Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  Thirty

  Washington, D.C.

  There was no way, however, they could accept what Upton had told them at face value. That’s how you get made a fool of.

  To survive in Washington it was better to follow what Ronald Reagan had said about the Russians and “trust but verify.” Or better yet, follow the advice about family from the City News Bureau of Chicago: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

  As Rena and Brooks were meeting with Upton in the Capitol, Maureen Conner was with Gil Sedaka in the Dirksen Building, trying to go through the committee work that might narrow down the list of enemies. Brooks texted Conner while Rena asked Upton a few more questions. They needed Maureen to verify Upton’s version of what happened with her chief of staff before the Senator and her aide had time to coordinate.

  Conner was able to check some of the details of what Smolonsky had learned on the Grid. Then she walked Sedaka through the bare bones of it, giving away just enough. She didn’t reveal Upton’s response.

  “You remember it?”

  He sighed. “One of the worst days of her life. She cut Emily loose. And it nearly killed her.”

  “Cut Emily loose?”

  “I called the U.S. attorney and asked him to convey to Burdick, no special favors. Treat Emily like anyone else. That’s what Wendy told me to do. She was cutting Emily loose. Not trying to protect her.”

  “Why’d you call the U.S. attorney? Why not Dick Burdick? He was the D.A. on the case.”

  “Because if I called Burdick, it would’ve looked like the opposite of what it was. To do the right thing here, I also needed to do it at arm’s length. And involve as many witnesses as possible.”

  It would be easy enough to check Sedaka’s story by calling the U.S. attorney. Smolonsky could do it.

  “The irony,” Sedaka was explaining, “is that Wendy has been punishing herself for this ever since.”

  “Punishing herself?”

  “The thing about Wendy, watching her up close all these years.” Sedaka paused, worrying he wasn’t being clear. “It’s not easy up here to be virtuous and effective. “It takes real effort. To keep that balance.” He paused again. “I don’t mean like it’s the battle between good and evil. But maybe it is.”

  Sedaka seemed to be slipping into a kind of nostalgic reverie about Upton’s career. Maybe because he thought it was about to end.

  “And you don’t always succeed trying to figure out what’s the right thing to do. You can seem like a moralistic jerk while you’re doing it. People tire of that up here. You can have integrity, but you have to be pragmatic. Wendy and some of her close allies up here, they talk about that. Susan Stroud did. What’s the right thing to do? That’s not a moral question; it’s a practical one. What will get the best result? And the answer is not always obvious. You have to know how to pull all the levers. Moral arguments don’t get you very far. They’re not priests up here. They’re politicians.”

  “No,” Conner said. “They’re not priests.”

  “And this place, the Hill, it changes people. And not in a good way,” Sedaka kept on. “Of all the thousands of members of the House and Senate, over all the years, maybe only a handful ever made it a better place. Really, only a handful.”

  He wasn’t looking at Conner anymore.

  “Wendy is different. She could be a historic figure. I really believe that.”

  GIL CALLED WENDY after the investigator left. “You okay?”

  “Holding up.” She sounded as if she had been crying. That was something he couldn’t remember seeing her do in years.

  “You want me to come over there?” She was still in the Capitol hideaway office.

  “No, I have things to do tonight, Gil. Thanks.”

  AT HOME SEDAKA TOLD HIS WIFE, Charlotte, about the day and the questions asked and the little progress made, just as he had told her this morning about the long night of questions from Rena and Brooks. She stared at him, resenting his commitment to Upton but not resenting the senator herself, whom she liked. “You’re in the arena,” she said, quoting an old line from Teddy Roosevelt about life in politics.

  “I always thought that was a reference to Roman gladiators, who fought to the death for the sport of rich spectators.”

  “Oh, I think it was,” she said.

