“It’s Henry you want,” I said. “And Henry wants me.”
Rado came back with a fillet knife, thin and sharp as a razor. One by one, with a few quick cuts, he removed the buttons on my shirt, then spread the fabric, exposing my chest.
“What you are saying does make sense. But as you know, it will need to be corroborated. Trust isn’t one of my strong suits.”
He touched the cold tip of the knife a few inches above my belly button and pricked the skin.
“You’ve heard about the heart thing?” he asked casually.
“Yes,” I said.
“It takes far too much effort to go through the breastbone.” He thumped mine with his fist like it was a hollow door.
“You can keep your victim conscious for more of the experience if you go under the sternum, what’s called a subxiphoid incision.”
“I’m offering you a deal,” I said. “We can help each other.”
“We’ll see,” Rado said and pressed the knife against my skin. As he tightened the flesh with two fingers of his other hand, my skin opened cleanly under the knife.
It was a long night with Rado. And that was just my first stop.
The next day, a blue spring morning, Rado and a handful of his favorite goons gave me a lift up to Kalorama, to the Davies Group mansion, for an appointment with Henry. I believe this is about when you first came into the story. My heart was intact, for the moment.
As they dropped me off, Alex flashed me his Sig Sauer. As if the gun weren’t enough, in the backseat Rado lifted a napkin to his lips, still hungering for my heart, to underscore what was at stake.
They waited around the corner while I shuffled my injured body toward the office. Davies Group had shut down for the holiday weekend, leaving only Henry and his war cabinet: the security team who toiled away in parts of the mansion the respectable folks never saw.
Marcus greeted me at the door. I could see the gap where my dad had knocked out his tooth. I hid a smile. As he brought me through security, I could tell his interest was piqued by the metal detector’s beeping at my chest. They frisked me, then stripped me, looking for weapons and wires. Henry was too smart to fall for any sting, any electronic surveillance.
Marcus searched my pockets and came out with two sets of fake credentials and something I didn’t know I’d been carrying: blueprints for a house, carefully folded, which my father, sleight-of-hand man to the end, must have slipped in my pocket at the hospital.
Even Marcus winced as my shirt came off. The cut was about four inches long, and the skin puckered around the metal. Rado hadn’t gone too deep with the fillet knife back at the White Eagle, and the bleeding stopped not long after he picked up what he had at hand—a dependable Swingline stapler—and clamped the wound shut.
It had been a long and strange week, easy enough to catalog from head to toe as I put my clothes back on: the hand burns from the DOJ fire, the facial cuts from the car crash, the two-pronged welt on my neck from the Taser. The hanging had almost dislocated my shoulder. Rado’s fresh handiwork stood garish on my chest. The healing puncture wound on my thigh from the night—it felt like a year ago—I’d listened as Marcus executed Haskins and Irin. And my swollen knee, something was definitely off in there, either from one of the falls or from barreling the Volvo through the door.
After I suited up, Marcus pointed to the weathered envelope I was carrying and said, “Envelope.” He wanted to search it.
“Not until we have a deal,” I said. “This will go wide if I disappear.”
Marcus escorted me through the concrete corridors of the secure areas, past where Gerald worked his surveillance magic, to Henry’s office. Marcus led me in, then stood guard outside.
Davies was at his window, taking in the view. Washington lay at our feet. I knew the bargain he wanted.
He would give me the kingdoms of the world in all their glory for my soul. It would be so simple. Just give in to him, let him corrupt me, and the whole nightmare would be over. No worries about Rado and his fillet knife, or about Annie’s safety.
He wanted a deal. He wanted to feel like he owned me again. And I was afraid, not of all the physical threats laid out against me, but of not being strong enough to resist Henry’s promises, his practiced manipulations that had slowly, insidiously consumed this town. I feared that he would turn me, that I would do anything he said, that, now that I understood the price of honesty—my father’s life, Annie’s pain—like all men I would happily choose corruption.
I couldn’t let that happen. I had to beat him at his own game.
Henry sat me at the far end of his conference table and leaned over me. “Just say it and all this is over. Come back to us, Mike. It only takes one word: yes.”
