I couldn’t believe it was happening. Like in a dream, I was watching it from outside my body: I took her shoulder and eased her back. She stared at me. I took a deep breath, then thanked her for the drinks and stood up.
“I’ll see you around,” I said, and left.
Irin had handed me two hints—that her father was worried about extradition, and that his case involved a higher power than Congress—and I had given her none. I was glad to get away unscathed.
Meanwhile, I kept my eye on Marcus. Every time he left the office with his game face on, I rang up the restaurants he frequented and checked for reservations under his aliases. I began to think the whole thing was futile, but then, the next Tuesday, I hit.
“Yes, Mr. Matthews. We have you for lunch for two at one thirty p.m. in the private room,” the host told me over the phone. He had a slight accent, Chinese maybe.
What I wanted to say was Seriously! Are you fucking kidding me? I’d almost given up hope in the exercise and was shocked that it worked. Now I knew where Marcus was heading on one of his cloak-and-dagger days.
I composed myself, said, “Excellent. Thank you,” then headed out to the restaurant in Prince George’s County to see exactly what the hell he was up to. PG County, as folks from DC call it and as PG County folks hate for it to be called, is terra incognita for most yuppies from Washington. The typical yuppie Washingtonian view is that PG is just an outgrowth into Maryland of the mostly poor and black southeastern quadrant of the District, so it’s the last place on earth you’d expect to find a guy like William Marcus, which was exactly the point.
The restaurant was in a strip mall full of Korean grocery stores. The restaurant’s sign advertised karaoke nights. I’d actually heard about the place from Tuck, who was always searching out authentic grub on the outskirts of DC. The food was supposed to be amazing. I couldn’t risk Marcus spotting me there, however. He would know something was up.
So I parked my car about three hundred feet down the road, then grabbed a spot at the window in the coffee shop across the street and waited him out. The coffee tasted burned and bitter, but the cup was bottomless. After fifty minutes I was bouncing on my stool and aching to pee, but I couldn’t afford to miss him and his accomplice leaving the restaurant.
I was still a little wary about the whole thing. I felt like maybe I was chasing after shadows and taking needless chances. After the twelfth Korean guy in a suit exited the place, each one getting my hopes up and then dashing them, I decided to give up and hit the head. Then the door opened once more. It was Marcus. He held it open, and Irin Dragović, looking voluptuous as ever, stepped into the sunlight.
Now what the hell was going on?
Marcus got back in his Benz. Irin got into her white Porsche Cayenne. They both cruised away.
On the ride back to the District, I narrowed the swarm of bees in my head down to three possibilities.
One, Marcus was fucking Irin. But that was unlikely. The guy had set plenty of honeypots himself and should know better than to take orders from his dick.
Two, Irin was acting as liaison with the Davies Group for some family business. Possible, but Rado had plenty of lieutenants and clearly didn’t want his daughter involved in his affairs.
And three, Marcus was using Irin as a honeypot to go after Subject 23. That seemed crazy. Why get the client’s daughter involved in such a tricky situation? Who knows? Maybe Rado had offered her up, a sort of bring-your-own bait deal. Maybe she’d tried to seduce me because she’d been sent by my bosses to figure out what I knew and see whether I was getting out of line. That seemed a little self-centered, though, even paranoid. I was only a bit player in all this.
The more I thought about it, the more I focused on one possibility: Marcus had used me to lure in Walker, so why wouldn’t he use Irin—so eager to prove her worth—to lure in the man on the tape?
CHAPTER TWELVE
IN THE ELEVEN months I’d been at Davies Group, I’d certainly gotten to know the seamy side of politics, but any jadedness I’d acquired fell away as soon as I heard my footsteps crack across the black and white tiles of the U.S. Capitol. All the marble heroes and double-coffered gilt ceilings made me as excited as a civics geek on a class trip.
At least, I felt that way until I caught up with Walker in Statuary Hall. It’s the old meeting place of the House of Representatives, and, except for the Capitol Dome, there’s nothing grander.
