Sarah Houston was not one for mincing words. “I need more people, Admiral.”
Grafton didn’t hesitate. “Draft them from every office in the building. If we don’t defuse this Russian money crisis, this agency is going to disintegrate along with the rest of the federal government. These people are going to be unemployed very soon.”
She nodded.
“Oh, by the way, here are a couple more telephone numbers I want monitored. Every conversation, everything these phones overhear. And you are going to have to be the one to do it. No one else.”
Jake Grafton decided that this evening might be a good time to try out his new, personal access to the president, so he gave him a call. “Jake Grafton, Mr. President. I am told that WSFC in San Francisco is going to run a two-hour confession from the chairman of the First Bank of the United States at ten o’clock our time this evening. No doubt it will be simulcast on the web.”
“I’ll watch.”
“The president of WSFC tells me the network refused to carry it sight unseen. If they think it is newsworthy, they’ll break into existing programing and run the thing nationwide. That’s the best we could get.”
“What will happen after they air it?”
“For Abe Goldman, personal catharsis at a hell of a price. He will probably have to go bankrupt and his bank may fail. But this thing is going to be a wake-up call for a lot of people who thought they could subvert the government and remain anonymous.”
“Tomorrow will be even more exciting than today,” Vaughn Conyers said bitterly.
“One suspects so. But I think we are coming to a crisis. We’ll weather it or we won’t.”
“I’ll watch. Thanks for the call.” The president hung up.
Jake was ten minutes into watching the broadcast of Abraham Goldman’s confession on his office computer when the network WSFC belonged to started carrying it. The program appeared on his office television, which had been tuned to the right channel, just in case. A note at the bottom of the screen stated that the program had been recorded “earlier today.”
The first notification that Goldman’s statement had hit some raw nerves was a telephone call from one of California’s senators, a woman politically joined at the hip with Harland Westfall, one who was obviously just now on the verge of a meltdown. “Grafton, I called WSFC about this filth they are airing this very minute, and the program manager said to call your agency. Are you responsible for this… this… venom from a deranged mind?”
“I am not deranged, Madam.”
“Don’t fuck with me, little man. I am not a madam! I am Senator Konchina to you! That bank is the largest in California! You just put the California economy on the chopping block. I want your resignation to be tomorrow morning’s headline or your agency will never get another dollar from the intelligence committee. Do you understand?”
“Is that a promise?”
“You are goddamn right—”
“Making promises you can’t keep is a bad habit, Senator.” Grafton hung up on her.
His next call—the calls were filtered by the executive assistant on duty, since the receptionist had gone home for the evening—was from a journalist Grafton had known for years, Jack Yocke (pronounced Yock-key). “Good evening, Admiral.”
“As I live and breathe.”
“The reason I am calling, Admiral, is that I just got a telephone call from Senator Konchina’s chief of staff. She and I have this little thing going. Anyway, she says the senator is bouncing off the walls because you are behind this confession of the chairman of the First Bank of the United States that is airing right now.”
“I’m watching it,” Jake said. “You can probably hear the soundtrack in the background. This is the first time I’ve seen it.”
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Jack, you know I don’t answer questions from the press, especially open-ended questions like that. You need to call the CIA public affairs office or the White House Press office tomorrow. Maybe one of those will have a statement. Or maybe they won’t.”
“Admiral, the senator is going public with her accusations that you set up this ‘manure dump’ by Abe Goldman. I need something for the website. Would ‘No Comment’ be fair?”
“I suppose. By the way, what are you up to professionally these days?”
“I have an hour show on Sunday evening for Fox that you obviously haven’t been watching,” the reporter said. “Maybe that will grow into something.”
“How are your ratings?”
“Middling. We’re selling pillows, cooking gadgets, and silver wafers. Silver is the investment you need for the coming depression.”
“Jack, you and I have always had a good working relationship in the past. You have played fair and haven’t cheated on the ground rules. If in the future there is a story that you could help tell, I’ll give you a call at this number, if you wish.”
“Anytime, Admiral, day or night. Except Sunday night when I’m on camera.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
Abe Goldman’s confession left Jake Grafton shaken. He hadn’t realized how detailed it was. The sources of the money, shell corporations, transfers, dates, telephone conversations with fellow conspirators… all those details gave it the power of authenticity that would make it extremely difficult for anyone to call Abe Goldman a liar and make it stick.
He went to the basement where Sarah Houston had set up shop. “Let me see everything you have on Senator Westfall.”
He knew that Westfall and the late Anton Hunt had been political soulmates, and now he learned that the younger Hunt, Michael, was equally in Westfall’s orbit. Or Westfall was in his. From the comments the two made to each other, they had made exhaustive plans to distribute the Russian largess. They kept referring to those plans. But what were they? Where were they?
