Dark Ambition (27 page)

"Tell him," he snapped, "the last thing I want is White House interference." He didn't have to behave like a good guest any longer. "Tell him to stay out of my way so I can get the case ready for trial."

Fulton was shocked. "Oh, I'd never talk to Mr. Slater that way."

"Well, you'd be doing him a favor if you did."

"It's a matter of respect and loyalty. I mean, how I talk to somebody like Mr. Slater."

"Jesus, you were in the marines too long." It was an unkind comment, knowing what had happened to Fulton's father and grandfather, but Ben didn't care.

Fulton clutched the steering wheel tightly to control his anger. "You obviously don't believe in serving your country."

Ben could feel his blood pressure rising as well. "I've spent my whole career in public service. I've had lots of high-paying offers from law firms, but I've turned them down."

"So why do you keep doing what you're doing?"

"It's a long story."

"We have time until we drop you off."

"We do," Ben said. He closed his eyes, not wanting to talk to Fulton, to Theo, or to anyone else for the rest of the night. "But we're not going to talk about it."

* * *

Amy was sleeping peacefully when Ben got home. He sat in the rocker in her darkened room and watched her. "So why do you keep doing what you're doing?" Fulton had asked him in the car.

It was a story he had told very few people—only Jenny and Nan. When the tragedy occurred, he was too young to comprehend it. Years later, when he had been a student at Berkeley, he had been obsessed with finding out what had happened to his father. Doggedly, he had pursued the events of more than a decade earlier, until he had pieced the story together from newspaper articles and interviews.

In the late fifties, when he was born, it had been a time of great growth in San Francisco. With limited land available, city council approvals for building projects were critical. With what was at stake, it was perhaps inevitable that there should be widescale corruption in the city government. Still, what Ben's father, Morris Hartwell, a young assistant district attorney, found exceeded what anyone had thought. Builders and developers were making massive payoffs into a slush fund. The open question was which city officials had masterminded this scheme and who were its beneficiaries. The public and the newspapers were clamoring for an end to the corruption and punishment for wrongdoers. Morris Hartwell, an ambitious young prosecutor, followed a paper trail that led him to Curt Richardson, a city council member who was clearly living well beyond his public salary. Following a sensational, headline-grabbing trial, Morris got his conviction and Richardson went to jail for twenty years. After a year Richardson was stabbed to death in the prison exercise yard. Then additional facts came out about the former councilman's life and his sources of income from a private investment in a Tahoe gambling casino. As Morris kept digging, he realized that Richardson had been set up with false evidence, and the young prosecutor had been duped by the false trail. Slowly, without any of the press fanfare that accompanied the earlier case, he began building a case against two other city councilmen. He was on the verge of taking his new evidence to a grand jury when a truck smashed head-on into his Ford Fairlane on a fog-shrouded road outside of the city. Morris and his wife, Nell, were killed instantly. Their five-year-old son, Ben, was at home with a baby-sitter at the time.

Ben was raised by Muriel and Stanley Walton. Stanley was a friend and colleague of Ben's father in the DA's office. He concluded that Morris's accident was a homicide, but he lacked the courage to pick up the torch. So he raised Morris Hartwell's son instead. The Waltons had a daughter, Terry, about Ben's age. They took him into their house, raising him as if he were Terry's brother, although their relationship became much more complex once they began dating as students at Berkeley.

Once Ben pieced the story together, he vowed that he would spend his life prosecuting the corrupt, particularly where a homicide or public officials were involved. That commitment led him to law school and then to the prosecutor's office in Washington. With each conviction, he felt he was avenging the wrong that had been done to his father and to him.

As the awful memories faded, Ben got up from the rocker and kissed the sleeping Amy gently. She turned over in her bed, pulled the thumb out of her mouth, and said, "I love you, Daddy."

"I love you too, honey," he whispered.

* * *

"Your package from Japan has arrived, Master Chen," the director's secretary said.

"Have them bring it up to my office," Chen replied, tingling with excitement. When the delivery man tossed the cardboard box on the floor, Chen wanted to scream, "Careful or we'll all be blown sky-high!" But he held his tongue and bit his lower lip.

That evening, Chen pretended to be working at his desk until the factory workers had gone home and the office was deserted. Then he reached into the closet in his office and pulled out the empty brown leather suitcase he had brought in last week. It was precisely the right size to hold the package from Alpha Industries.

The contents were all plastic. Nothing metal. Still, the suitcase was heavy with the package inside. Chen began perspiring as he lugged it down three flights of stairs and two blocks until he found a taxi.

Back in his room at the Shangri-La Hotel, Chen closed the curtains. After putting out the do not disturb sign, he threw the dead bolt on the door and hooked the chain for good measure.

Carefully, he slit open the top of the cardboard box, using a penknife he had in his shaving kit. With his engineer's training, he inspected the contents packed in bubble wrap. He studied the directions and examined each part. Sherman had been right: For a trained engineer like Chen, assembling it would be a piece of cake. Satisfied that he would be able to put it together and get out fast, he repacked everything as it had been in the box, then returned it to the suitcase. Tomorrow he would call in sick. He had no intention of leaving the hotel room until he received the signal from Sherman.

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

While munching on a bagel with strong black coffee, Jennifer glanced at the front page of the morning
Washington Post
to check the coverage of the Clyde Gillis case. There was a factual article about the charges that had been filed and this morning's arraignment. Nothing inflammatory from Hennessey or Ben.

At least Ben's keeping his mouth shut and not trying to prejudice prospective jurors, she thought with relief. God, she felt tired. She had been at the office until three a.m. doing legal research and drafting motions for Clyde Gillis. After only three hours of sleep she was gulping down coffee to sharpen her mind. She paused to rub her tired eyes. When she opened them and turned back to the newspaper, she saw a news analysis by Jim Revere, a
Post
staff writer, beginning in the bottom center of the front page, which focused on the question of who had the greatest influence on the President now that his friend and closest confidant was dead.

