The Power Couple

by Alex Berenson

  * * *

  Sure enough, her phone—Rachel’s phone—trilled a week later. “This my favorite stewardess?”

  “Dray? What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Rattrap for sale. Down 206 pas’ that Piggly Wiggly.”

  “News to me.” Though it wasn’t.

  “You think the bank calls you ’fore me?”

  “Shouldn’t have told me, now I have to outbid you.”

  “Why fight when we can you-know-what?”

  “No, what?”

  “This way you learn from the best. Gotta get it done quick, though.”

  So Rachel Townsend and Draymond Sullivan became partners not even six months after they met. The deal was small, three million in all, six hundred thousand down, the rest borrowed. No laws broken, at least as far as Rachel could tell. Fred Smith assured her they were making progress. He wants to see what kind of partner you are. Don’t ask too many questions, let him lead.

  Rebecca didn’t argue with Smith, but she didn’t entirely agree. Sullivan mostly ignored women unless they were either old and useful to him, like his secretary, or young and pretty, like his secretary’s daughter. Yet he liked showing off for Rachel Townsend. Maybe her expensive flashiness reminded him of himself. Rachel drove a new BMW M3, a bright red rocket, two doors and 330 horsepower. The car became a crucial prop, and something more. When she got behind the wheel in Birmingham, she was Rebecca, but by the time she pulled off the interstate in Montgomery, she was Rachel.

  Sullivan rode with her once on their way to Clanton. On a flat stretch of 65 where the cops couldn’t hide, she hit 110, swishing the BMW between tractor trailers.

  “Trying to kill me?” he said.

  “Pussy.”

  He looked hard at her. The M3 was cramped, even for average-sized adults. Sullivan stood six foot three and weighed close to three hundred pounds. She wondered if she’d gone too far. Instead he smiled.

  “Even wonder why I don’t hit on you, Rachel?”

  “You do hit on me.”

  “Yeah, but I stop when you tell me, so it don’t count.”

  “You respect me.”

  A line that set him laughing so hard his belly shook.

  “We both earned it the hard way.”

  “You spent your twenties on your back for a Russian too?”

  “My daddy sold Buicks. Good money. ’Cept he had a problem with dice. Huntsville was just big enough to have its own place to roll. By the time he was done, no more Buicks. No more house. No more daddy, day the sheriff slapped that eviction paper on our door he went upstairs and ate hisself a shotgun.”

  “I’m sorry, Draymond.”

  He flapped a hand, Don’t be. “Worthless coward bastard. My momma said she’d get a job cleaning houses, only she couldn’t clean worth a damn. Soon enough white people didn’t come poorer than us. Worst part was it happened when I was eleven. Old enough to remember when things were better. Thank God I loved hitting folks in the mouth.”

  She waited, but he didn’t explain.

  “How’s that?” she finally said.

  “All my talking, never told you I played right guard at Auburn, three years? It all started there.”

  Something changed between them then. She could see the dirt-poor teenager he’d been. The vision gave her the empathy she needed to get close to him.

  Close enough to destroy him.

  * * *

  That night, back in Birmingham, she told Brian what had happened. He knew her cover, of course. Officially, agents weren’t supposed to tell their spouses about undercover operations. But the rule was impossible to enforce, and the bureau didn’t try.

  Anyway, she needed Brian’s help. She carried a second phone for Sullivan’s calls. The kids couldn’t be around when she answered, so Brian sometimes had to hustle them away.

  They were lying in bed. She always found herself hungry for sex after she went to Montgomery. She tried not to think about why. Tonight, the first time ever, Brian had begged off, but she’d insisted. She’d rolled on top of him, grabbed his hands, pinned him down. Taken her pleasure as he lay on his back hardly moving.

  Now she repeated what Draymond had told her about his life, how underneath everything they were alike.

  “No doubt. You like being Rachel, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sometimes I think you like being her better than being you.” She didn’t know if he was serious. And she was afraid to ask.

