“Freddie! Of course. He used to freelance pieces to us. Fabulous researcher, fabulous.”
Hunter found Hatcher’s overly effusive manner annoying. Washington nonprofits, good and bad alike, usually hired as their presidents glad-handing political types whose major talent and obsession was fundraising. From the cut and quality of his suit, Hatcher was good at his job.
He turned to introduce Hunter to the other staff members. They fit the mold for denizens of D.C. nonprofits: mostly young, casually dressed, exuding idealism and nerdy intelligence. He filed away their names and faces as each greeted him in turn.
“Why don’t you join us?” Hatcher said. He grabbed an unoccupied folding chair from a half-filled table nearby and slid it in next to his.
“Only for a few moments,” Hunter said, taking the seat. “I left Frederick alone over there. Mr. Wasserman’s death has hit him pretty hard. They were good friends.”
“We all loved Arnie,” said Mark Deaver. A soft-spoken, gentle-looking man in his early fifties, Deaver was CAP’s vice-president and research director. “It’s hard to believe he’s gone.”
Hunter nodded. “It’s clear from what everyone said at the service that he was a special person.”
“You didn’t know him, then?” Hatcher asked.
“I didn’t have the pleasure. Frederick invited me here, as his guest.” He turned to Deaver. “It turns out Arnold, Frederick, and I were independently investigating an overlapping area of interest: the Currents Foundation.”
“Ah,” Deaver said. “The Hive.”
To Hunter’s questioning expression, Deaver chuckled and gestured toward a dark-haired, bespectacled young researcher. “It’s the nickname Tony gave it. Tell him, Tony.”
Tony Ferino cleared his throat and smiled nervously.
“Yeah. So, you know how bees behave. Like when you see them out in a field, they each seem to be completely isolated and disorganized? They fly around all over the place, erratically. It looks completely random, like nothing but their independent whims guide them. But then they fly back to their beehive. And what do you find there? It’s this perfectly designed, well-organized honeycomb, crawling with workers and drones. All tightly controlled and regimented. Each of them has a job. An assignment. All directed toward a single guiding purpose.”
He paused to flick an awkward grin toward Deaver, who nodded encouragement.
“So, that’s the Currents Foundation,” he continued. “It’s become, like, the central hive for hundreds of groups and thousands of individuals on the far, far left. All those workers and drones may seem to be going off in their own separate directions and working on their own separate projects. But then you check their 990 federal tax records, and you find they’re getting grant money and assistance from Currents. Not always directly. Maybe only indirectly, through intermediaries. But it’s all guided and coordinated.”
“By whom?” Hunter asked. “Who’s the queen bee?”
Deaver chuckled. “You mean king bee. Avery Trammel—you know, the billionaire investor and philanthropist.”
Hunter kept his face blank. “People on the political right portray him as some kind of Machiavellian mastermind controlling everything happening on the political left.”
Several at the table simultaneously said, “Well, yeah!” and “He is!” Then everyone laughed.
“Everyone knows Trammel has his fingers in pretty much everything going on in progressive politics,” Deaver added. “His money—and money he’s obtained from other sources—has bought him de facto control of the movement. He doesn’t actually run the Currents network directly, you see. After he set it up with seed money from his personal foundation, the Currents outfits appear to function more or less autonomously. However, Trammel sits on the board of the Currents Foundation and continues to donate to it significantly. He funds all the key groups and personnel, so he sets the agenda. And through his intermediaries in ‘The Hive,’ he has a lot of influence on the media, too.”
He recalled the man he had seen on the speakers’ platform outside the EPA. Trammel had stood unmoving in the wind, hands clasped behind his back, eyes looking somewhere in the distance while his actress wife clung to his arm. He seemed aloof from it all, exuding a self-contained aura of power.
Hunter decided to play devil’s advocate. “You’re saying he’s a capitalist who hates capitalism. How can that be?”
Hatcher, visibly chafing at being left out of the conversation, jumped in.