 

There's a logjam on the White House switchboard these days because of the huge number of incoming calls for Jim Slater. The trend that began with Slater's shift from treasury to the White House has snowballed with Robert Winthrop's death. Everyone in official Washington now realizes that the former New York investment banker is the second most powerful man in America.

Senator Rick Turner of Michigan said, "We all know how important Jim is. He's the one making the trains run now, putting it all together, the politics, the strategy on issues and policy, and the key appointments. He's the focal point of this administration."

Though Slater has been in Washington only three years, he has already created a mighty cone of influence. "Access to the President runs through Slater's office. And you'd better not try an end run," one senior official said, "or you'll be banished to political Siberia for the next year—and the four after that if Slater manages to engineer a reelection for President Brewster."

 

It was a heady thought for Jennifer to realize that "the second most powerful man in America" was courting her.

Everything was suddenly happening too fast. She was in the middle of the most important case of her life. Ben was back. He had been so sharp with her sometimes, but she realized that was only a defensive response on his part because that was how she had begun with him on the telephone Sunday night. He made it clear at the Old Ebbitt Grill that if she changed her approach and softened, he'd do the same in a minute. He had never forgotten what they'd had together any more than she had. But did she want Ben again? More than the intriguing, exciting Jim Slater?

* * *

Ben snapped the seat belt tight against Amy's lap in the front seat of his Volvo wagon, closed the door, and strode quickly around the back of the car to the driver's side. Since it was Thursday morning, they were on their way to Dr. Van Holland's office for Amy's weekly eight-o'clock appointment with the child psychiatrist. Even if Van Holland was on time, it would be tight to deliver her to preschool after the session and make it to court for Clyde Gillis's ten-o'clock arraignment. Ben was willing to risk it, though. He couldn't let her miss an appointment, and he couldn't ask Elana to take Amy because the doctor required at least one parent to come. Beyond all that, Ben knew that it was important for him to talk with Amy afterward, on the ride to preschool, about what had happened with the doctor.

He started the car and pulled away from the curb, deep in thought about whether these sessions really did Amy any good. He didn't see the blue Chevy that pulled out of a parking space behind him. It followed the Volvo at a steady fifty-yard distance.

Glancing over at Amy, he saw her clutching the old battered yellow metal lunch box with Barbie on the front. The damned thing was rusty on the corners, and he decided to make one more try at getting rid of it. "Saturday I'll buy you a new lunch box," he said.

She held it tightly against her chest. "No, Daddy. I like this one."

"But it's old, honey. The corners an sharp. You could get cut."

"Mommy bought me this lunch box. I want to keep it."

"But they have beautiful—"

"No, Daddy. I want this one."

He sighed and gave up. At Wisconsin Avenue, he turned right, moving into the heavy morning traffic of one of the main north-south corridors in Washington.

In the Chevy, Gwen lost sight of Ben's car, but she didn't care. Early this morning she had hooked to the underside of the Volvo's rear bumper the transmitter of a sophisticated homing device that Big Bob had sold her yesterday. The miniscreen on her car seat showed precisely where he was.

An hour later, when Ben pulled out of the parking garage of the Foxhall Medical Center on New Mexico Avenue, Gwen was waiting for him in the Chevy. She gave him a head start of fifty yards before pulling in behind him.

In front of the preschool, she watched him kiss Amy and then wait while the child scrambled into the small redbrick building with the yellow Barbie lunch box in her hand and a tiny backpack over her shoulders. Her hair was longer, but the child looked just like the picture Gwen had been given yesterday at the Lincoln Memorial. Through a pair of binoculars, she studied the girl's face while Ben kissed her good-bye, committing it to memory. Now she could easily pick Amy out of a crowd of children on a playground through a rifle scope.

* * *

Ambassador Liu walked diagonally across Franklin Square from the corner of 13th and K, in downtown Washington, carrying a Starbucks bag. Across the square, he saw a maroon Camry parked and a man with a bandage on his face behind the wheel.

The park service was late in raking this year, and the grass was strewn with leaves. As Liu walked, pigeons scattered from the path. He sat down on a bench near the center of the square and removed a cup of coffee from the bag. As he sipped it, he tried not to notice the man with the bandage approaching. Liu waited until he was seated on the bench to look around. No one was within listening range.

"You wanted to see me," the man said.

"After thinking about it, I'm worried that she may have made copies of the video."

"You want me to go back and visit her again?" the man said, relishing the chance of working over that bitch Ann Winthrop. Maybe he'd even get lucky and find that good-looking piece from the parking lot in the house as well. He became aroused just thinking about what he'd do to her.

Sensing his reaction, Liu said, "I just want you to get all the other copies of the video. You can't harm her or anyone with her, and don't take anything from her house."

When the man didn't respond, Liu added, "The fee's the same as before. There's twenty-five percent in cash in the Starbucks bag. The rest you'll get when the job's done. But I won't pay you if anybody gets hurt. Is that clear?"

Grumbling, the man nodded.

Liu knew he had made a mistake not considering copies of the video earlier. What had turned him in this direction was the relative ease with which Ann had surrendered the one she had. He was convinced that scene had been staged, that Ann had at least one more copy stashed somewhere, and he had to get back all of the copies. If his government ever found out that he had done this to Winthrop on his own, he would be brought home to Beijing and summarily executed. But it was imperative that Ann not be injured. The Clyde Gillis prosecution was roaring along. He didn't want to do anything to sidetrack it.