“Oh, and you don’t want sex?”
Sarah shrugged her shoulder. “Meh. Not as much as I want the pork belly from Redbird.”
Mark drew Sarah close and kissed her. Whatever his day brought, he knew he’d be rescued by these moments with his wife. Small moments that brought him more joy than closing any deal. “You’re the worst, you know that?”
Sarah was about to respond when they both heard a voice calling from behind them.
“Look at these little lovebirds! Get a room, you two!”
Mark knew who it was before he even turned around: Aaron Cutter, Pentagon IT something-or-other, Sarah’s college flame, and a general pain in Mark’s ass.
“Aaron,” Sarah said, forcing a pleasant response. “What a nice surprise to see you.”
Aaron grabbed both of Sarah’s hands and pulled her arms away from her body, scanning her from head to toe. A minute into their encounter and Mark already wanted to toss Aaron over the side of the building. He was half a foot shorter than Mark and had the physical composition of a waterbed.
“Check you out!” Aaron said, crass and loud. “You’re looking hot tonight!”
“Hey Aaron,” Mark said, forcing Aaron’s hand off Sarah by way of a firm—maybe too firm—handshake. “We were just on our way out.”
“Of course, of course,” Aaron said, agreeing but not going away. “I just wanted to say what’s up, see how you’re holding up.”
“We’re good,” Sarah said, trying to speed the conversation along. “How are you?”
“I’m good, thanks for asking. Just gearing up for this big security upgrade I’ve been hearing about. Believe me, it’s looooong overdue.”
Aaron was about to jump into another topic when Mark cut him off. “Wait,” he said. “Why are you asking how we’re holding up? You say that to people after something bad has happened.”
Aaron’s face dropped, though Mark knew it was for intentional dramatic effect. He relished these moments, and Mark knew it.
“Well, you lost out on that contract,” Aaron said as he ran his fingers through the wild black curls that grew like weeds on his head. “Before I left the office, I’d heard that General Hodges was sending paperwork over to what’s his name’s client?”
“Terrance Wilson.”
“Yeah, that dude.”
“No, no,” Mark said, feeling a slight bit of panic grow within him. “I straightened this all out just today, this afternoon. The contract is going to my client.”
“Oh, shit. Mark, man, I honestly didn’t mean to rain on your parade. I thought you knew—as far as I know, all this just went down a few hours ago.”
Mark’s stomach dropped, but he’d been in plenty of tight spots before. He knew not to let panic get the best of him; instead, he’d let the scorn he harbored for Terrance Wilson take the driver’s seat. He couldn’t allow this to happen. After everything he’d endured, he couldn’t lose that damn contract.
He looked at Sarah, who knew immediately. “Go,” she said. She was doubtless disappointed, and Mark swore a silent vow to make it up to her.
“I’m sorry,” Mark said, searching for words that wouldn’t come. “I just—I have to.”
With nothing left to say, nothing that could assuage Sarah’s hurt, Mark kissed her on the cheek and bolted out the door. He sprinted down the street, hailing a taxi.
“The Pentagon,” Mark told the driver. “And hurry.”
7
9:58 P.M.
“You need to take a leak? That’s your cover for gaining entry? This isn’t a McDonald’s, Mark. It’s the Pentagon.”
Private First Class Danny Rand had been working the Pentagon overnight security shift for over a year. He and Mark met at the retirement party for some Marine general the previous winter; Mark sent him a pair of courtside Wizards tickets the next week, saying he’d gotten them last minute and couldn’t use them. Mark sold it as one fan connecting another—after all, what kind of travesty would it be if such great seats went to waste? But, in reality, Mark figured it was never a bad thing to have an inside man at the Pentagon. And now, here he was.
“Listen, Danny, you know me.”
“Actually, I kinda don’t.”
“Well, you know me enough to know that I’m not a threat in any sense of the word. Okay? I just … look. You give me a visitor’s pass, I’ll get you off the night shift. I’ll move heaven and Earth to get you off this night shift. I promise you that.”
