While the phone rang, he glanced at his watch: half past eight, which would be half past two A.M. in Washington. A generic recording from the recipient’s wireless carrier came on as the call went to voicemail. Lang left his message in English.
“It has been decided. Our chief will travel shortly to conclude the merger talks. Call me if you wish.”
He pressed the red circle to end the call and returned to his desk with a smile of satisfaction on his pale lips.
Chapter Twenty-Three: Withdrawal
“We cannot pretend that we do not know this. We are not ostriches, and cannot believe that if we refuse to look at something we do not wish to see, it will not exist.”
–Leo Tolstoy
LATE AUGUST, WASHINGTON, D.C.
A hint of an early fall came to Northern Virginia, with a cool wind from the Blue Ridge Mountains that carried the threat of rain. Perhaps it was the low, scudding clouds, or perhaps his jet lag after the flight from Paris, but Roger Zorn felt a vague unease as he drove his rented Toyota Avalon along the Dulles Airport Access Road toward the District of Columbia.
Unlike his arrival at Dulles the previous March, he saw fewer homeless refugees from EMP-stricken New England, less litter, and fewer melancholy faces around the airport. He also noticed fewer security patrols and roadblocks along his route into the city, since intifada-related unrest had diminished over the summer. Entering the suburbs, he saw that traffic was heavier than on his last trip. It seemed as if Homeland Security might finally be getting a grip on things. And yet his anxiety remained.
Zorn left the interstate highway at Rosslyn and drove on into the District. By now it was half past eight P.M. and nearing the last glimmer of twilight. So it was difficult to determine whether any of the vehicles stopped at the traffic light might be trailing him up New Hampshire Avenue toward U Street. But by the time he arrived in Margaret Slattery’s neighborhood, he was reasonably certain that he was free of surveillance.
Zorn parked in a self-service parking lot a couple of blocks from her apartment and covered the remaining distance on foot. Perhaps because a light rain had begun to fall, he was the only pedestrian in sight and vehicular traffic was sparse. Despite not having spotted a tail, he had a sense of being watched. If true, there was little he could do about it now. So he pulled his jacket collar up around his neck and walked on through the drizzle.
On reaching Slattery’s luxury high-rise, he stepped into the entry vestibule to call her over the intercom. He buzzed twice and waited. No answer. He tried again. Same result.
Seeing a figure approach from the curb, he exited the vestibule and headed back across the street to look for lights in Slattery’s apartment. There they were, blazing from every window. He pulled a disposable cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed in hopes of drawing a response. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail, but midway through the recording that began, “You have reached…” Slattery picked up.
“Hello?” she answered, her voice sounding thick and confused. Might she have had a drink or two?
“Hi, ma’am. I’m downstairs with your sushi order,” Zorn announced in a voice as close to that of a slow-witted American twenty-something as he could manage. “Could you buzz me in? I tried the intercom but nobody answered.”
“But I didn’t order sushi.”
“Am I talking to Susan Murphy?”
“No, you’ve got the wrong number,” she replied and hung up.
The tactic had succeeded. Now he could return and buzz her again. Zorn stuck the phone in his pocket, went back to the vestibule, and pressed her buzzer one more time.
“Hello?” she answered, with a sharper tone than before.
“Hi, Margaret. It’s Roger. May I come up?”
“Was that you a moment ago?” she asked with an edge of suspicion.
“Can’t say. Top secret. But let me in and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Oh, Roger, there you go again with the secrecy.” Much as before, her voice sounded low and husky.
The intercom clicked off but a moment later the lobby door buzzed open.
On arriving on the seventh floor, he saw that the door at the end of the hall was ajar. Margaret Slattery stood in the gap, barefooted, her hair in a ponytail, wearing black slacks and a wrinkled white blouse that was untucked around the waist. Her puffy eyes looked as if she had awakened from a deep sleep.
As Zorn entered, Slattery displayed a groggy smile and laid a hand on his shoulder to plant a kiss on his cheek.