“That’s a mystery. Not much is known about his early life. He says he came out of a painfully broken home, and he refuses to talk about it at all. But he was obviously brilliant and self-made. He went to business school here in the Sixties, I recall.” Hatcher looked around for confirmation.
“George Washington University,” Deaver added. “Their School of Government, Business, and International Affairs. He got there on scholarships and graduated summa cum laude. He was one of the student radicals of that period. He got arrested a few times during demonstrations and admits he was involved with some of the more violent Marxist groups. But later he said he’d been young and foolish, and that violence was no answer to social problems. Right out of school, he took jobs on Wall Street and soon became regarded as a financial prodigy. They say he had an uncanny knack for being able to anticipate what would happen next in foreign markets.”
“That’s a quite sudden turnabout,” Hunter said. “From campus communist to Wall Street capitalist in just a few years. Yet from his current political activities, it doesn’t seem he’s changed his convictions all that much.”
“Yeah. That’s what Arnie thought,” Tony said. “He chatted with me a few weeks ago, when he was just getting into his Currents investigation. He said he didn’t think Trammel had really changed much since when he was a campus radical. Just his tactics.”
“Interesting,” Hunter said. “It’s such a shame that Mr. Wasserman couldn’t continue his work.”
Deaver tilted his head to look down the table at Hunter. “You can be sure it won’t stop with his death. We’ll continue investigating the Currents network.”
Hunter had to say it.
“Look. I have reason to believe—well, let’s just say I think the circumstances Arnold’s death are suspicious.” His eyes roamed the table, stopping on each face. “In fact, I think it may have something to do with his investigation. I want to warn you folks to be extremely careful going forward.”
“What?” Hatcher’s mouth hung open. “You mean you don’t think it was an accident? Are you saying—?”
Hunter raised a hand. “I’m saying some aspects of his supposed accident just don’t add up. Arnold told Frederick he’d uncovered some serious things about Currents related to the election. Maybe they were so serious that they put him at risk. So until more facts come to light, I urge you to stop poking into ‘the Hive,’ as you call it. Stop stirring up the hornets—at least for the time being.”
They all sat in silence for a moment, their eyes unblinking.
Tony cleared his throat. His eyes hardened.
“You’re asking us to stop doing our jobs,” he said, his voice suddenly firm.
“Yeah,” said Heather Summers, editor of one of their newsletters. “Our job is to uncover and report the truth about these groups.”
“I understand. And that’s an admirable attitude. But I have to—”
“No ‘buts,’” said Deaver, his own voice no longer soft. “We’d be betraying Arnie if we stopped now.”
Hunter looked from face to face—mostly young, but all idealistic. Determined. He turned to the one he thought might be most malleable.
“Mr. Hatcher, I’m serious. If Frederick and I are right, there could be a considerable risk to your people.”
Hatcher blinked. His own eyes moved around the table. “We’ve never faced anything quite like this,” he said tentatively.
“Dennis,” Deaver said to him quietly, “with the country coming apart the way it has been, it was onl
y a matter of time until things came to this. We’re here to give Americans the facts. We either do our work and fight back, or we might as well close our doors.”
Murmurs of agreement circled the table.
Hatcher turned to Hunter.
“We appreciate your warning, Dylan. We’ll proceed more carefully. But they’re right. Our donors expect us to expose those trying to undermine our country. We can’t allow them to silence us.”
For all Hatcher’s apparent character flaws, insincerity about his group’s mission didn’t appear to be one of them.
“Believe me, I understand and admire you for that,” Hunter said. “Please, though—keep your investigation low-key. Try not to let them know you’re looking into them until the day you publish your findings. After you’ve done that, you should be safe.”
“That’s moot at this point,” Deaver said. “We’ve scheduled an appointment with the directors of the Currents network for this coming week. So they’re going to know.”
