The 500: A Novel (18 page)

And three, Marcus was using Irin as a honeypot to go after Subject 23. That seemed crazy. Why get the client’s daughter involved in such a tricky situation? Who knows? Maybe Rado had offered her up, a sort of bring-your-own bait deal. Maybe she’d tried to seduce me because she’d been sent by my bosses to figure out what I knew and see whether I was getting out of line. That seemed a little self-centered, though, even paranoid. I was only a bit player in all this.

The more I thought about it, the more I focused on one possibility: Marcus had used me to lure in Walker, so why wouldn’t he use Irin—so eager to prove her worth—to lure in the man on the tape?

CHAPTER TWELVE

IN THE ELEVEN
months I’d been at Davies Group, I’d certainly gotten to know the seamy side of politics, but any jadedness I’d acquired fell away as soon as I heard my footsteps crack across the black and white tiles of the U.S. Capitol. All the marble heroes and double-coffered gilt ceilings made me as excited as a civics geek on a class trip.

At least, I felt that way until I caught up with Walker in Statuary Hall. It’s the old meeting place of the House of Representatives, and, except for the Capitol Dome, there’s nothing grander.

I went to check in with Walker to see if I could get any more information about Irin and her father’s business. Walker had some oversight on foreign relations, and given his extensive cocksmanship over in Georgetown, the odds were good he’d either run into Irin or at least heard a bit of background on her. And after our suburban adventure, the guy was just dying to do me a favor.

So in essence, I wanted to talk smut with Walker, and he invited me to Statuary Hall, America’s closest thing to a sacred pantheon. The whole place was full of little kids and nuns. I was starting to feel worse and worse.

I caught sight of Walker standing near Andrew Jackson’s feet and headed over.

“What the—” I edited myself as a kid toddled past. “What’s all this?”

“I’m not really sure. Tight schedule today; sorry about double-booking you. I think it’s a memorial for a woman missionary. Maybe something about orphans. I’m just here for a couple photos. My pollster told me I need to soften my image among women. Charles knows.”

He pointed to the corpulent aide following about twelve feet behind us. Fun fact: senators and congressmen, the guys nominally running the country, typically have no idea what’s going on. They spend all their time begging donors for money to get reelected, schmoozing, and flying back home to officiate at pig races at state fairs. Walking haircuts, they rely on their party bosses and an army of aides—socially challenged ex-debate-team nerds—to tell them what to think. Their lives are blocked out in ten-minute increments, and assistants constantly steer them like brain-injury victims from event to event.

“Can we keep this conversation between us?” I asked.

“Of course,” Walker said, and considering the dirt I had on him, I believed he actually would.

“Good. I wanted to ask if you know a girl named Irin Dragović.”

He repeated the name, then scrunched up his face in concentration. “I may need a little more to work on.” Given Walker’s volume, I had expected him to be iffy on ladies’ names. I showed him Irin’s Facebook profile photo: a lovely shot, about 40 percent cleavage, of her drinking from a bottle of Moët & Chandon White Star.

“Oh, yeah,” Walker said. “She’s hard to forget.”

“What’s her story?”

He thought for a moment. “Comes on very strong. Knows what she wants. Gets off on the power thing big-time. She wanted to go for it in my hideaway”—those are little offices hidden in the hallways near the House chamber—“no kid bullshit, either. No cling. No sentimentality. She’s a pro. And…”

Walker looked around, checking to see if anyone was nearby. Charles was out of earshot. A pack of nuns was about fifteen feet away. Still, given Walker’s typically dirty mouth, seeing him grow sheepish about saying something made me genuinely nervous about the bomb he was going to drop.

Daniel Webster’s statue loomed behind us, glowering down. I felt like a heel wringing kiss-and-tell out of Walker under the judging eyes of the Great Expounder of the Constitution, but I had bigger problems to worry about.

“Give,” I said.

“Rough stuff,” Walker said. “You remember that crazy chick I was telling you about?”

“Not particularly.” He had a lot of war stories, and I tended to zone out during them.