I went to check in with Walker to see if I could get any more information about Irin and her father’s business. Walker had some oversight on foreign relations, and given his extensive cocksmanship over in Georgetown, the odds were good he’d either run into Irin or at least heard a bit of background on her. And after our suburban adventure, the guy was just dying to do me a favor.
So in essence, I wanted to talk smut with Walker, and he invited me to Statuary Hall, America’s closest thing to a sacred pantheon. The whole place was full of little kids and nuns. I was starting to feel worse and worse.
I caught sight of Walker standing near Andrew Jackson’s feet and headed over.
“What the—” I edited myself as a kid toddled past. “What’s all this?”
“I’m not really sure. Tight schedule today; sorry about double-booking you. I think it’s a memorial for a woman missionary. Maybe something about orphans. I’m just here for a couple photos. My pollster told me I need to soften my image among women. Charles knows.”
He pointed to the corpulent aide following about twelve feet behind us. Fun fact: senators and congressmen, the guys nominally running the country, typically have no idea what’s going on. They spend all their time begging donors for money to get reelected, schmoozing, and flying back home to officiate at pig races at state fairs. Walking haircuts, they rely on their party bosses and an army of aides—socially challenged ex-debate-team nerds—to tell them what to think. Their lives are blocked out in ten-minute increments, and assistants constantly steer them like brain-injury victims from event to event.
“Can we keep this conversation between us?” I asked.
“Of course,” Walker said, and considering the dirt I had on him, I believed he actually would.
“Good. I wanted to ask if you know a girl named Irin Dragović.”
He repeated the name, then scrunched up his face in concentration. “I may need a little more to work on.” Given Walker’s volume, I had expected him to be iffy on ladies’ names. I showed him Irin’s Facebook profile photo: a lovely shot, about 40 percent cleavage, of her drinking from a bottle of Moët & Chandon White Star.
“Oh, yeah,” Walker said. “She’s hard to forget.”
“What’s her story?”
He thought for a moment. “Comes on very strong. Knows what she wants. Gets off on the power thing big-time. She wanted to go for it in my hideaway”—those are little offices hidden in the hallways near the House chamber—“no kid bullshit, either. No cling. No sentimentality. She’s a pro. And…”
Walker looked around, checking to see if anyone was nearby. Charles was out of earshot. A pack of nuns was about fifteen feet away. Still, given Walker’s typically dirty mouth, seeing him grow sheepish about saying something made me genuinely nervous about the bomb he was going to drop.
Daniel Webster’s statue loomed behind us, glowering down. I felt like a heel wringing kiss-and-tell out of Walker under the judging eyes of the Great Expounder of the Constitution, but I had bigger problems to worry about.
“Give,” I said.
“Rough stuff,” Walker said. “You remember that crazy chick I was telling you about?”
“Not particularly.” He had a lot of war stories, and I tended to zone out during them.
“At the Ritz?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“Well, I met her at that party at Chip’s. You know, that night we went out to my friend’s place and…”
“I remember,” I said. Getting arrested alongside whores and drug dealers tends to stick in your mind.
“She caught me alone in the library, came after me like a hungry whippet. We texted back and forth for a few days after that, then ended up meeting for a drink at the Sofitel. We got ourselves a room. One thing leads to another and I’m up to my ears in it and she asks me to give her a spank.
“I’m a gentleman, so I oblige. Again, and again. And then she asks me to smack her face, insists on it, actually. That’s not my thing, but I give her a playful little touch on the cheek. And then she leans up on her elbow. She stops the whole show and she says to me, like she’s my basketball coach or something, ‘Hey, listen. Give it to me real, across the face.’”
Walker gave me a can-you-believe-that look.
“Well, that wasn’t going to happen,” he went on. “Who knows what this girl is after? And I am sure not going to be tussling with her like that, maybe leaving marks and all. We went on for a while, though I think by that point my heart wasn’t in it.
