Mistress Read online

  “No. No, no, no.” I opt for a new transaction, transferring from savings into checking. This doesn’t make sense, but so what, I have plenty in savings—

  This transaction is unauthorized.

  “Unauthorized?” I yell at the machine. “Unauthorized?”

  I have to get out of here. I memorize the number it tells me to call and run back to my bike and start pedaling down Columbia to get distance from that ATM. I hook up the earpiece on my prepaid cell phone and dial the number. I get an automated recording.

  I terminate the call and focus on getting distance. I take a left on Quarry Road, then a right on Lanier Place. I stop in the middle of a quiet residential area and get off my bike. Standing on the sidewalk, I make the call.

  I navigate through the automated commands, my chest heaving, struggling for breath, and finally get a human voice. He thanks me for calling, tells me his name with incomprehensible speed, and asks for my name and account number. I only know the former, so then I have to give him my mother’s maiden name (Mapes) before we can finally talk. But the talk is brief. I ask, “Why the hell does my account say insufficient funds? And why can’t I transfer from savings to checking?”

  The man goes quiet, then he tells me he has to transfer me to “special services,” whatever the hell that means, and then there’s music, “Train in Vain” by the Clash, which is adding insult to injury because the Clash is one of the best bands of all time and “London Calling” is my all-time favorite song, but all the radio stations play is this cheesy “Train in Vain” and “Rock the Casbah” and WHAT THE FUCK IS TAKING SO LONG—

  “Mr. Casper, this is Jay Rowe with special services. How are you doing today?”

  “I’m doing pretty fucking poorly, Jay, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Sir, your account is disabled.”

  “Disabled? Then undisable it. Able it. Whatever the fuck the word is, do it!”

  “We can’t, sir.”

  “It’s my money! You can’t hold on to it!”

  “We can and we must, sir,” he says, but by now I get the picture. He’s following orders. This isn’t a decision my bank made on its own.

  “Sir,” he says, “your account has been frozen on orders of the United States Department of Homeland Security.”

  Chapter 77

  I hang up the prepaid phone and break it into about twenty-five pieces. I kick the pieces all around the sidewalk and unleash a torrent of obscenities that would make a trucker blush before I get a grip on myself. I feel like Keanu Reeves in Speed after he learned that his partner, Harry, had been blown up by Dennis Hopper. I feel like Dennis Hopper in—shit, I don’t know, he gets pissed off in a lot of his movies, so pick one.

  Craig Carney has been reluctant to play his trump card—having me indicted and arrested for murder—but he’s upping the pressure in other ways. He’s eliminated the one advantage I’ve had, free access to money. I have sixty-two dollars and change in my pocket.

  With one of my other prepaid phones, I call Ashley Brook Clark at the Beat. I’m trying to keep a cool head, but the waters of panic are rising, and come on, Ashley Brook, answer, answer, ANSWER YOUR—

  “Hello?” Ashley Brook says in a rushed voice.

  “Ashley Brook, I need your—”

  “Ben, thank God it’s—”

  “—help, I’m in a real jam—”

  “—you, everything is going haywire—”

  Fuck! I stop talking, so she will, too, and we can have a conversation. It sounds like it’s going to be a fun one.

  “Ben, everything is going crazy at the office. Payroll is telling me that our bank account has been frozen. The CIA was just here asking me all kinds of questions. They say you’re the subject of an espionage investigation and if anyone around here helps you, they will be considered coconspirators. Everyone around here is freaking out—”

  “Slow down, Ashley Brook. We can—”

  “They took our computers, Ben. They’ve taken everything. And they’re—they’re—”

  “Ashley Brook—”

  “Ben, they’ve shut down our website!” With these words, Ashley Brook loses her composure, bursting into tears and sobbing over the phone.

  No. No.

  “Have you called Eddie Volker?” I ask.

  Through breathless gasps, I think I hear the word yes.

  Maybe Eddie can think of something. But if the feds are talking about espionage, they’re talking about national security. They’re talking about the Patriot Act.