  “What am I supposed to say to that?”

  “You’re supposed to say no.” He laughed. And rolled onto his side.

  * * *

  Over the next couple of months, she fell into an odd limbo. She was effectively on hiatus at the bureau. She couldn’t risk conducting interviews under her real name as an agent. Alabama was too small for her to be sure she wouldn’t run across someone who knew Sullivan.

  So she was reduced mostly to document work when she wasn’t playing Rachel. And both she and Smith felt a little Rachel went a long way. She went to Montgomery twice a month at most.

  She couldn’t work out of the main office in Birmingham, either. Its address was publicly available, and Rachel Townsend had no reason to be there. Of course, Rebecca wasn’t the first FBI agent to have this problem. Every field office maintained at least two backup locations close by, rented through shell companies which had no traceable connection with any federal agency. At least one had to be hidden from local law enforcement, too.

  So, Rebecca spent most days alone in a three-room office that the bureau officially referred to as TCF–NA, True Compartmentalized Facility–North Alabama. The space was supposedly rented to CorthoSouth, a medical billing company. No one looked twice at the cover. Birmingham was a center of the American medical-industrial complex.

  She and Smith met every other week in Atlanta, two hours east, though they had protocols if she needed to talk more urgently. Every so often he let her join the kind of surveillance where the watchers spent shifts in vans and had no contact with the world. Boring jobs, but at least she could hang out with other agents.

  Not being allowed to do regular bureau work did have one advantage. Her cover job was nine to five, so she spent more time at home. But though she saw more of her family, she felt disconnected from her own life. Rachel was glamorous, rich, exotic. Rebecca had two kids and a rented ranch house. Rachel had an M3. Rebecca had an Accord.

  On top of the lies was the truth, the danger of an undercover operation, even one with white-collar targets. As long as her cover held, she should be fine. Violence wasn’t part of day-to-day life for Sullivan and his friends. But Rebecca couldn’t be sure how they would react if they discovered the FBI was targeting them.

  The upshot was that Rebecca spent a lot of time thinking about Rachel. But Rachel never wondered about Rebecca, much less Kira, Tony, or Brian.

  * * *

  Sullivan introduced her to his buddies. Every new contact meant more targets. But they were potential trip wires too. Just because Sullivan had bought her cover didn’t mean everyone else would. Let him do the work, Smith told her. Anybody seems too suspicious, back off, we’ve got plenty already.

  But she didn’t know exactly what that surveillance had found. Smith wouldn’t let her listen, and he briefed her only broadly. He wanted to cut the odds that she would blurt out something she shouldn’t know.

  Still, she figured that Smith would tell her if he thought arrests were close. At the least, he would warn her prosecutors were starting to lean on targets, How can you help us? How can we help you? She needed to be ready if Sullivan turned squirrelly.

  The deals she’d seen firsthand had been clean. Mostly. A little Section 8 fraud, minor tax evasion, low-level skimming. Misdemeanors, basically. Nothing to justify GULFSTREAM’s time and expense. Sullivan liked teasing her, hinting he was breaking the law without letting her see the details.

  She needed to do more.

  * * *

  He started to quote-unquot
e flirt with her harder. She let him.

  “We gonna run away together, Rachel?”

  “Ask your wife.”

  “Suzie don’t care long as she goes to Buckhead, shops at Neiman’s. Know how much that woman spends on clothes? Come on, have dinner with me. Up north if you like.”

  “You mean New York?”

  “I mean Birmingham. New York, please.”

  A week later he called her again, to tell her about a deal in Mobile.

  “Land straight from the city. Double our money. Only my old friends get this one.” The more corrupt and profitable the deal, the closer Sullivan held it.

  “Double? For realsies?” For realsies was definitely Rachel, not Rebecca.

  “You want in?”

  “You know it, Dray.”

  “Then have dinner with me.”

  “One condition.”

  “I don’t wear rubbers, sweetheart.”

