The Enemy Inside

THIRTY-ONE

She saw him leave on foot and wondered where he was going. It was the middle of the afternoon. They had already gone to lunch and returned. So Ana followed him.

Harry Hinds crossed over Orange Avenue and walked south along the front of the old hotel with its cone-shaped red roof and white siding. She wondered what her young niece and nephew would think if they saw this glittering place at night. When it was lit up, Ana thought it resembled an old-fashioned carousel.

Hinds took the curving cement walkway toward the hotel’s main entrance. Ana followed, far enough behind so that he wouldn’t notice. He might have been going to a meeting, except he wasn’t carrying a briefcase or wearing a coat.

He walked under the portico leading to the entrance and disappeared inside. Ana followed.

As she entered the lobby she lifted her sunglasses in order to see. Hinds was approaching an alcove off the main area, across from the reception counter. Under the alcove were two desks. One was empty, its plate-glass surface shimmering, not a scrap of paper on it. A woman sat at the other.

The moment she saw Hinds she stood, smiled broadly, and greeted him, not formally, but by his first name. “Harry! How have you been?” Ana couldn’t hear her, but she could read the woman’s lips.

She couldn’t make out what Hinds said. His back was to her. They chatted for a couple of seconds and the woman said, “How can I help you?”

“Oh, sure. Have a seat.”

They sat down at the desk.

Ana had her book. She plunked herself down in one of the striped club chairs against the wall in the lobby. She opened her novel and peered over the top, sharpening her listening eye.

Hinds handed the woman a folded piece of paper and they talked. “I see. I see.” The woman looked at the paper. “I see that. I can try. It’s short notice. But I’m sure we can find something. Let me take a. .” The woman swiveled around toward the computer at the side of her desk. Ana lost the half of the conversation she was able to pick up. The screen was too far away to make out anything.

The woman worked at the keyboard for two or three minutes as Hinds settled back into the chair. When she finally swung around toward him again she said, “Two coach seats. Last minute, they’re expensive.” She pulled a piece of paper from a printer under the desk, lined on it with a marker, and slid it across to him.

He looked, said something. She shook her head. And finally Hinds nodded. “Hotel’s no problem.” She said something about reservations this afternoon.

He said something else.

“Oh, sure, no problem. Feel free.” She pointed to something across the lobby. “They ask you for a room number, just tell them you talked with me,” she said.

Hinds got up and headed across the lobby, past the carpeted oak staircase, and through a door on the other side. The sign overhead read: FEDEX OFFICE CENTER. As soon as he left, the woman got up from behind the desk. For a moment Ana thought she was going to follow him, then the woman turned and disappeared under a sign that said LADIES.

Ana got up and made a beeline for the desk in the alcove, with Hinds’s note and the printout spread out on top of it. When she got there she hesitated only briefly, looked around, then down at the desk.

The note said “Lucerne,” what looked like the name of a hotel and some dates. Ana lifted her cell phone from her pocket, made sure the flash was off, and with one eye on the reception desk and the other on the ladies’ room, snapped three or four quick pictures of the note and the single page computer printout.

Satisfied that no one had seen her, she drifted away across the lobby and toward the business center where Hinds had disappeared. Through the glass door she could see inside. He was seated at one of the computer workstations chipping away at the keyboard. Why would he come over here to use the computer? she wondered. Then she thought about the man going through their trash behind the office. The lawyers knew they were being monitored. Ana made a mental note to be more cautious.

The gleaming black Town Car with Senate plates pulled up in front of the low metal building at Reagan National Airport. They were only three miles from the Capitol. The driver and another staffer, each wearing stiff dark suits, opened the doors and quickly stepped out of the front of the car.

The driver ran to the back to get her luggage from the trunk. The other young man opened the back right passenger door. Grimes set one foot onto the sidewalk, a forty-five-hundred-dollar Christian Louboutin Croc pump, took the young man’s hand, and exited the car.

She took a couple of seconds to assemble herself on the sidewalk, fluffed up her hair and straightened the long cardigan scarf so that it draped properly down the front of her dress, a one-of-a-kind Dior casual fashioned exclusively for travel.

The driver hustled her luggage up the ramp and into the building. The two men had been to this place enough times by now, almost every Thursday afternoon, to know the drill. They would pick her up at the same location Tuesday morning.

Grimes’s Gulfstream, the one she and her husband owned, was parked in a hangar on the other side of the building. She walked up the steps while her assistant carried her briefcase and computer and held the door open for her.

There was no TSA screening here, nobody sticking a hand up your crotch or x-raying your body, and no lines, no screaming children or bumping up against the unwashed. Though today Grimes had to suffer the inconvenience of a late takeoff.

She was waiting for two House members whose session was running a few minutes late, people from her own party who were hitching a ride home with her. She had hoped they would be here by now. They would, of course, have to pay for the privilege, or at least the taxpayers would, this to keep the seam on their ethics straight.

Air travel on private jets for members of Congress had become an issue a few years earlier when corporations started using it to gain access. The way to avoid the conflict of a gift was to have the members pay at least part of the cost. Now for a few thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money, funds from their office budget, they could party all the way across the country. No problem.

But today there was a problem. Her driver, coming the other way from delivering her luggage to the plane, stepped up close. “Senator. There’s someone waiting to see you.”

“Where?”

“Outside. He wouldn’t give me his name.” The assistant stepped off to the side so that Grimes could see past him through the glass door leading out into the hangar.

The Eagle was standing on the gleaming concrete just this side of the stairway leading up to the open door of the plane.

“He said that you would want to talk to him.” The look on Grimes’s face told the kid that something was wrong. “Do you want me to call security?”

