The White Mountain (12 page)

She was more concerned with
completing her task than allowing him the opportunity to apologize.  All she
wanted to do was get it over with and get back home.

Mary met Chuck at a coffee
shop the next morning.  With a slight headache after only two beers and a bevy
of information overload the night before, she ordered an extra-large cappuccino
and hoped the caffeine would ease the dull throb between her temples.  On the
other hand, it was almost a welcome discomfort as the pain gateway swung away
from her bad leg.

She carried her drink in one
hand and used her cane to push herself through the packed, bustling swarm of
coffee junkies with the other.

Chuck sat by the window at a
small two-top, green tea steaming in a white mug, uneaten scone resting on a
small dish, reading the
Washington Post
.  He looked up from the paper
and smiled as she sat down.  “The country’s going to the dogs, isn’t it?  Nothing
but doom and gloom in the news.  Pages and pages of death and destruction, and
only one little article about a man rescuing a puppy over on I-95.”

Mary sipped her cappuccino
and said, “If they put nothing but feel-good stuff in the paper, we’d be
reading it on the back of a business card.”

“Ain’t that the truth?  Every
day, it’s the same thing.  Gun control, raise taxes, lower taxes, abortion, fix
this, balance that—you know what the sad part of it is?  There is no single
right
answer, and we can’t stop fighting long enough to realize it.”  He closed the
paper, folded it, and then handed it to the suit-and-tie businessman sitting at
the adjacent table.  “Here you go,” he said.  “Your turn to be depressed for a
while.”

The man took it, thanked him,
and went back to scrolling through Facebook on his iPad.

“Are you on Facebook, Chuck?”

“Not in my line of work.  I
got too many
femme Nikitas
that’re still behind the Iron Curtain who’d
love to find out where I am.  Even if I did, I’m not that interested in reading
about what people ate for lunch.  Anyway, time to go to work.”  He leaned over
the table and lowered his voice.  “You give much thought to what we talked
about last night?”

“I barely slept, but for the
life of me, I can’t see an angle.  I’ve been a P.I. for years and I’ve never
had a case where I was so absolutely clueless about where to start.”

“Understandable, since you’ve
never had a case involving the First Lady.”

“That’s just it, Chuck.  I’m
in way over my head here.  I made up my mind about ten times last night to hop
in the car and drive home.”

“Glad you decided to stick
around, because you’re no help to me or Randall if you’re a couple hundred
miles away.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what kept
me here.  I decided I’d be even more useless at home.  So, what’ve you got? 
Where do we start?”  The sun coming through the window warmed Mary’s arm and
the side of her face as she waited for Chuck to sip his tea.

“Up front,” he said, “we’re
not getting within a mile of Jessica Walters.  That’s a given.  Even in my
wildest imagination, if I could somehow get Llewellyn—he’s the Deputy Director
of the CIA—to finagle some sort of meeting, say, based on the pretense of
national security, she’s a dead end.  He wouldn’t go for it regardless.  If
she’s involved, or if she’s not and knows the tiniest of details, there’s no
way she’d talk.  She wouldn’t risk the political fallout and she wouldn’t voluntarily
give anybody the chance to put her dad under the microscope.”

“Can we talk directly to the
dad?  Maybe we go in as reporters looking for a story?”

“Normally, that might be a
good idea, but a couple of things put the kibosh on it before we pick up the
phone. 
If
he wanted to talk, Richmond Steel has an earnings report
coming out next week and he’d probably be under a gag order due to SEC
regulations.  They don’t want him affecting the market price of the stock.”

“Not if it was something like
a personal interest story, right?  We could say we’re looking at doing a piece
on how the one-percent spends their time away from the office.”

“Maybe, but the man hasn’t
granted a public interview in over fifteen years.  He’s a recluse that only
comes out when their board needs him to make a public appearance.  Hates the
spotlight.  We’d never get past his secretary.”  Chuck pushed his scone across
the table.  “Here, eat some of this.”

