Damage Control

by Michael Bowen

  “Less than three months ago I got a call from this kid.” He bobbed his head earnestly at Fitz. “Twenty-two years old. Twenty-two. He has his whole career already mapped out. Four years on the staff of either the Senate Judiciary Committee or the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Maybe six years, but no more than that. Couple of articles along the way, then a book: Watching Sausage Being Made. Already has the title. No contents, but the title is a killer. He figures the book and the contacts he will have been busy making along the way will make him a standard go-to guy whenever CNN or NPR needs a comment on something in his field. Couple of years of that, and he takes a sabbatical for a stint on the White House staff. He’ll serve a president from either party. Not picky. After he’s done his West Wing time, he figures he returns to civilian life as a male Rachel Maddow, with his own show on a major cable news channel.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. I could have put half a dozen names on the character Rafe was describing. Fitz was laughing out loud.

  “I hope you told him that he should get a blond wig and breast implants and go on Fox News as a legal analyst.”

  “I would have,” Rafe grinned, “if I’d thought of it.”

  “Not like the old days,” Fitz said. “And you and I aren’t even that old.”

  “I know. Used to be, people took a job in Washington ’cause they wanted to get paid for doing the same thing that got them A’s on term papers in high school and college. Now they come because they take a look at their skill set and say: Doctor? I suck at chemistry. Lawyer? Those drones work too hard. Wall Street? I could end up broke or in prison. Regular business? Ugh, dad and mom did that. No, best way to maximize my lifetime earnings is to stick my snout in the public trough and then leverage the media game.”

  I sidled into Rafe’s field of vision. The instant he spotted me he reached out and pulled me giggling to his side. As he hugged me I made a quick but expert appraisal: Not drunk. Not close. Good.

  “Good talk, buddy,” Fitz said, sketching a see-ya salute.

  “Oh, don’t mind Josie,” Rafe said. “She just dropped by to make sure I don’t turn into the Church Lady.”

  “Gotta move along.” Fitz shook his head, smiling. “Keep it real.”

  “I didn’t spoil a pitch, did I?” I got a repentant pout ready in case the answer was yes.

  “Nope. Major and I were just playing Those Were the Good Old Days. What’s up?”

  I told him about Tony’s little bombshells.

  “So we spun Terry Fielding into an actual, honest-to-God story without realizing it?” Rafe asked. “Man, when you’re good, you’re good.”

  “And when you’re lucky, you’re lucky. But it looks like I have to examine every page of that bloody file, even though I agreed to a standstill with DeHoic.”

  “I’d say you do.” Rafe nodded emphatically. “You can tell her that you had to make sure there wasn’t anything on there that could get you an obstruction of justice charge if it somehow disappears after she gets her hands on it.”

  “Right. If she actually has the computer examined she’ll know that I accessed the file, and she could tell if I forwarded anything in it to some other computer. Would she also be able to tell if I printed anything out?”

  “You have to assume yes,” Rafe said. “So don’t print anything out.”

  “Right. I’ll just eyeball it—first thing Monday morning.”

  Rafe gave me that look that Southern boys sometimes lapse into before they remember their manners: I can’t believe that EVEN A WOMAN would say anything that fucking stupid.

  “First thing Monday, my ass. You need to be looking at that stuff tonight.”

  He was right. He was absolutely right. I hate when that happens.

  Chapter Eighteen

  So that’s how I came to be at my desk after ten o’clock on a Saturday night, going screen by screen through MVC’s pitch-file for Jerzy Schroeder. Really studying every page this time, instead of just looking for a juicy nugget. Sweating, because the A/C goes off at eight p.m. and I didn’t know how to turn it back on. Also swearing a bit at the sheer tedium of this exercise. It wasn’t as tedious as doing three-to-five, though, so I slogged on. Had to be something in here that DeHoic didn’t want to turn up if a flatfoot appeared with a search warrant. And if that something, or anything else in these pixels, might put my butt in a sling, I had to know about it before some beady-eyed disciple of J. Edgar Hoover did.

