“Sure. That’s possible,” Vladimirovich said.
“But,” Severin said.
“But we see a lot of fraud out there. Or at least what you might call compelling circumstantial evidence of fraud. Schemes you wouldn’t believe. And some of it can’t have been brought about without the deliberate ignorance, or even active assistance or guidance, of these foreign companies’ American lawyers.”
“Don’t you catch that when you go do the overseas, on-site part of your investigation or whatever?” Zhang asked.
“Not if a company is good at cooking its books or forging supporting documentation like raw material and utility bills, payroll records, invoices and shipping paperwork,” Bergman said. “I just had a case where we figured out the company we were investigating was the same company we’d penalized two years earlier. All the same people. They’d just changed their company name, moved to an office and warehouse two miles from their original address, and pretended they were new to avoid paying the cash deposits for tariffs that were slapped on them the year before. It’s a fraudulent way of getting yourself a clean slate and new investigation.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“They accidentally included letterhead with the old company name in some of their submissions to the new case record.”
“Oops,” Severin said.
“Yeah. And between you and me,” Bergman said, “it’s all the more suspect when a foreign company fares as well as YSP did in one of our investigations because there’s a lot of room for discretion in how we apply our statutes and regulations. A lot of gray area. And when we have the option, we don’t tend to rule on issues in a way that benefits the foreign companies. Especially Chinese companies. To put it bluntly, the deck is usually stacked against them—if their American adversaries in the case have any influence on the Hill, that is. It’s political.”
“Like everything else in this town,” Severin said.
“So much so that sometimes it’s hard to figure out who the good guys are,” Vladimirovich said. “I mean, if you’re a foreign company, is it okay to commit fraud to get around a law if it’s being applied unfairly?” He shrugged. “Sounds like a question for undergrad philosophy class, right?”
“So, bottom line, you’re suspicious of Holloman because of his success?” Zhang said.
Vladimirovich shrugged. “I’m suspicious of everyone. It’s the nature of the business. The foreign companies. The American companies. The lawyers on both sides. Our own political masters. They’re all working their angles, if you ask me. All bullshitting us. All scratching the backs of congressmen and senators who, in-turn, scratch the backs of the campaign contributors who own the foreign or U.S.-based factories involved in our cases. All twisting the law and facts to fit their ends. Undermining the legitimacy of our work until our efforts are practically meaningless. A dirty business, all the way around.”
“I take it you aren’t concerned about your potential future in politics, throwing around blunt statements like that,” Zhang said.
“No. And you know what? You think any of these bastards gives a crap about the American or foreign workers they’re supposed to be fighting for? Hell no. They’re all in it for themselves. For the billable hours. The power. The ego trip. This whole business is nothing but a three-ring weasel circus.”
“Hey, there’s numb nuts right there,” Bergman said, pointing to a tall but slouching, scowling, dark-haired man crossing the food court, a paper-wrapped sub sandwich held in the crook of his arm as if it were a football, making his way for the entrance to the pedestrian tunnel that led back under 14th Street to Commerce.
“Numb nuts?” Zhang asked.
“Wesley.”
As he walked, Wesley’s roaming eyes chanced upon Bergman. He stopped in his tracks. His gaze moved from Bergman to Vladimirovich, then to Severin and Zhang. His dark eyes smoldered as he took in the scene. There wasn’t a doubt in Severin’s mind that Wesley had been told someone was attempting to contact and interview Kristin and Bill’s other coworkers, and that Wesley was guessing, correctly, that he was looking at the culprits. In a vain attempt to look disinterested, he nodded an acknowledgement at Bergman, then resumed his course without looking back.
“So what else?” Bergman asked.
“Who else might know anything?” Severin said.
“I’m not sure. We can ask around for you. Course, the other problem is getting people to talk to you. Our office is sort of a weird bunch. Easily intimidated by the political chain of command, you know? Most of them were pretty spooked by what happened, and probably all the more spooked by the bosses telling them to keep their mouths shut—half implying that discussing it was somehow a federal crime.”
