“What, you think he’s going to let us just waltz right in and take what we want?”
Finally, Owen turned to me. “We’re hardly going to need his permission,” he said.
Before I could ask why not, he was already halfway back to Wittmer’s town house, heading up the steps.
Once again, the best I could do was try to keep up with him.
CHAPTER 75
THERE WAS zero hesitation, none whatsoever.
In fact, Owen had already taken off his T-shirt—what was left of it—and wrapped it around his hand by the time he reached the top step. I was only a few feet behind him, but I could see what was coming next a mile away.
What’s a little breaking and entering among friends?
With a quick right jab, the window to the left of Wittmer’s front door all but disappeared. Working clockwise, Owen knocked away the few holdout shards until we could both climb through without donating any more blood for the evening.
Just a guess, but being two pints down on a cavernously empty stomach is probably not recommended by the American Medical Association.
Owen put his T-shirt back on, entering first. I followed. And at no time did I bother asking him what he wasn’t telling me. I figured I’d know soon enough.
Even sooner, as it turned out, when our arrival in Wittmer’s foyer was greeted with nothing and no one. Just a dead silence.
The proverbial “bad feeling about this” was suddenly spreading fast from my gut.
“Upstairs,” said Owen.
He might have just been talking to himself. I couldn’t tell. Either way, there was no sign of the doctor on the first floor.
If “sparsely furnished” was the polite way of describing the downstairs of Wittmer’s home, the upstairs made the first floor look like an episode of Hoarders. Of the first three bedrooms we looked into, only one actually had a bed. And by bed, I mean a queen-sized mattress on top of a box spring on top of a Harvard frame. No sheets. No pillows.
And still no Wittmer.
Which only made it worse, that feeling of dread. The tightening of the chest muscles. The extra pull on the lungs with each breath.
The inescapable truth of something inevitable.
Because at no time—not for one fraction of a second—did I think there was a chance that Wittmer wasn’t there in his home. The only question was where.
“Here,” said Owen.
This time, he was definitely talking to me. Pointing, too. He’d turned the corner into the master bedroom.
Two steps past the doorway, I saw him. Wittmer, wearing the same clothes as when we’d left him, was lying in the bed on his back. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said he was simply asleep.
But I did know better, if only because Owen knew better.
Wittmer was never waking up.
CHAPTER 76
MEANS AND motivation. The whole story was right there in front of us, exactly as intended. Although it wasn’t intended for us.
On the bed next to Wittmer, where the ghost of his wife surely slept, was a large photo album opened to a spread filled with happy, loving pictures of the two of them in Paris. They were kissing in front of the Eiffel Tower, arm in arm beneath the external Habitrail-like piping of the Centre Pompidou in Beaubourg, and playfully leaning against Louis Derbré’s Le Prophète in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the golden head of the statue—and their faces—beaming in the sunshine.
Claire and I used to talk about going to Paris together. But life is ninety percent talk, isn’t it?
As if connecting the dots, my eyes moved from the photo album over to the empty pill bottle, the orange-brownish variety you get from your local pharmacy. Only, there was no label on it, no indication of a prescription.
Ironically, that made the story even more convincing. Wittmer was a doctor, after all. What pills wouldn’t he have access to?
It all made so much sense. Of course, that was why it was all bullshit.
I was catching on quick, all right. Certainly faster than the police would, if at all. Odds were they never would.
This was no suicide.
“Temazepam, if I had to guess,” said Owen with a nod to the empty pill bottle. “Very effective for insomnia, Michael Jackson notwithstanding. One injection, probably to the carotid artery, and the coroner would never know the drug wasn’t swallowed.”
The image of Wittmer giving injections to the prisoners in Stare Kiejkuty flashed through my mind. Oh, the irony …
Without even thinking, I leaned in, looking at Wittmer’s neck for a needle mark. I didn’t know why, I just did. I felt sorry for him. He’d made his choices, but he didn’t deserve this.
“Christ, we can’t even call the police,” I said.
Wittmer lived alone. There was no telling how long it would be before his body was discovered. The same could be said for the guy in my bathtub back in Manhattan, but I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about him. This was different.
“Maybe we could somehow leave an anonymous tip,” I said. “What do you think?”
I was still staring at Wittmer’s neck, waiting for Owen to answer. When he didn’t, I turned around. Again, he was gone. I called out to him.
“In here,” he responded.
I followed his voice to the only room left on the second floor we hadn’t searched. Wittmer’s office.
Unlike every other room, though, this one looked the part. A large, messy desk, stacked bookcases, and a well-worn leather armchair with an ottoman. There was even a rug—a faded crimson and gold Persian with tassels, some of them frayed, some of them missing altogether.
To call it a lived-in look would be an understatement. In fact, what it really was, was depressing.
This wasn’t Wittmer’s office. This was Wittmer. Period. In the wake of his wife’s death, his life had become defined by his work. This was all he’d had.
“What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Something I shouldn’t be,” said Owen. “Not if they’re trying to cover their tracks.”
