The GPS said that Marcus’s car was right on the waterfront. Maybe he’d cruised down here to watch the river go by, be alone with his thoughts, listen to “Cat’s in the Cradle.” But not likely. Hard by the 295 bridge and Buzzard Point, this was a better spot to get carjacked than inspired.
A bitter April wind whipped curtains of frozen rain over the Potomac. I followed the tracker, growing more doubtful by the second. It led me along the river by the Navy Yard. I moved closer to the bull’s-eye on my map and checked the surroundings, and it looked like Marcus was on the end of one of the docks. I scanned it, but saw nothing. Satellites don’t lie, though, so, after looking around to make sure I wasn’t being followed, I began walking down the dock, keeping to the shadows.
A little red light flashed faster and faster as I got closer to the bull’s-eye. It’s a handy feature, at least until you’re skulking along in the dark on a deserted pier. Then that red eye, blinking faster and faster until it’s almost glaring solid red, can start to feel a little sinister.
I stood on the bull’s-eye, the end of the pier. It was freezing. Marcus’s car sure as hell wasn’t around. Did he find the tracker in the wheel well? Throw it in the Potomac, and have it wash up here? That didn’t make sense based on the path it had taken.
A shadow moved at the far end of the dock. You could barely see it. Then it shifted again.
I had a second thought. This was the perfect place for Marcus to plant it himself, to find whoever was following him and trap him. So much for the digital future. If that was true, I’d cornered myself.
The movement was slow but unmistakable once I knew where to look. A silhouette cut across the yellow cones shining down from the sodium lights.
No exit. William Marcus bearing down on me like a Horseman of the Apocalypse. And there was no way I could lie my way out of this. I tried out a few stories in my head, but Marcus would see right through them. How could you possibly explain planting a tracking bug on your boss? Hiding outside his house? Stalking him?
No. It would be game-over for Mike Ford. At the least, the high times Davies Group had afforded would be gone. No medallions of Shenandoah veal with new potatoes at the Inn at Little Washington. And worse, my bosses had enough dirt to bury me for campaign-finance violations alone; they wouldn’t even have to get into the meth-house business. Back to jail, the charade over, truly my father’s son.
As I listened to the boards creak in the dark, closer and closer, I began to worry less and less about material things and more about Marcus’s leathery hands. I mean, he wouldn’t kill me, right? But what the fuck did I know about the habits of a guy who’d spent the 1980s strangling Sandinistas?
In any case, I couldn’t risk getting caught. All of my options were bad. I didn’t like the looks of the water either as it capped white ten feet below me. But I knew, however hellish the ride, I could make it to the next dock. One good thing about the navy: you learn to plunk yourself in all kinds of briny and haul ass without making too much noise.
A flashlight beam cut across the dock, and I jumped into the black. The main concern when you drop into icy water is that you’ll gasp, breathe in a lungful, and go down like a fluke anchor. I managed to avoid that, though the cold shocked my body and I immediately started breathing all crazy and dropped about forty IQ points. If you don’t kill yourself freaking out, you’ve got about fifteen minutes in arctic water far colder than this, so however much I felt like I was dying, I knew I had plenty of time. The light was scanning the water in long arcs, so I swam beneath the dock, a little cave of barnacles and foul-smelling green moss. I worked my way back under Marcus, cracking my head every now and then on a beam or a lag bolt.
I could hear him overhead. His light fanned through the cracks in the boards above me. As he came closer, I ducked under the surface, then swam beneath him.
I almost wished he’d been ranting and shouting threats. That cold efficient silence scared me more than anything else.
I made it back to the bulkhead, where the dock began, and sidestroked, the sleet stinging my ear, to the next dock, about fifty meters. I hauled myself out and tried to sprint to my car, but the best I could manage was a numb stumble. His light flashed over me in the dark and lit me up, but by now it was far-off and faint.
A fence separated the two docks. That bought me a little time. Once I got to the Jeep, I headed out and brought it up to about fifty miles an hour on the surface roads, and I made it to 395. I had the heat blasting like an open oven. It was only twenty minutes to my house, but I didn’t get back for forty, since I was constantly taking sharp detours and double-checking at every turn to make sure that Marcus wasn’t following me.
I ran inside the house, threw my clothes into the washing machine in the laundry room, and went straight for a twenty-minute steaming-hot shower. My hands were still shaking so badly from the cold I could barely twist the knobs. The only thing keeping me going was the prospect of sliding under a thick comforter and lying next to Annie.
I slipped into the dark bedroom and eased into bed. When I put my hand out to feel her waist, I just hit mattress. She was gone.
I found her downstairs. Actually, she found me. She was sitting on the couch with a cup of tea, waiting. She had watched me as I came down the stairs. Her eyes hinted at tears earlier, but now she was strictly business.
“Are you fucking someone else?” she asked in an oddly calm voice.
My brain seized up. I’d been smiling at her, still just happy to see her after such a shitty night. But any relief quickly disappeared.
