She was still sitting in the café, eyes wide from the implication of what he’d told her, when he turned the key in the ignition and pulled his car away from the curb.
CHAPTER 16
Three days later, her conversation with Peter was still playing off and on in the back of Ally’s mind. It was at its most distracting when she was at the office. She looked at Milton Casey differently now. It was hard not to wonder if what Peter said was correct. That there was some sort of strange connection between Feeney and Casey. She thought back to when Casey made them all watch the news segments about the Vatican memo on suitability for taking Communion. She thought about how the whole office stopped what they were doing to watch Owen Feeney address the cameras and explain why he was endorsing Arthur Wyncott for president. Nothing overtly unusual sprang to mind about the sequence of events, and even at the cocktail party where she last saw Feeney, Casey hadn’t spoken to him longer than to say hello. Still, Peter’s story had shaken her. If it had been about anything else it wouldn’t have packed the same punch. But for some time now, doubt had begun to seep into her about her church. After several years of one incident after another coming to light, she had begun to believe nothing was impossible no matter how far-fetched it might seem.
She struggled to readjust her focus to the tasks at hand. The major push to gather final support for Wyncott’s tort-reform bill had succeeded. Their efforts had targeted two senators for support: Walter Bingham, a Republican from California, and Mary Ryan, a Democrat from Pennsylvania. Both were respected across party lines and carried significant influence. Bingham’s son was planning a run for governor of West Virginia and needed assurances for the mining companies backing his campaign. An affiliation with Wyncott could help with that. Ryan was rumored to be sniffing around for a presidential run in 2020. With the endorsement of Ryan and Bingham, Wyncott had secured the necessary number of promised votes to ensure the bill’s passage. It was now on its way to the congressional hopper, where the physical bill would be retrieved, debated, and eventually voted on possibly as early as Friday morning.
Casey had directed her to resume work on her proposal to create economic development corporations to regulate funds earned by churches engaged in for-profit activities. Wyncott would be making campaign stops in Michigan and Indiana in the upcoming weeks, and Casey wanted to know how the proposal was likely to go over with audiences there. Ally wasn’t thrilled by the idea of having to work alongside Steve again. Once or twice he’d tried to make amends, as much as someone like Steve could. It started with a few fumbling invitations to join him and his friends for drinks at exclusive restaurants. “There will be a lot of good people there for you to meet.” Each time she declined. Father Gutierrez would probably have told her she was cutting off her nose to spite her face. But she’d already had more than enough of Steve Tilden, and if he thought they were “good people,” she was fairly certain she wouldn’t. More recently, he’d attempted to curry favor by bringing her a frothy coffee beverage. “I only drink tea,” she told him. This morning, he’d told her not to make any plans for Fourth of July.
His parents had rented him a boat for the summer. Everyone in the office was going to come to a party he was throwing on it. They’d get a great spot out on the water and watch the fireworks from there. It was going to be, he concluded with a phrase that didn’t make sense to Ally no matter how many times she heard it, “just sick.”
“Bring your swimsuit and a toothbrush. We’ll head downriver after.”
“We won’t be heading anywhere,” she said without looking up from her work. “I’ve already got plans.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t believe that for one minute.”
When she made eye contact she was shocked to see him smiling. Not smirking. Not mocking. But smiling.
“Okay then, Steve. I don’t have plans. I just don’t want to go.”
“Come on, Ally. Don’t you think it’s time to end the deep freeze? I mean, we’re adults and we’re colleagues.”
“Yes, we’re colleagues. Not friends. I have work to do.”
He lingered at her desk as if waiting for her to change her mind or speak to him again. She didn’t. After several minutes of dedicated ignoring on her part, he shuffled away. She overheard him talking to another colleague later when she walked past the break room. “I wish she’d just yell at me already and get over it,” he whined.
That was where Steve Tilden was wrong. Ally had stopped imagining what she would do to him with a branding iron. Now she was just waiting for the right moment to reveal him as the incompetent buffoon he was. For the preparation on Michigan and Indiana, Casey had mercifully divided the contacts list between them. Once they’d gotten a chance to speak with community organizers in each state and hear their takes on the Church tax restructuring, they’d have a chance to present their ideas on framing the discussion to best appeal to voters in those states.
She spent most of the day on the phone with a range of organizations. Even the ones who said they planned to vote for Archer, and thought most of their members would as well, were polite and took the time to listen to her proposal. In general, the various groups said they liked the idea. But Archer’s camp had been selling the idea of transparency more effectively than she anticipated. “When he said it,” an executive director named Sam told her, “it’s like a lightbulb went off. I thought, well, what are they doing with the money? I mean, half my time here is spent begging people for money or trying to convince them why we’re a good cause for them to support. Then I read about these megachurches where the pastors make six figures. Or a real estate developer buying an old school for millions.”
