Washington DC

by A. C. Fuller

  “What?”

  “Means he’s protected. Plus, way she told it, it was only one of his many crimes.”

  “I got the sense he was corrupt, but he’s also a fool. I thought he was too stupid to do much harm.”

  “Don’t be naive, Cole. ‘Corrupt’ is looking the other way for a buddy’s DUI, or accepting a pair of Jay-Z tickets from a store owner for looking out for him. Mazzalano occupies a space somewhere between common thug and straight-up psychopath. You’re right that he’s a fool, and fools usually get caught. But they can do a lot of damage before that happens.”

  “Now I feel like a fool.”

  They rode in silence, passing occasionally under an overpass or a flashing billboard, but the road ahead was dark except for the taillights of a single car far in the distance.

  She couldn’t think about Mazzalano anymore, and wasn’t ready yet to share the map. She needed to know for sure that she could trust Warren. His story about Gabby had moved her in that direction, so she shared something that had been weighing on her. “You know much about military records? Military communications?”

  Warren glanced over, nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  “It’s something I didn’t tell you. When Michael Wragg emailed me. He used my nickname. Monkey Tree. Only my husband called me that. And not in front of people. I was stupid for letting it lure me, but…”

  “I get it.”

  “And you heard what he said when we were in his apartment. Matt used to email me. We didn’t do paper letters. Could Wragg have gotten access to military email servers or something?”

  “Possible, though it would take a sophisticated hacker. I don’t think he was that.”

  “But he had partners.”

  Warren nodded.

  “I had no connection to him before I wrote that story. Within a day, he’d found the one thing that would get me to show up and meet him. That nickname. I just…”

  She trailed off. There wasn’t anything else to say.

  10

  Warren watched shadows dance on Cole’s face as they passed under the lights of an overpass. She appeared lost in thought. Talking about her husband wasn’t easy for her. That much was clear. But there was something she wasn’t sharing, and he needed her to trust him. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a spouse, not the way you did. But I lost my wife. Drove her away.” He shook his head. “I’m straightened out now, but she’s seeing someone.”

  “Who?” she asked, absently.

  “Dunno.”

  “How do you know?” Before he could answer, she continued. “Never mind, I know. You just know, right? I would have known if Matt was, well...”

  “What’s your background?”

  She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Did you always live in New York City?”

  “Nah. Moved around a bit. Raised in the city, though. Brooklyn. College in Florida, year in D.C., then moved around when Matt got transferred from base to base. You?”

  “Bay Area. Oakland. Scholarship to study criminal justice at John Jay, then 9/11 happened and I joined the Marines. To be honest, I was flunking half my classes and the scholarship was about to go away. But I loved the city. And I met Sarah there.” He’d wondered about Cole’s background since they met, and the next question he wanted to ask could offend if he asked it sloppily. Sarah had been raised in the Bronx, but her parents were Puerto Rican. Warren himself was black. The first day of preschool, his daughter had gotten the question, “What are you?” from a classmate, and hadn’t known how to answer. Hadn’t even known it was a question. She’d been four and hadn’t taken offense. But Cole was an adult, and adults offend easier than children. “Your parents? New Yorkers?”

  Cole eyed him. “Mazzalano had a way of asking me that, you know. The line from The Sopranos”—she switched to a bad Tony Soprano impersonation—“‘What part of The Boot you from, hon?’”

  Warren chuckled. “So you’re Italian?”

  “Mom’s parents were. Dad’s parents, my grandparents, were German Jews who escaped in 1938. Albert and Avigail Kohlberg.”

  “Kohlberg? Lemme guess. Ellis Island happened?”

  “Nah, I hear a lot of people’s names got lost in translation there, but this was a business decision. Grandparents had been married only a year and my grandfather had taken over his father’s bookstore when the Kristallnacht happened.”

  “The what?”

  “The Night of Broken Glass. Nazis burning synagogues. Smashing Jewish storefronts.”

