the media got a few details wrong?”
Miller deferred to Winters. “Well, they got it right insofar as they reported what we told them.”
“Uh-oh,” Boxers grumbled.
Winters continued. “The version of the story floated to the media has the agents dying on their own time during a random shooting. In reality, they were on duty, and protecting the First Lady.”
Boxers rumbled out a chuckle. “I
knew
this was going to be good.”
Jonathan said, “Was she stepping out again to someplace embarrassing?”
“She was kidnapped, Mr. Grave,” Winters said.
Jonathan’s jaw dropped. He didn’t surprise easily, but this one nailed him. He waited for the rest.
“That’s all we know,” Winters said. “Her entire detail was killed, and she was taken away.”
“By whom?” Jonathan asked.
“We don’t know.”
Jonathan looked to Irene. “How is that possible? She’s the First-freakin’-Lady. How does she get out of anyone’s sight?”
“The first step is to kill her security detail,” Miller said.
Okay, this was getting circular. “What do you want from us?” Boxers asked. “You’re the FBI.”
“We want to keep this incident low profile,” Winters said.
A laugh escaped from Jonathan’s throat before he could stop it. Irene put a hand on his arm to silence him.
“These are difficult times,” Winters said. “Our enemies feel more empowered than they have in years—”
And whose fault is that?
Jonathan didn’t ask.
“—financial markets are fragile. Americans’ confidence in their government is at an all-time low. If this news leaked out, the results could be devastating.”
“Shouldn’t it be devastating?” Jonathan asked. “I mean, agents are dead and the First Lady is being held hostage. That’s pretty damned hot stuff.”
“Of course it is,” Winters said. “We’re willing to move heaven and earth to clear this up. That’s why we’re turning to you, Mr. Grave.”
Boxers laughed. “You’re shitting me, right? What, you got more important things to take care of? The president too consumed with raising campaign money to devote time to this little detail?”
Winters shot a forefinger at Boxers’ nose. From the posture, he might have been pointing at a hole in the ceiling. “Watch yourself,” he snapped.
Boxers growled.
“Let it go, both of you,” Jonathan said. “Why us? You are, you know, the federal government. A few million folks in uniform and all that.”
“It’s a domestic matter,” Miller said. “The military is banned by law.”
“Jesus.” Jonathan turned to Irene. “And last time I checked, you have a few ambitious people working for you, too.”
Irene held up her hands. “Don’t think I haven’t offered.”
“We can’t risk it,” Winters said. “The news is just too big. To do what we have to do would require the involvement of courts and other law enforcement agencies. There’s no way the secret wouldn’t leak out.”
“And the secret is more important than Mrs. Darmond’s life?”