The Fix

by David Baldacci

  She cuffed him on the shoulder. “You know what I mean.”

  “I just don’t like to get caught up in other people’s lives like that.”

  “But getting caught up in other people’s lives is a really big part of most people’s lives, Decker.”

  “Not mine.”

  She sighed. “The meeting tonight puts things in a whole new perspective. I mean, if an attack on this country is planned, we need to solve this thing really soon.”

  Decker closed his eyes.

  She stared at him in disbelief. “Are you going to zone out on me? If so, I’ll just go to my room and go to sleep.”

  “Okay. Good night.”

  She pushed his legs out of the way, sat down next to him, and said, “Damn it, Decker, will you please talk to me?”

  He looked at her, clearly annoyed. “What do you want me to say, Alex?

  “Our country is going to be attacked. What are we going to do to stop it?”

  “I’m thinking about it. I am working on it. But I’m not a magician.”

  “But everyone thinks you are, me included. The things you can do. It’s amazing. You never fail.”

  “I actually fail lots of times. And I’m not a damn machine. So if you’re worried about the sky falling, don’t look to me to fix it.”

  He abruptly stood, grabbed his jacket, and headed out.

  “Decker, wait, I didn’t—”

  But he had already slammed the door behind him.

  He trotted down the stairs and out into the coolness of the night. And he started walking, each exhaled breath releasing tiny clouds into the sky.

  He was angry and he didn’t want to be. He knew that Jamison was actually complimenting him, voicing her complete confidence in his abilities. But he was feeling the pressure of preventing an attack. Even in his altered state where he didn’t “get” normal social cues, he clearly understood what was at stake.

  This was a long way from being a PI in a rust belt town back in Ohio, hustling for clients in all the wrong places.

  Not that long ago I was living in a cardboard box. And now I’m supposed to be the savior of the country? How effed up is that?

  He shoved his hands into his pockets, pointed his head down, and kept walking.

  He reached the river and stood and looked out over the expanse of water.

  It mirrored his thoughts: dark, murky, deep.

  He had to get traction on this case. Something to hang on to. There were so many moving parts, and just when he thought he had something, it fell apart, or was overtaken by a new development.

  Was that intentional? Are they trying to keep us reactive?

  He shut his eyes and let the frames roll through. It occurred to Decker that this process was like how the old-time animators would do their job, drawing slightly different versions of a character on multiple pieces of paper that you would then flip through to show motion.

  Well, he was hoping for some motion of the forward variety.

  He decided to begin at the beginning.

  One more time.

  And something had just occurred to him.

  It had to do with real estate.

  He made the phone call, and on the third ring Faye Thompson, Walter Dabney’s partner, picked up.

  “What is it?” she said when Decker identified himself.

  “I was just wondering about something.”

  “Look, I’m up to my ass in lawyers and federal investigators. I don’t have time—”

  “If you cooperate it will look better for you,” interjected Decker.

  He heard her sigh and then she said, “What do you want to know?”

  “When you joined the firm it was doing well?”

  “Yes. Very well.”

  “How about when Dabney first started out? Was he in the same office space you’re in now?”

  “Of course not. It was only him way back when. So he didn’t need that much space. And he couldn’t have afforded it anyway.”

  “Because he was building up his business.”

  “Yes. It takes a lot of work and hard times to build something like Walter did. He started out on a shoestring and slowly built from there. He maxed out his credit cards more than once, I heard. But he was hugely successful in the end.”

  “So money was tight?”

  “Well, if you have plenty of cash why would you max out your credit cards?” she said snidely.

  “Right. I understand that he had a yellow Porsche when he still worked at NSA?”

  “I know nothing about that. Are we done here?” she added.

  “I had one more question about his house—”

  But Thompson had already hung up on him.

  Next, Decker used his phone not to make a call but to order an Uber. Jamison had set an account up on his phone a few weeks ago. Five minutes later he was heading to Virginia.

  It seemed chillier on this side of the Potomac as the car pulled up the stately drive. The car stopped in front of the house and Decker got out.

  His knock was answered by Samantha. She looked like she had been crying.

  “What do you want?” she said in an unfriendly tone.

  “Is your mother here?”

  “She’s in bed. Can’t you leave us alone?”

  “I wish I could,” said Decker. “But I can’t. Can I come in?”

  “Why?”

  “Please?”

  She stepped to the side and allowed him to pass. She closed the door and stared up at him. “Well?”

  “So you all have lived here since you were little?”

  “Yes.”

  “In this house?”

  “Yes!”

  Jules came out of another room and saw Decker. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Just asking a few questions.”

  “What does our living in this house when we were little have to do with a damn thing?” said Samantha.

  “I’m not sure at this point. So your parents have lived here for what, thirty-five years?”

  Jules said, “About that, I guess. I’m thirty-seven and it’s the only place I remember.”

  “I saw some family photo albums in the library. Do you mind if I look through them?”

  “Why?” said Jules.

  “Because this case has taken on a heightened sense of urgency. We have reason to believe that unless we solve it, something bad is going to happen in this country.”

  Jules and Samantha exchanged glances. Jules said, “You’re bullshitting us.”

  Decker stared back at her. “I really wish I were.”

  She looked taken aback by his words. “Look, if you want to pore through old photo albums, knock yourself out.”

  Leaving Samantha in the hall, Jules led him to the library, pulled the albums off the shelf, and set them down on the coffee table. When she started to leave, Decker said, “Do you mind sitting here with me to answer questions I might have?”

  Jules sighed resignedly but sat next to him as he picked up the first one.

