Oppo

by Tom Rosenstiel

  “Really?” said Jobe.

  “Although he has never said so publicly, a former employee claims that Gerard feels the drug problems in America can be attributed to the civil rights movement.”

  Hallie Jobe closed her eyes and took in a deep breath.

  “He has also reportedly told friends he thinks the problem of racism in America is exaggerated, that to say we are a racist country is an example of mass thinking, something fashionable, and that you would be shunned if you argued with it.”

  That was greeted by silence.

  “He thinks climate change is probably real but overblown by mass psychology and that we haven’t adequately studied what the impact will be. He follows a biochemist in Oregon who argues that if climate change is real, the effect might be good. This guy thinks Americans will enjoy an earth with more plant and animal life than before, and that in any case it would be more efficient and effective if the government did nothing and markets were free to solve the problems of a warming climate on their own.”

  “This is the politics of crazy,” Lupsa said.

  “When did he start becoming a political power broker?” Rena asked.

  Brooks scanned the Grid timeline. She said:

  “Looks like he first got involved in politics around 2010. The first round of money was largely wasted. He did conventional things, like investing in other people’s PACs and super PACs. He backed libertarian candidates who all lost.”

  Brooks maneuvered the trackpad. “But by 2014 and beyond, his involvement got much bigger and more creative. He started a data analysis company called Millennial Insights. He became close with one of the most aggressive far-right-wing political activists, a woman named Rebecca Schultz, who was advising campaigns, running a PAC, and making attack documentaries about Democrats and Republicans she didn’t like. Gerard underwrote her. Around the same time, his contributions to conventional PACs ended. Instead, he started giving to donor-advised funds, where most of his money was anonymous. No one knows how much he has actually spent in the last six years.”

  Gerard was hardly the only billionaire donor in the country trying to hide how much he was really spending to handpick judges and governors and to change laws.

  Rena recalled Robinson’s slides, which showed the twenty billionaires who had given at least twenty million dollars each, the number of $1.7 billion in dark money in the last election.

  Brooks, her pancakes half eaten, pushed her plate away.

  “In some ways Gerard is unique. He was interested in ideas first, in philosophy and debate. In college he talked about writing books, making his views and his philosophy known, becoming the next William F. Buckley, shaping ideas, pushing his notions about so-called economic libertarianism. He wanted to explore the dialectic between socialization, marketing, and conformity versus the freedom of independent thought. But he wanted to be rich even more. He thought that was how you changed things.”

  “So why has he gone so quiet?”

  “Hard to say,” said Brooks. “But look at the timing. In 2010 you have the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United, ruling that money is speech and removing the limits on what an individual can give to a PAC. A year later, the IRS starts to go after Valerian. And it finds a champion in 2014 in Wendy Upton, who leads the charge, arguing that Valerian is a tax cheat. And not just any tax cheat. The biggest tax cheat in history. If Valerian has to pay all the taxes that Wendy Upton says it should, plus penalties and whatever they’ve racked up since from more basket trading, it’s probably ten billion dollars. It would be the biggest tax case ever. And Lord only knows what it would cost Gerard personally.”

  Rena saw Maureen Conner, who had stayed back to research something, entering the restaurant now, looking for them, her expression urgent.

  She sat down with a glance at Brooks’s pancakes. “Found it,” she said.

  Brooks pushed the food toward her friend. “Found what?”

  “Proof that Gerard’s PAC hired Gray Circle and what he hired them for.”

  It was the missing piece. They knew that Gerard’s company had once hired Gray Circle in another matter. But they didn’t have proof connecting it to a campaign yet. Apparently, Conner had now found it.

  “How?” Hallie Jobe asked.