  Thirty-One

  Richmond, Virginia

  Michigan governor Jeff Scott stood at the microphone. The flags of his home state, the United States, and the United States Army hung, as always, from poles beside him onstage. Scott grinned into the lights, the crowd a deep sea of silhouetted shapes. It was the last event of the night. Then home to Michigan on a late charter.

  Everyone was on high alert. The whole world was doing stories, it seemed, about the chaos of American elections. “Bloody Liberty,” Le Monde called the fights at U.S. campaign rallies the last several days—“Liberté sanglante.” There had been stories in government-run media of the rightist regimes in Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and even Austria, contemplating the decline of conditions for American democracy. The hint, barely veiled, was that the United States needed stronger leadership if it wanted to put the country back on a path toward security and prosperity, what some called “neo-democracy.”

  “Has the 20th Century Liberal Democratic Republic Outlived Its Value?” an essay in the new nationalist French paper Le Front asked, in a translation reprinted in the new intellectual weekly the Washington Chronicler, financed by Karl Sabanoff, the billionaire sports and real estate magnate. “We may no longer need Americans to light the way as a beacon for Europe’s political structures. But we need their economy to be stable enough to help our own ships navigate calmer seas.”

  Whatever one thought of the international right wing telling Americans how to vote, the reality was that it had been an unnerving week. Four violent incidents in four days—the fight at Pena’s rally, the brick thrown at Dick Bakke, the brawl at the Omar Fulwood event, and then the ruthless beating of a man in a Pena T-shirt by a Traynor supporter this morning. The story had built all day.

  Jeff Scott’s campaign security, a firm recommended to him by one of his backers, employed all former Special Forces soldiers, tough men well and efficiently trained. They had high-power scopes mounted in the rafters of the Virginia Commonwealth University Stuart C. Siegel Center.

  “Road Runner Four to Command,” the team leader stationed in the southeast rafters said.

  “Command.”

  “We have three possibles, moving east in section 104. Wearing dress shirts with what appear to be Pena for President T-shirts underneath.”

  “Copy that, Road Runner Four,” Command answered. “We are sending friends their way. Keep monitoring.”

  Road Runner Four, monitoring the southwest rafters, issued the orders to his men. “Southwest One and Three, keep eyes on these three possibles. Southwest Two, Four, and Five, keep scanning for others.”

  Road Runner Four watched through his own scope as the security team now came from two directions at the three suspicious men. Two men were grabbed by six trained former soldiers and began to be led away. There was a mobile police unit waiting outside the auditorium. But the third man broke free and began to run.

  Road Runner Four watched as the man climbed over people in their seats to higher rows.

  “Road Runner Four to Command, we have a runner,” he reported to his superior.

  “Copy that.”

  The man didn’t run long. Maybe twenty seconds. But there would be video.

  “Runner is in custody,” Road Runner Four said into his walkie-talkie.

  “Roger, Road Runner Four,” said Command, watching monitors in a communications room in the basement. “I will inform the city police.”

  In a half hour the Scott campaign issued a press release headlined SCOTT SECURITY TEAM FOILS POSSIBLE ATTACK AND DETAINS SUSPECTS AT CAMPAIGN EVENT. The press release noted that the people detained and handed over to police were wearing the same pro–Ma
ria Pena T-shirts as the suspects in the beating at the Traynor rally earlier that day. Friendly media throughout the day would extol the superior security work of the Scott team.

  * * *

  Rena was in his den reading. Or trying to.

  Nelson, the gray cat Vic had given him, was fighting for Rena’s attention with the book in his hand, a history of the chaotic 1860 election.

  When the phone rang it was Matt Alabama, routed through to Rena’s encrypted line.

  The correspondent knew nothing of Rena’s work for Wendy Upton. Washingtonians are used to compartmentalizing their lives—keeping secrets from friends, even loved ones. It was something people took more seriously than most Americans would have believed.

  “How are you, Peter?”

  Matt wanted to talk. Something was bothering him.

  “Dandy. How ’bout you?”

