High Treason

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Jonathan understood that there could be no White House reception or formal declaration of a job well done, but after two weeks, would a thank-you note have been out of the question? Even the Army had issued him citations for jobs exceptionally well done, though most of them were highly classified and could never be spoken of.

Reading the paper every day — he’d taken a special interest in the stories reported by the Washington Enquirer — it pleased him to read that the Canadian government had thwarted a terrorist plot against the United States. It seems that units of their military had received a tip from a confidential informant that the renovation of Saint Stephen’s Reformatory in Ottawa had in fact been a cover for a Russian dissident group that had been plotting for years to create havoc in America. Unfortunately, during the raid, the explosives were detonated and all of the terrorists were killed.

That last part intrigued Jonathan most, because he knew for a fact that a number of bad guys were still alive when Striker flew away. He wondered if the others were actually killed, or if they were just spirited away for some quality time with CIA interrogators.

Most important from Jonathan’s perspective, there were no reports of a helicopter being forced down that night, nor of VIPs being admitted to any hospitals in Vermont. Apparently when the administration actually cared about controlling leaks, secrets could be kept.

Jonathan was hunkered down in his office with a fire roaring against the blistering chill of the air outside, wading through the accumulated administrative crap that made business ownership such a pain in the ass. JoeDog was as close to the fire as she could be without actually igniting, and all but the most ambitious workers had gone home for the night. Jonathan had to kick Venice out of the place, telling her that she was not allowed to return until tomorrow at 10:00 A.M. Yes, she had a lot of responsibility, and yes, she had a lot of work to do, but sooner or later, she’d burn out if she didn’t step away for a while.

Besides, with her gone, the Cave was exceptionally silent, which meant that he could concentrate without interruption.

A gust of wind rattled the building at the same instant that his cell phone buzzed. J. Edgar.

Shit. He considered ignoring it, but Wolverine wasn’t the type to bother him for chitchat. He answered after the second ring. “Evening, ma’am,” he said.

“I see your light is on. Can you leave your desk long enough to let us in? It’s cold outside.”

Jonathan resisted the urge to look out the window. It would have been too… predictable. “Us?” he said. “Who’s ‘us’?”

“You’ll have to look to see,” she said. “But I’d rather talk in your residence than in your office.”

He sighed. The reality was that he welcomed any opportunity to so something other than the stuff he was doing. “Two minutes.”

Jonathan stood from his chair, triggering JoeDog to scramble to her feet, tail wagging, ready and anxious to find another place to lie down and sleep.

“Come on, Beast,” he said. “Come attack a government official.” They walked together to the office door, but upon opening it, he let JoeDog go first. It was better than being run over from behind.

He said good night to the guards and walked down to the residence. He pressed the code, and then he was home. He turned lights on as walked down one more flight to the main level, then across the living area to the foyer. He slid the latches and pulled open the door.

Irene Rivers stood wrapped in mink, the collar pulled tight under her chin, with a fuzzy fur hat down low over her ears. David Kirk stood next to her in a ski jacket, smiling from ear to ear. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see us again,” David said. On the other side of him stood Becky Beckeman in a poufy down coat that hadn’t been in style in Becky’s lifetime.

“Truer words,” Jonathan said. He stepped aside and ushered them in. “Have a seat. Get warm.” They entered and Jonathan scanned the area outside. “Where’s your detail?”

Irene peeled off her coat. “In the car,” she said. “And don’t feel too sorry for them. It’s a nice car.” JoeDog examined the visitors long enough to determine that they had no treats for her, and then she retreated to watch from under the coffee table.

Irene blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “I heard a rumor that you have an excellent collection of single malts.”

“Excellent is such a relative term,” Jonathan said. “But I think we could all agree on ‘fairly comprehensive. ’ What do you like?”

“Glenmorangie,” she said.

“Can I get in on this?” David asked.

“You’re not going to ask me to put ginger ale or Coke in it, are you?”

“No, I like mine neat and peaty. Got any Talisker?”

Jonathan smiled. “I might learn to like you after all, kid. Becky?”

“I’ll take the ginger ale.”

As his guests took their seats, Jonathan walked to the bookcase that housed the bar and poured three drinks of two fingers each, and a tall glass of ginger ale. His own glass, of course, contained Lagavulin. He served them with an apology. “I don’t have a freezer in the bar. Would you like me to get ice from the kitchen?”

