The 500: A Novel (22 page)

The Gibson was a throwback bar on U Street, relaxed and classy, a speakeasy-style place I would have dismissed as pretentious if it weren’t for the fact that the bartenders treated their spirits with an almost religious devotion. “Dancing after?” she asked.

“We’ll see.”

She smiled and headed toward the stairs. “I’ll get cleaned up before you come to your senses.”

I had some fresh New York strip in the fridge, and I started oil heating in a skillet. Annie disappeared upstairs to the bedroom and turned on the radio as I pulled out some salad. I could just barely hear it. She was always trying to catch up on the news.

Even in my own fridge I could never find stuff. I think it’s a guy thing. I jogged up the stairs to ask Annie if she knew where the mustard was hiding.

But I stopped dead outside the bedroom.

There was no mistaking it. The voice of Subject 23 was coming from inside.

I pushed open the door.

It was him on the radio. When I’d listened to that voice on the tape, it had been freighted with violence, fear of what Henry might do to him, and threats to strike back, but now it was droning confidently; calm, technical, and dry.

“Before we get to extradition,” he said through the tinny speaker, “don’t we need to address the jurisdictional threshold of whether the alleged crimes violate the law of nations?”

“What is that?” I asked Annie.

“What?”

“On the radio?”

“I don’t know. The news.” She turned away from her dresser. “Some Supreme Court case.”

I listened as the reporter came on the air: “That was Justice Malcolm Haskins in oral arguments last week, in a case that could have major repercussions for international human rights law. And now to Seattle, where…”

I ran downstairs to my laptop and tried to pull up audio of Justice Haskins. Everyone in Washington knew about Haskins; few, if any, knew him. He was a bit of a recluse and shied away from the usual parties and galas. In all my time schmoozing in DC, I’d seen him in person once, at the party at Chip’s. Then I remembered: Irin had been at the same party.

An associate justice on the Supreme Court, he actually wielded far more power than the chief justice. He was a moderate, and so he was often the crucial fifth vote, the swing vote. In a way, he had more clout than anyone else in the capital: he had the job for life, he didn’t have to fund-raise or cut deals, and his decisions couldn’t be overturned.

And I knew his name was on my list.

I found a few clips from oral arguments the previous year, and I listened to his voice. Then I pulled up the tape of the wiretap of Subject 23 I had stolen from my bosses in Colombia:

“…I wish it were all paranoia. It’s not. The man with the information: I think I found him. I have to get him before they do. They’d do anything for the evidence. If they had it, I know, I just know, it would be the end of me.”

I went back and forth between the two voices, one a pillar of the state, the other a cornered man, dangerous and afraid. I tried to calm myself, to not overreact. They were the same man: Malcolm Haskins.

“Mike!” I heard Annie yell. “The stove.”

A grease fire jumped three feet off the range. I guess I should have turned the gas off before I dug into the wiretap. I stood, pulled a lid from a stockpot, and sealed it over the frying pan. The flames licked out the sides, then died.

I’d nearly torched myself, the house, and the girl of my dreams. But the scorch marks and stinging smoke crawling along the ceiling were the least of my problems.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

AFTER I CONNECTED
Malcolm Haskins to the voice on Henry’s wiretap, a lot of mysteries from the last few weeks started to make sense.

For instance, the oral arguments I’d heard on the radio. They came from a Supreme Court case that dealt with extradition and the alien tort statute. It’s a law that goes back to the founding of the country. It says, in essence, that under certain conditions, a person can be brought to court in America for war crimes committed anywhere in the world.

If Rado had committed such crimes, as Rivera had suggested, he would be very interested in the outcome of that case. Maybe the loopholes I was going to have Walker put in the foreign relations bill weren’t so innocent; maybe they were there to protect Rado from trial in the United States.

If my bosses discovered that they could get a Supreme Court justice in their pocket, the legislation wouldn’t matter. That would explain why they took me off the case. They were all for getting me involved in low-grade hardball, but I guess it’s a good bet to leave the rookie at home when you’re talking about corrupting the highest court in the land.