  “I feel like a psychiatrist trying to diagnose an insane patient and I can’t read the symptoms,” Alabama said.

  Rena sat up. “Whaddya mean?”

  Alabama told him about the incident at the Scott event, the apprehension by Scott’s security team of people planning to disrupt the rally.

  “The more I think about it, the more I’m getting paranoid.”

  “Paranoid about what?”

  “About how it looks good for Scott. His people captured rioters before they had done their dirty work, something no other campaign managed to do. All the others had their rallies upset. So Scott looks like a victim, too, of the protesters, but also a hero because his team stopped these people before they did any harm.”

  Rena was quiet.

  “Maybe I’m getting too cynical,” his friend went on. “No candidate would risk it, sending people to attack other people’s rallies. Certainly not the people who run Jeff Scott’s campaign. Jack Garner is too smart for that.” Jack Garner was the campaign veteran managing Scott’s campaign. He was an old Washington hand.

  Rena said nothing.

  “You there, Peter?”

  “Just thinking about what you’re saying,” Rena said.

  “Your thinking gets in the way of your talking.”

  “Not for most people,” Rena said.

  “True that,” said Alabama. The reporter sighed but didn’t laugh.

  It was late and they were both tired.

  “Hope to see you, buddy, when I get back in town,” Alabama said.

  “Soon, I hope,” said Rena.

  Then he called Randi.

  He told her about what Alabama had said. She already knew, of course, about the arrests at the Scott rally. Randi was glued to the news most of the time.

  “We should try to see if these attacks on the rallies are connected,” said Rena. “See if Alabama’s paranoia might be justified.”

  “Wouldn’t the police already be doing that?”

  “They wouldn’t be looking for it,” Rena said. “For some connection between people arrested in different cities.”

  “Jack Garner is too smart to take the risk of pulling a stunt like this,” Brooks said. Same thing Matt Alabama had said about Scott’s campaign manager.

  “What about the people behind him? Lower down? Or his backers?” asked Rena.

  Jeff Scott’s major backers were the hedge fund and Silicon Valley magnate Wilson Gerard, the Aiken family from Illinois, and the Trice family in Arizona.

  “Are we now investigating scuffles at political rallies?” Brooks asked.

  Their to-do list was already too long.

  When he hung up, Rena glanced out the window to see if there were men watching the house. He hoped there were. Because it would mean they were still worried about him. Maybe he should just run out there and grab them. Maybe their presence was the only secret he knew.

  They still hadn’t found out what threat was looming over Upton. Every lead they had surfaced had come up dry—the JAG attorney Henry Nelson, sister Emily Upton, even Wendy’s love life. They’d contacted the two women Upton said she had had affairs with years earlier, but neither said they had been contacted by anyone else. They’d also tracked down the lone boyfriend from long ago, Dave Garrod. He appeared to bear no grudge against Upton. He also confirmed Upton’s story that she and Garrod had once considered marrying. He said he’d loved her at the time, but thought something felt missing for her. She didn’t love him, he thought. But he admired her still.

  Rena needed sleep, at least for a few hours. Almost everyone else was still at the office. Wiley and Lupsa were combing the Web looking for something they missed. Robinson, Conner, and Brooks were delving through Upton’s legislative career—with the help of software Lupsa had written that matched names of donors to rival campaigns to targets of hearings and Upton’s legislative votes. Hallie Jobe was still going through Upton’s career in JAG.

  He wasn’t sure how much good any of it would do. He figured sometime tonight Upton would get a call from both Traynor and Bakke pulling the plug on their offers. If they did, hopefully it would never come out that she had been threatened. And he was beginning to wonder if whoever was threatening Upton had anything at all. Maybe it didn’t matter. The threat itself was the threat. Upton would be smeared with rumors that weren’t true. And that would be enough. The facts wouldn’t matter.

