Seven Grams of Lead (5 page)

Beryl Mallery wanted
Gordon Langlind’s Senate seat.

“How do you explain the Dutchman?” Langlind asked her during their debate, three days before the election.

She didn’t know who the Dutchman was, and she had a bad feeling that she should. No doubt Langlind was trying to shift the discussion from California’s high rate of unemployment to his favorite topic, her personal life, which he had attacked viciously and explicitly throughout the campaign.

From the moment she entered the race, Mallery recognized that her “John Does”—Langlind’s designation for the men she’d dated—posed a liability. She hadn’t been lucky in love. Or, as the tabloids put it, she
“got around.” Was that illegal? No. Immoral? According to the experts on the all-star campaign team she’d assembled, hypocrisy was the only moral transgression voters couldn’t abide. So at the announcement of her candidacy, she acted preemptively, telling reporters, “As you may know, I’m thirty-six and I’m single. My opponent will disregard the multibillion-dollar online dating service I built from my dorm room and try to position the fact that I’m one of my best customers so that it disqualifies me from the Senate. Here, in my view, are the real issues …”

Afterward, she opened her personal life to her campaign team, urging them to claw through it as if she were their opponent. They identified forty-eight John Does she’d dated for longer than dinner and eleven others who might be influenced by Langlind to declare her a deviant. Fortunately, none of the men held a grudge, and her team gained their endorsements.

But evidently the team had missed someone.

The Dutchman?

Had she ever met a Dutchman? Had she ever known anyone from Holland for that matter? Business took her all over the globe, often, so she had probably shaken hands with dozens of Dutchmen. Just none she could recall.

Silence engulfed San Francisco’s Hastings law school auditorium as the 300 audience members hung on her response to Langlind. A thousand times as
many people watched on TV. The camera lights made her pale skin look corpselike, she thought. And of course there was the urgency. The sum total was that different laws of physics applied in a live, televised debate. Time ticked faster than usual. Words had weight. The auditorium’s sixty-eight degrees could bring water to a boil.

Langlind reined in his smirk, coming off as respectful. For fifty years he had been a gangly lummox. Then his overeating caught up to his metabolism, giving his features the look of the prototypical great man—inherited, like everything else to his credit. His florid complexion, attributable to liquor, played up his silver hair. The sharp white widow’s peak gave prominence to a huge forehead, adding undeserved IQ points to his appearance.

“I’m referring to your gentleman friend in Montauk,” he said, as if trying to be helpful.

Montauk. Yes, of course. The guy—what the hell was his name?—was married with kids. Or had been when Mallery met him. Had she wrecked his home? She wondered how much the Langlind team knew. And how in the hell had they found out about this?

She’d met him back in May, prior to declaring her candidacy. Having endured five straight twelve-hour days of contentious IPO negotiations at Morgan Stanley in New York City, she let the limo driver have the weekend off and took the train alone to East Hampton. Four weeks beforehand, anticipating the need to
clear her head following the IPO negotiations, she’d had one of her assistants book her a suite at the Maidstone Inn. On entering the hotel’s impeccable lobby, Mallery saw three of the Morgan Stanley i-bankers and their spouses. She turned and fled. Renting a car at the mom-and-pop agency a block down Route 27, she drove off in search of privacy. She ran out of road at a charmingly ramshackle Montauk inn that, two centuries earlier, had hosted wives awaiting returning whalers. In the twenty-first century, its sunset happy hour attracted locals and weekending yuppies. No one recognized her. Back then, outside of Silicon Valley, people rarely did.

By the time the sun dissolved into the Atlantic, she’d enjoyed enough Bloody Marys that she decided it best to take a room rather than return to the road. She signed in with a pseudonym, a habit resulting from trips to LA where strangers would accost her with “investment opportunities” or slip business plans under her hotel room door. Returning to the bar for a nightcap, she met a handsome thirtysomething American lawyer on the tail end of a seven-week sojourn in Amsterdam where his firm had won a class-action suit against a corporation that had been burying depleted uranium on property that shared groundwater with a primary school. In his free time, he built his own wooden sailboats. He was racing one of them in Sag Harbor the next morning.

