The 500: A Novel

by Matthew Quirk

  I didn’t even see the body stir; Rado played a good corpse. Only his hand moved as he lifted his gun and shot Henry twice through the back of his left shoulder. The old man turned around, grimacing, stumbled back into a trash bin, then sat straight down all the way to the floor, the way a toddler does. He slumped back against the door and, groaning through clenched teeth, emptied a nine-round clip into Rado’s prone body.

  Nothing angered him so much as a man like Rado, a man he couldn’t control. I think the Serb was at least halfway dead before Henry shot him up, which meant he was good and dead now. As I moved past the bodies, Henry realized his anger had gotten the best of him. His gun was empty. He didn’t have a second clip.

  Davies seemed to suffer with every breath. Rado’s round had opened a fist-size hole in his chest. I moved toward him slowly, stepped on his gun hand, and kicked his weapon away. I watched him for a moment.

  “I knew you didn’t have the stomach for this, Mike,” Henry said in a gruff whisper. It sounded like blood was in his lungs. “Hiding away, hoping someone else will clean up your mess: your dad, or Rado, even Annie. You think you’re some good guy, so moral. But it’s cowardice, Mike. You can’t kill me.”

  He lifted his right hand, beckoning me to help him. “The cavalry isn’t coming, Mike. Nice try, but they’re dead. Give me a hand. I’ll teach you. Behind that door”—he nodded his head toward the vault—“is every secret in Washington. It’s worth billions. You ran a nice play against me. Help me up. I’ll cut you in. Full partners.”

  I took his hand and lifted him away from the door.

  He smiled. “That’s it, Mike.”

  I pulled the thick plastic trash bag out of the bin to my right. Henry looked at it, puzzled. He tried a new gambit.

  “You can’t kill me in cold blood, Mike. Then you’ll be as bad as I am. Corrupt. A murderer. Part of my team in the end. You can’t win. Just help me up and we’ll run Washington together.”

  Henry had a point. I recalled the flood of anger I’d felt when I’d stomped the cop, when I’d thought that Annie had betrayed me, when I’d watched Langford’s blood spin through that dialysis machine. I just wanted to give in, to let the rage run unchecked, to destroy everyone in my way. God, it would feel so good.

  But now I knew that my father had been telling me the truth when he said he wasn’t a killer. No violence. We may have been thieves, but we weren’t murderers.

  Henry watched me waver. I saw relief in his eyes.

  I snapped the bag over his head, knocked him onto his stomach on the ground, and sat on his back while I tightened it over his face with my one good hand. As long as Henry was alive to work the strings, the corruption would never end. I’d never be free.

  He clawed at the bag, at me, kicked against the tiles, the bodies beside him: a full three minutes of him moaning and writhing under the plastic. The whole thing was a lot nastier and more exhausting than I’d expected.

  I’m sure I could have found a gun with a few rounds left or a clip among the downed men. There were more bodies in the outer corridors. But I needed Henry’s eyes. I held on for a long time after his feet made their last feeble kicks against the ground.

  “Mike,” I heard someone say, back near the office. I snapped my head around. It was Annie.

  I pulled the bag off Henry’s head, then threw all the weapons in it. I flipped over Marcus and searched his sticky clothes until I found what I wanted: the papers he had taken off me during the search, the plans for the house my father had dreamed of for his family, but never built.

  I took Henry’s right arm and dragged him along the floor to the door of the vault. Annie looked in through the false panel.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  She nodded, staring at the bodies, eyes wide.

  “Good,” I said. “I just need a sec.”

  She shrank back into the office.

  I looked over the vault door: palm print and eye scan. Fancy stuff. I lifted Henry’s limp arm and pressed it to the screen. The red light went green. I reached under his armpit, and, though it was a nightmare with my busted hand and shoulder, managed to muscle his limp body up with my knee and good arm. His eyes were wide open, staring, creepy. I nudged his head forward, and got his eye next to the retinal scan. The bolts of his vault retracted with a low mechanical whine.

  I let his body drop and opened the door. Files, videotapes, old reel-to-reels lay on the shelves, carefully stacked and indexed. Every secret Henry had collected to build his empire, decades of blackmail and extortion, were there for the taking.

  Henry was right. They were all I would need to be everything he was, to control Washington. As I stepped over the man I’d just killed and entered his sanctum, I certainly wasn’t feeling like one of the good guys.

