Mistress (18 page)

“A week before she disappeared,” says Sean Patrick Riley, “Nina Jacobs had her mail held at the post office for a seven-day period, and she told the
Washington Post
not to deliver her newspaper for seven days. She also had the lights in her home set on timers. Why would she do all that?

“She’d do that,” he continues, answering his own question, “if she were going on vacation for a week, and she didn’t want her mail to pile up or her newspapers to accumulate on her front porch. And she’d put her lights on timers so it would look like she was home, not on vacation, to ward off burglars.

“The thing is, Nina didn’t go on vacation. She was at work every day. She worked at the Public Face, a PR firm over on Seventeenth Street. She didn’t miss a day that week.” Riley opens his hands. “So she was in town, but living somewhere else.”

“Maybe she was watching a friend’s house,” I suggest.

“Right. That’s the best I can figure. But I don’t know whose. She has a ring of three or four friends she spends a lot of time with. I’ve talked to all of them. They were all in town, and Nina wasn’t watching their homes. I’ve talked to all of them, I should say, except Diana Hotchkiss. Don’t know if you heard, but she’s dead.”

“I heard,” I say. “Are you working with the local police on this?”

He lets out a grunt. “The feds,” he said. “They’ve scooped it from the locals. Which means in terms of cooperation, I’m getting a whole lotta nothing.”

I don’t know what to make of all this. Nina Jacobs was set up. Set up to play the role of Diana Hotchkiss—living at her apartment, wearing her clothes, and ultimately being thrown off a balcony. But set up by whom?

Diana? Was Diana capable of something like that?

“Who in Nina’s circle of friends have you spoken to?” I ask.

“Oh, let’s see.” He flips to another page in his small notepad. “Lucy Arangold, Heather Bilandic, and Anne Brennan.”

“What did Anne say?”

He shrugs his shoulders. “Same thing they all said. They didn’t know about any house-sitting. I think they figure she just took off somewhere. They said Nina was…
impulsive,
I think was the word.”

I’m still a little off balance by what I’m hearing. I can’t believe that Diana would have allowed her friend Nina to be pushed off a balcony in her place. Maybe the CIA, maybe some rogue government official—but not Diana.

“I need your help,” says Riley. “I’m at the end of my string, and you run a newspaper. I’m hoping you’ll run a big story on this. Maybe someone will read it and help me out.”

“A wee little Internet scribe like
Capital Beat
?”

He plays it straight with me. “Couldn’t get interest from the
Post
or the
Times
,
” he admits. “I think the feds pooh-poohed it to them, though I can’t prove that. Anyway, since you knew the lady, I thought you might be willing.”

“I might be,” I say.

He stares at me. “What does that mean?”

“It means I’ll need your homework,” I say. “And it means from now on, Mr. Riley, you and I are a team.”

The ride up Massachusetts Avenue is slower than usual, given that I’m on a bicycle, but it feels good to work the lactic acid out of my muscles, which are aching from the workout that Anne put me through last night. The midday sun is cooking me on this bike, but all in all, I’ve had worse days.

“So…Nina Jacobs,” says Ashley Brook Clark into the earpiece I’ve connected to my prepaid cell phone, the fourth I’ve purchased in a week as a result of my well-founded paranoia. (Is that an oxymoron? Can paranoia really qualify as paranoia if it’s well founded?)

Anyway, it’s a good thing I have money for all these cell phones and hotel rooms. Which reminds me, I’m low on cash. I need to find an ATM, which, for me, is no small task.

I let out a long sigh. Withdrawing cash from an ATM means I’ll be on camera, which means that I can’t be wearing my biking outfit lest they’ll know it’s my disguise. I’m going to have to change back into normal clothes, withdraw the money, get the hell away from that ATM as quickly as possible before the black helicopters drop out of the sky, or whatever’s going to happen, and change back into biking clothes.

This is getting old. They’re wearing me down. I don’t know how Harrison Ford managed to do it in
The Fugitive
. Of course, the technology was way different; it was probably a lot easier back then to hide and stay hidden. Plus it was just a movie, and this is really happening to me.

Tommy Lee Jones was outstanding in that movie and deserved the Oscar he got, but really, that year they should have given out two best supporting actor awards, because John Malkovich was absolutely brilliant as the assassin in
In the Line of Fire
. (Yes, I agree that Ralph Fiennes was great in
Schindler’s List
,
but Malkovich stole the screen every time he appeared.)

