“If you want him down there so badly, then you do it!”
He cocked his gun.
“Why are you doing this?” The words tore from my throat on the heels of a sob.
“Because I have to. He was too stupid and you were making too many connections.” He went silent as he watched me for a moment. “Just a suggestion: maybe you could roll him.”
“What?”
“Roll him. Might be easier.”
It should have been. I tried. But his arms kept flying out, stopping the momentum.
I took off my cardigan, threaded it underneath him, and tied it in a knot. Rolling got him to the edge of the ditch much faster. With one last push, he rolled down the slope. When I got up and turned around to leave, I saw that Beyer was right behind me.
He gestured down into the ditch with his gun. “You too.”
Chapter 51
After I gingerly slid into the ditch, he scrambled down beside me. Then he reached out around my ribcage and pulled me to his side.
I gasped with pain.
He spoke into my ear as he grabbed my arm. “I just need to borrow your hand for a minute.” I tried to pull it from his grasp, but he slid behind me, securing one arm to my side. Then he fit the fingers of the other around the gun. He pressed them to the stock. Released them, regripped my fingers around the stock again, and pressed.
“What are you doing?”
“It’s not what I’m doing. It’s what you’re doing. You’re getting ready to shoot your ex-boyfriend.”
I twisted, trying to free myself from his embrace.
He held me fast.
“But this is your gun. They’ll know it wasn’t me.”
“I’ve already reported it missing.”
“They’ll figure it out.”
“I don’t think so. It’s going to look like a murder-suicide.”
“I’m not murdering anyone. And I’m not committing suicide.”
“They’ll see the bruises on your arm. They’ll see the lump on his head. The gun will have his hair on it. Maybe some of his scalp if I’m lucky. And they’ll see your fingerprints all over the place. The trail you made as you dragged him to the ditch. No one will doubt what happened here.”
“They’ll find your fingerprints too.”
“That’s to be expected. It’s my gun. But you stole it. And you stole my car. I could have arranged this either way. Didn’t matter to me. But I figure this way, in the end? You get even. Everyone will think you killed him before you killed yourself. And don’t worry, I’ll make sure everyone knows you had a restraining order. You’re going to be a very sympathetic victim of domestic violence.”
“I won’t do it.” I tried to bend, tried to slip away.
He held me fast. “It’s the least you owe me. I was all set to poke around for Cade’s killer for a while and then declare it unsolvable.” He released me, but as he stepped away, he kept his gun trained on me. “And then you put two and two together. So give me your shoe.”
“What?”
“Your sneaker. Just take it off.”
“My shoe?” I couldn’t understand what he was asking, but he was the one with the gun. I used the heel of my other foot to lever it off.
He eased the front of his foot into it and then used my shoe to kick Hartwell in the ribs.
Hartwell groaned.
“I think he should be awake to see this, don’t you? So he can live the full experience before he dies?”
“You killed Cade, didn’t you?”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. He was planning to kill Hartwell and me too. There was only one reason for him to do that. “You’re the mole.”
He gave Hartwell another kick.
“Did you do it for money?”
He scoffed. “Money? No. I did it for the best of reasons. I did it for love. I fell in love with a Chinese national. She asked me to overlook something that I should have reported. It wasn’t anything significant. And I was in love with her so I did it. I didn’t even feel bad about it. But that one thing led to a second thing. And then a third thing.”
“You’re a traitor.”
“In a sense. But she wasn’t asking me to do those things because she wanted to compromise me. It’s because someone had already compromised her. Her family was back in China. If she hadn’t been able to get me to do those things for her, then the Chinese would have hurt them. She loved them. I loved her.”
“It’s treason.”
“Maybe to you. It’s not that I hate my country. It’s that I loved her. I love her. That’s my whole argument. The problem isn’t that I’m a bad guy, Ms. Garrison. It’s that I’m such a good one.”
“You’re going to be caught. They’ll figure it out.”
“Maybe. But I’m not the only one. That’s the genius of the Chinese. That’s what’s going on here. There’s me. There’s Hartwell. And there are others. Multiple actors, all playing their roles for their own reasons, all disconnected from one another. Sometimes at night, I lie awake and wonder just how many of us there are.”
My heart stuttered.
He gave Hartwell one more vicious kick.
Hartwell writhed on the ground and then came to, swearing.
“Watch your mouth. There’s a lady present.” He gestured with his gun. “Your turn.”
“My turn to what?”
“To do whatever you want. Punch him. Kick him. Bite him. I don’t care.”
Hartwell tried to push to his feet. He swayed for a moment and then gave up, sinking to his knees.
I shook my head. Regretted it instantly when it began to throb. “No.”
“I’d think it would give you a sense of closure.”
“I’m not like that.”
“We’re all like that.” He used my shoe to kick Hartwell. “Sure you don’t want to try?”
I did. I did want to try. I did want to see what it would feel like to be the one punching Hartwell, kicking him, instead of him kicking me.
