The Good Lie

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “Do you think he’d make a good president?” Rena asks.

  “I think he’s a paradigm shifter. And we need to try something. Because the paradigm we’ve got isn’t working.”

  Rena is quiet.

  “Peter, if we say no to him because we never get involved in elections, who are we fooling? What are we doing for Nash right now? Don’t you think Oosay will influence the next election?”

  But Rena has no answer for her.

  Eighteen

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 26

  SAN FRANCISCO

  Brooks spends the night in Seattle and flies to Washington the next morning. Rena takes the late flight from Seattle to San Francisco to see Victoria Madison and grab what remains of their Christmas plans, interrupted by the deaths in Oosay and the summons from the president.

  At the arrivals curb at the San Francisco airport, a Porsche Boxster pulls up next to Rena. The car window eases down and a woman with a freckled upturned nose and sun-streaked hair leans over from the driver’s seat.

  “My Christmas present to myself,” Vic says. “I finally decided it was insensible to drive a sensible car in California because you’re in it too much for it to be dull.”

  “You get wiser and wiser,” Rena says.

  He drops his bag in the tiny trunk and slides in beside her. He is reminded all over again of his first impression of Vic—a girl on a Beach Boys album all grown up. She smiles and leans to him. Her smoke-gray eyes, flecked with gold at the irises, do not close until the last second before they kiss.

  “Hi,” she breathes. “Merry Christmas.”

  Rena feels a wave of peace wash over him, at least for a moment.

  “Hi.”

  A longer kiss, grateful and reacquainting.

  If he is honest with himself, he is a little apprehensive about this visit. His and Vic’s lives fit into each other at long distance. Vic is his refuge from D.C., his faraway life, almost a dream. They talk or text most days and sometimes have long calls at night—which can be very late in Washington.

  Rena wonders how long this state of easy grace can last. At what point will Vic say they have to move further along or stop? She is about to turn thirty-seven, four and a half years younger than he, and, like Rena, she has already been divorced once. He hasn’t asked if she wants to become a mother, and Vic hasn’t brought it up. That conversation means talking about something else. His own marriage ended after a series of miscarriages and his emotional distance. Does he want to try to have children with Vic Madison? Where would they live? How would their lives blend together in the same place? In which place? In some ways, they hadn’t spent enough time with each other to know the answers. In other ways, how much time do you need to spend? What does it imply that he is not eager to have this conversation?

  Vic is an attorney in California, unconnected from politics, living in the world of technology and law and the outdoors. He, by contrast, lives in a city built as political compromise between the southern and northern states, a compromise that has never really settled.

  They head south down the Bayshore Freeway toward Vic’s house in Palo Alto, and Rena talks, but only carefully, about the assignment that has interrupted their Christmas vacation.

  She’d read the Tribune’s exposé, Vic says, and the accusations afterward that the administration might be involved in a cover-up.

  Out the window they pass a lighted life-size replica of Mr. Peanut in his monocle and spats standing atop a small factory building.

  “How could anyone seriously think this is anything more than just a tragic accident?” Vic says. “Terrorists killed these men. Not the administration. Why does everything have to be turned into something you can use to your political advantage?”

  Of course she is right, Rena thinks. Vic had been an important and calming influence during the sometimes surreal political theater that enveloped her father’s confirmation fight. She was the one person to whom the prickly judge would always listen, and Rena and Brooks never would have understood Roland Madison without her. Now, for Rena, she often provided a sane counterbalance to the hothouse atmosphere of the events in his life.

  But in Washington no one thinks twice about James Nash being blamed for Oosay. Everyone expects it—that whatever happens in D.C., the calculus will quickly turn to how different factions can exploit it, or be hurt by it. Even foreign attacks by terrorists. Being surprised by that, or unprepared, only makes one vulnerable. Lamentation is a luxury no one can afford.

  It’s taken Vic only ten minutes to remind him how people outside the city might see that as perverse.

