High Treason (19 page)

“Right.”

“It’s not the president himself.”

“Exactly.”

David found himself not blinking as he listened, his mind screaming to him that this was going to make Watergate look like a minor distraction.

Zanger continued, “You can’t use any of this on the record.”

“It’s all deep background,” Becky assured. While she might well have been playing a bluff, her promise concerned David. If they did, indeed, come out the other end of this ordeal whole and free, they would have to tell the FBI and others about what they’d just heard. How could they do that and still accept the Pulitzer that would be coming their way?

Zanger seemed satisfied, though no less disturbed. “But I never in a million years thought that tonight would ever happen.”

Becky cocked her head. “Tonight?” she asked. “What part about tonight?”

Zanger cocked his head, too, albeit in the opposite direction. He seemed equal parts confused and concerned. “Isn’t that why you’re here? Isn’t that why the two of you came to my door?”

Becky waited for it, and David was glad. Some issues be allowed to play themselves out.

Zanger looked shocked. “Really?” he asked. “The kidnapping. I thought for sure that you were here about the kidnapping.”

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN

N
icholas Mishin loved the sound of his sleeping house. Most nights, the one-story rancher in the Colorado hill country was too damn quiet. Ever since Marcie left with Josef—he was Joey now, he mustn’t forget—the house seemed to have lost its heartbeat. She’d taken the dog, too, so for too many nights and days, the otherwise comfortable house had been anything but a home.

For this week and next, though, that would all be different. Marcie had jetted off to some far-flung place with her rich new husband, leaving him alone with his son for the first time in ten months.

It was amazing how much children could change in a year. You expect it when they’re little, when every day brings a new skill and new adventures, but Nicholas had not been prepared for the metamorphosis that had consumed his boy between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays. He’d grown tall and lean—Nicholas estimated him to be five-nine—and despite the adolescent hair that would go from clean to oily in half a day, and the zits on his nose and cheeks and chin that were the focus of so much of his vanity, he fit every person’s definition of handsome. The California sun that was so much a part of his life while living with his mother had even managed to lighten his dark brown hair.

When Nicholas first saw Josef stepping out of the people mover into the arrival lounge in Denver International Airport, his gut seized at the magnitude of the change. He worried that in the months since they’d seen each other, the boy would have become a man so quickly that they would now have to get to know each other again as strangers.

Then Joey fired up that smile, and all the fears dissolved away. Without hesitation or embarrassment, he gave his old man a big hug, and from that second on, the missing slice of time stopped mattering.

It had been a great week, including three day-trips to the slopes—Vail, Copper, and Breckenridge—and an afternoon at the movies. Tonight, during dinner in front of the television in the family room, they’d agreed that tomorrow would be a lazy, do-nothing day, giving Joey a chance to catch up on his gaming and his e-mails, while allowing Nicholas to reestablish contact with the clients and colleagues he’d been pretending did not exist.

The evening had ended with a mind-numbing tutorial on World of Warcraft, a dizzying role-playing game that to Nicholas just felt like random violence, but he had to admit that the graphics were stunning.

That had taken them to the beginning of a new day, and much to Nicholas’s surprise, Joey had been the one to call it quits.

Now, an hour later, Nicholas still lay awake, listening to the peaceful sounds of the sleeping house.

He missed the old days when they were a complete family, but family dynamics were complicated things. While Marcie had been the first to wander from fidelity, he understood that he’d played a role in that. The obsession with work—he was an environmental engineer, which in fact was a far more interesting line of work than it sounded to people on the outside—combined with his even less healthy obsession with his mother’s current husband, had made him a pain in the ass to be around.

And it didn’t help that the media was so desperately anxious to throw fuel on his fires. They baited him and he swallowed the hook every time. All that negative energy and negative attention was too much for Marcie. He could have told them to mind their own business.

But he didn’t. And now the house had its heartbeat for only a few weeks out of the year. Yet more evidence of life’s most vivid lesson: Actions have consequences.

So, here he was, awash in consequences, and left with the struggle to fulfill another of life’s challenges: He could accept things as they were and enjoy his time alone with Joey, or he could burn with bitterness and be miserable. He could provide a happy environment for Joey or he could push his son away.

You only get one shot at any given moment in your life, and the wise man doesn’t squander a single one.

