Brooks took a breath. “And Verosian has some history. There was another incident in college. He was nineteen. It was pretty thoroughly covered up. But we found it.”
Muscled, charming, and marvelously sure handed, Frank Verosian—“Vero” to millions of fans—was the Wolverines’ All-Pro receiver, the team’s second-best player, and the man who made their Super Bowl–winning quarterback, Kyle Tucker, great.
“I didn’t go into the earlier incident yet, but it is thoroughly described in our report. The details, which a competent attorney should be able to get admitted at trial, are chilling and legally damning in their similarity to the current event.”
“What about the girl’s background? Did you look at that?” Grimaldi asked.
Peter Rena spoke at last.
“Fabian, you asked us to find out what happened here. We did that. Your player raped this young woman, who is just eighteen. If Verosian’s legal team wants to hire investigators to probe the victim’s personal history as part of a legal strategy to challenge her, they can do that. We don’t work for them. And that is not a task we would contract to undertake. Our job was to find out what happened. And tell you the facts.”
Grimaldi stared back at Rena in a way that made his displeasure abundantly clear, though it didn’t seem to bother the investigator as much as Grimaldi expected.
“That’s right, Fabian,” the lawyer Fowler said. “I asked Peter and Randi to look into this so we would know what was coming at us. I didn’t want to rely on Frank’s lawyers for this. They’re his lawyers, not ours.”
Grimaldi was seventy-three years old and had owned the Wolverines twenty-five years. But he recognized that America was changing, and it was that America to which he had to market his team. So he would change, too. After a moment he muttered, “Goddamn it.”
RANDI BROOKS DIDN’T SAY A WORD as the elevators glided down to the parking garage. Grimaldi owned the twenty-four-story office building. And the garage.
She didn’t say anything, really, until after slamming the door of her BMW. The exact words were less legally precise than the ones she’d offered in Grimaldi’s office: “Fuck him. Fuck his money. Fuck this shit. And fuck you, Peter, for being a man.”
Then she turned the car on and added, “You want to say anything about what happened in there?”
“I think you said it all just now,” her partner answered, “rather eloquently.”
She stared at him. Then she dissolved into an enormous, disgorging, and cleansing laugh. And Rena, swept up in her relief and anger, joined her.
The business cards for Rena, Brooks & Associates said BACKGROUND RESEARCH AND CONSULTING. Translation: people hired them to get to the bottom of things—usually when the consequences of not knowing were extraordinarily high. Either that, or things had already gone so badly wrong, knowing the full truth was the only option left.
The business varied. Companies hired them to vet potential CEOs and sometimes high-profile employees in trouble, including athletes. Given that they were based in Washington, D.C., they also did a fair amount of work for people in politics, though they tried to avoid working directly for campaigns. The current occupant of the White House, James Nash, had hired them twice in the last two years—to vet and confirm a Supreme Court justice and conduct an internal White House investigation of a controversial terrorist incident.
A few years back, a senator who owned an NFL team had hired them to scrub the background of a possible first-round draft pick about whom there were difficult rumors. Since then, more NFL teams, and some NBA, had asked them to look into the backgrounds of controversial high draft picks or incidents involving high-profile players.
Brooks wiped the laughing tears from her eyes and navigated her 5 Series BMW out of the parking garage.
The car emerged into an unseasonably sunny late February day in downtown Baltimore and headed away from the Inner Harbor toward 95 South to D.C. Rena pulled out his phone to see what email and text messages had come while they were in the meeting with Grimaldi and his lawyer.
There were dozens from the two hours he was offline, and more in the secure and encrypted messaging app they used internally at the office. There was an email from Victoria Madison as well. Vic was the plainspoken, wise, and beautiful daughter of the Supreme Court justice they’d helped confirm. She lived in California, and she was running out of patience with Rena for not moving there to be with her, leaving behind the Sodom and Gomorrah of craven cynicism that she believed Washington had become. She was also irritated that Rena thought he couldn’t share much of what he worked on, at least when it came to politics. That seemed only to exacerbate his natural tendency toward keeping his feelings to himself. Rena had begun sharing more with Vic about his work than he used to, except when it was absolutely impossible. “An experiment in trust,” Vic teasingly called it. “Or treason,” Rena suggested. “How’s my soldier?” Vic’s email read. “Haven’t heard from you in a few days.” He needed to call her.
Then Rena’s phone rang. He glanced down suspiciously—most calls these days seemed to be criminal scams—but he recognized the number.
“Senator.”
“Peter, how are you?”
The voice belonged to Lew Burke, the senior senator from Michigan.
Llewellyn Allen Edmund Burke was Rena’s former boss, and a good deal more than that.
