Q: Or sneaking up on her while she was bent over?
A: Possibly.
Q: And the fact that the juvenile’s fingerprint was found on the weapon—would that not make this possibility more likely still?
A: Yes, it would.
Rain starts to fall. Shit. It’s hard enough to navigate the Triumph with electricity running through my veins and my thoughts scattered in twenty directions. I need to keep this bike upright and moving. I need to get to a hotel in one piece.
I need to find out what’s on Jonathan Liu’s laptop.
Q: Professor Casper, I know this is difficult, but please tell us how you came upon the scene in question.
A: When I got upstairs, I knew immediately something was wrong. I could see my wife sprawled out on the bathroom floor. I—I knew—I’m sorry. I just—it’s so hard—
Q: That’s okay, Professor Casper. Take your time. If you’d like a glass of water…
A: Our son, Benjamin, was bent over her, crying. His arms were tucked under her, like he was trying to hug her. He was…saying good-bye to her, I think.
Q: And where was the gun?
A: In my wife’s hand. I’m sure Benjamin didn’t do this. I’m sure he didn’t kill her. As much as I loved my wife, I have to believe she did this to herself. Please, Your Honor—don’t take away my son, too.
The rain is kicking up now into a full-scale downpour. I have to get off the road. I can’t think straight right now and I can’t afford—
Wait, Calvert Street, the Omni hotel—do I have time to turn?
I make a late right turn, my top-of-the-line wheels doing their best—
But I got too greedy. The bike flies out from under me, skidding across the slick intersection and crashing into a light pole.
I’m not doing so well, either. I slide about ten feet on my right side. My leg is going to need some work. But no broken bones. At least I wore my helmet. A lesson to all you kids out there.
The intersection is empty this time of night. Good for me. More good news: the bike stayed in one piece, too, I notice as I get her upright.
The bad part?
The screen on Jonathan Liu’s laptop is splintered into pieces.
Chapter 44
When Anne Brennan comes out of her condo building the next morning, she catches my eye from across the street and does a double take. She points to herself as a question and I nod.
“Ben,” she says when she crosses the street. I can only imagine how I look to her. Another sleepless night at another hotel after I tried in vain to resurrect Jonathan Liu’s laptop.
She reacts badly when I give her the news about the Chinese lobbyist. Bad as in scared, which is the appropriate reaction. Everyone associated with Diana Hotchkiss seems to be falling on hard times these days.
“What in the world is going on?” she whispers to me, shading her eyes with a hand. She’s a nice midwestern girl, fun-loving and sweet—not cut out for this kind of thing.
“I don’t know, Anne. That’s what I’m trying to find out.” This isn’t exactly an ideal locale for a conversation, standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk in the U Street Corridor, but this whole affair is so bizarre that this rendezvous seems to fit right in.
I take her by the shoulders. “Listen, Anne. I thought I knew Diana. But I guess I didn’t. I didn’t know about Jonathan Liu or Alexander Kutuzov. And I didn’t know she was taking medication for depression.”
I can see from Anne’s reaction that she didn’t know that last part, either.
“What I’m saying is, I don’t know what I don’t know. But something was going on with Diana. And whether you’ve been holding back purposely or you don’t realize it, I think you know something you haven’t told me.”
She draws back, like she’s been accused. She places a hand at the nape of her neck. “I’m not holding back. I swear. Ask me anything.”
I struggle to even know what to ask. “The White House,” I say, recalling my conversation with Jonathan Liu. “Did Diana have any connection to the White House?”
“Well, c’mon, Ben. She was Craig Carney’s aide. Isn’t he one of President Francis’s best friends?”
I sigh. She’s right, of course. Craig Carney is deputy director of the CIA and one of the president’s closest allies. He probably calls the White House his second home. Diana probably did, too.
“Diana was there all the time,” Anne says. “She was on a first-name basis with Libby.”
