“Really?” I asked.
Davies laughed and dropped the deadpan. “Of course not. You don’t even need a high-school diploma to join. Crooks with badges. How often do the police or the FBI try something like this, Marcus?”
“Once, twice a year, at least,” Marcus said.
“Doesn’t it seem strange, the way he approached you, a relatively junior employee here? And all on his own. Outside of any official setting or oversight?”
“It did.”
“There are no refs, Mike. No one is outside the game. It’s a typical law enforcement stab at us. You know we’re not Boy Scouts, but we are absolutely scrupulous. We never cross the line. I’ve been at this for forty years, Mike, and we are squeaky clean. Never one infraction. People throw a lot of shit at us, but nothing has ever stuck. The legit folks know that, and they leave us alone. But let’s say you get someone, a detective, FBI, an inspector general, whoever. He figures if he can get some dirt on the most powerful firm in Washington, anything that will embarrass us or our clients, he can cash that in for some extremely valuable favors.”
“They’re always looking for the same thing,” Marcus said. “They want us to pull some strings to get them a raise or a plum assignment. Most of the time these guys are just looking for us to land them a job at a private company, a contractor, so they can make five times more than the government pays them.”
“Fortunately,” Henry added, “it takes more than a slice of cobbler to buy off our best associate.”
He stood and clapped his hand on my shoulder. “You did well, Mike. And we know it’s been tough being in the dark on the Dragović-Walker case.”
“Can you fill me in on that yet?”
“Well, Mike, unfortunately, incidents like this Rivera business are part of the reason we have to compartmentalize. Marcus has people planting bugs on his car, for God’s sake. Not everyone is a vault like you. And know that we don’t take it lightly. You may have noticed that Marcus and I are working like first-year associates. Every so often things just come together—a piece of information falls into your hands, a once-in-a-lifetime deal lines up, and then you just have to go for it, flat-out. We do fine, of course, but when a chance comes to really bend the arc, to make a world-class firm something even greater, you have to seize it. One day we’ll be able to explain it to you. You’ll understand.”
I wondered if that deal had something to do with wiretaps, threats, and a man called Subject 23.
“We know that you’re still clocking these ninety-hour weeks. It may look like we’ve disappeared, but we notice. Why don’t you and Annie take the company bird down to the villa in St. Barth’s? Whenever you like; just let us know. You’ll get your own little place on the water, very secluded. And you can just relax. You’ve more than earned it.”
As far as buy-offs go, that topped pie.
“Annie and I would really appreciate that, Henry. Thank you.”
As I left, it made me feel better knowing that even pros like Marcus and Davies sometimes make mistakes, like mentioning the cobbler, which I hadn’t talked about. Now I knew that they were watching me.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
YOU TAKE EVERY important man in Washington. You narrow that group down to those with a possible say in matters of international jurisdiction, a daughter in boarding school, and a dead wife. You’re left with 160 people. Expand your starting pool to include the national scene, and that number grows to 348. You spend a half an hour or so trying to track down some audio of each one—a conference recording, an interview on YouTube, whatever—and now you’re talking two to three solid weeks of work. Never mind that for 40 percent of the guys, you can’t find the audio, so you put them on a maybe pile and wonder if Subject 23 is hiding somewhere in that stack while you dick around on the Internet listening to clips from the most recent TED conference. Normally I’d have a junior associate go through all this, but there was no way I could let the bosses catch wind of what I was doing. I’d been searching for Subject 23 for a week straight, every night since I’d eavesdropped on Davies and Marcus.
Doing all that on top of my usual work was murder. But my date with Detective Rivera had reawakened my concerns about Subject 23, the man my bosses had been wiretapping. I had to do something, and I was a little shy about getting back into any cloak-and-dagger high jinks after my run-in with Marcus.
So far I had squat, and I hadn’t even had a chance to dig into Radomir’s past to see this if there was anything to what Rivera said about war crimes.
It was eight o’clock on a Thursday. I wasn’t normally one to whine, but I’d had a shitty week—frostbite-and-felony-accusations shitty. On top of all that I’d picked up a cold, probably from flooding my sinuses with the bacteria-ridden Anacostia River. I was hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table going through a list of potential candidates for my mystery man that never seemed to get any shorter.
I’d just about had it. I needed a break, maybe even to let myself enjoy this new life I’d won for a minute.
Annie stood in front of the open refrigerator in a pair of boxer shorts and one of my sweatshirts, acting acutely indecisive. She examined some take-out containers, then turned to find me staring at her.
“What?” she said, and aimed those blue eyes and curls my way.
“You,” I said.
“What’s your problem, Ford?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I love watching you.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Forget this,” I said, and shut my laptop and stood.
“Come here.” I held her and swayed with her through the kitchen. She rested her head on my shoulder.
“Let me make you dinner.”
“What are you up to?” she asked.
“Nothing. Why so suspicious? A catch like you, you should be getting treated like this every day. How about dinner, a couple glasses of wine, then I’ll take you to the Gibson. Whatever you want.”
The Gibson was a throwback bar on U Street, relaxed and classy, a speakeasy-style place I would have dismissed as pretentious if it weren’t for the fact that the bartenders treated their spirits with an almost religious devotion. “Dancing after?” she asked.