“At the Ritz?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Well, I met her at that party at Chip’s. You know, that night we went out to my friend’s place and…”

“I remember,” I said. Getting arrested alongside whores and drug dealers tends to stick in your mind.

“She caught me alone in the library, came after me like a hungry whippet. We texted back and forth for a few days after that, then ended up meeting for a drink at the Sofitel. We got ourselves a room. One thing leads to another and I’m up to my ears in it and she asks me to give her a spank.

“I’m a gentleman, so I oblige. Again, and again. And then she asks me to smack her face, insists on it, actually. That’s not my thing, but I give her a playful little touch on the cheek. And then she leans up on her elbow. She stops the whole show and she says to me, like she’s my basketball coach or something, ‘Hey, listen. Give it to me real, across the face.’”

Walker gave me a can-you-believe-that look.

“Well, that wasn’t going to happen,” he went on. “Who knows what this girl is after? And I am sure not going to be tussling with her like that, maybe leaving marks and all. We went on for a while, though I think by that point my heart wasn’t in it.

“And God, we were going for it, and just as I was about ready to spit, she’d pull away. Just leave me hanging. She had me pinned and wriggling, boy, all the power in her hands. In the end she had me begging like a dog.”

I heard a gasp at that point in Walker’s story; it sounded like it came from right next to us, which was weird, because we were off by ourselves. Fun fact no. 2: The half-dome shape of Statuary Hall affects the acoustics in the chamber, so if you stand at one spot (where John Quincy Adams’s desk was, actually), you can hear conversations on the other side of the room as if they were a few feet away, and vice versa. Adams supposedly used it to spy on the loyal opposition. So too, apparently, had a sheet-faced Sister across the hall. I gathered she was the one who had gasped after picking up a few bars of our conversation.

I ushered Walker a few feet away.

“What was she trying to get out of you?”

“Access. Introductions. Whatever she wanted, really. I think she was using me as a stepping-stone to bigger things, more powerful men.” Walker shook his head. “I’d rather not tangle with her again.”

“So you stopped calling her.”

“She’d already moved on. I heard she was going after some high-up at Treasury. That’s the thing. It wasn’t really about sex for her.”

He paused as we waited for a few representatives to pass.

“It was a power thing. You could see it in the game she played, letting you be the boss and then turning the tables, wringing out of you whatever she wanted. And she told me outright. ‘You’re one of the most powerful men in the country,’ she said. ‘I’m a twenty-year-old girl. And I can make you grovel to fuck me.’”

Walker laughed. “She certainly was right about that. And with those eyes and that rack in this town, she might be running the country by the next election.”

“And her father?”

“He’s the kind of man you never want to cross. I know just enough about him to not want to know more.”

“How’s that?”

“I may have to do business with him at some point, so the less I know the better. Plausible deniability, that’s the name of the game.”

“You know anything about legal troubles, some extradition issues?”

“No, and I don’t want to.”

He was clearly in the dark on Rado, so I let it rest there. We walked on for a few feet, and I caught Walker giving me a look that pretty clearly meant
You sly dog.

“And what’s your interest in the lovely Irin Dragović?” he asked. “Sparring partner, perhaps?”

“It’s not what you’re thinking.”

“I’m sure,” he said, and shook his head. “Aww, sticky sticky.” Again with the sticky. And again, I didn’t even want to think about what that meant.

An old schoolhouse-style clock buzzed five times in the corridor behind us. Near its top, between ten and two o’clock, it had eight lights. Five lit up white, and one red.

“I’ve got to go vote,” Walker said.

“Is that what those signals mean?”

“Fuck if I know,” he said, and lifted up his BlackBerry. “I just got a text from Charles.”

He beckoned the aide over. “You’ve got my cheat sheet for me?”

Charles handed over an index card.

“Yea. Yea. Nay. Yea,” Walker said as he read it. “Easy peasy.”

“What’s the vote on?” I asked.

Walker threw up his hands. “Beats me. Ask Charles. I’ve got to run. Say, you have plans for tonight? Having a little party. Should be a real hoot.”

Walker and I had different ideas about what constituted a hoot. “Rain check,” I said.