The First Lady, she means. Back when Blake Francis was a member of Congress, before he was elected governor of New York, he married Libretta Rose, a socialite and heiress to a jewel company’s fortune. Libby Rose Francis bankrolled his successful gubernatorial race, and eight years later he was elected president.
“And you know how Diana talked about President Francis,” she adds. “It was like he walked on water.”
I do recall that. “What about Operation Delano?” I ask. “Does that ring a bell?”
Anne’s darting eyes freeze. Recognition. Her mouth parts and she looks at me, then thinks twice about responding.
“Tell me,” I plead.
“I know that word. Delano, I mean. Not Operation Delano, but—I heard Diana say it over the phone one time. She was on her cell phone. I don’t know who she was talking to. But I remember it because it’s not a name you hear often. It was FDR’s middle name, right?”
“Right.”
“I think what she was saying was, ‘I don’t care about Delano,’ or something like that. Like she was mad, arguing with someone. I remember asking her, when she got off the phone, if she was having an affair with FDR. Y’know, making a joke.”
“What did she say when you said that?”
The wind blows Anne’s bangs off her forehead. She looks younger than her years. Under different circumstances, I might—well, under different circumstances. “She changed the subject, that’s what she did. What do you think this means, Ben? What’s Operation Delano?”
“I don’t know,” I say. There’s no point in engaging in rank speculation, especially with Anne, who’s probably freaked out enough as it is. So I don’t tell her what I think.
I don’t tell her what I get when I add up Diana’s suspicious death, the involvement of the CIA, the Chinese government, and what appears to be a massive cover-up.
I don’t tell her that I think Diana Hotchkiss might be a spy for the US government.
Chapter 45
Detective Ellis Burk drums his fingers on the steering wheel of his sedan. He says to me, “This story gets odder and odder the more you tell me.”
And he doesn’t know the half of it. I decided to leave out my trip to Jonathan Liu’s house last night. The cops can find out about his death on their own.
“Alexander Kutuzov.” Ellis nods. “I think I’ve heard of him.”
“Diana was sensitive about her relationship with him. That must mean something.”
“According to your friend Anne Brennan.”
“Right. According to Anne.”
“So I’m working on a secondhand account of how someone thinks someone else felt about something. That’s not exactly a rock-solid lead, Ben.”
“That’s why you’re an investigator, Ellis. Last time I checked, you follow up on leads. Does any of that sound familiar?”
“For cases I’m working on? Sure it does.” He looks over at me. “But this ain’t my case, partner. You’ll recall the CIA took it away from us local crime fighters. Does that sound familiar?”
Ellis is a good man. He could have told me to jump in a lake when I asked him to accompany me today. He’d have every right and every reason to. But something has raised his antennae, and Ellis is one of those cops who’s more concerned about right and wrong than he is about technicalities like jurisdictional boundaries.
Or maybe he just took one look at me and took pity on me. I’m sure I must look terrible. I peeked at myself in the mirror this morning and I looked like a character in a Tim Burton movie.
And I’m not thinking clearly anymore. I’m seeing shadows where there are none, hearing footsteps that don’t exist. I need help.
“I owe you one, man,” I say.
“You’re damn right you do.” When I don’t answer, Ellis glances at me. “We’ll check this guy out, Ben. Don’t worry.”
We drive to 5th Street in Dupont Circle, where AK Collectibles is located. It sits in the middle of the block, just as Anne Brennan said it did. Inside, the place is like a rich person’s study, with soft lighting and dark oak bookshelves, some chocolate brown leather chairs, every book covered in a protective sheath. There is classical music playing overhead and a dour gentleman looking over his glasses at us from the cash register.
Ellis flashes his badge and tells the guy he wants to talk to Alexander Kutuzov. You’d think he’d asked for a meeting with Santa Claus or the tooth fairy from the salesman’s reaction. He picks up a phone and whispers into it.
We loiter for a few minutes. I nod to a locked glass case containing a three-volume set of Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. I had a tutor, also named Jane, who liked the author so much she went to Jane Austen conventions where everyone dressed up like characters from her novels. I wish I liked anything that much. I wish my right leg hadn’t been torn up when I wiped out on the bike last night.
