The 500: A Novel (35 page)

I started off and just missed the cops by darting through a service door. They’d swarmed over the hospital. It took a half an hour of sneaking around corners and hiding in empty rooms to end-run around them as they swept the surgery wing.

But I couldn’t leave yet. I had to see my father again, to know he would make it. I found a call room, cracked the door, and stole some sleeping resident’s coat and stethoscope off the hook inside. I headed back to my father’s wing, my face down, buried in some papers I’d pulled from the coat pocket.

I came through an inner hallway into the surgery wing, striding past two cops who were scrutinizing all civilians but seemed blind to anyone in white. I walked to an empty nurses’ station. An older nurse with a grim look approached and asked, “Can I help you?”

“I need the chart on Robert Ford.”

Apparently the stethoscope did the trick. She didn’t question me, just rifled through the hanging files on the counter. “It’s probably with the body over in pathology by now,” she said.

Impossible.

“Could you double-check?” I asked, and nodded toward the computer. She typed his name in. I stepped beside her and read over her shoulder. The screen flickered, the text black on green. I couldn’t believe the words as I scanned his record. The last line read:
Transferred—morgue—cold storage.

“Oh,” she said. “He’s down in the fridge.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

BECAUSE OF MY MISTAKES,
my father was dead, and I had three hours until Rado would come after Annie and get to work on third-world-inspired violations I refused to imagine. My only weapon, the evidence against Henry, was ash.

I had to make a choice. Lose my soul to Henry or lose what I love to Rado. Even if Annie and I managed to duck the Balkan psycho, sooner or later Henry would find out that Annie was still on my side and would use her as leverage against me. There were no secrets from Henry Davies.

Two men wanted me dead, or suffering so badly I’d wish I were. My father had the luxury of not choosing, of taking the honorable death, a martyr to the end. But if I tried that, not only would I suffer, so would Annie, and she was all I had left.

It was an impossible choice. I saw one way out, and I would pursue it with a cold, unfeeling resolve. If the honest men were all criminals, then maybe only the criminals were honest. I had to make a deal. My father may have been gone, but he’d left me the answer. I would deliver myself to my killers and hope I could con my way back out.

After I escaped the hospital, my first stop was the White Eagle, the club where Aleksandar and Miroslav regularly held court.

Black Mercedes sedans lined the two blocks around the building, a beautiful former embassy. I walked up the curving steps to the front door. Thick men in slim suits stopped me cold.

“Tell Miroslav and Aleksandar that Michael Ford is here. Tell Radomir too, if he’s around. He’ll want to know.”

One goon pressed on his earpiece. A wire trailed from it into his suit. Pretty heavy security for a “fraternal society.” They frisked me, thoroughly, then dragged me through the salons—the place was full of Euro trash and beautiful whores—to a cozy little room in the basement with a fireplace, a chandelier, and two banquette couches.

Miro and Alex appeared and bound my hands behind my back, then knocked me onto the floor, my face on the carpet. Miro stepped on my bound wrists, pinning me to the ground. He held me like that while they talked about something—I got the sense it was soccer—in a language I didn’t understand. They were extremely casual about the whole thing.

Rado arrived a half an hour later, suggesting a freedom of movement pretty bold for someone hiding from a war-crimes tribunal. After some snapping of fingers and barking in what I took to be Serbian, Alex lifted me up to my feet.

“It’s very brave what you’ve done,” Rado said. “To come here and take your punishment like a man. I’m almost sad to not be able to enjoy the little black-haired one, but this is honorable what you’re doing.”

“You want revenge?” I asked.

“This is clear, isn’t it?” He smirked, raised his palms, and looked to his accomplices. They nodded.

“I’ll help you get it,” I said.

“I have been to this dance before,” Rado said, and smiled, pleased with the Americanism. “Allow me to hazard a guess. I’ve”—he put on a sort of cop-movie tone—“got the wrong guy.”

“That’s the only reason I’d walk in here defenseless. Think about it.”

He stepped very close to me, almost kissing distance, and put his hand gently on the side of my head. He looked into my eyes, and then, with an alarming, sudden strength, snapped my head sideways into what I can only guess was the mantelpiece because I was instantly unconscious.