  “Randi’s idea,” she said. “Different states have different reporting requirements about campaign contributions. Michigan’s are the strictest. In federal elections, a campaign can just say it paid money to such and such and leave it at that. This much to a polling firm. This much to a law firm. So campaigns hide what they are really doing by just giving the money to law firms. But the law firms never disclose if they paid any of that money out to other subcontractors.” They all knew that was how most oppo research was paid for. “But in Michigan, it’s tighter,” Conner said. “You’re required to list what was paid downstream to subcontractors, and to name them. You’re not supposed to hide what you’re doing.”

  “And?” Brooks asked.

  “And it’s there. Gerard’s super PAC, Freedom for America, paid the law firm Holstein Meyers. And Holstein listed that it paid Gray Circle.”

  Randi Brooks closed her eyes and then covered them with her hands. She was exhausted. And offended. What Gerard was trying to do to Upton struck Brooks differently and more personally than others here. Rena saw it, if no one else. The reason was because of Randi Brooks’s own life. In some ways, his partner’s private life was much closer to Wendy Upton’s than she ever let on. When she opened her eyes again, she looked at Rena with a sense of real anger.

  Rena smiled at his partner. “Randi,” he said, “I know how to end this.”

  * * *

  They were in a dark panel van with painters’ logos, parked outside the breakfast joint. As the group inside the restaurant began to move, the men in the van made a phone call.

  “They look like they are getting ready to break up,” the one in the passenger seat said into the phone.

  “How much you get?”

  “Not much. What do you want us to do? If they split up, there aren’t enough of us.”

  “Follow Rena. And don’t lose him again like you did yesterday.”

  Forty-Three

  Rena wanted to see Wendy Upton first. She knew nothing yet about any of this—Sara Bernier, Gray Circle, or Gerard. It would be a lot to process.

  He went home briefly to sleep, exhausted from his interrogation of Bernier and the all-night scrub of Wilson Gerard.

  Then he called Upton and told her they had found something that would be difficult to hear, but he needed to see her immediately.

  They met at her rented town house on the Hill. They sat at a small breakfast table in her kitchen. Her roommates, two other senators, were out of town. As Upton listened, Rena explained that the woman she had been quietly seeing for the last two weeks, Sara Bernier, was a paid operative hired by the billionaire Wilson Gerard to entrap her in a sexual scandal.

  Upton closed her eyes and bowed her head. She kept her face lowered a long time.

  When she raised it again, her eyes were red, but there were no tears, not as there had been when he had talked to her about her sister. She put her palms up to her eyes, as if to block any tears that might be forming, and when she moved them away, Rena sensed she had wiped whatever feelings she allowed herself to feel for Sara Bernier away as well.

  She looked at Rena and smiled, almost apologetically. Then shook her head. “So stupid,” she said.

  Then, softly, she placed one small hand on the small table, as if she were feeling to see if it were real, if the physical world were still real, and said, “This all has to stop.”

  “That’s what I have in mind,” Rena said.

  “How?”

  He didn’t tell her everything. He admitted hiring a surveillance team to watch her for three days and explained that this was how they’d caught Bernier.

  But he didn’t tell her he’d all but kidnapped Bernier yesterday. And he wasn’t going to tell her what he had in
mind now.

  “The less you the know, the better,” he said.

  Upton held Rena’s gaze in her own, her pale intelligent eyes searching his dark melancholy ones. She seemed to be weighing everything that had occurred over the last few days: She had been seduced by Sara Bernier; threatened to stay out of the race; surveilled by Rena’s people, who in turn had discovered that Bernier had set her up. They’d discovered the connection to an ex-spy group called Gray Circle and found the link between Gray Circle and Wilson Gerard, who had hired those ex-spies as revenge against Upton, probably for her catching him cheating on his taxes.

  Rena wondered at the depth of Upton’s humiliation, the proud, strong, good girl, this fearless woman, made such a fool of by a shady group of former foreign spies using sex to blackmail her. Her eyes never moved from his.

  “You can’t do anything I would be ashamed of. Or that’s illegal,” she said.

  Rena said nothing.

