Run for Cover

by Michael Ledwidge

  “Life’s just full of surprises, isn’t it, Kit?” Dawn Warner said.

  97

  Dawn Warner climbed out onto the street beside her.

  “I was wondering if we could talk for a second,” she said.

  Kit said nothing as her heart started beating again. She began hurrying across the street.

  “Kit?”

  “No thanks,” Kit said, moving quicker.

  “Don’t be silly, Kit. Just for a second.”

  Kit kept walking but Warner kept pace with her as they approached an open plaza.

  “I heard about your tirade to the director,” Warner said as Kit finally halted, glaring at her.

  “And you tore Weber a new one, as well. That took some real fire, Kit. Bravo. You’re fierce. You remind me of myself twenty years ago.”

  Kit shook her head, her face hot.

  The plaza they’d stopped in was a memorial for the US Navy with a huge fountain in it. Kit looked at Warner, then at the bubbling green water, wondering very seriously if she should do something right there and then. Split her nose open with her already balled fist. Grab her by her haute couture jacket lapels and get her over the fountain wall into the water and drown her. She had ten pounds on her and was two decades younger.

  “Why are you here? What do you want?” she finally said.

  “Can I tell you a story?” Dawn Warner said, looking her in the eyes. “When I was a teenager I knew a lot of kids from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. One of them was a close friend of a famous political family of a former president. One night I went to a beer party at their apartment. In this apartment there was a display of moon rocks—actual moon rocks from the Apollo mission—that had been gifted to the former president.”

  “Who gives a shit,” Kit said.

  “Listen. There was a drunken boy at this party, a football player from Fordham Prep. He decided to take one of the rocks as a joke. Two weeks later, this boy never made it home from football practice. He was found with two bullets in his back floating facedown in the Hudson River near Yonkers.”

  “I repeat,” Kit said glaring at her.

  “But that’s not the kicker,” Dawn Warner said. “The kicker is that the next time this girl went to the famous apartment for an event, the moon rock the boy had stolen was back in the display. That’s the kicker.”

  Kit stood and looked at her for another beat.

  “No,” Kit said. “I think I know the real kicker.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The dead football player was your boyfriend and you shooting him in the back was how you made your bones.”

  The smile Dawn Warner gave was the first genuine one Kit had ever seen her make.

  “Those claws, Kit. Like razors. That’s why we’re having this conversation. How would you like to be splendidly wealthy? Or have a post anywhere in the world? Or better yet, both?”

  “How’s that?”

  “You’re not going to beat us. You saw what happened in there. It’s just going to happen again and again and again. There’s just too much money at stake. We’re not talking billions, Kit, but trillions. With a T. I’m telling you truly as a person with sympathy for you and with respect, you need to come into the tent where it’s warm.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We’re past being caught, Kit. We run it now.”

  “It?”

  She made a gesture at the fountains, the buildings, the street, the sky.

  “This town, this country, this planet. Everything, Kit. The computer tech and surveillance grid has delivered a paradigm power shift of historic proportions. It’s the magic mirror from Snow White, Kit. It tells all. We see all and go where we want and do what we want. Nothing happens now without our consent. They say if you can’t beat them, join them, right? Well, you ain’t beating us. I could use you, Kit. Truly. You could be my protégé.”

  Kit reared back, staring wide-eyed. Then she started laughing. Really hard. Belly laughing.

  “That’s a no, I take it?” Dawn Warner said, giving her a half smile.

  It was a cold half smile now.

  “You’re crazier than a shit house rat,” Kit said mirthfully. “You and Weber and all of you. Run the world? You’re on those Silicon Valley drugs, too, right? LSD microdoses? That must be it. At your age? You need to get off that stuff, Dawn. You’re going to end up in the cemetery.”

  “I’m going to end up dead?” Warner said softly. “Well, I tried, Kit. You can’t say I never offered you a chance.”

