Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  To confront people about these things, they had learned to stage these encounters somewhere personal, in the subject’s home if possible, to make these sessions more intrusive and to signal this was not just another work problem you dispatched at the office. Upton, who shared a town house with two other senators, had agreed to come to Rena’s row house in the West End. Since his divorce from Katie Cochran four years earlier, the place had taken on the haphazard quality of a bachelor’s home that didn’t receive many visitors, though Vic Madison had helped Rena make the place more presentable. The cat Vic had given Rena, a large dark-gray British shorthair with striking golden eyes named Nelson, lay sleeping on a chair in the corner.

  “Whatever is being used to threaten you, it may be something you did in politics. Something controversial or hypocritical. More likely it’s something personal. A favor you did for someone that crossed the line. Or something sexual.”

  He let that linger.

  “Perhaps the incident you are being threatened with comes from a former lover.”

  Wendy Upton was not married and was rarely seen out with men or women. In an early interview Wiley had unearthed, she was quoted as saying, “That part of my life has eluded me.” She had been close to marriage once in the army, she allowed—the only reference to a romantic past they’d found. The relationship hadn’t survived, she said, after the two lovers were assigned to postings in different countries.

  Upton was still looking back at Rena saying nothing, which seemed to enrage Randi Brooks.

  Randi leaned forward to the senator now and interrupted Rena. “You need to understand, Wendy, we’re going to be here tonight for as long as it takes.” A glance at Sedaka. “And at some point tonight, I am going to talk with Gil alone in the other room.” She paused. “Any questions before we begin?”

  Upton offered a dry smile. “I assume then you’ll stop the dramatics?”

  That only made Brooks testier. “I’ll drop the dramatics when I feel confident that you’re taking this as seriously as we are.”

  Upton finally seemed to react. “You don’t think I’m taking this seriously? It’s my life, my career.” There was emotion now behind the hazel eyes. “What do I need to do to show you it’s serious? Break down? Cry? Confess something? I’m sorry, I don’t do that.”

  Brooks’s shoulders pulled back slightly, and she said: “Okay. Then let’s get started.”

  She rose from her chair so she could use her height. She planned, Rena knew, to be very hard, a sign of frustration but, in a way, also a show of respect for Upton’s strength.

  “Forget any research that was done on you in the past races. It was crap. The kind anyone could get online. Whoever’s coming after you now, they paid real money. They hired detectives. They talked to people who hate you. Tracked down every old rumor about you. They’ve got your digital history—every Web page you ever looked at. Every bit of porn or hate. And we’re doing that, too. And I’ll tell you now, in our experience, if someone pays enough money, there is always something.”

  It was hard to know how a client would react. Brooks had seen cases where even a few days of serious oppo were enough to drive someone from public life. That was the case with a congressman from Utah last year who had been pondering challenging the incumbent senator. The incumbent asked his oppo team to take a look at the upstart. Just three days later, the team paused to give the senator a report. He, in turn, sent an intermediary to meet with the congressman. You’re more than welcome to challenge the senator for his seat, the congressman was told. But you should know that after less than a week of digging we’ve got strippers and pills. Only you know what we will find next. “Strippers and pills” meant the congressman, a family-values conservative, was cheating on his wife and taking drugs of some kind. The congressman asked them for a week to think it over. Two days after that, he announced his immediate retirement from public life to “spend more time with my family.”

  The story had never come out.

  On the other hand, Brooks had seen clients for whom no transgression was too great. She once had to tell a governor who had put his gay lover on his payroll that he now had to resign and recognize his public career was over. The man’s wife and child were upstairs in the mansion while they met. The governor tried to argue that the scandal would be liberating; now he could live in the open as a homosexual, which would make him an even more effective champion of the oppressed, communities like the LGBTQ.

  Finally Brooks told him to stop. We’re paid to tell you the truth, she’d said. The truth is you married that woman upstairs, and even had a child with her, knowing they were a political cover story, brought a life into this world as a political lie. What you have done is immoral, and we will not stand by you. You cannot survive this and you shouldn’t. The governor resigned the next morning, still believing he could go on.

  Brooks looked at Upton and said, “Senator, are you a homosexual?”

  Twenty-One

  Rena was watching Sedaka. The chief of staff looked like he didn’t know how his friend would answer Brooks’s question. Because he didn’t know? Or didn’t know how much she would reveal?

  “If you’re gay, Senator, or bisexual,” Brooks was saying, “you need to tell us now. All the relationships you’ve had. And why you are not married.”

  In a quiet voice Upton said, “Love is a part of my life that has in large part eluded me.”

  The same phrase she had used in the interview Wiley had found.

  It sounded both sincere, Rena thought, and rehearsed.

  And it set off his partner even more. “I’m not a reporter for fucking Tucson.com, Wendy,” Brooks said. “So cut the bullshit. You told me when this began that you wouldn’t be intimidated by whoever was doing this. Then don’t be. That means we have no secrets here tonight. Or we are done with this and you walk out the door.”

