“Hi, Billy,” David said, causing the other man to yelp and spin around.
“Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Grayson Cantrell. Ring any bells?”
Zanger said, “Shit.”
“Clearly, you know him,” Becky said.
“What are you doing here?” Zanger said.
“Invite us in, Billy,” David said.
Zanger looked past David and craned his neck to scan the street in both directions. “You can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t come here. Not to my house. Suppose someone sees?”
“If they saw us, they’d think nothing. If they saw you looking like you’ve just been caught in a drug bust, they might start e-mailing each other.” David gave him a second to make sense of his words. “Now, let us in, please.”
His cheeks red, Zanger stepped through the door and then stepped aside to make room for his unwanted houseguests. “My family is sleeping,” he said.
“We’ll be quiet,” David said. The Zanger townhouse looked like every other suburban Virginia townhouse of its era. A narrow center hallway stretched from the front door to a sliding glass door in the rear. A stairway with a wrought-iron railing rose parallel to the hallway on the right, and on the left, a small living area led to a small dining area, which dead-ended at the linoleum-tiled kitchen that appeared to span the entire width of the house in the rear. While not especially cramped, you could see nearly every inch of the main floor in a single glance.
“I don’t like you being here,” Zanger said. “This is twenty levels of inappropriate.”
“I have no idea what that means,” David said. He walked past his host and helped himself to a red-patterned sofa in the living room, where none of the furniture matched. “We’ll only be here for as long as it takes.”
“As it takes to do what?” Despite the suit—David pegged it as off-the-rack from Jos. A. Bank—Zanger looked more like a college student than a White House adviser.
“Please sit down, Billy.”
Zanger sat on the edge of the coffee table, of all places, ignoring the inviting brown La-Z-Boy that David wished he had chosen for himself. Becky took it instead.
“Who did you say you’re a friend of?” Zanger asked.
David smiled. “Promise me that you’ll never play poker,” he said. “Grayson Cantrell. And before you deny knowing him, may I remind you that you just let two strangers into your house on the power of his name?”
Zanger’s eyes flashed surrender. “Ask your question and get out.” He didn’t pull off tough guy very well, either.
“Okay, I’ll get right to it,” David said. “What did you think of Kirk Nation today?”
Zanger looked way too confused by the question. “Kirk what?”
David smiled. “Kirk Nation. The blog. What did you think of it today?”
Zanger stood. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about. You need to leave.”
David looked to Becky, who winked. “I’m not going anywhere, Billy. Not until we have this conversation.”
“You really think that you can just barge into my home and speak to me—”
“Billy, it’s your schedule,” David said. “I have all night. I have all the nights and days I need.” He made a show of checking his watch. “I believe that you, on the other hand, must be awfully tired.”
Zanger tried blustering again. “Who do you think you—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Billy. Be righteously indignant if you must, but you’re wasting time. I’m not buying it. Kirk Nation. What are your thoughts?”
Zanger’s eyes narrowed as he connected some important dots. “I know you,” he said.
David arched his eyebrows. He knew where they were going, but they hadn’t gotten there yet. “Not personally, you don’t,” he said.
You could almost see the Rolodex cards spinning in Zanger’s head. “You’re him,” he said. “You’re David Kirk.”
David smiled with only his mouth, making a conscious effort to keep any inkling of humor out of his eyes.
“You wrote that shit about the First Lady. You had no proof about any of that.”
David smiled.
“What’s the grin for?” Billy still had not sat back down.
“What you said,” David explained. “You just confirmed a lot of my story.”
“I did no such thing.” He seemed to grow taller. He most definitely grew redder.
“There’s no podium here, Billy. No microphones. Because it’s just you and me talking, there’s not even a record to stay off of. Yet, you just told me that I leveled accusations that I couldn’t prove.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Yet you didn’t say that they were false.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t parse words with me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Billy, that’s what we both do for a living. Answer me this: Did you have anything to do with getting my site taken down?”
Zanger put both hands on the top of his head, his fingers disappearing in the tangled mop of brown hair. He started to speak, but then his filters kicked in, silencing him.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it,” David said.
Another aborted attempt. “Who’s she?” he nodded toward Becky.
“She’s my last remaining friend,” David said. “She’s my witness.”
“Are you armed?” Zanger asked.
It was a weird question, and David recoiled from it. “Maybe,” he said. “But if you’re thinking of starting some kind of fight, forget about it. I haven’t been in a fight since eighth grade, but I guaran-damn-tee that I could kick your ass.”
Zanger seemed to do the math in his head, and the results ended with a nervous smirk. “Okay,” he said. “You want the truth?”
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” David said.
Zanger took a few seconds to screw up his courage. “You’re a murderer, Kirk. You killed a cop last night. Now you’re concocting some kind of bullshit conspiracy. It’s nuts.”
“Then why did you deny knowing about my blog when I first asked you?”
The question hit Zanger like a slap. He clearly was trying to formulate an answer, but it wouldn’t come.
