High Treason

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nicholas Mishin loved the sound of his sleeping house. Most nights, the one-story rancher in the Colorado hill country was too damn quiet. Ever since Marcie left with Josef — he was Joey now, he mustn’t forget — the house seemed to have lost its heartbeat. She’d taken the dog, too, so for too many nights and days, the otherwise comfortable house had been anything but a home.

For this week and next, though, that would all be different. Marcie had jetted off to some far-flung place with her rich new husband, leaving him alone with his son for the first time in ten months.

It was amazing how much children could change in a year. You expect it when they’re little, when every day brings a new skill and new adventures, but Nicholas had not been prepared for the metamorphosis that had consumed his boy between his thirteenth and fourteenth birthdays. He’d grown tall and lean — Nicholas estimated him to be five-nine — and despite the adolescent hair that would go from clean to oily in half a day, and the zits on his nose and cheeks and chin that were the focus of so much of his vanity, he fit every person’s definition of handsome. The California sun that was so much a part of his life while living with his mother had even managed to lighten his dark brown hair.

When Nicholas first saw Josef stepping out of the people mover into the arrival lounge in Denver International Airport, his gut seized at the magnitude of the change. He worried that in the months since they’d seen each other, the boy would have become a man so quickly that they would now have to get to know each other again as strangers.

Then Joey fired up that smile, and all the fears dissolved away. Without hesitation or embarrassment, he gave his old man a big hug, and from that second on, the missing slice of time stopped mattering.

It had been a great week, including three day-trips to the slopes — Vail, Copper, and Breckenridge — and an afternoon at the movies. Tonight, during dinner in front of the television in the family room, they’d agreed that tomorrow would be a lazy, do-nothing day, giving Joey a chance to catch up on his gaming and his e-mails, while allowing Nicholas to reestablish contact with the clients and colleagues he’d been pretending did not exist.

The evening had ended with a mind-numbing tutorial on World of Warcraft, a dizzying role-playing game that to Nicholas just felt like random violence, but he had to admit that the graphics were stunning.

That had taken them to the beginning of a new day, and much to Nicholas’s surprise, Joey had been the one to call it quits.

Now, an hour later, Nicholas still lay awake, listening to the peaceful sounds of the sleeping house.

He missed the old days when they were a complete family, but family dynamics were complicated things. While Marcie had been the first to wander from fidelity, he understood that he’d played a role in that. The obsession with work — he was an environmental engineer, which in fact was a far more interesting line of work than it sounded to people on the outside — combined with his even less healthy obsession with his mother’s current husband, had made him a pain in the ass to be around.

And it didn’t help that the media was so desperately anxious to throw fuel on his fires. They baited him and he swallowed the hook every time. All that negative energy and negative attention was too much for Marcie. He could have told them to mind their own business.

But he didn’t. And now the house had its heartbeat for only a few weeks out of the year. Yet more evidence of life’s most vivid lesson: Actions have consequences.

So, here he was, awash in consequences, and left with the struggle to fulfill another of life’s challenges: He could accept things as they were and enjoy his time alone with Joey, or he could burn with bitterness and be miserable. He could provide a happy environment for Joey or he could push his son away.

You only get one shot at any given moment in your life, and the wise man doesn’t squander a single one.

Nicholas sensed that he’d been lying awake since first getting into bed, but in a dark room, it was always hard to tell. You slip in and out.

Right now, though, he felt his heart hammering in his chest, and he didn’t know why. A bad dream, perhaps? A bout of sleep apnea, for which he refused to wear that ridiculous fighter-pilot’s mask?

He heard something.

He couldn’t quite place it, but it was different from the normal sounds of the house.

Had to take the dog, didn’t you, Marcie? It was more fuzz ball than watchdog, but that puffy little mutt had ears as sharp as any hound’s.

He lay on his back, watching the ceiling, which showed itself only as a darker shade of black in an otherwise black room.

He heard it again. The pop of a floorboard outside the master bedroom door, the one you had to step on to gain access to the room. He’d often called it his ninja burglar alarm.

Nicholas sat up in bed and squinted to see the closed door. “Josef?” he said. “Is that you?” Who else could it be?

