Mason persisted. He wanted his meeting with the president. “We need to at least give people the feeling that mature heads are working together to solve the problem. Let’s just meet. One-on-one. Air it all out and get back to work.”
“Lew, once I get done pulling out the knife you stuck in my back, maybe I’ll meet with you. Until then, I’m not interested.”
Mason changed tactics and decided to appeal to President Murray’s sense of patriotism. “Mr. President, remember your speech? Remember how you said we owed it to our children to solve this problem? Forget what you think of me. I’m here and ready to solve the problem for them.”
President Murray hesitated.
Good. I’ve hooked him. Now reel him in.
“I’ve got Andrea Gartner in the Oval with me,” said President Murray. “Hang on.”
President Murray put the phone down. But he forgot to press mute. Or maybe the old phone didn’t have a mute button. Whatever it was, Mason could hear everything.
“It’s Lewis Mason,” the president said. “He wants to meet. I’d rather leap into a pile of manure.”
“Maybe you should do it,” said Andrea. “I know Mason’s a turd, but Appropriations is Appropriations. We’ve got to work with him to solve the debt crisis, whether we like it or not.”
Mason smiled. Andrea was doing his work for him.
“I don’t trust that lying sack of shit for a second,” said the president.
“Me neither, but we can’t solve the debt crisis without him,” she said. “You know that. It’s no worse than when you sent me to go beg for war funds from him.”
Thank you, Andrea, Mason thought. I couldn’t have made a better argument.
After a long pause, President Murray said, “All right. If you think it’s worth trying, I’ll meet with the bastard.”
The phone jostled, and the president returned to the call. “Lew, I talked to Andrea, and she’s convinced me to meet. Which is remarkable, considering what you did to her and to me. But I swear, you stab me in the back again, and I will make it my mission in life to destroy you.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.” Mason grinned. “I’ll do everything I can to make sure you don’t walk out of the meeting disappointed.”
“Where do you want to meet?”
“I’d be happy to host the meeting,” Mason said. “I still have some furniture in my office, and I saw the Oval Office was pretty well ransacked.” Now that President Murray had agreed to the meeting, Mason couldn’t resist twisting the knife further.
“Fuck you, Lew. You’re not the only member of the Appropriations Committee. I’m sure I could find someone who’s less of an asshole to deal with.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President, I didn’t mean to insult you,” said Mason disingenuously. “Trust me, I really do want to solve this problem.”
“Ha. Trust you?” President Murray laughed. “No fucking way. But we can meet in your office. You’re in Longworth, right?”
“Yes, I am. Office 4946. There’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’d like to meet one-on-one. No Andrea Gartner, no other Debt Rebel Gang members, just you and me, if that’s okay.”
“Fine. Whatever,” the president said, annoyed.
Mason smiled. He was on his way to decapitating Denali.
Twenty-four hours ago, Chinese cargo trucks had loaded up their booty from the White House. Now the halls and rooms were empty, stripped of their contents and shorn of their grandeur. The solid red, blue, and green of each room’s wallpaper, uninterrupted by the colors of paintings, curtains, and furniture, was blinding.
Andrea was in the Oval Office preparing some notes with President Murray for the meeting with Mason when she felt her cell phone vibrate.
“Pls call me ASAP emergency,” the message read. It was from Rachel.
“Mr. President, could we pause for a moment? I need to call Rachel. She says it’s urgent.”
“Not now, Andrea,” Murray replied. “The car to take me up to the Hill should be here any minute. We need to get these notes done.”
“Understood, sir.”
Andrea continued typing talking points on her laptop. Her cell phone was vibrating non-stop. Rachel had texted four messages. She ignored it.
“This look good?” she asked Murray, turning her laptop screen to him.
“Perfect,” Murray replied. “I imagine I’ll go off-script at some point. It always happens.”
“You’ll do fine, you always do,” Andrea said to give him a little confidence before leaving. She emailed the talking points to Murray.
