The Patriots Club (31 page)

54

“What is ‘Crown’?” shouted Bobby Stillman.

“I have no idea,” said the man they had captured in Union Square for what she thought was the fortieth time.

“Of course you know,” she insisted, then slapped his face, her sharp fingernails leaving angry furrows on his cheek.

He sat kneeling in the center of the hard terrazzo floor, wrists and ankles bound, and a broom handle laid across the backs of his knees. Prime U.S. beef buffed up, brainwashed, and trained to kill by the finest minds in the military, then spat out onto the streets to ply his trade to the highest bidder.

“You work for Scanlon,” she said, walking a circle around him, spitting her words at him like bullets. “Or is that musket on your breastbone just to attract the girls? Scanlon hires out exclusively to Jefferson. Why were you in New York?”

“We go where we’re ordered.”

“And your orders were to kill Tom Bolden?”

“No ma’am. Please, may I stand up?”

He’d been sitting in this position for thirty minutes. The weight of his buttocks and upper body pressed the broom handle into the crook of his calves, cutting off all circulation to his extremities. By now, the balls of his feet and his toes felt as if thousands of razor-sharp needles were stabbing him again and again. Soon the pain would advance to his ankles, his calves. She’d forced the experience on herself. It was unbearable. She had screamed in less than half the time.

“No,” she answered. “You may not. What brought you to Union Square?”

“We were supposed to find Bolden.”

“You were supposed to kill him, weren’t you!”

“No.”

“Your shooter missed. He wounded an innocent woman. Tell me something I don’t know. What is ‘Crown’?”

The man tried to lift himself off his knees, but Bobby Stillman pushed him back down. He moaned, but refused to answer. When his moans became shouts, and then screams, she lifted her foot and pushed him onto his side. “Five minutes,” she said. “Then we start over.”

Bobby Stillman walked outside the cottage and gazed into the falling snow. She was tired. Not just fatigued from the events of the day, the last week, but bone tired. She’d been on the run for twenty-five years. She was fifty-eight years old and her belief in her cause was fading.

A gust brought a flurry of snowflakes onto the porch. At least five inches had already fallen, clogging the mountain roads that led to her cabin in the Catskills. In an hour, two at most, the roads would be impassable. They would be stranded. She breathed deeply, and listened to the silence. The man’s shouts remained with her. It was necessary, she told herself.

She remembered a night long ago. The hot, humid air was electric with the chirping of crickets and the rattle of cicadas. And then the tremendous blast as the bomb that she and David had so carefully put together exploded outside the R & D lab of Guardian Microsystems. It had been her first step; the moment when she decided to vote with her feet. To act. To rebel. No, she corrected herself. To exercise her rights as a defender of the Constitution.

Twenty-five years . . . a lifetime ago.

She had arrived in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1971, a young, ambitious woman eager to make her mark. A graduate of NYU Law School, editor of the law review, a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War, she burned with a desire to serve. She had never viewed the law as a license to earn money, but as a call to duty, and her duty was to ensure that the rights granted by the Constitution to individual and government alike were scrupulously enforced. When she accepted a job as a staff attorney on the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, her friends were shocked. To cries that she had jumped the fence and joined the establishment, she said, nonsense. The choice was a natural one. There was no better place to exercise her calling than Capitol Hill. “Make law, not war,” was her activist’s motto.

The vice chairman of the subcommittee was a maverick second-term congressman from New York named James Jacklin. Jacklin was a decorated veteran, a winner of the Navy Cross, as close to a real-life “hero” as she’d ever met, if that’s what you could call a man who dropped napalm on women and children from the safety of a supersonic steel tube zipping high above their heads. She came to work prepared for battle, a red-haired rebel in a miniskirt with a maxim for every occasion and attitude to spare. Her job on the committee was to advise on the legality of actions proposed by the intelligence community. Even then she was a watchdog.