  Then a smile appeared on her face, meek at first, then growing until it became thoughtful. She said, “Lew Burke said I should trust you.”

  Rena thought of his friend Burke, of the trouble he had seen in the man’s eyes, and said, “Then you should.”

  ON THE STOOP OUTSIDE, Rena glanced back through the glass in the front door. Wendy Upton was still sitting at the small breakfast table. Rena could see her body shuddering, hands over her face, her head bobbing up and down. She was alone, and now the tears flowed freely. Tears for how many years and how many people, he wasn’t sure.

  He had come to admire her, for her integrity, her courage, her preparation. Almost everyone who met her in Washington was struck by those things. She was unlike almost anyone he knew in political life, certainly in the city. And he thought, as he turned away, about what she had forfeited for that.

  * * *

  As Rena headed down the block toward his old Camaro, the dark panel van turned on its motor. “Not too close,” the man in the passenger seat said. “Give him a block or two.”

  “Not my first fucking rodeo, Dick,” said the driver.

  “Then start showing it.”

  Before the van pulled out, however, two surveillance teams, both working for Samantha Reese, took photographs of the vehicle, front and back. The first team, working from a car a half block behind and on the other side of the street, took close-ups of the van’s plates, which would be traced easily enough.

  The second photographer was a woman jogging down the street coming toward the van. She used a camera hidden in her headband and made sure, from looking at her phone as she went by, that the faces of the men in the van were recognizable in the shots.

  As Rena got into his car, Samantha Reese texted.

  “Got ’em.”

  Rena wasn’t fond of texting—especially not emoji, which he considered a fad. Instead, he typed two words: “Thumbs-up.”

  Forty-Four

  Rena had to persuade Brooks they could trust Bill McGrath.

  When they told the political consultant everything, he winced as if what he had heard caused him physical pain.

  He looked away from his visitors, out the window, toward the Watergate and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Behind them, unseen from here, were the glass-roofed United States Institute of Peace and the Lincoln Memorial. Rena considered both buildings ironic. The peace institute was built while the country waged the forever war on terrorism. The memorial was built to honor the first president killed by a domestic terrorist. How far had the nation come in 155 years?

  “I hate this,” McGrath said, turning back from the windows to look at them. “These billionaires who want to reshape the country to their own distorted vision. They think their money conveys special rights and knowledge, which they exercise in secret, the same way they operate their businesses. That is feudalism, not democracy, and it’ll ruin us.”

  It was 10 A.M. on the sixth day.

  Before joining Rena here, Brooks had gone back to the office after breakfast to research the law. She wanted to determine whether Gerard and his companies had committed a crime—and perhaps whether Rena, in his interrogation of Bernier, might have as well. “They aren’t going to sue us, not for a hundred years,” Rena said. “She won’t even tell anyone it happened.” Brooks wasn’t so confident.

  When Rena suggested they needed McGrath or some other GOP insider to take the next step to stop Wilson Gerard, Brooks had worried there was too much risk. The political operative, she thought, might not want to offend the rising star in his own party and might tip off Scott or Gerard. Rena argued they couldn’t do what they needed without someone’s help.

  “And didn’t we hire him already for a dollar? So’s he morally obligated? Or do you have a better plan?”

  “I don’t have a better plan.”

  So they were here, and they had just told McGrath what they’d learned, more of it than Rena had told Upton. That’s when McGrath had turned and looked out the window and said he hated what big money was doing to politics, as if he and his group of professional consultants hadn’t in an earlier time taken power from the parties. The smoke-filled room had its sins and its virtues. Each effort to reform politics brought new forms of abuse. Corruption was like crime, not plumbing. You had to police it. It was never fixed.

  “Why did you tell me this?” McGrath asked.

  “We need you to make a phone call,” Brooks said. “I’ll tell you what to say.”

  Rena got up from his chair in front of McGrath’s desk. “And I have an errand to run. More of a trip, really. Randi will fill you in.”