Danny folded his arms over his chest and cocked an eyebrow. “And?”
“Seriously? Fine—and I’ll get you more courtside seats.”
Danny stepped to the side and unlocked the security door, letting Mark pass. As Mark hustled through the metal detector, Danny delivered a final warning with no indication of humor in his tone. “You have thirty minutes. Not thirty-one, not forty-two. Thirty. And if you’re not back here, I’ll come find you, knock your ass out, and feed you to Homeland Security. Understood?”
Years from now, Mark figured he’d look back on this day and call it “pizza delivery day.” Thirty minutes or less with everything. Right now, though, he didn’t find much humor in having an impossible clock to race against. He was just annoyed.
But, he couldn’t let that show. So instead, Mark turned, walking backward to keep moving, and shot Danny a mock salute. “I’ll be back in twenty-nine, sir. You just worry about which lady friend of yours you’ll be impressing courtside, all right?”
* * *
The mail room was still bustling with a skeleton crew prepping the day’s outgoing mail for tomorrow’s release. The room itself was cold and gray, lit by unflattering overhead fluorescent lights that cast the entire operation in a milky gossamer sheen. And for all Mark knew, the lights probably came equipped with security cameras, adding to the Kafka-esque feel this place was trying hard to sell.
There was no doubt that he shouldn’t have been there. Mark knew it. During daytime hours, the mail room would be closed off so no random wanderer—like, for instance, Mark—could infiltrate its workings and introduce who knows what to the fast-moving system of ingress and egress. Anthrax? A letter bomb? The wrong Netflix disc? Mark had no idea, and he really wasn’t concerned about security issues, especially as he was guilty of at least two security breaches just by being there. And he was plotting a third—mail fraud. He had to get his hands on a piece of General Hodges’s mail and extract his office location from it. In an operation this robust, the odds of snagging such a specific piece of mail, Mark knew, were not in his favor.
One of the best lessons Mark had ever learned is that when you don’t belong or don’t know what you’re doing, fake it. In fact, do more than fake it: Act like you’re somehow in charge. Even the vaguest sense of authority tended to keep people from questioning things too deeply, at least for a little while. Mark’s job was to understand people, and he was especially skilled at understanding what they wanted. If you could take what one person desired and satisfy it with what another person had, and vice versa, then you got the deal done. In the mania of brokering deals, what people wanted most was to know the plan. They craved feeling like they were in strong, capable hands, and that meant someone had to step up and be the leader. Someone had to take control. And when you did that, people tended to get in line and follow. In fact, they’d wanted to follow all along. With that in mind, if Mark was going to make it to Hodges through the mail room, he wasn’t going to get there through kindness and sincerity; he needed to bullshit his way through by acting like a person who was in charge.
In the middle of the room, Mark spotted a tall older man with a clipboard directing traffic. He ordered one worker to a stack of packages over here, another to a row of boxes over there. Then he checked his watch, released a long sigh, and looked up to the heavens as if praying that it would all be over soon. Mark pegged him both as the supervisor and a man who wanted, above all, to be left alone. That made him perfect. People who couldn’t tolerate being bothered were always the most desper
ate to remove the source of bother.
Mark approached him hastily, giving the impression that there was no time to waste. “Excuse me, excuse me. Sir? You’re in charge? They told me to look for you.”
“God damn it,” the supervisor replied. “Whose Amazon package got stolen this time?”
“What’s your name?” Mark asked, intoning his words to sound more official. “And are you or are you not in charge?”
“Yeah, yeah. I supervise the night shift. Name’s Randall. Look, just tell me who’s missing their package, and I’ll tell you what hands it passed through. That’ll narrow down the culprit in no time.”
“There’s no culprit, Randall. Well, except for somebody’s negligence.”
“I don’t follow.”
