Some of that physical security stuff he’d taught me himself, like you should always vary your routine. He told me a story about a Marine, a lieutenant colonel, at an outpost in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. The guy never took the same route twice, standard practice in a war zone, and always varied his daily routines, except for one thing: he raised the colors every morning and lowered them every night, like clockwork. A sniper caught him one morning at dawn when the flag was halfway up the pole. Point taken. It seemed a little psycho in placid Washington, DC, but if you watched Marcus enough, you’d see it: him zigging and zagging on the way to sensitive meetings, taking long detours, and so on.
After a week or two, I was getting pretty frustrated trying to crack whatever they were working on. Marcus was out of the office more than he’d ever been. The amount of legwork he was putting in himself instead of delegating to humps like me confirmed it was a big-deal case. I couldn’t get the voice from the wiretap, the talk of killing and fighting back, out of my head. I’d been involved in Radomir’s case from the beginning, and I had to see where it was going, both to ease my conscience and to cover my ass.
The solution hit me when I heard Marcus talking in the break room about his kid’s soccer game and then complaining about the cost of private school. He may have been a spy once, but now he was a salaryman and a cheap suburban dad. That meant I might have some levers to work with, because you could be damn sure that wherever he went and whatever he did, he was getting reimbursed down to the last cup of coffee. The corporate spy’s motto: leave no trace, but save your receipts.
Expenses were due on the first and the fifteenth of the month. You reported them online, printed the report out, then put a hard copy of it with all of your receipts in an envelope and shipped it down to payroll on the first floor. Except I’d noticed that Marcus’s assistant actually walked the expenses down herself. That made things a little trickier than simply intercepting his envelope while it lay in the interoffice mailbox waiting to be picked up.
It was the fifteenth. I knew Marcus was heading off somewhere. I’d tried to schedule a phone call with him, and his assistant said he was out of the office from eleven a.m. until two p.m. She headed down to the first floor at 9:30 a.m. as usual to drop off his expense report. I took the stairs down a moment after she left, and once she’d dropped off the envelope, I headed over to the desk of Peg, our payroll lady.
I carried with me a stack of manila envelopes and a couple interoffice envelopes for good measure. Peg had a wire basket on her cubicle wall where you could drop the reports. It was about half full, and, having watched Marcus’s assistant leave, I knew his report was on top. The cubicles were jammed together, and the Davies Group had a ceiling-mounted black-dome security camera every twenty feet or so. I’d have to be sneaky.
There’s a trick cardsharpers use called the bottom change. Without your mark noticing, you swap the bottom card of the deck with one you’ve palmed. Usually you do it so you can make the mark’s card suddenly appear in your hand or jump out of the deck to oohs and aahs. It’s good with boring uncles and socially challenged middle-schoolers. More important for conning purposes, the bottom change is the reason the mark will never win at three-card monte. You know how the three-card-monte dealer will usually flip over the card the mark has chosen using another card? That’s a variation on the bottom change called the Mexican turnover, and he’s swapping in a losing card to take the guy’s money.
The bottom change also happened to be how I was going to get Marcus’s report. Misdirection is the key to getting away with anything. Peg was one of those aches-and-pains office-worker ladies. She had the footrest, the wrist pad, the RSI braces, the cat mug, and most conversations with her involved some sort of medical rundown on how she was doing (bad) and complaints about how long it was until Friday. I knew enough to get a patter going and keep her distracted.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Michael Ford will attempt a bottom change with—dramatic pause—a stack of interoffice mail!
I approached her cubicle, readied my stack of envelopes, and asked Peg how she was doing. She took the bait and went on about how her floaters were back as I checked to make sure that the envelope from Marcus’s assistant was on top. It was. So I asked her something extremely obscure about the next open-enrollment period for our group health-care plan.
“Great question. Let me check.”