Instead, the two hit it off immediately. Jacklin was not the hawk she had expected. He, too, was against the war, and never afraid to express his opinions. For her every lick of fire, he contributed a chunk of brimstone. Together they exposed the secret war on Cambodia. They argued against the CIA propping up General Augusto Pinochet, the corrupt Chilean strongman. They called for an end to the firebombing of Hanoi. If her rulings were not always adopted, he urged her to keep fighting. To speak up. Jacklin anointed her the committee’s conscience.

The words were praise, indeed. He had served. He had lost a brother in the war. He knew firsthand the cost of conflict. He said that the price paid for a government’s foreign involvement was measured not only in lives but also in loss of influence, and a ceding of moral authority. It was this last that America could least afford. America of all nations. America must be a beacon of democracy, a bastion of freedom. America was the only country in the world formed not on the basis of common geography, but on a common ideology. America must remain a symbol.

And she loved Jacklin for it. For daring to speak out. For putting his ideas more eloquently than she ever could. For showing her that America’s values were a question not of politics, but of common sense.

Until the night she discovered him secretly copying her briefs and leaking them to his friends in Langley.

James Jacklin was a spy. A mole, in the vernacular that was just beginning to make itself known. And his mission was to infiltrate her and the “team” he said she represented. “The left.” His job was to gain her trust. To influence her rulings. To report the enemy’s actions in advance. He succeeded brilliantly.

Bobby Stillman’s initiation into the radical fringe was immediate.

She resigned her position on the Hill. She left Washington for New York. And she took a job with the organization that was the bane of all lawmakers regardless of age, color, creed, or party affiliation: the American Civil Liberties Union. She filed briefs. She argued cases. She wrote articles to halt the incursion of the government into the private sphere. Yet, her passivity sickened her.

From the sidelines, she watched as Jacklin rose to the position of secretary of defense and quietly rebuilt the nation’s military. She listened to his promises of a peacetime force and a need to look inward and knew he was lying. Every day that passed, she promised herself that she would act. Her anger grew in proportion to her frustration. After four years, she had her chance.

Jacklin had left the Pentagon and started Defense Associates, an investment firm that specialized in restructuring businesses active in the defense sector. When she saw that he had bought Guardian Microsystems, she knew she had found her chance.

Guardian Microsystems, which produced the most sophisticated listening devices known to man. Parabolic surveillance dishes capable of picking up conversations a half mile away. Miniature bugs that could listen through walls. The Reds didn’t have a chance. He had talked about the technology lovingly back when they had shared a bed. The thought that he would turn it against the people was the final straw.

Then came Albany.

A cry echoed from inside the dilapidated cottage. Reluctantly, Bobby Stillman walked back inside. Her colleagues had returned the Scanlon operative to his kneeling position.
Look at him,
she told herself.
He’s the enemy.

She was no longer sure.

Sometime in the last hour, she had come to believe that she was as guilty as he.

“What is ‘Crown’?”

55

Bolden stared at the pair of diamond-crusted ruby earrings. Twenty-seven thousand nine hundred dollars, from Bulgari. The next display held watches. Ten thousand dollars for some rubber and stainless steel.

Through the jewelry store’s windows, he enjoyed an unobstructed view across the lobby of the Time Warner Center. Smoked-glass doors guarded the entry to 1 Central Park, the address given the luxury residences occupying the fiftieth through seventy-fifth floors. He had been waiting ten minutes. In that time, a lavender-haired matron and her two shih tzus, a once-famous movie star, and a harried, instantly recognizable rock musician had scurried past the guards to disappear behind the smoked-glass doors.

A welter of bubbling voices drew his attention. Parading through the building’s main entrance at Columbus Circle was a tight-knit group of six or seven men and women. Several carried briefcases, one a round cardboard tube commonly used to transport building plans. All were dressed in black outfits. But it was the strange, geometric eyeglasses that gave them away. Architects, thought Bolden.