  Rubbers? Who said rubbers? Sixty-five-year-old men, that’s who. “I want to hear about the deal. Not the usual. I want to know how it really works.”

  “Better if you don’t.”

  “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Dray. No surprises. I’m in, I’m in all the way.”

  “In all the way. I like the sound of that.”

  “Bet you do.”

  * * *

  Dinner was at Bottega, Birmingham’s best Italian restaurant. She dressed conservatively, a knee-high black skirt and a simple black blouse, knowing Sullivan wouldn’t need any encouragement. She figured he’d be handsy, but she wasn’t worried. Smith had asked her if she wanted to have backup in the restaurant, but she’d laughed him off, You think I can’t handle Draymond after all this time?

  Now they sat side by side on a banquette at the back of the mezzanine, out of sight of prying eyes. She lived on the other side of the city, ten miles north. Still, doing anything in Birmingham brought an inevitable risk that someone who knew her as Rebecca might see her. Sullivan’s desire for privacy was simpler and more priapic. He kept touching her, her hand and arm and knee.

  The food at Bottega was good. Sullivan ordered course after course, lamb and rabbit and steak, eating like the hungry teenager he’d once been. He washed everything down with glasses of Johnnie Walker Blue. The scotch loosened his tongue, and he obligingly walked her through not just the Mobile deal but all his greatest hits, a laundry list of tax fraud, public corruption, kickbacks, and bribery.

  “That sounds even more illegal than everything else,” she said, after he told her how a South Alabama sheriff had lifted seven ounces of cocaine from an evidence locker for him. He’d passed it to a hospital executive deciding where to build a new surgery center.

  Sullivan laughed like he’d never heard anything funnier. “More illegal!” Haw-haw-haw, haw-haw-haw! “It’s all illegal, sweetheart, every last bit.”

  By this point Sullivan was five scotches in. Heavy pours. She was trying to keep him from a sixth. She worried that he would slur his words so badly the recording would become useless.

  She almost felt sorry for him as he put his head in the noose that she and the bureau had so carefully knotted.

  Then he tried to kiss her. She pulled away.

  “Gimme kiss.” He leaned over, put his gnarled right hand on her skirt, trying to push it up.

  “No, Dray.”

  “You promised.” Promisssed. The Return of the King had come out a few months before. She couldn’t help thinking Dray sounded like Gollum. He was sitting to her left. She clamped her legs together but he leaned in, pressed his right hand between them until his hand was between her knees.

  He twisted over, swiped his left hand at her breasts. She grabbed his wrist with both hands—she didn’t think he would feel the mic but she couldn’t take the chance. Then she felt her skirt riding higher as he shoved his right hand up her thighs.

  “Enough.”

  “I say the same. ’Nough teasing, Rachel.”

  His old-man sweat overwhelmed a peppery aftershave that belonged on a frat boy. He was not just heavy but stronger than she expected, stronger than she was, muscle under all that fat. His bulk blocked her, pressed her into the banquette. They were alone on the mezzanine. The meal had gone late as Sullivan brag-confessed, and the waiters and everyone else had disappeared.

  She kept her legs clamped but he pushed his hand up farther. The skirt began to tear, a slow rrrrrip, the sound horrifying. She had pepper spray in her purse but she didn’t know if she could reach it.

  “Stop. Please.”

  For a moment he hesitated, nodded as if to apologize.

  Then he kissed her, his lips thick and rubbery, his tongue like a cat pawing at a mouse hole, his breath sour with scotch. Bile rose in her throat. This couldn’t be happening. Not here, a public space, a restaurant. But it was. Sullivan grunted, a low animal sound. His self-control evaporated all at once. He pushed the table back with his legs like an animal who needed room, sending dishes clattering.

  If she didn’t do something, he was going to rape her.

  She jerked her arm up, the self-defense training from Quantico taking over, and slammed back his chin. He cursed and slipped back, giving her enough space to scream.

