The Power Couple

by Alex Berenson

  So she should be safe from retaliation. But the sheer number of defendants raised the risk. Only one had to be crazy enough to try. And these were privileged men who’d never considered they might go to prison.

  “What about testifying? I’ll have to be here for that.”

  “Everyone’s gonna plead. Almost, anyway. Bet on it. Can’t argue those recordings and already half of ’em have their lawyers asking about flipping. You have to come in, we’ll fly you back. Old home week. But the sooner you get out of here the better.”

  She hadn’t realized until this moment how much she liked Fred Smith. He was plainspoken and honorable. He had helped her through the most difficult moments of the investigation.

  “What about Boone?” The cooperator.

  “What about him?” Smith said.

  “He kept his word. We couldn’t have made this case without him.”

  “No way the US Attorney’s Office lets him walk.”

  “He seemed genuinely remorseful.” Boone struck her as a guy who might decide a one-way swim in the Gulf was preferable to the public humiliation of being known as a child molester.

  “The guy did what he did. He had a lawyer, a good one, he made a deal. Don’t forget those are real live girls in those pictures.”

  True enough.

  “Let’s talk about you,” he said. “You can go wherever you want. D.C. will take you in a second. New York.”

  “But.”

  “But. I’d stay in the field for at least one more rotation. Land mines everywhere up there; you really want to understand how the bureau works before you go north. Anyway, you’re too good right now to waste time in meetings.”

  “CI?” Counterintelligence seemed like a natural fit for her. She’d spent some of those hours in the CorthoSouth office practicing Russian.

  “If you like. The big bosses are still so focused on CT though.” Counterterror.

  She could tell he had a specific office in mind. “Out with it, Fred.”

  * * *

  She came home that night to find Brian in the garage, greasing the chain on his Ducati. He’d bought the bike used a month before. But it had needed fresh brake pads. Then the fuel line had clogged. He’d barely ridden it.

  She knelt beside him, rubbed his back. “Kids okay?”

  “Asleep.” He reached up and pressed the starter and the engine roared to life. He leaned against the bike, striking a pose. “Come on, Becks, let’s go.”

  “What if they wake up?”

  “Just around the block.” But he was already nodding, conceding defeat. He turned off the bike. “How was dinner?”

  “Fine. Fred’s a really good guy.”

  “Deputy Dawg? What’s he want?”

  She hated when Brian called Smith Deputy Dawg. “Remember a couple of months ago you said you’d had enough of Birmingham?”

  “I’m not sure that’s what I said.”

  It wasn’t. What he’d said was, We’d better get out of here, I’m starting to like it.

  “I get it, Becks. Your cover’s blown, time to bounce.”

  “Busted.” She smiled, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “Bet you already have somewhere in mind. You put in for it yet?”

  “Of course not. You know I couldn’t—” She stopped herself. She’d been about to say, I couldn’t have done this without you, but she had a feeling the words would only inflame him.

  “Couldn’t what?”

  “Come on, take me around the block. I’m serious.”

  “First tell me where we’re moving.”

  “It’s not like that, Bri.”

  “No? So if I say I really want to go to LA next, that’ll be cool?”

  “Do you really want to go to LA?”

  He turned on the bike, straddled it, rolled the throttle until the engine roared.

  “Houston. Fred thinks I should go to Houston.” She hopped on behind him, rested her hands lightly on his hips. “Now shut up and take me out before the kids wake up.”

  He did. And for a few minutes they were fine.

  14

  Houston

  Buzzing at her feet. An angry hiss, as if an inch-high demon were stuck in her purse.

  Her BlackBerry. Again.

  Probably the office. She couldn’t be sure. Because she couldn’t see it. Because she’d left it in her purse so she wouldn’t check it during dinner. Of course, if she’d really planned not to check it she would have left it at home.

  She should have left it at home. She and Bri hadn’t had a date night in months. Tough to make time for dates when she didn’t get home until seven thirty on weeknights and spent every other weekend chasing a serial killer and maybe something else too in South Texas.