“Come on, Billy. You’re busted and you know it. There’s something huge going down on Pennsylvania Avenue, isn’t there? Something bad is going down, and you’re a part of it.” David watched Zanger’s face as his words hit home. “I’m not a murderer, Billy. And looking at you—looking at the absence of panic when you realized who I was—I’m guessing you already knew that. I’m guessing that you want to put a stop to whatever shit is going down. God knows I want to. So what do you say?”
Zanger went to a place in his mind that brought tears to his eyelids. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said. When he looked to Becky, they spilled in single tracks down both cheeks.
“I could go to jail for this,” he said.
“You’re too young for that,” Becky said. “You look like a clean-cut nice guy. Whatever this secret is, you shouldn’t have to pay the price for it.”
Zanger swiped at the tears with the heels of his hands. “I got into this for all the right reasons,” he said. “Nobody gets into government to kill people.”
David’s heart jumped, but he worked hard not to show it. “I know,” he said. “Nobody goes into anything to do harm.” He had no idea if that was true, but it sounded like the words he should say.
Zanger looked at David for a long time without saying anything. His smooth jaw—he was one of those twentysomethings who looked as if he hadn’t yet shaved for the first time—flexed the whole time. David didn’t know if the stories on the Internet about prison rapes were true, but it occurred to him that Zanger had a femininity about him that would make incarceration particularly difficult.
“It started out seeming like the right thing to do,” Zanger said. “You know, it started out as protecting people. This first time you think it might be spinn
ing out of control, you sort of look the other way and figure that you just have to tweak a few things, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” David said. Clearly, Zanger thought that David had more concrete knowledge than he really did, but David didn’t want to interrupt the confession. Oftentimes, if you just kept listening, the lost details would line themselves up into a logical order. If they didn’t, you could always catch up when the monologue was over.
“Then you realize that the fixes you tried to do caused more problems. And then you try to fix those problems and five more things break.” He looked directly at Becky when he said, “I never in a million years thought that people would die. Would be killed.”
“Who was killed, Billy?” Becky asked. She leaned forward in her lounge chair and reached for his hand. “Tell me.”
“Surely you know,” he said.
“Tell me,” Becky repeated.
“Those poor people at the Wild Times Bar the other night,” he said. “I read the brief on that—I wasn’t supposed to, but I did, you know, because it was lying there on a desk.”
Becky continued to nod, devoting all of her energy and attention to Zanger, except for the flash from her eyes that told David to shut up when he took a breath to interrupt.
Zanger continued, “Nobody was supposed to die. In retrospect, I guess that the shooting was inevitable, but you don’t think that way during the planning stages, you know? Not when your boss is telling you that everything is going to be fine.”
“So the president is involved with this?” Becky asked. She tried to remain cool when she asked the question, but the fact was she should probably stay away from the poker tables, too.
Zanger showed confusion for a few seconds. “Oh, I get it,” he said. “It’s the job title. Deputy White House press secretary. Okay. Well, they don’t let me touch any of the high-profile stuff. I work for Doug Winters, the chief of staff. I’m sort of, nominally, his spokesperson.” He looked away. “Only really, I’m more of his personal assistant. He and my family go way, way back. He trusts me.”
“Ah,” Becky said. “So the guy telling you that everything’s going to be fine is just the president’s chief of staff.”
“Right.”
“It’s not the president himself.”
“Exactly.”
David found himself not blinking as he listened, his mind screaming to him that this was going to make Watergate look like a minor distraction.
Zanger continued, “You can’t use any of this on the record.”
“It’s all deep background,” Becky assured. While she might well have been playing a bluff, her promise concerned David. If they did, indeed, come out the other end of this ordeal whole and free, they would have to tell the FBI and others about what they’d just heard. How could they do that and still accept the Pulitzer that would be coming their way?
Zanger seemed satisfied, though no less disturbed. “But I never in a million years thought that tonight would ever happen.”
Becky cocked her head. “Tonight?” she asked. “What part about tonight?”
Zanger cocked his head, too, albeit in the opposite direction. He seemed equal parts confused and concerned. “Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that why the two of you came to my door?”
Becky waited for it, and David was glad. Some issues be allowed to play themselves out.
Zanger looked shocked. “Really?” he asked. “The kidnapping. I thought for sure that you were here about the kidnapping.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Nicholas Mishin loved the sound of his sleeping house. Most nights, the one-story rancher in the Colorado hill country was too damn quiet. Ever since Marcie left with Josef—he was Joey now, he mustn’t forget—the house seemed to have lost its heartbeat. She’d taken the dog, too, so for too many nights and days, the otherwise comfortable house had been anything but a home.
For this week and next, though, that would all be different. Marcie had jetted off to some far-flung place with her rich new husband, leaving him alone with his son for the first time in ten months.
