The Capitol Game

by Brian Haig

  Walters sneered back, twice as nasty. “Don’t play games with us.”

  “All right. I found your leak. You got a rodent problem in this building. A snitch, someone feeding loads of incriminating info to Jenson.”

  O’Neal tossed the papers onto Walters’s desk, then stood back and allowed the other two to read for themselves. Walters had forgotten his glasses and had to jam his face about three inches from the pages. Bellweather stood slightly behind him and leaned over his shoulder. O’Neal enjoyed the looks of growing horror on their faces.

  “Jesus,” Bellweather blurted after he finished. “She knows about the slush fund.”

  Walters was too stunned to say anything for a moment. He collapsed into his chair, gripping the armrests like a life raft.

  “Relax, fellas. Not all is lost,” O’Neal announced, too happy to be the irreplaceable lackey once again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bellweather demanded.

  “Remember, I was in the FBI. Those statements are nothing but paper. Unless they’re backed up by the living witness who made those claims, they’re worthless.”

  “Worthless?” Walters managed to croak, still shell-shocked.

  “Yeah, Mitch. In court, without that witness, it’s all inadmissible hearsay. God bless the Supreme Court. The accused has the right to cross-examine, and you can’t do that with pieces of paper.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Bellweather asked.

  “Isn’t it obvious, Dan?” Walters answered him with a sly smile, “Once we know who’s talking to Jenson, we take care of the problem. No witness, no evidence—no case.”

  “You mean kill her?” Bellweather asked.

  “Nothing that drastic is necessary,” O’Neal replied, smirking with pretended innocence. “There’s plenty of ways to make a source disappear. Money can cause a memory lapse. Enough money can even buy a complete reversal of old testimony. Maybe the source can just vanish for a while, take a long trip to a wonderfully remote place.”

  Bellweather quickly said, “Don’t even mention murder in this office, Mitch. Or kidnapping either. We’re businessmen. We have reputations to protect. We don’t behave that way.”

  The three men studied each other’s faces for a moment. The message was clear; nobody needed to say it. O’Neal had no famous reputation to protect, nor was he a “businessman” with a limited imagination. How O’Neal took care of the “rat” problem was up to him. Bellweather didn’t need to, or want to, know about it.

  “So who is she?” Walters asked. The source was referred to as “she” three different times in Jenson’s papers.

  “Consider what we know,” O’Neal, the investigator, began. “She works in accounting. She’s in the loop about the polymer. Here’s some other stuff Crintz got.” He planted Crintz’s little green book in front of Walters. The three of them bent forward and examined it together.

  Walters’s eyes stopped cold on the phone messages. Three messages in particular, three different callbacks Jenson was supposed to make to the same name.

  Bellweather caught his reaction. “That her?” he asked, pointing at the name as though Walters had missed it.

  O’Neal leaned closer. “Eva Green. Does she work here?”

  “In accounting,” Walters admitted, but nothing more.

  “That’s where the leaks are coming from.” Bellweather bent forward and studied the name more closely. “I don’t know her.”

  O’Neal, standing with his arms crossed and watching Walters’s distressed face, asked in an insinuating tone, “Who is she, Mitch?”

  Mitch looked like someone had just stuffed a fat golf ball down his throat. His face was red. He couldn’t seem to find his voice, and when he did, he yelled, “Bullshit. That’s impossible.”

  “Why is it impossible?”

  “It can’t be Eva. She’s been working for me.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I sent her up with Feist last summer to escort Wiley to the White House shindig. Feist said Wiley seemed impressed with her, so we worked out an arrangement.”

  “Describe this arrangement,” O’Neal asked, rolling his eyes. He hated amateurs dabbling in his field, getting in over their heads.

  “Eva’s one of those hyperambitious Harvard B-School types, always willing to go the extra mile to get ahead. She kept an eye on Wiley for me. We wanted to find out more about him and she filled in a few details. It was easy and cheap.”