Joey’s scream split the night like a hot ax, equal parts pain and fear. “Let go of me! Dad! Ow!”

Nicholas tore the covers away and threw his feet to the floor. “Josef! What is it?”

He’d taken only two steps when the door exploded open, and then they were on him.

There was something unnerving about seeing the third-floor offices lit up in the middle of the night. Jonathan noticed it as Boxers pulled the Batmobile into the garage at the rear of the firehouse.

As he stepped out, he waited for the sound that so often came next. The pounding of paws rumbled in the night as JoeDog, completely invisible in the dark, galloped from wherever she’d been to greet him with a running body-block.

He stooped and braced for it, and took it without falling. “Hello, Beast,” he said, rubbing her ears. He allowed his face to be licked a couple of times, and then the reunion ritual was complete. If he’d been coming in through the front door, she’d have had to run a couple of victory laps up and down the sidewalk. Who knew why?

“You treat her better than you treat people,” Boxers said.

“I like her better than I like people.”

Jonathan led the way through the back door into the mudroom that led to his living room, swatting wall switches to illuminate his sprawling man-cave. Fearless, protective creature that she was, JoeDog was careful to keep Jonathan between herself and Boxers.

Once inside, all semblance of firehouse disappeared, giving way to ornate oriental carpets and elegant yet cushy furniture. Jonathan had a thing for leather, and the upholstery in the place showed it. Dom D’Angelo, his best friend and local parish priest, once told him that his decorating aesthetic ran toward early hotel lobby.

JoeDog headed for her favorite club chair and settled in for the night.

An open stairway midway down the right-hand wall was the only architectural detail that remained of the old fire station — along with the brass pole that extended from the second-floor landing to the ground floor. Having spent so many hours polishing it as a boy, Jonathan couldn’t bring himself to take it out when he remodeled the place.

The door at the top of the stairs led to a vestibule that to the right opened to the second floor, the sleeping floor, and to the left through a reinforced steel door that joined the stairway that led from the street to the office spaces on the third floor.

Jonathan opened the stairway door and let Boxers go first onto the landing. The night guard — a youngish former Air Force PJ named Sam Franco, who’d left a leg behind in Afghanistan — stood at the third floor landing.

“What’s up, Sam?” Jonathan asked.

“We’ve got a special surprise for you inside,” Franco said. “But Ms. Alexander made me promise not to tell you.”

“You know I don’t like surprises, right, Sam?”

“Yes, sir, I do. But the worst you can do is fire me. Ms. Alexander can make my life hell forever.”

“Kid’s got a point,” Boxers said. “He’s already earned his combat badge.”

Jonathan scanned his thumbprint, punched the code into the cipher lock, and entered what he figured was going to be an entertaining night.

If Jonathan’s living room was the hotel lobby, then his office was the lounge. Huge by any reasonable standard for offices, the themes of oriental carpeting and comfy leather continued, but in here, the addition of carved walnut paneling gave the space a feeling of warmth that Jonathan loved. His tastes were the polar opposite of Venice’s chrome-and-glass aesthetic.

His visitors sat in the expansive and expensive conversation group in front of the fireplace that dominated the right-hand wall. Jonathan’s heart skipped a beat when he saw the source of the mystery.

First Lady of the United States Anna Darmond, née Yelena Poltanov, sat with perfect posture in the Hitchcock armchair on the far side of the hearth. In the frenetic light of the well-stoked fireplace, she somehow looked regal in stretch pants and a bulky sweater that would have made a perfect fashion statement in Telluride.

“Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “How nice to see that you’re not dead.”

Irene shifted in her seat. “Jesus, Scorpion.”

Jonathan’s preferred seat in this section of his office was a wooden rocking chair marked with his name and the Seal of the College of William and Mary. After too many back injuries to count over the years, it was the only chair that reliably gave him the support he needed. No one else ever sat in his rocker.

“Okay, Yelena, let’s have it,” he said, settling in and crossing his legs. “How come your Secret Service detail is dead and you’re not?” He used her old name in a deliberate effort to get a rise, but no one in the room flinched. If anything, the First Lady merely looked bored.

