Fatal Conceit (12 page)

Fauhomme grinned. “Now there's the team spirit.” He glanced over at Lindsey, whose face registered his shame.
Fuck him
, the fat man thought.
I thought these spook types would have more balls.
“You're dismissed, General,” he said with scorn.

Without a word or another glance at either man, Allen got up
and left the office. “Jesus, I hated to do that,” Lindsey said when the door clicked shut. “What if he decides to take the hit and goes to the press?”

Fauhomme laughed, a cruel, barking sound. “The press? Those lazy herd animals that used to be the Fourth Estate?” he scoffed. “They'll report what I tell them to report, and the public will think what I tell them to think. I'm not worried about the press . . . at least not most of them, and the ones I would worry about are few and far between. We just have to make it through the election.”

“What about Allen? You really think he's going to play ball?”

Fauhomme narrowed his eyes and glanced at the door the general had just left through. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “A good man like that putting his poor cast-aside wife through what will happen if he doesn't? Not to mention the shame and embarrassment that will destroy his legacy?”

He paused to think some more. “Still, you're right, I don't like wild cards.” He stopped talking and punched in a number on his cell phone. “Yeah, Ray,” he said. “I want you to follow our little bird for a few days until we get through this hearing. I want to know where he goes and who he meets with. We got his phone tapped and an intercept on his cell? Yeah? Good man. Keep me posted. What's that? . . . We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, for now just watch him.”

Fauhomme hung up and smiled at Lindsey. “Never fear, Big Ray Baum is on the case,” he said, and lit a cigar. “I just love election season, don't you? Really gets the competitive juices flowing.”

A
RIADNE
S
TUPENAGEL PAUSED TO LET
her eyes adjust to the dark interior of the White Horse Tavern. As always, a lot of memories flooded in any time she walked into the bar, even on a sunny Friday afternoon in autumn, which wasn't the usual time of day she'd frequented the place.

A fixture in the Village since it opened in 1880 as a longshoreman's bar, the tavern had gained its reputation as a place where writers and artists gathered beginning in the early 1950s when Dylan Thomas made it his home away from hotel. Legend had it that Thomas, whose likeness graced several paintings now hung behind the bar, drank himself to death there, though he actually went home to the nearby Chelsea Hotel and succumbed several days later. Beat writer Jack Kerouac had been tossed out of the White Horse so many times that the message “Jack Go Home” was still scrawled on a wall of the men's restroom. And other luminaries who had tipped back a few there included Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Mary Travers, and Hunter S. Thompson, as well as a host of New York's lesser-known artists and journalists, including Stupenagel, who had first joined them longer ago than she would ever admit.

As a drinking destination for the famous and infamous, the
White Horse had become a tourist destination, taking some of the “locals' hangout” flavor out of it. But it was still a nostalgic place for her, especially because she was there to meet a former lover whom she used to have drinks with there when they were both in New York. They'd met in the 1980s when she was a “younger” journalist reporting from various war zones in Africa; he'd been a young army major with the 101st Airborne working “black ops” trying to hunt down various African war criminals. They'd become lovers on one hot, sweltering night in Nairobi and then repeated the performance in various places around the world when her job as a journalist and his job as a soldier brought their paths together. She'd gone on to make a name for herself as a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and he'd risen through the ranks to lieutenant general and given his last command overseeing the stabilization of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. A year earlier he'd retired, only to be named acting director of the CIA after his predecessor got caught trying to meet up with someone he thought was a twelve-year-old girl but who turned out to be a Silver Spring, Maryland, police detective.

As her eyes adjusted, Stupenagel caught a glimpse of herself in the big mirror that ran the length of the old-fashioned wooden bar. At least in the half-light, she saw the same tall, beautiful woman with the wild blond hair and the cherry red lipstick that was her trademark. Her date had told her that he would prefer not to attract any attention, so she'd toned down the usual high heels and revealing low-cut blouses she also favored for a light sweater, denim jeans, and flats. She hoped that the lines she knew were around her eyes and mouth wouldn't be too noticeable and then chided herself.
After all, Ariadne, you're happily engaged to a wonderful man, and Sam's been married for twenty years.
She ordered a beer and headed to one of the back rooms, where she took a seat in a high-backed booth where she could watch the door.