  When Vic was hurt by the killer who was stalking her father, Rena blamed himself for not anticipating the threat sooner and protecting her. As their feelings for each other deepened, Rena worried Vic would suspect that his feelings for her were mixed with that guilt, and such suspicions would scuttle their relationship, the first of any consequence for him since his divorce.

  He’d confronted her with this fear, a rare instance of his articulating his feelings, particularly with women. But he can’t seem to bring himself to raise the subject of where their relationship is headed now. Especially, he tells himself, in the middle of another crisis.

  Vic lives on a hidden street near the Professorville section of Palo Alto, not far from Stanford University. The street is called Community Lane. A hundred years ago, the land had been part of a compound for a utopian boys’ school. The boys lived in cabins, as did the teachers. Vic had bought one of the old cabins and rebuilt it into a Frank Lloyd Wright–influenced two-bedroom house with floor-to-ceiling windows that opened to a rock and water garden on all sides. She had spent time in Bali, and she re-created that environment in the garden. All of it, the house, its rock, fern, and water gardens, all hidden by a tall wall from the houses around it, made Vic’s home feel like a sanctuary.

  Inside the house, Vic takes Rena’s hand, pulls him gently toward the bedroom. “I made a bet with myself regarding something.”

  “Will I be let in on it?”

  “You might say that,” she says, closing the bedroom door behind them.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Vic tells Rena she is taking him to a place for lunch called Duarte’s Tavern. “It’s over the hill on the ocean side in a little town called Pescadero. And then I have a surprise for you. A Christmas present.”

  Pescadero turns out to be a small ocean town halfway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz. It has two street lights and a one-block main street. In the center is a plain-looking barn-red storefront with an L-shaped neon sign announcing DUARTE’S TAVERN and a smaller one underneath that spells out LIQUOR. Inside are two rooms with tables and a grand old wooden bar. Photos of the Pacific coast going back one hundred years hang on the walls. The owner, Ron Duarte, lives upstairs, Vic says. His grandfather, a Portuguese fisherman, started the place. “The three things to get here are the fried oysters, cream of artichoke soup, and pie.”

  The weather is cool but sunny, something close to what it would feel like in early spring in Washington, though it is two days after Christmas.

  She eats delicately, a tiny spoonful of soup at a time, and as she tilts her head her bangs dangle into her eyes.

  “The best artichoke soup ever, right?”

  “I’ve never had artichoke soup before.”

  “Then that’s a yes.”

  He has missed her.

  “What was this man like, the one you visited in Seattle—this Russell, or Rousseau?” she asks.

  Rena pauses over this. There are things he cannot tell her—indeed he can tell her almost nothing. But he knows he also can’t fly out to visit her and then say he can’t discuss anything about his life.

  “He’s haunted.”

  “By what?”

  What can he say to her?

  “I think serving his country over this whole period we’ve gone through, fighting terror and making the mistakes we’ve made, it’s scarred him. The job is too big. We’re not throwing enough of the countr
y into it. We borrow the money to fight, and ask most people for no sacrifice; the war only divides us.”

  This is ground they have covered before. Rena thinks U.S. citizenship comes at too low a price. He believes the country should require two years of universal service of everyone at age eighteen, male and female, in some form of civilian or military work. Among other virtues, it might be the only time people of different cultures and classes will ever mix anymore in America. Vic has made counterarguments for which Rena has no good answers. Compulsory service hasn’t unified Israel, has it? she says. Why would it work here?

  She is watching him now, and Rena wonders if she, too, is thinking about how different their lives are, she the liberal from California and he the soldier, even if he was no longer welcome in uniform.

  “You should move here,” she says suddenly.

  Rena takes her hand.

  What would he do out here? Security consulting for technology companies run by people who just turned thirty?

  “Would you consider it?”

  Washington is a disaster, but it’s what Rena knows. And though he and Randi make most of their money working for corporations, not politicians or public interest groups, they know the commercial work mostly pays the bills so they can afford clients engaged in public affairs.