  “A chance to what? Be corrupt to the bone like you? Sell my soul to the devil? Screw over my neighbors and countrymen and their children? Gee, thanks, Dawn. That’s real nice of you, but I’m good.”

  “I offered you a seat in the lifeboat, Kit. I can’t help it if you’re too stupid to take it.”

  98

  Kit stood rooted to the concrete, listening to the bubbling of the fountain as she watched Warner walk back to her car. She got in and slammed the door behind her. Kit thought the car would pull away. But it didn’t.

  Kit scanned the sidewalk. Looking across Pennsylvania Avenue, she saw one of Warner’s minion agents, the tall, rusty-haired one. He was paying a street vendor for a brown bag of something. She watched as he carried it to the corner light and took out his phone.

  Kit froze for a moment and then began fishing through her carry-on. She produced the surveillance phone John Barber had given her and turned it on and pointed it at Fitzgerald as she pretended to put it to her face.

  “No, honey. I can’t talk now. Seriously, I’m jammed right this second,” said Fitzgerald’s voice suddenly in her ear from where he stood waiting to cross the street.

  “But you have to,” said a woman’s voice on the line.

  “It’s not happening. I’m right in the middle of all this. I can’t,” Fitzgerald said.

  “How about at the airport? When are you leaving?” the woman said.

  “In three hours.”

  “That’s not acceptable,” the woman said. “That coach might be gone by then. I’m not taking this shit anymore, Patrick. You know how embarrassing it is to watch your oldest son ride the bench game after game?”

  “Fine,” Fitzgerald said, annoyed around a mouthful of pretzel. “I’ll try, all right. But if I can’t catch him today, I’ll call him first thing tomorrow from San Fran.”

  “Ooh-la-la. San Fran. The way you say it,” Fitzgerald’s wife said sarcastically. “All this jet-setting around with the elite is turning you so cool, Patrick. It really is. Can I have your autograph when you get back from San Fran, darling? After you hand me your dirty underwear.”

  Fitzgerald laughed at that.

  “Alrighty then. Fun as this is, I have to go now, sweet pea.”

  “Wait. Is he still with you? He’s testifying on CSPAN in twenty minutes they said. I just turned it on.”

  “No, billionaire boy isn’t with us anymore,” Fitzgerald said. “His security took him a second ago, but we have to pick him up from Capitol Hill in two hours. The witch is excited she’s getting so much time with him on the flight.”

  “You need to follow her lead, Patrick. You need to kiss his ass like there’s no tomorrow. I’m telling you, this is the chance of a lifetime. Weber could make us rich by sneezing on you.”

  “Yeah, right. When the witch hits the powder room, I’ll just lean over and say, ‘Hey, Ethan, baby. You need me on your team, bro.’ Oh, shit. Gotta go. Broom-Hilda is back in the car. For real. She’s waving at me. I’ll call you tonight when we get in.”

  Kit slipped the illegal spy phone back into her carry-on and had her real one out before Fitzgerald made the Rover’s door.

  “Kit, hey. What’s the scoop?” Gannon said.

  “Mike, listen. I need help.”

  “Help?” Gannon said. “What happened? Ho
w many of them are there this time?”

  “Very funny,” she said. “We got blocked here in DC but I’m heading to the airport now.”

  “The airport?”

  “Yes. I’m getting the next flight to San Francisco. You need to do the same.”

  “Why?”

  “Warner is flying there this afternoon with Ethan Weber. Something is up. I can feel it. This isn’t over yet.”

  99

  Dawn Warner’s suite was on the top floor of the Clement Hotel in Palo Alto. In the mirror where she sat doing the finishing touches to her makeup, she could see the jack-o’-lantern lights atop Stanford’s famous Hoover Tower behind her through the window across the street.

  The ice cubes in the vodka tonic rattled as she lifted it. She took a bracing sip and placed it back down.

  One drink, she thought, laying down her lip primer as she smiled at herself in the mirror. Just one little stiffener to anchor her calm.