“NO! It’s all right. . not a problem.”

“Would you like us to stay?”

“Ahh, no. . put my computer and the briefcase on the plane. Then take the car and go, both of you, back to the office.”

“Are you sure?”

Grimes snapped her eyes toward the kid and froze him with a cold look. “I wouldn’t say it if I wasn’t. Now go!” One of them headed for the plane with her briefcase and computer in hand. The other one disappeared out the front door back toward the car.

She looked at the Eagle, who just stood there staring at her through the closing glass door, a simpering smile on his face. Whatever it was, he’d better make it quick. She wanted him out of here before her colleagues arrived. It wouldn’t do to have them seen together.

“What do you want?”

“Perhaps you’d like to talk up in the cabin,” he said.

“We can talk right here.”

“I could use a ride out to the coast.” He had his own plane, but he wanted to talk to her on hers.

“That isn’t happening!” said Grimes. “I have other passengers today.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Two other members.”

“That’s great. I’d love to meet ’em.” He headed toward the stairs and started to climb.

“And my husband’s meeting me at the other end.”

“You can introduce us,” said the Eagle.

She looked toward the building, hoping the other two members wouldn’t come walking through the door any second.

“Aren’t you coming?” He stood at the top of the stairs in the plane’s open door, looking down at her.

She had no choice. Grimes climbed the stairs as quickly as she could. Once inside, she was greeted by the copilot. “Hank, this is Mr., uh. . Mr. Black. He’ll be flying with us today.” She looked nervously over her shoulder. “We should take off immediately.”

“I thought there were two today. Another passenger?”

“He canceled at the last minute,” said Grimes. “I’d like to get moving as quickly as possible.”

“You got it.” The copilot whistled. Two guys came out and rolled the stairs away. He closed the door and threw the lever to lock the pressurized seal. Then went forward. A few seconds later the engines started.

The Eagle settled into one of the cream-colored overstuffed executive swivel seats in the cabin. It was a nice plane, but not as nice as the one he owned himself, which was a later model.

The Gulfstream moved slowly out of the hangar onto the taxiway and started out toward the runway. Grimes leaned over and looked back through one of the windows.

“You might want to sit down, buckle up,” said the Eagle. “But then I guess you own the plane, you make the rules. You wanna become jelly on the rear bulkhead, you paid for it, why not.”

She dropped into one of the chairs on the other side of the cabin, buckled herself in, crossed her legs, crossed her arms, and glared at him.

“Blue Crocodile.” He looked at her shoes. “Do they come that way? I mean snapping up out of the bayou? Or do they have to dye ’em?”

“What do you want?” She said this through lips stretched tight as a drum.

“I’ll bet those are a real hit with the green-granola set. But then they probably don’t know about the airplane either, do they?” He lowered his head a little and leaned forward so he could see out through the little porthole window just behind her. “Hey, isn’t that Jim Bellows? Maybe we should wave.”

She turned around in the chair. Bellows, a congressman from the Bay Area, was standing out in front of the hangar waving his arms frantically, motioning for them to come back.

Suddenly the door to the flight compartment opened. The copilot stuck his head out. “Looks like your other passenger showed up after all. You want to go back?”

“No!” said Grimes. “Just keep going.”

The guy shrugged his shoulder and closed the door.

“My attitude entirely,” said the Eagle. “Man wants to fly, he ought to be here on time.”

“I don’t know what I’m going to say to him next week,” said Grimes.

“Tell him he got bumped.”

“What do you want?”

“Oh, yeah, business. Well, let’s see. It’s going to be a long flight. We’ve got a lot of time. What is it, five hours?”

She ignored him. “I suppose the next thing you’re going to want is a drink.”

“Wouldn’t hurt,” he said. “Is there a flight attendant on board or will you be serving?”

“Get on with it.” One of the blue high heels was now tapping the floor.

“Well, if you’re gonna be that way, fine. Let’s talk business. I take it you took care of the two judicial vacancies? Called the White House?”

“Is that what this is about?”

“Among other things,” said the Eagle. He looked around, noticed the door at the rear of the cabin. “This thing got a bed back there? I could use some Zs later.”

“Yes, I made the call! Just like you asked.”

“What did they say?”

“They weren’t happy. I’ll tell you that. They wanted to know the names of the people I was leaning toward.”

“And what did you say?”

“I told them I’d let them know as soon as my staff was finished checking them out. Exactly what you said.”

“And?”

“What could they do?”

“Exactly,” said the Eagle. “See? You have more power than you think.”

“Against my better judgment.”

“Well, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” said the Eagle. “It wouldn’t be the first time that let you down. Now what I want you to do. . I think you know a lawyer out in L.A. by the name of Cletus Proffit?”

“Never heard of him,” said Grimes.

“Mandella, Harbet, Cain. You know, Serna’s old partners?”

“OK, maybe I know the name. I may have met him once or twice. I can’t remember.”

“Well then, it’s time to get reacquainted. I want you to call him, ask him for a favor.”

“I don’t even know the man.”

“That’s all right. He knows you. He was a giver to your last campaign. Of course, he gave to your opponent as well. What you call an equal opportunity opportunist. When you talk to him, use his first name. Call him Clete. When he calls you senator, tell him your friends call you Maya. You know, polish his apple. Get his head in the trough with you. Make him think he’s part of the club. He’ll do whatever it is you ask. Tell him you want him to act as an intermediary on some highly sensitive pending judicial appointments. If you do it right, he’ll be flattered,” said the Eagle. “Now here’s what I want you to tell him. . ”