White House staff pulled up two sedans to take President Murray up to Mason’s office on the Hill. The seventeen-car motorcade convoy was no more. The Chinese had taken the limousines.
“Good luck, Mr. President,” Andrea said as President Murray climbed into the back of the waiting car. He nodded, smiled, and closed the door.
Andrea watched the president’s car drive off until it disappeared along Pennsylvania Avenue. She then turned her phone on and finally reviewed Rachel’s texts as she hurried back to her office. They were progressively more urgent:
I need to speak with you!
Call me now!
WHERE ARE YOU?????
When she reached her office, Andrea was surprised to find it untouched. The Chinese apparently spared it in their White House looting.
Andrea called Rachel. “I got your texts. What is going on?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“Why?”
“You aren’t going to believe what I have to tell you. This is some deadly serious stuff.”
Andrea dropped into her office chair and stared at the West Wing outside her window. “All right, I’m sitting.” She could practically feel the adrenaline secreting into her bloodstream, delivering a confounding mixture of dread and excitement. “FBI called me this morning. They brought in some experimental facial recognition technology from MIT, and they think they’ve finally solved the Pripyat Consortium mystery. Pull up a picture of that Pripyat Consortium guy.”
Andrea opened her laptop and pulled up the Pripyat Consortium press conference online.
“Okay, I have him on my screen now.”
“Take a good look at him. You said he looked familiar, right?”
“Yes.”
“The FBI thinks his name is Pyotr Dzerzhin Mesorovsky.”
Andrea frowned. “Who the hell is that? Should I know?”
“He has a brother,” said Rachel.
“Get to the point already!” Andrea bellowed.
“His brother’s name is Lavrenti Mesorovsky and he lives in the United States.”
Andrea went through her mental Rolodex without success. “I’ve never heard of anyone named Lavrenti Mesorovsky.”
“That’s because he Anglicized his name.”
“To what?”
“Lewis Mason.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. Lewis Mason.”
“The Lewis Mason?”
“Look at Zegna Suit, the Pripyat spokesman, and then look at a picture of Mason.”
Andrea quickly typed into the search engine and pulled up some pictures of the House Appropriations Committee chairman.
Lord almighty.
Andrea knew Zegna Suit looked like someone familiar to her, and now she knew why.
Lewis Mason.
The resemblance was uncanny. The same thick build. The same short arms and stocky legs. The same vaguely Russian features—the narrow eyes, the bulbous nose. Zegna Suit wore a beard, probably to conceal his identity.
Rachel finally dropped the bomb. “Zegna Suit is Mason’s brother.”
“You mean—”
“Mason’s a Russki.”
“What about that whole story he loves to tell? The farm in Kansas? The foreclosure? The apartment with all the rats in Kansas City?”
“That part of his story is true. But here’s what he doesn’t tell people.
He didn’t leave Russia because he was an orphan. His father worked for the Soviet government. The FBI thinks there’s a good chance the Russians planted him here in the United States decades ago and planned to activate him as an agent when he became an adult. They probably put him in a situation where he was sure to grow to hate the United States.”
Andrea’s mind flooded with thoughts too quickly to process. Was this a dream? Lewis Mason? A Russian spy? Sure, he was an unmitigated jackass, but never in a million years would she have ever thought he was a Russian spy. The guy made his political living trashing people who he thought weren’t conservative enough, excommunicating them from the Republican Party for their sins. How could Mr. Debt Rebel Gang, Mr. Chief RINO Hunter, be a Russian operative?
Yet at some level, she knew it was true. All these unexplained events—Mason’s attempts to kill the emergency budget, his double-cross that ended the war with China, his lack of concern for Taiwan—were starting to make sense.
“Andrea, you there?” Rachel said, concern in her voice.
“You have to be kidding me,” Andrea whispered.
“The FBI thinks it’s all true. It’s a classic deep-cover spy story. And it gets worse. Mesorovsky’s middle name is Dzerzhin.”
