Storm Front

CHAPTER 22

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Ling Xi Bang camped out near the Dirksen Senate Office Building, spending the final minutes before her appointment on a park bench, where she could monitor the comings and goings in Senator Donald Whitmer’s suite. Mostly, it was just goings. Around twenty minutes to eight, the last of his staffers went home, leaving the senator alone.

At 7:57, she watched Whitmer take a phone call that, she knew, would be coming from Fake Senator Feinstein’s office. That was Xi Bang’s — or, rather, Jenny Chang’s — cue to move in. She reached into her pouch and pulled out the pill she had been provided. It was a CIA standby: benzotripapine, which counteracted the intoxicating effects of alcohol. It was hell on the kidneys, she had been told, so it wasn’t wise to take it very often. But Storm said Senator Whitmer was a champion drinker, and she needed to be able to keep pace without getting impaired.

Thus prepared, Jenny Chang breezed by Security, into the building, up the elevator, through the front door of Senator Whitmer’s office, through the reception area, and to the outside of the inner sanctum without difficulty.

She tapped on the door.

“What is it?” Whitmer asked. He sounded annoyed. Just like a man who had been asked to stay late and then got stood up at the last minute.

Then schoolgirl Jenny Chang appeared in his doorway, clutching a file.

“Why, hello there, young lady,” he said, his voice warming up by about fifty degrees.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry,” she gushed. “I thought this was Senator Sessions’s Office. I was just supposed to deliver this to him. Oh my God.”

Donny Whitmer laughed. “Darling, I’m afraid you’re a little lost. Senator Sessions is the junior senator from Alabama and he’s in the Russell Building. I’m Donald Whitmer, the senior senator from Alabama. Although I’ve been told I look five years younger than him.”

Donny ran his hand through his silver hair. There was nothing like a schoolgirl to bring out the schoolboy in any man, no matter what his age or station in life.

“I’m so, so sorry to bother you, Senator,” she stammered. “I’ll just…”

And then it happened. In all her fluster, Jenny Chang let the file she was holding flop open, dropping its contents on the floor. She immediately stooped down to pick it up, making sure to give Senator Whitmer a nice view.

“Oh my God, I’m such a klutz!” she moaned.

“Here, here, let me help you,” Senator Whitmer said, springing out of his chair with very non-septuagenarian agility, until he was kneeling on the floor next to her. Very, very next to her.

“I’ve got it. I’ve got it. Please, I don’t want to trouble you.”

“Now, now, it’s no trouble,” he said, warmly. “But now you’re going to have to tell me who you are. You can’t just walk into my office and throw things around unless I know your name.”

“I’m so, so, sorry,” she said, standing up and holding her arm out stiffly. “I’m Jenny Chang. I’m an intern for Senator Jordan Shaw of Connecticut. I’m sorry. I’m new.”

“I can see that,” Donny said, taking her right hand softly in his.

“I just love working for her, though. She’s just the best. Don’t you just love her?”

Senator Shaw was a Democrat, one of the smartest people in the Senate and yet, in Donny’s mind, a total bitch — one of those female Senators who most certainly didn’t play ball with the boys. He hated her.

“Who doesn’t love her?” he cooed. “She’s a great public servant. You’ll learn a lot from her.”

“Oh, I know. I know. I’m just so lucky to have landed this internship. It just sucks that it’s over in six months.”

“Well, there are always other opportunities on Capitol Hill,” Donny said. “I might have an opening coming for an… energetic young person. If you’re interested.”

“Really? Oh my God, that would be so amazing! But don’t you have to, I don’t know, interview me or something?”

“That’s a fine idea,” the senator said. “How about now?”

“R-r-really? You mean it?”

“No time like the present. If that’s okay with you. Why don’t you take a seat?”

“Oh my God, that’s great,” she said, walking toward one of the chairs in front of the senator’s desk.

“Not there,” he said quickly. “Feels too… undemocratic. Why don’t you have a seat over there. We can get comfortable. Get to know each other in a less formal setting.”

He gestured toward the couch–love seat combination in the corner. She chose the couch. “You mean like here?” she said.

“That’s fine. Just fine. Why don’t I pour you a drink? You can’t work for an Alabama senator unless you learn how to drink a real Alabama-style whiskey.”

“Is that… is that allowed?” she asked, going as wide-eyed as she knew how.

“Well, that depends. How old are you?”

“I’m twenty-two, but…”

He silently gulped. “Well, then, there’s no problem at all.”

One drink led to two. And then more.