I still couldn’t quite bring myself to believe it. Trying to throw the Court just seemed nuts—but so did everything else that had happened since I met Henry, so why not?

The night I nearly burned down the kitchen, I figured out that I had at least a little bit of breathing room before anything happened between Irin and Haskins. Henry had said he would hold off on going after Subject 23—what exactly he meant by that I didn’t know—but he would act immediately if Irin tangled with him herself.

I had a buddy who had clerked on the Court a couple years back. After that, he signed up with a corporate firm and got the half-million-dollar signing bonus that’s standard for guys coming out of Supreme Court clerkships. He lasted a year, then bailed; now he just lived off the bonus and traveled.

You never knew where in the world he was going to be, but you knew he was going to be checking his e-mail. I asked him if he knew where Haskins lived or whether he was in town. He got back to me in two minutes:
Not a chance he’s in DC. The guy’s like fucking Thoreau. No oral args. or conference next week, so I can guarantee he skipped out to his place in Fauquier County to play hermit for the weekend.

That same night I scanned the headlines from the past few weeks for Haskins’s public appearances and checked them against the log from the GPS I had on Irin’s car. Sure enough, at least twice she’d been to the same events Haskins had attended—one was a fund-raiser and the other a lecture at American University. She must have found out that it was Haskins who would decide her father’s fate and was sizing up the justice herself. Maybe she’d already started working her magic on him.

I called Haskins’s office the next day. I said I was from the school newspaper at Georgetown and asked if I could get some time with Haskins before his speech on campus.

“Well, son,” the press flack said, “I’m afraid he’s on vacation through next Friday. I don’t have any record of a speaking engagement.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “That’s from last year. My bad. Have a good one!” I’d probably gone a little overboard trying to sound college age, but I’d found out what I wanted. The tip from my buddy that Haskins was out of town checked out.

I could keep my eye on the tracker on Irin’s car and make sure she stayed away from Haskins so that nothing would go down until I figured out what the hell to do. I was feeling a lot better, and when I checked in on Irin (who, like Marcus’s wife, was another Internet oversharer), I found I had even more breathing room.
Have fun in Paris ;)
one of her friends wrote to her on Twitter. Great. The farther away from Haskins, the better.

I could head out to the Inn at Little Washington with Annie, clear my head, and figure out my next steps. I’d never needed a break so badly.

Saturday arrived at last, a beautiful spring day. Annie and I headed out of DC on 66, and soon enough the gentle folds of the Shenandoah mountains rose ahead of us.

Funny, though: I couldn’t resist glancing at the tracker, and Irin’s car had started moving when she was supposedly in Paris. Maybe a friend had borrowed it.

Funnier still, how the little bull’s-eye of Irin’s tracker seemed to be following me and Annie on our way out to the country. I didn’t worry too much. Lots of people head into the country on nice weekends.

And not funny at all, after we arrived at the inn (and Annie jumped for joy when she found the champagne I’d asked to have waiting in the room, and I discovered a bathroom containing splendors I’d never thought possible), I noticed the bull’s-eye turning right, off I-66, heading north into Fauquier County, where Haskins had his country place.

I suddenly lost my appetite for champagne and the six-course meal of a lifetime. I zoomed in and watched Irin get closer and closer to a little town about an hour away from us called Paris, Virginia. I’d never heard of it, but one of the many black-suited valets and concierges who were always hovering nearby and attending to our whims filled me in: it’s a getaway town in Fauquier County for Washington’s powerful, much like this burg. It seemed like a good spot for a crucial Supreme Court justice to get away from it all.

Henry and Marcus had said they would be watching Irin. And from what I overheard under Henry’s deck, I knew that if Irin got close to Haskins and whatever evidence he was hiding tonight, her life, and maybe his, would be in danger. Based on the warnings from Tuck and Marcus, I suspected that if the whole thing came apart and people got hurt, Henry would set me up to take the fall.

Let this one go,
I thought. I tried to convince myself it wasn’t happening. I couldn’t put my career on the line. And if I fucked up again with Annie, I could lose everything I’d built with the kind of girl who if you’re lucky comes along once in a lifetime. I could barely believe what I was doing—it was like I was watching myself in a dream—when I told Annie I had to go, and I would do everything I could to be back by dinner.