  Her lips and then her mascara finished, she dotted on her perfume. It was Yves Saint Laurent Opium, and the courtly fragrance of it and the rose glow of the evening sky outside the window behind her suddenly reminded her of her childhood.

  Her glorious childhood, she thought, smiling as she sipped at her drink.

  She remembered her Brearley uniform, shopping with Mommy on Madison, birthday parties at the Waldorf Astoria, at Serendipity. She remembered being in her pajamas standing atop the curving staircase in their 67th and Park duplex as she watched Mommy and Daddy getting ready for all the fall charity week soirees.

  Her tall daddy in his spotless Armani tux standing on the marble by the door, her model mother with her curly blond hair up, an Australian beauty in a black gown and heels.

  She’d been born and raised on such Park Avenue scenes. Her father, a financier at a merchant bank, even had a limousine, a long hunter-green Lincoln that he would sometimes take her in to her piano lessons, if she was very good.

  You’re a princess, he would tell her as they rode hand in hand among the taxis and skyscrapers and crowds. You’re my little American princess.

  Then suddenly everything had changed.

  It was her first year in high school when her mother and father divorced.

  That’s when she and her siblings had ended up in Bronxville, she thought with a frown.

  Bronxville.

  What a fall it had been, she thought, squinting. A Brearley girl at Bronxville High? Prometheus had hardly fallen lower when he was hurled from the top of Mount Olympus into Tartarus.

  No more looking out over the storybook yellow-and-pink spring tulips on the Park Avenue median. No more Mr. and Mrs. Carabante, the live-in couple who had been their butler and maid. And certainly no more limo rides with Daddy through Central Park.

  Instead they’d lived above a dentist, their run-down building so close to the train station that her grimy bedroom window would rattle every time the Metro North train passed.

  She thought of her pathetic know-it-all obnoxious father with his ’80s Porsche and suspenders the occasional times he would deign to come by. The sniveling visits to go for pizza, where she’d given serious thought to how much life insurance he had and how difficult it would be to successfully poison a person.

  But she had brought them back, hadn’t she? Dawn Warner thought with a nod. She and her brother and her little sister. She had withstood it all. It was she who had gotten into Columbia and then graduated summa from Harvard Law. Her discipline, her tenacity, her steamroller ambition.

  And it didn’t stop when she’d scored the top slot at Justice. No way. That was the beginning. She’d gone hard at it for years making connection after connection, getting mentor after mentor to show her how things were actually done in the beltway.

  It was also she who’d made all the proper moves to perch her brother, Charlie, back into Daddy’s investment bank despite his horrible college career and trouble with the law. No one else.

  Now with her guidance, her brother, Charlie, was VP in the multinational investment bank’s mining sector. In this position, he was now at her obedient beck and call to instantly and conveniently connect with her newest branch of business, her ever-expanding contact list of overseas global friends and partners.

  She laughed to herself softly. Who knew that one day the words bismuth, nickel, and tungsten would be so very charming to her. Because dug up from the Third World dirt by her busy bee multicultural partners worldwide, a generous percentage of these industrial metals were now, at this very moment as she sat there, being turned into electronic currency and shot across the magical under-the-sea high-tech glass fiber lines to be deposited at the speed of light at her pedicured feet.

  How many offshore accounts was Charlie juggling now? Thirty-six? Most of them seven-figure, some even eight. Minute by minute, they increased like the debt clock in Times Square.

  In her happy vodka tonic buzz, Dawn Warner smiled at the analogy. She closed her eyes and breathed in Yves’s lovely Opium as her vision filled with a string of numbers, huge numbers that continually flickered higher and higher toward infinity as they burned brighter and brighter in blazing glowing neon red.

  100

  When Kit carded into room 811 at the Palo Alto Westin, John Barber was set up on the bed, working a laptop, while Gannon was by the window with a camera on a tripod.

  She put down the coffee and sandwiches on the desk of the tight discount room and went over and huddled next to Gannon.