“What kind?”

“Cranberry and orange.”

“
Ugh
, no thanks.  I’d
rather starve.”  Her stomach growled at the thought of food, so she picked it
up and took a bite anyway, chewing, thinking, and then swallowing with a
grimace.  “The two highest profile people are out, which is probably good
because they’re the least likely to talk and have the most to lose.  Not to
mention the fact that if we go in there snooping around, trying to get
information on a super-secret murder contest, they could make one phone call
and have us on the wrong side of the ground somewhere out in the National
Forest.”

Chuck nodded.  “Absolutely.”

“What else do we know about
the Richmonds?  Did your guy mention why
they’re
the ones writing the
ten million dollar checks?”

“He didn’t, but best guess?”

“Best guess.”

“Tradition.”

“Tradition?  It takes a fairly
sick mind to keep funding something like that.  A whole line of sick minds. 
How long has this been going on?”

“I was told—and granted, this
was coming from a guy so drunk he was slurring his words—he
said
since
the Civil War.”

“Holy shit.  Since the Civil
War?”

“Yes, ma’am.  Whether or not
I believe him is another story.  I have a hard time grasping the fact that
something like this could’ve gone on for so long without some Dudley-Do-Right
putting the brakes on it, but in a way, it seems feasible.”

“How so?”  Mary took another
bite of the scone.  The flavor hadn’t improved.  She pushed it back across the
table to avoid the unwanted temptation.

“The Richmonds, they’re old,
old money.  Richmond Steel was formed in 1901 and Edward, the patriarch of the
whole thing, he was rubbing elbows with Rockefeller and Carnegie way back
when.  Before that, he fought for the Confederates and then sometime after the
war ended, he moved his family up north and used some of his daddy’s plantation
money to start up the company.”

“You think they’ve been
putting up the prize money this whole time?”

“I don’t know for certain,
but I’d say so.  Too many loose lips if you try to spread it around.  Something
like this, you’d want to keep it as quiet as possible.”

“It’s the
why
that
makes me wonder.  How’d they even get involved in the first place?”

“If I had a dollar for every oddball
thing a billionaire did with his money, I’d probably have a few extra zeroes in
my own bank account.  Some people collect wine, other people collect scalps.”

“So weird.”  Mary took a
drink of her cappuccino, then wiped a glob of foam from her upper lip.  “There
has to be some inroad to the family.  Everybody has a black sheep they don’t
claim.  We need somebody that’s pissed off enough to talk.”

Chuck said, “But not so
pissed off that they’re willing to talk to the real press without some coercion. 
If that were the case, would’ve happened ages ago.  Cat would’ve already been
out of the bag.”

“Any history of mental
illness in the family?  You know, some random uncle that might have been
unnecessarily committed because he was blabbing family secrets?”

“Again, in a perfect world,
that’d be a fantastic place to start.  However, I can’t confirm it because I
haven’t looked that closely, but my guess would be no.  These ultra-rich, D.C.
elitists have a reputation to uphold.  They wouldn’t want their good name tarnished,
you know?  Admitting your bloodline is tainted almost counts as a sin around
here.”

“You’ve got a way to say no
about everything, don’t you?”

“Eh, if I’d tried to survive
on uneducated guesses all these years, I wouldn’t have.  I’m dating myself, but
I’ve been in this business longer than you’ve been alive.  What I’ve learned
is, the logical paths are never the safest.  Say you’ve got something wrong
with your car, what’s the first thing most people do?  The first natural
response, I mean.”

“I don’t know, Chuck.  Look
under the hood?”

“Exactly.  And how many of
them know what they’re looking at?”

“Not very many.  What’s your
point?”

“None that helps us, really. 
What I’m saying is, you can’t figure something out if you don’t know what all
the parts are and how they work together.  Just because your car’s making a
funny noise doesn’t mean you can tell what’s wrong.”