  “Yes, I would consider it. Would you consider Washington?”

  “I would,” she says, but Rena can see doubt behind her smile.

  They are reaching that point, he knows, that neither of them is entirely ready to confront.

  They finish and pay. They have another stop to make, Vic says. She has a surprise for him.

  They drive north to Half Moon Bay, a much larger town up the coast that is beginning to get discovered by city people. The old part of the town, away from the highway, still has fishing boats and an old main street and coastal charm. Vic pulls her new Porsche into a space in front of an old Victorian house.

  The sign out front says TABBY’S PLACE and has a picture of a cat on it.

  “My friend runs this,” Vic says. “He made one hundred million dollars in a start-up before he was forty. When he cashed out, he decided he wanted to create a place to rescue cats.”

  It is like a luxury hotel inside. The cats live in suites. There are enormous parklike common spaces, with runs and hiding places and climbing structures. Scores of cats lounge about and play. Rena thinks of an all-inclusive resort he stayed at once in Mexico—Cabo San Lucas for cats.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “You’ll see.”

  They stop in front of one of the cat suites. Sprawled inside, looking out, is a large charcoal-gray cat with dense short fur. It has startlingly bright golden eyes, an upturned Myrna Loy nose, and an enormous triple chin. The cat, Rena thinks, bears an uncanny resemblance to Winston Churchill.

  “He’s a British shorthair,” Vic announces. “They’re very affectionate. And I’ve already made a large donation for him in your name.”

  “I live in D.C.”

  “I also bought you a carrier. So he can fly home with you. Only rule is they live indoors. I signed papers promising.”

  Rena looks at Vic with an expression that in an interrogation room had frightened suspects into confessing to crimes that put them behind bars for years.

  She seems immune to the look.

  “He will be your buddy, this little man,” she says gaily.

  She opens the door to the suite, picks up the cat, and hands him to Rena. The cat puts an arm on each side of his neck as if hugging him.

  “It’ll be good to have someone who appreciates you when you come home at night. He can keep you company in your den while you read.”

  Rena and the cat stare at each other.

  “By the time we get back to my place in Palo Alto, I expect you to have given him a name.”

  Rena looks pleadingly at Vic.

  “Look, pal, do I have to tell you the obvious?” she says. “Let’s just say you might have commitment issues. Your mother abandoned you. Your dad died on you. Your wife divorced you. We need to work on this. We’re gonna start with a cat.”

  Rena experiences the unfamiliar sensation of powerlessness—and the even more unfamiliar feeling of giving in to it.

  AS THEY WALK OUTSIDE, Rena holding the cat in its carrier, he notices a black Ford Focus down the street. Two men sit inside.

  He has seen the car before, he thinks, in Palo Alto. He is sure of it, though of course he can’t be entirely sure.

  He recalls Rousseau’s warning about being watched. Would they be so obvious that he would notice them? Or perhaps that is the point? Or is he imagining all this?

  “You okay?” Vic asks.

  He puts his arm around her. “I’m great.”

  Nineteen

  THURSDAY, JANUARY 2

  1823 JEFFERSON PLACE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

  Even in the twenty-first century, people just didn’t expect a woman.

  Not to do this kind of work: surveillance, security, personal protection, and the rest.

  As far as Samantha Reese was concerned, that blind spot only made women better choices for the job. People would look right past them, just a glancing thought, a reflex—“oh, a woman.”

  So you use that, every slight, every prejudice; it’s all opportunity.

  Reese has gotten to the restaurant early, watched it for an hour before it opened and then entered through the small French doors at 11:30 A.M. just after seeing the owner, Giovanni, open up. She sits at the bar drinking Campari and soda, deciding which table she thinks would be best, then excusing herself and asking where the restrooms are. She goes the wrong way so she can scan parts of the place one can’t see from the main room, and apologizes when she wanders into the kitchen and finds the back door to the alley, making amends in perfect Italian before she returns to the dining room.