“So what?”
“Dzerzhin is a shortened form of Dzerzhinsky. It turns out that Zegna Suit and Lewis Mason are the great-grandsons of Felix Dzerzhinsky.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“The founder of what became the KGB.”
Andrea couldn’t believe her ears. “The KGB?”
“Yes, the KGB.”
Andrea could feel the blood draining from her face. She thought she must look white as a ghost. The KGB, the old Soviet Union’s state security and intelligence agency.
“Jesus, Rachel, Mason called a few hours ago and asked the president to meet with him to discuss the budget. Murray didn’t want to do it, but I convinced him. The president is heading over to Mason’s office as we speak.”
“You have to stop that meeting and get the president the hell out of there. Radio the Secret Service. Call the Capitol Police. Get someone to pull the fire alarm. Anything. Just get the president the hell out of there!” Rachel sounded frantic.
Andrea hung up and immediately called the Secret Service using a special number programmed into her cell phone. “This is OMB Director Andrea Gartner. You need to put me through to the president now. It’s an emergency.”
“Slow down,” the operator said. “I need you to follow the protocol. Can you give me your Cabinet code?” Every Cabinet member had a special code to confirm their identity.
“This is Andrea Gartner. Emergency code 755220.”
“Okay, let me just confirm your code—”
“We don’t have time to confirm my code!” Andrea shouted. “The president is meeting with Lewis Mason. He needs to get out of there now. Do you understand?”
“Ms. Gartner, the president has his security detail. Whatever it is, they can handle it. I’ll radio them to let them know,” the Secret Service agent said, annoyance in his voice. “I’ll let them assess the situation.”
“But Lewis Mason is—”
A dial tone interrupted her. The Secret Service agent had hung up.
Andrea slammed the phone down. There was a good chance the president was in mortal danger and she hadn’t told them about it soon enough.
There was only one thing left she could do. She raced out to her car to try to save President Murray herself.
Every muscle in Andrea’s body was taut as a piano wire. She was the only thing standing in the way of President Murray walking into Mason’s office a sitting duck.
As she pulled her car out of the White House complex onto Washington’s crowded streets, she thought of those Seventies’ cop show reruns she watched when she was home sick from school. The ones where Detective Hunter would pull out a police dome light, slap it on his car, and zoom toward the crime scene. What she wouldn’t do to have that awesome power right at this moment. Without police lights, Andrea waited at every red light along Pennsylvania Avenue. She thought about running the lights but was afraid of the cross traffic.
She wondered if she should have found a Secret Service agent willing to drive her up to Capitol Hill. But she’d already struck out calling the Secret Service. Plus, she’d have to find a Secret Service agent with a car. Most of the Secret Service had been laid off, and most of its motor pool was on a ship bound for China. She’d make it to the Hill faster on her own.
Her left foot twitched impatiently at the red light at Fifteenth Street as she waited to turn left onto Pennsylvania Avenue. “There are two streets here!” she screamed helplessly at the traffic light, stuck on red. That was when she saw the black Forester again.
It was two cars behind her, but it was unmistakable. Andrea stared into her rearview mirror and could just barely make out the driver. That same pale, almost pasty complexion, the full, bearded cheeks, the balding head, and the suit. Mason’s brother. The Pripyat spokesman in the Zegna suit. The man she now knew as Pyotr Dzerzhin Mesorovsky.
Terror gripped her. She turned her radio off to remove any distractions. She needed to be sharp.
The light turned green. Andrea made the left turn onto Pennsylvania Avenue and looked again in her rearview mirror in time to see the Forester making the same left turn. Behind the Forester she saw an ambulance.
When she reached Twelfth Street, she turned left. Two cars behind her, the Forester made the left turn without signaling. Andrea drove past the Hotel Harrington and up to the intersection of Twelfth and F Street. This time, a right turn toward Capital One Arena. Sure enough, the Forester made the right turn, still two cars behind her.