“We’ll see.”
She smiled and headed toward the stairs. “I’ll get cleaned up before you come to your senses.”
I had some fresh New York strip in the fridge, and I started oil heating in a skillet. Annie disappeared upstairs to the bedroom and turned on the radio as I pulled out some salad. I could just barely hear it. She was always trying to catch up on the news.
Even in my own fridge I could never find stuff. I think it’s a guy thing. I jogged up the stairs to ask Annie if she knew where the mustard was hiding.
But I stopped dead outside the bedroom.
There was no mistaking it. The voice of Subject 23 was coming from inside.
I pushed open the door.
It was him on the radio. When I’d listened to that voice on the tape, it had been freighted with violence, fear of what Henry might do to him, and threats to strike back, but now it was droning confidently; calm, technical, and dry.
“Before we get to extradition,” he said through the tinny speaker, “don’t we need to address the jurisdictional threshold of whether the alleged crimes violate the law of nations?”
“What is that?” I asked Annie.
“What?”
“On the radio?”
“I don’t know. The news.” She turned away from her dresser. “Some Supreme Court case.”
I listened as the reporter came on the air: “That was Justice Malcolm Haskins in oral arguments last week, in a case that could have major repercussions for international human rights law. And now to Seattle, where…”
I ran downstairs to my laptop and tried to pull up audio of Justice Haskins. Everyone in Washington knew about Haskins; few, if any, knew him. He was a bit of a recluse and shied away from the usual parties and galas. In all my time schmoozing in DC, I’d seen him in pers
on once, at the party at Chip’s. Then I remembered: Irin had been at the same party.
An associate justice on the Supreme Court, he actually wielded far more power than the chief justice. He was a moderate, and so he was often the crucial fifth vote, the swing vote. In a way, he had more clout than anyone else in the capital: he had the job for life, he didn’t have to fund-raise or cut deals, and his decisions couldn’t be overturned.
And I knew his name was on my list.
I found a few clips from oral arguments the previous year, and I listened to his voice. Then I pulled up the tape of the wiretap of Subject 23 I had stolen from my bosses in Colombia:
“…I wish it were all paranoia. It’s not. The man with the information: I think I found him. I have to get him before they do. They’d do anything for the evidence. If they had it, I know, I just know, it would be the end of me.”
I went back and forth between the two voices, one a pillar of the state, the other a cornered man, dangerous and afraid. I tried to calm myself, to not overreact. They were the same man: Malcolm Haskins.
“Mike!” I heard Annie yell. “The stove.”
A grease fire jumped three feet off the range. I guess I should have turned the gas off before I dug into the wiretap. I stood, pulled a lid from a stockpot, and sealed it over the frying pan. The flames licked out the sides, then died.
I’d nearly torched myself, the house, and the girl of my dreams. But the scorch marks and stinging smoke crawling along the ceiling were the least of my problems.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
AFTER I CONNECTED Malcolm Haskins to the voice on Henry’s wiretap, a lot of mysteries from the last few weeks started to make sense.
For instance, the oral arguments I’d heard on the radio. They came from a Supreme Court case that dealt with extradition and the alien tort statute. It’s a law that goes back to the founding of the country. It says, in essence, that under certain conditions, a person can be brought to court in America for war crimes committed anywhere in the world.
If Rado had committed such crimes, as Rivera had suggested, he would be very interested in the outcome of that case. Maybe the loopholes I was going to have Walker put in the foreign relations bill weren’t so innocent; maybe they were there to protect Rado from trial in the United States.
If my bosses discovered that they could get a Supreme Court justice in their pocket, the legislation wouldn’t matter. That would explain why they took me off the case. They were all for getting me involved in low-grade hardball, but I guess it’s a good bet to leave the rookie at home when you’re talking about corrupting the highest court in the land.
I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. Trying to throw the Court just seemed nuts—but so did everything else that had happened since I met Henry, so why not?
The night I nearly burned down the kitchen, I figured out that I had at least a little bit of breathing room before anything happened between Irin and Haskins. Henry had said he would hold off on going after Subject 23—what exactly he meant by that I didn’t know—but he would act immediately if Irin tangled with him herself.
I had a buddy who had clerked on the Court a couple years back. After that, he signed up with a corporate firm and got the half-million-dollar signing bonus that’s standard for guys coming out of Supreme Court clerkships. He lasted a year, then bailed; now he just lived off the bonus and traveled.
You never knew where in the world he was going to be, but you knew he was going to be checking his e-mail. I asked him if he knew where Haskins lived or whether he was in town. He got back to me in two minutes: Not a chance he’s in DC. The guy’s like fucking Thoreau. No oral args. or conference next week, so I can guarantee he skipped out to his place in Fauquier County to play hermit for the weekend.
That same night I scanned the headlines from the past few weeks for Haskins’s public appearances and checked them against the log from the GPS I had on Irin’s car. Sure enough, at least twice she’d been to the same events Haskins had attended—one was a fund-raiser and the other a lecture at American University. She must have found out that it was Haskins who would decide her father’s fate and was sizing up the justice herself. Maybe she’d already started working her magic on him.
