The 500: A Novel (17 page)

Watching him closely for the past weeks I’d discovered a couple of his tells. On his long-lunch days, when it was impossible to track him down, he would sometimes just barrel out of the office, head down, like a man on a mission. He certainly wasn’t the captain of the office pep squad normally, but the coolness was distinct.

Today had been one of those days, so I figured there was a decent chance he was off working on his and Davies’s top secret case. And while he wasn’t a regular anyplace, there were a couple restaurants he’d gone to twice. I sure as hell wasn’t going to follow him anywhere. That was too much time and too much effort for an uncertain payoff, and frankly I was scared shitless of trying to out-tradecraft William Marcus.

But I could certainly ping a few of these restaurants and check to see if he had a reservation. My personal cell phone and I took a stroll, and I went down the list. “Hello, yes. I just wanted to confirm a reservation for William Marcus. Oh, really. Is this Lebanese Taverna? I’m sorry, I must have called the wrong number.”

Try that one twenty times.

I came up empty-handed and returned to the office feeling a little silly; the whole thing was so Nancy Drew. I should have known; nothing is ever simple.

I went to my desk to take the reports back down to Peg before anybody noticed my stupid tricks and I got into real trouble. They would probably think I was stealing from the company and give me the boot. It was a crazy risk, and for nothing. But as soon as I sat down I had to take a look at the reports again. They had all been prepared by Marcus’s assistant, and I’d been at the company long enough that I’d know if we had guys by those other names working here. I opened up the two other envelopes.

I stepped outside again and tried the office phone number listed for Daniel Lucas. Sure enough, Carolyn answered. “Omnitek Consulting. Daniel Lucas’s office.”

I hung up and thought about it for a minute. I’d just found Marcus’s alias.

I considered the names again: Matthews and Lucas. They seemed familiar. It took me a few minutes to figure it out. There was a pattern to his aliases. The surnames were variations on the Gospels: Matthew becomes Matthews, Luke becomes Lucas, just like Mark could become Marcus.

I’d made a few missteps before I worked it all out, but I was still rather proud of myself. I copied the expense reports, dropped the originals back in interoffice mail, then took another walk and tried calling the restaurants that Marcus had been visiting and asking for him under his aliases. Nothing.

I had plenty of patience. I would just keep trying until I smoked him out.

I was asking to get caught, really. I’d been noticing her for at least fifteen seconds as she jogged ahead of me on Mount Pleasant Street while I walked back from work. Staring was unlike me, but this was a special case: a healthy female form of perfect proportions flying down the sidewalk, black ponytail swaying.

I turned a corner and broke away, glad she hadn’t caught me gawking and called me on it. But as I walked on, I looked back and noticed that she stopped, then turned my way.

“Mike?” I heard her say. “Mike Ford?”

And now, as she moved nearer, I recognized her: Irin Dragović, in black running tights.

“Don’t let me slow you down,” I offered.

“I’m done,” she said, and leaned over and cupped her left knee.

“Tore my ACL playing soccer in school. It acts up in the cold.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Which way are you going?” she asked.

I pointed up Mount Pleasant Street.

“Can I walk with you a bit?” she asked.

“Sure.”

We started back toward my house. The ingénue act from the beach in Colombia was gone. She apologized for it, actually, said her friends had put her up to it, that she used to be a shy girl and maybe went overboard as a result.

I told her not to worry.

“Where’s the best place to get a cab around here?” she asked, and glanced back. We were a block from my house. My Jeep was parked across the way.

I had a feeling this run-in with Irin might not have been quite as accidental as she’d implied, but with the tramp act on pause, she was actually pretty charming: funny and down-to-earth.

Ever since I’d been pulled off Rado’s case and found the tape, I had a lot of questions about the Serb’s business. She had a privileged view into her father’s affairs and the habit of shaking people down for information, which I’d witnessed firsthand when she tried it on me on the beach in Colombia. She seemed like a good person to chat with, to see what I could shake out of her.

And of course, it was the gentlemanly thing to do. I offered her a ride. We headed back to her place, in Georgetown.