  They can do pretty much whatever they want to me.

  It is over ninety degrees outside today, but I have never felt a greater chill running through my body. They are doing everything in their power to destroy me, and now they’re doing something even worse. They are destroying my newspaper, and hurting my employees with it. People who depend on me to put food on the table.

  I have to do something. I have to save my paper and the people who’ve made it so great. But what can I do? Where can I confirm anything I suspect? I can’t even separate the good guys from the bad guys, much less turn to any of them for help. And my friends will now be risking a prison sentence for so much as loaning me five bucks or answering a question. I can’t jeopardize any of them. But take them out of the equation, and who do I have left? I don’t even have a newspaper anymore.

  I’m out of money, resources, and friends.

  And probably time.

  I can only think of one other thing. I take a breath and hope against hope.

  “What about Jonathan Liu’s computer?” I ask. If there is any place where I can find proof of what’s going on—not supposition, but proof—it will be on that computer.

  Ashley Brook is quiet for a long time.

  “They took it,” she says.

  Chapter 78

  Eddie Volker parks his Mercedes sedan in the parking garage below his law office. The place is hot and sticky but also dark and private, so it’s not a bad place to wait for him when he comes off the elevator past seven o’clock tonight after a day’s work.

  I show my hands when I step out from between the cars. As anyone would, he stops, retreats, and assesses, but then he relaxes when he sees it’s me.

  “You’re gonna give me a heart attack, Ben.” He loosens the collar on his dress shirt and takes a couple of breaths.

  “Can we talk in your car?” I ask.

  Eddie joins me in his Mercedes. The passenger side is full of napkins and food wrappers and unpaid bills. It looks like the interior of my car, which I hardly ever drive.

  “You need to know everything, Eddie,” I say. “Before we decide what to do, you need the full picture.”

  I give it to him in fifteen minutes. It’s a lot to digest, going back to when someone jumped off Diana’s balcony to now. But he already knows much of this, and say what you want about Eddie’s personal habits and clientele, he has a sharp mind.

  He lets out a nervous giggle. “I’ve had all kinds of clients,” he says. “But you may have won the prize for stepping into shit.”

  “So what the hell do I do, Ed—”

  “First things first, Ben. Right now, if you go online to the Beat, it says the website is under repair and maintenance and will be back soon. It’s an agreement I worked out with Justice. So okay, it’s not ideal. You’ll lose advertising revenue and readers, sure. But it’s not fatal. Nothing about the DOJ shutting you down, nothing about espionage or anything like that. The paper’s reputation is intact.”

  “For now,” I say.

  “For now,” he acknowledges. “If I were you, I’d focus on solving your personal problems first. Which are considerable, I’ll grant you.” He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “So…the president is having an affair and the Russians know about it. They’re blackmailing him so he’ll keep quiet while they start rolling their tanks through the old Soviet bloc countries?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “And Diana Hotchkiss is the president’s mistress.�
��

  “That’s my guess. It makes sense.”

  “And the US government has made it a point to tell the world that Diana, not some stand-in, is dead.”

  “Yeah. The president said it in a press conference. The MPD is saying it. They’ve even coerced Diana’s family into saying it. So the Russians are supposed to believe Diana’s dead. I guess this is how the CIA thinks they’ll thwart the blackmail. If there’s no ‘she’ in the he said she said, then the president can deny the affair and nobody can contradict him.”

  Eddie takes all this in. Then he turns and looks at me.

  “So if our government has taken care of the problem by faking Diana’s death, why are they still afraid of you, Ben?”

  “Because I’m not accepting that Diana’s dead.”

  He shrugs. “Yeah, but so what? You’re just some reporter without proof. The president will deny it, Diana’s parents will deny it, and that will be the end of the discussion.”

  I give that some thought.

  “So I ask again,” says Eddie. “Why does the US government consider you a threat?”

  It’s a good question. The right question. If I were trying to cover up an affair, the first thing I’d want to do is remove the mistress from the equation. They’ve done that. They’ve made everyone believe Diana is dead. So what else could—

  Oh. Oh, of course.

