The 500: A Novel (21 page)

At last, all I wanted: to pull the comforter up to my chin and curl up with Annie’s little potbellied stove of a behind. It was heaven. She clicked off her light.

“And, hon,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“If you do ever fuck around on me, I will hunt you down and I will crucify you.”

Aww. Daddy’s girl.

“As you should, sweetie,” I said. “Love you.”

“You too.”

That was it, I told myself. To hell with Subject 23 and Irin. I was not giving up everything I’d earned just because I’d taken a few clues out of context and had a little fun playing detective.

Case closed, right? Except I couldn’t stop thinking about Annie’s reservations, about how her first instinct was to tell Marcus and Henry.

I tried to convince myself I hadn’t told her the full story for her sake, but maybe it was for my own. As I tried and failed to fall asleep, I realized that my suspicions about the Davies Group were making me question everything connected to the company. The group was my whole world. The friends, the money, the house, and, in a way, even Annie: I owed it all to Henry. So who could I trust?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HIS HEAD WAS
shaved bald and he was built like a football center. The back of his neck had rolls like a pack of hot dogs. He sported tinted sunglasses, wraparound-baseball-player style. He walked stiffly, elbows out, like he either had a backed-up colon or thought he was in a Western. He wore a sack suit and a cheap tie. In other words: a cop.

With my family history, I get a little nervous around cops. Granted, now that I had the thick wallet and the cozy house in the city, I could see their appeal, but old habits die hard. Especially given my recent string of unorthodox activities, I was not at all happy when this palooka sat down next to me at a lunch counter and starting looking me over.

There are no decent diners in the neighborhood where I work. There’s a spot called the Diner, but it’s a retro/meta thing where a sandwich costs ten dollars. So I spend more lunches than I should at a restaurant called Luna’s. It’s one of those Berkeley-earth-mom places, the kind with a bathroom mural of Noam Chomsky and Harriet Tubman holding hands and sliding down a rainbow, but the burgers are good and cheap. If you tuck in at the counter and focus on the food and free coffee refills, you can hardly tell it from a regular greasy spoon.

But it certainly wasn’t the kind of place I’d expect to find this red-faced peace officer.

“Michael Ford?” he asked.

“Do I know you?”

“Erik Rivera,” he said. “I’m a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department, Special Investigations Division.”

“Okay.”

“This is a friendly visit,” Rivera said, which to my ears threatened an unfriendly future run-in. “How’s the cobbler?”

“It’s good.”

“Good.” I guess this was how they taught cops to rapport-build at MPD summer camp. It left a little to be desired, but thankfully Rivera got down to business.

“I was hoping to get your help on a few questions we had about some goings-on at the Davies Group,” he said.

Goings-on? Was I on
Dragnet
? I took a deep breath and, in a perfect monotone, gave him my best lawyerese:

“I regret to inform you that we have confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements with all of our clients and I am legally bound to refrain from discussing, well, anything with you unless I am subpoenaed. Even under that circumstance, the obligation varies according to the relevant case law. I suggest you direct your queries to the general counsel at Davies Group. I would be more than happy to give you his contact information and see that this matter is addressed in a manner satisfactory to all parties involved.”

I turned back to my cobbler, scooped some ice cream on top, and took a bite.

“Fair enough,” he said, bringing himself up to his full tough-guy stature. “I’ll just let you know a few things, then, while you enjoy your dessert. What if I told you that the Davies Group was systematically corrupting the most powerful people in Washington?”

I considered responding,
Oh, you mean the Five Hundred,
or
No shit.
But I said nothing.

He sat down at the counter. “And what if I told you that Radomir Dragović was under suspicion of committing crimes against humanity?”

Radomir was a bit long-winded, sure, but war crimes? Come on. That was just bigotry. Not every Serb was a genocidaire. Though that would explain his concerns about extradition.

“And what if I told you that you might be complicit in several felonies? I think you know enough about prison time and the importance of cooperation with law enforcement to make the right decision, Mr. Ford.”