  Rafe had wanted to come with me, but a thirty-second talk-through pegged that idea as a non-starter. It wouldn’t do to have Rafe signing it at the security desk of MVC’s building, much less showing up on tape from the surveillance cameras, on the night when digital records would show I’d taken a look at Jerzy’s file.

  Pushing midnight, I’d reviewed more than three hundred pages of the pitch-file without seeing anything important that I didn’t already know. I couldn’t get complacent, though. I sighed. Scrolled. Impatiently rubbed away a rill of sweat coursing down the back of my neck. Cut loose with a couple of unladylike ejaculations. Scrolled. Sighed—bingo!

  Color photograph, showing up quite nicely on the high-res desktop monitor that MVC provided to me. Night shot. Front and center, Sanford Dierdorf—the guy MVC wanted to help Schroeder run out of business and maybe into the slammer. Standing in front of one of those Gulfstream jets that’ll set you back eight figures. Smiling. He wore mustard-colored hunting pants. His shirt was Black Watch plaid—again, standard issue hunting garb for rich guys. On his right hip he had a holster with one of those flaps that goes over the handle of the gun it’s holding. Growing up I’d known plenty of hunters who took a sidearm with them when they went into the woods for a weekend of Bambicide.

  Dierdorf stood next to a woman who bent her head slightly forward as she lit a cigarette. The lighter’s flame left no doubt. DeHoic—except that for once the gray lady hadn’t dressed in gray. So either Abercrombie & Fitch doesn’t sell Outdoor Wear in gray, or DeHoic was trying for incognito. To DeHoic’s right stood two gentlemen in dark business suits. Also smiling. With Japanese features.

  Okay, nerds, do your stuff. I brought the cursor over the head of the one nearer to DeHoic. The nerds came through. A little white bubble with letters in it appeared over the guy, as if he were saying something in the Sunday comics. Jimmy Matsuyama. Same trick with his buddy. Stan Surakawa.

  I hesitated. Printing the page might cost MVC several hundred-thousand dollars, get me fired and maybe get me killed. But what if I just clicked the Screenshot icon? Would that make a record? I shook my head. Too big a risk.

  Screenshot. Wait a minute. Maybe I couldn’t make a screenshot, but I could sure take a shot of the screen. Whipped out my iPhone. Sort of like a selfie, except taking a picture of something else. Click! Checked the image on the phone’s screen. Uh, no. Pretty much sucked. Just my luck, there’s never a professional grade Nikon single-lens reflex digital camera lying around when I could really use one. Shit. I was starting to get a headache. I needed a tablet.

  Tablet. No, Josie, you precious idiot, you don’t need a tablet, you need a Tablet®. I fished my iPad Mini out of my purse. I’d never used its camera feature, but it couldn’t be all that hard. Fussed with it a bit. It was pretty intuitive, as it turned out. Frame. Focus. Click! Check. Yep. Not a candidate for the National Gallery, but I could make out the faces and read the bubble words clearly enough.

  Okay. Another forty-five minutes of scrolling to go, minimum, but I’d found nothing criminal so far and at least now I knew I’d have something to show for my efforts. Something pretty provocative, in fact. I sat down to get back to work.

  The hallway lights and the overhead lights in my office went off. It happened automatically every sixty minutes. An energy-saver. I got up to truck down the hall and flip the manual override switch—something I’d done twice tonight already. I’d kicked my shoes off more than two hours ago, and I didn�
��t bother to put them back on for this jaunt.

  Two steps into the hallway, I heard a distinctive thunk from the suite’s lobby area. That sound could only mean one thing, and it wasn’t good.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I’d heard the thunk a thousand times. An electronic lock holds the big, glass door at the suite’s main entrance closed. That thunk is the sound it makes when someone unlocks it by flashing a key-card at a sensor tastefully embedded in the mahogany frame on the door’s right side. Someone like me or like Seamus—except that I was already here and the pope will be going through her second divorce before Seamus pops by for office hours around midnight on a Saturday.

