Nixon fired the special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation after—
No. Stop. No more presidential trivia!
The president wags a finger. “I’m not going to comment on an ongoing investigation the special prosecutor is conducting. All I can say is that I haven’t made any ‘deal’ with Mr. Carney or anyone else.” The president waves a hand. “Thank you, all.”
The president steps down. For the first time, I see the First Lady, Libby Rose Francis, lurking in the corner. She looks back over the press corps as the president moves away from the podium. We make eye contact. She looks less frosty than usual, probably humbled by recent events. She doesn’t wave to me or mouth any words to me, but her expression eases and she nods her head in acknowledgment.
I don’t know what her life must be like. She is the First Lady, after all, so by most measures she’s doing pretty damn well. But she’s living a lie, and probably has done so her entire life. I can’t imagine what that does to a person.
Maybe these events will provoke something within her, will lead her to publicly out herself. Or maybe that video will surface some way, somehow, in the Wild, Wild West that is the Internet. I don’t know. And I don’t really care.
I just want to go home.
Chapter 111
Anne Brennan walks down the steps of her condo and looks up at the sky. It is promising rain. She begins to head north, then she catches my eye across the street. She stops and looks at me, unsure of how to respond. A casual wave wouldn’t fit the occasion.
I cross the street and stop short of her.
“They made me do it,” she says.
“I know.” I sigh. “You were in love with Diana.”
She nods. Her eyes well up with tears. “They said if I helped them keep tabs on you, they’d go easier on Diana. And they’d let me see her.”
That’s about what I figured.
“When I first came to you,” she says, “I wasn’t doing it for them. I didn’t even know Diana was alive. I really wanted your help. But they saw me with you, and then they sunk their claws in me. They told me Diana was in custody and that how well she’d be treated depended on how much I helped them.”
None of this is surprising. I take it in without comment. There’s really nothing for me to say to her, which makes me wonder why I’ve come here at all. I guess I just wanted to see her one more time.
She searches my face for something other than bitterness. I’m not sure what she finds.
“That night we had,” she says. “That wasn’t part of the plan. It just happened. I was…kind of a mess at that point. And you’re such a good guy. Anyway, I don’t regret it. I hope you don’t, either.”
But everything else was a lie. That night she called and said she’d been attacked and threatened. Her fear of being prosecuted. All of it was a lie, orchestrated by the feds to get me to stand down.
“They’re never going to let her out of prison,” she says, speaking the words as though she hopes they aren’t true.
But they are true. Diana will spend the rest of her life behind bars.
Anne’s lucky she didn’t get pinched, too. After all, she was Diana’s lover. Didn’t she know Diana was blackmailing the US government? Apparently not—or at least the feds don’t think so.
My guess is she didn’t know. But who am I to judge? This lady fooled me twenty times over.
“You got caught in a tough situation,” I say. “No hard feelings. Move on with your life, Anne.” I consider a hug, or extending my hand, but nothing makes sense. It will probably be a long time, in fact, before any of this fully makes sense to me.
So I just walk away as warm rain drops on my shoulders.
Chapter 112
I thought I was prepared for what I would see when I turned the corner, when the guard pointed to the chair and told me I had thirty minutes and that my conversation would be monitored. But I’m not.
Diana Hotchkiss is dressed in a shapeless orange jumpsuit, as I knew she’d be. Her once silky hair is now a flat mop on her head. Her face is pale, void of any color from makeup or the sun. All this I expected.
What I didn’t expect was her eyes, looking at me through steel bars, hooded and dark and glassy, revealing nothing. She is neither happy nor sad to see me. There is no hope in her expression, no life whatsoever. All emotion has been washed away. Diana is utterly and irrevocably broken.
I shrug my shoulders, unsure of where to possibly begin.
“Were we even friends?” I ask. “Was anything real?”
I hate myself for asking. I don’t want to care about the answer. But I do.
Diana is standing, leaning her back against the wall in her solitary cell, so that I see her in profile. She chews a fingernail that, from the looks of it, has been reduced to a nub already.
“Everybody plays everybody,” she says. “Everybody lies to themselves and others. Everybody uses everybody else.”
That’s what she needs to tell herself. What she did was wrong, but it was just a variation on what everybody else does. A pretty big variation, though. She was helping another country blackmail the United States of America.
“So why am I here, Diana? Why did you ask me to come?”
She takes a moment before answering. “I wanted to apologize,” she says. “I’m sorry I ever got you mixed up with this. I didn’t mean for you, or Nina, or Randy—”
With that, her expression breaks, her composure crumbles, and she is sobbing into her hand. Her cheeks have probably absorbed countless tears over the last weeks, as her life disintegrated before her eyes. I don’t know what she expected to happen. Did she really think this was going to have a happy ending?
Probably not. They’ll probably teach a course on her at Quantico, a case study in self-destructive behavior.
I feel myself pitying her, but then a sudden anger emerges. “What you did to Nina Jacobs was unconscionable,” I say. “Unforgivable.”