(Why am I putting my thoughts in parentheses? What’s next—footnotes? Am I losing my mind?)

“So you want this story on the front page,” Ashley Brook says. “And you want a nice big photo of Nina Jacobs, and you want me to mention Sean Patrick Riley’s name several times.”

“A photo of him, too,” I say.

“And why is that? I didn’t even like that guy when I met him.”

“It makes him safer,” I tell her. “If they catch him sniffing around and want to get rid of him, he’ll be harder to kill now that he’s gotten publicity. He’ll be more visible.”

“And you think people who are willing to fire machine guns at you in midday, at a busy downtown intersection, care about visibility?”

“I’m doing the best I can here, kid.” I stop at the three-way intersection where Idaho Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue meet 39th Street and take a squirt from my water bottle. “If Nina’s disappearance becomes big news, then it makes it harder for them to cover it up by killing people or whatever.”

“Then why don’t you apply that logic to yourself?” she asks me. “You wrote that article about Diana Hotchkiss. Why aren’t we publishing that for the same reason? To keep you safe?”

It’s a good question. I’ve already threatened Craig Carney with that very thing, splashing the entire story over the front page of my website—Diana’s connection to Carney, Jonathan Liu’s murder, Operation Delano, etc. There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. One of them Ashley Brook already knows.

“You and your journalistic scruples,” she moans.

Well, that’s close. I don’t have a wife or children and probably never will.
Capital Beat
is my only family. It’s the only thing I’ve ever created. If I print something I can’t prove, I deface something I love. And I risk a crippling lawsuit and the loss of the
Beat
’s reputation. We may not be the
Washington Post
,
but we are hard-hitting, fair, and fearless, which is more than most news organizations can say these days. So if I go down in flames, I want to know that I’ve left behind at least one thing that is good in this world. And they can always print the story after my death.

But there’s another reason as well.

“I haven’t been indicted yet,” I say. “They haven’t issued a warrant for my arrest yet.”

“Okay. So?”

“So—Carney threatened to do that, right? The feds seem to be in control of this situation, and the deputy director basically promised that if I didn’t play ball with him, there would be cops serving an arrest warrant any minute. But they aren’t. They’re keeping their powder dry. So for the moment, I’ll do the same.”

“I’m not really following the logic,” Ashley Brook says.

“I think they’re as scared of me as I am of them,” I say. “Neither of us wants to pull the trigger, because once we do, the other side will respond in kind.”

“It’s like the Cold War with us and the Russians,” she says. “They didn’t nuke us because they knew we’d nuke them. Mutually assured destruction.”

Malkovich was mesmerizing in
Dangerous Liaisons
and hilarious as the foulmouthed ex–CIA agent in
Burn after Reading
. Every time he cussed, I laughed out loud.

The light changes at the intersection from red to green. Traffic starts to move northbound. I start up again on the bike and pedal through the intersection.

“So you must be close to something big,” she says.

I pick up the pace on my bike. My destination is only ten minutes away now.

“And if I’m right,” I say, “I’m about to get closer.”

I sit on a bench outside the Bender Library looking over the Quad, where I spent four years eating my lunch or throwing a Frisbee or playing Hacky Sack between classes. The Quad is sort of the heart of American University’s main campus, a rectangular lawn bordered by the library on one end and the Kay Spiritual Life Center on the other. It’s crisscrossed with pedestrian walkways and has a seating area in the middle, complete with concrete benches. Some of the main academic buildings are situated along the borders. I haven’t been here since, oh, I think it was 2008, when I covered a student demonstration protesting the genocide in Darfur, complete with a mock refugee camp and a “die-in,” where all the students lay across the lawn to simulate the mass casualties.

After I’ve told him my lengthy narrative—the tale of Benjamin Casper over the last two weeks—Professor Bogomolov, seated next to me, puts a frail hand on my shoulder. “A most troubling story,” he says.

He should know about troubling stories. Andrei Bogomolov was born in the Soviet city of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, where he studied psychiatry and history. But he wanted to live free in the West. So in 1974, while serving as a psychiatrist on a Soviet boat, he jumped ship off the Ivory Coast and swam ashore. The KGB chased him through Ghana, where he reportedly was hidden by Peace Corps volunteers in a camp and later smuggled to the US embassy in Accra, where he was granted political asylum. The whole matter led to an international dustup in the heat of the Cold War period. (Can there be heat during a Cold War?)