Henry wanted me as a protégé, as a son. And I knew he wouldn’t let me give up easily. To be worthy I couldn’t simply accept his terms, roll over, and beg to be taken back. Henry would only accept a man as cagey as he had been in his young, hungry days, someone playing hard to get.
I placed the sealed envelope on the table. For Henry, it was the one piece of leverage that could take him down: the torn-off lobe of his ear along with the police report that laid out his role in Pearson’s death. I had two things he wanted: that envelope, and myself.
“This is the only real trust, Mike,” he said. “When two people know each other’s secrets. When they have each other cornered. Mutually assured destruction. Anything else is bullshit sentimentality. I’m proud of you. It’s the same play I made when I was starting out.”
Only I knew who really killed Haskins and Irin. With that and the envelope, I was very dangerous indeed.
My dad was dead, and Henry for now believed that Annie had betrayed me. He had nothing to lever me with. For once, Davies didn’t have the overpowering advantage he was used to. It was time for me to get greedy.
“You and Marcus killing Haskins and Irin, owning the Supreme Court. That move was for more than just Radomir’s case. That’s a long-term investment. How much will it bring in over time?”
Henry smiled, a proud father. He saw where I was going. It’s exactly what he would have done.
“Enough.”
“I’m curious,” I said.
“I had a dozen clients with interests in Supreme Court decisions lined up, just to start. Over the next decade, we’re talking ten, maybe eleven figures.”
Billions, or tens of billions.
“See, Mike. This was to be my last work for clients. Soft-minded people always ask, How much is enough? How many houses do you need? It shows how limited their vision is, how narrow their wants. The money, the houses, the women a third my age: it’s all very nice. But that’s never been what it’s about.
“After the Haskins job, I would finally have enough. Enough to not have to rely on clients. Sure, I own this town. But I have to finance it by doing others’ bidding. Not anymore. No more bowing to others’ wishes. With the money that will come in now, I can finally seek my own ends, financed from my own coffers, executed through my own power. This swamp along the Potomac will be my empire, and I will answer to no one. I have only a few loose ends to tie up. That envelope, for one, and the recent regrettable unpleasantness between me and my star senior associate.”
“Partner,” I said.
“We could talk about that.”
“What does a partner bring in? Last year, say?”
Henry tented his fingers. “We use modified lockstep compensation. I could probably bump you up the ladder a bit, given your contributions. At that point, five to seven million a year. With the money from the Court coming in, next year will be a very good year. Figure four or five times that.”
I thought for a moment. “I will give you this evidence,” I said, tapping my finger on the envelope, “and guarantee that you will never have to worry about it again. In exchange, Rado goes away. The police leave me alone. I get my life back. And I become a full partner.”
“And from now on, you’re mine,” Henry said. “A full
partner in the wet work too. When we find Rado, you’ll slit his throat.”
I nodded.
“Then we’re agreed,” Henry said. The devil held his hand out.
I shook it, and handed over my soul with the envelope.
Plink-plink. The noise came from below. It had started a moment before, but now, in the silent room, it was impossible not to notice.
Henry stepped to the window, then circled around to the window on the other side of his office. Rado’s Range Rover, and another for his men, was parked outside the hillside entrance to the secure area of the mansion.
“Marcus,” Henry yelled. “Get in here.”
Marcus arrived, gun drawn and held beside his thigh, but my broken-down ass was the last thing he needed to worry about. The plink-plinks now sounded a lot more like the crack of gunfire.
Rado and his men were inside.
Henry pointed to me. “Tie him up,” he said.
Marcus swept me over his hip and slammed me onto my neck and shoulder blades on the ground before I realized what was happening. He hiked my arms behind my back and handcuffed the right wrist tightly. He ran the cuffs through the handle of Henry’s filing cabinets before clamping the other cuff on my left. I was stuck, arms behind me, sitting on the floor.