  “Easy, cheap? What’re you talking about?” Bellweather bellowed, slamming a hand against the wall. Whatever plot this idiot had hatched up now seemed to be biting them all in the ass.

  “Nothing complicated, Dan. All she had to do was drop in. Visit him occasionally. Go out on a few dates. Build trust, get Wiley to confide in her.”

  “She was a mole?” O’Neal asked. This idiot didn’t even know the nomenclature of the trade.

  “Sort of, yeah, I guess. Update me on what Wiley was doing and thinking. If something more developed, I promised her a fifty grand bonus.”

  “And did it… uh, did she?” Bellweather asked, tiptoeing into the rich, lurid details.

  Walters bunched his shoulders and shrugged. “Not really. He treated her like a sister. The arrangement ended months back. Eva had a sort of breakdown. Seemed like a good idea to end it.”

  Bellweather traded a quick glance with Martie. “Sounds like she was a double agent,” he suggested.

  That’s exactly what it sounded like, but Walters refused to believe it. “Look,” he said defensively, “I’ll bring her in. Hit her up with a few questions and get to the bottom of this. If it’s her, I know we can cut a deal. If it’s not—”

  O’Neal finished his thought—“Then we’re back at square one.”

  “And you just wasted another million bucks,” Bellweather said.

  Jack was finding it hard not to burst out in laughter as he sat at the console and listened. The arrogance of these people was appalling, their stupidity worse. They had no compunction about delving into his life, sneaking into his home, bugging his phones, and paying people to destroy his reputation and his life. Yet they had no idea, not even a suspicion, that the same things could be done back. He had tapes going back seven months of Eva huddled in Mitch’s office, making her reports and seeking fresh instructions. He particularly enjoyed listening to Mitch offering her tips on how to seduce Jack.

  He removed the tape, carefully affixed the date, time, location, and names of the subjects, then placed it on top of his growing stack. He inserted a fresh tape, stretched his back, then went to the kitchen to make supper.

  Best to call his lawyer on a full stomach.

  The time had come for him to make his move.

  29

  Less than twenty-four short hours after Harvey Crintz committed his first burglary, the gang of FBI agents showed up in his office. Three in all, grim-faced men in a mixture of nice blue and gray suits, holding a warrant and arresting Harvey in front of his coworkers. The agents weren’t in a conversational mood.

  Harvey’s supervisor rushed out of his cubbyhole and began barking questions but got no answers. They flashed the warrant, pinned Harvey’s arms behind his back, slapped him in cuffs, and marched him out. Harvey tried making noise about calling his lawyer and was rudely told to shut up. He had no right to a lawyer until he was booked, charged, and processed, they told him with menacing frowns. In any event, he was informed, he didn’t need a lawyer, he needed a priest.

  An hour later, after the three agents gave Harvey a glimpse of the ten photographs displaying his face and his body rifling through Mia Jenson’s safe—apparently it had been wired and connected to a tiny camera of some sort, a camera he had triggered in his clumsy search the day before—he agreed with them.

  A priest was his only hope.

  At almost the same instant, another group of Feds conducted a much larger raid on the offices of TFAC. They burst through the entrance, waving subpoenas and warrants, barking at employees to line u
p against walls and spread them.

  Accompanying them was a large forensics team that raced upstairs and jumped on the firm’s computers and preserved everything on the hard drives. After another few minutes, the moving men with boxes showed up and began hauling out loads of papers, spy equipment, virtually anything not nailed to the walls and floors.

  Martie O’Neal was hiding in his office when Special Agent Danny Ryan, an old pal from Bureau days, burst through the door.

  “Hey, Danny, what’s up?” he asked, trying to stifle his shock. He was leaning back in his chair, legs crossed on his desk, trying hard to look and act cool rather than terrified.

  “How ya doin’, Martie?” Ryan answered as if they were regular golf partners. Ryan’s eyes shifted around the office—what a dump.

  “You tell me.”

  “I’d say not well, buddy.”