  Now she sat across from Brian at a white-tablecloth sushi restaurant in River Oaks, Houston’s fanciest neighborhood, surrounded by oil company executives and their second wives. She and her husband were sipping sake they didn’t like and eating yellowtail rolls they couldn’t afford.

  Happy anniversary!

  Because not going out together for six months meant overcorrecting when the big night arrived, trying too hard to prove everything was copacetic. Even though Rebecca knew the mistake she was making. Even though she could still remember when the perfect meal was fried eggs and hash browns and a kitchen counter on which to enjoy Brian’s company.

  Because those hash browns might not even have been that long ago—eleven years wasn’t that long—but that couple no longer existed. Might as well have been Antony and Cleopatra, that’s how dead they were. The days of push-the-plates-in-the-sink sex were gone and not coming back.

  She and Brian needed to be a different couple, a grown-up couple. They needed to celebrate their anniversary properly. To find a new way to be together. Maybe the new way wasn’t as much fun as the old way, but they needed to pretend it was, or else…

  “You can look,” Brian said. “It’s okay.”

  “What?” She feigned surprise. Badly.

  “I know you want to check, just go ahead.”

  * * *

  She’d been intimidated when they arrived in Texas three years before. The Houston office had over three hundred agents, many more than Birmingham, investigating everything from money-laundering by Mexican cartels to big white-collar crime cases like Enron.

  What Rebecca had pulled off in Birmingham didn’t mean much here. And the office was very male. The bureau claimed almost a quarter of its agents were women. But that number was misleading. Human resources and other back-office jobs leaned female. Only a few women were frontline agents doing real investigative work.

  For the first time Rebecca saw the bureau’s casual sexism. It had been hidden at Quantico, because headquarters watched training so closely. In Birmingham, Fred Smith hadn’t put up with it. But here male agents hung out after work at bars where the only women were cop groupies.

  Smith had connected her with two agents he knew, but one rotated out a month after she arrived. The other had suffered a heart attack and retired. Quickly she felt like a cog in a big machine, jumped from case to case on the orders of her bosses. Whatever momentum she’d had from Birmingham was gone. She worried coming here had been a mistake.

  It was Brian who gave her the answer.

  “What about the US Attorney’s Office? Bet it’s not ninety percent guys.”

  He was right. From what she’d seen, at least one-third of the prosecutors in Houston were women.

  “You’ve got a law degree, they’ll like that. And maybe they’re tired of dealing with all that testosterone coming out of Jester.” T. C. Jester Drive, home of the bureau’s main Houston office, although the bureau was moving to a new building off the Northwest Freeway.

  “You think the way to get ahead is to ignore what my bosses want and beg the AUSAs for help?” The question came out more aggressively than she’d intended.

  “I think if the prosecutors like you, it’ll make your bosses happy, Becks. Have coffee with them. Help the
m out when you can.”

  “Extra work.”

  “Not usually a problem for you.”

  I’m not worried about me.

  * * *

  Brian was right. The prosecutors took to her. Within six months they were asking for her. Her immediate supervisor, a crusty Oklahoman, tried to complain, but his boss told him to stop yapping. They like her, one less problem for me. Rebecca had to admit, for a guy who had always bounced from job to job, Brian understood office politics.

  But she was right, too. She paid the price with the kids for the late nights. Kira was in school now, and Tony kindergarten. Both were old enough to know she was shorting them. She had one ironclad rule. She reserved Sunday afternoons for family. But they needed more.

  The second-worst part was that Brian barely seemed to care. She had steered him to a new job as a systems administrator at ConocoPhillips, which would happily hire anyone with an FBI connection. When she asked him if he liked it, he said, “Installing and maintaining enterprise software, every boy’s dream.”