It could have been worse. After Rado’s rope work, I’d made it something of a personal rule never to walk into a likely hostage/torture scenario without swallowing a few pain pills first. It dulled the sharp edges of the encounter nicely. Add to that the numbness, the complete indifference to my fate I’d felt since my dad died, and it made getting tossed around a bit more, the repeat wrenching of an already busted shoulder, seem like no big deal.
Henry and Marcus were too smart to fall for me wearing a wire, but Henry, as a good former soldier for Nixon, should have known not to wire himself. He glanced up at the bookshelves, where the hidden camera I’m sure he’d used to blackmail dozens of politicians had finally captured him. I guess he’d never had to worry because he controlled it.
He pressed a button on his phone. “Gerald!” he barked into the speaker. But Gerald, I’m afraid, was unavailable.
Annie, when she’d first heard about my plan for today, was as pesky as a little sister about helping. I wasn’t going to let her risk her life. But after she’d said she would simply show up at this little office party, uninvited and uninformed about the dangers, the greater risk would have been keeping her in the dark.
After her performance in the woods with my father and me, taking a punch while chasing me down, she was very much in Henry’s good graces. As part of the crew searching for me, and a budding Davies dirty trickster, there would be nothing too extraordinary about her strolling into the secure areas of the mansion.
When I first told her about how Gerald had an omnipresent eye on the private lives of the Davies Group, Annie couldn’t place the name.
“Big guy, lots of Star Wars figurines.”
She replied with a nauseated look.
“Sorry.”
She had also noticed Gerald’s creepy attention around the office, and today all she had to do was play a little damsel in distress to get him to open the door to the room where he monitored the cameras around the mansion. The 100,000-volt stun gun I’d given her took care of the rest. She cuffed up Gerald (two pairs, double locked, just in case), then, via an off-the-shelf wireless intercom, piped the audio/video from Henry’s office to Rado in his car.
Sure, once I said yes and shook Henry’s hand, he finally owned me. But once he acknowledged killing Irin and Haskins when he thought I was just haggling over my price, I owned him. Rado was listening, and that’s all it took to redirect his vengeance to the proper target: Davies.
The gunshots picked up, closer now, answered by the distinct rat-a-tat of an assault rifle going full auto.
I certainly wasn’t a fan of Rado the war criminal. I’d told Annie to get out of the building as soon as Henry said the magic words that revealed to Rado that he’d killed Irin. Rado’s men advanced through the hidden stairs and corridors of the mansion, and I really didn’t have a dog in this fight. I wanted to make sure Henry’s men were wiped out, so I’d given Rado the basic layout, but not too easily, so I’d kept a few things from him. Mostly, to borrow a line from Kissinger, I was hoping both sides would lose: Henry and Rado. I wanted casualties more than anything else.
Henry wasn’t happy about the armed invasion. He walked over to the table, glowering at the envelope. I was sure he was angry at getting taken, but there was more to it than that, a sense of betrayal as well.
Behind all the posturing and power, he was a lonely guy. His wife he’d more or less purchased. No kids. Nothing in his life but work. Instead of friendships he had complicities, and the only trust he knew was the uneasy suicide pact that came when two men had the goods on each other. He wanted a protégé, a son, but I sure as fuck wasn’t going to join him in that hell.
He lifted the evidence.
The pig in a poke is one of the oldest and simplest cons. You sell someone a pig and give them a bag (known way back when as a poke) with something else inside.
It’s a risky play, typically a stupid move. But I had a few things going for me. My dad had held out under a fatal beating to protect the evidence, so Henry would assume I had something.
But that was only part of it. Henry was blindingly obvious about what he believed. We swindlers don’t believe in anything, really. But we can clue in pretty quickly to what someone else does. And if some mark believes unfailingly in one truth, you can bet your ass we’re going to find a way to use that truth against him. Henry wasn’t shy about trumpeting his one true maxim: everyone can be gotten to, everyone has a price. He had faith in one thing: treachery. It was his strength, sure, but I was going to make it his weakness. There was no such thing as honesty in Henry’s world. He had to believe he could own me, that I, like every other man, could be corrupted. So I let him. The envelope didn’t matter. I wasn’t playing my hand, I was playing Henry.
