“Don’t you think the FBI thing proved you aren’t your mom? Now we have to move to Alabama?”
“Plus the cost of living is nothing down there, we can finish paying back my loans.”
She had another reason, too. Word at Quantico was, small offices were best for first postings. Every new agent got thrown on scut work like background checks. But the little offices offered a better chance for a real role on cases. And the Birmingham office was known for being aggressive about probing Alabama’s political corruption.
“Your job, your choice,” Brian said.
Rebecca relaxed, knowing she’d won. “If you really don’t want to—”
“No, it’s fine, try something new.”
Neither of them liked Philadelphia. The city was a tattier version of Boston, filled with the same pointless loathing for New York. And Brian had had a hard time finding work. Small businesses here didn’t care much about the Internet. The big law firms and financial services companies downtown wanted their tech staffers to be full-time employees with college degrees. Brian was stuck in the middle. I’d be better off somewhere people aren’t so afraid of computers. Thus his preference for the West Coast.
Though Brian hadn’t had much chance to work anyway. Someone had to take care of the kids, and Rebecca’s maternity leave for Kira had ended after four months. Then she worked sixty-hour weeks at Poynter. She’d been exhausted even before she got pregnant again. And Tony had been a difficult pregnancy. During her first trimester she’d thrown up so often that she tore blood vessels around her eyes, like a late-stage alcoholic. Morning sickness didn’t begin to describe the feeling. She survived on Gatorade, crackers, and gummy vitamins. But she made up for all those missed meals later. By the time Tony mercifully emerged, she’d gained seventy-two pounds.
But who was counting, ha ha.
Four months later, she was back at work. Again. Sixty-hour weeks. Again. And when she wasn’t, her life was changing diapers and shopping for store-brand groceries, saving a few bucks to pay down her loans. She tried not to think about her Wesleyan friends, who all seemed to hopscotch from Tokyo to Budapest before landing in Williamsburg to work as set designers. (How they paid the bills was a question everyone was too polite to ask, at least out loud.)
Rebecca knew that as far as misery went hers was mild. Her kids were healthy. She worked in an air-conditioned office, not a sweatshop. Even so, she couldn’t escape the sense that she’d gotten old fast, that somehow she’d cheated herself.
But she’d chosen this path, no one had made her. And for her these years of pain had a point, an endgame. Quantico. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.
What about her lawfully wedded husband? What was the point for him? She didn’t know whether Brian had understood what their lives would become after her graduation. She felt almost afraid to ask. Between her days writing memos and her nights breast-feeding, she didn’t have the emotional energy for a conversation about their lives and roles. When Brian would have a chance to collect on the chits he was banking. If they even were chits. If he even wanted to collect. Maybe he was happy staying at home, hanging out with Kira and Tony. He doted on them, read to them, made them laugh, cooked them oatmeal for breakfast and tacos for lunch. He was a good dad.
And she wasn’t exactly sitting around eating bonbons.
So when he agreed to Birmingham she didn’t argue the point.
* * *
Now here they were. She had the job she’d aimed for her since that conversation with Ned. And the job was…
Awesome.
From the first she had loved the bureau. She loved its sense of mission and purpose. She loved being the last line of defense, making complicated cases that the local cops were too overwhelmed or politically compromised to bring. She loved the resources the FBI had. If she had a question about fingerprints or DNA sequencing, someone at headquarters or Quantico would have the answer. If no one did, criminologists and scientists were happy to help when she told them she was an agent. While her classmates from UVA wrote briefs about collateral estoppel, she listened to wires, pulled phone records, took long-lens surveillance photos. I can’t believe I get paid to do this stuff.
Birmingham had been a smart choice, too. After September 11, the bureau’s biggest offices had put hundreds of agents on al-Qaeda–related investigations. In cities like New York, up to half the agents were now chasing counterterror leads. The impulse was understandable, but so far the work had mainly come up empty. Maybe al-Qaeda did have dozens of sleeper cells in the United States waiting for orders to wreak havoc. But the FBI hadn’t found them.