  By George, I think I’ve got it.

  But all things considered, I better keep the thought to myself for now.

  “Eddie, I have to run, but listen. I wouldn’t ask—but I need some cash.”

  “Cash?” Eddie thinks about that. “I’m…not sure I can help you, Ben.”

  “Right, I understand—you can’t assist me in any way. I don’t want you to go to prison. I was just thinking, if you had some pocket money on you, that kind of thing. I’m not suggesting you write me a check or anything.”

  Eddie is quiet for a while. “I suppose when I’m taking my keys out to start my car, some money could fall out of my pocket that I wouldn’t notice.”

  “That could happen, sure.”

  “It wouldn’t be more than a couple hundred bucks.”

  “It would be a couple hundred bucks more than I have.”

  Eddie gets out of the car. As silly as we both find it, he actually takes the cash out of his money clip and drops it to the cement floor. “Oops,” he says.

  I don’t pick it up right away. I’ll wait until he drives out of here. Might as well play along with the charade. He can truthfully say he never handed me money.

  But he did hand me an idea. I think I know what the US government is afraid of. And I have an idea how I can confirm it.

  Chapter 79

  Suddenly finding myself forced to economize, I stay at the cheapest hotel I can find. You know it’s a cheap hotel when the bathroom’s down the hall. When “air-conditioning” consists of waving your hand in front of your face. When you can hear the guy in the next room rolling over in bed. When “room service” means they loan you a flyswatter. When the telephone is in the lobby instead of on the nightstand. When there isn’t a nightstand.

  But I’ve seen the sun rise another day. That in itself is a major victory.

  With the few remaining minutes on one of my three remaining prepaid phones, I make the call and set up an appointment. They tell me I’ll have to wait until after lunch, so I have some time to kill. I should probably hide in the hotel room, but it’s so crappy that I think I’ll take my chances on the open streets.

  Or at least in a coffee shop, where I pull my baseball cap low and nurse a small coffee and pick at a blueberry muffin. I grab a Post that someone left on the next table over and go to the headlines. I’ve missed being a reporter and vastly prefer it to fugitive life. The pay’s better and nobody tries to kill you.

  “Shit!” I yell when I see the lead story above the fold: RUSSIAN LEADER ESCAPES ASSASSIN’S BULLET.

  I quickly whip through the article. Russian prime minister Yuri Mereyedev narrowly escaped assassination last night when a man opened fire on him while he was speaking at a rally outside Moscow. Russian police captured a man who is believed to have ties to—surprise, surprise—the Georgian secret police. The US State Department is said to be “closely monitoring” the situation.

  I throw down the newspaper. Andrei Bogomolov anticipated this very thing. A terrorist attack, he predicted, that would be blamed on the Republic of Georgia. This is close enough. Certainly close enough for provocation’s sake.

  Russia is moving closer to an invasion of her southern neighbor. The plan to reconstruct the old Soviet empire is already under way.

  Chapter 80

  I lock my bike to a parking meter, visit a fast-food bathroom so I can change into some presentable clothes, and enter the building a block away. I show my press credentials at the sign-in and the next thing I know, I’m in a plush waiting room. It reminds me of my visit to Jonathan Liu’s offices. It didn’t turn out so well for Jonathan. Let’s see how this turns out for Edgar Griffin.

  “Mr. Griffin will see you,” says an elderly woman who doesn’t think much of my appearance. Apparently one of the principals at the law firm of Griffin and Weaver isn’t accustomed to people of my ilk crawling in.

  “Yes, Senator, I agree.” Edgar Griffin is speaking into a headset while waving me into his lavishly appointed office. This is corporate chic at its chicest, if that’s a word. It probably isn’t. Anyway, this office is the size of a tennis court. It has a wall full of fancy books, another wall full of diplomas and framed photographs of Mr. Griffin, Esquire, interacting with important people, and a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking K Street. The decor is walnut and brass. Money and power. And helping people with money and power get more money and more power.

