High Treason

by John Gilstrap

  “Truer words,” Jonathan said. He stepped aside and ushered them in. “Have a seat. Get warm.” They entered and Jonathan scanned the area outside. “Where’s your detail?”

  Irene peeled off her coat. “In the car,” she said. “And don’t feel too sorry for them. It’s a nice car.” JoeDog examined the visitors long enough to determine that they had no treats for her, and then she retreated to watch from under the coffee table.

  Irene blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “I heard a rumor that you have an excellent collection of single malts.”

  “Excellent is such a relative term,” Jonathan said. “But I think we could all agree on ‘fairly comprehensive. ’ What do you like?”

  “Glenmorangie,” she said.

  “Can I get in on this?” David asked.

  “You’re not going to ask me to put ginger ale or Coke in it, are you?”

  “No, I like mine neat and peaty. Got any Talisker?”

  Jonathan smiled. “I might learn to like you after all, kid. Becky?”

  “I’ll take the ginger ale.”

  As his guests took their seats, Jonathan walked to the bookcase that housed the bar and poured three drinks of two fingers each, and a tall glass of ginger ale. His own glass, of course, contained Lagavulin. He served them with an apology. “I don’t have a freezer in the bar. Would you like me to get ice from the kitchen?”

  Becky smiled. “No, this is fine.”

  “I confess you’ve piqued my interest,” Jonathan said, lowering himself into a lush green leather reading chair. Irene sat to his right in another lounge chair, and David and Becky had taken spots on the sofa to Jonathan’s left.

  Irene started. Sort of. “Mr. Kirk and Ms. Beckeman have something to tell you.”

  The hairs on Jonathan’s neck moved. “Oh, yeah?”

  David took a sip as he nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you about the story we’re never going to write. It turns out that Nicholas and Josef Mishin have the wrong last names.”

  Jonathan crossed his legs and took a sip of his own. This was going to be interesting.

  “By DNA testing, their real last name should be Winters.”

  Jonathan nearly choked. “You mean as in Douglas Winters? As in the president’s chief of staff?”

  “Yep.”

  Jonathan scowled and glanced at Irene for confirmation. She answered with her eyebrows.

  “How can you know this?”

  “During our research, we found out that Winters has been joined at the hip with Tony Darmond since the Mesozoic era—since before Darmond was even in Congress. And you know how everybody says that Nicholas is the image of his mother, with the light hair and the blue eyes? That given the president’s coloration, Nicholas got every recessive gene?”

  Jonathan rocketed back to his first meeting with Winters in Arc Flash’s barn. The hair was going gray, but he had blue eyes and the complexion that suggested that he might have been a blond in his youth. “And because Winters has similar coloring, you’re suggesting—”

  “We’re not suggesting anything,” Becky said, hijacking the narrative. “We’ve got proof. When the rest of us were left behind at the hospital, we got to talking with Joey Mishin—a nice kid, but man is he gonna need some counseling. Actually, he was afraid of David, but he talked to me. He told stories that he’d heard from his dad that Tony Darmond was never nice to him when he was growing up. He said he felt like—and this was the phrase he quoted—a redheaded stepchild. That’s when the lightbulb went on over my head.”

  Jonathan scoffed, “But that’s hardly—”

  “Jesus, are you going to let us finish or not?” David snapped. “We have a confidential source inside the White House who was able to bring me a soda can that Winters had drunk out of. We sent it, along with a sample of Nicholas’s blood that I got off my pants that night.” He paused for effect.

  “It’s a match?”

  “Perfect.”

  Jonathan gaped, and then he chuckled and took a longer sip of scotch. “Holy shit. So why are you both here?” He looked to Irene for the answer to that one.

  “Because you’ve got enough skin in this game to get really pissed off, and I wanted you to know that restraint is the key to everything.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  She explained. “David showed the courtesy of running this past me. Frankly, it’s not a suspicion that had ever occurred to the Bureau or anywhere else that I know of. We took it to Alexei—he actually prefers to be called Len—and he seemed shocked as hell that we knew. That had been the Movement’s trump card.”

