The Survivors (24 page)

“It is, yes.”

“I'm trying to reach Peter Sorensen.”

“Speaking.” I heard him mumble something harsh, maybe a curse. Then: “Sorry. I'm fixing my dinner. I should know enough to use an oven mitt.” He set something down with a clunk. “How can I help you?”

I told him I wanted to talk to him about Braeder Design Systems. “Hmmm,” was all he said.

“I'm trying to put together some information on Braeder from twenty-five years ago, when they got their first big contracts.”

“Interesting period for them. How did you get my name?”

“Charlene Russo. She's—”

“Russo?” he said, suddenly coming alive. “Eric's wife?”

“Right.”

“There's a blast from the past.”

“Here's another one—Howard Markaris. He told me I couldn't trust anything you said.”

Sorensen sniffed. “Markaris is an oily reptile. Who did you say you were?”

“My name is Cal Henderson. I'm a psychologist here in the District.”

“Why is Braeder important to you?”

“It could help a patient of mine.”

“A psychologist checking out Braeder. That's certainly fitting.” He paused and I could hear silverware clinking. “All right, we can talk. Off the record, of course.”

“Of course.” What record was I going to put it in anyway?

“I should be done eating in half an hour. Drop by any time after that.”

“At the Institute? How late will you be there?”

He chuckled. “Like I said, anytime. Oh, and you'll have to knock. The doorbell is broken.” He slurped something off his finger and hung up.

I'd parked my car in a public lot a few blocks from the Hay Adams. On the way, I dialed Scottie's number. As he'd warned me, I had to leave a message. He called back before I'd gone fifty feet. From the first word, I could tell he was angry.

“Hold on,” I said. “Before you start calling me names, you should know I've been working on Braeder most of the day.”

“You still could have called. I left three messages—”

“I know. Listen, here's what's going on.” I gave him the short version: my early-morning conversation with Jamie Weston, meeting with Charlene and Cass Russo, what Tim Regis had to say. When I mentioned meeting with Howard Markaris, Scottie got angry again. “I could have been there too! Why didn't you tell me?”

I hesitated a moment too long.

“You didn't want me there. You thought I'd go nutso on the guy.”

“Something like that.” Sometimes you just have to be honest. “Either way, it worked out OK. When I mentioned Peter Sorensen's name, Markaris almost blew a fuse. He definitely didn't want me to talk to him. So I called Sorensen. He agreed to see us tonight.”

“Us?” Scottie said, trying to sound casual.

“I didn't mention you, but sure. That is, if you promise to leave your nutso at home.”

He snorted a laugh. “I don't think that's possible.”

“Where can I pick you up?”

“I'd rather have my own wheels. I'll meet you there.”

“If you say so.” I gave him the address. “Let's make it an hour from now. Sorensen said he was just starting dinner.”

The address turned out to be on a residential street not far from Georgetown University. Scottie got there before me and was sitting on the curb, studying his tablet computer. His bicycle lay beside him in the grass.

I had to park halfway down the block. As I walked back, he called, “It smells like a brewery around here.”

Some of the row houses were well maintained but others were a mess—chipped paint, gutters hanging, screen doors missing. The yards there were trampled patches of weeds littered with beer cans.

“Georgetown students rent a lot of these places. There's a party every night—twice on Saturday.”

“How do you know that?”

Because Tori told me
was the truthful answer. Still, I couldn't help tweaking him. “You need to live a little, Scottie.”

“Right,” he huffed. He stood up and dusted off the seat of his pants. His skin seemed paler than usual, and he was fidgeting like a seven-year-old in need of a trip to the bathroom.

“Are you all right?” I said.

“Sure, why not?”

I kept staring at him and he said, “I had a rotten day at work, and I was worried about what you were up to.”

“OK, one step at a time. Let's see what Sorensen has to tell us.”

“It's that place over there,” he said, nodding across the street.

It was a row house like all the others, in worse shape than some, but a lot better than the student rentals. There was a small plaque on the door that said
Defense Contracting Institute, Inc.
Washington is home to thousands of centers and foundations and associations. Some play in the policy big leagues, like Brookings and Heritage and Cato, with armies of analysts and fund-raisers. Some are lonely outposts with only one or two staffers, often washed-up government execs trying to keep their hands in the game. Others are harder to classify—and sometimes just plain wacko.

“I was doing some checking on Sorensen,” Scottie said.

“What did you find out?”

He shrugged and shoved the tablet in his backpack. “Some stuff. Let's go see the guy.”

He was so jittery, I wanted to sit down and have a talk with him, but Sorensen might have spotted us and be wondering what we were doing out there. I didn't want to spook him. So inside we would go.

Scottie locked his bike to the porch while I knocked on the door. It opened, revealing a lanky man with a shock of gray-blond hair and a matching mustache. He tilted his head back and looked down his long nose at me. “You're Henderson?”

“Yes. This is my associate, Scott Glass.”

Scottie seemed surprised that I'd mentioned him. He awkwardly stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

“Sure,” Sorensen said, ignoring the handshake. “Nice to meet you, too.” He waved us inside. “Something to drink? I think there's water in the fridge.”

“Nothing for me,” Scottie said, so gruffly that I frowned at him.

“Sure, whatever you've got,” I said.

He led us to a room off the central hall, what had been the living room when this was used as a home. There were two chairs in front of a battered metal desk. On the desk were three oldish laptop computers. Every other surface in the room was covered with stacks of papers and files. The place hadn't been dusted in about a decade.