“Please excuse me for not answering the first time you buzzed. I guess I shouldn’t have uncorked the wine so soon after taking my meds.”
“Wine is good for you. And so is sleep. It’s the meds that bear watching,” Zorn muttered as he followed her inside.
“Thanks for caring,” Slattery answered, shooting him an amused glance. “Or do you speak in your capacity as a wine-grower?”
“Both.”
“Then may I offer you a glass?”
“I’d love one. I came straight from the airport and didn’t have time to wet my beak.”
She led him into the kitchen, but instead of opening the refrigerator, where she kept her supply of chardonnay, she opened an eye-level cabinet and brought out an unopened bottle of Woodford Reserve Double Oaked Bourbon, along with a cut crystal glass.
“The last time you visited, you asked for whiskey and I didn’t have any,” she said, holding out the bottle for Zorn to inspect. “Is this a brand you approve? The man at the store said it was a bit hit among his regulars.”
Zorn recognized the label and shot Slattery a delighted grin.
“Incroyable! I’ve wanted to try this one for months. You can’t get it in France.”
“Then pour yourself a glass, Roger, and come along. I’m eager to hear about your trip to Africa,” she said as she pulled a fresh wine glass from an overhead rack.
Slattery pulled a recorked bottle from the fridge and carried bottle and glass to the living room. Zorn followed and the couple took the same seats on twin white settees where they had sat when Zorn last visited.
He gazed around the spacious living room, his eyes stopping at the wraparound window that looked across U Street toward downtown D.C. By now the drizzle had become a steady rain, making jagged streaks through the droplets that clung to the window’s outer surface. The room was as tidy as it had been on his first visit, except for rumpled cushions on Slattery’s settee and the empty wine glass on the floor beside it.
“Thanks for letting me know you were coming,” Slattery began once both were seated. “I was beginning to think you might never come back.”
“To be honest, I thought the same.”
“Oh?” she replied, raising one eyebrow. Without saying more, she reached across the table to pour herself a generous helping of chardonnay.
Zorn used the pause to turn on the television before opening a talk radio app on his smartphone. If the room were being monitored, their conversation would be garbled in the resulting crosstalk. He moved closer to Slattery to make his words easier to hear.
“I was perfectly content to let Brandon Choe run our U.S. business,” Zorn replied before uncorking the whiskey bottle and pouring a two- finger serving into the tumbler. “But decisions about the company’s future have required my presence.”
“What kind of decisions? Before you left, you said you’d be terminating your DHS contracts. Have you come back to pull out of the ESM program?”
“Not exactly,” Zorn answered, avoiding Slattery’s gaze. “We’ve entered merger talks with Tetra. If we can come to terms, Tetra will be taking over our ESM contracts.”
Slattery’s eyes opened wide and her freckled face went a shade paler. .
“You’d make a deal that would place nearly the entire ESM program in Tetra’s hands?”
“Margaret, I have investors and lenders and employees to consider. Zorn Security is not a one-man band. This hasn’t been an easy decision for me, but I believe a merg
er would offer the best outcome for the company’s stakeholders.”
“And what about the detainees? And the rule of law? You’d be willing to put all that aside and give the abusers a free pass?”
She had raised the wine glass to her lips but set it down without drinking.
“No, I don’t mean to let things continue exactly as before,” Zorn responded, pausing to swirl the bourbon in his glass. “But nor is it clear how to turn things around.”
“So what do you intend to do with your new evidence from Niger? Hold on to it? Or bury it? If you’re going to exit the U.S. market anyway, why not go public with it?”
“And derail the merger? You and I both want the abuses to stop, Margaret, but I don’t think public disclosure is the way to go.”
“You have a better idea?”
“Well, yes. Didn’t your last message say that you knew someone in the White House who might be in a position to stop the abuses discreetly if given sufficient evidence? Who is that person? Your boss, the White House counsel?”
“Actually, I was thinking of Nelson Blackburn.”
