by Diane Capri
CHAPTER SIX
Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park was unseasonably warm for mid-May as bright sunlight flooded the Washington, D.C. area following the massive overnight storm. Now, with the rainfall just a memory, people crowded into the park, eager to enjoy the early taste of summer.
Young mothers pushed baby strollers along walking paths, stopping and chatting and admiring each other’s infants. Joggers of all ages pounded the paths, weaving around old folks leaning on canes and walkers as they shared the same routes. College students tossed Frisbees back and forth, running and leaping and shouting.
Tucked into the southeast corner of the park, backed snugly against a row of neatly trimmed ficus bushes, was a wrought-iron bench. On this bench sat Nelson W. Michaels, middle-aged, balding, dressed in a rumpled blue suit—not expensive but not cheap—with a maroon rep tie loosened to enable him to unfasten the top button of his off-white dress shirt. A briefcase rested on the ground next to his nervously tapping left foot. He was a good thirty pounds overweight, the extra baggage making him appear at least a decade older than his thirty-eight years. He was sweating heavily.
Nelson hoped he looked just like any other anonymous government bureaucrat passing the time on his lunch hour by ogling the throngs of sexy young women in the park. He pretended to read the newspaper, which he had opened randomly to the sports section. The Washington Nationals, widely considered the worst team in baseball, had just won their seventh consecutive game, leading fans to begin hoping the team might actually be competitive after all.
Nelson raised his face to the sun and tried to slow his racing heartbeat through sheer force of will. He was just one of dozens of guys in the park – hundreds really – plain and invisible. There was no reason to work himself up to a stroke over an illicit lunch hour rendezvous, for Chrissakes. What he was doing had been going on in the capitol since the days of Washington and Jefferson.
Without warning, a man dropped onto the other side of the bench, legs splayed, sweat glistening on his olive skin. He seemed to have materialized out of nowhere and Nelson gasped in surprise.
The man looked younger than Nelson by a decade. He had a full head of thick, wavy black hair that he wore slicked back from his high forehead. He was dressed in stonewashed jeans and an Oxford shirt with the top two buttons unfastened and the long sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He carried a brown leather briefcase, virtually an exact replica of Nelson’s.
The new arrival leaned forward and placed his briefcase on the ground to his right, then sat without moving, saying nothing and staring unabashedly at the steady stream of young women walking and running past the bench. Many of them looked barely half his age. He made no effort to hide his interest in their forms, especially the ones outlined nicely in tight-fitting T-shirts and Lycra running shorts.
Nelson felt his stomach clench in an unwitting visceral response to the man’s arrival, and he tried to examine his newspaper with renewed interest. He read the same sentence about the Nationals three times but absorbed nothing. He knew the man sitting to his left was the one he was scheduled to meet today, although he had never seen him before and had no idea what he looked like. Obviously it was impossible to get a sense of the man’s appearance from a few emails and a whispered phone call or two.
Nelson began to sweat even more profusely and wanted nothing more than to get this meeting over with. He had never felt more exposed in his entire life. It was as if the word traitor was emblazoned on his chest, like the scarlet letter in the classic Nathaniel Hawthorne novel he had been forced to suffer through in high school.
Now, though, he knew exactly how poor Hester Prynne must have felt. It seemed to Nelson that everyone was staring suspiciously at him. He knew that wasn’t really the case; in fact, no one was paying him the slightest bit of attention. The exposed feeling was just his overactive imagination playing games with his nerves, but knowing it logically and accepting it emotionally were two completely separate issues.
After ten long, silent minutes, Nelson picked up his contact’s briefcase. He had been given very precise instructions, and had been told he must follow the instructions to the letter when making the exchange. There had been no or else attached to the instructions, but none had been necessary. Nelson had no idea who he was dealing with, nor did he care. But he knew they didn’t play by the same rules as everyone else, and was fully aware that if he expected to see the sun rise tomorrow morning, he had best do exactly as he was told.
Nelson risked a glance at the man’s face. His companion looked completely at ease. He never even returned Nelson’s glance, just continued sitting with his legs stretched out, watching the girls pass by as if he could spend the rest of the day enjoying the sunshine and doing absolutely nothing else. Nelson figured maybe he could.
With the new briefcase clenched in his sweating hand, all Nelson wanted to do was sprint to his car—and although he realized his sprinting days were long past, it was still what he wanted to do—and race back to his office. The urge to escape was almost overwhelming. Somehow, though, he forced himself to stand and walk through the park at the leisurely pace that had been demanded of him by the stranger.
After an eternity, Nelson reached the safety of his car. He didn’t think he had ever been as relieved to slide into the stained and torn cloth driver’s seat as he was right now. He fired up the engine, avoiding even a single look into Lady Bird Johnson Memorial Park as he drove out of the lot, and then continued the short distance to the Pentagon.
Nelson had not eaten lunch and normally would be starving by now, but he had never felt less like eating in his life. He was queasy, and he could feel acidic bile rising into his throat. A headache, the seeds of which had been threatening to bloom all day, continued to worsen and showed signs of morphing into a full-blown migraine. All he could think about was getting back to his office.