  “Damn.”

  “They were lucky to get out. Kohl was a German name, maybe French-German. At some point the ‘Berg’ was added, so he figured he’d drop the Berg, but he didn’t want to take a German word as his name. So he went with Cole. He figured he could be whoever he wanted in America. He told me before he died that he regretted it. Wished he’d kept the name.”

  “Was it a thing back then? A Jewish guy and an Italian woman?”

  “I don’t really know. Not a huge thing, I don’t think. Mom’s parents were lapsed Catholics, and my mom wasn’t practicing. Might have been a bigger issue if she was. I mean, it was the seventies by then. Bigger issue was the Brooklyn versus Lower Manhattan thing.”

  “The Italian thing, that why Mazzalano leaked to you?”

  “To me he was a source. A sleazeball asshole of a source, but just a source. I don’t know what I was to him. For all the crap journalists get these days, I don’t think people realize just how much shit we have to put up with.”

  Warren checked the gas gauge. Just over half a tank. “I wanna get gas soon.”

  Cole leaned over and checked the gauge. “We have like two-thirds of a tank left.”

  “Had a run-in with a cop in Nevada once that started when I ran out of gas. Don’t like falling below half, especially in this gas guzzler. Half a tank in this thing won’t take us a hundred miles.”

  “Still, we can probably wait. What was the run-in about?”

  “Don’t want to talk about it.”

  He’d been on his way to college, with a stopover in Las Vegas. A city kid who didn’t quite comprehend how far apart gas stations can be in the vast empty spaces of the West. He’d run out of fuel on Route 15, seventy miles outside of Vegas, and been stranded for an hour before a highway patrol officer rolled up and approached him, gun drawn. He’d stood in the blazing sun for twenty minutes while the cop checked and double-checked his ID. Finally, he’d been cleared and dropped at the nearest gas station. Before driving off, the highway patrol officer offered a weak apology. “You understand, kid, we don’t get a lot like you out this way. You look like a guy wanted for a robbery ’round here.”

  The interaction had crystallized his desire to become a cop himself. If the system is broken, don’t complain. Never complain. Fix it.

  “Racist cop in Nevada?” Cole asked, and he realized he might as well have told the story, since she’d guessed it. “Rob, I write about police for a living. Nothing shocks me.”

  Warren shook his head slowly, a sign he used to indicate definitively that he was done talking. It worked on most people in his life, but not on Cole.

  “Tell me this,” she pressed, “why D.C.? I quit my job and need to write, need to track this story. But you seem like a by-the-book guy.”

  “Try to be.”

  “Driving a crazy reporter lady to D.C. isn’t exactly by the book.”

  “I guess not.” He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He was still in the Nevada desert all those years ago.

  “That’s it?”

  “I’m a man of few words.”

  “I’m not, so lemme guess.” She eyed him for permission and he nodded, cracking a slight smile. Cole prided herself on being able to read people, but he had a pretty good poker face.

  “I was thinking about it when you wouldn’t come into Wragg’s storage unit. You believe in the law. Despite the fact that I screwed you, my paper screwed you, then the department screwed you, you res
pect the law. Am I right so far?”

  Warren gripped the steering wheel tight, then noticed and relaxed his hands. She was right, but he wouldn’t admit it. He offered a non-committal sideways nod.

  “My guess is, like most cops, you figured out pretty quick that the world isn’t split into good guys and bad guys. There’s a lot more gray area than you used to think, than you’d like to think. Matt said that about the Marines, too. Take your interaction with that pedophile. If we took a poll, half the people in New York City would say you should have blown that guy’s head off. No trial. Just execution. Instead, you gotta cuff him and sit back and take it as he makes those disgusting comments about your daughter. Now he’s eating meals paid for with your tax dollars. Same time, you lost it for five seconds and a nosy reporter—me—wrecks your career. My hunch is, despite all that, you’re still a believer. You gotta believe that the department is good, the Marines are good, even though you see the bad.”