I called Haskins’s office the next day. I said I was from the school newspaper at Georgetown and asked if I could get some time with Haskins before his speech on campus.
“Well, son,” the press flack said, “I’m afraid he’s on vacation through next Friday. I don’t have any record of a speaking engagement.”
“Oh my God,” I said. “That’s from last year. My bad. Have a good one!” I’d probably gone a little overboard trying to sound college age, but I’d found out what I wanted. The tip from my buddy that Haskins was out of town checked out.
I could keep my eye on the tracker on Irin’s car and make sure she stayed away from Haskins so that nothing would go down until I figured out what the hell to do. I was feeling a lot better, and when I checked in on Irin (who, like Marcus’s wife, was another Internet oversharer), I found I had even more breathing room. Have fun in Paris ;) one of her friends wrote to her on Twitter. Great. The farther away from Haskins, the better.
I could head out to the Inn at Little Washington with Annie, clear my head, and figure out my next steps. I’d never needed a break so badly.
Saturday arrived at last, a beautiful spring day. Annie and I headed out of DC on 66, and soon enough the gentle folds of the Shenandoah mountains rose ahead of us.
Funny, though: I couldn’t resist glancing at the tracker, and Irin’s car had started moving when she was supposedly in Paris. Maybe a friend had borrowed it.
Funnier still, how the little bull’s-eye of Irin’s tracker seemed to be following me and Annie on our way out to the country. I didn’t worry too much. Lots of people head into the country on nice weekends.
And not funny at all, after we arrived at the inn (and Annie jumped for joy when she found the champagne I’d asked to have waiting in the room, and I discovered a bathroom containing splendors I’d never thought possible), I noticed the bull’s-eye turning right, off I-66, heading north into Fauquier County, where Haskins had his country place.
I suddenly lost my appetite for champagne and the six-course meal of a lifetime. I zoomed in and watched Irin get closer and closer to a little town about an hour away from us called Paris, Virginia. I’d never heard of it, but one of the many black-suited valets and concierges who were always hovering nearby and attending to our whims filled me in: it’s a getaway town in Fauquier County for Washington’s powerful, much like this burg. It seemed like a good spot for a crucial Supreme Court justice to get away from it all.
Henry and Marcus had said they would be watching Irin. And from what I overheard under Henry’s deck, I knew that if Irin got close to Haskins and whatever evidence he was hiding tonight, her life, and maybe his, would be in danger. Based on the warnings from Tuck and Marcus, I suspected that if the whole thing came apart and people got hurt, Henry would set me up to take the fall.
Let this one go, I thought. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t put my career on the line. And if I fucked up again with Annie, I could lose everything I’d built with the kind of girl who if you’re lucky comes along once in a lifetime. I could barely believe what I was doing—it was like I was watching myself in a dream—when I told Annie I had to go, and I would do everything I could to be back by dinner.
“Tell me you’re kidding.”
“I wish.”
We went around in circles for twenty minutes. I couldn’t believe I was arguing against her when everything she was saying—to stay here, away from trouble—made so much sense. How could I abandon all this? Risk everything I’d earned?
I could see she was getting suspicious again, thinking about the other night, the lies, the photo of Irin.
“I would think you were cheating on me, but you’re not dumb enough to do it this clumsily,” she said. “S
o that’s reassuring. I just…just tell me what’s going on.”
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Swear to me.”
“I swear.”
“It’s a case from work that got out of control. I need to drive about an hour from here and stop something from happening. Stop someone from getting hurt bad, or worse. I won’t lie to you, but I can’t tell you everything because it’s a dangerous situation, and I could never forgive myself if you got pulled into it. I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”
“I’m sorry, Annie. I can’t let you.”
“Call the police, then.”
“I will. I won’t let myself get hurt.”
“Then go. It’s fine. Just go.”
I knew I couldn’t call the police. I’d already seen Henry and Marcus put local cops in their pocket, and what could I say without sounding like a nutjob? No. This was strictly damage control: find a way to stop Irin from approaching Haskins without putting my neck on the line.
I just hoped I could do it without the whole affair blowing up. There were so many ways it could go wrong, bringing in my bosses, the press, the law; I couldn’t begin to imagine the wreckage.
The tracker on Irin’s car had stopped moving halfway between Upperville and Paris. The bull’s-eye sat in the middle of the highway. As I drove to the spot, I saw nothing: no cars and no homes, only woods and a pothole that nearly swallowed my Jeep. Maybe it had knocked the GPS unit off Irin’s car. Or it was another ambush. Either way I sped past it toward Paris.
It wasn’t really even a town, just a dozen or so Colonial houses scattered in a hollow running up to the Blue Ridge: that augured well for my odds of spotting Irin and Haskins.
I cruised the area looking for Irin’s Porsche but found nothing. After half an hour, I pulled into the Red Barn Country Store. I was starving. Tonight’s special was a bitter cup of coffee and a Snickers. Not quite the inn. I was getting a little cranky and angry at myself as I batted away doubts. I mean, what the hell was my plan here? Maybe I’d just gone nuts with paranoia.
The 500: A Novel Page 17