But I don’t. I’m off balance from the elbow toss, and the front guy has both hands on my sport coat before I can say ambush. He pushes me up against the wall, right next to the hand dryer, while the white guy recovers from my elbow.
“Take it easy, take it easy,” I say.
He thrusts a knee into my groin and I double over. Pain is a word you can look up in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until someone drills you in the balls. And this guy knew how to throw that knee. He got the frank and the beans.
Franks and beans! Franks and beans!
The white guy grabs me by the hair and stands me up straight again. My hands go south, primitive instinct to protect what’s left of the family jewels, while I try to catch my breath.
“This is your last warning, Benjamin,” says the black guy, fixing his tie in the mirror. “Stop asking questions about Diana Hotchkiss.”
The mention of her name shakes me awake, reminds me why I’m doing this. “I’m not afraid of Jonathan Liu,” I manage to say.
“Jonathan Liu?” The black guy chuckles, then looks in the mirror at his partner, who has a bloody face. “There’s a lot you don’t know about Jonathan Liu, Benjamin.”
From behind, the white guy delivers the next blow, a sharp punch to my kidney, and I crumple to the ground. Searing pain shoots from my groin and back and head, synapses firing in all directions. My vision goes spotty and I struggle to remain conscious. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to urinate again.
The black guy squats down next to me. “You’re going to go back to DC and you’re going to call the Hotchkiss family. You’re going to tell them you’ve made a big mistake, and you’re very sorry, but you’re sure that Diana is dead and you won’t be bothering them again.”
These guys know everything we said to each other. Whoever they are, their resources are unlimited.
“And…why…would I do…that?” I manage.
“Because if you don’t, Benjamin, they’re both going to die.” The man stands again, his polished wingtips inches from my nose. “Don’t you see the pattern, Ben? Everyone you try to talk to ends up dead. It’s like you’re pulling the trigger yourself.”
Speaking of pulling the trigger. They’ve kneed me in the balls and sucker punched me. But compared to the things that have happened over the last week, that’s like a peck on the cheek.
Point being, they aren’t here to kill me. These aren’t the same guys with automatic weapons who tore up my cabin.
So who are they?
I try to move, but the pain kicks up with the faintest of motions. I’m curled up in a fetal position on a skanky bathroom floor. At least I don’t have any question about whether I’ll be able to urinate again. A warm stain has spread across my pants.
“I’m not…” I start, but it’s hard to even speak, and anyway they’ve left. It’s just me, myself, and I in the bathroom.
“I’m not going…to stop,” I say.
Chapter 35
“George, you’re going to have to trust me,” I say into my cell phone as I walk through the covered parking garage near Reagan Airport.
“Trust you?” George Hotchkiss screams through the phone. “You tell me my daughter is still alive, and now you tell me to just forget the whole thing?”
That about covers it, yeah.
“Just for now, George. Give me some time to figure this out.”
“Why the hell should I do that? Why should I wait one damn second?”
“Because your wife already lost a son, at least, and maybe a daughter, too. Don’t make her a widow on top of all that.”
That seems to quiet him. “Just give me a couple of days, George. Promise me that much. Then you can make whatever noise you want.”
I punch out my cell phone after I finally get a concession from Diana’s father that he’ll keep quiet for forty-eight hours. I don’t know if those guys in the bathroom were bluffing, but somebody is taking this very seriously, and I don’t want the deaths of Diana’s parents on my conscience, however she may have felt about them.
I pull out my keys and start to climb on my bike when I hear a squeal of tires, a car racing down the ramp from the upper level of the parking garage. It’s a black stretch limousine. And it stops right in front of me.
I brace myself. I’m a sitting duck. I’m standing in a parking space with cars on either side of me and this limo cutting off my only route of escape.
I have no good options. I don’t even have time to panic.
The tinted passenger-side window rolls down. A handsome, well-appointed Asian man stares at me.
“Well, well,” I say.
“You’ve been looking for me,” says Jonathan Liu.
Chapter 36
Opposite me in the back of the limo sit the notorious Jonathan Liu and a stocky white guy holding a firearm in his lap who looks formidable. Not barroom-brawl formidable but special-forces formidable.
Up close, Jonathan Liu is everything you’d expect—the nattily attired lobbyist, the slick look. But beneath the facade there is more—hands that tremble, eyes that dart about. Jonathan Liu is scared.
“Are you going to kill me?” I ask, which if you think about it is kind of a dumb question.
Liu studies me a moment. “If I wanted you dead,” he says, “you’d already be dead.”
That’s a pretty cool line. Something you’d hear in a movie. And convincing, too. But if I were going to kill somebody and didn’t want that person to resist while I drove him to some undisclosed location, that’s exactly what I’d say to him. If I wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. Then the guy would relax, I’d drive him to a garbage dump and say, Just kidding! and pump him full of lead.
(I mean, if I were the kind of person who’d shoot a guy.)
“Then how ’bout your friend puts away his gun?” I suggest.