  A quick glance at the speedometer showed they were going nearly ninety now. He’d lost track of his speed. He eased his foot off the gas. Something in what Cole said was right, but something was also way off. He couldn’t put it into words, though. “Interesting theory.”

  “That’s it?” Cole wore a squint that said, “That ain’t it.”

  The gas gauge needle now stood nearly flush with the halfway line. A sign indicated gas and food at the next exit. “That’s not it,” he said. “I’m just…I’m trying to figure out how to say it.” He took the exit and slowed, following a roundabout to a brightly-lit gas station. “It’s not that I have to believe, despite all the shit I see. I do believe. Yeah, I’ve had a lot of disillusionment. But this system—monumentally screwed up though it is—is literally the best thing we’ve got.” A sigh leaked out of him, like a tire going flat, and he turned into the station. “We need gas. Was hoping we’d make Philly on one tank, but…”

  “I could use coffee anyway.”

  “Real coffee, or a liquid candy bar?” Warren hoped the joke would break the tension.

  “Call it whatever you want. There’s something I need to tell you, but I need sugar first.”

  11

  Cole waited in line to pay for snacks, watching through the window as Warren filled the tank. But this system—monumentally screwed up though it is—is literally the best thing we’ve got. His words echoed in her mind. He’d been talking about the thin blue line between violent criminals and their potential victims, a line she’d wanted to believe somehow existed a priori. What Warren meant was that it had to be drawn every day, by flawed individuals. She’d always considered journalism at its best to be another kind of line, a line that connected secretive governments, corporations, and other institutions to the people they claimed to serve. Lately, sifting through the sea of digital detritus that made up the modern media, it was difficult to find much reporting that fit that description. Like police officers, reporters and the media institutions they served were flawed. But she needed to believe they were better than the alternative.

  Returning to the car, she found Warren at the trunk, mixing a white powder into a large bottle of water.

  “I got you a protein bar,” she said. “And nuts.”

  He held up the milky-looking drink. “Got protein. Those bars are just candy anyway.”

  “Is there anything that isn’t candy to you?”

  He answered by downing the quart of protein drink in four impressive chugs.

  He slid into the driver’s seat. Cole got in and they pulled to the side of the station, where a single light flickered between dented bathroom doors. She pulled up the photo of the map and adjusted the contrast on her phone to make it more readable. She handed it to him as he killed the engine.

  He gave it a glance and handed it back. “Wondered when you were gonna tell me what you saw in there.”

  “I almost didn’t.” He stared, expressionless, inviting her to explain. “You gotta understand about reporters. We scramble for scraps of info. It’s our business. I just walked into the lair of a man who may be the orchestrator of a major serial killing, or a terrorist attack. It’s not in my nature to share. Especially since, you know, technically, I was breaking and entering.”

  Warren grabbed the food bag and pulled out a pack of almonds. “Talk me through what you saw. We’ll get to the map later.” He popped a few almonds in his mouth and smiled. “Thanks for these. Only thing I’d eat from that joint.”

  “There were books, military artifacts, papers. No computer. Probably planned, or maybe helped plan, the Ambani killing from there, then got lazy and began working from home. Or maybe he worked on a laptop from the storage unit that he took with him. Look again.”

  She held up the map. Warren squinted at the screen. “What am I looking at?”

  “World map, zoomed all the way out.”

  The map had been large, maybe five feet wide by three feet high. The individual states in the U.S. portion were colored in pale shades of yellow, orange, and light brown, as were the Canadian provinces and other countries. Cole zoomed in on the east coast of the United States, then pointed at a tiny silver pin in the map, stuck into the little black dot that marked “New York City.” Next, she scrolled down the east coast slowly, reaching another pin on the black dot for “Washington, D.C.”

  “See what I’m getting at?” she asked.