Mark walked Randall over to what he assumed to be an outgoing bin of mail. He picked up a few letters, casually thumbed through them, then tossed them back onto the pile. “General Hodges sent an outgoing package down here earlier today. We’ve sent three requests and have been waiting four hours for someone to retrieve it. Do you think the general should come down here himself and get his package back? Is that what you all think? Maybe while he’s busy doing that, you can strategize how to win our next war.”
“Wait, wait…,” Randall said, rubbing his temples. “I didn’t get any request to intercept a package. Are you sure—”
“Am I sure we asked more than once to get the general’s package back to him? Are you sure that’s the question you want to be asking right now?”
Mark saw Randall feeling the pinch. A little bit of perspiration appeared on his forehead and his breathing got a little deeper. His rheumy eyes started to narrow. “Okay, okay. Look, I’ll track the package myself and have it sent up immediately. If you can tell me General Hodges’s office location code, I’ll have it taken—”
“All hands on deck, Randall! I want everyone here, including you, to rummage through this disaster of a mail room until you find it. I’ll wait.”
Randall threw up his arms, then called in his team. As he delivered instructions on finding Hodges’s parcel, Mark looked at the people surrounding him and realized how much he was counting on these total strangers. They had to not only materialize a piece of mail Mark wasn’t even sure existed, but that letter, package, whatever, had to include Hodges’s return address, complete with his office location.
Mark waited, each moment stretching on endlessly. He couldn’t believe so much—his career, his future, his reputation—was going to be decided in the Pentagon’s mail room. Succeed and his sins would, largely, be forgiven. Fail and he might as well tie a red cape around his neck and wait to be gored by a pack of stampeding bulls.
Randall walked over to Mark, arms folded over his chest. “Who did you say you were again?”
Mark was taken aback by Randall’s temerity. “William Lowe,” Mark said.
“Where’s your ID?” Randall asked, pointing to the identification card clipped to his belt.
Mark looked at Randall—this wasn’t small talk. Mark was being vetted, and he had nothing to say in response. Claiming he left it in his office wouldn’t cut it; any follow-up question would take a wrecking ball to his house of cards. No, he didn’t know where his office was. No, he couldn’t go get it. The tables turned on Mark, and now he was the one sweating. But then, as if to undermine Mark’s steadfast belief that the universe was a cold and indifferent place, he heard the two words that salvaged his day:
“Got it!” someone yelled from behind one of the shelves.
And out came a middle-aged woman who walked with a slight limp and a voice so raspy she had to smoke no less than a carton a day. “Was with the next batch to go out, so you got here just in time.”
Mark grabbed the package greedily and inspected the return address. The coveted information was there—Mark already knew what to do, and now he knew where to go. He thanked the chain-smoking lady and hurried toward the exit. Randall tried to intercept his stride, asking clumsily about Mark’s ID, but Mark wasn’t about to allow even a starving puma to get in his way. A burned-out overnight mail room supervisor had zero chance.
“You just be glad no one lost their job tonight,” Mark said, then shoved the exit door open. He had only eighteen minutes to go.
* * *
The door to Hodges’s office was monochrome gray, like every other door up and down the hall. Except behind this door was Mark’s future. Mark took a moment to collect his thoughts. He heard Hodges inside, shuffling around, maybe pouring himself a drink, judging by the sound of clinking glass. Mark had his facts, his case was solid, his conviction on behalf of his client was real. All he had to do now was execute. And that started with a knock on General Hodges’s door.
Mark had never met Hodges, even while trying to secure the contract. Mark knew two things about the decorated general: first, he was a celebrated war hero who had the rare distinction of being respected by the many people below him and the few above. Second, Hodges was known to be a guarded and private individual. He had no family, no life that anyone knew of outside the U.S. military, which made him difficult to reach on a personal level. That was worrisome. Commonalities helped drive connections. Mark made his clients and partners feel like friends, not commodities, and he used his authenticity to compensate for any shortcomings in negotiations to get deals closed. General Hodges, Mark knew, required a different strategy.