  Now I had an even better deal. The kingdoms of the world in all their glory, and I wouldn’t even have to knuckle under to Henry. All for me. Maybe he was right. Maybe everyone did have a price. Maybe this was mine.

  “Mike,” Annie said. She stood outside the vault and looked in terror from one injury to the next on my bruised body.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Never better,” I said. “You sure you’re all right, hon?”

  “Yeah. A little shaken up, that’s all.”

  “Good.”

  I limped over. The best I could manage hug-wise, given my limb situation, was to sort of lean against her. She ran her fingers through my hair.

  “What’s in there?” she asked, looking at the vault.

  “Keys to the kingdom.”

  “What are you going to do with them?”

  I looked at the bodies, the blood pooling, clotting on the floor. I had an awful mess to deal with, here and at the DOJ, and there was that whole double-murder rap and a handful of other crimes I’d committed while on the run. It would take a whole lot of convincing, a lot of leverage, to get out of this bind with what was left of my skin intact. I stepped back into the vault and started leafing through files. This one was a senator, this one a committee chairman, and here was a police chief.

  I’d been running from my father’s, from my crooked past, for years, gunning for that respectable life. The crooks turned out to be, in their own ways, honest, and the honest men crooks. Now I had to choose. Should I shut that door and walk away? Let the police chase me down like a criminal and be the only one to know I’d done the honorable thing? Or should I take Henry’s throne? Choose corruption, live like a king, and buy all the respect I needed?

  I looked around the vault. Washington’s secrets now ran through me. I chose neither. I was born crooked, sure, but like my father, I was an honest thief.

  I would take them, use what I needed to get out of this, and then I would destroy them.

  Annie’s cell began to ring. She looked to me, raised the phone. It was Cartwright’s number. I answered it.

  “He’s alive, Mike,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your father.”

  “What happened?”

  “No time. You’re at the Davies Group?”

  “Yes.”

  “You okay?”

  “Fine. Annie too.”

  “You need backup?”

  “Just a way out of here,” I said. “Everyone else is dead, and this place is about to be swarming with law. Where are you?”

  “Turning off Connecticut, toward you, hauling ass. Are the cops there already?”

  I checked the far windows. There were two patrol cars out front.

  “There’s a second entrance,” I said, and steered him to the underground garage Henry and Marcus had dragged me through after they’d picked me up at the museum.

  I grabbed trash bags and emptied what I needed from Henry’s vault. The two sides—Henry’s men and Rado’s men—had torn each other apart. We picked through the mess, met Cartwright downstairs, and sped away just as the police arrived to cordon off the Davies Group mansion.

  Cartwright filled me in on what had happened at the
hospital. The beating had left my father with a retroperitoneal bleed, a hemorrhage in a hard-to-find part of the abdomen. They had had to give him two transfusions before the surgeon could find it and close it. My father was fine, medically, but by then Henry’s men had surrounded the hospital. Cartwright realized the only way to get him out was to kill him.

  He switched my father’s wristband and chart with those from a guy who had come in after a motorcycle crash and died in the emergency department. A variation on the morgue con, I guess. With Henry’s men thinking my dad was dead, Cartwright had enough time to get him to his veterinarian friend. It certainly wouldn’t have been my first choice of doctor, but when I finally got to see my father, in the back of a storefront office out near Ashburn, surrounded by barking Pomeranians and squeaking parrots, he seemed okay—white as a sheet, but okay.

  “I think you stole something of mine,” my father said, and he put his arm around me.

  “Is that how it happened?” I asked, and handed him back the bloodstained plans for the house.

  “How’d you get Henry?” he asked me.

  “Pig in a poke.”

  He nodded. “Good boy.”

  We got to work on building that house. There’d been a healthy bale of cash in Henry’s vault. I considered it hazard pay; part of it went toward Quikrete and 2 x 12s, and my father’s home took shape.

  Any really unforgivable crimes that surfaced in the files from Henry’s safe found their way into prosecutors’ hands. Where Henry had bent the law, I used the dirt that he’d collected to apply enough pressure to straighten it out once again. That let me sort out some of my own recent misunderstandings with the police and see that Detective Rivera of the Metropolitan Police Department never got his granite countertops.