“At some point, we may have to go to China for a bit of follow-up,” Severin said. “With that in mind, if there is anything you can give us that might help us figure out who to talk to over there, such as the names of people at the company they were investigating, that would be enormously helpful.”
“No problem,” Vladimirovich said. “The sorghum case got handed off to a new hire. Nice enough guy. If you give me your email address, I’ll ask him to send you the public version of the company’s investigative questionnaire responses. The amount of useful information in those things varies from case to case, but they should have some public information about the organization, management, and even maybe a little bit about the ownership of the company. Anything that isn’t proprietary.”
“That would be great. Thank you.”
Severin gave both of them his cell number, email address, and the name of their hotel in Arlington, asking that they do whatever they could to encourage their colleagues to reach out.
As they rose to leave, Bergman paused. “I just thought of one other thing. It’s probably nothing.”
“In movies,” Zhang said, “when they say it’s probably nothing, it always ends up being the clue that breaks the case.”
“What is it?” Severin asked.
“The day before they dropped off the radar, Keen texted me a picture to my smartphone. No text. Thing is, I can’t even make out what it’s a photo of. It’s a huge image. Takes forever to load. And when it finally does, I have to scroll all over the place to find the edges. All I can make out is a big black and gray blob. I figured it was, you know, like an unintended or accidental text. Probably an accidental photo, too. Touchscreen buttons activated by accidental contact, in his pocket or whatever.”
“That happens to me all the time,” Vladimirovich added. “Once, when I was in a bar hitting on this Hill intern, I pull my phone out of my coat pocket to find that my mother has been on the other end for almost 15 minutes.”
“Did she hear anything incriminating?” Severin asked.
“She claimed she couldn’t hear a thing. Just bar noise muffled by the fabric of my coat pocket. Said she stayed on the line just in case I’d been kidnapped and gagged or was having a heart attack. But who knows. She might just have been trying to avoid embarrassing me.”
“Would you mind forwarding me the photo Keen texted to you?” Severin asked Bergman. “You never know with these things. Did you tell State about it?”
“State?”
“The investigators from the State Department.”
“Are you kidding? We’re a couple of nobodies. They never bothered to meet with us.”
TWELVE
The same afternoon, Severin and Zhang turned the corner of 14th Street and Constitution Avenue, striding into the shadow of the massive Commerce headquarters building, to find Elaine Danielson, waiting for her bus in her kelly green dress and tan raincoat, right when and where Bergman told them she would be.
“Ms. Danielson?” Severin asked softly. She flinched anyway, then gave a furtive glance up 14th in a desperate search for her bus. “My name is Lars Sev—”
“I can’t talk to you.” She hardly made eye contact before taking two steps closer to the curb and scanning the area as if looking for a means of esca
pe.
“You already know who we are.”
“Please go away.”
“We’d only ask for a moment of your time. We’ll be completely discreet. Nobody ever has to know you spoke with us.”
“No.” She gave up on the bus and made for the crosswalk, walking quickly. Severin guessed she was heading for the Federal Triangle Metro Station. Striding alongside her, he noticed tiny droplets of sweat forming on her hairline. But it was only 49 degrees out, and she’d barely walked 20 yards.
“If you’d even answer just a couple of quick questions for me. Just a couple.” Her pace quickened. “What did the email from Keen and Powell say? Did they find something? Did they think they were in danger?”
“Go away.”
“Ms. Danielson, what are you afraid of? Did someone threaten you?”
She didn’t answer. Didn’t slow down. Didn’t so much as turn her head to look at Severin. And a few moments later, she turned into one of the auxiliary pedestrian entrances to the Ronald Reagan Building. A brawny security guard stood just inside the door. Severin and Zhang gave up their pursuit. But just as they were turning to head up the street, a man in a cheap gray suit appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, directly in front of them. It looked to Severin as if the man was puffing his chest out.
“Mr. Severin?”