But Alabama had relatively few Muslims, which meant the Birmingham office could focus on the work it had always done, with less interference than usual from D.C. Mid-career agents might worry they would be marginalized because they weren’t doing counterterror work. But Rebecca would have plenty of time to work her way up and wait for the tides to shift. Sooner or later the bureau would return to its more traditional strengths, like public corruption and organized crime—especially if the counterterror investigations didn’t go anywhere.
She especially liked the senior agent in the office, a fiftysomething Tennessean named Fred Smith. He reminded her a little of Ned, but with more gray hair and a southern accent. In the FBI, the agent who ran an office was known as the Special Agent in Charge—and the joke at Quantico was that some SACs lived up to the name. Not Smith.
On her first day, he’d told her, “This is my last posting. Don’t have to worry about political stuff from me. I just want my agents to make cases. Let me show you the ropes, work hard, we’ll get along.” The speech sounded too good to be true. But Smith had turned out to mean every word.
Really, the only problem with the job was that she liked it too much. She could always do more work. Agents interviewed witnesses in teams, so that part of the job was nine to five. But she could always pull another property record, listen to another wire, practice her shooting. The phenomenon of new agents plunging into the job was common enough to have a name: “Hoover Fever.”
But unlike a lot of those new agents, Rebecca had two little kids at home. And a husband.
She’d helped Brian find a twenty-hour-a-week job as an information technology administrator at the University of Alabama, working on the school’s email system and fix other computer issues. The job wasn’t exactly sexy. But it made him something more than a stay-at-home dad. She thought having a salary would be good for his self-esteem. As for what he thought, she wasn’t sure.
Maybe she was to blame. The energy she had left over after work she focused on the kids. She hated the idea that they would think of Brian as their go-to parent. Right now her priorities, truly, were bureau/kids/Brian, and the race wasn’t all that close.
About the only place they still clicked was in bed. After she had Tony, their sex life had dried up, but since they moved to Birmingham, it had come back. She enjoyed him as much as ever.
Okay, almost as much. Like all couples, they’d lost a bit from the spectacular have-to-have-you of the first few months. But the fact that the sex was still good reassured her. Their marriage couldn’t really be in trouble if they could still connect that way. The house was still solid. They just needed to change the light bulbs. Caulk the windows. Stop deferring the marriage maintenance. But there wasn’t anything wrong.
So, she spent her birthday weekend at home. She tried not to think of those hours as maintenance and instead to be present not just for Kira and Tony but for Brian too.
Then she went back to the office on Monday and found the break she needed in the Draymond Sullivan investigation.
On a call with “Denny”—Denard Thomas Quincy III, his banker and golf pal—Sullivan’s mask had slipped. Not much, but enough to give her a peek. After the usual NASCAR and Hooters talk, Denny had gotten down to business.
About the sixty-five property, Dray—
Get that new off-ramp, perfect for a hotel.
Yeah huh?
Pick it up cheap, that wetland thing. Everyone worried about permits.
That gonna be a problem?
Not once I talk to Ray-Ray.
How much you think?
Don’t know what you’re talking about, Denny. Sullivan slammed down the phone.
Ray-Ray was—probably—Ralph Waller, the Montgomery County surveyor, another of the good ol’ boys who ran the county.
Denny and Ray-Ray and Dray. The names sounded like a punchline to a joke about a pig roast. But these men were canny enough to have skimmed and stolen for decades. Unless Rebecca was very much mistaken, Quincy III had just suggested Sullivan bribe Waller to remove a wetlands designation so that he could build a hotel, which had led Sullivan to end the call immediately, in case someone like her was listening.
She spent the morning finding out everything she could about the hotel project. After lunch she asked Smith for ten minutes. “Might have something on the Sullivan case.”
“Okay, go.”