Hunter sighed. “Okay. Just be careful. Keep your eyes open, and notify the cops about anyone or anything strange that you notice. Meanwhile, Frederick and I are pursuing this, too. I’d like to get together with you in two or three weeks, so that we can perhaps compare notes.”
“Absolutely!” Hatcher said, smiling again. “It’s a relief to know that we’re not the only ones out there looking into this.”
“You’re not. And maybe by then we’ll know exactly what happened to Mr. Wasserman.”
“So the police are investigating it as suspicious?” Deaver asked.
“I don’t know,” Hunter said. “But I am.”
3
“No, Cyrano! You don’t chew that!”
Just outside the front door of the house, Annie bent to extricate the leash from the puppy’s jaws.
Hunter said, “Let’s see how far we can walk before I have to pick him up and carry him.”
“At this rate, we’ll be lucky if he manages fifty feet,” she said as Cyrano, tail beating the air like a flailing sword, paused at the bottom of the steps to sniff a dead leaf. “So, tell me about the service.”
“It was well-attended. And moving. Wasserman was well-liked. Quite a few friends and family stood up to tell stories about him. So did his colleagues at the Center for Advocacy Profiles.”
“Did Wonk speak?”
He shook his head. “Wonk’s taking this pretty hard. Wasserman was one of his few close friends.”
“You’ve said something seems off about his death. What’s the evidence for that?”
“None that the police have found. At least, none they’ve mentioned publicly. But Wonk and I think the circumstances are disturbing.”
“How so?”
Hunter explained in detail while they half-followed, half-tugged the bouncing, squirming pup down the driveway to the street.
“I agree that, in combination, all those circumstances do seem suspicious,” she said. “Of course, we’re trained to suspect everything and everyone.”
“Everyone? Now, Annie—when have I ever given you cause to be suspicious of me?”
She rolled her eyes.
They followed the trotting little dog along the quiet residential street in the twilight. About a mile long, Connors Point was a narrow finger of land pointing out into the Chesapeake Bay. Well-maintained homes lined either side of Connors Point Road. Those on the right faced open water, while those on the left—the western side, where Hunter’s house stood—abutted a marshy tidal pond. Hunter had chosen that side of the street because he loved the marsh’s abundant variety of birds and wildlife. While Cyrano stopped to investigate a rock, he and Annie enjoyed a formation of geese silhouetted against the blood-red sunset, accompanied by the operatic twittering of a mockingbird.
“I’m sorry I got so upset with you last night,” she said.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “You had every right to.”
“No. I know you’re only trying to protect us.”
“Well, I’ve been doing a lousy job of it this past year. I’m planning to operate a lot more carefully, now.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing, in how I use my wheels. As you know, after I went off the grid as Matt Malone, I bought a lot of used vehicles, mostly in private sales, and registered each of them under one of my aliases. That was to give me plenty of options, in case I ever had to disappear again. I store them in long-term parking garages scattered all around the area, including Metro stops. That way, I can swap them out whenever I transition from one alias to another.”
“Exactly how many cars do you own, anyway?”
“Cars, vans, trucks—I’m up to about a dozen, now. Last year I had to add quite a few for my, um, extracurricular activities.”
“You mean running around shooting bad guys?”
“Well, yeah—if you insist on being crude about it. Anyway, since last Christmas I’ve gotten lazy and sloppy about which vehicle I drive under which alias. I’ve been pushing my luck that I don’t have an accident or get stopped for a ticket. I have to be more consistent about who gets to drive which vehicle.”
“‘Who?’ Do you mean—”
“I mean which alias. The names on the registrations, licenses, plates, and VIN numbers all have to match up. From now on, out here, Vic Rostand will have exclusive use of the CR-V, the Ford van, and the motorcycle. Up in the Allegheny Forest, Brad Flynn will be driving my latest acquisition, a Toyota pickup. Around D.C., Dylan will use either the Forester or the white van, which he keeps garaged in Bethesda. That’s also where Wayne Grayson parks the armored BMW beast. It’s registered to him, so he gets exclusive driving privileges in it, except for emergencies.”