“The Full Nelson?” Zorn inquired with a startled look. “But he’s an ally of Charlie Scudder. I recall the two of them working the Middleburg Conference like a tag team. What makes you think Blackburn would take on the thankless task of mucking out Scudder’s Augean Stables?”
“Nelson and Charlie have grown apart of late,” Slattery revealed, staring into her glass. “In private, Nelson is critical of how Charlie has mismanaged the ESM program and let Tetra run riot. I get the sense Nelson may want to start the cleanup sooner rather than later, keeping the abuses under wraps until the intifada is no longer a threat. Then let chips fall where they may.”
“Onto Scudder’s head, I expect.”
“Something like that.”
“Hmmm,” Zorn replied while stroking his stubbled chin. “That sounds just like something Blackburn would do. Declare victory, dial back the removals, and pay Tetra to dismantle its offshore camps. It would be a much more orderly approach than unleashing a full-blown media circus.”
“It might,” the lawyer mused, her lips pressed together into a frown. “But then again, you can never be quite sure with Nelson. He might just change his mind and go public the moment he thought it to his advantage.”
“Hmmm, that’s not at all what I had in mind. It’s not a risk I’m willing to take.”
Slattery’s face darkened. Clearly she favored turning over Zorn’s dossier to someone in authority right away, whether it be Audrey Lamb, Nelson Blackburn, or some scribbler at the Washington Post. To Zorn’s thinking, Blackburn seemed the lesser evil. If he could be trusted to work quietly, his option appeared to be the one least likely to disrupt Zorn’s plans. Zorn let the idea simmer in his mind while he took another sip of whiskey.
“If not to the media, and not to Nelson, then where else would you go with the evidence we’ve been collecting?” Slattery challenged.
“Patience, Margaret. Let me give it more thought. Meanwhile, you haven’t let me tell you about my time in Niger tracking down the clue you gave me.”
The attorney’s face softened.
“Okay, I’m all ears,” she said, appearing to relax as she poured herself more wine.
Zorn then proceeded to relate what he’d seen in Niger, from the artisanal gold mine in the Aïr Mountains, to the repatriation base at Assodé, to his conversations with Max Steiner, to the slave market at Timia. He told her about finding Amjad Ibrahim on the market square, of recording his saga, and of watching him struck down in the desert by a drone-fired missile. Then Zorn reached into his pocket and removed a black thumb drive.
“It’s all in here,” he said, dangling the tiny device in the air. “There’s a recording and transcript of Amjad Ibrahim’s interview, video footage taken at the slave market, and a full report of what I saw at Assodé, including my talks with Steiner.”
“That’s more than enough to bring the whole stinking edifice down,” Slattery told him, her face flushed with excitement. “You’ve got to release this now, Roger! To Nelson, or Audrey, or Congress, or whoever else can put maximum pressure on the administration.”
Slattery reached out to take the drive from Zorn’s hand, but he snatched it back.
“I have an idea,” he said. “What if the two of us meet with Blackburn and offer him ninety days to dismantle the entire emergency measures program and cancel DHS’s contracts with Tetra, Zorn Security and the other ESM contractors, after which we make the dossier public? Do you think he’d go for it?”
“The way you put it sounds too much like blackmail. I fear he might take it the wrong way and call in the FBI.”
Zorn stroked his chin while weighing other choices.
“Okay, then, what if we offered him the same ninety-day head start, along with an exclusive on the dossier, in return for an ironclad guarantee of whistleblower protection?”
“That might work better,” Slattery replied with a nod. “Nelson could claim full credit for averting a scandal by volunteering to clean up Charlie Scudder’s mess.”
“So do you think it’s worth taking the risk of pitching it to him? Could we rely on him to keep it under wraps?”
“Having known Nelson for nearly twenty years, I believe we could. Besides, I’ve already told him about your visit to Corvus Base, and he didn’t leak that.”
Zorn shot her a look that must have showed his alarm, because she added quickly, “You gave me permission to brief him about it, remember?”
