“Hello, Thomas,” Ridge replied, addressing Senator Tom Macon from South Dakota. “Funny how we all seem to line up like cows at the trough come feeding time, isn’t it?”
A smile crossed Macon’s face as the two men moved forward, the reaction in response to Ridge’s comment, an inside joke they always shared, finding some way to incorporate a nod to their respective western states.
“That it is,” Macon replied, assuming the same stance as Ridge, the two ambling through the open hallway and pulling up short of the elevators. Reaching out, he pressed the button to call the lift their way, waiting as the doors slid open before extending a hand inward. “Please, age before beauty.”
Feeling the corners of his mustache shift upward, Ridge wagged a single finger at his friend, stepping inside the elevator. “This once, I’m going to give it to you. Just this once, though.”
“Much obliged,” Macon replied, following Ridge inside, the doors closing and slowly lowering them to the basement cafeteria. “So, how’s it feel to be a short-timer?”
Feeling his back molars clamp down tight, Ridge fought any urge to let Macon hear them grind, not wanting to make a single sound, give off the slightest impression that the comment had even registered.
If left to his own devices, he would have slid out of office days before, avoiding any press junkets like the one that morning, bypassing any awkward elevator conversation, eschewing having to go through ten versions of the same discussion that he knew was waiting at the caucus gathering downstairs.
It was not often that a senator with his sort of tenure left office, even less frequent that they did so under the not-so-subtle advice of their population base. Already in the last two months, he had witnessed a fair number of sideways glances when making his way to the Senate floor for roll call, something he suspected would only intensify in the coming hour.
“It’s not so bad,” Ridge said, waving a hand in front of him. “I always said this next one would have been my last anyway. This just means I get back out on the rivers while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.”
Overhead, the lighted numbers of the elevator informed them they had reached their destination, a single ding of the bell preceding the doors parting wide. As it did so, a flood of sound rushed in around them, the bulk of the majority caucus having already gathered, clusters of people all deep in conversation, each fighting to be heard above the noise.
Holding the door open with a hand, Macon swung his opposite arm forward, motioning Ridge through. “You mean to tell me you’re going to miss all this? I can’t imagine why.”
Exiting the elevator, Ridge took two steps forward, stopping on the edge of the enormous room, surveying the expanse before him.
From where they stood, the space stretched more than eighty yards in either direction, the interior of it lined with round tables under white cloths, ten seats surrounding each. At the front of the room was an impromptu stage with a lectern and a bevy of American flags, a handful of techs putting the final touches on the mechanical necessities for the coming meeting.
Along the back wall was a buffet line, a fair number of people already working their way through, their ages and appearances displaying that some Senators had been quite liberal with bringing along their staff to the gathering.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” Ridge replied, his dry tone letting it be known what he thought about everything he saw before him.
Remaining silent, Macon eased up alongside him, he too assessing the room, his features showing he was as unimpressed as his counterpart.
“Most people think what we do is nothing but glamor, getting wined and dined on the taxpayer dollar. What they don’t know is how much time we spend on things like this, meaningless meetings that we’d all just as soon avoid if we could.”
“Amen to that,” Ridge muttered.
Shifting a few inches closer, Macon lowered his voice and said, “And what do we get in return? Bullshit like you got this morning from that constituent of yours. Like you’re supposed to know what happened to her son.”
Feeling his eyes grow wider, his brows rising, Ridge flicked his gaze to Macon, feeling his body temperature rise a few degrees. “You heard about that, did you?”
His face falling flat, Macon lifted a hand, clapping it around Ridge’s arm.
“Of course, Jack. Everybody has.”
Chapter Five
The stares as Ridge entered the cafeteria conference room had been bad. They had escalated in frequency and intensity as he worked his way through the buffet line, each passing moment bringing with it an intense awareness of every person around him and the keen interest they seemed to have in the lame duck senator from Wyoming.
All of that paled in comparison to the number of looks he garnered as he finished eating, stood and made his way directly back to the elevators, feeling the collective weight of their eyes on his back.
Leaving his table service right where it was, Ridge had stood in the middle of the elevator with a sneer on his face, almost daring somebody in the room to say something as the doors slowly closed before him, blocking him from view.
The moment he was shut away inside, back to being left free to his own devices, he sagged visibly, releasing the heavy breath he seemed to have been holding since the moment Macon offered his condolences.
Two minutes after entering the elevator, Ridge exited on the third floor, turning a hard right and heading straight back to his office. Unlike his previous trip down the hall, there was no slow amble used to cover the ground, his focus aimed at the floor in front of him, his hands out and pumping along either side.
As he strode forward, he was vaguely aware of a small handful of people filing by, many of them continuing the trend of gawking as they watched him go.
Not that he now, or ever, had really cared what most of the people in the building thought.