  But they both knew he couldn’t quit. They lived basically paycheck to paycheck. Working for the FBI was surprisingly expensive. The bureau expected its agents to dress professionally. Good women’s clothes didn’t come cheap. Rebecca was stuck buying five-hundred-dollar Theory suits. Plus, yes, she had one indulgence. She’d bought a 330i, the BMW one model down from the M3. It was a sedan, so she could haul the kids in it, though after one too many spills on the leather she tried to keep them in Brian’s old Jeep Cherokee.

  Should she have spent thirty-eight K on a car? Maybe not. But the M3 had spoiled her, and she did drive a lot. Everyone in Houston drove a lot.

  Anyway, she was the primary earner, wasn’t she? A man in her position would have bought himself a nice car and not felt guilty. She knew, because the FBI garage was filled with equally flashy vehicles. The feeling in the office seemed to be that a million-dollar house was impossible—and would make everyone wonder how you’d paid for it—but a thirty-five-thousand-dollar car was achievable.

  She didn’t just spend on herself, either. She wanted the kids to have nice clothes. Maybe because she felt guilty about not spending enough time with them. A predictable feeling, but its predictability didn’t make it less real. Not to mention taxes, and babysitters, and trips back to Massachusetts to see her parents, and groceries, and making sure she picked up her share of the drinks when she went out with the AUSAs, and everything else—no, Brian couldn’t quit. They needed the thirty-four thousand he made just to stay on top of the bills every month.

  “So you don’t like the job?” she said.

  “Does it sound like I like the job?” He used the Socratic method with her a lot these days.

  “I just want you to be happy, Bri.”

  “That what you want? For me to be happy?”

  So often their conversations now slipped into the thrust-and-parry of a swordfight. Or maybe more accurately the cape-waving of a bullfight. She wasn’t sure who was the matador.

  She wanted to scream at him. Maybe she should. Maybe a good screaming match would break the glass wall that was rising between them, a millimeter a day, slow and certain. She could still see him. He still looked the same. But she couldn’t reach him. Even their sex life had withered. They weren’t in a dead bed, not yet. But they rarely got together more than a couple of times a month. He’d wanted the lights off recently, another first. She wondered what porn star or model he was thinking about, because she knew it wasn’t her.

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you know how annoying you are these days? Professor Unsworth?” She looked over, hoping the joke had broken through. Not that she particularly cared. If the second-worst part of her dereliction of duties at home was that Brian hardly cared, the worst part was that she didn’t either. Yes, she missed the kids. She wanted to do more for them, with them. But all her guilt didn’t get her home a minute earlier.

  Being an agent was still her dream job. Especially now that Brian’s advice had put her career in Houston back on track. Maybe one day she’d get cynical, tired of the bureau. Not yet. Every morning she woke up in awe of her responsibility. She put criminals in prison.

  And, yeah, she liked showing all the bureau’s Jims and Johns that she could make cases better than they could, find the pressure points in interviews, the hidden bank accounts, the extra video camera that had the clear angle.

  Anyway, if she and Bri were asking rhetorical questions, how about this one: What had he expected when they met? If she hadn’t gone to a big law firm, she’d be a young partner at this point, working nights and weekends. Or she wouldn’t have made partner, and she would have had to find another job at a smaller firm. Either way, they’d have more money, but she’d spend even less time at home.

  Thing about rhetorical questions, they are mostly better off unasked. So she didn’t. She poured herself into the bureau instead.

  Most nights, Rebecca barely made it home in time to tuck in Tony, talk to Kira for a few minutes. By ten she was ready for bed herself. The schedule gave her an hour or two to spend with Brian. But she needed that time to decompress. To watch dumb television, American Idol, The Bachelor, whatever. Anything that would lock her mind in the off position.

  Sometimes she wanted to tell him about her day. But she could rarely find the energy. His own work was so boring neither of them could pretend to care. When they wound up talking for more than a few minutes on weeknights, the subject was usually the kids.

  Then she went to bed—alone—and woke by five forty-five to work out for an hour, get Kira and Tony dressed and pour their cereal. Having breakfast with them was the only way she could know she’d see them each day.