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wish.”

We went around in circles for twenty minutes. I couldn’t believe I was arguing against her when everything she was saying—to stay here, away from trouble—made so much sense. How could I abandon all this? Risk everything I’d earned?

I could see she was getting suspicious again, thinking about the other night, the lies, the photo of Irin.

“I would think you were cheating on me, but you’re not dumb enough to do it this clumsily,” she said. “So that’s reassuring. I just…just tell me what’s going on.”

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“I won’t.”

“Swear to me.”

“I swear.”

“It’s a case from work that got out of control. I need to drive about an hour from here and stop something from happening. Stop someone from getting hurt bad, or worse. I won’t lie to you, but I can’t tell you everything because it’s a dangerous situation, and I could never forgive myself if you got pulled into it. I’m sorry.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m coming with you.”

“I’m sorry, Annie. I can’t let you.”

“Call the police, then.”

“I will. I won’t let myself get hurt.”

“Then go. It’s fine. Just go.”

I knew I couldn’t call the police. I’d already seen Henry and Marcus put local cops in their pocket, and what could I say without sounding like a nutjob? No. This was strictly damage control: find a way to stop Irin from approaching Haskins without putting my neck on the line.

I just hoped I could do it without the whole affair blowing up. There were so many ways it could go wrong, bringing in my bosses, the press, the law; I couldn’t begin to imagine the wreckage.

The tracker on Irin’s car had stopped moving halfway between Upperville and Paris. The bull’s-eye sat in the middle of the highway. As I drove to the spot, I saw nothing: no cars and no homes, only woods and a pothole that nearly swallowed my Jeep. Maybe it had knocked the GPS unit off Irin’s car. Or it was another ambush. Either way I sped past it toward Paris.

It wasn’t really even a town, just a dozen or so Colonial houses scattered in a hollow running up to the Blue Ridge: that augured well for my odds of spotting Irin and Haskins.

I cruised the area looking for Irin’s Porsche but found nothing. After half an hour, I pulled into the Red Barn Country Store. I was starving. Tonight’s special was a bitter cup of coffee and a Snickers. Not quite the inn. I was getting a little cranky and angry at myself as I batted away doubts. I mean, what the hell was my plan here? Maybe I’d just gone nuts with paranoia.

But I didn’t have a chance to fret for very long. The long coil spring creaked as the screen door opened and slammed shut. Malcolm Haskins walked in, wearing loose-fitting jeans and a Yale Law sweatshirt. I watched his reflection in the glass doors of the refrigerators as he did his shopping: a box of shotgun shells, some trash bags, and a folding saw, the kind you use to prune trees. He could have just been provisioning for a good old country weekend—spring turkeys were in season—but his shopping list sure didn’t set my mind at ease.

As he reached for his wallet to pay, his sweatshirt drew against his waist. I could make out the outlines of an inside-the-waistband holster, sized for a hefty pistol, maybe a .40.

Bad news.

It was easy enough to follow him. There were few lights near the town, and the streets were mostly empty. I parked on a fire road hidden from the highway about four hundred yards from his house. There was no sign of Irin or her Porsche. Haskins’s cottage sat in a meadow at the foot of the hills.

I walked through sparse woods behind his house, parallel to the main road. Hiding between two trees, I could see glimpses of the interior. It seemed the appropriately stealthy thing to do, at least until I saw a white Porsche pull up in front of the house. If I had been on the road, maybe I could have spooked her somehow, or just tipped my hand and, damn the consequences, warned her.

I started toward the house, but I was too late. Irin disappeared through the front door.

Storming in and announcing that the whole thing was a setup seemed, well, rash. I’d just calmly explain to Haskins that I’d been stalking him, but only because my dear colleagues were trying to shake him down, corrupt the highest court in America, and maybe kill him. I was doing him a favor, really. That’d go over like gangbusters. And then I’d only have to deal with the consequences of having betrayed my bosses and thrown myself in front of whatever they had had planned for Haskins. Piece of cake.