“Susie!” Ridge proclaimed as he stepped through the tall wooden door to his suite, the gate always open during business hours, inviting anybody from Wyoming that might be in town to stop by and visit.
Inside the small confines of the front office, his voice sounded much like a cannon blast, reverberating off the walls, causing the young girl seated behind the desk to visibly jump, jostling the tan-colored liquid in her cup.
“Sorry, Ash,” Ridge said, stepping past the desk and into the doorway of the office that offset his own, the back half of the suite split into two equal portions.
Unlike his side, which was one large space, the room expansive, housing only a single desk, this one was arranged into an open bullpen, a quartet of desks shoved into each of the corners.
Seated in the back right was Marian Ellerbe, a woman in her late-twenties, the most recent hire of the staff, just two years removed from Duke University. Dressed in a black pantsuit with a white blouse, she was shifted in her chair to stare back at him, a half-eaten deli sandwich on the desk before her.
Ten feet to her left was Kyle Stroh, his white-blonde hair pulled back into a widow’s peak, his pale complexion made even more so by the yellow shirt and matching tie he wore, the overall effect making him appear much younger than the thirty-four years Ridge knew him to be.
Together, the two served as legislative aides for the Senator, Ellerbe covering health and human services topics, Stroh sticking with agriculture and education.
Anything else that needed to be covered was overseen by Beckwith, the final desk in the room sitting empty, the third aide for the office having quit abruptly after the election two months prior, wasting no time in moving over to the private sector once it was clear the position was operating under a truncated timetable.
“Yes, Senator?” Beckwith asked, her seat arranged just inside the door, making for optimal entry and egress whenever she was needed.
If she was surprised in the slightest to see him back so soon she did nothing to show it, her features impassive, her voice free of accusation or concern.
“My office, right now,” Ridge said, hooking a
thumb back over his shoulder before glancing up to his aides and adding, “You guys, too. Bring your food if you want.”
Without waiting for any verbal response, Ridge strode across the small landing between the two sides, his footfalls swallowed up by the thick carpeting underfoot. Going straight to his desk, he pulled out his chair and lowered himself into it, arriving just moments before Beckwith, Ellerbe and Stroh coming in on her heels.
Each armed with a notepad and pen, they pulled forward the same chairs that had been used by the constituents that morning, the trio sitting across from him in a line that couldn’t help but conjure a bit of déjà vu.
Barely waiting for them to take their seats, Ridge said, “I’m guessing you know why I called you in here.”
Across from him, the two aides both glanced down to their blank notebooks, ceding the floor to Beckwith.
“What happened downstairs?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Ridge replied, spitting the word out instantly before pausing to reconsider. “Okay, well, nothing down there in particular.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I rode the elevator down with Senator Macon, who offered me his condolences on what happened this morning,” Ridge said, unable to contain his voice as it rose slightly.
In response, he continued to get a view of the top of both Ellerbe and Stroh’s heads, their focus intense, the latter even going as far as to jot down a note.
“This morning,” Beckwith said, working her way through the statement. “The interview. He saw it.”
“Yes,” Ridge said, “and apparently everybody else has as well.”
Three feet away, Beckwith’s lips parted just slightly, creases forming on either side of her mouth as her jaw sagged open. “Oh, my.”
“No,” Ridge said, waving a hand at her. “Nothing like that. I don’t blame you, and we’re not about to sit around here feeling sorry for ourselves.”
At that, each of the three people before him looked up expectantly, not sure where he was going with things, their faces registering everything from mortification to open curiosity.
“What do we have on the agenda for the rest of the afternoon?” Ridge asked.
Immediately shifting her attention down to the same leather planner resting on her lap, Beckwith hooked a finger around the ribbon and pulled it open, running her gaze down the length of the page.
“You were scheduled to be downstairs until two, after which you have a meeting with Senator Schultz to discuss new zoning laws around Yellowstone and Representative Conrad to talk about the new wind farms in the Wind River Range.
“And this evening is the farewell mixer.”
Of everything mentioned, the discussion with his House counterpart was the only thing of even nominal importance, the mixer something that ranked lower than the media event that morning on ways he wanted to spend his final hours in office.
“Never mind any of that,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?” Beckwith replied, snapping her attention up from the book spread atop her thighs.
“You heard me,” Ridge replied, a hint of an edge in his tone. “We’re clearing our schedules. All of us. For the rest of the day, the only thing any of us are focused on is finding the answer to that poor woman’s question.”
Chapter Six
The image was enlarged from the tiny touch screen on Leopold Donner’s phone to the vertical monitor sitting on his desk, though the extra space did nothing to enhance the resolution. If anything, it was only made worse, the picture becoming pixelated and distorted, the original footage grainy, as if taken on an aging device of some sort.