Also, I wish people weren’t trying to kill me.
I didn’t see the movie, but I loved Keira Knightley in Domino, where she played a bounty hunter. Very hot.
“What’s the damage?” I ask the guy behind the counter, motioning toward the glass case containing the Jane Austen books.
He looks over his glasses at me again. “Volume two has some tearing in the rear flyleaf, and we made some small repairs to a couple of the pages in volume three.”
“No. I meant, how much does this cost?”
“Ah. You are looking at a first edition from 1813.”
Look, if you don’t want to tell me, just say so.
“Sixty thousand,” says a man who appears from a door behind the counter. His accent is heavy on the Russian. He is middle-aged, bald, and dressed in a black suit, black shirt, and black tie. His neck is the size of a tree trunk, and his face looks like it was cut out of a rock formation.
“Sixty thousand what?” I ask. “Rubles?”
The man seems amused at my naïveté. “You must not be a collector.” He looks at Ellis. “Now, Officer—”
“Detective.”
“Yes, Detective. Mr. Kutuzov is not here, obviously. Though I believe he is in the States at the moment, but I cannot tell you this with certainty.”
“But you know how to get hold of him,” Ellis says. Ellis hands his card over the counter.
Knightley was also good in one of those Pirates of the Caribbean movies and one of the Star Wars prequels.
The man takes Ellis’s card and gives him another card. Ellis takes it and reads it, as do I. It’s a card for a lawyer named Edgar Griffin, from Griffin and Weaver.
“That’s too bad,” says Ellis. “I was hoping to just have a quick chat with Mr. Kutuzov and then move along. But if you’re involving lawyers, then maybe we’ll have to take him to the police station for questioning. It makes the whole thing more antagonistic.”
“Antagonistic.” The Russian allows a brief smile. “I thought in America you were not punished for requesting the assistance of counsel.”
“You know a lot about our system for a guy who sells used books for a living,” I say. It isn’t really my place to chime in, but this guy doesn’t know that I’m a reporter and not a cop. Maybe Ellis and I can be a team, like on Castle, except I’m not a crime novelist and Ellis isn’t a hot brunette, last time I looked.
Ellis says, “Tell Mr. Kutuzov, or his lawyer, that if I don’t hear from him soon, I’m going to come looking for him again, and it won’t be as enjoyable as this visit.”
The man stares at Ellis with a flare in his eyes, but he ultimately relents. “As you wish,” he says. “I shall pass on your inquiry.”
“Please do that.”
We’re back in the car a minute later. “Well, that didn’t take long,” says Ellis. “We’re barely in the door and the guy’s already lawyered up.” He looks at me. “It’s a start, Ben. We’ve shaken the tree. Now let’s see what falls out.”
Chapter 46
“Still nothing on Operation Delano?” asks Ashley Brook Clark over the phone. “I haven’t pulled out all the stops. You still want me to hold off?”
“Could be dangerous,” I say into my cell. I have a limp after the bike wipeout and I’m working on almost no sleep, but it warms me up to talk to a friend and colleague. Ashley Brook’s been with me since I started the Beat five years ago.
“Danger’s my middle name,” she says. “Hey, Ben—tell me this much. How did Operation Delano come up?”
“Jonathan Liu mentioned it to me the other day.”
“The lobbyist Jonathan Liu? The one they just found dead in his house?”
“That one, yes.” By yesterday evening, a few hundred media outlets were reporting the news. Gunshot wound, apparently self-inflicted, according to the reports, but nothing else from the MPD.
“And I got confirmation from one of Diana’s best friends, Anne Brennan. She heard Diana mention it once. Delano, not Operation Delano.”
“Same difference,” says Ashley Brook.
I’ve never really understood what the phrase same difference means. I mean, I get Ashley Brook’s meaning, which at the end of the day is the point of communication—to convey a thought—but same difference never made sense to me.