“What?” I said. “No.”
She lifted one of the profile pictures of Irin I’d printed out.
“You’re always late, making up excuses. You come home, get rid of your clothes, and head straight for the shower. You think I’m stupid? I know what that means.”
“It’s for work,” I said. “Her father is Rado Dragović.”
“Don’t give me that. A twenty-year-old party girl is what, lobbying the Pentagon? I looked her up and a million searches came up on your laptop. Are you stalking this girl?”
“Hon, you know networking is part of the job. I’m checking up on her for a case, and I promised Walker I’d meet with him tonight—”
“Just shut up,” she said. “Walker’s at the House right now for the budget vote. Stop lying to me. It’s disgusting.”
She stood and marched to the front door. I chased after her, stammering, wearing only my boxers. Once again I was freezing my ass off, but now I was half naked on my front porch. I realized that the truth would be much harder for her to believe than any bullshit I came up with, but I didn’t want to lie to her again.
“Hon. I can explain. It was work; I lied because I didn’t want to get you involved. It’s about our bosses, about Davies. Please. Come back inside.”
“You want me to trust you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then trust me. You more than anyone know how this town works, Mike. You can’t take without giving. Tell me what’s going on.”
“I’ll show you.” I walked her back into the hallway near the kitchen, and lifted my clothes out of the washing machine.
“That smells like a bilge,” she said, and wrinkled her nose. I guess she was expecting the odor of another woman’s perfume or the scent of sex.
“I lied to you. I never should have. I’m sorry. Truly. I certainly wasn’t fucking anybody reeking like that.”
“Just tell me what’s happening.”
I chose my words carefully. Why trouble her if the whole thing was just me chasing shadows? And why involve her if there was real danger?
“I was worried that some unethical stuff was happening in a deal I was part of. So I had to double-check a few things. And, because I’m a moron, in the course of sneaking around I fell into some disgusting water and nearly froze to death.”
She considered this for a minute.
“That’s too ridiculous an alibi to invent.” She scrutinized me for a s
econd. “You fell in the water?”
“Yeah. The Anacostia. It was freezing,” I said. “I’ve had a really rough night. I’m so goddamned sorry.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
“I know I’m probably just being paranoid, and I didn’t want to get you mixed up in it. It was stupid and I’m done.”
“Did you tell Marcus or Henry?”
“No. And please keep this between us. I was sort of doing this on my own and I could get in big trouble if they found out. All right?”
“You should tell them,” she said. “They’ll know what to do.”
Annie was a gunner, like me. Work was everything, and she was close with Davies. Hell, it was Davies who had thrown Annie and me together in the first place. I didn’t want to think about what she would do if it came down to a choice between him and me.
“I know,” I said. “But can we just keep this to ourselves? I checked it out, there was nothing to it, and I could get in trouble for going off the reservation. You won’t mention it to anyone, will you?”
I could tell she was getting wary again.
“No,” she said, finally.
“You swear?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. I’ll never lie to you again. You have a right to be angry. Take your time. I can give you a ride home if you like, but I hope you can forgive me and stay.”
She stared me down and let me suffer for another minute.
“No,” she said. “Let’s just go to bed.”
At last, all I wanted: to pull the comforter up to my chin and curl up with Annie’s little potbellied stove of a behind. It was heaven. She clicked off her light.
“And, hon,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“If you do ever fuck around on me, I will hunt you down and I will crucify you.”
Aww. Daddy’s girl.
“As you should, sweetie,” I said. “Love you.”
“You too.”
That was it, I told myself. To hell with Subject 23 and Irin. I was not giving up everything I’d earned just because I’d taken a few clues out of context and had a little fun playing detective.
Case closed, right? Except I couldn’t stop thinking about Annie’s reservations, about how her first instinct was to tell Marcus and Henry.
I tried to convince myself I hadn’t told her the full story for her sake, but maybe it was for my own. As I tried and failed to fall asleep, I realized that my suspicions about the Davies Group were making me question everything connected to the company. The group was my whole world. The friends, the money, the house, and, in a way, even Annie: I owed it all to Henry. So who could I trust?
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
HIS HEAD WAS shaved bald and he was built like a football center. The back of his neck had rolls like a pack of hot dogs. He sported tinted sunglasses, wraparound-baseball-player style. He walked stiffly, elbows out, like he either had a backed-up colon or thought he was in a Western. He wore a sack suit and a cheap tie. In other words: a cop.
With my family history, I get a little nervous around cops. Granted, now that I had the thick wallet and the cozy house in the city, I could see their appeal, but old habits die hard. Especially given my recent string of unorthodox activities, I was not at all happy when this palooka sat down next to me at a lunch counter and starting looking me over.
There are no decent diners in the neighborhood where I work. There’s a spot called the Diner, but it’s a retro/meta thing where a sandwich costs ten dollars. So I spend more lunches than I should at a restaurant called Luna’s. It’s one of those Berkeley-earth-mom places, the kind with a bathroom mural of Noam Chomsky and Harriet Tubman holding hands and sliding down a rainbow, but the burgers are good and cheap. If you tuck in at the counter and focus on the food and free coffee refills, you can hardly tell it from a regular greasy spoon.