Could he somehow convince Westfall he had the plans? Or should he try to get them?
He flipped through the transcripts, which were not prepared by stenographers listening to raw audio, but by computers that converted sounds to print. Consequently there were typos, missed words, unrecognizable phrases, and the like. But the gist was usually there. If necessary, a real human could listen to the conversation in question and see if a better transcript could be prepared.
Half the senators in Westfall’s party were apparently in on some portion of the secret. It was a miracle that such a secret had been kept so long. No wonder the Russians had been ready to spin the wheel—if they didn’t, it would have come out piecemeal.
Grafton moved over to the transcripts of Ava Silva’s calls. She was getting more and more worried as the days passed and she talked to her confederates, some of whom repeated the assassin rumors that Carmellini had helped spread. At first she discounted those rumors, but lately she had ceased to do so. She even warned several of her fellow conspirators to be careful, to watch for strangers, to take reasonable precautions.
Which begged the question: What were reasonable precautions against a determined assassin?
As he rose to leave, he saw Sarah Houston watching him under lowered eyebrows, frowning. She was wearing a headset that was plugged into a computer. “Do you know who those last two phones belong to that you wanted monitored?”
“Conyers and Kiddus.”
“You’ll put us both in prison.”
Grafton went back to his office and stirred through the telephone messages that had accumulated this evening. He called for his driver and went to the parking lot to meet him.
Abe Goldman watched the first hour or so of his confession, then his wife turned off the television. She was petite, like him. She looked at Goldman and said, “Enough. You and I are going to bed.”
“I had to do it, Rachel. I had to confess.”
“I know. You did the right thing. But it’s time for bed. These men will sit here and make sure we get a good night’s sleep.”
“We will,” Armanti Hall said.
Goldman was all used up.
I helped him walk into the bedroom and sit on the edge of the bed. His wife said she would take it from there, so I left and closed the door.
The telephone was off the hook.
What do you say or do when you have just blown up the existence you spent all your life building? Sure, he did the crimes, but still… after all, this is America! You lawyer up, deny everything, take the Fifth, string it out as long as humanly possible with delays and appeals, and finally, if heaven forbid you are convicted, when the sentencing comes you throw yourself on the mercy of the court. You do the remorse thing; talk about your charities, tell the judge you are now in tight with Jesus or Jehovah, have friends testify about your wonderful warm heart and have your doctor testify about your infirmities.
Goldman didn’t do that. He stood tall to take the bullet.
I really liked the guy.
Out in the living room Armanti Hall was standing looking out a window at the night skyline of San Francisco. You could see the First Bank tower on the top of a hill, standing all lit up against the dark sky.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be standing in front of this window—” I said, just as a hole appeared in a pane of glass in the middle. A tiny shower of bits flew inward. The bullet had passed between us. We hit the deck anyway.
“Gonna be a long night,” Armanti said.
I stretched out on the floor. “Think we ought to call the cops?” I asked.
“It’ll be an hour before they get here. That dude will be asleep in Oakland by then.”
We settled the matter by finding the liquor cabinet and pouring ourselves stiff ones.
Although he was exhausted, Jake Grafton had the driver take him to the Lincoln Memorial. He left the car and walked up the stairs, stood at Lincoln’s feet, and, finally, turned and looked back toward the Washington Monument. Then he left the memorial and walked the hundred yards to the wall, the Vietnam Memorial, with its 58,000 names.
That was a strange place. If you closed your eyes and fingered the engraved names, you could see them through the mists of time, see those young men from your youth, those young Americans who went forth to fight because they were told this was America’s battle. Those faces, precisely like the faces of the men who fought at Shiloh and Gettysburg, in the smoke of the Wilderness, on the Marne, at Normandy, Guadalcanal, and a thousand other places…
It was one in the morning when Jake Grafton found the car and driver and asked to go to Arlington Cemetery. When the Civil War dead were being brought to Washington, they were interred in Robert E. Lee’s lawn, at the Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington. American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen have been interred there ever since.
On an early summer night, Jake Grafton could feel their presence.
It was after two when the driver dropped him at his building in Roslyn and he let himself into his condo with a key.
“Jake, is that you?” Callie’s voice.
“I’m home.”
The next morning every network on the planet was playing short snippets of Abe Goldman’s confession, so Harland Westfall, Franky Konchina, and the Speaker of the House put their heads together to see what might be done. They decided that they needed to nudge the media off the Goldman story, the Russian fake money story, the attempted bribery of almost every public official in the nation and half the prominent businesses. The Speaker introduced a bill in the House to impeach President Conyers for unspecified “high crimes and misdemeanors.” She announced it in the rotunda of the Capitol. One of the high crimes was the investment of Russian money in the president’s resort he had developed in Florida.