He watched them closely, waiting for them to veer to the left or right, toward the pavilion of retail shops flanking the entrance. The group steered a course toward the smoked-glass doors. Leaving his position by the jewelry store, Bolden strolled briskly across the lobby. A young woman trailing the pack caught his eye. “Just move in?” he asked, catching up to her.

“Me? Oh, I don’t live here,” the woman responded.

“But you should,” he said. “The views are marvelous. On a clear day . . . well, you know how the song goes.”

Ahead, the leader of the group waved to a guard who had already swung the door open and was ushering them in.

“The top floors are a must,” Bolden prattled on. “Cost a fortune, but the way I see it, if you’re going to break the bank, why not go all the way. What’s this, a birthday party? Someone get a raise?”

He was the bullshit artist he’d always despised, throwing one line of garbage after the next. To his horror, he saw that it was working. Not only was this serious, reserved-looking woman giving him the time of day, she seemed flattered by the attention.

“A celebration,” she said. “We just won a commission. Champagne at the boss’s place.”

“Congratulations, then. I’m sure you did all the work.”

The woman smiled self-consciously. “Only a little.”

“You’re lying. I can tell. Your cheeks are turning red. You did it all.” Bolden never removed his gaze from the woman. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see the guards giving every member of the group the once-over, doing a head count as they passed. It was then that the woman stumbled. Her heel caught on the carpet and she turned an ankle. As Bolden put out a hand to steady her, he bumped into the security guard holding the door. The woman cried out briefly, caught herself, and laughed. The entire group stopped as one, and turned to check that she was all right. The boss, an older man with a long iron gray ponytail, insisted on escorting her to the elevator. The group ambled down the hallway, their voices merry.

Left alone, Bolden turned and smiled at the guard. He was waiting for the hand to fall on his shoulder and ask him who he was, and just what in the name of God did he think he was doing trying to fake his way into the apartment building. Instead, he received a gracious “Excuse me, sir,” followed by “Have a nice evening.”

And then it was over. He was through the doors, strolling across the muted gray and polished-silver lobby, past the oriental antiquities and faux Bayeux tapestry.

He caught up to the group and they all filed into the same elevator. The architects got off at fifty-five. Bolden waited until the last had gone, then pushed seventy-seven. The penthouse. Gossip around the office was that it had gone for a cool twelve million.

“On a clear day,” he whistled, for the security camera and for himself. Reaching into his overcoat, he pulled out his baseball cap. A few calls had established that Schiff was at home, waiting to be picked up by Barry, his chauffeur, and driven out to Teterboro Airport to fly down to D.C. for Jefferson’s Ten Billion Dollar Dinner.

The elevator opened and he stepped into a cool beige corridor. Beige carpeting, beige paneling, dim lights. A door on either side of the corridor led to the penthouse apartments. Schiff’s he knew faced east, toward the park. Bolden rang the bell. He stood with his shoulder to the door, his head cocked to obscure his face. Just then, he heard a buzzer. The latch turned automatically. A voice issued from an invisible speaker. “That you, Barry?”

“Yes sir.”

Bolden pushed open the door.

Mickey Schiff rounded the corner of the entryway. He looked tanned and dapper, dressed in evening attire. Bolden rushed forward, took him by his collar, and slammed him into the wall.

“Get out of here,” said Schiff. “I already called security.”

“If you called security, you wouldn’t have let me in.”

Bolden pushed Schiff in front of him, guiding him into the living room. The condominium was decorated in a bachelor’s style, with sleek, arty furniture that didn’t look particularly inviting, the living room dominated by a sixty-inch plasma screen and a very large Picasso from his Blue Period. A bachelor worth a couple of hundred million dollars, that is.

“Sit,” said Bolden, pointing to the couch.

Reluctantly, Schiff lowered himself onto a cushion.

“You going to the Jefferson dinner?”

“Isn’t everybody?”

Bolden sat down on a matching couch across the coffee table. “First thing you have to realize is that you’re screwed.”

“How’s that?” Schiff asked, brushing dust from his tux.