“Yeah, now I do. But one more question about Blackburn. Does he have any history with Larry Lawless or Tetra Corp? Is there any chance he might be in their pocket?”
Slattery offered Zorn a perfunctory frown.
“Nelson has spent most of his career in Silicon Valley. To my knowledge, he didn’t have any dealings with the defense industry or with Tetra before joining the White House. What’s more, none of the other Big Five security contractors contributed a dime to POTUS’s election campaign. So I think it’s safe to say that this administration, and Nelson personally, are not beholden politically to Tetra or to any other security contractor.”
“All right, then. I’m willing to meet with him if you are,” Zorn replied, leaning back in his settee. “But I won’t hand him the dossier until we hear his ideas for winding down the emergency measures. Is that understood?”
“Yes, that’s fine, Roger. But you will give me my copy now, won’t you? You promised you would.”
Zorn opened his left hand and glanced from the thumb drive to Margaret Slattery’s face and back again to the drive.
“You’re right. I did,” he said, remembering their secret exchange of emails.
“Then it’s settled,” Slattery replied. “I’ll call Nelson’s office first thing tomorrow. As soon as I find out when he’s available, I’ll post a new email message to let you know when we’ll be meeting him at the EOB.”
“Great. I’ll be in the office all day,” Zorn replied, matching Slattery’s businesslike tone. “And thanks, Margaret. I appreciate your help.”
“Don’t mention it. It’ll be a relief to discuss this with Nelson. Now I won’t feel like Audrey and I are the only ones in this administration working to pull back the curtain on what DHS is doing. And if Nelson lets us down, we can always take the dossier to DOJ.”
An awkward pause followed, during which neither knew what to say. So each took the opportunity to refresh his or her glass. As they did so, Slattery’s landline rang. She excused herself and stepped into the dining room to take the call.
While Zorn couldn’t hear more than a few isolated words and phrases of what Slattery was saying, her voice seemed oddly drained of emotion. Her responses were almost entirely monosyllabic, reminding him of the call from her mother during his first visit. Zorn guessed that it had to be her mother again, because he couldn’t imagine anyone else dragging down an otherwise intelligent and capable woman so quickly.
When the call ended
, Slattery returned from the dining room, pale and shivering. She dropped onto the settee, seized her glass and downed its contents without a word.
When she spoke at last, it was through gritted teeth.
“I’m sorry you had to hear that,” she said. It was the same phrase she had used the first time he had overheard her speak to her mother.
Noticing the wobble in Slattery’s voice and seeing her shoulders tremble, Zorn unfolded the decorative woolen throw that lay across the back of his settee and stepped out from behind the coffee table to wrap it around her shoulders. She looked up and met his eyes with a grateful expression.
“No matter what I do, it’s never enough. I know I shouldn’t say this, but I hate that woman so!”
Zorn remembered feeling much the same way about his own father once. That had changed after he married and raised children of his own. Was it Freud who said that true maturity begins with empathy for one’s parents?
Zorn took a seat beside Slattery and took her hand. For a minute or more, she leaned into him and seemed about to recover.
“It’s all right,” he told her. “You’ve been under a lot of stress. Now you can relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”
But a moment later, she looked up with an expression of such vitriol that he wondered what had come over her.
“How can you say that? Things aren’t fine at all!”
“You need rest, Margaret. Why not turn in now? You’ll feel better in the morning. We can talk again tomorrow.”
He tried to help her to her feet but she wouldn’t budge. She wriggled out of his grip and moved away.
“You don’t fool me,” she accused him. “All you want is to save your precious company so you can go back to France and tend to your vineyards. You don’t give a damn about what happens to me or this country!”
“That’s not true and you know it, Margaret. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have risked going to Corvus Base, let alone all the way to Niger.”
“Well, bully for you! I say, to hell with your Triage and your emergency measures! I’m sickened by what you people have done to detainees you conveniently label as terrorists so you can line your pockets at government expense!”
Root and Branch Page 34