  I crept close enough to the doorway between the hall and the lobby to see the lobby door area. Pitch black. Which it shouldn’t have been. There should have been a pale semi-circle of light just outside the doors that stays on all the time. I’d worked enough late nights to know that. Couldn’t really see anything in the dark, but a change in the depth of the blackness, combined with the barest whisper of crepe sole on faux marble, told me that someone was pushing the door open and coming in. Time to channel my inner coward.

  The intruder would have to go about thirty feet to get to the hallway. I’d have to go about twice that far to get to Seamus’ office—I sure as Hell wasn’t going back to my office, and his was the next closest. Advantage burglar, but at least I knew exactly where I was going and the burglar would have to feel his way.

  I breathed a quick prayer to St. Monica and started moving. Slow and steady, backwards the first few yards, then I turned tail. Bare feet on pile carpet, I could move almost silently if I just kept it to one measured pace after the other instead of thunder-footing it like a hippo in heat. I figured that the risk of being heard if I started hurrying was a lot higher than the risk of being seen, even once the burglar entered the hallway himself. Or herself. Tension rippled through my shoulders and closed my throat. The bad guy had to have made it into the hallway by now—but Seamus’ door loomed just ahead on the left.

  No percentage in looking back, so I didn’t. Stopped. Held my breath. Waited for a sharp challenge or the sound of running feet, which would mean he’d spotted me and I was basically toast. Nothing. I slipped into Seamus’ office, budging his door the bare twenty centimeters I absolutely had to in order to get in.

  Okay. Give the burglar maybe ten seconds to get to work gutting my computer—because why else would he be here?—and then discreetly dial nine-one-one. Got it made, right?

  Wrong. Remember Uncle D’s crack comparing my mind to whitewater that runs fast but not deep? Well, right about now it clicked up to Grade Four rapids.

  Within seconds the burglar entering my office would see that my computer was on. He’d spot my shoes and my purse. So he’d know I was still here. Maybe then he’d just grab the computer and high-tail it. At least as likely, though, he’d start looking for me. So I definitely do not start nattering with a nine-one-one dispatcher, because he’d hear me and know right where to go.

  If he looked for me, where would he look? Ladies’ room qualified as the most logical place to find me, so maybe he’d go there first. No guarantee of that, though, and anyway, then what? When he came up empty on the loo he’d start looking other places and sooner or later he’d get to Seamus’ office—probably sooner. The women’s restroom was outside the suite, around two corners from the elevator bank. If I could just be sure he’d gone there, I could haul ass out of the suite and down four flights to the security desk before the intruder even knew I was on the run.

  How could I possibly know that, though? I’d been listening as hard as a five-year-old trying to hear sleigh bells on Christmas Eve, and I hadn’t picked up a sound. My whole restroom strategy would depend on pure guesswork.

  Then I heard something—and guesswork dropped right out of the equation.

  “I know you’re in here.” Menacing male voice, calm but firm, projecting but not yelling. “I need you to come here. Nothing to be afraid of. I’m not going to hurt you. I just need to keep an eye on you while I do my job.”

  Dear Lord, I wanted to believe that. It’d make everything so easy. If I fell for a line like that, though, my sainted papa would kick my ass when I met him in Heaven (or wherever)—and I would flat-out have it coming. I reflexively stepped backward, almost lost my balance, and had to put my left hand on Seamus’ desk to steady myself. Stifled some colorful Cajun expletives. After a good ten seconds, I heard the voice again.

  “If I have to come looking for you, I will find you—and when I find you I will hurt you. Considerably.” A trace of anger stained the voice, which now rose a bit. “You’ll be taking your meals through a straw for weeks. I know what I’m doing and I have night-vision goggles. You don’t have a chance. Just come out and we’ll do this without any bruises.”

  My knees turned to noodles. Gut churned. Felt like puking. So tempting. Don’t do it, Josie. Maybe Seamus had a gun. Yeah, sure. Seamus? You kidding? I groped his desktop, trying to find the edge so that I could work my way down to the drawers. I felt a smooth, glossy tube and knew at once what it was—the closest thing to a firearm Seamus was likely to have: one of his six cheap cigarette lighters.

  “All right,” the voice said. “You asked for it.”