  McGrath looked suspicious. “What the hell are you two playing at?”

  “You will love it, Bill,” Rena said, but as he left, Rena smiled in a way McGrath thought a little sad.

  BROOKS AND MCGRATH SAT in chairs facing the whiteboard where five days ago he’d showed them his vision of the Republican electorate. A speakerphone sat on a small table between them. McGrath dialed the number.

  “Jackie, it’s Bill McGrath.”

  Jackie was Jack Garner, the campaign manager for Jeff Scott.

  A garrulous, coffee-and-campaign-amped voice said, “Bill, what’s going on, man!”

  “You alone, Jack?”

  “Never. Too busy, man, trying to win the presidency. Beatin’ alligators off with a stick. Fightin’ the lyin’ media. You know.”

  Garner was from the Midwest, but he’d picked up a faint southern bend in his speech somewhere along the years he spent learning politics from South Carolina hard boys.

  “You need to be alone, Jack. We need to have this conversation in private.”

  “The fuck, Bill? You got me on speaker?”

  “I have Randi Brooks with me. You need to go somewhere private.”

  There was a pause as Garner contemplated the implications of McGrath, the old Republican political guru, sitting with Randi Brooks, the staunch liberal known as one of the most lethal political investigators in the country. “I’ll call you back in three minutes,” Garner said. The southern accent was gone.

  McGrath drummed his fingers on the table while they waited.

  What was about to occur was one of those never-to-be-told-about exchanges that political people like McGrath lived for—part of the adrenalized behind-the-scenes maneuvering that might change history and that historians almost never heard about. McGrath was one of those people who operated in power’s shadows, a consultant who did not carry an official title, who never wanted to be an aide or a staffer, and whose stories were rarely told.

  It took Jack Garner less than three minutes to call back.

  “So what is the big fucking mystery?”

  “I don’t know if you were a party to what I am about to tell you, Jack,” McGrath began. “I don’t really care. It doesn’t matter. It’s your guy, and it all sticks to him, whether he knew about it or not. Unless you end it today.”

  “What in the name of God are you talking about, Bill?”

  “Randi Brooks is going to explain
it, Jack. But I think for your sake, and Jeff Scott’s, you better listen.”

  She walked through just part of it at first—from the moment Wendy Upton got the threat to stay out of the race to her and Rena finding the threat against Upton and who was behind it. But she stopped short of telling Garner what they had found. She and McGrath wanted to see how Garner reacted to this much first, before they made their offer.

  Garner just listened, collecting as much intelligence as possible without offering any back.

  “You want to know what we found?”

  “No, I want to keep dicking around. Go ahead, Randi. Finish it.”

  Brooks told him the rest, about the conspiracy, the hiring of a shadowy firm of French and Israeli ex-spies, the use of the honey trap, and that they had traced it all back to Scott’s behind-the-scenes benefactor, Wilson Gerard. In Brooks’s account, there was no doubt about any of it. She didn’t tell him they had grabbed Bernier and confirmed most of it from her.

  Garner was quiet.

  And McGrath added: “It all comes back on you, Jack. You and your man, Scott. Because it was Gerard.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Garner said.

  “Then call Rebecca Schultz,” McGrath said. Rebecca Schultz was Gerard’s political adviser and ran the dark money super PAC supporting Scott. “And if you really don’t know anything about it, just pass along our offer.”

  “What offer?”

  “This one,” McGrath said, and he stopped so Brooks could explain it.

  She said: “Jack, you desist with the Gitmo letter. And everything else. Everything collected by Gray Circle. And we won’t reveal that your side hired foreign nationals to influence an election, which, by the way, Jack, is illegal. We also won’t reveal that you tried to set up Upton in a sex scandal, which is also illegal. That information will pretty much destroy your guy.”

  Garner was silent a long time, and it was heavy silence, and it made Brooks happy.