  Sullivan pulled away as a waiter thumped up the stairs to the mezzanine. They sat side by side in silence, staring across the empty room. As if the dishes had fallen by themselves. He was panting, from arousal or pain she didn’t know.

  The waiter hurried over. “Everything okay, ma’am?”

  She stood, unsteadily. She leaned back against the banquette, feeling its cool leather against her hands. Now that she had escaped, every sensation was magnified; she heard a fork clicking against a plate downstairs as if the diners were at the next table.

  “Bathroom.” She staggered away.

  * * *

  The bathroom was empty. She ran the faucet, waited for her breathing to steady. Rachel and Rebecca had both been wrong. Sullivan was a bad guy, he took what he wanted, what wasn’t his. Why had she imagined he wouldn’t do the same with her? She was nothing but a warm hole to him. She splashed water on her face, reapplied her lipstick, smoothed her skirt.

  She hated Sullivan. But she hated herself a little too.

  * * *

  At Quantico they’d had training for talking to survivors of sexual assault. One afternoon only. Rape cases were mostly local, not FBI. Survivors often blame themselves for what’s happened, wonder if they encouraged their assailants. You should remind them that the victim—the survivor—is never to blame.

  Never? She’d known what she was doing, teasing Sullivan into talking—

  No. Not her fault.

  She dabbed her face with a napkin once more. Thought back to Ned and that night at Drakes. Now she had a law enforcement story all her own. Haw-haw-haw.

  When she came back the plates were reset, a new glass of scotch for Sullivan. He smiled at her as though nothing had happened. “Feisty.”

  “You have no idea.” She kept her voice steady.

  “You want coffee? Or should we get out of here?”

  She needed every ounce of self-control not to pepper-spray him until he gagged. Was he joking? For the first time she understood gaslighting; she wondered if she could trust her own memory. Only it wasn’t memory, it was still happening, her heart thumping one hundred fifty beats a minute. She wondered if she could last through coffee with him, decided the answer didn’t matter. He’d given her more than enough. In every way.

  “I’m gonna go home.” She paused. “Alone.”

  “See you soon, babe.”

  “You know it.”

  * * *

  She had planned to sleep that night in Rachel’s downtown condo. She didn’t want to risk Sullivan following her home. But as she left Bottega she found herself almost automatically tracing the route that led to I-65 and her house. To husband and daughter and son.

  She swung the M3 around. She didn’t get to go home. Not tonight. What would she tell Brian about Sullivan? Wha
t would he do? What if he confronted Sullivan and destroyed the investigation? What if he didn’t? What if he simply accepted that this man had attacked her? What if he blamed her?

  Which would be worse?

  No. She didn’t want him to know.

  When she took the job, she’d promised Brian, No secrets. In this together.

  Turned out she’d lied.

  * * *

  The arrests came three months later.

  Two bank CEOs, seven state legislators, three sheriffs, an Alabama Supreme Court justice, four mayors, eight developers, almost two dozen assessors and bureaucrats and local judges. Plus the one-and-only Draymond Sullivan. More than forty in all, a huge haul. Even Rebecca couldn’t keep track of everyone. She’d gathered evidence directly on almost half the targets. The rest had been developed off her leads. Among the biggest corruption cases the bureau had made in decades.

  Smith took her out to dinner the next night, just the two of them, nothing fancy, a barbeque place with wooden benches, paper plates, cold beer, and perfectly smoked ribs. He seemed subdued on the drive over. She didn’t understand what was wrong, until he raised his Coke—he didn’t drink.

  “Congratulations, Rebecca. You did it.”

  “We did it.”

  “Gonna miss you.”

  She thought he must be retiring.

  No. He walked her through what she’d been too focused on the case to see. She couldn’t stay in Birmingham. The defendants would learn her real name during discovery. Odds were that no one would try to come after her. Doing so would be impossibly foolish. Most of them were looking at one to five years. Even Sullivan was looking at twelve, fifteen at most. They could have gone after him for sexual assault too, but Rebecca had insisted they keep what had happened at the dinner far from the indictment.