Mallery imagined herself sending bottles of Dom
Pérignon to the i-bankers for enabling her to meet the man whom she had dreamed of since she first read “Cinderella.” After four years of college, five years working in three big cities, and then three semesters of graduate school, she’d experienced such futility in finding a man who met her criteria that she parked herself at her computer for three consecutive days and nights in an effort to expand her pool of dating prospects to the entire world. At the time, online matchmaking services used algorithms that essentially gave equal weight to climbing Everest and replacing the toothpaste cap. Her product, modeled on software that matched kidney donors and recipients, hinged on a Male/Female Utility Quotient driven by individual idiosyncrasies. The formula evolved into a website on which 1 in 155 dates led to marriage, a seemingly poor rate, but better than her closest competitor by a factor of three. Mallery was 0 for 234 as her own customer when she met the Dutchman.

In the Hastings auditorium, there was a palpable feeling of expectation.

Mallery turned to Langlind. “Oh, you mean Sidney?”

Langlind raised his shoulders. That he didn’t know the name reduced the likelihood that Sidney had been the Langlind campaign team’s snitch. Probably it was somebody who’d seen her with Sidney at the bar and overheard the snippet about Amsterdam. Which was good, because if Langlind’s people didn’t
know Sidney’s name, or that he wasn’t Dutch, they probably hadn’t found out about the wife and kids.

“Interesting guy,” Mallery said.

“Are you sure?” asked Langlind. “You’d only met him that night, and, with all due respect, you’d had a bit to drink.”

The moderator nearly slipped off his chair in his rush to grasp the microphone. “Senator, is this necessary?”

Langlind shifted to choirboy mode. “I raise this incident with regret, and do so only because it speaks volumes with regard to my opponent’s fitness for the United States Senate.”

The moderator—a local anchorman—faltered, lost without his teleprompter. The only rule in the debate was decorum, but Mallery thought appealing to the moderator on those grounds would be tantamount to retreat.

Turning to Langlind, she said, “I am, to quote you, Senator, ‘no poster girl for temperance.’ Maybe someday I’ll have a drink named after me, like you do.” At Langlind’s squash club, just two blocks down California Street, the members had named a mix of whiskey and schnapps the Passed Out Naked on the Locker Room Floor.

“You had, what, four or five Bloody Marys that night?” Langlind asked.

“Five, I think,” she said. “Maybe they’ll start calling it the Bloody Mallery.”

The uncomfortable silence in the audience transformed to laughter.

Langlind didn’t miss a beat. “Plus a bourbon, all in just two hours, leading to a trip upstairs to a hotel room for which, if I’m not mistaken, you paid cash and gave a fake name. Was it because the Dutchman was married with children?”

A roundhouse punch to the jaw would have left Mallery less dazed. She hadn’t told a soul about Montauk. Not even Sidney could have known her bar tally. She’d paid cash, one drink at a time, to three or four different bartenders, each busy filling orders for the crowd of patrons. Could Langlind have had someone following her? Even if that level of surveillance were possible, why would anyone have ordered it? This was well before the party had asked her to run.

Gripping the lectern, she said, “What happened was, after the bourbons, Sidney and I were climbing the charmingly creaky wooden staircase together to my room. Then he took out his phone and texted someone,
‘Hitting hay now, need to be up early for the regatta.’
He turned to me and explained, ‘Don’t want phonus-interruptus from the wife or kids.’ Which was how I learned of them. And the affair ended right then and there.”

The audience sat in stunned silence.

Pivot, Mallery exhorted herself. Shift the topic. Langlind’s principal area of vulnerability was his poor record in the Senate; she often reiterated Ronald
Reagan’s killer question in the 1980 contest with Carter:
Are you better off?
Her campaign manager liked to say that the primary goal in a debate is convincing people you’re honest; the secondary goal is to make them think your opponent’s an asshole.

“As you may recall, Senator Langlind has brought up my ‘John Does’ before, once or twice,” Mallery said to the audience, sparking a few laughs, in turn rekindling her confidence. “If it’s important to voters, I’ll dish on the night I painted Montauk red. But the question was how to create jobs in California. That’s much more important to me. As I see it, the issue isn’t my John Does, but the John Does out there who need work.”