  Warren took the phone. His cop instincts had taken over. He worked through the map methodically, zooming out to get a wide view until he found a pin, then zooming in until he could read the name of the city. From Washington D.C. he scrolled further south to a pin in Miami. From Miami, he scrolled far west to a pin in Los Angeles, then north to San Francisco and back east to Las Vegas.

  “Five U.S. cities.” He didn’t look up.

  He continued scrolling, first all the way down through South America, where there were no pins, then east to the bottom of the African continent. Methodically, he zig-zagged north through Africa, hunched over the small screen.

  The locations of the pins had stuck in Cole’s mind in the unit, but she followed along with him.

  Finding no pins in Africa, he scrolled north into Europe to pins in Paris and London. Next, he moved slowly east through Asia. Cole stopped him when he landed on the only pin on that continent: Tokyo.

  He regarded her, his face lit in flashes by a flickering light on the side of the gas station. His eyes were wide, his mouth half open.

  “Nine pins,” Cole said. “Nine cities.” She put her phone in her hip purse. “New York, D.C., Miami, LA, San Francisco, Vegas, Paris, London, Tokyo. Nine cities. Nine rifles.” Recognition registered on his face. “What?”

  “Remember when I said that the buyer of the rifles was likely connected to political extremists from the moment I saw the sale?”

  “Yeah, and it looks like you were right.”

  “But Wragg is American. A white nationalist. He mentioned Jews, and that whole slogan thing. What was it?”

  Cole read it from her notes app: “An international brotherhood, united by General Ki for a singular mission: to end the great replacement, to restore the sovereignty of nations, to birth a new era of freedom.”

  “International,” Warren repeated. “Nations. With an S.”

  “I looked up ‘General Ki,’ by the way. Top hit was an aikido school in Cedar Rapids. Not a mention of anything resembling a real guy anywhere online.”

  “Probably a code name known only to a handful of these assholes. I had this as a gang of old, white, ex-military guys. American separatists, something like that. Not the kind of guys with access to Paris and London, and definitely not Tokyo.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know. Could be bigger than we thought.”

  Cole watched Warren think. The look on his face betrayed a mind racing with the implications. She’d already decided what they had to do next, but it went against her instinct, which was to guard information until she could write about it.

  Cole tensed when a man a
ppeared under the flickering light by the bathrooms, fumbling with a key attached to a long wooden stick. Warren watched him carefully until he disappeared into the bathroom.

  Cole broke the long silence. “We need to get this map out there. If it means what we think it means…”

  Warren shook his head. “Mazzalano. You met with him tonight. My guess is he had you tailed. It’s the only way that guy could have shown up right after us. Followed us from Little Italy into Jersey, then hung back to see what we were doing at the storage unit. If Mazzalano had you tailed, it means he now knows about the stuff in storage. If that’s the case, he’ll be on TV by tomorrow morning taking credit for finding Wragg’s dungeon.”

  “But if he’s corrupt—”

  “He is corrupt, but he’s also power hungry. Corrupt cops do all sorts of regular police work, too. You said yourself he likes to be in the know. If Mazzalano has the map, he’ll use it to his own advantage, sure, but that will mean taking credit for it within the department.”

  Cole popped the cap off an iced coffee drink. “So you’re saying we don’t release it?”

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  By two in the morning, they’d paid cash for a room with two double beds in a motel ten miles from D.C. Cole stuffed her duffel bag into a drawer, then flopped onto one of the beds, which was so springy it nearly bounced her onto the floor. Warren unpacked clothes and arranged his water and protein powder by the sink. “Be careful,” she said. “The beds are crazy. Like all springs and no actual mattress materials. Why are you unpacking?”

  “It’s just what I do. I like to keep things in order.”

  He sat on his bed, detached the prosthetic lower portion of his right leg, and stashed it under a pillow.

  “You sleep with it?” Cole asked.

  “In case we need to get out of here in a hurry.”