Nelson W. Michaels, traitor.
He could not get that sickening thought out of his head, and it made him feel weak and shaky, even though he was confident his malfeasance would never be discovered. He had been extremely careful in the correspondence he conducted with his shadowy contact and believed strongly that no one knew he had just sold classified information to a group he knew nothing about. He justified his actions by telling himself that he had only sold a transportation schedule and a map depicting a delivery route.
That was all. It wasn’t like he had trafficked in nuclear weapons or anything truly dangerous.
Nelson was feeling better, if only marginally so, by the time he finally arrived at his office. He entered quickly and closed the door behind him, realizing with some surprise that he had absolutely no recollection of the past ten minutes. He had been so lost in his paranoia that the last thing he remembered was walking through the wrought-iron front gate of the park and crossing the pavement to his car.
He tossed the briefcase onto his desk, where it landed with a thump, then sank into his well-worn chair in the corner of the office, listening to the air aahing out of the faux leather seat as it was displaced by his body weight.
Nelson was miserable.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tony sat on the park bench watching the fat fuck waddle away and couldn’t make up his mind whether he should laugh his damn fool head off or spit in disgust. Getting the information he wanted had been so easy that if he actually gave a crap about his adopted country he would have been appalled.
All it had taken to select his mark was a little judicious Internet research into the personal lives of a few of the most likely Pentagon candidates. It was amazing how much of people’s private lives was available on the information superhighway just waiting to be discovered if you were willing to take the time to look for it. And inside of two days, he had narrowed the list of potentials to three, eventually settling on Nelson W. Michaels as his stooge.
Tony had learned that Michaels spent an inordinate amount of time at Pimlico, so he arranged a “chance” meeting, where they commiserated over gambling d
ebts. That orchestrated meeting was followed up with a few innocuous emails and within weeks Tony had the man dangling expertly on his hook.
Nelson was valuable to Tony because as an acquisitions specialist at the Pentagon, he had unfettered access to the information Tony needed. The information had seemed harmless enough to the midlevel bureaucrat that he had agreed to part with it for a measly ten thousand dollars. Tony had been prepared to go much higher if necessary. He didn’t really care either way. It wasn’t his money.
Nelson’s briefcase rested on the ground next to Tony’s feet, exactly where the Pentagon staffer had left it. Tony passed the time observing the pretty American girls, all of whom appeared self-absorbed and shallow, pressed from the same Western mold. He watched with the emotionless dead eyes of a shark and chuckled thinking about the just completed rendezvous. To say Nelson had been nervous would be an understatement. The fact of the matter was that Nelson had been about ready to shit his pants in terror and had done a lousy job of hiding it.
For a few minutes, Tony had thought that maybe the frightened amateur was going to stroke out right there on the bench. He pictured Michaels holed up somewhere counting his unmarked bills, thanking his lucky stars for the good fortune of meeting a man who had been willing to pay him so much money for such harmless information, and he smiled.
He wondered if Nelson had heard the news yet that his coworker Lisa Jensen was dead; he supposed he must have by now. Even in an office the size of the Pentagon, an employee dying in a tragic auto accident surely didn’t happen every day. It had to be the talk of the building.
Tony chuckled again, and when he did, an overweight middle-aged woman in too-short shorts and a tight T-shirt shot him a half-fearful look as she race-walked past. He watched her with amusement and decided it was time to go.
Tony Andretti, formerly of Syria and Afghanistan and now living in the United States of America, picked up the battered brown leather briefcase without bothering to look inside it—he had no doubt whatsoever that the information he had paid for was safely tucked inside because Michaels did not have the balls to screw him over—and strolled through the park in a direction opposite the one Michaels had used when he left a few minutes ago.
It was a picture-perfect afternoon, and Tony took his time walking because his workday had just ended.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The artificial cool of the Pentagon’s climate-controlled interior was ordinarily a welcome relief to Nelson on humid days, of which there were plenty in Washington, D.C. Today, however, the air-conditioning was doing little to control his heavy perspiration, which ran in rivulets down his face and neck. It trickled under the collar of his shirt and spread in an ever-expanding arc under each armpit.
Nelson tended to perspire a lot anyway, but after the extreme stress of the illicit meeting with … well, whoever the guy was, he felt as though he had been through the wringer. So he continued to sweat. A lot.
After breathing a sigh of relief and sinking into his chair, Nelson had tossed the briefcase onto his desk, preferring to get his pounding heart and racing pulse under control before examining the inside of the case to verify that the agreed upon ten thousand dollars was actually even in there.
Nelson laid his head on the cool surface of the government-issue desk, instantly turning it slick with his sweat. Still breathing heavily, he tried to force himself to relax, clear his mind, enjoy in the fact that he had actually gotten away with it.
He only now realized that he had half expected a bunch of grim-faced FBI agents or military police to surround him as he exited the park. They would force him spread-eagled onto the pavement while they patted him down for weapons, then perp-walk him in front of dozens of television cameras and newspaper reporters to a waiting police car before whisking him off to jail.