“Who are you?”
With a jerky quickness, the man flashed his federal credentials and badge. Severin was 90 percent certain they bore the seal of the State Department, and entirely certain of the reason the man was so quick to return his credentials and badge to his pocket.
“Why are you questioning people about a U.S. government matter?” the man asked.
“You know something? You were so quick to tuck your credentials away that I didn’t catch your name.”
“You’re questioning people about an overseas matter under federal jurisdiction.”
“I am? Who gave you that idea?” Silence. “Nobody, huh? Well, well. Special Agent No-name, sent forth by nobody.”
“You don’t have an investigator’s license valid in this jurisdiction. So your activities are illegal.”
“Is that right? Well, isn’t this a little outside your jurisdiction too? I thought you guys were all about diplomatic security. Holding the schlongs of foreign diplomats while they pee or whatever.”
“I’ll be happy to bring along one of my friends in the D.C. police next time. And I can assure you that this is within their jurisdiction.”
“Oh yeah? What’s your name, buddy? Let’s see those credentials again.” The man stood unmoving, his expression suddenly less commanding. “I thought so. So what’s the story? Friend of a friend ask you to hassle us? To try to scare us off? What are you going to do, arrest us because some douche you’ve never met asked a friend of yours to ask you to tell us we’re working as PIs without licenses?” The man stood silent, now looking entirely unsure of himself. “Need me to say that again, but slower? Tell you what—$50 says your boss doesn’t even know you’re out here doing this. Am I right? Is that kosher with your chain of command? No, it isn’t. So get lost.” As Severin turned to flag down a taxi, he saw that Zhang had been standing behind him grinning.
“Hey, I’m not—”
“And get a real job, schmucko.”
The man didn’t follow them.
*****
“What do you think that was about?” Zhang asked as they sat in the back of a worn-out cab that smelled like day-old chicken curry, headed back across the river to their hotel.
“Someone doesn’t like us being here. Could by anyone. But there was absolutely nothing officially sanctioned about that dimwit approaching us, rest assured. Favor by a Sigma Chi frat brother of a cousin of a friend of a friend of a friend type of thing. Guy’s name was probably Chet. Or Chad. He looked like a Chad.”
“If he’s just some chump, then how did he find us?” Zhang asked.
Severin was wondering that himself. “Maybe Wesley saw us from his office window, as we were pacing back and forth out there watching for Danielson, and called the guy,” he said, now quite unsure of himself.
“Does Wesley have an office on that side of the building?”
“How should I know?”
THIRTEEN
As Severin opened his hotel room door, eager to get to his toilet, he stepped over a standard white business size envelope with his last name on it. It wasn’t marked with the hotel’s letterhead.
Five minutes later, he was standing in Zhang’s doorway, holding the open note in his hand. It was written on a sheet of printer paper. “I think we have a dime-store spy on our hands here. Look at this thing.” The note read: Go home, Severin. More going on than you know. You are playing with fire. Friendly warning. “Looks like someone did it with their non-dominant hand so the writing wouldn’t be recognizable.”
“How banal,” Zhang said. “Isn’t that a trick from one of the Hardy Boys stories?”
“Wallace, your comments are starting to make me feel like my whole life is one big rerun.”
“A remake, you mean. An inferior remake.”
“First, you tell me this whole affair has a hackneyed plot, or sounds like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and that I’m just the latest clone of the redemption seeking former lawman from dozens of crap movies you’ve seen. Next, I’m a lesser knockoff of Travis McKee.”
“McGee.”
“McGee then. Unlicensed PI—”
“And excessive drinker.”
“—from 20-plus mystery novels. Old hat. Now you’re telling me we’re re-enacting elements of a Hardy Boys story from, what, 70 or 80 years ago?”
“And let’s not forget that even your name is stolen from a 19th century novella about a Ukrainian pervert.”
“See what I mean?”
“Well, you know what they say.”
“No, but I bet you’ll tell me.”