Behind him, he heard the rattle of glasses from the bar as Boxers helped himself.

“I know what you think of me, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said. “Director Rivers has told me everything. I understand your anger, but I assure you that it is misplaced. I am not a murderer, and I am not plotting any terrorist schemes.”

“Yet here you are hiding, when you could be lounging in the middle of the most secure cocoon in the universe.”

The squeak of a cork told him that Boxers was going for the good stuff, and then the faintest aroma of peat confirmed that he’d selected scotch.

“Security cuts both ways, Mr. Grave,” Yelena said.

“Digger.”

“As you wish. But great fortresses make great prisons.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Promise me you’re not going to whine about the loneliness of the bubble.”

A glass bearing two fingers of Lagavulin arrived from over his right shoulder. In Boxers’ hands, the tulip glass looked more like a shot.

“You need to hear her out, Dig,” Irene said and the Big Guy helped himself to the remaining club chair. “Open that big mind of yours.”

Jonathan recognized her words as a rebuke and he dialed it back. “Okay, Yelena, the floor is yours.”

“I prefer to be called Mrs. Darmond.”

“And I prefer to be in bed at this hour.” Jonathan took a sip of scotch. Liquid contentment. He knew he was being a shit, but it was calculated shittiness. He wanted her to be off balance. Enough people sucked up to her every whim. She needed to know that he was not among them.

Yelena looked to Irene. “Is it important that I be humiliated?”

“My office, my rules,” Jonathan said.

Irene narrowed one eye, clearly annoyed. “If you think Digger’s annoying, wait till you get to know Big Guy.”

Boxers threw Irene a kiss and took a sip from his glass.

Yelena drew a deep breath, settled herself. “I am not planning terrorism,” she said. “However, my husband is.”

Jonathan recoiled. “You mean the president of the United States?”

“He is the only husband I have.”

“Now, anyway,” Boxers said. He responded to the angry glare with a shrug. “Hey, I’m just keeping it honest.”

“And honesty is important, Mrs. Darmond,” Jonathan said. “Irene wouldn’t have brought you here if you didn’t need my help. I’m not putting my life on the line for anyone who doesn’t tell me the complete truth. I don’t care who they are, or what their husbands do for a living.”

“I’m not asking you to risk anything,” Yelena objected.

“Uh-huh,” Jonathan said. “Now, who is President Darmond planning to terrorize?”

“I understand that you’ve already seen the drawings.”

Jesus, was there anything Irene hadn’t told her?

“I’ve seen a lot of drawings,” Jonathan acknowledged. “Bridges, tunnels, a building here and there.”

“The airliner that was shot down at O’Hare,” Yelena said. “That was him.”

“Bullshit,” Jonathan said. The word was out before he could stop it. He conceded that Darmond was a disaster as a president, but come on. “Why would he do that?”

Her answer came with a shrug that indicated it was the most obvious answer in the world. “Because his numbers are down.” The sibilant s got special emphasis with her accent.

“You mean poll numbers?” Venice asked, clearly aghast.

“Yes, poll numbers,” Yelena said. “His popularity. We are coming up on an election year, no?”

“Interesting strategy,” Boxers said with a laugh. “Vote for me or I’ll bomb your neighborhood. Has that ever worked? Outside of Chicago, I mean?”

Yelena continued. “Every president profits from crisis. Every president wishes he could have been in office for Pearl Harbor or 9/11, to be the subject of such unity and patriotism. Every president wants a Grand Moment.” She leaned on those last words.

Jonathan had occasionally thought that presidents thought such things, but hearing them verbalized by a president’s wife took him to a dark place. “Ma’am, attacking your own countrymen is hardly—”

“It is not about the attack,” Yelena interrupted. “It is about the response. It is about victory over an enemy.”

That was exactly the rationale he would have expected. And given the president’s track record for scandal, maybe it made some degree of sense, but good God. Jonathan decided on a different tack. “How do you know this?” he asked. “How does he plan to make it work?”

“I don’t know the workings,” she said. “But I know he is desperate about his poll numbers. America has stopped liking him.”