“And God, we were going for it, and just as I was about ready to spit, she’d pull away. Just leave me hanging. She had me pinned and wriggling, boy, all the power in her hands. In the end she had me begging like a dog.”
I heard a gasp at that point in Walker’s story; it sounded like it came from right next to us, which was weird, because we were off by ourselves. Fun fact no. 2: The half-dome shape of Statuary Hall affects the acoustics in the chamber, so if you stand at one spot (where John Quincy Adams’s desk was, actually), you can hear conversations on the other side of the room as if they were a few feet away, and vice versa. Adams supposedly used it to spy on the loyal opposition. So too, apparently, had a sheet-faced Sister across the hall. I gathered she was the one who had gasped after picking up a few bars of our conversation.
I ushered Walker a few feet away.
“What was she trying to get out of you?”
“Access. Introductions. Whatever she wanted, really. I think she was using me as a stepping-stone to bigger things, more powerful men.” Walker shook his head. “I’d rather not tangle with her again.”
“So you stopped calling her.”
“She’d already moved on. I heard she was going after some high-up at Treasury. That’s the thing. It wasn’t really about sex for her.”
He paused as we waited for a few representatives to pass.
“It was a power thing. You could see it in the game she played, letting you be the boss and then turning the tables, wringing out of you whatever she wanted. And she told me outright. ‘You’re one of the most powerful men in the country,’ she said. ‘I’m a twenty-year-old girl. And I can make you grovel to fuck me.’”
Walker laughed. “She certainly was right about that. And with those eyes and that rack in this town, she might be running the country by the next election.”
“And her father?”
“He’s the kind of man you never want to cross. I know just enough about him to not want to know more.”
“How’s that?”
“I may have to do business with him at some point, so the less I know the better. Plausible deniability, that’s the name of the game.”
“You know anything about legal troubles, some extradition issues?”
“No, and I don’t want to.”
He was clearly in the dark on Rado, so I let it rest there. We walked on for a few feet, and I caught Walker giving me a look that pretty clearly meant You sly dog.
“And what’s your interest in the lovely Irin Dragović?” he asked. “Sparring partner, perhaps?”
“It’s not what you’re thinking.”
“I’m sure,” he said, and shook his head. “Aww, sticky sticky.” Again with the sticky. And again, I didn’t even want to think about what that meant.
An old schoolhouse-style clock buzzed five times in the corridor behind us. Near its top, between ten and two o’clock, it had eight lights. Five lit up white, and one red.
“I’ve got to go vote,” Walker said.
“Is that what those signals mean?”
“Fuck if I know,” he said, and lifted up his BlackBerry. “I just got a text from Charles.”
He beckoned the aide over. “You’ve got my cheat sheet for me?”
Charles handed over an index card.
“Yea. Yea. Nay. Yea,” Walker said as he read it. “Easy peasy.”
“What’s the vote on?” I asked.
Walker threw up his hands. “Beats me. Ask Charles. I’ve got to run. Say, you have plans for tonight? Having a little party. Should be a real hoot.”
Walker and I had different ideas about what constituted a hoot. “Rain check,” I said.
I fled the nuns as quickly as I could. I’d been hoping my suspicions were wrong. Everything would be so much easier if I could just let the whole matter rest. But no. Based on what Walker had told me, I was even more worried about where all this was going. Irin seemed like perfect bait for the man on the tape.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
WILLIAM MARCUS WAS certainly a cagey operator, but I think after all his years in the field, the spy had finally met his match: Mrs. Marcus. For every alias and out-of-the-way meet-up Marcus used to confound foes real and imaginary, there was Karen Marcus, Facebook fiend, posting Is it wine time yet? and Can’t wait to see you at the shower this weekend. xoxoxo. She hadn’t quite mastered the labyrinth of privacy settings, so it was almost as good as having a homing beacon up Marcus’s ass.