A decade earlier, Rena had blown up his military career by refusing to ignore evidence of sexual harassment by a general about to be promoted to head Central Command. Burke, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, had rescued the foolish young army major by hiring Rena as an investigator on Armed Services. That signaled to the army that Rena had done nothing wrong. In the eleven years since, Lew Burke had continued to guide Rena’s life. It was Burke who had urged Rena to start his consulting firm with Randi Brooks, though she was a Democrat and Rena a Republican. In the eight years since, it was often Burke, one of the few publicly bipartisan politicians left in Washington, who guided Rena and Brooks’s work from a distance. For Burke, friendships were not random accidents. They were bonds and responsibilities. And they defined one’s life.
“I’m afraid, Peter, I need to ask a favor.”
“Sir.”
“How soon could you and Randi be at my house?”
The reassuring voice—flat as a midwestern plane tinged on the odd word by a New England prep school drawl—sounded uncharacteristically tense. “I’m afraid it’s rather urgent. And perhaps, on your way, you and Randi can discuss whether she would have any problem doing work for Senator Wendy Upton.”
Six
McLean, Virginia
Llewellyn Burke and his wife, Evangeline, lived in a terra-cotta-roofed estate in McLean, Virginia, perched above the Potomac River. It was a 1920s-era home—Spanish style, tile roof and white plaster walls—a house more at home in the Hollywood Hills than among the faux colonials of Washington. It was also modest compared to its neighbors on the bluff, especially the fifty-room estate of the Saudi prince next door.
Most extraordinary, though, was the setting. Behind the house, down stone steps, past a small swimming pool, lay a secluded patio on a cliff overlooking the river. One heard the water before seeing it. In a canyon two hundred feet below, the Potomac churned deadly white, and it did not calm until it eased under the Chain Bridge and entered Georgetown. There it became wide and deceptively passive as it meandered past the monuments of the federal city, hiding its lethal currents below.
A housekeeper greeted Rena and Brooks at the door. She led them to the rear patio, into the crisp, almost spring-like February day. When they reached the second level and heard the roaring river, they found Senator Burke sitting with Senator Wendy Upton of Arizona and another man, her chief of staff, Gil Sedaka.
The two fixers didn’t know Senator Upton well. When they’d guided the nomination of the iconoclastic Rollie Madison to the Supreme Court two years earlier, Wendy Upton had been the first Republican on Judiciary to announce
her approval. Others followed.
Eighteen months later, she’d been a needed voice of reason during joint congressional hearings investigating a terrorist attack in North Africa that killed a U.S. general and three other Americans. Rena and Brooks had been hired by President Nash to conduct an internal White House investigation of the incident and keep Nash two steps ahead of the media and Congress.
In both experiences, Upton had been intellectually honest, independent, and someone whose opinion carried weight with other senators. Rena and Brooks considered her sharp, modest, and impeccably prepared. And behind the scenes, where it mattered most but was recognized least, she could be shrewd and strategic. At one critical point in the Africa hearings she had undercut their nemesis, Richard Bakke, from making a cynical grandstand that might have done them in.
She reminded Rena of a prodigiously gifted musician whose dedication to practice created the illusion of effortlessness.
Her appearance was also deceiving. She had a round face, hazel eyes, and a porcelain complexion, which combined to make her look delicate, even vulnerable. But her soft features, Rena thought, tended to mask her intelligence and her will. Anyone who doubted her grit also probably didn’t know her story. Upton’s parents had been killed in a car accident when she was sixteen. She had taken the GED, sued the state to become an emancipated minor, then raised her ten-year-old half sister so the two could stay a family. She ran her parents’ business until her sister was old enough that Upton could finally attend college. It was the first step in what would become a life of fiercely independent actions.
Burke rose to greet them, made gracious introductions—ever the well-bred scion of a Michigan auto dynasty—and invited everyone to sit. In his early sixties, with dark hair graying at the temples, Llewellyn Burke had a gracious and listening manner that people instinctively trusted. His sea-blue eyes were welcoming and optimistic, just as Rena’s nearly black ones seemed brooding and sad. But today Rena noticed age lines on his friend he hadn’t seen before, small rivulets, like new creek beds of stress, stretching from his eyes toward his temples.
Burke looked gravely at Rena, then at Brooks. “You know how much is at stake in this election,” he began.
The election—the brutal chase for the presidency—had begun in earnest. The first Super Tuesday primary—eight states—was a week away; another “super” contest, six more states, followed the week after.
“Something ugly happened today,” Burke said. “Something we need your help with. A phone call.” Burke’s halting speech was unlike him. “Wendy, perhaps you should explain.”
Upton looked at her chief of staff, Sedaka, who shook his head. She had to say this herself, he was telling her. She did, with a calm that would have been beyond most people.
Over the last two days, she explained, she and Sedaka had received four phone calls about the vice presidency. She walked through each one: the first from the Traynor campaign, the second from Bakke’s, and the third last night from the state archivist.
Then a call this morning from her finance chairman in Tucson passing along the threat, conveyed through a major donor: if Upton agreed to the vice presidential spot, someone knew something so terrible about her that it could end her career. She recalled the words from memory, though Rena could see she had written them down on paper in what looked like shorthand: “If you accept the offer to run as vice president, there are people who know something about you, which they are prepared to use to destroy you. Even drive you from the Senate. And out of public life entirely.”