As she turned to her computer and started clicking away, I brought my stack over to the wire basket. I pushed my expenses off the top of my stack with my thumb while I lifted the top envelope of the stack in the basket—Marcus’s expenses—with my pinkie and ring fingers, adding them neatly and invisibly to the underside of my stack. A perfect bottom change.
Except as I glanced down during the change, I noticed that the envelope under Marcus’s also had his assistant’s handwriting. It was identical: From: Carolyn Green. To: Expenses. First Floor.
Shit. Did I grab the wrong envelope? Or not actually pick it up?
I looked away from the wire basket as Peg answered my question.
I needed another distraction. Time to scramble. “And while I’m down here, can I ask you a second question? How does the annual fee for the Contrafund stack up against the Dow Jones index fund in the 401(k)? I’m worried they’re eating me alive.”
This she knew off the top of her head. Shit. I pressed on. “And the Diversified International?”
“Well, let’s see,” she said, and started leafing through some files.
This time it wasn’t as pretty, but I managed without being completely obvious to fish the second envelope from Marcus’s assistant out from the wire basket. Peg turned back around just as I noticed a goddamned third envelope with the same exact handwriting. I was starting to feel like I was getting hustled at three-card monte.
For the life of me, I couldn’t think of a question to get Peg to turn around one more time. I was just standing there like a dolt, acting odd, sticking out, attracting suspicion, everything I didn’t want to do. I could tell she was losing patience. Finally, I looked at the mug and said, “Oh, is that your cat?”
“Yes, Isabelle!” She reached for the mug and I grabbed for the third envelope. By this point I was palming a four-inch stack of paper and any attempts at subtlety were gone. My whole forearm was burning when we finally wrapped up our chat about Isabelle’s hip problems. When I got back to my desk, I checked my stack, and there were three envelopes addressed identically by Carolyn. Maybe she handled some other people’s expenses too. One report was for a guy named Richard Matthews, and another for Daniel Lucas, neither of whom I had ever heard of. Maybe they were contractors, I thought, and I put theirs aside. I unwound the red string on the third envelope, and there it was, Marcus’s expenses, tracking him for the past two weeks better than a private eye. I scanned for restaurants, hotels, flights, names of the people he dined with, anything that would reveal what he’d been up to. The lunches drew my eye. It was what I expected from a cagey guy, no patterns, no routines, though he tended toward nicer places that required reservations. That might be handy.
Watching him closely for the past weeks I’d discovered a couple of his tells. On his long-lunch days, when it was impossible to track him down, he would sometimes just barrel out of the office, head down, like a man on a mission. He certainly wasn’t the captain of the office pep squad normally, but the coolness was distinct.
Today had been one of those days, so I figured there was a decent chance he was off working on his and Davies’s top secret case. And while he wasn’t a regular anyplace, there were a couple restaurants he’d gone to twice. I sure as hell wasn’t going to follow him anywhere. That was too much time and too much effort for an uncertain payoff, and frankly I was scared shitless of trying to out-tradecraft William Marcus.
But I could certainly ping a few of these restaurants and check to see if he had a reservation. My personal cell phone and I took a stroll, and I went down the list. “Hello, yes. I just wanted
to confirm a reservation for William Marcus. Oh, really. Is this Lebanese Taverna? I’m sorry, I must have called the wrong number.”
Try that one twenty times.
I came up empty-handed and returned to the office feeling a little silly; the whole thing was so Nancy Drew. I should have known; nothing is ever simple.
I went to my desk to take the reports back down to Peg before anybody noticed my stupid tricks and I got into real trouble. They would probably think I was stealing from the company and give me the boot. It was a crazy risk, and for nothing. But as soon as I sat down I had to take a look at the reports again. They had all been prepared by Marcus’s assistant, and I’d been at the company long enough that I’d know if we had guys by those other names working here. I opened up the two other envelopes.
I stepped outside again and tried the office phone number listed for Daniel Lucas. Sure enough, Carolyn answered. “Omnitek Consulting. Daniel Lucas’s office.”