Liu shakes his head. “That’s to make sure that when we’re done talking, you get out.”
“I hate to shatter your ego, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me.” Samuel L. Jackson’s line in Pulp Fiction. Always loved that line. Never thought I’d use it. Never thought it would be true.
Jonathan Liu observes me awhile. “I’d heard you could be stubborn. Relentless, actually, is the word I heard.”
I look back and forth between Brutus and Liu. “You heard that from…Diana?”
He nods but doesn’t speak.
“How is she, by the way?” I ask, as though I’m asking him about his folks or something.
The comment doesn’t register with him immediately. “What kind of a sick thing to say is that?”
“C’mon, Jonathan. I was born at night, but not last night.”
“I—don’t understand that reference.”
“Oh, now you’re the foreigner who doesn’t speak English so good? Give me a break, Jonathan. You speak English better than me.”
He leans forward, elbows on his knees. “You’re not suggesting Diana is alive.”
This guy’s a lobbyist by trade, so his entire job description comes down to two words: bullshit artist. He’ll look you in the eye and promise you that deregulation won’t lead to corporate misbehavior, that Fortune 500 companies need government subsidies so they can put people to work, even if the money goes to golden parachutes for their CEOs. He’ll piss on your leg, as they say, and tell you it’s raining.
“That would be news to the US government,” he says. “I even heard the president gave her a ten-second eulogy at his press conference.”
“And why would he do that?” I ask. “I’ve covered over a hundred presidential briefings, and other than at the death of a world leader or some other elected official I’ve never heard a president do that. For your run-of-the-mill staffer? Why is it so important to the federal government that we believe Diana is dead?”
He doesn’t have an answer for that. He has an agenda today; he planned out the whole rendezvous, so he obviously has something to tell me. I might as well hear what he
has to say.
The limo reaches the ticket booth of the parking garage and we exit. The driver, whoever that may be behind the shaded glass, pulls the car over instead of heading toward the highway.
Jonathan Liu rubs his hands together and wets his lips—tells, giveaways, indicators that something or somebody has put the fear of God into him. A good reporter recognizes all the signs.
“You’re asking the wrong question,” he says.
“And what question should I be asking, Jonathan? I have a hundred for you.”
“Have you ever heard of Operation Delano?”
I haven’t. My expression probably answers for me.
“That’s where your shovel should be digging, Mr. Casper.”
“Help me,” I say. “Tell me where to dig.”
He gives me a smile that on a normal day I’d interpret as condescension. But the sweat trickling from his brow gives me an indication of the struggle he’s experiencing.
“Delano,” I repeat. “FDR’s middle name. This involves the president? I should be digging at the White House?”
Jonathan Liu looks me squarely in the eye. His expression never cracks, but he’s not saying no.
“Now we’re done,” he says. “Get out.”
“No,” I say.
“Yes. Listen to me, Mr. Casper. You’ve created a lot of trouble for me, coming around my office and accusing me of all sorts of things. I may not even survive this.”
“Hang on a second, Jonathan. Let me reach for my hankie. I’ve been shot at, I’ve had to crash-land my plane, Diana’s brother was murdered, and I don’t know what’s happened to Diana at this point. And I’m pretty sure that you have something to do with all of that—”
“I don’t. I didn’t even know that any of that had happened to you. I knew about Diana and her brother. Not you. But now that I do know, Mr. Casper, I want you out of my car more than ever.”
“Yeah? And why’s that?”
Brutus the bodyguard clicks off the safety on his handgun. He isn’t aiming it at me yet, but it won’t be long.
Jonathan Liu says, “Because apparently you’re closer than you even realize.”
Chapter 37
I ride the Triumph back to the capital, taking an unusual route toward K Street in case someone is following me. The capital is sweltering today, and it’s so bright you have to squint. It makes it more challenging to look around for people watching you, following you, hunting you.
I feel a measure of relief and comfort as I push through the revolving door of the ground-level offices of Capital Beat. The chaos of the street noise is immediately replaced with the hushed urgency of a newsroom. The Beat is small, taking up only the ground floor of the four-story building I inherited, but I’ve packed it with a maze of cubicles—enough to accommodate the staff who keep the business running.
An unfamiliar face greets me at the front desk. She must be the new receptionist I haven’t been in to meet yet. “May I help you, sir?” she asks politely.
A head pops up from within the maze, and the advertising layout coordinator, Shari—in the newspaper business known as the “dummy”—breaks into a grin.
“Hey!” she says, more loudly than necessary. “Look who decided to grace us with an appearance!”
Immediately, five other heads pop up from different cubicles and shout greetings.
“You guys look like prairie dogs when you do that,” I retort.
“It’s an act we’re perfecting,” says Shari. “We’re hoping someday we’ll be good enough to hide on the lawn of the West Wing and blend in with the native fauna.” She looks furtively around, makes a few rodentlike noises, and disappears back into her cubicle.
I sigh. It’s good to be here.