But as soon as she finished playing the tape, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Denny literally says, ‘How much.’ ”
“And Sullivan says, ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
“Because he knows.” She was flummoxed. “If Sullivan didn’t know—honestly didn’t—he would ask. Denny, buddy, what are you talking about? That’s how real conversations go.”
“You forget what they learned you in law school, Rebecca? Doesn’t matter what he knows, it matters what he says, and he denies knowledge clear as day. Forget about it. Chuck would laugh me out of his office.” Chuck was Charles Wave, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “Chuck likes to win.”
“This is by far the best thing I’ve heard. If it’s not good enough, we’re never gonna get close.”
“Maybe not.”
“What then?”
“You don’t like this guy.”
“I don’t.” The way he talked about Jenelle shouldn’t matter, but it did. Them cheerleaders. She can do a split on my face anytime she likes.
“Enough to take a chance? Something’s come up that could give us a way in. I normally wouldn’t suggest it to anyone as green as you, but it looks like you can walk and chew gum too. The fact that we’re up here and he’s down there, it could play.”
“Sir? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“In or out, Rebecca?”
There was only one answer to that question.
13
The FBI named its undercover operation against Draymond Sullivan GULFSTREAM. It was a sting, though the bureau preferred not to use that word anymore, to avoid giving defense lawyers the chance to claim agents had entrapped their clients. Rebecca was at its heart.
She played the role of Rachel Townsend. Rachel had grown up in Mystic, Connecticut. She liked to party more than study and quit high school a month into senior year. After two years in New York, she found work as a flight attendant on private jets. The job opened her eyes to the world of the super-rich, and she liked the view. At twenty-four, in Geneva, she quietly married Oleg Fedanov, a sixtysomething Russian billionaire real estate developer. At twenty-eight, she even more quietly divorced him.
Now Rachel was back in the United States, rebooting her life in Alabama, where she knew no one. She had $12.7 million in the bank and a love of real estate she’d picked up from Fedanov, who had built apartment complexes all over Russia. She was street smart and aggressive, happy to cut not just a corner but an entire side if necessary.
Setting the cover took months. The private jet company, Velocity Air, was real and had helped the FBI before. Fedanov was also real, and really lived in Geneva. He owed the bureau a favor or five. He was a millionaire, not a billionaire. But an investigator would need Kremlin-level contacts to know for sure. Swiss marriage and divorce records were secret. The Townsend family would vouch for Rachel, in the unlikely event anyone ever knocked on their door in Mystic. Of course, Rachel’s high school didn’t have a yearbook picture of her. She hadn’t graduated.
In Birmingham, Rachel lived in one of the new apartment buildings downtown. It had a doorman, so no one could knock on her door without warning. And according to Rachel’s cover, she traveled frequently to California and Europe, which gave her an excuse for not being there.
The story wasn’t perfect—no cover was perfect—but it was solid. If Sullivan got close enough to crack it, the FBI should know in time.
* * *
The cover was only the beginning.
Next Rebecca, aka Rachel, had to find a way to get close to Sullivan, an impossible job without help from the inside. But the FBI had a cooperator, Kevin Boone. Boone was a senior vice president at BankAlabama with an unfortunate fondness for pictures of naked five-year-olds. Boone’s vices didn’t extend offline, as far as the bureau could tell, so he was a safe bet for a delayed sentencing. As safe as a guy who liked kiddie porn could be, anyway.
Boone had offered to testify against Sullivan. But Boone didn’t have the details on Sullivan’s schemes. Besides, a jury would never convict Sullivan on Boone’s testimony alone, not once it knew the charges Boone faced. Jurors tended not to believe child pornographers.
Northern District of Alabama prosecutors were reluctant to make a deal with Boone, but Smith convinced them that Boone offered unique access to Draymond Sullivan. Sullivan and Boone had known each other twenty-five years. BankAlabama had financed several deals for Sullivan. If Boone vouched for Rachel Townsend, Sullivan would listen.