I hung up and thought about it for a minute. I’d just found Marcus’s alias.
I considered the names again: Matthews and Lucas. They seemed familiar. It took me a few minutes to figure it out. There was a pattern to his aliases. The surnames were variations on the Gospels: Matthew becomes Matthews, Luke becomes Lucas, just like Mark could become Marcus.
I’d made a few missteps before I worked it all out, but I was still rather proud of myself. I copied the expense reports, dropped the originals back in interoffice mail, then took another walk and tried calling the restaurants that Marcus had been visiting and asking for him under his aliases. Nothing.
I had plenty of patience. I would just keep trying until I smoked him out.
I was asking to get caught, really. I’d been noticing her for at least fifteen seconds as she jogged ahead of me on Mount Pleasant Street while I walked back from work. Staring was unlike me, but this was a special case: a healthy female form of perfect proportions flying down the sidewalk, black ponytail swaying.
I turned a corner and broke away, glad she hadn’t caught me gawking and called me on it. But as I walked on, I looked back and noticed that she stopped, then turned my way.
“Mike?” I heard her say. “Mike Ford?”
And now, as she moved nearer, I recognized her: Irin Dragović, in black running tights.
“Don’t let me slow you down,” I offered.
“I’m done,” she said, and leaned over and cupped her left knee.
“Tore my ACL playing soccer in school. It acts up in the cold.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Which way are you going?” she asked.
I pointed up Mount Pleasant Street.
“Can I walk with you a bit?” she asked.
“Sure.”
We started back toward my house. The ingénue act from the beach in Colombia was gone. She apologized for it, actually, said her friends had put her up to it, that she used to be a shy girl and maybe went overboard as a result.
I told her not to worry.
“Where’s the best place to get a cab around here?” she asked, and glanced back. We were a block from my house. My Jeep was parked across the way.
I had a feeling this run-in with Irin might not have been quite as accidental as she’d implied, but with the tramp act on pause, she was actually pretty charming: funny and down-to-earth.
Ever since I’d been pulled off Rado’s case and found the tape, I had a lot of questions about the Serb’s business. She had a privileged view into her father’s affairs and the habit of shaking people down for information, which I’d witnessed firsthand when she tried it on me on the beach in Colombia. She seemed like a good person to chat with, to see what I could shake out of her.
And of course, it was the gentlemanly thing to do. I offered her a ride. We headed back to her place, in Georgetown.
I should have just dropped her off, but as I pulled up in front of the little daddy’s-money Colonial (no roommates, of course), she finally slipped me a hint of what she was up to.
“My father’s case,” she said. “It’s more complicated than wrangling a few loopholes for imports and exports.”
“Are you telling me or asking me?”
“Can I talk to you?”
“Of course,” I said.
She looked warily up and down the street.
“Inside?”
I looked from her upturned eyes to the house. Bad idea. There was Annie to think about—though with the hours we both pulled, I’d barely seen her for the past two weeks—and my bosses, who’d told me to keep my distance from the case. Keeping my hands off the daughter of Radomir, a semilegitimate businessman who was handy with a knife, seemed like good policy as well.
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”
I mean, why shut the girl out when she was just starting to give up info? Strictly business, I told myself. Though it sounded much less convincing with her shower on in the background after we’d gone inside and she excused herself to change.
I was half expecting her to come back out in a loosely tied kimono or a silk robe, some Mata Hari number. She did return in something “a little more comfortable”—hospital scrubs on the bottom, and on top a Georgetown Basketball sweatshirt with the neck cut wide enough to bare her shoulder. I could relax a little. She looked like any other everyday-PJs college girl.
The only thing to drink in the house was vodka—typical—so I had mine with tonic and she joined me. I noticed hers was all bubbles and mine barely any. It was an old trick; Lyndon Johnson would have reamed out his secretary if she’d ever given him an unwatered-down drink while he was putting the screws to some poor drunken mark in his office. I drank mine slowly, and twice switched our glasses while her attention was elsewhere.