She recognized Sam Allen the moment he walked into the
room. He was wearing a disguise that might have fooled most people—a loose, dingy old army sweatshirt and faded blue jeans with a beat-up Yankee ballcap and dark, nondescript sunglasses. He was carrying a beer, trying to look nonchalant, but he couldn't hide the ramrod-straight posture or square shoulders when he turned to face her. He wasn't very tall, just over six foot, which had her beat by only a couple of inches, but he was one of those men whose presence always made even larger men seem to shrink by comparison. She could tell that he still had his athlete's body—he was famous for his morning runs with his officers in Afghanistan, and woe to the younger subordinate who couldn't keep up—but she was thinking about another sort of stamina that had always been impressive when he spotted her and headed back to the booth.

Stupenagel stood and they hugged. Breathing in the old familiar scent of him, she noted that the loose clothing wasn't covering up any extra padding, and the same muscles she remembered so well were still present. She was grateful, however, to see that the lines around his eyes were deeper than hers and his day-old beard had as much salt as pepper in it. Still, he was a gorgeous man, and she wondered what her fiancé, Gilbert Murrow, would think of a mulligan.

“Hello, Ari,” he said, using the nickname that only he had ever dared, “you look as beautiful as ever.”

Trying not to melt into a puddle of female gooeyness, Stupenagel smiled and rolled her eyes. “I guess vision is the first of the senses to go,” she said. “But a little blindness in an old beau never hurt a girl.”

Allen smiled and sat down across from her with his back to the door. Anyone walking in would not see him without coming back.

“So how's Martha?” Stupenagel asked, thinking that inquiring about his wife was the best way to throw cold water on her fantasies.

Allen's smile faded. “She's fine,” he said. “The kids are gone, and I'm busy with the new job, so she spends a lot of time on her farm in Vermont.”

Stupenagel smiled. “Sounds like a happily married older couple. She's on the farm and you're in D.C.” Then she saw the look on his face. “What's wrong, Sam?”

For the first time since she'd known him, Allen looked vulnerable. “It's been a while since Martha and I have lived as husband and wife,” he stammered.

Suddenly, Stupenagel knew what was troubling him. “You're having an affair.” She hadn't meant for her comment to sound so shocked. She'd had plenty of sexual encounters herself, including with more than a few married men, some of them quite famous or important. But Sam Allen had never seemed the type. She'd been surprised when she returned from covering a war in Central America many years earlier to learn that he'd married Martha Philpott, who she learned was a New England blue blood. The one time she met her, Martha didn't seem the sort to have captured the romantic interest of the hot-blooded warrior she'd sweated up the sheets with in Kenya and beyond. But when she'd gotten over her disappointment, not that she'd ever believed that nuptials were in their future, she realized that the other woman was the perfect military wife; a good mother to their two children, an asset on the arm of her husband at the social gatherings so important to an officer with aspirations. And Stupenagel knew that Allen's one weakness was ambition.

Allen hung his head and nodded. “I hate that word,” he said. “I met someone and fell in love.”

“While you were married . . . that's an affair, Sam,” Stupenagel said.
Again with the judgmental tone, Ariadne. You're no paragon of virtue
. “And for someone in your position . . . if the press got wind of that . . .” She let her voice trail off.

“I'm being blackmailed, Ari.”

Stupenagel sat back with a scowl on her face. “Some shithead threatening to spill the beans on your girlfriend to bollix up your confirmation if you don't give them what they want?”

“That's part of it,” Allen said. “But these aren't just any blackmailers.”

Stupenagel frowned. “How do you mean?”

Allen looked around behind him, then turned back. “You've heard the official story about Chechnya?”