I should have just dropped her off, but as I pulled up in front of the little daddy’s-money Colonial (no roommates, of course), she finally slipped me a hint of what she was up to.

“My father’s case,” she said. “It’s more complicated than wrangling a few loopholes for imports and exports.”

“Are you telling me or asking me?”

“Can I talk to you?”

“Of course,” I said.

She looked warily up and down the street.

“Inside?”

I looked from her upturned eyes to the house. Bad idea. There was Annie to think about—though with the hours we both pulled, I’d barely seen her for the past two weeks—and my bosses, who’d told me to keep my distance from the case. Keeping my hands off the daughter of Radomir, a semilegitimate businessman who was handy with a knife, seemed like good policy as well.

“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I mean, why shut the girl out when she was just starting to give up info? Strictly business, I told myself. Though it sounded much less convincing with her shower on in the background after we’d gone inside and she excused herself to change.

I was half expecting her to come back out in a loosely tied kimono or a silk robe, some Mata Hari number. She did return in something “a little more comfortable”—hospital scrubs on the bottom, and on top a Georgetown Basketball sweatshirt with the neck cut wide enough to bare her shoulder. I could relax a little. She looked like any other everyday-PJs college girl.

The only thing to drink in the house was vodka—typical—so I had mine with tonic and she joined me. I noticed hers was all bubbles and mine barely any. It was an old trick; Lyndon Johnson would have reamed out his secretary if she’d ever given him an unwatered-down drink while he was putting the screws to some poor drunken mark in his office. I drank mine slowly, and twice switched our glasses while her attention was elsewhere.

I took a liking to the girl, apart from the obvious physical appeal. She had a decent sense of humor, with a spot-on impression of her father’s overly refined manner (“Then it’s simply not a Sazerac,” she intoned, with a dismissive hand) and a few nicely cutting jibes about Representative Walker’s hypocrisies (apparently she knew him from his exploits among the women of Georgetown).

I steered the conversation back to her father, drawing out what she knew. I could almost forget that at the same time, she was probably trying to trap me into giving up anything I had learned.

Her angle in the whole thing, she said, was respect. Her father thought a woman’s role was screwing and cooking. Irin had too much brains and ambition for that, and so she wanted to show him she was a worthy heir and maybe earn herself a role in the family business. She figured if she poked her nose in she could prove her value by helping her father out of the jam that had originally brought him to the Davies Group for help.

It didn’t sound like the whole truth.

“All I know,” I said, “is that he came to us to work out some boring import-export loophole.” That was basically a matter of public record, but Irin’s eyes narrowed hungrily.

“It’s more than that,” she said.

“What have you heard?”

“It’s not just his business that’s in trouble. It’s him. He’s worried about something with jurisdiction, extradition—some lawsuit or trial he needs to be protected against.”

Now I was starting to see Irin’s real motives. Rumors trailed Radomir, suggesting he was connected to arms trafficking. Maybe Irin was interested in more than just overturning her father’s narrow ideas of a woman’s place. If he was brought to trial and proven to be a criminal, it would certainly make it a lot harder for her to keep up the charmed life of a darling American coed. The family would be ashamed, ruined, and the source of Irin’s allowance would run dry.

I didn’t say anything. That tends to draw people out better than any question. Most would rather say something they shouldn’t say than sit in silence.

“It’s out of Congress’s hands too,” she went on. “All I know is that there’s a new person who’s making the decision, someone powerful they need to convince.”

That sounded like it might have something to do with my man from the wiretap: Subject 23.

“And how did you learn that?” I asked.

“Deductive reasoning,” she said innocently.

I looked at her bra strap, the smooth olive skin of her shoulder. She had moved closer to me. I’d barely noticed. As we’d talked, the growing intimacy had felt as natural as curling up on the couch beside a longtime girlfriend. She noticed me taking in her body, my eyes lingering on the deep line of her cleavage showing through the widened neck of the sweatshirt.

“Pure logic, huh?” I asked.

“Well, I may have used some other gifts,” she said. She showed me a sly smile. “It’s good to have a full quiver.”