Becky smiled. “No, this is fine.”

“I confess you’ve piqued my interest,” Jonathan said, lowering himself into a lush green leather reading chair. Irene sat to his right in another lounge chair, and David and Becky had taken spots on the sofa to Jonathan’s left.

Irene started. Sort of. “Mr. Kirk and Ms. Beckeman have something to tell you.”

The hairs on Jonathan’s neck moved. “Oh, yeah?”

David took a sip as he nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you about the story we’re never going to write. It turns out that Nicholas and Josef Mishin have the wrong last names.”

Jonathan crossed his legs and took a sip of his own. This was going to be interesting.

“By DNA testing, their real last name should be Winters.”

Jonathan nearly choked. “You mean as in Douglas Winters? As in the president’s chief of staff?”

“Yep.”

Jonathan scowled and glanced at Irene for confirmation. She answered with her eyebrows.

“How can you know this?”

“During our research, we found out that Winters has been joined at the hip with Tony Darmond since the Mesozoic era — since before Darmond was even in Congress. And you know how everybody says that Nicholas is the image of his mother, with the light hair and the blue eyes? That given the president’s coloration, Nicholas got every recessive gene?”

Jonathan rocketed back to his first meeting with Winters in Arc Flash’s barn. The hair was going gray, but he had blue eyes and the complexion that suggested that he might have been a blond in his youth. “And because Winters has similar coloring, you’re suggesting—”

“We’re not suggesting anything,” Becky said, hijacking the narrative. “We’ve got proof. When the rest of us were left behind at the hospital, we got to talking with Joey Mishin — a nice kid, but man is he gonna need some counseling. Actually, he was afraid of David, but he talked to me. He told stories that he’d heard from his dad that Tony Darmond was never nice to him when he was growing up. He said he felt like — and this was the phrase he quoted — a redheaded stepchild. That’s when the lightbulb went on over my head.”

Jonathan scoffed, “But that’s hardly—”

“Jesus, are you going to let us finish or not?” David snapped. “We have a confidential source inside the White House who was able to bring me a soda can that Winters had drunk out of. We sent it, along with a sample of Nicholas’s blood that I got off my pants that night.” He paused for effect.

“It’s a match?”

“Perfect.”

Jonathan gaped, and then he chuckled and took a longer sip of scotch. “Holy shit. So why are you both here?” He looked to Irene for the answer to that one.

“Because you’ve got enough skin in this game to get really pissed off, and I wanted you to know that restraint is the key to everything.”

“I don’t follow.”

She explained. “David showed the courtesy of running this past me. Frankly, it’s not a suspicion that had ever occurred to the Bureau or anywhere else that I know of. We took it to Alexei — he actually prefers to be called Len — and he seemed shocked as hell that we knew. That had been the Movement’s trump card.”

“The Movement?” Jonathan asked.

“Sounds like the shits, doesn’t it?” David said with a laugh.

“That’s what the Russian expats called themselves. They found out about the truth of Nicholas’s paternity through Pavel Mishin, the man who was supposed to have been the kid’s father. Apparently, they’ve been sitting on it for a while, waiting for the best moment to hurt the president.”

Jonathan scowled again. “Nobody cares about bastard children anymore.”

“President Darmond didn’t know,” Irene said. “The president had always assumed that Mishin was the father, which was why he and the First Lady never got along, and why Nicholas the Younger was never treated well. Only Winters and Yelena knew the real truth — and Mishin — and Winters understood that if word leaked, he’d be toast in the administration.”

“Is he also involved with this terrorist stuff?” Jonathan asked.

“Yes,” Irene said. Her scotch was gone now, and she motioned for another. This time, Jonathan set the bottle next to her. “Apparently, Winters really loved the kid, and by extension, I guess he really loved Yelena, too.”

“Did he know about the witness protection stuff?”

“He does now, but he didn’t when they had their affair. He says he didn’t know until a guy named Dmitri Boykin approached him with that, and the knowledge of the true paternity. He was devastated and the bad guys knew it. That’s when they started applying the screws. They promised to hurt Nicholas if Winters didn’t pull strings to grant the Movement access to weapons.”

Jonathan recoiled. “Can a chief of staff do that?”