While she was regaling the press with recitations of Conyers’ crimes, a national newspaper broke the story that the Speaker and her husband had made over eight million dollars from assorted lobbyists in Washington and Sacramento, money that didn’t look as if it were Russian money, although it might have been. The payments, according to the story, were apparently bribes for political favors, including securing government contracts for the Speaker’s spouse, who was a construction contractor. When she had finished with her announcement of the impeachment bill, one of the reporters asked her about the bribery story, which she had not yet read or been briefed upon.
Still, the Speaker denounced that story as fake, a smear, although she had just smeared the president with Russian money herself. That irony was not lost on her.
Humiliated and enraged, the Speaker stalked off to Harlan Westfall’s office to unburden herself with an epic rant; Westfall’s office computer captured every syllable.
The question presented itself, so a pundit finally asked it: If you had an unlimited source of free money and knew some politicians who were a bit less than honest, how much would you spend to get the kind of government you richly deserved, that you knew your fellow Americans richly deserved? How much would you spend to soothe the appetites of the savage politicians and improve the world for all mankind?
Chapter Twenty
The political scene was a cornucopia that kept on giving if you were in the news business. The press had yet to tumble to the fact that Ava Silva and Senator Westfall had been busy giving money to their political enemies in a way that would create problems for them. Meanwhile, Ava and her disciples were doing the same to their so-called friends. If your goal is to topple the establishment, screw everybody. Saul Alinsky never said that, but he should have.
Of course, the Russians had helped. They had agents, or friends, or, usually, damn fools who didn’t know where the money was coming from or care, who gave people money in ways that would ruin them if the receipt of the funds ever came to light. And now the light was beginning to shine.
The morning newspaper was a catalogue of greed and stupidity, Jake Grafton decided. He had the kitchen television on while he slurped coffee, scrutinized headlines, and read snippets of stories. His cell phone was still off. The instant he turned it on, people in his agency and across the spectrum of government would be after him.
The amazing thing, he thought, was that all the politicians were pointing fingers at their ideological enemies, in public, in print, on camera. Their opponents were evil, greedy men and women without scruples, lying hypocrites who said one thing to the voters and did something else in their private lives. Even if a politician had been slimed himself, he seemed to think it perfectly logical to accuse his ideological enemies of the same kind of odious behavior that he himself had been accused of.
When Callie came into the kitchen in her robe, he kissed her and poured her some coffee. She sat down beside him at the counter and took her first experimental morning sip. For the first time that morning, Jake Grafton actually became aware of his surroundings. The sun peeping up over Washington threw the bright colors of the kitchen in stark relief. He realized that Callie had put a planter with three little flowers in the windowsill.
“What are those?” He gestured at the flowers.
“Violets. I have always loved them.”
He smiled and kissed her. “I missed you, lady.”
“I missed you too, husband of mine.” She sighed and gestured at the television and newspaper. “Where is all this going, Jake?”
“They hate each other, the mutual hatred society.”
“People used to be able to disagree about politics.”
“We’ve lost that somewhere along the way,” her husband said thoughtfully.
She glanced at the clock. “The driver will be here for you in thirty minutes.”
He stood. There was just time to shower and shave. “When this is over, I’m retiring.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Honest Injun. Cross my heart.” He smiled and touched her hair. “I want to spend my days with you. And I want to get the airplane out of the hangar, get it inspected, and go flying.” Jake owned a Cessna 170B that he hadn’t flown in two years. The tires were probably flat and mice were converting it into condominiums.
“Oh, Jake, I wish you would really retire,” Callie said, searching his eyes. “I want s
ome us time.”
He kissed her, then headed for the bedroom and master bath.
The driver and bodyguard were waiting at the curb when Jake walked out of his building. Typical morning traffic, a pleasant morning, the sidewalk area in shadow from a building across the street, and the men were smiling at him.
He heard the whack as the bullet hit him, the sickening thunk of a bullet traveling at over two-thousand feet-per-second finding flesh. The impact staggered him; then he was falling, the world was spinning… the concrete sidewalk hit him in the face and the world went black.
“Holy fuck,” the bodyguard screamed as he crouched, pulled his pistol and looked wildly around for the shooter. The driver was already lying on top of the admiral, trying to ensure the shooter didn’t put another bullet into him.
“Over there,” a bystander shouted, and pointed at the parking garage across the street.
The bodyguard checked, didn’t see anyone, then set about saving the life of the man he was supposed to protect. He pulled him over to the shelter of the car and told the driver to call 911. Shots fired, man down.
Grafton was still breathing, thank God, but his pulse was erratic. A chest wound. A big hole in his back. He was bleeding onto the concrete. Bright red blood.
The guard had spent eight years in the army, done three tours in Afghanistan. He had seen his share of gunshot wounds. This one looked really bad. He had that horrible feeling that this guy wasn’t going to make it.
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