  When the man she is meeting arrives, she is seated at a corner table from which she can see the whole room. She watches him slip through the small front door.

  She waits.

  He looks the same, which is to say good, still lithe, strong. He always reminded her of a panther, quiet, watchful, dangerous. He isn’t her type; he’d also been married until recently. Still.

  “Thanks for coming, Sam,” Peter Rena says when he gets to the table. He is wearing a gray suit and a formal wool overcoat, the Washington uniform of respectable anonymity. Reese is wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt under a down vest, her only acknowledgment to the gray January cold.

  “You only need to ask, Peter,” Reese says. “You know that.” She glances around the restaurant. “Good place.”

  It is called Trattu, a small Italian restaurant on Jefferson Place just down the block from the office at 1820. It is Rena’s favorite restaurant in the city. Twelve small tables in the basement of another town house. Giovanni and his wife, Antonia, serve northern Italian food they learned to cook from grandmothers, parents, and aunts—Mama Style Oven Fish Stew, Chicken Breast Stuffed with Roasted Red Pepper, and Corn Meal from the Pot.

  “What’s so urgent I had to leave Colorado for?” she asks.

  “I want you to keep an eye on Randi and me.”

  Reese raises an eyebrow.

  “You think someone’s watching you?”

  “Anthony Rousseau thinks it’s possible.”

  That raises the other eyebrow.

  “You’ve seen Tony Rousseau? What are you into, Peter?”

  She and Rena met in the army when Reese was doing a rotation in the military police. Rena had never met anyone so determined and disciplined, even in uniform. She came from a military and athletic family, her mother a talented triathlete, her father a decorated marksman. Her mother died young and in the open spaces of Colorado; her father taught her to hunt and track and shoot. In college she accomplished something her father had aspired to but never achieved, a spot on the U.S. Olympic biathlete squad—the hybrid sport of cross-country skiing and shooting. She enlisted in the army, like many Olympia
ns, for the support and discipline required to help her train. Reese became one of just four female soldiers to successfully make it through the grueling nine-week Army Ranger school. When injuries set back her Olympic prospects, and the army failed to deliver on promises, at age thirty-one she resigned her commission.

  She lives in Colorado near Snowmass, where she can train and work when she wants at a gym she co-owns. She keeps a low profile, and clients barely notice when from time to time Reese seems to vanish because she and a group of other military friends have taken a job doing surveillance or personal security, so-called body work.

  Rena still hasn’t answered Reese’s question about why he had seen Anthony Rousseau.

  “Don’t make a show of the watching our backs,” he says. “You don’t need to be invisible. But I don’t want to make Randi crazy. Or anyone else. Far enough away that most people would never notice you. Close enough that if someone really good were watching, they’d know.”

  “Why would someone be watching you?” she asks again.

  “I don’t know that they are.”

  “Why would Rousseau think so?”

  Rena isn’t sure how much to say.

  Reese is a brunette with broad shoulders and the sculpted features of an athlete. Her manner is direct and eerily calm, something she refined from years of her father telling her to win men’s respect by looking them in the eye and telling them what she really thought, not by looking away and winning their fascination. Often her expression is sardonic.

  “Sorry, Peter. You need to tell me what this is about. Or my answer will be no.”

  Of course. He would demand the same if their roles were reversed. So he tells her what he can—the assignment from the president, their frustrations, their visit to the lake, and Rousseau’s warnings. Not everything. Hopefully enough.

  “You must think the threat is at least plausible,” she says.

  “Something went wrong out there in Oosay, and people don’t want to talk about it—maybe not even tell the White House the full story.”

  Sam Reese has a refined sense of irony. The idea that people would be making mistakes and then panicking to cover them up seems to fit her worldview, which—as best as Rena can make out—is that if people thought harder about the state of their lives, they would be in a perpetual state of panic or despair. So most people don’t think about it. Not that Reese has ever sat down and told Rena her worldview.