“Just once?”
I shook my head, both tempted and repulsed by the possibility.
“Your loss.” He took my hand and fit it to the stock of the gun again. Aimed it at Hartwell.
Hartwell protested. Raised a hand as if to stop us. “What are you doing?”
Agent Beyer responded. “What somebody should have done to you long ago. You’re not a good person.”
“Whitney—wait! Please!” Hartwell reached out, pleading, with both hands. “I swear I’ll never follow you. I’ll never contact you. I’ll never touch you again. I swear it. I swear it! I’ll do anything. Just tell me what to do.”
My skin crawled. The hair at the back of my neck stood on end. I couldn’t control my trembling.
“I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! Just-just-just—”
I clenched my jaw. Tried to make the trembling stop. “Just let him go.” I spoke the words through my teeth.
“Can’t.”
“Whitney! Help me!”
I squeezed my eyes shut. I just wanted it all to stop.
Hartwell was crying. “Do you want money? Is that what you want, Beyer? My father will pay you. He’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“Shut up!”
The crack of a shot rang out as the agent’s hands squeezed around mine.
Chapter 52
The agent released the gun and collapsed behind me.
The sudden freedom caused me to stumble forward and I dropped the gun.
Hartwell rolled up into a ball and lay there shrieking.
And then people appeared like ghosts from the woods. Down from the trail above us. Up from the trees below us.
And all I could do was nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
Leo came up to me. He took me by the elbow and turned me away from the agent.
I pointed to the gun that was on the ground. Tried to tell him what had happened, but no words came out of my mouth. And no breath came out of my lungs.
My vision n
arrowed, turning everything gray and fuzzy.
I put my hands to my knees, then bent and lowered my head between them.
Vomited.
Leo put a hand to the back of my neck, then twisted to shelter me, fitting his body to mine.
I turned into him. Held on to him as my body convulsed in one long, wrenching sob.
He took me by the hand, led me to a low earthen wall, and had me sit down. He sat with me, held my hand, while I told one of the FBI agents what had happened.
I told them what I’d figured out and what I knew of Agent Beyer’s involvement. I told them where to find the index card with names I’d written down and why they needed to start asking questions.
Quickly.
While there was still time.
An ambulance came.
They treated me.
They treated Hartwell before they put him into a squad car and took him away. And then they put Agent Beyer on a stretcher. Just like Cade, he’d died with a hole in his head.
One of the other police officers drove Leo and me home. Leo sat with me in the back seat.
“I thought he was going to make me pull the trigger. I really did.” I shivered in spite of the heat.
Leo took hold of my hand. Guided the ice pack I was holding back to the welt on my cheek.
“I don’t know how he was planning on getting away with all of it. How did he think he wouldn’t be suspected?” I asked.
“Everyone on the team knew your story. Knowing the background of your relationship with Hartwell, he probably thought no one would be suspicious of a murder-suicide. And when you don’t have suspicions, you don’t look for alternate explanations.”
“But how was he going to get away? Was he going to hike out?”
“He’d rented a car. He’d parked down at the end of one of the trails.”
I looked out the window as the car turned off the parkway and onto Arlington Boulevard, climbing the hill from Rosslyn to Courthouse. “What about Hartwell?”
“He won’t be bothering you anymore. Espionage comes with a pretty big jail sentence.”
“What if he tries to blame it on me? What if he tries to say I was going to shoot him?”
“You’d have all of us as witnesses.”
I turned to him. “How did you find me?”
“What you said at the house about stepping-stones gave me an idea. It seemed like Cade was made to believe the mole was left over from the 2010 hacks. But what if the mole hadn’t been in the agency before that? What if he’d come on the scene during the hacks? I asked some questions about the FBI investigation back then. Got confirmation that Beyer was the one who signed off on everything. He was the one who worked with the FDIC to ensure that the suggested countermeasures were actually taken. And after that case, he got called in to a lot more hacking cases. The FDIC had seven big hacks in 2015 and 2016. He was given those investigations too.”
“But we already knew that. We knew he led that first investigation. And didn’t some commercial company analyze it too?”
“They did. But who verifies the verifiers? No one. We just accept what they say without proof that it’s true. I called Detective Sims, but she said you’d already left with him. I may have officially been off your team, but I never really left. I could still track your phone. I saw when you headed toward the parkway. Thought that seemed odd. I wasn’t that far away, so I decided to follow you.”
“You were there the whole time.”
“Right behind you.”
I hadn’t been alone.
Through all of that, I had never been alone.
* * *
It didn’t take long for the story to explode. Someone must have helped reporters find it because before the afternoon was over, it blew up in the media.
That evening, Congressman Thorpe came over to Leo’s house. He tried to tell me that there must have been a misunderstanding. That his son couldn’t have done the things he was being accused of.
I pointed to my blackened eye.