She leaned closer, rising slightly, her knees on the couch. Her scrubs hung loose on her hips, and I could trace from her belly down, lower, along the curve and shadows of her thighs: dangerous country.

“Does that make sense?” she said. “There’s one man who the whole thing rests on. A fulcrum?”

“Maybe,” I said. She didn’t press, didn’t puncture the illusion that this whole thing was more flirtation than interrogation. Her hand came to rest just above my knee, and then slid along my thigh. Those brown eyes moved closer to mine, then she turned slightly off to the side. Just a peck. Innocent almost. Her hand slid higher, and she pressed her breasts against me, her lips to my temple.

A desire, deeper and stronger than any willpower my mind could muster, drove me toward her.

And I’d like to think it was out of love for Annie. I’d like to think I was that good a guy. But I’m not sure. Maybe it was just basic self-preservation at work. The girl had tried the straight slut approach in Colombia, and when that didn’t work, she sized me up and nailed my weak spot with this sweet girlfriend-material bit. I didn’t know who she was working for, but she was dangerous. And now that I’d stolen the tape of that wiretap, I had some dangerous information of my own. However much I fancied myself a willful man who could keep his trap shut, I was sure that fucking her would, in one way or another, prove harmful to my health.

I couldn’t believe it was happening. Like in a dream, I was watching it from outside my body: I took her shoulder and eased her back. She stared at me. I took a deep breath, then thanked her for the drinks and stood up.

“I’ll see you around,” I said, and left.

Irin had handed me two hints—that her father was worried about extradition, and that his case involved a higher power than Congress—and I had given her none. I was glad to get away unscathed.

Meanwhile, I kept my eye on Marcus. Every time he left the office with his game face on, I rang up the restaurants he frequented and checked for reservations under his aliases. I began to think the whole thing was futile, but then, the next Tuesday, I hit.

“Yes, Mr. Matthews. We have you for lunch for two at one thirty p.m. in the private room,” the host told me over the phone. He had a slight accent, Chinese maybe.

What I wanted to say was
Seriously! Are you fucking kidding me?
I’d almost given up hope in the exercise and was shocked that it worked. Now I knew where Marcus was heading on one of his cloak-and-dagger days.

I composed myself, said, “Excellent. Thank you,” then headed out to the restaurant in Prince George’s County to see exactly what the hell he was up to. PG County, as folks from DC call it and as PG County folks hate for it to be called, is terra incognita for most yuppies from Washington. The typical yuppie Washingtonian view is that PG is just an outgrowth into Maryland of the mostly poor and black southeastern quadrant of the District, so it’s the last place on earth you’d expect to find a guy like William Marcus, which was exactly the point.

The restaurant was in a strip mall full of Korean grocery stores. The restaurant’s sign advertised karaoke nights. I’d actually heard about the place from Tuck, who was always searching out authentic grub on the outskirts of DC. The food was supposed to be amazing. I couldn’t risk Marcus spotting me there, however. He would know something was up.

So I parked my car about three hundred feet down the road, then grabbed a spot at the window in the coffee shop across the street and waited him out. The coffee tasted burned and bitter, but the cup was bottomless. After fifty minutes I was bouncing on my stool and aching to pee, but I couldn’t afford to miss him and his accomplice leaving the restaurant.

I was still a little wary about the whole thing. I felt like maybe I was chasing after shadows and taking needless chances. After the twelfth Korean guy in a suit exited the place, each one getting my hopes up and then dashing them, I decided to give up and hit the head. Then the door opened once more. It was Marcus. He held it open, and Irin Dragović, looking voluptuous as ever, stepped into the sunlight.

Now what the hell was going on?

Marcus got back in his Benz. Irin got into her white Porsche Cayenne. They both cruised away.

On the ride back to the District, I narrowed the swarm of bees in my head down to three possibilities.

One, Marcus was fucking Irin. But that was unlikely. The guy had set plenty of honeypots himself and should know better than to take orders from his dick.

Two, Irin was acting as liaison with the Davies Group for some family business. Possible, but Rado had plenty of lieutenants and clearly didn’t want his daughter involved in his affairs.