  Lighter. Picked it up. Grabbed a handful of paper from the credenza behind his desk. Didn’t know what it was, didn’t care. Flicked the lighter and held its brave little flame to the edge of the paper. Figured that if I could set the paper on fire, I could hold it up to the smoke detector and, if St. Monica wasn’t busy with anything else, trigger an alarm that would spook the guy. Come on! I mean, you’d think paper would go up just like that, but nooo. I could smell smoke and hear crackle and feel heat—damn, could I feel heat—but it didn’t strike me as the kind of conflagration likely to motivate a smoke detector.

  Well, it’s just gonna have to do, that’s all. The guy had apparently started with the two rooms on this hallway closest to the lobby: a storage closet and an area with a high-speed color printer and a couple of photocopiers. He thought I was within earshot, so he must have decided I was inside the suite rather than in the ladies’ room. He’d just search systematically, making sure he stayed between wherever I was and the lobby. Wouldn’t take him long to rule out those first two rooms. Seamus’ office would be his next stop.

  I raised the smoldering bundle of paper toward the ceiling, in what I vaguely remembered as the general area of the smoke detector. Stood there like an imitation of the Statue of Liberty in a middle-school pageant. Nothing to do but wait and hope, and I didn’t figure to have long to do either one. Couldn’t see or hear a thing, but I sensed him outside the door. My gut churned. Heart raced.

  I heard Seamus’ door slam open. The burning papers in my hand now cast just enough light for me to see the dark outline of a black-clad figure, no more than ten feet away.

  “Okay, bitch, I gave you fair warning!”

  I screamed. Faintly saw the figure leaping toward me, and not a damn thing I could do about it.

  Suddenly my sheaf of paper exploded in bright, pulsing, yellow and blue flame that flared toward the ceiling and scorched the Hell out of my hand in the process. Dropped the burning pages—just in time to hear the smoke alarm start howling like a Sigma-Tau pledge on Hell Night.

  I braced myself for a body-slam that would knock me into the middle of next week. It didn’t happen—and I couldn’t believe what did. The guy stopped in his tracks. Raised his hands to his head like he’d suddenly gotten a migraine on steroids. Bent over the way you do when you take a real good gut-punch. Ripped thick goggles off his head, letting them thump dully on Seamus’ singeing carpet.

  WTF? I had no idea saints could do that! I hadn’t been to Mass since I’d visited Mama last Easter, but it looked like I’d better drop by this Sunday for sure. I mean, damn. Short term, anyway, it seemed to me that things couldn’t get much better.


  Then they did. Automatic ceiling sprinklers came on and started soaking me and the intruder to the skin. I was probably a lot happier about it than he was.

  No reason to tarry. Skirting around him, I darted for the door. He grabbed at my legs. Seemed like his heart wasn’t in it, but he managed to catch my left ankle with a lucky forearm swipe. I pitched headlong, ate some damp carpet, and started scrambling on my hands and knees. I’d covered about half the remaining distance to the door when he decided to come after me, even though he apparently still couldn’t see anything and didn’t have much idea where I was. His left foot cracked my ribs and his right buried itself in my fanny as he tripped over me and went flying through the air. I wasn’t sure which hurt worse, but I figured neither one hurt anything like as much as the smack he took on the noggin when he collided with the door jamb.

  I clambered to my feet, hitched the lower half of my dress up to public indecency level, and flat-out ran over him: kidney, head, floor—then into the hallway. Skipped and hopped a bit, almost lost my balance, banged a shoulder against the hallway’s far wall, but managed to keep my feet and sprint for the suite’s lobby.

  The lobby was still dark except for a flashlight beam big enough and bright enough to stare down a semi-tractor trailer on a two-lane highway. Accomplice? Didn’t have any better ideas so I stopped cold. A nanosecond later a steely hand gripped my left bicep. At close quarters, in the back-glow from the flashlight, I recognized LaDasha Wallace, a rent-a-cop from the security desk downstairs. Didn’t know her, except for a vague recollection that she was a Marine veteran, but I’d seen the nameplate in front of her when I signed in a few hours ago. She must have recognized me, too, because she dispensed with a lot of the preliminary palaver.

  “What in Hell is goin’ on?”