CHAPTER 77
HE WAS standing by one of the bookcases, staring long and hard at a picture in a dust-covered silver frame. It was an old photograph of Wittmer from his undergrad days at Princeton, a group shot of some members of the Cap and Gown eating club.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for the engraving at the bottom of the frame saying as much, I never would’ve known that.
So why is Owen staring at it so intently?
I leaned in close, focusing on Wittmer. He looked so young. Happy. Alive. “What am I not seeing?” I asked.
“The whole picture,” Owen said.
If I’d somehow lost the forest for the trees, there was still no finding it as I canvassed the other half dozen faces staring back at me in the photo. Owen all but expected as much, giving me a hint.
“He had a lot more hair back then,” he said.
With that, he reached out with his index finger, tracing a line from Wittmer to the guy on the end, who was lanky and, yes, had only a hint of a receding hairline.
But now I could picture him bald, and in doing so, all I could see—and recognize—was the same smirk masquerading as a smile that he always flashed in interviews as if there weren’t a question in the world that could ever trip him up.
Of course, that was according to Claire, who had, in fact, interviewed him for the Times. She said he reeked of coffee and cockiness.
“Clay Dobson?”
“Exactly,” said Owen.
“Okay, so Wittmer went to school with the president’s chief of staff,” I said. “What are you suggesting?”
“A connection.”
“Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
“Yeah, except for one thing,” he said. “There are no coincidences in politics.”
That sounded a lot like an Aaron Sorkin line, but I wasn’t about to debate it. “What kind of connection?” I asked. “Do you mean, like, orchestrated?”
“Of course not,” said O
wen, as facetious as I was incredulous. “Nothing illegal ever happens in the White House.”
Point taken. Multiple points, actually. Arms for hostages … sex with an intern and then lying about it under oath … a certain botched burglary at a hotel only a handful of miles from where Owen and I were standing?
Suddenly, the only thing I could hear in my head was the voice of then-senator Howard Baker during the Watergate hearings, asking one of the most famous—if not the most famous—political questions of all time.
What did the president know and when did he know it?
Then again, maybe we were getting a wee bit ahead of ourselves.
I leaned in again, staring at the images of Wittmer and Dobson. “It’s still only a picture,” I said.
“You’re right,” Owen replied. “It’s possible that it’s nothing. Of course, it’s also possible that Lawrence Bass really did want to spend more time with his family instead of running the CIA.”
I’d forgotten about that. Owen hadn’t. We’d watched the announcement Bass had made with his wife and two young daughters in the East Room of the White House. The guy had been the president’s pick to become the next director of the CIA. Not only was he passing that up, he was resigning from the National Security Council.
Still. Forget Aaron Sorkin. This was starting to feel more like an Oliver Stone fever dream.
“So, now … what? Bass is somehow connected, too?” I asked.
Only, this time, I could hear it in my own voice. That incredulous tone was missing. Owen could hear it, too.
“Just for the sake of argument,” he said, “what if there really was a path to the White House? How would we follow it?”
Between the two of us, I was the only one with a law degree, but you could’ve fooled me, the way he asked that question. Because lawyers—the good ones, at least—never ask a question they don’t already know the answer to.
I wasn’t the only one with Watergate on the brain.
“For the record, you don’t look anything like Dustin Hoffman,” I said.
Owen gave me a quick head-to-toe. He smiled. “Yeah, and you wish you looked like Robert Redford.”
BOOK FOUR
PANTS ON FIRE, EVERYTHING ON FIRE
CHAPTER 78
CLAY DOBSON gazed across the clutter of his large oak desk, locking eyes with his 9 a.m. appointment while doing everything he could not to break into a shit-eating grin.
It wasn’t easy.
The morning had already brought the good news from Frank Karcher that their little problem in New York had been taken care of—right here in their own backyard, no less. The kid and the reporter’s boyfriend were both dead.
Of course, so was his old college chum, Wittmer, but there was a reason Dobson had had cameras placed inside and outside Wittmer’s home. He’d never fully trusted the guy. Wittmer was weak.
So, too, was Lawrence Bass.
That was what made this meeting with him such a lay-up, thought Dobson, the former small forward for the Princeton Tigers basketball team. Dare he think it, a slam dunk.
After all, Bass hadn’t bum-rushed him out on Pennsylvania Avenue or cornered him with a clenched fist in the men’s room at the Blue Duck Tavern, where all the political heavyweights fed both their stomachs and their egos.
Instead, he’d made an appointment. An appointment? That was like knocking on a door instead of kicking it down. Total milquetoast. No balls.
“I’d like an explanation, Clay,” said Bass, sitting with legs crossed on the other side of the desk.
Even that was weak, thought Dobson. He’d like an explanation? No, you dolt, you demand an explanation!
Yeah, the decision to sandbag Bass, the former director of intelligence programs with the NSC, was looking better by the second. He would’ve made a lousy head of the CIA, not that he ever really had a shot at the gig. Bass was simply a decoy, the fall guy who would pave the way for Frank Karcher.
“Trust me,” said Dobson, folding his arms. “Karch is not the loose cannon you think he is.”
“So it’s really going to be him?” asked Bass. “The rumor’s true?”