The voice calling for Mark to enter the office was softer than he expected. Though Mark had watched Hodges in press conferences over the years, he expected him to sound, away from the camera, like a man who’d endured war and combat—Mark expected him to sound hard, abrasive even. But the “come in” that came from the other side of the door could have come from anyone at all.
Mark did as he was told. He opened the door and was greeted by Hodges, who looked back over his shoulder at Mark, drink in hand. The room was sparsely decorated. A simple, tidy desk was positioned on Mark’s right and behind it stood an American flag perfectly upright on a pole. It—the flag—reminded Mark of his days as a Cub Scout. Next to Hodges was a drink cart with a decanter of whiskey resting on it. Hodges didn’t recognize Mark, but wasn’t alarmed by his presence, either; Mark was certain the general had already pinpointed a half dozen ways to kill him before he could so much as pantomime a gun out of his thumb and finger.
“Can I help you? Is there something wrong with the package?”
Mark looked down at the package gripped in his hands, having forgotten about it completely. “No … no, sir. I’m actually here to talk to you about something different. My name’s Mark. Mark Strain.”
“Ahhh,” Hodges said, heading over to his drink cart. “The lobbyist. How’d you get in here?”
Mark entered the office with hesitant, careful steps. He didn’t want to seem brash or inconsiderate of Hodges’s space. “That’s a long story, sir. But I think it’s safe to say that I used all of my skills to make it here to you.”
The general smiled. “Okay, you’re here. What do you want?”
“Well, sir,” Mark said, placing the package on Hodges’s desk, “I’m just going to be honest with you—I think giving the contract to Lockhorn is a huge mistake. With all due respect. Sir.” Keying everything to being humble and respectful was a gamble, but it felt like the right play.
Hodges paused, his poker face unreadable. Authority figures—especially military authority figures—didn’t typically enjoy being defied, so Mark was ready for anything. Anything except Hodges being patient and kind.
“I see,” Hodges said after his contemplative moment. “Would you care for a drink, Mark?”
“Ummm, well, I would typically say no. But after the day I’ve had … yes. I would love a drink.”
Hodges poured Mark a healthy glass of bourbon, neat, and handed it to him. “I hope you’re driven by more than winning a contract,” Hodges said. “Cyber warfare … it’s a big deal these days. We’ve got terrorists trying to breach our servers round the clock, the Rus
sians messing with our elections, and who knows what else. So, before we go any further, I want you to ask yourself if this is about a personal win, or is it about something greater.”
Mark moved to the window to capture the moon’s glow over D.C. He loved the D.C. skyline at night. After a moment of soaking in the district he so adored, Mark took a long drink, and the whiskey made his eyes burst open. He was grateful his back was to Hodges.
“General, I’m in a pretty good place, professionally. I’ve worked my way to the top of my firm, and that affords me certain … licenses. One of which is being selective about who I take on as clients. If I don’t believe in what I’m selling, I don’t sell it. Not anymore. So, if you’re asking if I believe in Verge, the answer, without a doubt, is yes. Yes I do.”
Hodges eyed Mark, contemplating. “That’s a better response than what I got from the other guys, I can tell you that.”
“Verge knows what they’re doing, sir. They have an impeccable record, and they’ve proven, time and time again, to be on the cutting edge of cyber defense. I know this is a delicate time, and this contract is more important than most people realize. But Verge is the firm who will keep the Pentagon protected.”
“But Verge hasn’t secured a contract this large in its history,” Hodges countered. “How do you know they can handle it?”
Yes. A crack. Asking for details meant more time to negotiate. Time to push.
Mark took a long, cleansing breath as he steadied himself to make his closing argument. “General, this morning—which, to be honest, feels about ten years ago—my wife told me she was pregnant. I can’t even wrap my head around what that means, being a dad. It’s so … immense. The point, salient to you and me, is that even in this very, very brief window of time I’ve entertained the idea of being a father, I’ve felt the stakes of the world get a lot higher. And that’s why, if someone’s going to be on the frontline of this battle, I’ll sleep better at night knowing it’s Verge.”
The Throwaway Page 6