“All respect, you’re not helping much,” Boxers said.

“I stopped liking him years ago. Everybody knows that. We hardly make it a secret. But I am not responsible for the bad economy or the big debt or the scandals in the administration. Tony — the president — is responsible for all that, and the people are angry.”

Jonathan understood that anger all too well. In fact he’d been up close and personal with more of the scandals than he cared to think about.

“With a big national emergency, people will stop thinking about those things. They will start thinking about the emergency.”

Jonathan asked, “So, what makes you think he’s planning an attack on his own country?”

Yelena’s response came quickly: “You thought I was going to do that — attack my own country. Why is it so difficult to think that the president might do the same thing?”

Boxers answered without dropping a beat. “Because he’s the president of the United States and you’re a dissident imposter who’s been living a lie for decades.”

Jonathan shot him an angry glare.

“What, like you’re not thinking the same thing?”

Yelena’s features reddened.

Irene said, “Come on, guys. A little civility here.”

Jonathan got it. “Sorry, Mrs. Darmond, but we’ve dedicated a lot of energy to the proposition that you’re the bad guy. That’s only after we were told by Douglas Winters and Ramsey Miller that you had been kidnapped. Now you’re telling us that the president is planning a terrorist attack. That’s a lot of whiplash.”

He gave her a few seconds to let it sink in.

“You mentioned Douglas Winters,” Yelena said. “It was through him that I found out about Tony’s plot.”

“The White House chief of staff,” Jonathan said. He just needed to be sure.

“Gettin’ better and better,” Boxers said.

“I overheard him talking with a man about the lack of security around bridges and tunnels and other infrastructure around the country. At first, I thought it might be some kind of security briefing, but the tone was wrong. There was excitement in his voice. Enthusiasm. It struck me as odd so I listened more, and it continued the same way.”

“Was he on the phone or in person?” Jonathan asked.

“In person. Someone in a meeting.”

“Who?” Irene asked.

“I don’t know. The door was closed, but not all the way.” As those words left her mouth, her eyes shifted, ringing a warning bell for Jonathan.

“Where did this happen?” he asked.

Hesitation. “That does not matter.”

“Yeah, actually it does,” Jonathan said. “Let the record show that my job was to find you, and here you are. You’re free to leave and let me go to bed right now if you’d like. But if there’s more, mine are the only rules that count. Either come off all the details or go home. I don’t care which.”

Yelena looked to Irene for help.

“Officially, I’m not even here,” Irene said. “None of us are. If we go official, I need to arrest you for the murder of a lot of people at the Wild Times.”

“But I didn’t do those things.”

Irene shrugged a gesture of helplessness. “I don’t make the rules, I merely enforce them. You say you’re innocent, and I happen to believe you. We’re here in the first place because I happen to believe you. But that doesn’t matter.”

“So, you would put me in jail?”

“I’d have to, because I’m paid to believe in the system. If you’re innocent, then either the prosecutors would not be able to prove their case, or your defense team would be able to uncover the truth.”

Yelena looked pained, deep creases appearing over her eyes. “But if the government is involved…” She let the words trail away.

“This isn’t your first trip to the dance,” Irene said. The deference had suddenly disappeared from her tone. “Scorpion and his team are the best at what they do, and what they do is all done under the radar. If you want help from me, you have to sit in jail. You want help from him, you stay free. The choice is yours.”

Yelena shifted her gaze to Jonathan. “That is not much choice,” she said.

He smiled. “The details, Yelena. All of them.”

“Please stop calling me by that name.”

The room waited for her answer.

The First Lady folded her hands on her lap and rocked ever so slightly back and forth in her chair. Finally, she blurted, “We were at a hotel.”

Boxers reflexively coughed out something like a laugh. “Uh-oh.”

That pretty much said it all.

“You and Winters?” Jonathan asked, just to be sure.

“Together?”

Yelena started to answer, then shrugged. “What can I say? The rumors are true.”

Jonathan looked to Venice. “There were rumors?”

She nodded.

“Why didn’t we talk about this?”