Thornton knew a
National Security Agency analyst who might be able to help him. He’d first made Kevin O’Clair’s acquaintance by e-mail while gathering background for an unmanned-aerial-system story eight years ago. Over the course of several more spy-tech pieces, their digital correspondence blossomed into analog friendship. But even if he’d never met O’Clair, Thornton would have felt comfortable in going to him for help today based on a single piece of biographical information. After earning a doctorate in electrophysiology at MIT, O’Clair passed up a fortune from Silicon Valley to work for the National Security Agency. In five years at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, O’Clair’s diffidence and timidity proved impediments to career
advancement. Still Wall Street recruiters contacted him every month with prospective jobs whose salaries were three or four times that of the highest government pay grade. His wife, pining for a lifestyle of country clubs and haute couture, threatened to leave him unless he cashed in. When they divorced, she moved with their then three-year-old son to Princeton, New Jersey. O’Clair obtained a transfer to the NSA’s office in Manhattan, an hour from Princeton by train. Along with child support and alimony, the jacked-up cost of living left him in a cramped apartment on the outskirts of Jersey City. He’d once confided to Thornton that his bedroom, not much larger than its full-size bed, faced a FedEx depot where the beeping of delivery trucks backing up rarely ceased, and he continued to hear the noise even when it did. A hedge fund in nearby Greenwich, Connecticut, subsequently offered him an analyst position tailor-made for an introvert, at a base salary ten times what the NSA was paying him, as well as a bonus potentially in excess of the base salary. He needed no time to think about it. He declined the offer, resolute in his desire to serve his country.

But how to discreetly brief him, Thornton wondered on the cab ride home from Penn Station, trying his damndest all the while to keep his hands off the lump behind his ear. An eavesdropping device of some sort, he suspected. In which case it was a good bet that his phones and computers were being tapped too.

At his apartment, he texted O’Clair, “It’s been too long since the last meeting of the Crossain’Wich Club.” O’Clair would probably suspect something was up. There was no Crossain’Wich Club. The two of them had never gotten together for a Crossain’Wich. Or breakfast of any kind.

At ten o’clock the next morning, the friends sat across from each other in a booth at a now-quiet Burger King two blocks from the National Security Agency’s offices in downtown Manhattan. O’Clair had been a cross-country runner at West Point fifteen years ago and never lost his string-bean physique. He attempted to counter his boyish face with a wide mustache. It made him a hard read. He had to be wondering why Thornton was now going on and on about the Knicks’ defense, or lack thereof.

When the restaurant momentarily emptied, Thornton said, “Excuse me, I’ve got to hit the head.”

Rising, he nudged across the table a small piece of water-soluble white paper that he’d purchased at a drugstore near his apartment. Hobbyists commonly use water-soluble paper as a dissolvable base for embroidery. Thornton had tossed a twelve-sheet package into his basket along with—for cover’s sake—a bunch of other items. In preparation for his meeting with O’Clair, he jotted onto one of the sheets the details of the lump he’d found beneath his scalp and his related suspicions, including an explanation of how the assassin knew to wait in ambush at Au Bon
Pain. Thornton hoped that as soon as O’Clair read the message, he would drop it into his coffee. After all, it had been O’Clair who told Thornton the story of the young clandestine operations officer who made the mistake of trying to dissolve water-soluble paper in a martini.

Thornton walked to the men’s room, pushed through the door, did three laps of the overly bright stalls, flushed a urinal, and walked out.

Biting back a grimace as he lowered himself back into his seat, he saw that his message was gone, in all likelihood responsible for the bubbles on the surface of O’Clair’s coffee.

“So, dude, I was thinking it would be good for you to get in some fresh air, bag some endorphins,” O’Clair said. “Princess Sarah’s got Nathan this afternoon. What do you say to a hike?”

The thought of it caused a flare of pain in Thornton’s rib cage.

“Sounds great,” he said.

The overcast morning became a sunny and mild afternoon. After crunching for a mile through crisp blond and russet leaves alongside Riverside Park’s jogging path, O’Clair turned sideways to fit into an opening in the three-story brick wall behind the West 103rd Street soccer field. Thornton traipsed after O’Clair into a space so dark he could see nothing beyond a
rusty staircase, and he saw that much only because of O’Clair’s powerful flashlight. Fifty degrees tops, the air reeked of mold and rodents. O’Clair explained that he had learned of this place while supervising an NSA-funded research project at nearby Columbia University.