I wish I had stayed that way. When I came to my wrists were still bound behind my back, but now the ropes around them ran up to a hook on the ceiling behind me. The blow to my head gave everything a swimmy, underwater quality. That made it especially hard to balance. I was standing on a small crate, on the tips of my toes. Any lower, and the ropes tightened, yanking back my shoulders. One was already pretty bad off from my run-in with Marcus at the museum. Whenever I lost my balance, the ropes jerked my arms back, wrenching the sockets.

Alex held the other end of the rope and would periodically, even when I managed to keep my balance, give it a yank.

“A Palestinian hanging,” Rado informed me, ever helpful. “Known as the
strappado
to Machiavelli, when he received it for conspiring against the Medicis, and the ropes at the Hanoi Hilton. I believe it is how the North Vietnamese deprived Senator McCain of the full use of his arms.”

The only thing worse than torture is torture at the hands of a bore. Whenever I managed to slip into half-consciousness or retreat to my happy place—sleeping in on a cool Sunday with Annie’s warm bottom beside me—Rado would break in yammering with another fun fact. Fortunately, they had given me some high-octane painkillers at the hospital for my burns. I’d swiped some more on my way out. Without them, I probably would have just fessed up to the murders I didn’t commit and let Rado kill me. Instead, the pain was merely excruciating as I felt the tendons and muscles in my shoulders tear, the bones grind out of place.

“Done well, it leaves no marks,” Rado said. “And yet it can quite easily paralyze, permanently destroy the feeling in both arms.”

I was almost relieved when he stopped talking and walked behind me.

“It’s Henry you want,” I said. “And Henry wants me.”

Rado came back with a fillet knife, thin and sharp as a razor. One by one, with a few quick cuts, he removed the buttons on my shirt, then spread the fabric, exposing my chest.

“What you are saying does make sense. But as you know, it will need to be corroborated. Trust isn’t one of my strong suits.”

He touched the cold tip of the knife a few inches above my belly button and pricked the skin.

“You’ve heard about the heart thing?” he asked casually.

“Yes,” I said.

“It takes far too much effort to go through the breastbone.” He thumped mine with his fist like it was a hollow door.

“You can keep your victim conscious for more of the experience if you go under the sternum, what’s called a subxiphoid incision.”

“I’m offering you a deal,” I said. “We can help each other.”

“We’ll see,” Rado said and pressed the knife against my skin. As he tightened the flesh with two fingers of his other hand, my skin opened cleanly under the knife.

It was a long night with Rado. And that was just my first stop.

The next day, a blue spring morning, Rado and a handful of his favorite goons gave me a lift up to Kalorama, to the Davies Group mansion, for an appointment with Henry. I believe this is about when you first came into the story. My heart was intact, for the moment.

As they dropped me off, Alex flashed me his Sig Sauer. As if the gun weren’t enough, in the backseat Rado lifted a napkin to his lips, still hungering for my heart, to underscore what was at stake.

They waited around the corner while I shuffled my injured body toward the office. Davies Group had shut down for the holiday weekend, leaving only Henry and his war cabinet: the security team who toiled away in parts of the mansion the respectable folks never saw.

Marcus greeted me at the door. I could see the gap where my dad had knocked out his tooth. I hid a smile. As he brought me through security, I could tell his interest was piqued by the metal detector’s beeping at my chest. They frisked me, then stripped me, looking for weapons and wires. Henry was too smart to fall for any sting, any electronic surveillance.

Marcus searched my pockets and came out with two sets of fake credentials and something I didn’t know I’d been carrying: blueprints for a house, carefully folded, which my father, sleight-of-hand man to the end, must have slipped in my pocket at the hospital.

Even Marcus winced as my shirt came off. The cut was about four inches long, and the skin puckered around the metal. Rado hadn’t gone too deep with the fillet knife back at the White Eagle, and the bleeding stopped not long after he picked up what he had at hand—a dependable Swingline stapler—and clamped the wound shut.