  “The Movement?” Jonathan asked.

  “Sounds like the shits, doesn’t it?” David said with a laugh.

  “That’s what the Russian expats called themselves. They found out about the truth of Nicholas’s paternity through Pavel Mishin, the man who was supposed to have been the kid’s father. Apparently, they’ve been sitting on it for a while, waiting for the best moment to hurt the president.”

  Jonathan scowled again. “Nobody cares about bastard children anymore.”

  “President Darmond didn’t know,” Irene said. “The president had always assumed that Mishin was the father, which was why he and the First Lady never got along, and why Nicholas the Younger was never treated well. Only Winters and Yelena knew the real truth—and Mishin—and Winters understood that if word leaked, he’d be toast in the administration.”

  “Is he also involved with this terrorist stuff?” Jonathan asked.

  “Yes,” Irene said. Her scotch was gone now, and she motioned for another. This time, Jonathan set the bottle next to her. “Apparently, Winters really loved the kid, and by extension, I guess he really loved Yelena, too.”

  “Did he know about the witness protection stuff?”

  “He does now, but he didn’t when they had their affair. He says he didn’t know until a guy named Dmitri Boykin approached him with that, and the knowledge of the true paternity. He was devastated and the bad guys knew it. That’s when they started applying the screws. They promised to hurt Nicholas if Winters didn’t pull strings to grant the Movement access to weapons.”

  Jonathan recoiled. “Can a chief of staff do that?”

  “A chief of staff can do anything he wants to. As a practical matter, he is surrogate president, so long as nothing has to be signed into law. That’s what chiefs of staff do. In Winters’s case, it meant alerting Alexei or Dmitri to the movement of materiel. Apparently, that’s a pretty simple matter.”

  “So that explains all the US military munitions at Saint Stephen’s,” Jonathan said, connecting the dots.

  Irene poured another two fingers.

  “So, when are you arresting Winters?” Jonathan asked.

  Irene’s answer came without hesitation. “We’re not.” It clearly was the money shot that she’d been preparing for.

  “You can’t be serious,” Jonathan said.

  Irene said, “What would be the point? All that stuff we told you on the first meeting—the fragility of the world economy, and the devastation that a crisis of confidence could do—that’s all real, Dig. The threat of further damage went away when the cache of weapons was destroyed. In the opinion of the attorney general, more harm than good would be done by prosecuting Winters.”

  “What about the victims at O’Hare? Their blood is on his hands.”

  “Only if you look ridiculously closely,” Becky said.

  “Come again?” Jonathan had sort of forgotten that she was even there.

  “He was acting to protect his only child,” she said.

  Hot blood rose in Jonathan’s face. “He murdered over a hundred people.”

  “No, he didn’t,” David said. “The Movement did that. I guarantee you that’s the editorial slant the Enquirer would give it. Sure, there’d be a clamoring for Winters’s head, and he’d get fired, but at the end of the day, the editorial board of the Enquirer and every network would see this as a human interest story, and Winte
rs as a benevolent scapegoat.”

  “Even as the financial markets tumbled,” Irene added. “This isn’t without consequence,” she continued. “Tomorrow, Doug Winters will announce his retirement from the Darmond administration.”

  “No doubt to ‘spend more time with his family’,” Jonathan mocked.

  “Or something like that,” Irene confirmed.

  “And then he’ll pull in a million-five a year on K Street,” Jonathan said, referring to the home of the major lobbyists.

  “Or something like that.” Irene paused for the words to sink in. “You know, Digger, justice isn’t always about the individual. Sometimes, it really is about the commonweal. If a threat is eliminated, it’s not necessary to find someone to blame it on. It’s not as if he were personally ordering the murder of individual people.”