  “I’m assuming you got a warrant or a subpoena to justify this unwarranted intrusion into private premises. I wanta be sure I sue the right folks.”

  “Can the big threats, Martie. Makes you sound silly.”

  “Like that, huh?”

  Ryan nodded. “You’re so totally screwed I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “Oh.”

  “You remember the procedures or do I need to explain them?”

  O’Neal slowly eased out of his chair. In his early days in the Bureau he’d been a field hand; how many times had it been him on the other end of this process, watching the weird mixture of emotions on their faces, often wondering how he’d react in their place. He placed his hands on his desk and bent forward with his legs spread apart. He made a silent vow to himself that he would remain calm and unaffected. There would be no cracks in the hard veneer. He would show his old Bureau buddies how a real badass behaved. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I got the right to remain silent, blah, blah, blah. Should I call my mouthpiece now?”

  “It’d be a waste of time.”

  “Can I least call my wife and tell her I won’t be home for dinner?”

  “She knows, Martie. Another van of agents is at your house with a search warrant. I’m sure she gets the message.”

  Martie was suddenly fighting back an almost unstoppable urge to cry. His knees went weak, his voice thick and whiny. He squeezed his eyes shut and muttered, “When will I get home for dinner?”

  Ryan understood the question. “Assuming sterling behavior and an Emmy performance in front of three absolute chumps on a parole board, about twenty years. Sorry, Martie, no deals. Don’t need ’em. We got the burglars who hit Jenson’s home. They all talked. We got Crintz and he’ll talk, too. We got a burglary in a private home up in Jersey seven months ago, and… hell, truth is, we got more evidence and charges than we know what to do with. You’ve been a very bad boy.”

  As Ryan patted him down, it was dawning on Martie that he had been sucker-punched. All these months, somebody had been pulling the strings, jerking him around like a fool dancing at the end of a long, tight noose.

  “At least tell me who turned you on to me,” he asked, almost a croak.

  “If I knew the whole story, I still wouldn’t tell. But you definitely screwed with the wrong people. Now shut up and let me finish.”

  When the senior agent in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office sends an invitation, even the Pentagon’s inspector general and the director of the DCIS respect the summons.

  The meeting was set for five, the witching hour. Both senior Pentagon officials, along with a small retinue of aides, arrived five minutes early in a matched pair of black government sedans at the downtown Judiciary Square field office. A junior flunkie was at the curb and escorted them through security, then up a short flight of stairs to the SAC’s domain.

  Special Agent Mia Jenson and a tall man who looked vaguely familiar but none of them recognized were waiting in the hallway. Mia walked directly up to Margaret Harper, director of the DCIS. “Agent Mia Jenson,” she said by way of introduction. “I work for you.”

  The eyebrows lowered with curiosity. “I’ve heard your name,” Harper offered, shorthand for, because I recently booted you off the Capitol Group case.

  Without hesitation or further explanation, Mia handed her a piece of paper. One page, neatly typed and signed. “My resignation,” she announced without elaboration.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s effective immediately. Approve it and it’s done.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “You’ll find out in a few minutes. Any possible questions will be answered, I promise. For now, it’s strongly in your interest that you approve this resignation.”

  “I’ll do no such thing, Jenson. I don’t know how long your obligation is, or what sort of trouble you’re in.”

  “I’m not in any trouble, and my obligation’s irrelevant. I’m about to hand you the biggest case of the decade. Release me, or I can’t.”

  The crowd around them was now listening in to this fascinating conversation. Harper pondered this strange request for a minute, then replied, “I don’t make deals with my own agents.”

  “That’s the whole point. Release me and I’ll hand you the biggest case you’ve ever seen. Otherwise, forget it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Think about where we’re meeting. I’ll hand it off to a different investigative agency and you’ll stand on the sidelines with mud on your face and watch the action. Trust me, it’s strongly in your interest to avoid that.”