It had been a long and strange week, easy enough to catalog from head to toe as I put my clothes back on: the hand burns from the DOJ fire, the facial cuts from the car crash, the two-pronged welt on my neck from the Taser. The hanging had almost dislocated my shoulder. Rado’s fresh handiwork stood garish on my chest. The healing puncture wound on my thigh from the night—it felt like a year ago—I’d listened as Marcus executed Haskins and Irin. And my swollen knee, something was definitely off in there, either from one of the falls or from barreling the Volvo through the door.

After I suited up, Marcus pointed to the weathered envelope I was carrying and said, “Envelope.” He wanted to search it.

“Not until we have a deal,” I said. “This will go wide if I disappear.”

Marcus escorted me through the concrete corridors of the secure areas, past where Gerald worked his surveillance magic, to Henry’s office. Marcus led me in, then stood guard outside.

Davies was at his window, taking in the view. Washington lay at our feet. I knew the bargain he wanted.

He would give me the kingdoms of the world in all their glory for my soul. It would be so simple. Just give in to him, let him corrupt me, and the whole nightmare would be over. No worries about Rado and his fillet knife, or about Annie’s safety.

He wanted a deal. He wanted to feel like he owned me again. And I was afraid, not of all the physical threats laid out against me, but of not being strong enough to resist Henry’s promises, his practiced manipulations that had slowly, insidiously consumed this town. I feared that he would turn me, that I would do anything he said, that, now that I understood the price of honesty—my father’s life, Annie’s pain—like all men I would happily choose corruption.

I couldn’t let that happen. I had to beat him at his own game.

Henry sat me at the far end of his conference table and leaned over me. “Just say it and all this is over. Come back to us, Mike. It only takes one word: yes.”

Henry wanted me as a protégé, as a son. And I knew he wouldn’t let me give up easily. To be worthy I couldn’t simply accept his terms, roll over, and beg to be taken back. Henry would only accept a man as cagey as he had been in his young, hungry days, someone playing hard to get.

I placed the sealed envelope on the table. For Henry, it was the one piece of leverage that could take him down: the torn-off lobe of his ear along with the police report that laid out his role in Pearson’s death. I had two things he wanted: that envelope, and myself.

“This is the only real trust, Mike,” he said. “When two people know each other’s secrets. When they have each other cornered. Mutually assured destruction. Anything else is bullshit sentimentality. I’m proud of you. It’s the same play I made when I was starting out.”

Only I knew who really killed Haskins and Irin. With that and the envelope, I was very dangerous indeed.

My dad was dead, and Henry for now believed that Annie had betrayed me. He had nothing to lever me with. For once, Davies didn’t have the overpowering advantage he was used to. It was time for me to get greedy.

“You and Marcus killing Haskins and Irin, owning the Supreme Court. That move was for more than just Radomir’s case. That’s a long-term investment. How much will it bring in over time?”

Henry smiled, a proud father. He saw where I was going. It’s exactly what he would have done.

“Enough.”

“I’m curious,” I said.

“I had a dozen clients with interests in Supreme Court decisions lined up, just to start. Over the next decade, we’re talking ten, maybe eleven figures.”

Billions, or tens of billions.

“See, Mike. This was to be my last work for clients. Soft-minded people always ask, How much is enough? How many houses do you need? It shows how limited their vision is, how narrow their wants. The money, the houses, the women a third my age: it’s all very nice. But that’s never been what it’s about.

“After the Haskins job, I would finally have enough. Enough to not have to rely on clients. Sure, I own this town. But I have to finance it by doing others’ bidding. Not anymore. No more bowing to others’ wishes. With the money that will come in now, I can finally seek my own ends, financed from my own coffers, executed through my own power. This swamp along the Potomac will be my empire, and I will answer to no one. I have only a few loose ends to tie up. That envelope, for one, and the recent regrettable unpleasantness between me and my star senior associate.”

“Partner,” I said.

“We could talk about that.”

“What does a partner bring in? Last year, say?”

Henry tented his fingers. “We use modified lockstep compensation. I could probably bump you up the ladder a bit, given your contributions. At that point, five to seven million a year. With the money from the Court coming in, next year will be a very good year. Figure four or five times that.”