  Jonathan thought through everything that had been told to him, and he marveled at how limited his options were. They’d constructed a box around him. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

  “Because you’ll find out, one way or the other,” Irene explained. “You’re that inquisitive, and you’re that good. I drove all the way down here with David and Becky to make sure all of you understand the consequence of individual retaliation. It is not to happen.”

  Jonathan regarded his longtime friend with a cocked head. “Have you been drinking the Darmond Kool-Aid, Wolverine?”

  “Don’t you dare go there with me,” she said. “My oath is to the Constitution, not to petty politics. I swore to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’m not happy with the twist that phrase has taken over the past few years, but I’m not going to oversee a global collapse based on a high-horse ‘gotcha.’ Not on my watch.”

  “So he walks on a murder charge,” Jonathan said. The words tasted like acid.

  “Is that really the line that you of all people are going to walk?” Irene fired back.

  Under a strict interpretation of the laws of the land, Jonathan had committed multiple murders on his own. “I do what I do in service to the innocent,” he said. Even as the words left his mouth, he realized that they sounded like they came from a Superman movie poster.

  “Then do it again,” Irene said. “Let this go.” Jonathan turned to the others in the room. “How are you guys doing?”

  “I killed people,” Becky said.

  “They were all bad guys,” Jonathan replied.

  “But they were people. I need to find my way on that.” She looked at her lap. “I’ll get there.”

  “I don’t think I can continue to do journalism,” David said. “I like the investigation, but I don’t like the politics.”

  “So, what’s the alternative?” Jonathan asked.

  “There’s always a spot for you at the FBI academy,” Irene said.

  Jonathan laughed. “No politics there.”

  “That’s an interesting option,” David said. “But I’ve also been thinking about becoming a private investigator.”

  Jonathan smiled and took a sip. “Is that so?” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s so. In fact, between you and Wolverine, I’d like to set up a bidding war. Who wants to go first?”

  At eight-thirty the next morning, a jogger in Burke Lake Park saw a shadow behind a tree. As she moved closer to investigate, she saw the blood and she screamed. A panicked 911 call brought the Fairfax County Police and Fire and Rescue Departments in force.

  It took the White House two hours to make the formal announcement that Douglas Winters, chief of staff to the president, had committed suicide by firing a single bullet into his brain.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My beloved bride Joy continues to be a source of strength, inspiration and sanity, making every day worth waking up to.

  Thank you, Chris, for being who you are. I couldn’t be more proud.

  David Kirk did a brave thing through his generous donation to the Recycling Research Foundation and therefore earning his fictional namesake, as did Becky Beckeman with her donation to Living Word Lutheran School in Rochester, Michigan. I’m not sure either realizes how rarely stories end up well for characters whose names are so earned, but in this case they lucked out. I assure everyone who reads these words that the David and Becky who appear in this book are truly works of fiction, and bear no similarity to their namesakes.

  My Canadian buddy and single malt sensei, Len Shaw, is neither a terrorist nor a former resident of the Soviet Union. Instead, he is a respected colleague whom I am honored to call my friend. He, too, shares no traits with his fictional namesake.

  I owe a great thanks to Michelle Gagnon and John Ramsey Miller for reading an early draft of High Treason and giving me some excellent advice. If there are any mistakes in the book, blame them because they should have told me. Thanks also to The Rumpi—Art Taylor, Ellen Crosby, Donna Andrews, and Alan Orloff—for their ongoing advice and enduring friendship.

  The team at Kensington Publishing continues to amaze me with their overwhelming support and guidance. Special thanks go to my editor, Michaela Hamilton, production editor Arthur Maisel, and my publisher, Laurie Parkin, and the guy who runs the whole shebang, Steve Zacharius. Adeola Saul is the best publicist in the business, and Alexandra Nicolajsen is my mistress of the Internet. Thanks to all.

  But none of it would happen without my good friend and agent, Anne Hawkins.

  Special Bonus

  Turn the page to enjoy an exclusive short story that provides surprising insights into the character of hostage rescue specialist Jonathan Grave . . .

  First time in print!