  Upton cupped her hands in front of her, closed her eyes, and said, “I had a relationship in the army. In JAG.”

  “Hold on, back up first,” Brooks said. “Nothing in college? At all?”

  Upton shook her head no.

  “We’re going to verify that,” Brooks warned her, glancing at Liu to make a note for Smolonsky. “So your first sexual relationship occurred in the army? In JAG?”

  Upton nodded. “He was another attorney. We tried a case together—on opposing sides. We were both posted in Germany at the time. Then he was sent to Japan, and I was posted in Washington. We talked briefly about getting married. The relationship didn’t survive the distance.”

  Brooks said: “We need his name.”

  Upton, hesitated, hands still in her lap, rocking forward slightly, then nodded. “Dave Garrod. David. Middle name Paul.”

  Ang Liu wrote it down.

  “Where can we find David Paul Garrord now?”

  “Brussels,” Upton said.

  “Tell us about your time with him. How did it start? How long did it go on? Tell me about how it ended.”

  Upton told the story stiffly, of a young woman with little experience falling for a superior officer who had a girlfriend in another country and dumped her for Upton, and then both relationships fell apart. It was a distant story from long ago, told the way someone might tell a story about someone else. According to Upton, however, it was the last significant relationship of her life.

  They would have someone track this down in the morning to see if Upton was lying about any of it.

  “You say this was the most important relationship you had. Were there others? Even casual ones?”

  Upton shook her head slightly. There was a moment of quiet. Then Rena, who had not spoken for some time, asked:

  “You didn’t answer Randi’s question. Have you ever had a homosexual relationship?”

  “What if I had?”

  “That’s not the question.”

  “The question,” Brooks joined, “is whether someone might try to use it against you. If you have had relationships with women, we need to know now. We ne
ed to talk to them and find out if one of them might have given something to someone and whether it’s being used against you.”

  Sedaka was looking down. He had known someday this was coming, Rena thought, even if he didn’t know the truth about his friend’s private life.

  “Yes, I have.” A breath. “I’ve had experiences with women.”

  Upton looked Brooks in the eye. “One amounted to a kiss during law school. With a friend, a woman. She considered herself bisexual at the time. We were friends. The friendship deepened. For a few days we wandered on the edge of something else. There were hugs. And one night, kissing. And a bit more. But that was all. It didn’t go further. She is married now with children. She no longer, as far as I know, considers herself bisexual.”

  “But there were others,” Brooks said.

  Upton took a deep breath. “The other was over a period of a few months when I was in JAG. It was also in Germany. After David. It was brief. We never went out in public as a couple. We are still friends. I cannot imagine she would ever reveal anything about it. I don’t believe either of these women would betray those relationships.”

  Brooks said: “They wouldn’t need to. And they shouldn’t need to. But we need their names.”

  “Every name. If there are more than those two,” Rena said.

  At the suggestion she was still holding more back, Upton simply nodded her understanding. “It’s just these two. I will write them down for you, and give them to you tomorrow. But they should hear from me first.”

  “You’ll give them to us now,” Brooks said. “We’ll give you till noon tomorrow to contact them first yourself.”

  So they had gotten this far. But it was only a start. Rena got up to stretch. As he did so, he noticed a red sensor light behind the television in the den flickering. The light was part of a system Arvid Lupsa from the office had installed. The system monitored whether someone outside the house might be tracking digital devices inside. It was now possible, Lupsa had explained, for people to monitor the various devices you owned that were already tracking you—your computer, phone, TVs, audio internet devices, even the fridge—watching, listening, counting how often you opened the door. Lupsa had installed the sensors in the homes of everyone at the firm. The flicker was a silent warning. Rena had never seen it flickering before. It meant someone was monitoring them, including perhaps this conversation.

  “Do you want to take a break?” Brooks was asking Upton.

  “I’m fine. Let’s keep on.”

  “Well, I need a break,” Rena said. “Stretch my legs.” He headed upstairs and then to the front bedroom window. A glance down both sides of the street.

  He saw a car with two men inside parked at the end of the block, just enough light inside to suggest the presence of some kind of larger electronic screen. Rena made his way to his closet and pulled out a lockbox. From it he pulled something dark and heavy—not a gun, which sat in a different lockbox, but an encrypted phone, one that couldn’t be monitored. He left his regular phone by his bed, still on, and plugged it into a charger. Then he came downstairs and left the house through the back door.

  By the time he got to the street, the car was gone. He’d been spotted, he thought. Upton was being watched. And so, apparently, was he and probably his team.

  This had just gotten a lot more serious.

  With the encrypted phone he dialed his friend Samantha Reese, the woman he had called from outside Llewellyn Burke’s house yesterday.

  “Sam, are you in the city yet?”

  “Yes, Peter,” said Reese.

  “Then I think we need you to start what we discussed. First thing tomorrow morning.”

  They talked over a few details. And Rena went back inside.

  Twenty-Two

  Most of the time the things that destroy a public life are as familiar as old movie plots: Family. Love. Money. Sin. And sometimes, if it’s great enough, hypocrisy.