All right. Now I was actually a little angry. That was obviously a dig at my dad and a clear sign this guy had scoped me out. My impulse was to knock him off the bar stool and strip out his trachea with my dessert spoon, but a reaction was undoubtedly what he was after, so I bottled it up.

“You’re not from DC,” I said. “Is that a Long Island accent?”

Rivera was thrown a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “Bay Shore.”

“Then you should know,” I said, looking around under his stool.

“Know what?”

“When you go on a fishing trip, you ought to bring beer. Have a nice day.”

I don’t know if the flatfoot got the joke, but he got the message.

“Suit yourself,” he said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

He left me his card. As I finished up my cobbler, I could finally let my nerves show. I shook my hands out and took a deep breath. What the fuck did the cops want with me? I wasn’t doing too badly career-wise, but I was still a nobody at Davies. Certainly not an obvious target for the Special Investigations Division.

From a professional point of view, Rivera’s play was clumsy at best. Starting out with threats, even tacit ones, never gets you very far. If he was trying to turn me into a mole, he’d already flubbed it. My bosses were likely to know if the police were sniffing around the firm, especially with Rivera being so brazen about coming up to me near work. Maybe that was the point, to cut me off from my bosses so he was my only friend. Or maybe I was overthinking it, and the guy was a total clod. Based on what I knew about your typical career law enforcement officer, the latter seemed a distinct possibility.

He hadn’t really told me anything specific. Ten minutes of research on the Davies Group would give you enough straws to make a bluff like that at a fresh-faced young guy like me, maybe even scare him into blabbing. Shit, he might not even be with the police. Public corruption was typically an FBI matter, anyway. Something didn’t make sense. I certainly had plenty of worries about my bosses, but my close calls with Marcus and Annie had made me wary about going too far with my extracurricular snooping. And I was still too much in the dark to even think about switching sides and working against Davies. The guy was unstoppable, and nothing happened in this town without his knowledge. I was certain of only one thing: My bosses would find out about this sooner or later. So I’d better go report back to them and earn some brownie points before they found out from someone else that the cops had approached me.

I headed to the cashier. “Your friend already paid,” she said.

Motherfucker. I hated owing anyone anything. That’s how people come to own you, drip by little drip.

Davies and Marcus had been impossible to find ever since Colombia. But as soon as I mentioned the Rivera run-in in an e-mail to Marcus, they were suddenly free and eager.

I sat between them at the conference table in Davies’s office and related the story.

“That’s all he said? No more specifics?”

“That was it,” I said. “I hope I didn’t say too much.”

“No. You did a great job. I’m sorry you had to deal with this. I imagine you’re wondering if there’s anything to it.” Davies seemed calm, eager to put me at ease.

“I believe in what we do here, though a little reassuring couldn’t hurt.”

“Mike, you’ve been in Washington long enough to know that everybody is looking for an angle,” he said in a serious tone. “The Metropolitan Police Department is the one exception.”

“Really?” I asked.

Davies laughed and dropped the deadpan. “Of course not. You don’t even need a high-school diploma to join. Crooks with badges. How often do the police or the FBI try something like this, Marcus?”

“Once, twice a year, at least,” Marcus said.

“Doesn’t it seem strange, the way he approached you, a relatively junior employee here? And all on his own. Outside of any official setting or oversight?”

“It did.”

“There are no refs, Mike. No one is outside the game. It’s a typical law enforcement stab at us. You know we’re not Boy Scouts, but we are absolutely scrupulous. We never cross the line. I’ve been at this for forty years, Mike, and we are squeaky clean. Never one infraction. People throw a lot of shit at us, but nothing has ever stuck. The legit folks know that, and they leave us alone. But let’s say you get someone, a detective, FBI, an inspector general, whoever. He figures if he can get some dirt on the most powerful firm in Washington, anything that will embarrass us or our clients, he can cash that in for some extremely valuable favors.”