The visual quality of it was of little import to Donner as he worked, though, having seen the entire sequence enough times to know exactly what was contained, the blurry bursts of color more than enough to tell him who was speaking and when.
Using the scroll bar on the bottom of the screen, he pushed the feed along until he saw the burgundy splotch that he knew to be the coat of the woman seated in front of Ridge. With his right hand, he navigated the mouse over the woman’s features, cropping out a square more than six inches on either side and exporting it into a secondary program already running on his desktop.
As little as five years prior, the thought of Donner doing such work would have been enough to make the man laugh out loud. Enlisting in the Navy right out of college – a four-year jaunt that was marked more by his time throwing a discus and performing keg stands on the local Greek circuit than anything related to scholarly pursuits – the bulk of his career was spent ankle-deep in the mud.
The first moment he’d been eligible he had enrolled in SEAL training, spending the better part of a decade bouncing across the globe, never ceasing to marvel at the fact that while he was employed by the Navy, most of his time was spent in one desert or another.
Content that that was the life for him, never had the thought of getting out crossed his mind, images of becoming something like Arnold Ames, a man still wearing the uniform well into his fifties, being the ideal he aspired to.
Clear up until the moment he realized just how much money the private sector was willing to dole out to men with his training.
His first dalliance with what many in the service referred to as the dark side occurred in Iraq. At the time, he was still in the direct employment of the United States government, forced to be a bystander as men that he had been serving with just six months prior came to town, wearing more comfortable clothes and carrying far superior weaponry.
Not short on braggadocio, they had also been quick to share that just a few months in their current post would garner more than he made in a year.
Without a wife or children, never before had Donner given a great deal of thought to retirement, or saving money, or even anything beyond the world of green camouflage he was living in.
An errant piece of shrapnel from a roadside IED changed all that for him, twisted metal no larger than a silver dollar managing to slice clean through his triceps muscle, cycling him back stateside, requiring surgery and six months of rehabilitation time.
By the time his recovery was complete, he had come to realize his time with the Navy was as well, cashing out five years short of a pension, content that whatever he might miss out on would be more than compensated by the litany of private operators lining up for men with his particular skills.
Turned out, he was right.
Now five years into his life on the civilian side, he had ascended to partner status with his new employer, enjoying near-total autonomy coupled with hefty financial backing.
Along the way, he had also collected no small number of contacts, men such as Ames, people that made the secondary ventures that he knew would serve his actual retirement interests.
“Alright,” Donner said, lifting the cropped image of the woman from the screen and transposing it onto the secondary screen. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
Beginning with a few clicks of his mouse, the moves practiced several times over, Donner ran a basic enhancement. On screen, the program responded to his commands, a horizontal line stretching across the bottom of the image and slowly working its way upward.
With each bit of distance, it filled in the grainy and blurred spots on the image, using a combination of contextual clues and educated guessing to clarify the image.
Less than a minute after pulling it from the video, the resolution had gone from unusable to something fairly clear, the screen depicting a woman that looked to be just north of fifty, her hair trending toward silver, her features pointed and harsh.
“Damn,” Donner said, wincing as he looked at the woman, sun lines appearing around his eyes. “Feel sorry for the poor bastard that ever procreated with that.”
Saving the new image to his desktop, Donner closed out the photo program, pulling up facial recognition software in its wake.
Entering the new picture into it, he started the program to searching, a status bar appearing at the bottom of the screen.
Chapter Seven
The woman’s name was Clara Tarby, the search for her being as simple as consulting the guest registry in the front of the office, the information entered in her own stilted handwriting, plain blue letters scribbled across the page.
The first three attempts to contact her had all gone for naught, the calls going directly to voicemail, an automated voice reciting the number they had tried to reach and imploring them to leave a message.
Between each of the calls, there was plenty of speculation throughout the office, the myriad of possibilities for the absence being everything from she was underground in the subway to she had already made her way back to the airport and was currently somewhere over Middle America, headed back home.
The decision to wipe away a half day — the final half day at that — to engage in a hunt for the woman in an attempt to answer her question was not entirely well-received in the office, though nobody went as far as to say anything.
Instead, they had all done as instructed and cleared their schedules, incurring no small amount of pushback from various organizations in the process.
As expected, Ridge’s response had been to have them tell everybody to go to Hell.
He had one last day in office, and he would use it however he saw fit.
In the time since their prior meeting, the three staff members had pushed their chairs to the side to accommodate a fourth seat in the arrangement, putting Beckwith and Tarby in the center, the two young aides on either end. As odd a conglomerate as Ridge could ever remember being seated before him, the quartet was spread from one corner of his desk to the other, their faces bearing a variety of expressions.
Motive ; One Last Day ; Going Viral Page 29