  They knew Upton probably had no scandal with money. Rena, Brooks & Associates operated a small credit union, ostensibly for employees, that mostly was used to conduct credit checks on clients, something that was shockingly easy to do now. They knew everything about Upton’s finances—what she owned and what she owed. Her net worth consisted of the tavern and store owned with her sister, a small apartment in Tucson, a parcel of land outside the city, some stocks and bonds, and some retirement money from the army and Congress. There was little else.

  They had walked through Upton’s love life, such as it was.

  When Rena returned, Brooks was questioning her about her early days in Tucson.

  He said nothing to anyone about the discovery that they were being watched.

  “You got through college awfully quickly, two years—while raising a kid sister and running a business. Sure you didn’t cut any corners?”

  That made Upton smile. “You need to understand something: I started college at twenty, having missed half of high school. I’d lost four years of my youth raising my sister and running a business. All I wanted to do at school was catch up. College was the first thing I had done entirely for myself since I was sixteen. I couldn’t get enough of it.”

  It was the answer they expected, but they wanted to know if the Wendy Upton they were seeing now was the same one they had put together in their jigsaw puzzle picture of her from documents last night and where, if not, the pieces didn’t fit.

  Brooks nodded and looked at her partner. “I’m going to talk to Gil in the other room now,” she said.

  They had two reasons for talking to Sedaka, for his being here at all. They wanted to watch his reactions and ask him questions. They also wanted Upton to see it and feel pressured by it.

  Brooks and Sedaka left, and Rena and Liu were alone with Upton.

  “Tell us about JAG,” Rena said.

  “What about it?

  “What were the most contentious cases you had?” She named three. Ang Liu wrote them down. “Were you ever threatened by someone you convicted?” She hadn’t been. “Which cases did you fail on?” There were a few.

  Whoever was watching them was likely the same person threatening Upton, Rena was thinking. Then he tried not to think about it. He needed to focus on the task at hand.

  “Tell us about what happened when you began to change your mind about defending soldiers accused of sexual offenses.”

  “Ahh,” she said. “So that’s where you are heading.”

  “Yes, that’s where we’re heading. We need to know what enemies you made.”

  “I don’t believe I left the service with enemies.”

  Well, you’ve got some now, Rena thought. And they’re trying to destroy you, and they have people outside my house listening.

  “You need to do better than that, Wendy,” Rena said. “You pushed the army to reform itself over sexual harassment. And you think no one held a grudge?”

  The army still held a grudge against Rena for saving it from promoting a general who was a sexual harasser.

  But she was silent, loyal, unwilling apparently to throw anyone in the service to the wolves. It was admirable. And probably foolish.

  She was waiting for him to ask another question.

  “The experience you had defending sexual harassers opened your eyes to what was wrong with the system. And you, in turn, began to open the eyes of others.”

  “You mean Henry Nelson,” she said.

  Rena said: “And ultimately he pushed harder than you did. And it ended his career.”

  A look of defiance flashed across her face.

  “Henry was moved by his own experience. Maybe my journey gave him permission to act on what he already felt.”

  “But it ended his career.”

  “I think Henry . . . went about advocating for change the wrong way,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “You were in the army. You should know.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It isn’t complaining in the service that bothers p
eople. It’s how you do it. Henry decided to break the chain of command. But he knew what he was doing.”

  For all her strength, Rena thought, there was more underneath. He just hadn’t gotten to it.

  “And you don’t think that made you enemies, for your part in changing Nelson? His enemies didn’t blame you?”

  “Not someone who would come after me like this,” she said.

  Let us decide that, Rena thought.

  “What about Nelson? Is it possible he blames you, for leading him down a path that drove him out of the army?”

  She was silent, and Rena leaned on it. “Why are you and Henry no longer close?”

  Finally a question that seemed to stop her.

  “Maybe because we had different jobs by then,” she said. “I had left the service. Gone into politics.”

  “And he had fallen in love with you. And now he was busy blowing himself up. And you didn’t help him.”

  She stared him.

  “He didn’t want my help,” she said.

  Rena stared back with a mix of sadness, sympathy, and pitilessness. Then he took a long breath, rose slowly from his chair, and disappeared into the kitchen.

  AT HIS BREAKFAST TABLE Brooks was talking to Sedaka.

  “You had to know,” she said, repeating her last question for Rena’s benefit.

  “Know?” Sedaka said. “Was I supposed to follow her around?”

  She gave him a disappointed look. “You never asked?”

  “Would you?”

  “You’ve never seen her with anyone romantically?”

  “Wendy is about as private a person as I have ever met.”

  “Never seen her with a close friend. Male or female.”

  Sedaka hesitated, and Brooks and Rena exchanged a glance.

  “I know you want to protect her, Gil. The way to do that is no more secrets.”

  Sedaka let out a long breath. Forty-eight, five years younger than Upton, he had spent most of his working life at her side. They’d met as aides on Senator Furman Morgan’s staff, Sedaka only a few years out of the University of Charleston. When Upton ran for the House, she’d taken Sedaka with her.