Sam wasn’t the only one she heard saying that. A number of her conversations came back to the metaphor Archer had used about how it was time for churches to stop behaving like corporate profiteers. The organizers Ally spoke with liked his idea, they liked what he had to say, but most of all they liked the idea that the money trail would be easier to follow. After rereading her notes from all the conversations, it became clear that presenting her original proposal was going to be a tougher sell for Wyncott than they thought. A few times she looked toward Tilden to get a read on what kind of response he was getting. Nothing in his body language indicated positive or negative feedback. She still had some time before Casey expected her finished analysis, and she knew she’d have to get to work. Based on the timeline they were looking at, Wyncott didn’t have to sell a completely new idea. He just needed to offer his variation on Archer’s. She called around to the team handling tax issues and got the exactly the answers she wanted. Under her modified proposal, Wyncott would be able to address concerns about churches abusing tax breaks and the question of transparency all at once.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard. Churches and other religious organizations would be required to convert the tax savings resulting from their special status to a set-aside fund. Use of these funds would have to be reported quarterly, including a breakdown of transactions, which would provide greater transparency. The privacy of other funds would be respected, but the amount saved each year through special status would be made public via IRS filings, along with how it was spent. A group could still pay for its leaders to travel to a conference, for example, but if they paid with money from a tax break, they’d face public opinion.
She wasn’t sure if Casey was going to go for it, but she was confident that Wyncott could make a stronger impression walking in with this idea than with a proposal that voters in Michigan and Indiana were already saying didn’t do enough. It would give Wyncott the opportunity to say he was prepared to challenge churches running themselves like corporations while reaping the benefits of nonprofit status. Casey had been clear from day one that the chances her idea would ever be more than a sound bite were slim to none. “But dress it up with some nice words,” he told her. “Make it look pretty.” So she did.
She didn’t know how long she’d been typing at her desk, but when she finally looked up, mo
st people in the office had left. It was late. This time she didn’t feel the same sense of accomplishment she had in the past when she managed to throw something together ahead of schedule. The conversation with Peter Merrick still lingered in her mind and made it difficult for her to look at what she’d written without the nagging feeling she was becoming a little too much like Casey. That by deliberately crafting something meant to pay lip service long enough to secure votes, she was officially a cheat.
The printer’s fan whirred and blew hot air in her face as she waited for it to spit out her document. The few people who remained in the office appeared to be winding down. She hadn’t seen Casey in over an hour. It wasn’t clear whether he intended to return. His door was still slightly ajar, and a small desk lamp burned brightly, splashing fingers of light onto the unremarkable wall-to-wall carpeting. Ally wanted to hand him the summary personally. At only 10:00 p.m. he might still show up. She slumped in her chair, lolling her head back to stare at the ceiling. It was throbbing from too many hours spent staring at the computer screen, and her stomach rumbled in a reminder she hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. DC was the kind of place where delis didn’t seem to stay open past 6:00 p.m., and tumbleweeds wouldn’t have seemed out of place in the neighborhoods dominated by offices and bland federal buildings at this hour. She needed a break from the office—someplace she could keep an eye out for Casey and inhale a tasteless (but caloric) sandwich as quickly as possible. When she got outside, she took off toward E Street, hoping she could find something cheap, fast, and not completely revolting.
Success eluded her. A bookstore café was still open, with a bleak selection of pastries and sandwiches that sat in the case like the last children picked for the kickball team. Even that was too good to be true. She took a seat but never had a chance to order. Although the shop listed its hours as 8:00 a.m.–11:00 p.m., by 10:20 the passive-aggressive barista had begun hovering around her seat, sweeping the floor and shouting more loudly than necessary to her colleague in the book section, “Hey, Danny? Grab that TRASH BAG there would’ja? I’m stuck CLOSING alone again!”
Dejected, she gave up and decided to head back to the office. One of her coworkers, a staffer on the international relations team, was exiting as she came around the bend. She caught the door before it clattered closed and slipped into the room silently. Twenty feet ahead of her, with his back turned, Steve Tilden stood at her desk flipping through what she could only assume was her church tax proposal. Everything in her wanted to tackle him and pummel him. He was absolutely unbelievable. A shameless, spineless reptile. But she knew better this time. She knew that the best way to take care of someone like Steve Tilden was to wait, figure out what he was planning, and then cut his legs out from under him, just like he’d done to her in that meeting.
She darted down the hallway to the break room and hung out there until a few minutes had passed. She opened and closed the microwave. She pressed the buttons loudly and often. She ran the water and clanged the coffee mugs around. And when she walked back to the bullpen afterward, Tilden was back at his desk looking like the cat that ate the canary. They were the only two people left in the office. She gave him a begrudging nod.
“I thought you left for the night,” he said.
“Nah—grabbed a sandwich and hung out watching TV with the donor relations team. Have you seen their media lounge?”
Steve was clearly relieved. “Oh yeah,” he said. “That thing is sick!”
She nodded at his notepad. “How’d it go with your calls today?”
“Fine. Not much to report.”
“Really? Nothing?”
“Nope. Just more of the same.”
“Yeah,” she looked him straight in the eye. “Mine, too. The same as the others. Guess we can keep to the original plan.” For an instant, Steve’s brows pinched together in confusion. Ally saw it—saw that he wanted to ask her about it, ask her why she’d changed her proposal. But he couldn’t.