  Day Five

  Friday

  February 28

  Thirty-Two

  Gray Hawk Hunting Lodge

  Ogemaw County, Michigan

  Senator Llewellyn Burke’s black Escalade pulled up in front of the stone and wood hunting lodge just after sunrise.

  The building was new, but it had been built to look old.

  The Gray Hawk Hunt Club was the most exclusive private hunting preserve in the Midwest—eight hundred secluded acres surrounded by a ten-foot electric fence, hidden in the Michigan woods just ninety minutes from Detroit. The main lodge, which sat above the lake, included a “saloon,” a main dining room, and a series of private “salons” where business could be conducted. There were various bungalows nearby for overnight guests and a second dining room on the lake called “The Renegade,” used for private dinners and heated by Franklin stoves. The club was owned by an anonymous group and offered only one hundred invitation-only equity memberships for an “initiation price” rumored to be $1.4 million, plus an annual operations fee of $250,000. But there was little argument, among those lucky enough to have been invited here as guests for a meal or to hunt white-tailed deer, that Gray Hawk was the most elegant of the 136 controversial private hunting preserves in Michigan.

  Senator Burke was visiting this morning at the invitation of Michigan governor Jeff Scott, the decorated army veteran who, at age forty-one, now aspired to be president. Senator Burke’s wife, Evangeline, had been invited, as well, to join them for breakfast after the two men had an early meeting. Senator Burke had sent Evangeline’s regrets.

  As his car pulled up, Senator Burke noticed that Governor Scott’s wife, Elaine, was not waiting on the front porch.

  But he did see Scott’s campaign manager, Jack Garner, who went inside before the Escalade stopped.

  Scott rose to greet Burke and shake his hand. “Senator,” he said warmly. “Lew,” he added, as he clasped a second hand over Burke’s.

  The gesture was friendly if choreographed—and vaguely threatening, Burke thought. Scott’s hand now enveloped his own and could control it. Politicians loved physical demonstrations of power.

  “I was thinking, as I was waiting for you,” Scott said, “I don’t know we’ve really had time alone before. Without anyone else in the room, I mean.”

  They had met before, of course, many times. But Scott was right. This was the first time the senior senator and the young governor had ever been one-on-one for what Scott had promised was just a personal visit. No agenda. Just “two men who oughta know each other better getting the chance.”

  “Shall we go in, Senator, or would you like to sit here on the front porch?”

  “Whatever you prefer,” Burke said.
r />   The more Scott chose, the more Burke would learn about him.

  “I’d love to take a walk, actually, if you’d like,” Scott said. He was polite and respectful. “It’s so beautiful here.”

  Walking had become the new meeting venue of choice at Davos and other gatherings of the powerful, who believed it led to more creative thinking.

  “Then let’s walk.”

  “Splendid.”

  Scott put a light hand on Burke’s shoulder and they headed down the steps and onto a path leading to the deep woods.

  “I don’t know if I’ve told you before, Senator, what a hero you are of mine. I just admire how you’ve made your way in politics, how you’ve always seemed true to your beliefs. There are so few people in public life like that.”

  And Scott offered the smile that had quickly made him famous. It was a little-boy grin on a grown man’s face, sweet and mischievous and a little elusive.

  Scott had recognized the magic of his smile on people for as long as he could remember, delighting moms and teachers and big sisters when he was a boy, later intriguing women when he had come of age and drawing men to follow him in combat. Scott’s charm was so confident and easy, Burke, too, felt its magnetic pull.

  He could have been a movie star. But Scott was more than that. He was a real-life war hero who looked like a movie star. In Iraq, he had saved men in battle at the risk of his own life. That had won him the second-highest medal that his country offered for heroism in combat, the Distinguished Service Cross. Then he’d come back to the U.S. and started a company to help veterans, which made him a millionaire. Then, with no meaningful executive experience beyond his officer field training and being a front man for the veterans group, he ignored the Michigan GOP’s request that he run for Congress, “jumped the line,” and ran for governor. Now, after a single term, he was running for president.