“There are a lot of rumors about Mrs. Darmond that we didn’t talk about,” Venice said. “Actually, the rumors say that you and Douglas Winters have been having an affair off and on for many years.”

“But no one could find enough evidence to make the accusations stick,” Yelena said. “We have long been friends. That does not mean that we have long been lovers.”

“But have you?”

She sat straighter in the chair. “We were that night, yes.”

“I don’t understand,” Irene said. Clearly, she was hearing details for the first time as well. “How can you be in the same hotel room and not know who Winters was talking to?”

“It was a big room,” Yelena said. “Several rooms, actually. A suite at the Apex. And because of, well, propriety, we arrived at different times. I showed up earlier than expected, and they were in one of the bedrooms. I listened from the living room. When it sounded like the meeting was breaking up, I ran to the other bedroom and closed the door.”

“Why?” Jonathan asked. “Why wouldn’t you want to confront a credible suspicion of terrorism? You’re the First Lady of the United States.”

“I was concerned for my safety.”

“Bullshit,” Boxers said. “You travel with an army of bodyguards.”

Yelena shook her head. “Not that day. I had shaken them all off. I’ve gotten pretty good at that.”

Jonathan wanted something to make sense. “So, this guy you’re having an affair with. You thought he was going to kill you?”

“I didn’t know what to think. The subject matter was so startling. It was the last thing I expected to hear. At a moment like that, everything changes. Suddenly, you begin to question if what you’d always assumed to be black was in fact white. I didn’t know what to think. So, yes, in that moment, I was frightened. If not of Douglas, then of whoever he was talking with.”

“After you darted back to the other room,” Irene said, “did you peek out of the door to see who was leaving?”

“Ultimately, yes. But not at first. Not until I was certain that they would not see me at the door. By the time I looked, the man was nearly at the door. All I saw was the back of his head. He had gray hair, that’s all I can tell you. Same height as Douglas and maybe a little heavier, but not much.”

“He didn’t look familiar at all?”

“It was the back of his head. Backs of heads are backs of heads.”

“So then what?” Jonathan asked. “How do you go from hiding to stepping out to greet Douglas?”

“I took a shower,” she said. “When I came out of the shower, I told him that I had arrived early and that when I heard he was in the middle of a meeting, I decided to leave him alone.”

“How did he handle that?”

Yelena thought before answering. “He seemed… nervous. He didn’t ask me outright if I had overheard his conversation, but he went all around it. When I asked him who he was talking to, he said it was a work matter. Those were his words. A work matter.”

“How long ago was this?” Jonathan asked.

She pondered. “About six weeks. When I asked him who he was meeting with, he told me that it would be inappropriate to say. He implied that it was a national security matter. But that was bullshit, of course.” It came out bool sheet, causing Jonathan to smile. “We were meeting for a tryst. Who would invite official business for that?”

“Who would invite a terrorist?” Jonathan countered.

“He didn’t expect me for a half hour. This was a good off-the-record place to meet. In official offices, records are kept of who comes and who goes. Records are kept of phone calls. In hotels, especially in hotels like the Apex, people make a point of not noticing who comes and goes.”

“But how do you do that?” Venice asked. “Your face has been on every magazine cover in the world.”

Finally, a smile from the First Lady. “Thanks to the Marshals Service, I have become very accomplished with disguises over the years. You’d be surprised what a wig and different eyebrows will do. Throw in a pair of glasses and maybe some prosthetic teeth, and you can be a whole different person in less than fifteen minutes.”

“Let’s get back to the original track,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go back to the night before last at the Wild Times Bar. What was that about?”

“I have to go back even further,” Yelena said. “That night when I heard the conversation, I tried a couple more times to get Douglas to expand on what he was talking about, but the harder I pushed, the more uncomfortable he became. To the point of being angry. So I stopped pushing. But in what I heard, it sounded to me like Douglas was pointing to something, as if he had documents or even diagrams. Referring to something as he spoke. The next morning, I woke up early and I sneaked over to that other room.”

She looked up at Boxers. “Yes, we slept in the same bed, not in separate rooms.”

Big Guy showed no emotion at all.