“A chief of staff can do anything he wants to. As a practical matter, he is surrogate president, so long as nothing has to be signed into law. That’s what chiefs of staff do. In Winters’s case, it meant alerting Alexei or Dmitri to the movement of materiel. Apparently, that’s a pretty simple matter.”

“So that explains all the US military munitions at Saint Stephen’s,” Jonathan said, connecting the dots.

Irene poured another two fingers.

“So, when are you arresting Winters?” Jonathan asked.

Irene’s answer came without hesitation. “We’re not.” It clearly was the money shot that she’d been preparing for.

“You can’t be serious,” Jonathan said.

Irene said, “What would be the point? All that stuff we told you on the first meeting — the fragility of the world economy, and the devastation that a crisis of confidence could do — that’s all real, Dig. The threat of further damage went away when the cache of weapons was destroyed. In the opinion of the attorney general, more harm than good would be done by prosecuting Winters.”

“What about the victims at O’Hare? Their blood is on his hands.”

“Only if you look ridiculously closely,” Becky said.

“Come again?” Jonathan had sort of forgotten that she was even there.

“He was acting to protect his only child,” she said.

Hot blood rose in Jonathan’s face. “He murdered over a hundred people.”

“No, he didn’t,” David said. “The Movement did that. I guarantee you that’s the editorial slant the Enquirer would give it. Sure, there’d be a clamoring for Winters’s head, and he’d get fired, but at the end of the day, the editorial board of the Enquirer and every network would see this as a human interest story, and Winters as a benevolent scapegoat.”

“Even as the financial markets tumbled,” Irene added. “This isn’t without consequence,” she continued. “Tomorrow, Doug Winters will announce his retirement from the Darmond administration.”

“No doubt to ‘spend more time with his family’,” Jonathan mocked.

“Or something like that,” Irene confirmed.

“And then he’ll pull in a million-five a year on K Street,” Jonathan said, referring to the home of the major lobbyists.

“Or something like that.” Irene paused for the words to sink in. “You know, Digger, justice isn’t always about the individual. Sometimes, it really is about the commonweal. If a threat is eliminated, it’s not necessary to find someone to blame it on. It’s not as if he were personally ordering the murder of individual people.”

Jonathan thought through everything that had been told to him, and he marveled at how limited his options were. They’d constructed a box around him. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

“Because you’ll find out, one way or the other,” Irene explained. “You’re that inquisitive, and you’re that good. I drove all the way down here with David and Becky to make sure all of you understand the consequence of individual retaliation. It is not to happen.”

Jonathan regarded his longtime friend with a cocked head. “Have you been drinking the Darmond Kool-Aid, Wolverine?”

“Don’t you dare go there with me,” she said. “My oath is to the Constitution, not to petty politics. I swore to protect this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I’m not happy with the twist that phrase has taken over the past few years, but I’m not going to oversee a global collapse based on a high-horse ‘gotcha.’ Not on my watch.”

“So he walks on a murder charge,” Jonathan said. The words tasted like acid.

“Is that really the line that you of all people are going to walk?” Irene fired back.

Under a strict interpretation of the laws of the land, Jonathan had committed multiple murders on his own. “I do what I do in service to the innocent,” he said. Even as the words left his mouth, he realized that they sounded like they came from a Superman movie poster.

“Then do it again,” Irene said. “Let this go.” Jonathan turned to the others in the room. “How are you guys doing?”

“I killed people,” Becky said.

“They were all bad guys,” Jonathan replied.

“But they were people. I need to find my way on that.” She looked at her lap. “I’ll get there.”

“I don’t think I can continue to do journalism,” David said. “I like the investigation, but I don’t like the politics.”

“So, what’s the alternative?” Jonathan asked.

“There’s always a spot for you at the FBI academy,” Irene said.

Jonathan laughed. “No politics there.”

“That’s an interesting option,” David said. “But I’ve also been thinking about becoming a private investigator.”

Jonathan smiled and took a sip. “Is that so?” he said.

“Yeah, that’s so. In fact, between you and Wolverine, I’d like to set up a bidding war. Who wants to go first?”

At eight-thirty the next morning, a jogger in Burke Lake Park saw a shadow behind a tree. As she moved closer to investigate, she saw the blood and she screamed. A panicked 911 call brought the Fairfax County Police and Fire and Rescue Departments in force.

It took the White House two hours to make the formal announcement that Douglas Winters, chief of staff to the president, had committed suicide by firing a single bullet into his brain.