I took a liking to the girl, apart from the obvious physical appeal. She had a decent sense of humor, with a spot-on impression of her father’s overly refined manner (“Then it’s simply not a Sazerac,” she intoned, with a dismissive hand) and a few nicely cutting jibes about Representative Walker’s hypocrisies (apparently she knew him from his exploits among the women of Georgetown).
I steered the conversation back to her father, drawing out what she knew. I could almost forget that at the same time, she was probably trying to trap me into giving up anything I had learned.
Her angle in the whole thing, she said, was respect. Her father thought a woman’s role was screwing and cooking. Irin had too much brains and ambition for that, and so she wanted to show him she was a worthy heir and maybe earn herself a role in the family business. She figured if she poked her nose in she could prove her value by helping her father out of the jam that had originally brought him to the Davies Group for help.
It didn’t sound like the whole truth.
“All I know,” I said, “is that he came to us to work out some boring import-export loophole.” That was basically a matter of public record, but Irin’s eyes narrowed hungrily.
“It’s more than that,” she said.
“What have you heard?”
“It’s not just his business that’s in trouble. It’s him. He’s worried about something with jurisdiction, extradition—some lawsuit or trial he needs to be protected against.”
Now I was starting to see Irin’s real motives. Rumors trailed Radomir, suggesting he was connected to arms trafficking. Maybe Irin was interested in more than just overturning her father’s narrow ideas of a woman’s place. If he was brought to trial and proven to be a criminal, it would certainly make it a lot harder for her to keep up the charmed life of a darling American coed. The family would be ashamed, ruined, and the source of Irin’s allowance would run dry.
I didn’t say anything. That tends to draw people out better than any question. Most would rather say something they shouldn’t say than sit in silence.
“It’s out of Congress’s hands too,” she went on. “All I know is that there’s a new person who’s making the decision, someone powerful they need to convince.”
That sounded like it
might have something to do with my man from the wiretap: Subject 23.
“And how did you learn that?” I asked.
“Deductive reasoning,” she said innocently.
I looked at her bra strap, the smooth olive skin of her shoulder. She had moved closer to me. I’d barely noticed. As we’d talked, the growing intimacy had felt as natural as curling up on the couch beside a longtime girlfriend. She noticed me taking in her body, my eyes lingering on the deep line of her cleavage showing through the widened neck of the sweatshirt.
“Pure logic, huh?” I asked.
“Well, I may have used some other gifts,” she said. She showed me a sly smile. “It’s good to have a full quiver.”
She leaned closer, rising slightly, her knees on the couch. Her scrubs hung loose on her hips, and I could trace from her belly down, lower, along the curve and shadows of her thighs: dangerous country.
“Does that make sense?” she said. “There’s one man who the whole thing rests on. A fulcrum?”
“Maybe,” I said. She didn’t press, didn’t puncture the illusion that this whole thing was more flirtation than interrogation. Her hand came to rest just above my knee, and then slid along my thigh. Those brown eyes moved closer to mine, then she turned slightly off to the side. Just a peck. Innocent almost. Her hand slid higher, and she pressed her breasts against me, her lips to my temple.
A desire, deeper and stronger than any willpower my mind could muster, drove me toward her.
And I’d like to think it was out of love for Annie. I’d like to think I was that good a guy. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was just basic self-preservation at work. The girl had tried the straight slut approach in Colombia, and when that didn’t work, she sized me up and nailed my weak spot with this sweet girlfriend-material bit. I didn’t know who she was working for, but she was dangerous. And now that I’d stolen the tape of that wiretap, I had some dangerous information of my own. However much I fancied myself a willful man who could keep his trap shut, I was sure that fucking her would, in one way or another, prove harmful to my health.
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