  DISCIPLINE

  Dr. Marvin Eugene Applewaite, Ed.D., had no idea what drew him to open his eyes in the middle of the night, but when he did, and he saw the child’s battered face staring at him, he screamed. His body jerked like a grounded fish as he struggled to flip from his stomach to his back to defend himself. His legs tangled in the covers, rendering him momentarily defenseless.

  His reaction startled the ten-year-old, who reflexively stepped backward.

  Marvin sputtered, “Who . . . what do you mean . . . good God.”

  He’d seen this boy before. He was a student. Because of the adrenaline coursing through his system, he couldn’t remember his name. In fact, just this afternoon—

  “Headmaster, my father says he would like to speak to you,” the boy said.

  “Jon Gravenow?” The name popped into his head at the same moment when he realized that the boy had turned on the bedside lamp. “Get out of my house. Who do you think you are?”

  The boy looked down and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Denim jeans and a T-shirt to visit the headmaster’s house. This was exactly the kind of disrespectful behavior that made the boy a perpetual discipline problem at Northern Neck Academy.

  “He, um, said he wanted to see you now.”

  As the adrenaline drained and awareness returned, Marvin sat taller in his bed. He adjusted his pajama blouse to make the buttons align.

  “He did, did he? Well, it must be very urgent if he sends his son to burglarize my house. Do you know that you can go to prison for this? Do you know that you can be expelled?” That last point was a certainty, Marvin thought.

  The boy continued to stare at his sneakers.

  “Look at me, young man,” Marvin commanded. His head was completely clear now. If there was one thing that an experienced educator knew, it was how to project authority over a child.

  Jon Gravenow did as he was told. His left eye was still swollen from this afternoon, and it appeared that someone had applied a new butterfly bandage to his lip.

  “Get out of my house at this moment, or I will call the police. Tell your father that if he wants to see me, he can call for an appointment.”

  Jon’s face showed nothing. The rebuke triggered neither anger nor fear. “We’ll be waiting in the living room,” the boy said. He turned on his heel and left through the open door to the hallway. Sure enough, the far end was illuminated in
the wash of light from the parlor downstairs.

  The temerity! Marvin felt his blood boiling as he rolled to his side and lifted the telephone from its cradle. Just who did these people think they were? Maybe a chat with the local police would set them on the right—

  No dial tone.

  The fear returned, fueled by a new rush of adrenaline. He realized for the first time that this was more than some childish prank; that he might truly be in danger. They’d cut the phone line, for heaven’s sake, and now a man he’d never even met sat perched in his living room.

  Marvin ran his options. The first was to flee, but he dismissed that out of hand. He was forty-six years old, not in the best of shape, and on the second floor of a home that boasted twelve-foot ceilings. As if that weren’t bad enough, a leap from either of his bedroom windows would send him into a nest of wrought-iron patio furniture. Even if he survived the fall, he would likely wish that he hadn’t.

  He could dash down the stairs and try to make it to the front door, but that path would take him directly through the living room where his uninvited guests sat waiting.

  He could try hiding, but then what? Would he just wait for them to become bored and leave on their own?

  No, he thought, the only reasonable option was to face them. He would summon as much dignity as the occasion allowed, and he would hear what they had to say. After all, if their main desire had been to do him harm, they could have hurt him in his bed.

  Come to think of it, the very fact that a man sent a child to deliver his message was a sort of peace offering in its own right.

  His options, then, boiled down to only one: He would hear what his visitors had to say, and when their conversation was over, he would take the necessary actions to ensure that the adult went to prison, and the boy never again set foot in Northern Neck Academy.

  Marvin took his time getting dressed. There was no time to shower, but he could certainly comb his hair and brush his teeth. That done, he donned the navy blue suit he had laid out for today. White shirt, yellow tie, black socks and matching shoes, shined to a high gloss. When he was buttoned and cinched, he tucked the loops of his wire-rimmed glasses behind his ears and headed for the stairs.