“This is Washington, Larry. What rumor isn’t?”
Bass let go with a defeated sigh, slouching a bit. Dobson was happy to have him vent a little, but they both knew Bass had no recourse. He was a good soldier, and good soldiers fall in line.
As if having just reminded himself of that, Bass straightened up in his chair. The air returned to his lungs, his chest expanding.
“I serve or don’t serve at the pleasure of the president,” he said. “I understand the politics in play, and I appreciate your wanting to look out for me and my family.”
“You have my word,” said Dobson. “In a few months, you’ll have your pick of jobs and complete financial security.”
Bass nodded. “I know, and like I said, I appreciate that. It’s just that … Karcher? Really?”
“Listen, I understand your frustration, I really do,” said Dobson, rising from his chair. He walked over to the credenza and poured himself more coffee. It was his third refill of the morning. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, turning back to Bass. “Do you want a cup?”
“Actually, I do,” Bass said. “Thank you.”
Dobson cocked an eyebrow, surprised. The coffee offer was merely out of politeness. A perfunctory gesture. Everyone and their mother knew that Bass abstained not only from alcohol, but also from caffeine. It was the one and only thing he and Karcher had in common.
For a devout Catholic, Bass was more Mormon than most Mormons.
Was this the first loose thread, wondered Dobson? The beginning of the complete unraveling of Larry “Halo Head” Bass?
Coffee … then a little whiskey in the coffee … then hold the coffee, just give me the whiskey?
In the meantime, “How do you take it?” asked Dobson. “Cream?”
“No, but three sugars,” Bass said.
Dobson turned his back, reaching for the sugar bowl and spoon on the credenza. He began scooping. “You like it sweet, huh?”
“Yes,” said Bass. “Sweet.”
Like revenge.
CHAPTER 79
THERE WERE two things on Frank Karcher’s to-do list that morning. Both bordered on a death wish.
The first was lying to Clay Dobson. Bright and early, at oh-seven-hundred hours, he told the president’s chief of staff that the kid and the former lawyer were eliminated, their bodies disposed of so thoroughly that even God himself didn’t know where they were.
How much time this would buy Karcher, he didn’t know. But there was only so much bad news and perceived incompetence he could dump in Dobson’s lap, and that quota had already been met in spades.
So it was time for plan B. As in, bullshit. He’d played the game inside the Beltway long enough to know how things really worked. When the truth doesn’t cooperate, stop telling it.
Sure enough, Dobson was so relieved to think the kid was no longer a threat that the collateral damage—the stuff that actually was true—was taken in stride. When he was told about Wittmer, as well as about having to shut down the now bullet-ridden lab behind M Street, Dobson’s only response, after a pregnant pause, was “So the kid is definitely gone, right?”
Of course, the fact that the kid actually wasn’t gone was merely semantics, a minor detail, as far as Karcher was concerned. Sometimes a lie is just the truth that hasn’t happened yet.
Or so he’d convinced himself as he made his way to the outskirts of McLean and the off-site training gym of the CIA’s Special Activities Division, the same division he’d headed up years ago before moving up the ladder to become the National Clandestine Service chief.
The reason the gym was off-site was because it “officially” didn’t exist. Nor was it open to all the agents-in-training of the Special Activities Division. Only a select group was invited to join, the CIA’s equivalent of Green Berets.
Accordingly, hanging a sign out front that read MEN O
NLY would’ve been redundant.
Paying a visit to the gym was the second item on Karcher’s to-do list. It promised to be one the young agents would never forget, although that was precisely what they were required to do.
Nothing “officially” happens in a place that doesn’t officially exist.
Barging through the door, his heels stomping the cement floor with each and every step, Karcher marched straight across the middle of the windowless gym toward an old-school boom box on a milk crate that was pumping out Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”
Without breaking stride, he grabbed a twenty-five-pound barbell off a rack and heaved it dead center into the boom box, a perfect strike that shattered the cheap molded plastic into a hundred pieces. The gym immediately fell silent, save for the lingering echo of Lars Ulrich’s drumbeats.
Then, as patiently as possible for a man desperate to save his career, Karcher waited until every set of eyes was looking directly at him. He scratched the chin underneath his oversized head before folding his arms, his deep voice filling the room until there was no escape, not for anyone.
“Okay, he barked. “Who’s the toughest motherfucker here?”
CHAPTER 80
THERE WERE no takers, no volunteers.
This, despite the fact that membership in this particular gym was predicated on being a badass, and being proud of it.
A smart badass, though. Someone not prone to unnecessary risk or exposure, or, at the very least, someone who knew a trick question when he heard one.
Karcher glanced around amid the deafening silence, making sure to lock eyes with the dozen or so men in the room. He was giving each and every one of them his live-grenade look, the full-on crazy, the kind of batshit stare that could make Charles Manson himself step back and say, “Hey, man, whoa … chill out.”
But Karcher was only getting started.
Slowly now, he made his way over to the largest agent in the room, a brick wall with a buzz cut who was sitting on the bench press between sets. The veins rippling up and down each arm looked like maps of the DC Metrorail.