Now Andrea slowed down, just like she’d seen in the movies, and waited for the light at Eleventh Street to turn yellow. The crosswalk signal counted down to red. Six . . . five . . . four . . . When the crosswalk timer reached three, Andrea roared across the intersection, leaving the Forester stuck behind the car between them, which had stopped at the light.
Lost him.
At the next block she turned down Tenth Street to get back to Pennsylvania Avenue and resume her race to the Hill. To her left was Ford’s Theatre, the site of President Lincoln’s assassination. The feeling of doom crept over Andrea again. She wasn’t superstitious, but driving past the site of the first presidential assassination as she raced to prevent what might possibly be another assassination jangled her nerves. She stepped harder on the gas.
At Tenth and Pennsylvania, she made a left turn and was back to impatiently waiting at red lights to go the remaining ten blocks to Capitol Hill. She ignored her rearview mirror, focusing instead on the traffic ahead of her. Who was slow, who was fast, who could she get around? She looked for beat-up old cars and out-of-state plates, the slowpokes she’d need to get past, and plotted her path around them like a NASCAR driver.
Stopped at yet another red light on Sixth Street near the National Archives, Andrea glanced into her rearview and shook in fright.
There was the black Forester, looming like a monster she couldn’t kill. It was right behind her now; she didn’t even have the protection of a car or two between them. Had he seen her turn back to Pennsylvania Avenue? Was he tracking her with some GPS device?
Her left leg twitched faster.
Should I make a run for it? Should I drive to a police station? Should I try to call the Secret Service again?
Her brain was overloaded with options. She couldn’t finish a thought before it was overtaken by another.
In a panic, Andrea whipped her head left and right, looking for oncoming traffic, and then floored her Camry to try to get through the light and leave the black Forester behind. Her tires squealed. Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw motion. A red blur. Then an explosion.
The Camry spun wildly as shards of glass exploded across her face and arms. Andrea screamed as the left side of her head collided with the beam separating the front and back driver-
side doors. She could no longer make out shapes; all she could see were blurred colors, a rainbow of reds and blues and greens passing before her eyes.
Another loud bang and the spinning stopped as abruptly as it had started. Another shower of glass flew past her face, this time from her right. Her head jerked wildly to the right, her body twisting against the resistance of the seat belt.
Then all motion stopped, the sounds of exploding glass and collapsing metal replaced by silence. Her left temple throbbed and warm liquid trickled down her face and onto her neck.
She opened her eyes just enough to confirm she was alive and stared forward, dazed. The sunlight seemed brighter, almost blinding. Light entered her eyes but no images registered in her mind, as if the light was passing through her without stopping. Looking down, she could make out lacerations, bright red with blood, crisscrossing her forearms. When she moved her feet, she felt layers of broken glass shards beneath her shoes.
Just as she began slipping into unconsciousness, the sound of a siren pierced her ears.
Paramedics? Police? How could they have gotten here so quickly?
A red light flashed, illuminating the interior of her destroyed car.
It must be an ambulance.
She heard voices at the car door. They weren’t speaking English; it sounded like Russian. The car shook as the people outside tugged at its door. With a pop and the squeal of creaking metal, the door swung open. Shards of glass fell from the window onto her left arm.
“Dermo!” shouted a man she still could not see. Andrea was no expert on languages, but she recognized the Russian accent. “If she’s dead, so am I. Xu Li will see to that,” said the invisible stranger.
Andrea’s lightheadedness, bordering on delirium, gave the encounter an unreal, dream-like feel. She didn’t know who was talking—there were two voices—and couldn’t follow the conversation at all.
A large weight pressed her into her seat. The smell of an unbathed man mixed with gasoline filled the air. She could make out a round, bearded face and a bulbous nose. He was wearing a necktie and the glare of sunlight shone off his business suit.
It was the driver of the Forester. Zegna Suit. Pyotr Dzerzhin Mesorovsky, Lewis Mason’s brother.
Debt Bomb Page 27