“Let me lay it out, just so we’re clear,
Lieutenant Colonel Schiff
. I’ll keep it simple. Your last act as a marine supply officer was to steer a seventy-five-million-dollar contract to Fanning Firearms, a company owned by Defense Associates, an LBO firm James Jacklin set up in 1979, right after he left the Pentagon. In exchange for handing Fanning Firearms the contract, he paid you over a million dollars. Three hundred twenty thousand went for the down payment of the house in Virginia. The rest, he wired to your new account at Harrington Weiss. In addition, you received a cushy job at Defense Associates and a starting salary of five hundred thousand dollars. Even today that’s a lot for a guy with no banking experience. Back then it was a fortune.”

“I did no such thing,” spat Schiff. “That’s a shameless lie.”

“Numbers never lie.” Bolden removed a sheaf of papers he’d stuffed into the rear of his waistband and threw it onto the coffee table. “It was the first thing you taught us in our training class. Anyway, you’ll find all the details there.”

Schiff examined the papers. “Where did you get these . . .” he began, then dropped the papers on the couch. “That was twenty-five years ago. The statute of limitations has run out.”

“Who’s talking about pressing charges? I’m going straight to
The Wall Street Journal
with this. I can’t think of a reporter that wouldn’t kill for this scoop. Hell, Mickey . . . it’s not an article. It’s a book. Besides,” added Bolden, “integrity’s mandatory for running a Wall Street firm. The statute of limitations never runs out on that.”

“You want to believe that, go ahead.”

“You know something? I do want to believe that.”

Schiff considered the information, his eyes darting from the papers lying on the coffee table to Bolden and back again. He ran a hand across his mouth, alternately frowning and pursing his lips. “Okay, okay,” he said finally. “What do you want?”

“What do you think? Your help.”

“And then?”

“I’ll tear up the papers.”

“Your word?”

“I can’t destroy the records, but I’ll give you my word that I won’t turn you in. But you don’t get HW. I won’t do that to Sol.”

“Sol? Is he the saint now?”

“You weren’t the first person Jacklin bribed to get a contract, and you certainly weren’t the last. It’s his modus operandi. Five’ll get you ten that half of Jefferson’s counselors are on the take. All I’m asking is for you to help me take a look.”

“And for that you’ll forget everything you know about my involvement with Defense Associates?”

“Not quite. You’re going to the police and telling them that I didn’t kill Sol. You’re going to say that as a witness you are willing to swear that I wasn’t holding the gun when it went off. You’re also going to write a memo informing everyone at the firm that I didn’t touch Diana Chambers.”

“Anything else?” asked Schiff.

“One more thing,” said Bolden, leaning forward, arms resting on his knees.

“What’s that?”

“Tell me about ‘the committee’ or ‘the club.’ ”

“What club is that?”

“The club that gives you your marching orders. The people who told you to act dumb when you saw the doctored tape of me shooting Sol Weiss on television. The people who ordered you to beat up Diana Chambers, and to plant those fictitious e-mails on the company server. I know Jacklin’s involved, but I think there are others, too. It’s too big.” Bolden stood and circled the coffee table, eyes locked on Schiff. “Help me out, Mickey. It’s got to have a name.”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You’re out of luck, then.” Abruptly, Bolden scooped up the documents and walked toward the door.

Schiff let him get five steps before shouting, “Sit down, Tom. Come back. You got me by the balls, okay?”

Bolden remained standing.

“Look, you’re a good kid,” Schiff went on. “I’m sorry you’ve gotten mixed up in this, but there are some things you have to know. The world is not always run according to the rules.”

“Is that supposed to surprise me? So do you agree or not?”

“Yeah, sure. Have a look at the accounts. But I’m not saying a thing about Jacklin. You want to expose me? Go ahead. Call the
Journal
. Call the
Times
. Do what you got to do. But that’s as far as I go.”

“As far as you go?”

“Yeah.” Schiff tugged at his cuff, and spent a moment adjusting it so that exactly one inch of white cotton was showing.