Stupenagel's eyes narrowed. “Yeah, sure. I was at the Rose Garden when the president gave his little talk.”

“Well, not everything is as it is being laid out,” Allen said in a low voice. “I think the wrong guy might be getting the blame.”

“It wasn't this Daudov?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Allen replied. “That's what the Russians are saying, but they've got it in for him for their own reasons. I've heard some rumors that the attackers were foreign Islamic extremists, not Chechen at all, and tied to Al Qaeda.”

“I knew it,” Stupenagel hissed. “That means the prez stood up there and lied.”

“I don't know that he knows,” Allen said. “I'm hoping that if the Al Qaeda information is true, and I believe it is, it's the low-life advisers around him that are keeping him in the dark. I guess I'm still naïve enough to want to believe that the president of the United States wouldn't knowingly lie to his constituents, particularly when there are murdered Americans lying dead in another country.”

Stupenagel snorted. “I haven't been that naïve since Nixon,” she said. “But it would be a hell of an embarrassment if a week after he says Al Qaeda is kaput, they show up and wipe out an American trade mission.”

“That's something else,” Allen said. “I don't believe that this ‘trade mission' was just some goodwill gesture to the locals.”

“What do you mean?” Stupenagel said. She could feel the woman who a moment ago was all gaga over an old lover turning into the journalist.

“Just a hunch, but the powers that be are awfully close-lipped about it, considering I'm the acting head of the main intelligence agency,” Allen said.

“So what else you got?”

“I also have reason to believe that it wasn't some spontaneous strike that caught our people asleep and was over quickly. I think the reports that they may have held out a few hours, plenty of time for us to have scrambled air support from our bases in Turkey, are true. And that report from Reuters about villagers saying they heard a drone during the fight? There may be some truth to that as well.”

Stupenagel whistled. She was all journalist now. “This is incredible. If it's true, the administration is lying through its collective teeth.” She thought about it for a moment. “I'd sure as hell like to know what that so-called trade mission was really about and what it has to do with what happened.”

“So would I,” Allen replied, “and I'm going to find out.”

“What are you going to do in the meantime?”

The troubled look returned to Allen's eyes. “I don't know,” he replied. “My inclination is to say what I know at the hearing on Tuesday. But I've been told in no uncertain terms to let it go until after the election or . . .”

“. . . or somebody exposes your affair, which pretty much dumptrucks your confirmation.”

“And hurts people I care for very much.”

Stupenagel reached across the table and held Allen's hands with her own. “I'm sorry, Sam,” she said. “You're a good man and whatever happened to you and your wife, that should be between the two of you. I'm not saying an affair was the way to go about changing your life, but I know these things can get complicated.”

“Thanks, Ari,” said Allen as a tear formed and rolled down his cheek. “I knew I could find an understanding shoulder to cry on, but I made this bed, no pun intended, and I'll deal with the consequences. I just need to figure out the best way, and timing, to do that.”

“So who are these people who are blackmailing you? I mean I can guess, but how high up does this go?”

“High, but I'm not sure how high, and I'm not ready to speculate on that with a journalist, even one I've seen naked.”

Stupenagel laughed. “You've seen more than that. So can I use this?”

“You mean for a story?”

“That's what I do, Sam. If you want, I'll just say it came from a well-placed source.”

Allen shook his head. “They'll know who it was. Let me think about it. If it was just me, I'd say go for it, confirmation be damned. But I don't know yet if the president deserves to take a hit on this. And more important, I have Martha and the kids . . . and Jenna . . . to think about.”

“Jenna. That's her name,” Stupenagel said, feeling a prick of jealousy again. “She must be something for you to have risked your reputation and career.”

“She is.”

“Does she feel the same way about you?”

Allen thought about it, then nodded. “I think so. She's quite a bit younger and maybe it's all just pillow talk, but she says she loves me. Maybe I'm a fool but I believe her, and I feel the same.”