Diana’s sobbing escalates to uncontrollable spasms, overcome by the magnitude of her disgrace, her shame, her lack of a future—take your pick. She slides to the floor and cries for the better part of ten minutes.
When it finally abates, she says through her hand, “The week that Nina stayed at my apartment…was the week that…everything happened.”
“The week you gave the video of you and the First Lady to the Russians,” I say. “And the week they showed it to Craig Carney.”
“Yes.” She takes a deep breath. “I wanted a head start. I knew Kutuzov’s people were keeping tabs on me. I wanted them to think I was staying at my apartment.”
“So as they watched your apartment from a distance, they’d see someone who looked like you and wore your clothes going in and out of your apartment, sleeping there, feeding the cat—and they’d think you were still around town. When in fact you had left the country. Someplace warm, I assume. Someplace without an extradition treaty with the United States.”
She nods again. The CIA probably used its considerable resources to relocate her and decided that they didn’t care one bit about an extradition treaty. I picture an acquisition team dropping out of a black helicopter, arresting her on a beach or something, and then whisking her back to Quantico.
“And why call me to install the surveillance?” I ask. “You just felt like embroiling me in an international conspiracy? Misery loves company?”
“Because you were the only person I could trust,” she says.
I don’t respond. Inside, I am fighting the temptation to believe what she’s saying. She’s fooled me enough for one lifetime.
“I realized the Russians might try to kill me once they had the video and I was no longer any use to them,” she explains. “And if they tried to kill me, I wanted them on video inside my apartment.” Diana looks up at me. “Ben, I swear to you, I didn’t know they’d move so quickly. Nina was going to leave the next day. I didn’t think they’d come after me that night. I…I didn’t want her to die. I didn’t. I swear.”
> I don’t know if I believe her or not. But either way, she was being awfully reckless with someone else’s life.
“And who covered up Nina’s death?” I ask. “The CIA?”
She looks at me like the answer’s obvious. “Of course. By then they knew everything. They might have even known that the Russians were coming for me. They made a decision that they wanted everyone to believe I was dead.”
And it worked. For a while, at least. Until I got curious.
But now it’s over. Diana checked her morals at the door, made an admittedly bold and daring attempt at scoring a huge payday, and lost as badly as someone can lose. Now she will spend the rest of her life in a cell.
I loved this woman. You can’t just turn off that kind of feeling. But I loved a person who didn’t exist. I loved someone Diana was pretending to be. Maybe the signs were there, but I refused to see them. Maybe I didn’t want to see them.
The guard approaches and tells me that my time’s up. I take a deep breath and look at Diana.
I place my hand gently on the bars of the cell and look at Diana one last time. “There’s still good in your life,” I say. “It’s going to be harder to find it. But it’s there, Diana. Don’t stop looking for it.”
Then I walk away, wondering if I should start taking some of my own advice.
Chapter 113
Professor Andrei Bogomolov doesn’t answer the door when I ring the bell. Instead, a nurse leads me back into his den, where Andrei is lying on a hospital bed positioned against a wall.
Andrei looks twenty times worse than the last time I saw him, only a week ago. The hideous disease that ails him is rapidly winning the fight. Wisps of hair atop his head stand in various directions. His eyes are black and vacant.
The hospital bed wasn’t here the last time I came. Or at least he didn’t let me see it. It tells me that the end is near for him, and that he wants to die at home, not in a hospital.
He tries to smile, but even that small feat seems to cause pain. I take his hand in mine and squeeze it gently.
“Hello, old friend,” I say.
“You are…a hero,” he manages. You’ve done well, Grasshopper.
“All in a week’s work.” I’m trying to lighten the mood, but it falls flat.
I look out the window to the garden, recalling that barbecue only weeks after Mother died. If you ever feel that you’re in danger, Andrei had said to me, you can call me, Benjamin. I will help you.
“You have come here…for a reason,” he whispers.
“I came to see my good friend.” I smile at him.
Andrei winces, and then a coughing attack ensues. I pick up a washcloth at his bedside and wipe his mouth when it’s over.
“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want to say,” I tell him.
“Yes, I…do,” he manages. “It is…long past…time. A subject…I’ve debated…many times. Many…”
His eyes close. He drifts off to sleep. The pain medication from the IV drip, probably, or maybe just general weakness. After a few minutes, he snaps awake, his eyes unfocused, and he takes a moment to orient himself before he looks at me again.
“Why did my father kill my mother?” I ask.
The question and, probably, the memories it invokes cause him pain, and his mouth contorts briefly. “This is not…something…that we could confirm…at the time. But now…now we believe…we know…the answer.”
“Why did my father kill my mother, Andrei?”
Andrei takes a deep breath.
“He didn’t,” he says.
I draw back, as if zapped by electricity.
“His…employer did,” says Andrei. “Your father…tried to…prevent it.”
His employer. Father’s employer? He doesn’t mean American University.
“So there was a reason the CIA put you at American U,” I say. “You were spying on my father.”
Andrei closes his eyes and nods. “It is…true.”
“Who did Father spy for?” I ask. “The Russians?”