Nicholas sensed that he’d been lying awake since first getting into bed, but in a dark room, it was always hard to tell. You slip in and out.

Right now, though, he felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he didn’t know why. A bad dream, perhaps? A bout of sleep apnea, for which he refused to wear that ridiculous fighter-pilot’s mask?

He heard something.

He couldn’t quite place it, but it was different from the normal sounds of the house.

Had to take the dog, didn’t you, Marcie?
It was more fuzz ball than watchdog, but that puffy little mutt had ears as sharp as any hound’s.

He lay on his back, watching the ceiling, which showed itself only as a darker shade of black in an otherwise black room.

He heard it again. The pop of a floorboard outside the master bedroom door, the one you had to step on to gain access to the room. He’d often called it his ninja burglar alarm.

Nicholas sat up in bed and squinted to see the closed door. “Josef?” he said. “Is that you?” Who else could it be?

Joey’s scream split the night like a hot ax, equal parts pain and fear. “Let go of me! Dad! Ow!”

Nicholas tore the covers away and threw his feet to the floor. “Josef! What is it?”

He’d taken only two steps when the door exploded open, and then they were on him.

 

 

There was something unnerving about seeing the third-floor offices lit up in the middle of the night. Jonathan noticed it as Boxers pulled the Batmobile into the garage at the rear of the firehouse.

As he stepped out, he waited for the sound that so often came next. The pounding of paws rumbled in the night as JoeDog, completely invisible in the dark, galloped from wherever she’d been to greet him with a running body-block.

He stooped and braced for it, and took it without falling. “Hello, Beast,” he said, rubbing her ears. He allowed his face to be licked a couple of times, and then the reunion ritual was complete. If he’d been coming in through the front door, she’d have had to run a couple of victory laps up and down the sidewalk. Who knew why?

“You treat her better than you treat people,” Boxers said.

“I like her better than I like people.”

Jonathan led the way through the back door into the mudroom that led to his living room, swatting wall switches to illuminate his sprawling man-cave. Fearless, protective creature that she was, JoeDog was careful to keep Jonathan between herself and Boxers.

Once inside, all semblance of firehouse disappeared, giving way to ornate oriental carpets and elegant yet cushy furniture. Jonathan had a thing for leather, and the upholstery in the place showed it. Dom D’Angelo, his best friend and local parish priest, once told him that his decorating aesthetic ran toward early hotel lobby.

JoeDog headed for her favorite club chair and settled in for the night.

An open stairway midway down the right-hand wall was the only architectural detail that remained of the old fire station—along with the brass pole that extended from the second-floor landing to the ground floor. Having spent so many hours polishing it as a boy, Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to take it out when he remodeled the place.

The door at the top of the stairs led to a vestibule that to the right opened to the second floor, the sleeping floor, and to the left through a reinforced steel door that joined the stairway that led from the street to the office spaces on the third floor.

Jonathan opened the stairway door and let Boxers go first onto the landing. The night guard—a youngish former Air Force PJ named Sam Franco, who’d left a leg behind in Afghanistan—stood at the third floor landing.

“What’s up, Sam?” Jonathan asked.

“We’ve got a special surprise for you inside,” Franco said. “But Ms. Alexander made me promise not to tell you.”

“You know I don’t like surprises, right, Sam?”

“Yes, sir, I do. But the worst you can do is fire me. Ms. Alexander can make my life hell forever.”

“Kid’s got a point,” Boxers said. “He’s already earned his combat badge.”

Jonathan scanned his thumbprint, punched the code into the cipher lock, and entered what he figured was going to be an entertaining night.

 

 

If Jonathan’s living room was the hotel lobby, then his office was the lounge. Huge by any reasonable standard for offices, the themes of oriental carpeting and comfy leather continued, but in here, the addition of carved walnut paneling gave the space a feeling of warmth that Jonathan loved. His tastes were the polar opposite of Venice’s chrome-and-glass aesthetic.

His visitors sat in the expansive and expensive conversation group in front of the fireplace that dominated the right-hand wall. Jonathan’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the source of the mystery.

First Lady of the United States Anna Darmond, née Yelena Poltanov, sat with perfect posture in the Hitchcock armchair on the far side of the hearth. In the frenetic light of the well-stoked fireplace, she somehow looked regal in stretch pants and a bulky sweater that would have made a perfect fashion statement in Telluride.

“Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “How nice to see that you’re not dead.”

Irene shifted in her seat. “Jesus, Scorpion.”

Jonathan’s preferred seat in this section of his office was a wooden rocking chair marked with his name and the Seal of the College of William and Mary. After too many back injuries to count over the years, it was the only chair that reliably gave him the support he needed. No one else ever sat in his rocker.

“Okay, Yelena, let’s have it,” he said, settling in and crossing his legs. “How come your Secret Service detail is dead and you’re not?” He used her old name in a deliberate effort to get a rise, but no one in the room flinched. If anything, the First Lady merely looked bored.

Behind him, he heard the rattle of glasses from the bar as Boxers helped himself.

“I know what you think of me, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said. “Director Rivers has told me everything. I understand your anger, but I assure you that it is misplaced. I am not a murderer, and I am not plotting any terrorist schemes.”

“Yet here you are hiding, when you could be lounging in the middle of the most secure cocoon in the universe.”

The squeak of a cork told him that Boxers was going for the good stuff, and then the faintest aroma of peat confirmed that he’d selected scotch.

“Security cuts both ways, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said.

“Digger.”

“As you wish. But great fortresses make great prisons.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Promise me you’re not going to whine about the loneliness of the bubble.”

A glass bearing two fingers of Lagavulin arrived from over his right shoulder. In Boxers’ hands, the tulip glass looked more like a shot.

“You need to hear her out, Dig,” Irene said and the Big Guy helped himself to the remaining club chair. “Open that big mind of yours.”

Jonathan recognized her words as a rebuke and he dialed it back. “Okay, Yelena, the floor is yours.”

“I prefer to be called Mrs. Darmond.”

“And I prefer to be in bed at this hour.” Jonathan took a sip of scotch. Liquid contentment. He knew he was being a shit, but it was calculated shittiness. He wanted her to be off balance. Enough people sucked up to her every whim. She needed to know that he was not among them.

Yelena looked to Irene. “Is it important that I be humiliated?”

“My office, my rules,” Jonathan said.

Irene narrowed one eye, clearly annoyed. “If you think Digger’s annoying, wait till you get to know Big Guy.”

Boxers threw Irene a kiss and took a sip from his glass.

Yelena drew a deep breath, settled herself. “I am not planning terrorism,” she said. “However, my husband is.”

Jonathan recoiled. “You mean the president of the United States?”

“He is the only husband I have.”

“Now, anyway,” Boxers said. He responded to the angry glare with a shrug. “Hey, I’m just keeping it honest.”

“And honesty is important, Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “Irene wouldn’t have brought you here if you didn’t need my help. I’m not putting my life on the line for anyone who doesn’t tell me the complete truth. I don’t care who they are, or what their husbands do for a living.”

“I’m not asking you to risk anything,” Yelena objected.

“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said. “Now, who is President Darmond planning to terrorize?”

“I understand that you’ve already seen the drawings.”

Jesus, was there anything Irene hadn’t told her?

“I’ve seen a lot of drawings,” Jonathan acknowledged. “Bridges, tunnels, a building here and there.”

“The airliner that was shot down at O’Hare,” Yelena said. “That was him.”

“Bullshit,” Jonathan said. The word was out before he could stop it. He conceded that Darmond was a disaster as a president, but come on. “Why would he do that?”

Her answer came with a shrug that indicated it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Because his numbers are down.” The sibilant
s
got special emphasis with her accent.

“You mean poll numbers?” Venice asked, clearly aghast.

“Yes, poll numbers,” Yelena said. “His popularity. We are coming up on an election year, no?”

“Interesting strategy,” Boxers said with a laugh. “Vote for me or I’ll bomb your neighborhood. Has that ever worked? Outside of Chicago, I mean?”

Yelena continued. “Every president profits from crisis. Every president wishes he could have been in office for Pearl Harbor or 9/11, to be the subject of such unity and patriotism. Every president wants a
Grand Moment
.” She leaned on those last words.

Jonathan had occasionally thought that presidents thought such things, but hearing them verbalized by a president’s wife took him to a dark place. “Ma’am, attacking your own countrymen is hardly—”