I fled the nuns as quickly as I could. I’d been hoping my suspicions were wrong. Everything would be so much easier if I could just let the whole matter rest. But no. Based on what Walker had told me, I was even more worried about where all this was going. Irin seemed like perfect bait for the man on the tape.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WILLIAM MARCUS WAS
certainly a cagey operator, but I think after all his years in the field, the spy had finally met his match: Mrs. Marcus. For every alias and out-of-the-way meet-up Marcus used to confound foes real and imaginary, there was Karen Marcus, Facebook fiend, posting
Is it wine time yet?
and
Can’t wait to see you at the shower this weekend. xoxoxo.
She hadn’t quite mastered the labyrinth of privacy settings, so it was almost as good as having a homing beacon up Marcus’s ass.

Almost, but not quite, which is why I was skulking in the bushes outside his house in McLean, getting ready to plant a homing beacon on Marcus’s ass. Well, actually, on the wheel well of his Mercedes. They were at her niece’s baby shower up in the Brandywine Valley. The minivan was gone.

I’ll be the first to admit that technology takes all the fun out of snooping on people, and I had tried to do it the old-fashioned honest way, with all the shoe leather that entailed. During the weeks I’d spent attempting to get a bead on Marcus’s mysterious lunch dates, I dug into the literature on how to tail people. It’s great stuff: leapfrogging, paralleling, the ABC technique. One night I was reading up on the best cars to use for a stakeout when I stepped back and asked myself what the hell I was thinking of doing.

The truth was, I’d grown very attached to my blissful new yuppie life. I had a great crew of friends, the beautiful girlfriend, the backyard with the fire pit and the cold beer.

Annie and I, even though we were working crazy hours, were doing great. The week after my Irin run-in, Annie had to go to Paris for work (some Davies project that was being kept pretty quiet). I asked her if she could tack on a long weekend there and if I could come meet her (last-minute transatlantic trips were one of many luxuries afforded by the Davies Group that I could see myself getting used to). I’d been growing increasingly worried, even as we got more serious, that there was some conflict, some reservation, some hidden issue holding her back. It kept me from asking her to move in, or saying I love you. The latter I’d skirted around but always got the sense from her that it wasn’t the time. It was strange, and I wondered if it had something to do with all her one-on-one work with Henry or with a wariness about my past or my family.

But after Paris, I felt settled, sure. On our last night there, we were standing on the balcony of our hotel room, with a clear view over the Tuileries from La Défense to Notre-Dame. The setting, coming at the end of a four-day romp where we’d barely left the hotel and Annie had surprised me with quite a bit of only-on-vacation new material, was romantic enough that she probably would have said “I love you” to a pigeon, but I didn’t care. She said it to me. I said it back. She was mine. It had all come true.

Maybe that’s why I was letting these suspicions about my bosses drive me to take such risks: you get everything you want and all of a sudden you’re bored and want to start fucking it all up. But I wasn’t going to let that happen. Annie and I had reservations at the Inn at Little Washington coming up in two weeks. It’s a super-deluxe country inn, the best on the East Coast, and I wasn’t going to miss out on the meal of my life
and
vacation sex by getting myself killed playing spy versus spy against William Marcus.

Maybe I’d stumbled onto some wicked plot that endangered lives, but maybe I was just drawing lines between dots that didn’t connect and getting myself worked up over nothing. It would have been easy enough to forget about what had happened, to lose myself in the countless hours I was putting in at Davies. But every time I tried to turn away from the case of Rado and Subject 23, some new reminder would appear, like when Tuck, my closest friend at work, quit.

One day, I was grabbing coffee in the break room, though
break room
doesn’t do it justice. On the second floor, it was set up like an old-fashioned men’s club, with beautifully worn leather couches, checkerboard marble floors, and food available at all hours. Tuck came up to me with a grim look on his face.

“I’m moving on, Mike,” he said. “New job. Over at State. I wanted to tell you before you hear from somebody else.”

“Congratulations,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure if that was the right word. You could spend fifteen years climbing over bureaucratic deadwood at the State Department and still have less clout than a fifth-year associate at Davies Group. Tuck’s father was the deputy secretary, though, so I was sure he’d have a little help on his way up.