Showed him my arm.
I even pulled up my shirt so he could see my ribs. As he left Leo’s house, one of the FBI agents pulled him aside to talk.
It didn’t surprise me. His name was on my list.
Even out on the West Coast, my father heard the news. It made all the national media outlets. The story had everything: politics, corruption, espionage, hacking. It even had a bonus villain. And since that person was a congressman’s son, it was a big deal.
My father called me that evening. “Are you okay? Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I would have wanted to know. I would have gladly worried!”
“You couldn’t have done anything about it. And with the house and everything—”
“Even with the house and everything, you’re still my favorite kid.”
I was his only kid. “You have enough going on.”
“I still want you to be honest with me. And you never answered the question.”
“What question?”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t have to worry about being killed anymore.”
“You still didn’t answer the question.” If I ever wondered where my cross-examination skills came from, I only had to look to my father. “What do you have to worry about?”
“The bar exam. A place to live. The one I was in didn’t work out.”
“But you’re living somewhere, aren’t you?”
“I’m staying with a friend.”
Chapter 53
It took a while to unravel what had happened, what Hartwell was responsible for and what Agent Beyer had done. The FBI wouldn’t tell me everything.
Here’s what I was able to piece together: Agent Beyer was on the team that investigated the original Chinese hacks. Cade found whatever it was that Beyer left in the FDIC’s systems. It was Cade’s tragedy that he was assigned back to Agent Beyer himself. The mole he was looking for was his FBI handler.
The agent was placed in the precarious situation of wanting to know all the information Cade had found but not wanting to reveal himself. He was able to convince Cade they were looking for a mole, an FDIC insider. Unfortunately, Beyer let the investigation go on for one question too long.
It was pure coincidence that Hartwell had been corrupted by the Chinese as well. And it was fate that put Cade at the nexus of both schemes.
Despite the fact that Hartwell was tightly connected to political and social power, despite the fact that he knew what to do, what to wear, what to say in any situation, none of that helped him in the end. As he liked to say, details mattered. The fact that he’d lied about his company’s financing and let China into the FDIC’s secure systems made his fall from the moneyed elite all the more stunning.
I suspected investigators would eventually discover that millions of dollars in illegal contributions had been injected into our politics. China had been in our financial system for twelve years. For some congressmen—like Representative Thorpe—that was six congressional campaigns. Over the years, with China’s prompting, politicians had hollowed out the financial reforms that had been enacted after the Great Recession of 2008. To Congressman Thorpe’s credit, he had tried to do the right thing with his bill. But little wonder that when China began to pull strings, all those congressmen changed their minds and voted against it.
All across the country, Chinese citizens had been quietly but quickly leaving the properties they’d purchased. What had been viewed as a boon to the real estate market should have been seen as a massive attempt to get the heck out of Dodge.
As the trade wars were happening, China’s objective wasn’t to normalize trade relations with us. It was to unbalance our relations with everyone else. We were worried about them manipulating their currency? We should have been worried about how they were manipulating ours.
The Chinese economy had taken a beating for several years during the trade wars. But they knew we’d be p
aying for those few years of trade wars for the rest of a generation. By letting us do the hard work of harming ourselves, they were able to simply watch as we punished our own allies, pushing away all of our friends.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, someday soon, the FDIC quietly tells the almost five thousand banks they insure to closely examine the credentials of their account holders. I wouldn’t be surprised if, in the next year, more laws are put in place to make it more difficult for foreigners to purchase real estate. And I would be shocked if a dozen or more politicians don’t suddenly quit campaigning for reelection and decide to resign instead.
* * *
I stayed with Leo until I took the bar exam. But after that, things started to get complicated. We decided that I needed to move out in order for us to figure out if we could move on, into the future, together.
A friend of his had a nanny apartment that they weren’t using anymore. Their children had graduated from high school and gone on to college. It was a haven of peace and quiet built above their detached garage. Situated at the back of their woodsy lot, it had all the charms of a tree house.
And multiple layers of security.
* * *
The job lead that was forwarded to me by my professor turned into something big. One of the tech billionaires had chosen cryptocurrency as his pet project. He wanted to save the world—literally—by ensuring that disaster aid for developing countries actually made it into the hands of the disaster’s victims. He wanted guarantees that if there were any stipulations—like rebuilding outside of flood plains or replanting fields with environmentally appropriate crops—they were encoded on the currency’s blockchain.
The team he was putting together was small, but it was mighty. The day I interviewed with them, we sat around the conference table and debated the merits of the basic concept of a stablecoin. Was it just delaying the inevitable, wholesale move to cryptocurrency, or was it a worthy first step? Most of the team was wearing jeans that day. And part of the compensation package was assistance with paying off student debt.
I signed on to start work at the end of October, even though a permanent position was contingent on passing the bar and being sworn in. That wouldn’t happen until after my character and fitness review was completed. I was told that would be in December.
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