But it certainly wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect to find this red-faced peace officer.
“Michael Ford?” he asked.
“Do I know you?”
“Erik Rivera,” he said. “I’m a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department, Special Investigations Division.”
“Okay.”
“This is a friendly visit,” Rivera said, which to my ears threatened an unfriendly future run-in. “How’s the cobbler?”
“It’s good.”
“Good.” I guess this was how they taught cops to rapport-build at MPD summer camp. It left a little to be desired, but thankfully Rivera got down to business.
“I was hoping to get your help on a few questions we had about some goings-on at the Davies Group,” he said.
Goings-on? Was I on Dragnet? I took a deep breath and, in a perfect monotone, gave him my best lawyerese:
“I regret to inform you that we have confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements with all of our clients and I am legally bound to refrain from discussing, well, anything with you unless I am subpoenaed. Even under that circumstance, the obligation varies according to the relevant case law. I suggest you direct your queries to the general counsel at Davies Group. I would be more than happy to give you his contact information and see that this matter is addressed in a manner satisfactory to all parties involved.”
I turned back to my cobbler, scooped some ice cream on top, and took a bite.
“Fair enough,” he said, bringing himself up to his full tough-guy stature. “I’ll just let you know a few things, then, while you enjoy your dessert. What if I told you that the Davies Group was systematically corrupting the most powerful people in Washington?”
I considered responding, Oh, you mean the Five Hundred, or No shit. But I said nothing.
He sat down at the counter. “And what if I told you that Radomir Dragović was under suspicion of committing crimes against humanity?”
Radomir was a bit long-winded, sure, but war crimes? Come on. That was just bigotry. Not every Serb was a genocidaire. Though that would explain his concerns about extradition.
“And what if I told you that you might be complicit in several felonies? I think you know enough about prison time and the importance of cooperation with law enforcement to make the right decision, Mr. Ford.”
All right. Now I was actually a little angry. That was obviously a dig at my dad and a clear sign this guy had scoped me out. My impulse was to knock him off the bar stool and strip out his trachea with my dessert spoon, but a reaction was undoubtedly what he was after, so I bottled it up.
“You’re not from DC,” I said. “Is that a Long Island accent?”
Rivera was thrown a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “Bay Shore.”
“Then you should know,” I said, looking around under his stool.
“Know what?”
“When you go on a fishing trip, you ought to bring beer. Have a nice day.”
I don’t know if the flatfoot got the joke, but he got the message.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”
He left me his card. As I finished up my cobbler, I could finally let my nerves show. I shook my hands out and took a deep breath. What the fuck did the cops want with me? I wasn’t doing too badly career-wise, but I was still a nobody at Davies. Certainly not an obvious target for the Special Investigations Division.
From a professional point of view, Rivera’s play was clumsy at best. Starting out with threats, even tacit ones, never gets you very far. If he was trying to turn me into a mole, he’d already flubbed it. My bosses were likely to know if the police were sniffing around the firm, especially with Rivera being so brazen about coming up to me near work. Maybe that was the point, to cut me off from my bosses so he was my only friend. Or maybe I was overthinking it, and the guy was a total clod. Based on what I knew about your typical career law enforcement officer, the latter seemed a distinct possibility.
He hadn’t really told me anything specific. Ten minutes of research on the Davies Group would give you enough straws to make a bluff like that at a fresh-faced young guy
like me, maybe even scare him into blabbing. Shit, he might not even be with the police. Public corruption was typically an FBI matter, anyway. Something didn’t make sense. I certainly had plenty of worries about my bosses, but my close calls with Marcus and Annie had made me wary about going too far with my extracurricular snooping. And I was still too much in the dark to even think about switching sides and working against Davies. The guy was unstoppable, and nothing happened in this town without his knowledge. I was certain of only one thing: My bosses would find out about this sooner or later. So I’d better go report back to them and earn some brownie points before they found out from someone else that the cops had approached me.
I headed to the cashier. “Your friend already paid,” she said.
Motherfucker. I hated owing anyone anything. That’s how people come to own you, drip by little drip.
Davies and Marcus had been impossible to find ever since Colombia. But as soon as I mentioned the Rivera run-in in an e-mail to Marcus, they were suddenly free and eager.
I sat between them at the conference table in Davies’s office and related the story.
“That’s all he said? No more specifics?”
“That was it,” I said. “I hope I didn’t say too much.”
“No. You did a great job. I’m sorry you had to deal with this. I imagine you’re wondering if there’s anything to it.” Davies seemed calm, eager to put me at ease.
“I believe in what we do here, though a little reassuring couldn’t hurt.”
“Mike, you’ve been in Washington long enough to know that everybody is looking for an angle,” he said in a serious tone. “The Metropolitan Police Department is the one exception.”
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