Bolden crossed the distance between them in four steps. He grabbed a handful of Schiff’s hair and yanked his head back. “They shot my girlfriend. Do you understand that? She’s pregnant. I asked you who are they, Mickey.”

Schiff arched his back, and batted at Bolden’s hand. But beneath the pain, he was looking at him sadly, as if for all his own problems, he didn’t envy Bolden one bit. “All you have to know is that they exist.”

Bolden let go of Schiff’s hair. “Get up,” he said. He was disgusted with Schiff and disgusted with himself for having to make a deal with the devil. “You can drive me down to the office.”

“I need my keys and my wallet.” Schiff gestured haltingly toward his bedroom.

“Help yourself,” said Bolden, keeping a half step behind him.

They’d covered half of the corridor when Bolden heard a noise coming from the door to his right. A muffled cry. He stopped. “What was that?”

Schiff looked at him, then bolted for the door of his bedroom.

Bolden hesitated, then ran after him. Ahead, the door slammed shut. Bolden rammed a shoulder into it, feeling it budge. The lock flew home. Bolden backed up a step and kicked at the door handle. Two blows splintered the doorjamb. The third sent the door buckling on its hinges.

Schiff stood next to his bed, a phone cradled under his ear, pulling an imposing nickel-plated automatic from the drawer of his night table. He was desperately trying to chamber a round. Bolden stalked across the room. Schiff dropped the pistol and picked up a ten-inch jade statue. Lunging, he brought the statue down on Bolden’s shoulder. Bolden ducked, but the blow staggered him. Schiff raised the statue again. Bolden grabbed his wrist and wrenched it. The statue fell to the carpet. Still grasping Schiff’s arm, Bolden freed the phone and slammed it into the carriage.

“Who’s in that room?”

Schiff didn’t answer.

“Who’s in that—”

Schiff’s knee caught him in the stomach. Bolden doubled over. A blow to his back forced him to the ground. Schiff ran from the bedroom. The pistol lay a few feet away. Rising to his knees, Bolden picked it up and followed, stumbling, fighting for his breath.

Schiff paced at the far side of his living room, his back to the window. A lone figure floating on clouds. He had a phone to his ear.

“Put it down,” said Bolden.

Schiff stared defiantly at him. “Hello,” he said. “This is—”

Bolden raised the gun. The trigger had a feather’s weight. The window behind Schiff shattered, but did not break. Schiff fell to a knee, clutching the phone. “Hello,” he said. “Mr.—”

Bolden clubbed Schiff on the neck with the butt of the pistol. Schiff fell to the carpet. Bolden hung up the phone and returned to the room where he’d heard the muffled voice. The door was unlocked. Diana Chambers lay on the bed. A stack of melted ice packs sat on the night table, alongside several containers of painkillers. Her eye was puffy, the bruise a deep purple. “I heard shouting,” she said, pulling herself up.

“It was just Mickey.”

“Is he all right?” Even drugged up, she sounded like she really cared. “You didn’t shoot him, too?”

“What’s it to you?”

The look she gave him said it all. She was in on it, too. Mickey’s office squeeze looking to do her share for the cause. What was a black eye, after all, compared to the daily bruising she took just trying to break through the glass ceiling?

“What did he promise you?” Bolden asked. “A raise? A promotion? A ring?”

Diana slumped back on the bed, her eyes fixed to the ceiling.

Bolden came closer. “Why is Mickey doing this? Did he tell you?”

Diana Chambers glared at him, then turned her head away. Bolden took her by the jaw and turned her face toward his. “You’re being very rude, Diana. We haven’t finished our conversation. Tell me something. What is ‘Crown’? Did Mickey mention that? Did he ever talk about a woman named Bobby Stillman?”

“No,” said Diana after a moment. “Never.”

“Then why is he trying to destroy me? What did he tell you to make you agree to let him hit you? You’re a smart woman. There had to have been a reason.”