Close Quarters

FIFTY-FOUR

Marcella Cready sat and stared at her laptop screen, where she had been thrashing out the main details of what she had learned from Walter Conkley. She was too experienced to be thrilled by what she now knew, too hardened to feel anything but quiet satisfaction at the promise of what lay ahead. She had uncovered other men and women involved in corruption, double-dealing and outright criminality on a vast scale; but the members of the group Conkley had called the Dupont Circle Group were something else. Benson, especially.

She had only a vague knowledge of Chapin, Teller and Cassler — a man she’d thought was long dead — but the former senator from Virginia was the big beast who would occupy the very heart of the story, providing it with the meat that would make it fly. Financial investors, bankers, lawyers — even former members of the Intelligence Community going back to the Cold War era — were big game, but Benson would be the biggest kill of all. The reverberations caused by Conkley’s testimony would echo around Washington DC and the rest of the country for years to come.

She decided to celebrate with a drink at the thought of Benson’s upcoming fall from grace. She walked round the room first, straightening cushions, adjusting pieces here and there. She regretted inviting Conkley to her apartment, which she habitually kept as her private space, a retreat from the daily grind of interviews and reports. But with what Conkley had promised to reveal in detail, she hadn’t trusted anywhere else to be private enough. And she needed absolute trust in her surroundings to put the facts down that would effectively nail the Dupont Circle Group to the wall.

As she lifted the whisky decanter, she heard the buzz of the entry phone. She walked over and pressed the button.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Walter Conkley. I have something else—’ The voice was indistinct and the rest of his words were lost in the clatter of a delivery truck roller going down. Maybe he had more juicy details he’d forgotten about. Jesus, like what — that Benson was in bed with the North Korean president? Or had he simply developed cold feet and wanted to retract his story?

No chance, not now. This was going global. She pressed the button.

‘Come on up.’

Two minutes later the doorbell buzzed and she walked down the corridor, whisky in hand and already experiencing a light heady feeling. She needed food to counter the alcohol. She hadn’t eaten a bite all day. But that could wait. Maybe she’d send out for a pizza and get this thing done and dusted.

She opened the door and a man she’d never met before stepped into view. He was smartly dressed, young and even handsome if you liked men with Clark Kent glasses and wide, brown eyes. A mid-level government employee, perhaps, or a corporate middle-manager on the way up the ladder.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, and leaned forward to look past him, expecting to see Walter Conkley lurking in the background. ‘You shouldn’t be up—’

The man stepped towards her before she could move away, and she felt his breath on her cheek. At the same moment she felt a sharp pain in her side, shocking and icy-cold. Just for a brief moment she was overcome by a sense of weightlessness, and felt the whisky glass being taken out of her hand. Then her legs gave way and she began to fall down a long, darkening tunnel.