  Mr. Griffin, Esquire, is wearing a striped shirt, a power-red tie with a tie clip, silk braces over his shoulders, and gold cuff links. His hair is full and greased. He has a thin, narrow face and neatly trimmed eyebrows.

  “Senator, I couldn’t have said it better,” he says into his headset with a laugh.

  I’ll bet you anything there isn’t anybody on the other end of the line. He just wants me to see his importance. That’s why I’m here, after all—at least in his mind. I called earlier today and said I was a reporter doing a piece on the “top ten movers and shakers in the capital,” and he was going to be numero uno, with his mug plastered on the front page of our humble website.

  Suddenly he found that he could spare a half hour in his busy schedule.

  “Edgar Griffin,” he says to me, removing his headset.

  “Ben Casper.” We shake hands. I make sure he can see my press credentials sticking out of the pocket of my sport coat. I hope they will distract him from its myriad wrinkles, given that said sport coat has been balled up in my gym bag for several days.

  “There was going to be a photographer?” he says.

  “There was. There will be,” I say. “We’ll try to schedule something for tomorrow.”

  “Fine. Just talk to Cheryl.”

  I look around the office. “Wow,” I say. “You’ve done quite well for yourself. I’ve done my homework, Ed, and I’ve gotta say, when I ask around about the powerful people in this city, your name comes up a lot.”

  “Edgar,” he says.

  Are we reintroducing ourselves?

  “Ben,” I say.

  “No. I mean—you called me Ed. It’s Edgar.”

  “Sorry. I have a lawyer named Ed. Actually, it’s Eddie. Eddie Volker. You know him?”

  He wrinkles his nose. Apparently, Mr. Edgar Griffin of Griffin and Weaver doesn’t know Eddie Volker, a lawyer several notches below him on the elitism ladder who defends criminals and helps journalists.

  “I knew an Edward Verrill in Cambridge. Not Vogel, I don’t think.”

  Annnnnd there. It took him less than five minutes to tell me he went to Harvard Law School.

  “That’s a family name, isn’t it?” I ask. “Edgar.”
/>   “Yes, it is.”

  I nod. “And that law degree from Harvard? I’ll bet you weren’t the first in your family, were you?”

  Edgar seems slightly offended. “My father attended as well.”

  Okay, he didn’t go to Harvard. He attended it.

  “Grandpa, too?” I venture.

  Now he is offended. “My grandfather as well, yes.”

  So he basically just had to make sure he didn’t wet his pants at the interview. He was in before he submitted his application. But better I don’t say that to him. Not yet, anyway. Maybe on the way out.

  I raise my hand, a sign of peace. “It’s my resentment showing. I tried for Harvard and didn’t get in.”

  That’s not true. I didn’t apply to Harvard. In fact, I didn’t even apply to American University. My dad just informed me one day that my days of private tutors were over and that I was going to American the following fall. But I’ve made Edgar feel just a little bit more superior than he already felt. If that’s possible.

  “So, Edgar, you’ve managed to build up quite a list of clients,” I say, looking over a sheet of paper that does not contain a list of anything whatsoever. In fact, it’s blank. “Ah, Alexander Kutuzov, I see here. The billionaire?”

  Now we’re back in Edgar’s comfort zone. “Alex has been wonderful to work with.”

  That’s one way superior people try to act more superior—using famous people’s nicknames to show their familiarity. Yeah, I was having lunch with Jenny Lopez the other day, and who was sitting at the next table but Bobby De Niro and Marty Scorsese.

  “Here in the States,” he says (people refer to the United States as “the States” when they want you to know they’re world travelers), “we’ve helped Alex with licensing and some related litigation over his soccer franchise.”

  I point to the same piece of paper that has absolutely nothing on it. If this guy didn’t have his head so far up his ass, he might notice that.

  “I see here you helped Mr. Kutuzov with the negotiations on that oil pipeline in Russia. The one that feeds oil to Russia’s neighbors.”