It was amazing how much children could change in a year. You expect it when they’re little, when every day brings a new skill and new adventures, but Nicholas had not been prepared for the metamorphosis that had consumed his boy between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays. He’d grown tall and lean—Nicholas estimated him to be five-nine—and despite the adolescent hair that would go from clean to oily in half a day, and the zits on his nose and cheeks and chin that were the focus of so much of his vanity, he fit every person’s definition of handsome. The California sun that was so much a part of his life while living with his mother had even managed to lighten his dark brown hair.
When Nicholas first saw Josef stepping out of the people mover into the arrival lounge in Denver International Airport, his gut seized at the magnitude of the change. He worried that in the months since they’d seen each other, the boy would have become a man so quickly that they would now have to get to know each other again as strangers.
Then Joey fired up that smile, and all the fears dissolved away. Without hesitation or embarrassment, he gave his old man a big hug, and from that second on, the missing slice of time stopped mattering.
It had been a great week, including three day-trips to the slopes—Vail, Copper, and Breckenridge—and an afternoon at the movies. Tonight, during dinner in front of the television in the family room, they’d agreed that tomorrow would be a lazy, do-nothing day, giving Joey a chance to catch up on his gaming and his e-mails, while allowing Nicholas to reestablish contact with the clients and colleagues he’d been pretending did not exist.
The evening had ended with a mind-numbing tutorial on World of Warcraft, a dizzying role-playing game that to Nicholas just felt like random violence, but he had to admit that the graphics were stunning.
That had taken them to the beginning of a new day, and much to Nicholas’s surprise, Joey had been the one to call it quits.
Now, an hour later, Nicholas still lay awake, listening to the peaceful sounds of the sleeping house.
He missed the old days when they were a complete family, but family dynamics were complicated things. While Marcie had been the first to wander from fidelity, he understood that he’d played a role in that. The obsession with work—he was an environmental engineer, which in fact was a far more interesting line of work than it sounded to people on the outside—combined with his even less healthy obsession with his mother’s current husband, had made him a pain in the ass to be around.
And it didn’t help that the media was so desperately anxious to throw fuel on his fires. They baited him and he swallowed the hook every time. All that negative energy and negative attention was too much for Marcie. He could have told them to mind their own business.
But he didn’t. And now the house had its heartbeat for only a few weeks out of the year. Yet more evidence of life’s most vivid lesson: Actions have consequences.
So, here he was, awash in consequences, and left with the struggle to fulfill another of life’s challenges: He could accept things as they were and enjoy his time alone with Joey, or he could burn with bitterness and be miserable. He could provide a happy environment for Joey or he could push his son away.
You only get one shot at any given moment in your life, and the wise man doesn’t squander a single one.
Nicholas sensed that he’d been lying awake since first getting into bed, but in a dark room, it was always hard to tell. You slip in and out.
Right now, though, he felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he didn’t know why. A bad dream, perhaps? A bout of sleep apnea, for which he refused to wear that ridiculous fighter-pilot’s mask?
He heard something.
He couldn’t quite place it, but it was different from the normal sounds of the house.
Had to take the dog, didn’t you, Marcie? It was more fuzz ball than watchdog, but that puffy little mutt had ears as sharp as any hound’s.
He lay on his back, watching the ceiling, which showed itself only as a darker shade of black in an otherwise black room.
He heard it again. The pop of a floorboard outside the master bedroom door, the one you had to step on to gain access to the room. He’d often called it his ninja burglar alarm.
Nicholas sat up in bed and squinted to see the closed door. “Josef?” he said. “Is that you?” Who else could it be?
Joey’s scream split the night like a hot ax, equal parts pain and fear. “Let go of me! Dad! Ow!”
Nicholas tore the covers away and threw his feet to the floor. “Josef! What is it?”
He’d taken only two steps when the door exploded open, and then they were on him.
There was something unnerving about seeing the third-floor offices lit up in the middle of the night. Jonathan noticed it as Boxers pulled the Batmobile into the garage at the rear of the firehouse.
As he stepped out, he waited for the sound that so often came next. The pounding of paws rumbled in the night as JoeDog, completely invisible in the dark, galloped from wherever she’d been to greet him with a running body-block.
He stooped and braced for it, and took it without falling. “Hello, Beast,” he said, rubbing her ears. He allowed his face to be licked a couple of times, and then the reunion ritual was complete. If he’d been coming in through the front door, she’d have had to run a couple of victory laps up and down the sidewalk. Who knew why?
“You treat her better than you treat people,” Boxers said.
“I like her better than I like people.”
Jonathan led the way through the back door into the mudroom that led to his living room, swatting wall switches to illuminate his sprawling man-cave. Fearless, protective creature that she was, JoeDog was careful to keep Jonathan between herself and Boxers.
Once inside, all semblance of firehouse disappeared, giving way to ornate oriental carpets and elegant yet cushy furniture. Jonathan had a thing for leather, and the upholstery in the place showed it. Dom D’Angelo, his best friend and local parish priest, once told him that his decorating aesthetic ran toward early hotel lobby.
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