  Harper shuffled her feet and looked uncertain. “How about this?” she offered. “I’ll grant a temporary resignation, hear what you have to say, then decide whether to make it permanent or rescind it.”

  Mia thought about it a second. “All right, that works for me.”

  A moment later they marched into a big conference room.

  Marcus Graves, the SAC, and three senior agents were already there, seated with serious expressions at the large conference table. “Coffee and tea in the corner,” Graves hospitably announced, pointing in the direction of two matching tables. One held two big urns and some cups, the other a portable tape player hooked to two large speakers.

  Nobody wanted. Instead they quickly hustled around both sides of the conference table and took seats. Mia and her friend sat in the middle, side by side, with grim but relaxed expressions.

  Notepads came out, pens were propped, the chairs stopped scraping the floors. The moment everybody looked ready and attentive, Mia offered them all a pleasant good evening and thanked them for coming. She continued, “My name’s Mia Jenson. I’m a law school grad, granted the right to practice law in D.C. by the district bar. The past two years I’ve been an agent with the DCIS, but effective two minutes ago, I’m retired and back to practicing law.”

  Thomas Rutherford II, the Pentagon’s inspector general, an older gentleman, but also a lawyer, looked at Graves, and gruffly asked, “If she works for us, why are we meeting here?”

  “Why don’t you let her explain it?”

  “I’d rather hear your explanation first.”

  It was a reasonable request and Graves decided to be friendly and cooperative. “Mia came to us about seven months ago. She was looking into possible crimes by a big defense contractor. She became worried about her safety, with good reason, it turned out. Over the past few days, we busted a large criminal ring. Her home was broken into, her office burgled, unsavory people began looking into her background. Now I suggest you listen to what she has to say.”

  The inspector general’s hands folded on the table and he stared at Mia. His expression conveyed more confusion than anger, though it was clear he was unhappy having to hear about this on foreign turf. Harper’s look conveyed no confusion, just anger; a junior agent doesn’t carry the dirt outside.

  Mia met their stares with a firm expression. “I’d like to introduce my client, Jack Wiley. Until eight months ago, Jack was a partner in Cauldron, a private equity Wall Street firm. It was Jack who brought the dea
l to buy Arvan Chemicals, with its polymer and patents, to the Capitol Group.”

  Jack’s introduction electrified the room. All eyes shifted to his face; more than a few eyes narrowed and the frowns deepened a few notches. Over the past twenty-four hours everybody in the room had learned his name. A few had seen his face on TV or splashed on the front page of their morning paper. He was the subject of a nationwide manhunt, the smiling face on a five-million-dollar wanted poster, and, quite possibly, the culprit behind a twenty-billion-dollar swindle. A few thought how he barely resembled the photo on TV—he seemed so much taller, thinner, less tanned. Jack smiled and nodded pleasantly, visibly unconcerned to be in the midst of so many law enforcement authorities.

  Mia waited long enough for the shock to wear off. “On Jack’s behalf, here’s the deal we’re offering,” she continued. “Jack will come forward and offer testimony on one condition. He’s a whistleblower. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the program, but it won’t hurt to review a few important stipulations. Last year the federal government spent over $2.5 trillion. Considering that at least ten percent of that was lost or stolen due to waste, fraud, or abuse, the Congress in its wisdom passed a whistleblower act granting a reward of up to twenty-five percent of whatever the government collects against cheating companies. Now the good news. Jack’s not greedy. He wants a mere ten percent of whatever he saves.”

  “Or we can just arrest him,” Harper threatened. “Throw him in our nastiest, most vicious federal prison and see how long he holds out before he talks.”

  “You don’t have the grounds,” Mia said, very cold, very lawyerlike.

  “How about graft? Theft, bribery, falsification of documents. I’m sure we’ll think up more charges. We can be very creative. Something will stick.”

  “Jack’s done nothing wrong. He’s innocent. And we have the evidence to back that up.”

  “And that’s the first time I’ve ever heard a defense lawyer make that claim,” Harper snapped back, baring her teeth.