“I know.  I
know
,
okay?  God, there has to be somebody we can talk to.”

“The only person I can think
of, that might be a possibility, is Herbert Richmond.”

“And he’s?”

“The First Lady’s brother. 
Did you see him on
60 Minutes
about a year ago?

“That show’s still on?”

Chuck laughed.  “I have half
a mind to tell you to get off my lawn.  They profiled him when the First Lady
was doing that whole thing with the homeless vets, remember? 
Never Too Late
. 
Remember that?”

“I think so.”

“He talked about how he came
back from Vietnam and had trouble getting his bearings back regardless of how much
money his daddy had.  Complained that he never completely got rid of his PTSD
and what a shame it was that we still had former soldiers living on the streets
almost forty years later.”

“But that doesn’t make him an
outcast.  Nothing that’ll make him want to show off their skeletons.”

“True.  It
does
tell
us that he’s willing to talk to the press, because he’s been a media whore
since, and that all goes back to your original idea.”

“Okay, then.  We go after
Herbert Richmond.  The real question is, what’s our plan of attack?  We can’t
sit him down at a table and say, ‘Why is your family funding a murder game?’
and ‘Who’s Ares?’”

Chuck turned up the corners
of his mouth and his shoulders went along with them.  “Your guess is as good as
mine.”

For the next two hours, they
tossed around ideas. 

Mary’s cappuccino sat
unfinished, as did Chuck’s green tea.  They were too engrossed in hashing out
details to notice, agreeing and disagreeing, hypothesizing, proving points and
disproving others. 

They role-played some
scenarios. 

They made concessions and
eventually created a picture that might be believable to a person like Herbert
Richmond.  Effective in its simplicity.

The more lies you tell, the
harder they are to remember.

The breakfast rush came and
went, and they sat, nearly alone in the coffee shop, somewhat satisfied with their
next steps.

“I think we can actually do
this,” Mary said.

“We’ll see.  Reminds me of
this time back in Russia.  We were making this play for info on a spy
satellite—”

“Sputnik?”

“God no, how old do you think
I am?”

Mary smirked.  “Kidding.”

“Get off my lawn,
whippersnapper.  Anyway, there’s four of us.  Me, this guy Johnson, another kid
named Heckleford that we called Peckerwood, and this real ball-buster of a lady
named Natalya.  You remind me of her, actually.  She’d been in trouble with the
KGB and was looking for a safe way out of the country, so we promised to get
her out if she’d help us.  To keep a long story short, her family produced
vodka and were well-to-do, you know, by Russian standards.  Natalya was the
black sheep and more than willing to talk.  Turns out, her father was working
for the government to illegally transport this spy satellite disguised as a
shipment of vodka.  The thing was headed for Cuba and we were a hair’s breadth
away from the sequel to 1962.”

“1962?”

“Cuban Missile Crisis.  Back
then, everybody’s fingers were itching to push that big red button and we
couldn’t afford to allow the tension to get that high again, so we spent days
coming up with a plan to intercept this thing and destroy it.  We all rolled up
our shirtsleeves and pounded vodka like it was water.  Smoked so many
cigarettes, you could barely see the notes we had spread out all over the
table.  We covered every possible angle we could think of and thought we had it
all figured out.  In the end, the lesson learned was that nothing—no matter how
confident you are—
nothing
is ever foolproof.”

“What happened?”

“They all died.”

CHAPTER 12

Randall had tried all night
to get in touch with Mary, but she wouldn’t answer her cell phone.

By that point, she would’ve met
with Chuck, learned the truth, and he supposed she was so riled up that she
didn’t want to talk to him.

At 7AM the next morning, with
the room illuminated by nothing more than dawn skulking through the
ground-level windows, Randall spread a large, blue tarp across his basement
floor.  He straightened the corners and then lined the edges with sandbags.  If
they could stop a river from overflowing, surely they’d be able to stop blood
from seeping onto the concrete.