Finally, prosecutors agreed to allow Boone to plead guilty to a sealed indictment. He received no promise of a reduced sentence. Instead, the government merely agreed to wait on his sentencing hearing as long as he was helpful on GULFSTREAM.
The sentencing delay made sense. If the guilty plea became public, Boone’s value as a cooperator would vanish. Sullivan would figure Boone had flipped and suspect anyone Boone brought to him. Meanwhile, the delay gave Boone the strongest possible incentive to sell Rachel’s story. If the operation went south and the FBI pulled the plug, Boone would find himself headed to the nearest US Penitentiary. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred pictures.
From the start, Fred Smith made sure Boone knew he was responsible for Rebecca’s safety. Any of them good ol’ boys even breathes on her, you will spend the rest of your life in prison. Won’t be one of those fun prisons, neither. No administrative segregation no matter how much you beg. And I personally will tell BoP to make sure everybody knows what you’re in for. You understand?
Boone understood.
* * *
Thus, Rachel Townsend became a high-net-worth client of BankAlabama. Thus, Boone helped her buy a pair of fleabag apartment buildings in Clanton, halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery.
Draymond Sullivan, who liked government rent checks, had rolled up Section 8–eligible apartments in the area for years. Sullivan was interested in his new competition, especially when Boone told him she was “a hottie from New York.” He invited her to coffee in Montgomery. “Nobody knows more about land down here than me. Let me help you out.”
Rachel wore her lipstick a shade redder than Rebecca, her perfume a spritz heavier, her blouse unbuttoned lower. Low enough to persuade Draymond to talk to her breasts instead of her face, so the microphone in her bra could pick up his voice more clearly.
The microphone was black, fingertip-sized. A two-inch wire connected it to a memory chip smaller than a dime. Two days before, she had brought bras to the office so that Walter, a surveillance technician on loan from the Atlanta office, could sew tiny pockets into their fabric. “Better to use your own undergarments, you’ll feel more comfortable.” Walter was fussy, fiftyish, with a crew cut and a round stomach. Undergarments sounded exactly right coming from him. In another era he would have been called a confirmed bachelor.
“What if he searches me?”
Walter tucked the microphone and chip into the black cotton of
her bra—and they vanished. Even Rebecca could hardly see them. “Why would he? It’s not transmitting, just recording to the chip. So no signal, only current. Even professionals have a hard time spotting these.”
* * *
Their first couple of meetings felt like duds to Rebecca. Sullivan didn’t pay much attention to her body or her story. Mostly he talked about himself, his apartment buildings and strip malls and hotels. I own half of Montgomery County, sugar. He couldn’t seem to decide whether to hit on her, buy property with her, both, or neither.
She wondered why Sullivan would make her a part of his criminal conspiracy at all. After all, he had sixty-five million dollars stashed in local banks, at least as much offshore. For bigger deals, he could raise hundreds of millions from his partners or borrow from BankAlabama. He hardly needed her.
But Boone assured her he was interested. Lots of folks can give him money. Just none of ’em look like you. A polite way of saying that if she expected to get close to Sullivan, she’d have to let him get close to her.
A move that would have been easier if she liked Sullivan even a little. But everything about him, from his drawl to his double chin to his boots—boy down near Mobile makes ’em from gators he catches his own self—turned her off. Some successful men seemed to take perverse pride in their own awfulness, the fact that they dominated despite being ugly in body and soul.
Or maybe Sullivan just had no idea how he came off.
She made sure she never hinted at her feelings. She didn’t think Sullivan was the type to notice, anyway. Still, after five months she feared she’d failed. The bureau had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting together her cover, made itself the proud owner of two apartment buildings barely fit for human habitation. She had asked Fred Smith about renovating them, but he insisted she do nothing. Nothing will blow your cover faster than fixing ’em up.
If GULFSTREAM failed, her FBI career would be in trouble. Maybe she could move to Clanton, manage the properties. Smith told her not to worry. These jobs have a rhythm; he’s checking you out.
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