We don’t print any publications on paper, but the newsroom still smells like ink. We get all the major papers, and someone reads them thoroughly every day. And the ink smell is mild compared to the smell of hot computer parts. So the aroma is a combination of hot plastic, dust, and damp newspapers. I think it smells like hard, honest work.
The office is pretty quiet. Most stories are filed remotely these days. The few employees I pass on the way back to my office look pretty much like you’d expect DC journalists to look. Lean and hungry, but sleep-deprived and stressed-out. Blue jeans, moccasins, no color coordination, zero fashion sense. Just like me.
The newsroom is divided into sections. The department editors—politics, grapevine, opinions and features, and photography—have large cubes surrounded by tall walls. Around each editor, the staff writers for each department have tiny cubicles, small enough for you to be able to touch both sides when you’re sitting down. The writers are usually out news-gathering, anyway. No sense in making them too comfortable at the office.
The copy editors all sit in a row down the far left-hand side of the room, their enormous monitors displaying the soon-to-be-published stories in huge type. The sales department—the only department that actually receives visitors at this location—is the most visible and most comfortable. There’s a reception and greeting area immediately to the right of the entrance in front of well-appointed cubicles furnished with large screens for displaying online advertising at each station.
I reach the large cubicle of Ashley Brook Clark, who runs the politics department and shares White House duties with me, and poke my head in. I’d called ahead and asked her the big question.
She spins on her chair and looks up at me. “Never heard of it,” she says. “Operation Delano, you said?”
“Right.”
“Don’t know it. Want me to cast a net?”
“I’m not sure. I think I like you in one piece, Ashley Brook.”
She draws back. “It’s that serious?”
I tap the side of her cubicle. “I’ll get back to you.”
My office is in the back, the only one with actual walls, though they’re all clear glass, so there’s not much privacy, anyway. The door reads BENJAMIN CASPER, EDITOR. I don’t need a title with “chief” or “executive” in it. At least an “editor” sounds like he works for a living. Of course, since Diana…well, one of the perks of owning the business is that I can count on Ashley Brook to run it for me while I’m away. I’ll need that perk for now.
Everyone wants to talk to me about the plane crash—my phone exploded with e-mails and texts after the news leaked out—but I brush them off because I’m tired, and it’s only a fraction of the story of my life over the last week.
I called ahead and had my secretary buy me some shirts, pants, underwear, and toiletries—on the company card, of course, which means on my dime—so I could stay mobile. I pick up a set and head for the bathroom.
When I turned this place into a newsroom, I blew out the walls in both bathrooms and added showers, a feature that suits the lifestyles of employees with irregular hours. Good for me now, because I need a hot shower. I’m going to wash up, change, and get the hell out of this office before whoever’s chasing me finds me here and shoots up the place. I’m radioactive right now.
When I’m done, I feel better, refreshed, and I wish like hell I could put my feet up in my office and snooze.
The buzzer on my intercom cries out. It’s the new person up front. Our last receptionist would just turn and yell back to me across the entire space.
I’m not sure I even remember how to use this thing, but I push a button and say, “Yes?”
“Mr. Casper?”
Who else would it be? “Yes.”
“Someone named Anne Brennan to see you,” she says. “She says it’s urgent.”
Anne Brennan is Diana’s best friend.
“Send her back,” I say.
Chapter 38
I greet Anne Brennan at the door of my office and offer her a chair. She looks like she could use it. She looks tired and out of sorts—frazzled, as Diana used to say.
I don’t know Anne very well. I met her just a handful of times, but other than Randy she was the only person Diana ever talked abo
ut in terms of personal intimacy. So I feel like I know her through Diana.
Anne is cute, a petite woman with curly brown hair to her shoulders, attractive in a warm, nonthreatening way. Mary Ann to Diana’s Ginger. That would make me Gilligan.
“I’m not sure why I’m here,” she says. “I’m not sure where to go. Diana trusted you so much.”
“Tell me,” I say. I’m debating what I might tell her. She should go first.
“I mean, first it’s Diana, and now people are coming around, asking me all kinds of questions about her.”
“What people?” I ask.
“The CIA,” she says. “They want to know what I know about Diana. Why she would kill herself. Was she romantically involved with someone? Things like that.”
“What did you tell them?”
I admit, I’m hoping her answer will be, You, Ben. She was romantically involved with you.
“I—I didn’t—” She gets out of the chair and starts to pace. She’s been shaken up by the feds. They have a way of doing that. “I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to tell them, y’know? I wanted to keep her privacy. But it was like they knew I was holding back. And then they start threatening me. They say they’ve pulled all my tax returns for the last ten years and they’re sure they can find something wrong with them. ‘You can always find something,’ they said. They said I could lose my home and my catering business and—”
“Anne. Anne. It’s okay. It’ll be okay. I promise.”
She bursts into tears, her face in her hands. I put an arm around her shoulder and help her back into the chair. I fetch some water from the tiny fridge behind my desk and hand her the sweaty bottle.