Now, as Marcus ducked through the false panel into the corridor that led to Henry’s vault, Davies picked up the envelope. He opened it and emptied it onto the table.
A slice of dried apricot slid out, and behind it, floating down, came a menu from the White Eagle. (Radomir, God bless him, had offered me an actual human ear to make the whole ruse more realistic. “It’s really no problem at all,” he’d said. I declined.)
“There is no evidence, Henry,” I said. “Marcus burned it at the DOJ.”
The gunfire was close now. A bullet exploded through the molding of the panel. Plaster dust and splinters sprayed through the room.
“Radomir heard everything.” I looked up toward the camera hidden in the bookshelves. “He knows you killed his daughter.”
I’d seen Rado’s old-world style on display in Colombia, of course. But it had been Henry who tipped me off to just how dangerous a man who lives only by blood and honor can be in Henry’s world of calculated greed and fear.
Back at the White Eagle, I stuck to my story even after Rado opened up my skin. I guess that was enough to convince him I wasn’t lying, and he was game to listen to my plan. If I could back up my claim that Henry had killed his daughter, if I could get Henry to admit to the crime, I could just let Rado’s charming brand of psychotic violence do the rest.
He may have been a war criminal, but he at least had a code, a thief’s honor, that in its way made him more honest than the seemingly respectable men Henry whored out every day.
Henry had fucked with Rado’s daughter, the same way Henry had fucked with my dad, and Henry was about to realize that the one truth that defined his world was false. Certain things were priceless. Certain men couldn’t be bargained with.
“You ingrate fuck,” Henry said. “I offered you everything. I offered you this city on a platter. And when you come at me, you don’t even have the decency to do it like a man. You hide behind Rado?”
I was still bound to the cabinet. He stoo
d over me, seething.
“That cunt Annie.” He smiled. “I see. The two of you, still together. Now it all makes sense.”
He looked toward the door.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes. She’ll suffer first. You’ll watch. And then it’s your turn. You think you’ve found a way out, Mike? Think I can’t get to you? No. You’ve only made it worse. You’ll beg me, plead for it to stop. You’ll give me everything I want and more.”
He kicked me hard in the face with his wingtip. The room briefly fuzzed out like an old TV, but I stayed conscious. By now gunfire and screams surrounded Henry’s suite.
Davies pulled a pistol from a drawer in his sideboard and stepped through the false panel in his wall into the corridor by the vault. I spit some blood out, trying for a nice long arc but succeeding only in dribbling it down my shirt.
The painkiller was wearing off. To keep a clear head, I’d taken only one. So I had better be quick about it. The handcuffs hit right above the bones of my hand. They were too tight, double-locked, with the keyhole facing away from my fingers, so I wouldn’t have been able to jimmy it even if Marcus hadn’t already taken everything off me I could have used as a pick.
The shots came louder now. Practically in the room. I heard a groan. The handcuffs weren’t getting any wider. My hand would just have to get smaller. I pried my left thumb back with my right hand, felt the pressure build, the bone flex, just barely. I let go. I was going to make myself pass out. It felt so creepy and wrong. The Band-Aid approach, then.
I jerked back my thumb. The bone cracked like kindling. The room went all wavy once more, and I squeezed the hand through, raking the cuff over the broken bones. I retched, tried not to throw up from the pain. My hand was free. I stood. The cuff dangled from my right wrist.
Searching the desk, I found that Henry had taken the only gun. I sidestepped to the open panel that led to his vault. The area immediately in front of the door was empty. I heard only labored breathing, no more gunshots.
I moved in deeper and glanced around a corner. There were four or five bodies: Marcus was down, and Rado. Henry had been right. Rado would defend his honor no matter what the cost. It’s what I’d been counting on, but Rado hadn’t gone far enough. Henry, with the pistol drawn in front of him, stepped over Marcus’s corpse, checking the far door for more gunmen. He’d survived massacres before. I couldn’t let him survive this. I would have to get behind him and get one of the guns off the bodies. The few pistols I could see, on the floor or in dead men’s hands, had their racks slid back, chambers open: out of bullets.
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