She shrugged and sat back down in her chair. The set-aside summary was still on her desk, exactly where she’d left it. But the sheaves of paper were uneven and misaligned. She nonchalantly straightened the pile and went back to typing. From time to time, she felt Steve watching her, trying to read her reaction perhaps. She didn’t give him one, just focused on her computer screen, typing randomly on the keyboard between reading recaps of shows she missed by not having a TV.
Tilden was typing furiously, and Ally had a pretty strong notion that whatever he was working on was going to closely resemble what sat on her desk. After a while, he stood up and retrieved something from the printer. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him read over it. He was a mouth reader and a loud one at that. She couldn’t make out any of the words, but the ghostly whispering was as annoying as Tilden himself. After a few more rounds of printing and mouth-reading, he stuck the document in a blue folder. With a measured glance her way, he slipped into Casey’s office. She couldn’t turn to watch him without making it obvious what she was doing. But when at last he exited the office, the folder was no longer in his hands. He lingered around his desk after, watching her intermittently. She could feel it. Midnight came and went with no sign of Casey. Then one o’clock. She desperately wanted to go home and get some sleep, but she had to wait out Tilden. Why hadn’t he gone home? As far as she could tell, he wasn’t typing anymore. Finally, at one thirty, she heard him sigh and the creak of his chair as he pushed back from his desk.
“That’s it,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore. I’ve got to get out of this place. You want to share a cab home?”
She blinked at him. “I don’t think we live near each other.”
His face flushed. “Oh, yeah. You’re way out in Takoma.”
“Yes, way out,” she said drolly. “Thanks, though, for the offer.”
It was the first genuine thing she’d said to him in weeks. He smiled. “Don’t stay too late.”
He grabbed his bag and headed out the door. She remained at her desk for a full twenty minutes after he left, even though the curiosity was killing her, just to make sure he wasn’t coming back. There was no way he was going to get away with taking her ideas and passing them off as his own this time.
Bleary-eyed and exhausted, she finally pushed open the door to Casey’s office. It was a disaster area. His moratorium on e-mail had left documents, binder-clipped, spiral-bound and loose-leafed, piled up like Jenga towers waiting to tumble over. In the desk-lamp light, she could make out the colored folders but the blue and purple ones were indistinguishable. She picked up the first one. Plans for Wyncott’s roundtable with a green-energy coalition. The language had too much scientific content to have been written by Tilden. The next one was on a comprehensive campaign to address the crystal-meth pandemic. Definitely not Tilden. She spotted the corner of a dark folder sticking out from a pile on the far side of the desk. With its awkward angle against the rest of the more orderly pile, it looked like it had been put there in haste. Pulling it from the pile, she noticed it felt somewhat heavy and bulky. Initially, it looked to be related to the tort-reform bill. The first few lines talked about excessive expenses incurred by large awards from civil litigation and the need to cap payouts. She glanced at the second page and was about to put it back in the pile when a word caught her eye: churches. For a moment she contemplated the idea that Tilden was smarter than she’d given him credit for.
Peeking her head out of the office, she confirmed she was still alone and took the folder to her desk. The summary laid it all out: Churches and religious entities had fallen victim to the litigious nature of American society. Despite special status, they were being targeted by lawsuits for damages that far exceeded their capacity to pay. In its conclusion, the paragraph made reference to an addendum to Wyncott’s tort-reform bill that would limit the amount churches or other religious organizations would be required to pay in the event a court found in favor of the plaintiff in civil litigation against them. To minimize the negative impact on citize
ns as a result of litigation—school or community center closures, for example—this amount, the summary stated, should not exceed $200,000 per claimant. If the case had been brought on behalf of a collective of parties, similar to those brought against Big Tobacco, the award couldn’t exceed $200,000 per party, or $50 million, whichever was less. The addendum would be inserted under Division C, Title II, Section 101, a.6. Ally returned to Casey’s office and dug around on his desk until she found a copy of the bill. It wasn’t difficult to spot. At nearly eight hundred pages single-spaced, it was competing with a nineteenth-century English novel for detail. She flipped through the pages, stopping on 657, Division C, Title II, Section 101, a.6. She scanned it and, sure enough, there was a line offering protection to churches.
She wrote the page number on a Post-it and returned to the materials in the blue folder. The rest of the first document outlined the estimated impact of the tort-reform bill. A table provided sample savings based on projected models for existing companies. Defense contractor McIntyre Industries would save an estimated $380 million in damages and legal fees. Fall River Energy Corporation stood to hold onto $520 million it would otherwise have paid out. And at the bottom of the table, the recently added clause projected to save the Catholic Church nearly $700 million. She unclipped the rest of the materials. The second document didn’t have a title, but a date/time stamp in the footer indicated it had been printed in February. It was a timeline. Important polling days and town-hall meetings were in bold. The due date for Wyncott’s tort-reform bill submission was highlighted in red. So also was a possible date range for the vote on it. Election Day appeared in purple. And there, between Wyncott’s bill and election day was a three-word line: Vatican Memo Released.
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