Driving here, Rena and Brooks figured they were being pulled into something political. Maybe a background check on Upton—a quick vetting she could give suitors who might offer her a VP slot. Maybe, they thought, there was something difficult in her background, and she wanted a read on how damaging it might be.
They hadn’t expected this. This would mean reverse engineering someone else’s vetting of Upton—to find out who was threatening her and with what.
And they’d have only days to do it.
For while the primary campaign for president seemed endless, in reality its fulcrum point was brief, usually just a few weeks. The parties had arranged the schedule to avoid drawn-out fights, which meant, ironically, that the nastiest skirmishes occurred early and quickly, before most states had voted or most voters were paying attention. They were at that fulcrum point now.
If Upton wanted to accept either offer to run as vice president, she would have to answer in a matter of days or the offer would vanish.
The race, meanwhile, had already become ugly. After eight years of tactical moderation by James Nash, as he tried to manage the country’s fissures, the populist edges of both parties had grown impatient and increasingly angry, though Nash had accomplished more than people realized. The Democrats, for their part, were engulfed in a brutal internal war. Progressives wanted to pull the party to the left around “economic justice.” Moderates wanted to create a more diverse coalition of ideas to welcome former Republicans alienated by the right. To Rena, Democrats had been wandering without ideological focus for forty years—ever since the noble but failed experiments of the Great Society foundered in the unpaid debts and ideological scars of Vietnam.
The GOP, meanwhile, had now fallen into a war for its own soul. The Reagan Revolution was spent, depending on one’s view, either having succeeded too well or worsening the problems it claimed it would solve. Wherever one stood, mistakes abroad and economic fears at home had swept up the GOP in a rising tide of conservative populism. Just as Democrats no longer could define what their party stood for, Republicans could no longer decide what conservatism meant. Should it be small government, balanced budgets, and a libertarian tradition of leaving people alone? Or did conservatism mean drawing inward, toward economic nationalism, tax cuts, anti-immigration policies, and enshrining evangelical morality into political law?
Rena, an avid reader of history, believed the world teetered at a pivot point between two epochs. On one side was the industrialization of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the other was globalism, world migration, and digital and algorithmic revolution. No one seemed to understand the political implications of this new world—even the corporations that controlled the technology running it. But the past no longer seemed to offer a path to the future. The unfinished dialogues of the Founders over the meaning of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—and the intentions behind words like “created equal” and “justice for all”—had broken out into new and ugly arguments about old feuds, like festering wounds that had never healed.
The one shared emotion was fear—that the political system was failing and American power was waning. The number-one book on the New York Times nonfiction list was Evelyn Bock’s Dusk in America.
Rena was watching Upton, doing what Randi Brooks called his “reading” of people, sensing their hidden feelings and motivations from the way they moved, their body language, and the timbre of their voices.
There were two obvious questions they needed to ask her: Did she know what secret could be used against her? And did she suspect who might want her destroyed?
Brooks moved, just slightly, toward Upton, squaring her body to face the other woman’s. “Did these offers to run as vice president come out of the blue?”
The question implied more than it might appear: Brooks was trying to find out who else might know of the offers—and so be a suspect.
“Out of the blue,” Upton repeated. She knit her fingers together. “I don’t know David Traynor very well. I know he likes to surprise people. He hinted once, as a joke, that we should run together. But we are not close and hadn’t discussed this.” She took a breath. “About all we have in common is we’re both called mavericks.”
“Had you ever discussed joining the ticket with Bakke’s people?”
Upton suppressed a smile. “Politics makes strange bedfellows,” she said. “Obviously, Dick and I have little in common other than party.” A glance at Seda
ka. “An alliance would be a classic maneuver: I broaden his appeal as he tries to block Jeff Scott or Jennifer Lee.”
Jeff Scott was the governor of Michigan who had surged unexpectedly to front-runner status in the GOP primaries. Jennifer Lee, niece of a former president, was the best-financed candidate in the race but so far had failed to catch fire.
Some in the GOP, Rena and Brooks also knew, had wanted Upton herself to run, a move Rena thought would be powerful. His partner, a liberal Democrat, had always believed the first female president would be a Republican; a Republican woman would pull from all voter groups, something that would be harder for a female Democrat.
Rena noticed Sedaka, the chief of staff, shifting in his seat, a sign something had been left unsaid. He asked Upton: “What in your past could destroy you?”
“I have no idea.” She said it quickly and a little defiantly.
“And who do you think might threaten you?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
She was strong, frightened, angry, and she wasn’t helping them.
“No idea at all?”
“Maybe I should focus on my enemies more and my friends less.”
That seemed to get a reaction from Llewellyn Burke. “Maybe we all need to do more of that these days.”
The remark was uncharacteristically dark for Burke, and Rena thought he saw something in his friend’s face he hadn’t fully grasped before: how much this campaign posed a threat to Burke, too. Especially the unexpected success of Jeff Scott, the first-term governor from Burke’s home state.
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