Mistress

Chapter 70

The ride up Massachusetts Avenue is slower than usual, given that I’m on a bicycle, but it feels good to work the lactic acid out of my muscles, which are aching from the workout that Anne put me through last night. The midday sun is cooking me on this bike, but all in all, I’ve had worse days.

“So…Nina Jacobs,” says Ashley Brook Clark into the earpiece I’ve connected to my prepaid cell phone, the fourth I’ve purchased in a week as a result of my well-founded paranoia. (Is that an oxymoron? Can paranoia really qualify as paranoia if it’s well founded?)

Anyway, it’s a good thing I have money for all these cell phones and hotel rooms. Which reminds me, I’m low on cash. I need to find an ATM, which, for me, is no small task.

I let out a long sigh. Withdrawing cash from an ATM means I’ll be on camera, which means that I can’t be wearing my biking outfit lest they’ll know it’s my disguise. I’m going to have to change back into normal clothes, withdraw the money, get the hell away from that ATM as quickly as possible before the black helicopters drop out of the sky, or whatever’s going to happen, and change back into biking clothes.

This is getting old. They’re wearing me down. I don’t know how Harrison Ford managed to do it in The Fugitive. Of course, the technology was way different; it was probably a lot easier back then to hide and stay hidden. Plus it was just a movie, and this is really happening to me.

Tommy Lee Jones was outstanding in that movie and deserved the Oscar he got, but really, that year they should have given out two best supporting actor awards, because John Malkovich was absolutely brilliant as the assassin in In the Line of Fire. (Yes, I agree that Ralph Fiennes was great in Schindler’s List, but Malkovich stole the screen every time he appeared.)

(Why am I putting my thoughts in parentheses? What’s next-footnotes? Am I losing my mind?)

“So you want this story on the front page,” Ashley Brook says. “And you want a nice big photo of Nina Jacobs, and you want me to mention Sean Patrick Riley’s name several times.”

“A photo of him, too,” I say.

“And why is that? I didn’t even like that guy when I met him.”

“It makes him safer,” I tell her. “If they catch him sniffing around and want to get rid of him, he’ll be harder to kill now that he’s gotten publicity. He’ll be more visible.”

“And you think people who are willing to fire machine guns at you in midday, at a busy downtown intersection, care about visibility?”

“I’m doing the best I can here, kid.” I stop at the three-way intersection where Idaho Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue meet 39th Street and take a squirt from my water bottle. “If Nina’s disappearance becomes big news, then it makes it harder for them to cover it up by killing people or whatever.”

“Then why don’t you apply that logic to yourself?” she asks me. “You wrote that article about Diana Hotchkiss. Why aren’t we publishing that for the same reason? To keep you safe?”

It’s a good question. I’ve already threatened Craig Carney with that very thing, splashing the entire story over the front page of my website-Diana’s connection to Carney, Jonathan Liu’s murder, Operation Delano, etc. There are two reasons I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. One of them Ashley Brook already knows.

“You and your journalistic scruples,” she moans.

Well, that’s close. I don’t have a wife or children and probably never will. Capital Beat is my only family. It’s the only thing I’ve ever created. If I print something I can’t prove, I deface something I love. And I risk a crippling lawsuit and the loss of the Beat’s reputation. We may not be the Washington Post, but we are hard-hitting, fair, and fearless, which is more than most news organizations can say these days. So if I go down in flames, I want to know that I’ve left behind at least one thing that is good in this world. And they can always print the story after my death.

But there’s another reason as well.

“I haven’t been indicted yet,” I say. “They haven’t issued a warrant for my arrest yet.”

“Okay. So?”

“So-Carney threatened to do that, right? The feds seem to be in control of this situation, and the deputy director basically promised that if I didn’t play ball with him, there would be cops serving an arrest warrant any minute. But they aren’t. They’re keeping their powder dry. So for the moment, I’ll do the same.”

“I’m not really following the logic,” Ashley Brook says.

“I think they’re as scared of me as I am of them,” I say. “Neither of us wants to pull the trigger, because once we do, the other side will respond in kind.”

“It’s like the Cold War with us and the Russians,” she says. “They didn’t nuke us because they knew we’d nuke them. Mutually assured destruction.”

Malkovich was mesmerizing in Dangerous Liaisons and hilarious as the foulmouthed ex-CIA agent in Burn after Reading. Every time he cussed, I laughed out loud.

The light changes at the intersection from red to green. Traffic starts to move northbound. I start up again on the bike and pedal through the intersection.

“So you must be close to something big,” she says.

I pick up the pace on my bike. My destination is only ten minutes away now.

“And if I’m right,” I say, “I’m about to get closer.”