  The albums were arranged chronologically, so Decker was able to get where he wanted to go relatively quickly.

  “These are your grandparents?” he said, pointing to several old photos.

  Jules nodded and pointed. “My dad’s mom and dad. They’re dead now. They were from Princeton, New Jersey. We used to go and visit them. He was a professor of political science there.”

  “Impressive. They look like they were pretty well-off.”

  “No. They lived in a house provided by the university. I know my dad helped them out financially when they got older.”

  He pointed to another photo. “And these folks.”

  “My mom’s parents. They lived in Oregon.”

  “Did you visit them out there?”

  “No. I never knew them. They had a small farm. They died in a mudslide when my mom was little. It swept the entire property away, the house, barn, everything. Her parents’ bodies were never found. She was at school or she would have
been killed too. After that she went to an orphanage. Then came east when she was an adult.”

  “How did your parents meet?”

  Jules’s features softened. “It was sort of romantic, actually. My dad was working in Maryland, right out of college. My mom worked as a waitress at a café near there. She was putting herself through college. Some of the people at Dad’s work would go there for breakfast and lunch. She would wait on him and they struck up a friendship. Mom was a knockout back then and I’m pretty sure she had plenty of suitors. When she got off work one night he was waiting in the parking lot with flowers and tickets to a play at the National Theater. Needless to say, they hit it off. The rest is history.”

  “Very nice. So your mom didn’t come from money?”

  “From money? No, not that I know of. Why?”

  “Just something somebody said. It’s not important.”

  He closed the album.

  “Anything else?” asked Jules.

  “Have you heard from Natalie?”

  Jules nodded. “She sounded okay. She said she was so sorry for everything.”

  “And what did you say to that?”

  Jules shrugged. “I hate what she did. I mean, it totally destroyed our family. But she’s still my sister.”

  “I get that. Family is family.”

  He rose.

  She said, “Have you found who killed Cissy?”

  “Not yet. Still working on it.”

  “I don’t understand any of this, I really don’t.”

  “Well, you wouldn’t be alone on that.”

  Decker left the house, then turned around to look at its exterior.

  He should have seen this before, he knew. He had two possible conclusions. Now he just had to see which one was right.

  CHAPTER

  66

  “EIGHT HUNDRED and forty-nine thousand dollars,” said Milligan. “They closed on the property a little over thirty-five years ago. Tax tables show it’s worth probably four times that now, and even more on the open market. Wish I had that kind of asset in my retirement future.”

  Decker looked over his shoulder. They were in Milligan’s office at the WFO.

  Decker had returned home the previous night and apologized to Jamison for walking out. She had, in turn, apologized to him for her comments.

  “We’re all under a lot of pressure,” she’d said. “But you probably more than anybody else. I didn’t mean to add to your burden.”

  And they had left it at that.

  Decker looked at the computer screen and said, “Thirty-five years ago. Couple years after Jules was born.”

  “Right.”

  “And Dabney was still working at the NSA?”

  “Right. He’d been there about four years by then, started right out of college. He left to start his own firm six years later.”

  “Do we know what his salary was at NSA?”

  “Ballpark, yes, and to jump to answering your obvious next question, it could not have supported the purchase of that house. So at age twenty-six he bought a mansion. Definitely should have been a red flag for someone.”

  “Do we know if they paid cash or took on debt?”

  “That’s the rub. The documents I found showed that they put four hundred thousand down and financed the rest. His wife had a job back then too. She worked at a real estate firm as a Realtor.”

  “Could her income have covered it?”

  “Not all of it, no. Not even combined with his. But where did the four-hundred-thousand-dollar down payment come from? You would think the NSA would have asked the same question.”

  “Maybe they did, and it was satisfactorily answered,” replied Decker.

  “Maybe,” said Milligan. “And we can try to ask them, but my experience is you don’t get fast answers from those guys, if you get answers at all. Bogart’s been trying to get them to respond to questions about Dabney, and so far all he’s gotten back is silence.” He looked at Decker. “What made you think about all this?”

  “Big, expensive house purchased by a young couple without a lot of money. Pretty basic.”

  “I guess we should have seen that too. But it’s all perspective, I suppose. Dabney was super-successful over the years and his house just sort of fit the picture of that success. I didn’t think about the timing of the purchase all those years ago.”

  “Cecilia Randall also told me that Dabney bought a yellow Porsche around the same time as they closed on the house. And she said that she thought Mrs. Dabney came from money, the way she dressed and conducted herself. Now, Jules did tell me that Ellie’s parents were killed in a mudslide and she was sent to an orphanage. Maybe she got compensation from that. But if that were the case, why would you be working as a waitress to put yourself through college?”

  “You wouldn’t,” replied Milligan.

  “So if we can find out the source of the money maybe we can figure out what happened all these years later.”

  “You think they’re connected?”

  “I think they have to be.”

  “Dabney was at NSA. He certainly would have had access to classified material. And then he starts his own firm. I know we were speculating that he only recently committed espionage to help Natalie. But do you think he might have been spying all these years?”

  “Hard to say. He might have worked with Berkshire over three decades ago and then quit spying for some reason. And somehow turned back to her all these years later to sell the secrets and get the payoff to help his daughter. That might solve the question of why we could show no connection between them. We didn’t look back three decades.”

  “I think you might be on the right track, Decker.”

  “On the other hand, Dabney couldn’t have killed Cecilia Randall. He was already dead.”

  “We don’t know for sure that her murder is connected. It might just be a random killing.”

  Decker shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “If he has been a spy all this time, it’s not going to be easy for his family to learn this, not after everything else they’ve been through.”