Almost, but not quite, which is why I was skulking in the bushes outside his house in McLean, getting ready to plant a homing beacon on Marcus’s ass. Well, actually, on the wheel well of his Mercedes. They were at her niece’s baby shower up in the Brandywine Valley. The minivan was gone.
I’ll be the first to admit that technology takes all the fun out of snooping on people, and I had tried to do it the old-fashioned honest way, with all the shoe leather that entailed. During the weeks I’d spent attempting to get a bead on Marcus’s mysterious lunch dates, I dug into the literature on how to tail people. It’s great stuff: leapfrogging, paralleling, the ABC technique. One night I was reading up on the best cars to use for a stakeout when I stepped back and asked myself what the hell I was thinking of doing.
The truth was, I’d grown very attached to my blissful new yuppie life. I had a great crew of friends, the beautiful girlfriend, the backyard with the fire pit and the cold beer.
Annie and I, even though we were working crazy hours, were doing great. The week after my Irin run-in, Annie had to go to Paris for work (some Davies project that was being kept pretty quiet). I asked her if she could tack on a long weekend there and if I could come meet her (last-minute transatlantic trips were one of many luxuries afforded by the Davies Group that I could see myself getting used to). I’d been growing increasingly worried, even as we got more serious, that there was some conflict, some reservation, some hidden issue holding her back. It kept me from asking her to move in, or saying I love you. The latter I’d skirted around but always got the sense from her that it wasn’t the time. It was strange, and I wondered if it had something to do with all her one-on-one work with Henry or with a wariness about my past or my family.
But after Paris, I felt settled, sure. On our last night there, we were standing on the balcony of our hotel room, with a clear view over the Tuileries from La Défense to Notre-Dame. The setting, coming at the end of a four-day romp where we’d barely left the hotel and Annie had surprised me with quite a bit of only-on-vacation new material, was romantic enough that she probably would have said “I love you” to a pigeon, but I didn’t care. She said it to me. I said it back. She was mine. It had all come true.
Maybe that’s why I was letting these suspicions about my bosses drive me to take such risks: you get everything you want and all of a sudden you’re bored and want to start fucking it all up. But I wasn’t going to let that happen. Annie and I had reservations at the Inn at Little Washington coming up in two weeks. It’s a super-deluxe country inn, the best on the East Coast, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the meal of
my life and vacation sex by getting myself killed playing spy versus spy against William Marcus.
Maybe I’d stumbled onto some wicked plot that endangered lives, but maybe I was just drawing lines between dots that didn’t connect and getting myself worked up over nothing. It would have been easy enough to forget about what had happened, to lose myself in the countless hours I was putting in at Davies. But every time I tried to turn away from the case of Rado and Subject 23, some new reminder would appear, like when Tuck, my closest friend at work, quit.
One day, I was grabbing coffee in the break room, though break room doesn’t do it justice. On the second floor, it was set up like an old-fashioned men’s club, with beautifully worn leather couches, checkerboard marble floors, and food available at all hours. Tuck came up to me with a grim look on his face.
“I’m moving on, Mike,” he said. “New job. Over at State. I wanted to tell you before you hear from somebody else.”
“Congratulations,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure if that was the right word. You could spend fifteen years climbing over bureaucratic deadwood at the State Department and still have less clout than a fifth-year associate at Davies Group. Tuck’s father was the deputy secretary, though, so I was sure he’d have a little help on his way up.
“Why the shift?” I asked.
He looked along the paneled ceiling of the break room, and then said, “Why don’t we take a walk.” I glanced at the cameras hidden in the joinery overhead, then followed him out.
We walked outside, past the oddly juxtaposed compounds of Embassy Row: a Beaux Arts mansion beside a concrete box beside an Islamic complex crowned with minarets. Tuck went on about the dossier he’d be working on at State, about big opportunities and the family tradition of public service, but I could tell something else was on his mind.
“Why are you really leaving?” I interrupted.
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