Sorensen continued to the back of the house and soon returned with a bottle of water for me. He shambled to his seat behind the desk. I couldn't see the computer screens, but the machines were on. His eyes flicked across them. “Braeder, huh? How could finding out about those guys help a patient of yours?”

“He had a traumatic event when he was young,” I said, giving Scottie a quick glance. “It involved a woman who worked for Braeder. She had some problems there of her own, and we're trying to sort that out.”

He seemed to buy that explanation. “What do you want to know?”

Scottie cut in before I could speak. “Tell us about this place. What do you do here?”

“Military technology. We keep up on what's new, publish a weekly newsletter, monitor contracting activity, report on waste. Sometimes we give strategic planning advice to the Department of Defense. There's too much secrecy in the business. It leads to all kinds of inefficiency.”

He'd obviously delivered that spiel before. As he spoke, he stared at the computers. Something flashed up on one and he began typing. Then he took up with a second machine, tapping with each hand. I smiled, reminded of a keyboardist in some old rock band.

“How many people work here?” Scottie said.

“I've got two full-time administrators and four interns. There are about twenty others who freelance doing investigations, writing reports for the newsletter.”

“Do you live here?” Scottie said.

It was obvious that he did, and that made it a rude question. I squeezed Scottie's arm. “Let me take over for a minute.”

Sorensen was looking at us, forgetting about his computers. “No, it's all right. I do live here. I get more work done that way.”

Scottie had leaned forward and seemed to be trying to stare him down. I didn't understand what was going on with him.

“Let's get back to Braeder,” I said.

“Yes, let's,” Scottie said. “Even living here, this must be an expensive operation to run. Where do you get your funding from?”

“Ah,” Sorensen said. He slouched back in his chair, sticking his long legs out to the side. “We get our money from a variety of private sources, some in the defense industry, some outside.”

“Braeder?” Scottie said.

Sorensen looked at me, giving a faint smile. “Apparently your associate has done some research that he hasn't shared with you. Bravo, by the way, on what you've found out. Information on nonprofit funding isn't easy to track down. Yes, Braeder is one of our major contributors.”

He closed up the laptops, eliminating the distractions.

“You said you got my name from Eric Russo's wife. That's fascinating, really. The last time I saw Charlene was over twenty years ago. She threatened to kill me.”

TWENTY-FOUR

F
or half a minute Sorensen seemed lost to the world, then he stood up. “I've spent enough time in this room today. Let's go upstairs.”

I expected him to take us to his living quarters on the second floor, but he went up another set of stairs to the roof. He had a deck built there, with garden planters and expensive all-weather furniture. It was dusk, and the views were amazing—the lighted spires of Georgetown University, the Washington Monument and Capitol dome, National Cathedral.

“Have a seat,” he said. “I'll be right back.”

After he disappeared down the stairs, Scottie leaned over to me. “He's not telling us everything. He used to work for Braeder.”

“I know. Charlene Russo told me.”

“Not just any employee. He was division head—”

Sorensen had reappeared. He was carrying three highball glasses and a bottle of Black Label scotch. “Neat?” he said.

He didn't have ice, so I nodded.

He poured three stiff fingers in each glass and sat down. “I love it up here. It's the only place I can seem to think anymore. You get old, your mind gets too cluttered up with things.”

He took a sip of his drink and looked up. “Venus over there.” He pointed at a bright spot near the horizon. “In five minutes, it'll be dark enough for Vega to show.” He smiled slightly. “More clutter in my mind.”

Or just showing us you're the smartest guy around, I thought. I could go with that. “You must have done something pretty special to get Charlene Russo to threaten to kill you,” I said.

“Not really.” He nudged our glasses and nodded for us to drink up. “Unless you think tilting at windmills is special.”

Scottie took a drink, so fast I heard the
glug
from across the table. “Just tell us what happened,” he said flatly.

Sorensen looked hurt. He was obviously a bright man; he wanted some respect. I said, “We'd really like to hear the story.”

He evened up the scotch in the glasses before he went on. “All right, but it goes way back, to when I was in school.”

He told us his family had owned a military contracting outfit—not huge, but a solid business. He'd gone to Harvard, then MIT for a doctoral degree in engineering. He never was into the business end of things. He loved being in the lab, working out technical puzzles. By the time he was thirty, he had nine patents to his credit. He could have just continued on that path, “working seven days a week knocking things together,” as he put it.

Sorensen stretched out and rested his glass on his narrow belly. “Everything was great until the day I met Ned Bowles.”

“When was that?” I said.

“That was in February, twenty-five years ago.”

Scottie and I looked at each other.

Sorensen continued, “Ned's company and ours were competitors, so I had no idea what he wanted when he called and asked to have lunch. We met; he was charming. He came right to the point, too. He wanted to hire me—away from my own family. It sounded preposterous at first, but then he started talking about this new design facility he was going to build, and the other people he was going to hire. He offered me a salary three times what I was making and offered to make me division head of research for all of Braeder.” He gave Scottie a nod. “I heard you talking when I came back with the bottle. Bravo again on your research.”

Scottie shrugged slightly and took another swallow of scotch.

Sorensen said, “I went back to the office and told my father. I thought he'd treat it as a joke. Instead he blew up, told me I was an idiot for even talking to Bowles.” His voice dropped a beat. “There are some things I can't abide, even now.”