  “How’s it looking?”

  “See for yourself,” Gannon said, edging back the curtain.

  Kit bent to the Nikkor zoom lens that was pointed at the window of Dawn Warner’s suite across the street.

  Its viewfinder showed a balcony, a glass door, and a portion of the suite’s living room. Through the gap in the curtains the blown-up view in the ten-thousand-dollar spy camera was vivid enough to pick up the wood grain in the credenza.

  Gannon and Barber had been at the airport with the surveillance equipment waiting for Kit when she landed. She already had the New York office head, Bill Ferguson, help her get a bead on Dawn Warner’s whereabouts, so they had headed straight from the airport to the Clement.

  They found an almost perfect surveillance vantage point at the Westin just across the street, and then Gannon had gone across into the Clement Hotel covertly. He’d managed to plant two bugs, one on her room’s phone line from the basement and another audio bug in the hall just outside the room.

  They still might do a counter-intel sweep for them but Kit didn’t think so. From what they’d already heard they seemed to be very much in a hurry about something.

  “I see steam,” Kit said, looking through the camera. “Okay, there she is by the mirror scrubbing up, dress on the bed there. Gucci. My, my. This dinner they’re heading to must be très chic. What’s the name of this mind-blowing new restaurant again?”

  “Flower Moon West,” Gannon said.

  “Flower Moon West. How...something.”

  “Upscale yet earthy?” Gannon tried.

  “Stuck-up rich asshole?” John Barber said.

  “There you go, John. You win,” Kit said, laughing.

  “Wait, I hear something.”

  “Is she speaking Chinese again?” Kit said.

  That Warner had received two phone calls on the room phone from people speaking Chinese was quite shocking. But that Warner had answered them back also in Chinese was even more so.

  Expert-level Chinese was quite a curious skill for a top-echelon US Justice Department official to have.

  But it was all starting to fit, Kit thought. Warner, Weber, China.

  Weber’s interview in Wired magazine said Sonexum was going to be looking into making a bigger move into the Pacific Rim.

  Also, what had Warner said in DC?

  This is about trillions, Kit. With a T.

&
nbsp; “No. No Chinese this time. Worse,” John Barber said, leaning into the headphone. “She’s singing again.”

  “What now? More vintage Whitney Houston?” Gannon said.

  Kit shook her head. As Warner got ready, she was rocking her personal play list. It was heavy on eighties and nineties love ballads. A countdown of pure cheese, Kit thought.

  “No, wait. Let me guess,” Kit said. “Celine Dion?”

  “‘I’d do anything for love,’” John Barber sang dramatically in almost pitch perfect imitation of Meatloaf. “‘But I won’t do that.’”

  Gannon and Kit burst out laughing.

  “That’s really good, John. I didn’t know you had such a high and sensitive singing voice,” Kit said.

  “Yeah, a little too good, John,” Gannon said.

  “Heads up. Her room phone’s ringing,” Barber suddenly said, clicking the audio up on the laptop speaker.

  “Hi,” said a man’s voice.

  “It’s the driver. Fitzgerald,” Barber said.

  “I told you not to use the landline,” Warner said.

  “I know. My phone died. I’m in the lobby.”

  “What is it?”

  “I just wanted you to know he’s here.”

  “Gandalf?”

  “Yes, they just landed.”

  “How’s he looking?” Warner said.

  “Harris said okay. He’s pouring coffee into him. He’s going to make him shower at the hotel.”

  “He’s got a suit?”

  “Yes. He has one with him. He has everything with him.”

  “His passport everything?”

  “Yes. Harris checked first thing.”

  “Passport?” Kit mouthed.

  “And have him shave, too. That thing on his chin is vile. If I have to sit next to it during dinner, I’ll be blowing chunks before the second course.”

  “He’ll do what he can.”

  “And tell him to get a move on. Our guests don’t do late. And charge your damn phone.”

  “I will. Sorry.”