He felt completely drained. Between the physical exertion and the stress, Nelson wanted nothing more than to drive home, toss his jacket and tie over the back of a kitchen chair and go straight to bed. Unfortunately, it was only one o’clock in the afternoon, and guys on the lower rungs of the mid-level management ladder didn’t just take an afternoon off, even if they had successfully completed a very busy lunch hour filled with treason and ill-gotten monetary gains.
Finally he raised his head, feeling the tension headache building in the base of his skull. Rising slowly—God I’m sore, could I really be that out of shape? Of course I could—Nelson shuffled to his closed office door and thumbed the button on the knob, locking it from the inside.
He knew he was probably overdoing the cloak-and-dagger stuff a bit. Not many people had occasion to visit Nelson Michaels in his cramped little office. Most of his communication was conducted via telephone or email, so it was rare for anyone just to walk in on him. And it wasn’t like he had a steady stream of friends dropping by to shoot the breeze. In fact, now that he thought about it, it wasn’t like he had many friends at all, either at work or outside of it.
Still, you could never be too careful. It wouldn’t do for a coworker to waltz in and find Nelson hip deep in wads of unmarked bills like some overweight bureaucratic version of Scrooge McDuck in his counting house. Even the most dim-witted government drone would realize something was amiss in that little scenario, so Nelson wasn’t taking any chances.
Settling back into his overstuffed vinyl-covered imitation leather chair—this wasn’t your typical institutional metal and plastic worker bee’s chair, but Nelson had figured when you spent all day sitting on your ass you should at least be comfortable, so he had paid for the thing out of his own salary—he took a deep breath and held it for a moment, dizzily certain he would pop open the briefcase only to discover it was empty. Then he exhaled nervously and popped the brass clasps and lifted the top of the case.
And broke into a satisfied treasonous smile.
Piled neatly inside, rubber bands holding them snugly together, were stacks and stacks of non-sequential bills in small denominations, exactly as promised. The rich green tint of all the tens, twenties and fifties provided a dazzling contrast to the faded red felt of the briefcase’s interior. He didn’t stop to count the money, not right here at his desk inside the Pentagon—Nelson may have been a traitor, but he wasn’t an idiot—but judging by the size and number of stacks, the full ten thousand dollars had been delivered.
The sense of relief Nelson felt at not being stiffed was palpable. He still couldn’t figure out how he had gotten so incredibly lucky, managing to bamboozle that olive-skinned idiot from the park into trading a boatload of untraceable cash for a small amount of trivial information regarding the transportation of a small amount of military hardware and the route the delivery truck was going to take.
Now he would be able to replace a large portion of the money he had gambled away at the track and other venues in the past year or so. He had been withdrawing cash from his retirement nest egg for quite some time while conveniently forgetting to mention that fact to his wife. Nelson had been on a losing streak for months, and every good gambler knew that the time to start betting heavily was when you were losing: nobody loses forever, and every loss meant a win was now that much closer to reality, statistically speaking.
That was Nelson’s theory, and he was still convinced it was a good one, though it had yet to work in his favor. But he was certain Joy would disagree, especially given the results. The couple had had several knock-down-drag-outs over the years on the subject of Nelson’s gambling, and he knew Joy would be more than a little pissed off if she discovered he had siphoned thousands of dollars of retirement money into unsuccessful wagers.
Joy just didn’t understand. He knew he was on the verge of hitting it big; he just had to stick to his guns a little longer.
But even a full-fledged optimist like Nelson had started to get nervous when the losses continued to mount and the IRA totals continued to dwindle. Sooner or later the little woman was going to find out. How long could he reasonably expect her to go without checking the balance of the damned thing?
Now, through an incredible stroke of dumb luck followed by some shrewd negotiating, Nelson had managed to recoup enough of his losses in one day that even if Joy discovered he had been gambling with their future, she wouldn’t be able to complain too much.
Feeling much better now about his situation and about life in general, and sufficiently relaxed that he had nearly stopped sweating, Nelson stuffed the stacks of twenties and fifties he had been admiring back into the briefcase and then snapped it closed. The exhaustion he had felt just a few minutes earlier had magically been replaced by an almost narcotic-like state of euphoria.
He walked across his office with a spring in his step and unlocked the door, opening it again to the world, or at least to the dreary corridor with the institutional green vinyl floor tiles, then returned to his desk revitalized, ready to finish out the workday.
CHAPTER NINE
Tony pushed open the door to a large but anonymous private garage located on a large but anonymous private lot in suburban Washington. He had purchased the property for a song several years ago because, not to put too fine a point on it, the lot wasn’t in one of D.C.’s most desirable neighborhoods.
In fact, at the time Tony made the cash purchase (another reason the price had been so low), the garage was in the middle of a ten square block area the local authorities had virtually given up on as unsalvageable. Crime was rampant; gangs and drugs and prostitution were everywhere.
Tony didn’t care about any of that. He wasn’t in the business of urban redevelopment, but he was in the business of protecting his assets. So after closing on the property, Tony Andretti undertook the process of introducing himself to the local underground entrepreneurs, the ones trading in the guns, the drugs, and the prostitution, and convincing them it was in their best interest to leave him the hell alone.