“Everything has been done before.”
“Then save me some time by telling me how this story ends.”
*****
Lacking motivation to find a good place to eat, they settled for another unimpressive meal in their hotel. Afterward, though it was barely 7:30, Zhang said he was too tired to go out, so Severin headed back up to his room with a tentative plan to pour all the little vodkas and gins in his mini-bar into a cup with two ice cubes, add a splash of tonic water, kick back in bed, and maybe watch a pay-per-view movie. A comedy. As he arrived at the elevators on Zhang’s floor, he found another man already waiting there. Both the up and down elevator buttons were pushed. Severin figured the guy wasn’t watching what he was doing and hit the wrong button first. Maybe he was drunk. The up elevator came, and they both moved toward it—the man starting to move a split second after Severin. Once inside, the man pushed the button for the top floor. “What floor?” he asked Severin. For reasons that escaped him, the hairs on the back of Severin’s neck stood up. “Seven please,” he said. As the elevator ascended, Severin had the peculiar feeling that the man was studying him with his peripheral vision. Of course, he couldn’t tell for sure. But the feeling was definitely there.
He got out on the seventh floor and walked down the corridor as if everything was normal as could be, looking over his shoulder a couple of times as he went. Nobody was behind him. Reaching the fire stairs, he climbed to the eighth floor, peeked out the cracked fire door to see whether the man was anywhere to be seen, then walked to his room, smiling over what he was certain—or at least nearly certain—was just silly paranoia.
Before mixing his drink and turning on a movie, he decided to check his email one more time. He was pleased to see that the new Commerce investigator who had taken over Powell and Keen’s sorghum case had, presumably at the request of Bergman or Vladimirovich, emailed him several dozen files that hopefully included the promised public versions of the company’s voluminous investigative questionnaire responses. He’d look at them later. In the meantime, he forwarded copies to Zhang.
He was ab
out to shut down his laptop when the tiny white envelope icon symbolizing a newly received email appeared in his in-box. It was from an anonymous Gmail account—the email address a nonsensical combination of letters and numbers. Someone had probably set up the account just to send this one email. There was nothing in the subject line but an exclamation point. Nothing to suggest there were any computer viruses attached. Opening it, he found a simple four-sentence note. I was a friend of Kristin Powell. I have information for you. Meet me at Galaxy Hut on Wilson Boulevard in Arlington this evening at 9 PM. I already know what you look like.
Wishing the email contained a little more information, Severin was nevertheless pleased to learn that at least one of his old watering holes was still in business. A place where he could always find a good beer on tap. He wrote back a plain reply. Galaxy Hut. 9 PM. See you there.
Back on his feet and staring out his 8th floor window, across the Potomac River and western edge of D.C., he called Zhang and told him to hold off on changing into his jammies. He remained there after hanging up, gazing down on the labyrinth of office buildings that housed the government agencies, law and lobbying firms, and embassies comprising the privileged but never satisfied core of the most powerful city on Earth. Innumerable entities pressing innumerable causes with cleverly veiled disregard for the desires or best interests of the electorate. Desperate people vying, clawing for seats at the top table. For power. Just looking at it conjured up memories—some exaggerated, some dead on the money—from the time he lived and worked there. In his bitter and cynical eyes, it was a corrupting snake pit that slowly but surely brought out the worst in people.
Severin caught himself nearly shuddering. Snapping out of it, he pondered the fact that there were a disconcerting number of gaps in his understanding of what happened to Powell and Keen, and perhaps more importantly, why it happened. If anything, the number of unanswered questions was growing, not shrinking. It was his understanding that the precious soybean trade agreement was signed, sealed, and delivered. In other words, it was, in theory, no longer a factor. So why was there still so much apparent push-back? Why were people still so afraid to talk with them? For that matter, why was so much of the State Department report blacked out in the first place? Was there something else going on? Something that he had yet to discover? He really began to wonder. And was he truly just being paranoid about the man in the elevator? Perhaps not.
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