Anyway. Back to our regularly scheduled programming.
“So what is this about the Russians?” Ashley Brook asks. “You said when you called that this Delano thing ties into the Russians.”
I pass a couple making out on a park bench and experience intense jealousy toward anyone who (a) doesn’t have someone trying to kill them and (b) has someone they can make out with on a park bench.
“FDR normalized relations with the Russians,” I say. “He officially recognized them and he gave them a lot at Yalta, when he, Churchill, and Stalin were divvying up the spoils after World War II. He caught a lot of heat for that. It’s something, at least.”
“Not really, boss. It’s pretty thin.”
“That’s why I pay you princely sums to uncover information, Ms. Clark.”
“You pay me princely sums? I must not be reading my paycheck right.”
Everyone’s a comedian.
“Okay, well, I’ll look for a Russian angle,” she says. “Hey, boss? Are you still living out of a gym bag? A different hotel every night?”
“It beats being dead. By the way, if anyone shows up at the office with a submachine gun, tell them I’ve moved to Antarctica.”
“Will do. I’ll tell them you’re studying penguin mating habits. But seriously, Ben—be careful, okay?”
“Careful’s my middle name.”
“I thought Martin was your middle name.”
Don’t remind me. “I’m off to see Ellis Burk again,” I tell her. “We’ve got a date with Alexander Kutuzov’s attorney.”
“That should be fruitful. Lawyers are usually very forthcoming and helpful.”
“I know. I’m going to brush up on my Latin.”
“Okay, well, stare incolumem.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s been a while since high school,” Ashley Brook says. “But I think it means ‘stay alive.’”
Chapter 47
Two hours later, Ellis Burk and I are driving to the law firm of Griffin and Weaver, one of those swinging-dick firms with all kinds of connected lawyers and former politicians who represent major players before courts and legislatures and steamroll the rest of us on a daily basis. But that’s not why Ellis is troubled. He’s been troubled ever since he learned, along with the rest of the world last night, that Jonathan Liu is no longer breathing.
“This is against my better judgment,
taking you along,” he says.
“We’re, like, a team,” I say. I mention Castle to him but he doesn’t respond. Most cops I know don’t like cop shows. But team or not, I admit I feel more comfortable in the escort of a DC police detective. Who’s going to shoot at me while I’m hanging with a cop?
Traffic is light today, late morning. The sky is cloudless and the temperatures will hit one hundred today. The dog days of summer. It makes me think of that giant schnauzer waiting for me back at my town house, probably lifting his leg on my walkway as we speak—
I hear a sound that reminds me of thunder, which makes no sense, and before my brain can register anything the glass on the rear window has shattered, and Ellis lets out a wail and his shoulder is spouting blood and he falls forward, his jaw crashing into the steering wheel, and I start to reach for him but a torrent of gunfire tears across the dashboard and then Ellis pounds his foot on the accelerator and we burst forward, heading into the intersection against the light and cars are screeching to a halt and Ellis is shouting but I can’t make out any words. He’s using his left hand to steer and we’re both crouched down and rocking back and forth with the zigzag of the car and then his gun drops onto the seat cushion and he says, “Use it, use…it!” So I pick it up and have no idea how to fire this thing and then the gunfire starts again and glass is shattering everywhere and the body of the car is taking hit after hit whump-whump-whump along the passenger side and—
“Are you okay?” I shout.
“Shoot!” Ellis yells.
—and I lift my head up high enough to see out the window just barely and there’s a black SUV and I see the muzzle of some machine gun and I point my gun and shoot one, two, three times, blasting out my own window, and then the return fire comes, bullets buzzing over my head, and then something warm sprays onto my neck and hands and I turn and see Ellis’s face, or what’s left of it—
—and then we veer sharply to the left and something smacks my face and snaps my head back and all I’m thinking, the only thing I’m thinking before everything goes dark, is Please, not Ellis, please not him, too.