  Meanwhile Bri hung in the kitchen past midnight, wearing headphones as he stared at his laptop. He claimed he was coding an app. But the couple of times she’d surprised him, he’d snapped down the screen so fast she figured he was watching porn. He’d been right about movies on the Internet, she had to admit.

  He was right a lot of the time. In truth, he was probably smarter than she was. But if she had learned anything since college, it was that brains only went so far. Getting ahead meant grinding.

  Only she wasn’t sure Brian cared about getting ahead. Though the layer of irony that coated him meant she couldn’t entirely tell. She understood. They were both Generation X. They had grown up with irony as their default setting. When they were teenagers, no cultural influence—at least for white kids—had been more important than Nirvana, its very name a thumb-in-the-eye joke. Brian had seen Nirvana in Seattle. He had his signed first-edition copy of Microserfs. If she tried, she could still connect with him that way. But trying no longer interested her much. The FBI wasn’t a very ironic place. Solving crimes wasn’t a very ironic job. For the most part she’d left irony behind.

  Sometimes she feared she’d left her husband behind, too. Viewed in straightforward, brutal terms, the equation was simple. Her workday left her barely enough time to be a mother or a wife. Not both.

  She saw what the job was doing to her family. She tried to back off. Truly. She stopped raising her hand for Saturday jobs. She read to Tony and listened to Kira.

  * * *

  Then the Border Bandit showed up.

  Rebecca hated everything about the case, starting with the cheesy nickname the media had given the perp. “Border Bandit” made him sound like a used-car salesman, not a psychopath who had murdered somewhere around twenty women in Texas and more in Mexico.

  She hated the way the murders were caught in immigration politics—the women were nearly all either undocumented or first-generation arrivals. She hated the fact that the investigators couldn’t even guess what the body count on the Mexican side might be. Corpses from the narco wars piled up in the desert so fast that the federales could barely make basic cases, much less help a transnational homicide investigation.

  She hated the killer’s effectiveness at covering his tracks. He’d left only the faintest traces of
forensic evidence: a partial tire track at one murder site, a piece of rope at another. She hated that investigators had processed some crime scenes so poorly that they weren’t even sure if the Bandit had killed his victims where they were found. She hated her sneaking feeling that the Bandit was a cop.

  And she hated the way the bureau was stuck on the margins of the case. The FBI had become involved after the Texas Rangers asked for profiling help. But the Rangers wanted to keep control of the case, and they had the political juice to do so. In response, the Houston FBI office told agents they could work the case only as volunteers on days off. The political signal could not have been clearer. We aren’t responsible for an investigation that isn’t ours. Enter at your own risk.

  But Todd Taylor, the director of the Ranger company in South Texas leading the investigation, came to Houston to ask for volunteers.

  We all know that Austin wants us Rangers to run the investigation. Taylor didn’t say anything about what he wanted, Rebecca noted. But I look around this office, I see you have more agents than all the Rangers in Texas. I’d be a fool not to ask for help. Especially if you speak Spanish. Outside a thunderclap hit, as if to punctuate his words. Then another and another. July in Houston meant end-of-days weather. Can’t promise any of us are going to be covered in glory. This case is tough. But I can tell you this. Guy’s not gonna stop until we catch him. Reason I came up here.

  Rebecca found herself nodding.

  Her vow to keep Sundays for the kids vanished. Every other weekend she drove to the border, three hundred fifty of the most boring miles anywhere. Even without stops, the trip took five hours. She ached to speed, of course, and she knew she could escape tickets if she showed her bureau identification. But getting pulled over inevitably cost more time than speeding saved. So she kept to a steady eighty-one, a pace that hardly counted as speeding on a Texas highway. She left before dawn Saturday morning, came home after dark Sundays. The schedule was ridiculous, exhausting. On Mondays she was a zombie. Even Tony noticed. Mommy, are you okay? You look sickie. One afternoon she realized that she hadn’t seen Brian riding his motorcycle in a while. You should go for a ride, she said. It’s a nice day. He looked at her strangely. I sold it. Last month. So we could pay the credit card bill.