“They’re always looking for the same thing,” Marcus said. “They want us to pull some strings to get them a raise or a plum assignment. Most of the time these guys are just looking for us to land them a job at a private company, a contractor, so they can make five times more than the government pays them.”

“Fortunately,” Henry added, “it takes more than a slice of cobbler to buy off our best associate.”

He stood and clapped his hand on my shoulder. “You did well, Mike. And we know it’s been tough being in the dark on the Dragović-Walker case.”

“Can you fill me in on that yet?”

“Well, Mike, unfortunately, incidents like this Rivera business are part of the reason we have to compartmentalize. Marcus has people planting bugs on his car, for God’s sake. Not everyone is a vault like you. And know that we don’t take it lightly. You may have noticed that Marcus and I are working like first-year associates. Every so often things just come together—a piece of information falls into your hands, a once-in-a-lifetime deal lines up, and then you just have to go for it, flat-out. We do fine, of course, but when a chance comes to really bend the arc, to make a world-class firm something even greater, you have to seize it. One day we’ll be able to explain it to you. You’ll understand.”

I wondered if that deal had something to do with wiretaps, threats, and a man called Subject 23.

“We know that you’re still clocking these ninety-hour weeks. It may look like we’ve disappeared, but we notice. Why don’t you and Annie take the company bird down to the villa in St. Barth’s? Whenever you like; just let us know. You’ll get your own little place on the water, very secluded. And you can just relax. You’ve more than earned it.”

As far as buy-offs go, that topped pie.

“Annie and I would really appreciate that, Henry. Thank you.”

As I left, it made me feel better knowing that even pros like Marcus and Davies sometimes make mistakes, like mentioning the cobbler, which I hadn’t talked about. Now I knew that they were watching me.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

YOU TAKE EVERY
important man in Washington. You narrow that group down to those with a possible say in matters of international jurisdiction, a daughter in boarding school, and a dead wife. You’re left with 160 people. Expand your starting pool to include the national scene, and that number grows to 348. You spend a half an hour or so trying to track down some audio of each one—a conference recording, an interview on YouTube, whatever—and now you’re talking two to three solid weeks of work. Never mind that for 40 percent of the guys, you can’t find the audio, so you put them on a maybe pile and wonder if Subject 23 is hiding somewhere in that stack while you dick around on the Internet listening to clips from the most recent TED conference. Normally I’d have a junior associate go through all this, but there was no way I could let the bosses catch wind of what I was doing. I’d been searching for Subject 23 for a week straight, every night since I’d eavesdropped on Davies and Marcus.

Doing all that on top of my usual work was murder. But my date with Detective Rivera had reawakened my concerns about Subject 23, the man my bosses had been wiretapping. I had to do something, and I was a little shy about getting back into any cloak-and-dagger high jinks after my run-in with Marcus.

So far I had squat, and I hadn’t even had a chance to dig into Radomir’s past to see this if there was anything to what Rivera said about war crimes.

It was eight o’clock on a Thursday. I wasn’t normally one to whine, but I’d had a shitty week—frostbite-and-felony-accusations shitty. On top of all that I’d picked up a cold, probably from flooding my sinuses with the bacteria-ridden Anacostia River. I was hunched over a laptop at the kitchen table going through a list of potential candidates for my mystery man that never seemed to get any shorter.

I’d just about had it. I needed a break, maybe even to let myself enjoy this new life I’d won for a minute.

Annie stood in front of the open refrigerator in a pair of boxer shorts and one of my sweatshirts, acting acutely indecisive. She examined some take-out containers, then turned to find me staring at her.

“What?” she said, and aimed those blue eyes and curls my way.

“You,” I said.

“What’s your problem, Ford?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I love watching you.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Forget this,” I said, and shut my laptop and stood.

“Come here.” I held her and swayed with her through the kitchen. She rested her head on my shoulder.

“Let me make you dinner.”

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“Nothing. Why so suspicious? A catch like you, you should be getting treated like this every day. How about dinner, a couple glasses of wine, then I’ll take you to the Gibson. Whatever you want.”