“I looked all around, but I didn’t see anything. I tried to be quiet, but you have to make some noise just to sift through things. I found his briefcase, but it was locked. I was trying to get into it when I heard Douglas moving around. I quickly put everything down and went back out to the living room. I was back out there before Douglas came out of the room, but I think he suspected I was up to something. He asked me what I was doing and I told him that I was just restless.

“ ‘Why are you acting so strangely?’ he asked me. I told him that I don’t know what he is talking about. I made some excuse why I needed to be back at the White House, and then we get dressed and leave.

“Nothing was the same after that. We would meet, but he would always be nervous. In between time, I called old friends, Albert Banks and Steven Gutowski. We met for lunch at the White House and when I told them what I thought was going on, they said I should call the FBI.” She glanced at Irene.

“Did you?” Irene asked with a defensive edge to her voice.

“What would I say? Already, I am considered a liability to my husband. The press and the White House staff all think I am crazy. If I make an accusation like this, the best thing that would happen is that no one would listen. Worst thing… well, I don’t know. My friends tell me that I should tell my protection detail, but it’s the same problem there. No one would listen. I need proof.”

“Are you getting to the computer files soon?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes, exactly,” Yelena said. “Three nights ago, Douglas and I meet again. Different hotel, but we spend the night. I begin to think that maybe I am crazy. But that afternoon, as I walked into the hotel — remember I am in disguise — I saw a man I have not seen in many years. Dmitri Boykin was walking across the lobby from the elevator to the front door.”

“Let me guess,” Jonathan said. “Gray hair, same height as Douglas Winters and maybe a little heavier.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“I sense that we all should have gasped when you said that name,” Jonathan said. “But I don’t get it. Who is he?”

“Russian mafia,” Irene said. “Former GRU, bosom buddies to the old Soviet network. Deeply committed to anything that hurts the US. Great friend to Iran, great friend to Syria, and we suspect strong ties to Venezuela. Cuba goes without saying.”

Jonathan felt a chill. “You’re suggesting that this was the man Winters was meeting with?”

“Exactly,” Yelena said.

“It’d be a hell of a coincidence otherwise, wouldn’t it?” Boxers said.

Jonathan sat back in his chair. The potential enormity was just beginning to dawn on him.

Yelena continued, “So when I got up to the room that afternoon, something was very wrong with Douglas. He was pale. He looked shaken. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack. No, he said, he just had to think some things through. But his hands were shaking. I asked what I could do and he said nothing. He said that he was going to take a shower before dinner.”

Yelena stopped her narrative and looked to the ceiling, as if for support. “That’s when I went through his pockets and found the flash drive. I didn’t know if it was anything, but it was all I could find. It was in an inside, inside pocket of his suit coat, and I took it and put it in my purse. When he came out of the shower, I talked him into doing room service and eating in the hotel’s bathrobes. Just as a way to keep him from finding out what I’d done.

“The next morning, I left before he was awake. Back at the residence in the White House, I tried opening files, but I couldn’t. I just knew, though, that the evidence I needed was there. So I called Steve Gutowski and we agreed that we would meet at the Wild Times that night, where I would give the flash drive to him. He is a computer genius. He brought Albert Banks with him. And, of course, because of everything that was happening, I brought my Secret Service detail with me. But it was a very small detail.

“I gave the flash drive to Steve, who had brought a laptop with him, so he made a copy for Albert. Between the two of them, we were sure we would find out what was on the drives. When that was done, we partied for a while longer, and then my Secret Service detail insisted that it was time to leave.”

“What happened when the shooting started?” Jonathan asked.

Her eyes glazed with tears. “That was terrible. Those poor people. The shooting started when I was nearly to the car. It started with an explosion, and then I was pushed and shoved and I don’t know what all happened. I found myself back inside the bar, and then Steve had his arm around me, and we were on our way out the back door. We sneaked away in all the confusion.”

The room remained silent for the better part of a minute when someone knocked lightly on the door.

Boxers opened it to reveal Sam Franco standing on the other side.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” he said. “But two people downstairs say they have to see you right now.”

Jonathan cocked his head.

“Their names are David and Becky.”