  In the end, we found a good use for all the blackmail material I’d taken from Henry’s office. The first bit of construction we did on my dad’s new place was a stone fire pit in the back. Once he’d healed up, my father, Annie, and I brought some lawn chairs out in the backyard and got a nice fire going. I brought out all the files and tapes from Henry’s safe. We sat around, grilling, drinking a few beers. It was all just right, like my memories of when I was a kid creaking away on the swing set, my parents laughing in the summer night, before my father got sent away. Now we were once more just your typical happy family, except we happened to be burning evidence.

  Annie and I had plenty of money left to head someplace warm for a while, then start over somewhere new. It would take a while to get my father fully back on his feet, though, and he and I had a lot to catch up on.

  So while I was stuck in DC, I figured I’d make the best of it. I was honest, sure, but I could never fully kick those sneaky habits. And I didn’t want to. I’d learned that much. The honest men had gotten me into this mess, and those criminal ways I’d never kicked, the ones I’d inherited from my father, got me out. I could barely remember it now, but there was a time, only a year ago, when I’d busted my ass—two Harvard degrees and a full-time job—with the hope that one day I could get some good done in this brothel of a town.

  Everything from Henry’s vault was gone. I’d guarded those secrets with my life and seen that every last shred disappeared in the flames. They lived on only in me. Even without the files, the mere knowledge of all those dark histories was plenty potent.

  I had to wonder if there was a way to make something good out of all the evil Henry had stirred up. It’s an interesting question: How do you go honest in a city run by crooks?

  As that house rose up, strange things started happening in the capital. There was less partisan squabbling, less posturing for the next election, less kicking back to special interests. Good bills somehow passed with votes on both sides of the aisle. It was the most productive session Washington had seen in a long time, almost as if each of the most powerful men in town suddenly found himself with a conscience, or maybe a gun to his back.

  No one knew who or what was behind it all. And I made damn sure it stayed that way.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My wife, Heather, kept me going throughout this risky proposition with her constant encouragement, humor, and patience. My parents, Ellen and Greg, and brothers, Michael and Peter, served as sounding boards and narrative-knot untanglers at every step. Allen Appel was an incredibly generous guide to the genre and the business. Sommer Mathis, Miranda Mouillot, and Kevin Rubino pitched in as readers and plot doctors.

  Dr. Evan Macosko patiently answered all of my loopy medical questions about faked deaths and the like. Gary Cohen shared his experiences in the world of corporate espionage. Alexander Horowitz helped with background on prisons, as did Elaine Bartlett’s memoir Life on the Outside. Joe Flood’s The Fires introduced me to the Halligan bar, which led me to the New York Fire Department’s manuals on how to break into anything.

  David Bradley gave me my first job at the Atlantic, when I was twenty-one, and with it a chance to peek behind the curtains of official Washington. My thanks to him and everyone I worked with at the magazine, especially Josh Green, Jim Fallows, Cullen Murphy, Scott Stossel, Joy de Menil, Ross Douthat, Jennie Rothenberg, Abby Cutler, Terrence Henry, Robert Messenger, and Ben Schwarz. I’m indebted to all the amazing reporters and editors I’ve met and traded stories with in DC.

  My agent, Shawn Coyne, took a gamble on me and helped hash out the idea for The 500. I’m extraordinarily grateful for his help and unerring guidance. He and the rest of the team—Justin Manask and Peter Nichols—worked magic to get Mike Ford off the page and into the world.

  Reagan Arthur is a writer’s dream of an editor. My deepest thanks go to her and Michael Pietsch and everyone at Little, Brown for trusting a first-time author and making this book possible. Copyeditors Tracy Roe and Peggy Freudenthal did a beautiful job tightening up the text and saved me from many errors. I’m indebted to Marlena Bittner, Heather Fain, Miriam Parker, Amanda Tobier, and Tracy Williams for their enthusiasm in spreading the word about The 500.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Matthew Quirk studied history and literature at Harvard College. After graduation, he joined the Atlantic and spent five years at the magazine reporting on a variety of subjects, including crime, private military contractors, the opium trade, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. The 500 is his first novel and is currently in development as a major motion picture. He lives in Washington, DC.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2012 by Rough Draft Inc.

  Cover design by Ploy Siripant

  Cover photograph © Tim Robinson/Millennium Images

  Cover copyright 2012 © Hachette Book Group Inc.

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property.
If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Reagan Arthur Books/Little, Brown and Company

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  First e-book edition: June 2012

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  ISBN 978-0-316-19860-8

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four