Anyway, Andrei came to American University to get a PhD in Russian history and never left. He’s been part of the history department ever since. He’s one of those professors who likes to sit out on the Quad eating his lunch with the students, enjoying the sunlight on his face and, I suppose, the feeling of freedom as well.

I took one of his classes while I was an undergrad here, but the truth is, I’ve known Andrei since I was a kid. He and my father were colleagues in the history department for decades. Andrei would come to our house for dinner, always showing up with a present, usually some Russian coin and a story to go along with it.

After Mother’s death, he was particularly nice to me. I remember him telling me about harsh winters in Russia, hunger pains in his stomach, a feeling that he had no control over his own destiny, and how his faith in God got him through all of it.
You can suffer anything, Benjamin
,
he used to tell me,
if you believe in yourself and God.

I haven’t talked to Andrei in years, probably not since Father’s funeral, but I remember him being a man of understatement. After experiencing what he experienced, I guess most things pale in comparison.

“A
most
troubling story,” he repeats.

“Operation Delano, Andrei,” I say.

He nods. He knew that was the question I was going to ask him, and his reaction tells me I’ve come to the right place. Ever since I heard the phrase, and then learned about Alexander Kutuzov, I’ve been thinking about the Russians. If anybody would know about the Russians, it’s Andrei.

“Very well,” he finally says. “Operation Delano.”

“Let us walk,” Andrei says. “They tell me walks are good.”

I don’t understand the reference and want to ask, but not now. Andrei’s always been a man of few words, a reserve probably long instilled in someone who had planned since childhood to defect to the West but had to play along in the Soviet system until the moment presented itself. If he wants me to know about his ailment, he’ll tell me.

Andrei pushes his small, withered frame off the bench. He tucks his hands into his slacks—completing the professorial look that his tweed sport coat began—and nods to the wood carving of an eagle in the garden next to us. “I love that bird,” he says. “Do you know why, Benjamin?”

The eagle is made from the wood of a hundred-year-old tree that had to be removed from the Quad. One of the classes carved out this beautiful bird as a gift to the university.

“Because it’s our national bird?” I guess.

He manages a smile. Andrei was waiting for me here on this bench when I arrived, and seeing him now on his feet, struggling, I’m struck by how ill he appears.

“Because something beautiful came of something dying,” he says.

I let him lead, and we walk along the borders of the Quad, past the Mary Graydon Center. I remember meeting there once a week for the Young Democrats of America. Not that I was a Democrat, or, for that matter, a Republican. I joined for the same reason most college guys would join something: because there was a hot girl in the group. I chased after Cassandra Richley for over two years. It was worth the wait.

“Yalta was a time of great uncertainty,” says Andrei. He’s referring to the Yalta Conference, where Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill gathered to divvy up the spoils after the Nazis went down in flames. “Of course, you have studied this.”

“Of course.”

“Stalin was truly dealing from a position of strength. He was already occupying many of the countries he wanted to enclose in the Soviet bloc, and he had twice the troops of the Allies. Still, he didn’t know if he had Roosevelt’s trust. He was rather sure he didn’t have Churchill’s. He was looking for leverage in the negotiations.”

I stop in my tracks. Andrei doesn’t seem to notice at first, but then he stops as well and faces me.

“What are you telling me, Andrei?” I say. “Operation Delano was an attempt to gain leverage on FDR?”

Andrei’s heavy, tired eyes rise up to mine.

“None of this has been verified,” he says. “There is only talk.”

“Then tell me about the talk, Andrei.”

Andrei breaks eye contact with me and stares off in the distance, as I recall him often doing. Back then he conveyed quiet strength—shoulders back, a broad chest, a defiant chin. Now he is frail, his shoulders curled inward, a stoop to his posture, his skin heavy and ill-fitting on his weathered face, only wisps of white hair covering his head. But those eyes, that glassy stare, haven’t changed. Probably no one will ever know what is contained in that stare. Memories, I assume. Memories of things best forgotten.

“The talk,” he says, “is that Operation Delano was the Soviets’ attempt to blackmail the president of the United States.”