Andrei’s eyes open again. “China,” he says. “We believe…that your mother…discovered this…and they…the Chinese—”
“The Chinese killed my mother because they thought she was going to blow Father’s cover,” I say, everything crystallizing now.
“Just so,” he whispers. “Just so.”
I release his hand and back away from his bed. “And…why…why…why the hell…did Father frame me for—”
Out of nowhere, my throat closes up and I completely lose my composure. The tears almost jump from my eyes down my cheeks, and my chest starts to heave. I stay that way for God knows how long, whimpering like a child and crying like I don’t remember ever crying, struggling for oxygen and seizing up, trembling and screaming in choked wails, everything buried deep within me now pouring out—
Father was a spy? And that’s why Mother was so despondent all that time? She found out that her husband was a traitor. She didn’t know what to do.
When it’s over, when I’ve wiped my face and my nose and caught my breath again, I look over at Andrei. He opens a hand to me. I return to his bedside and hold it.
“My good…Benjamin,” he whispers. “If the…truth…came out…they said…they would kill…they would kill you next.”
“Father was protecting me?” I say the words as though they’re poison on my tongue.
“Your father came home…and found her dead. The Chinese told him…they could not…be implicated…nor could…he. You were…the only choice. Benjamin…your father…took every…step…to ensure your acquittal.”
No matter how my mind is spinning right now, no matter what avalanche of memories besieges me right now, even I would concede that point. I had the best lawyers and I did, after all, beat the charges.
“Is this why I never went to school? Is this why I had private tutors and hardly ever left home until college?”
Andrei nods. “He feared…for your…safety.”
Everything is upside down. Every belief I held about him—wrong.
“Years later,” says Andrei, “we finally…caught your father. It was…too embarrassing to publicly…reveal. He cooperated and…was placed…”
“Under house arrest,” I say. He was placed under house arrest at his cabin. That’s why he stayed there and never let me come, all those years, until he died. He didn’t want me to know.
“A traitor, yes,” says Andrei. “But a traitor who…loved his son.”
No. No. This is too much. Overload. System failure.
I hear myself speak but I don’t know what I said, and then I’m pacing around his den, and then the air outside is somehow cold, stinging my skin, up is down, down is up, someone else is inhabiting this body, it’s not me, I’m not Ben, and car horns are honking and tires are skidding and someone is cursing me, and then I’m running, I’m running as fast as I can and it feels good, it feels right, and I’m laughing and I’m crying, and it feels liberating, it feels normal—
Jimmy Carter is credited as the first president to routinely jog. He did it mostly for stress release. But since then almost every president has jogged except Reagan, who was probably too old to do it regularly, and George W. Bush, who had to give it up after knee pain. Reagan was a former lifeguard who preferred swimming, as did Kennedy to relieve back pain, and John Quincy Adams regularly started his days by swimming nude in the Potomac, funny story about that…
THREE THOUSAND MILES east of balmy Serra Retreat, it was cold and raining along the still-dark shore of southwestern Connecticut. Downstairs, in his basement workout room, Michael Licata, recently appointed don of the Bonanno crime family, was covered in sweat and grunting like a Eurotrash tennis pro as he did his Tuesday kettlebell workout.
As he felt the burn, Licata thought it was sort of ironic that out of all the rooms in his new $8.8 million mansion on the water in moneyed Westport, he liked this unfinished basement the best. The exposed studs, the sweat stains on the concrete, his weights and be
at-up, heavy bag. Pushing himself to the limit every morning in this unheated, raw room was his way of never forgetting who he was and always would be: the hardest, most ruthless son of a bitch who had ever clawed his way up from the gutter of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.
The short and stocky fifty year old dropped the forty-pound kettlebell to the concrete floor with a loud crack as he heard the intercom buzz on the basement phone. It was his wife, he knew from bitter experience. Not even six-thirty a.m. and already she was on his case, wanting some bullshit or other, probably for him to pick up their perpetually late housekeeper, Rita, from the train station again.
And he’d imagined that by working from home instead of from his Arthur Avenue social club in the Bronx, he could get more done. Screw her, he thought, lifting the bell back up. The man of the house wasn’t taking calls at the moment. He was freaking busy.
He was stretched out on the floor, about to do an ass-cracking exercise called the Turkish get-up, when he looked up and saw his wife. She wasn’t alone. Standing there in the doorway with her was his capo and personal bodyguard, Ray “The Psycho” Siconolfi.
Licata literally couldn’t believe his eyes. Because how could it be possible that his stupid wife would bring Ray here, into his sanctuary, to see him shirtless and sweating like a hairy pig in just his bicycle shorts?
“You’re kidding me, right?” Licata said, red-faced, glaring at his wife as he stood.
“It’s my fault?!” Karen shrieked back at him, like his very own silk-pajama-clad witch. “You don’t answer the frigging phone!”
That was it. Licata turned like a shot-putter and slung the kettle bell at her. Before she could move, the forty-pound hunk of iron sailed an inch past her ear and went right through the Sheetrock, into the finished part of the basement, popping a stud out of the frame on the way. She moved then, boy. Like a scalded squirrel.