“Damn. I love riding in Wayne’s sexy Beemer.”
“Stop pouting. How would it look for you to be seen gallivanting about town with a blond millionaire when you’re supposed to be engaged to Dylan Hunter?”
“Well, until Dylan decides to announce our engagement, I’m free to fool around with any man I want.”
“You shameless hussy . . . Anyway, if I ever have to use any of my other aliases, they’ll drive the nondescript junkers I’ve parked elsewhere.”
She slowly shook her head. “How do you manage to keep all this stuff straight?”
“How does an actor keep all his roles straight?”
“Don’t you ever wake up wondering who you really are?”
“I used to.” He squeezed her shoulders. “But not anymore. Up at the cabin, I made a New Year’s resolution to become Dylan Hunter, for good. Brad, Wayne, Vic, and the other dudes—they’re all just acting roles for Dylan, now.”
“Still, I marvel at how you can switch from one character right into another, like flipping a switch.”
“I had to get good at it, back when I was in Ops. If I hadn’t, any slip-up could have gotten me killed.” He grinned at her. “Knowing that was a strong motivator for me to rehearse a lot.”
He felt the vibration of the phone in his hip pocket.
“Now what?” he sighed, fishing it out. It was a fresh burner, receiving calls through his usual series of spoofing websites and call-forwarding. He was surprised to see the name on the display.
“Hello?” he answered simply, not identifying himself, from an abundance of caution.
“Dylan? Is that you?” Dan Adair’s unmistakable baritone conjured the image of his strong face, and the short-cropped, sandy-gray hair and beard.
“Dan! What a nice surprise. How are you, my friend? And Nan, and the family?”
“Doing great,” the oil entrepreneur replied. “We all are. How’s Annie?”
“Terrific. She’s right here, waving hello to you. We’re out walking our new puppy.”
“A dog, huh . . . Well, that’s ironic. That’s why I’m calling . . . First, let me tell you that for security, I’m using a borrowed phone. Can you talk freely on this line?”
Hunter frowned. “We’re good, Dan. What’s up?”
“I
just heard it on the local news. A guy walking his dog found a man’s body out in the woods.” He hesitated. “Out near Otter Creek.”
He looked out over the marsh, at the grasses stirring in the breeze.
“You don’t say.”
“Apparently, the cops haven’t identified the body yet. And they’re tight-lipped about the manner of death, except they say it looks like it was under ‘suspicious circumstances.’”
Hunter realized what must have been in his own face, because he saw its reflection in Annie’s.
“I see,” he said.
“I figured you’d want to know.”
“You’re right. Thanks for the head’s-up.”
“Dylan . . . You do know that whatever happens, you can trust us. All of us—including Will.”
Hunter recalled Adair’s duplicitous stepson—how he’d conspired with Zak Boggs and nearly gotten all of them killed. Before he could speak, Adair went on.
“When Boggs turned on him and was about to kill him, along with the rest of us—well, that changed him. He’d never been so scared in his life. Or more ashamed. And you were right: He is trying to make amends.
“I’m so glad for you, Dan.”
“Well, I just wanted to let you know. I’ve got to run. Dinner’s waiting.”
“Thanks, Dan. I’m grateful. Say hi to Nan and the rest of the family.”
Hunter ended the call. Pondered the news in silence as he removed the battery and the SIM card.
“Well?” Annie demanded.
He told her.
“You know what will happen when they ID the body,” she said. “Cronin will hear about it. And he’ll know.”
“He won’t know anything. And whatever he suspects, he won’t be able to prove. There’s no evidence I was even around that area at the time—because they won’t be able to determine the exact date and time of death.”
The puppy, tugging at the leash in her hand, began to whimper. She bent to pick him up. Held the little creature against her face, for mutual reassurance. Both looked up at Hunter. In the gathering gloom, the pup’s eyes were wide and black and eager. Hers were narrow and gray and anxious.
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