Jenny Chang was bubbly and enchanting. She arched her back. She crossed and recrossed her legs. She leaned toward him, then away.

It certainly was having the desired effect. Donny wanted her. Bad. Enough that she was quite sure it wasn’t his big brain doing the thinking anymore.

Oh, he was doing an admirable job at being gallant and gentlemanly. He resisted sliding down the couch toward her. He asked thoughtful questions and seemed to be interested in her responses — which was impressive, since even Xi Bang wasn’t interested in some of the vapid crap that was pouring out of Jenny Chang’s mouth.

He even maintained good eye contact as they spoke. Except, of course, every time she looked away from him, she watched out of the corner of her eye as his gaze traveled downward to her breasts and legs.

Soon, she shifted their conversation toward politics, which Jenny indulged even though it, like, sort of, you know, didn’t always make sense to her. She had to make him explain things a lot. And drink more as he did it.

When he was done telling a particularly self-important story about victory in a partisan scuffle, she threw her hands up in the air and declared, “It just seems, like, so hard to get anything done around here. It’s like everyone’s all ‘Oh, I’m a Republican’ or ‘Oh, I’m a Democrat,’ and they just argue all the time. They forget that they’re supposed to pass laws and stuff.”

“Now, now, darlin’, don’t lose faith in the process.”

“Why shouldn’t I? Nobody gets anything done in this city anymore without a gun to their head.”

“That’s not always true. You can… you can still get things done if you… if you know how,” Donny said smugly, a crooked smile on his face. Clyde May had seen to it he was no longer feeling much pain.

“Yeah? Give me one example,” she said. “Tell me about one time when you got a bill passed without it turning into World War Four between red and blue.”

“Well, okay, okay now… So, fuh example, a few weeks ago, a friend… friend of mine called me up. Needed a favor. Wanted a little something-something passed. So I got it passed for him. Put it into a propro… an appropro…,” he stopped and drunkenly spit out the word, “an ah-pro-pre-aye-shuns bill, and it sailed right on through.”

“Just like that?”

“Jus’ like that.”

“That must be a good friend,” she said, and scooted toward him in a way that lifted her skirt a little higher. “How does one become such a good friend to such an important senator?”

“Well… you have to be gen… gen… gen’rous.”

“Maybe I should call up this friend of yours, and he can give me pointers on how to be generous,” she said, stooping slightly so as to unfetter his view. “What’s this friend’s name?”

Donny couldn’t help himself. Even though he knew she was watching, his eyes shot down her blouse, to that black lacy bra he had already taken off a hundred times in his mind.

“Tha’s parta what makeshimafriend,” he slurred. “I can’t tell you.”

“Oh, come on. I’m your friend, right? So you can tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

She slid close to him. He wet his lips.

“Oh, you’re my friend, all right,” he murmured.

“Why don’t you whisper it to me?” she purred. She leaned her ear so it was right next to his mouth. Her hand rested lightly on his thigh.

He was pretty much addled in every way a man can be addled. And yet, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, in a place that not even Clyde May could reach, there was a small voice that told him perhaps he shouldn’t say.

“Now, now,” he said. And then, in a minor victory for self-control, he stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me for one moment, I do believe I need to use the restroom. You’ll be here when I get back… We’ll… We’ll toast the great state of… of Al-BAMA!”

“That we will,” she said.

The moment he left the room, she sighed. This was taking too long. And while the Clyde May wasn’t getting her drunk, it still burned her esophagus every time she took a sip. She had also been leered at enough for one night. She was ready to be done with this.

She had done her best to pry the information out of him directly. She had failed. It was time for her chemically aided backup plan. She removed the small glassine envelope of powder she had been keeping wedged in her shoe, parted its seal, then poured its contents into the senator’s glass.

Too much pentobarbital would actually kill ol’ Donny. Dosed properly, it would take less than fifteen seconds to put him into a sound slumber for four hours. She swirled the glass’s amber contents until the powder dissolved.

When he returned, they toasted Al-bama, despite the fact that it had lost a syllable sometime during the night. Then Xi Bang counted backward from ten. By the time she reached two, Donny Whitmer’s chin had hit his chest.

Just to have a little insurance in case she needed to resort to blackmail — and because she thought it would amuse Storm — she went over to the slumbering Senator, posed with him suggestively, and snapped a few photos.

She e-mailed them to Storm, then went to work. She had four hours but didn’t feel like testing the limits of the drug’s potency. She quickly laid the senator out on the couch, where he would think he had just drifted off. He would have a Hall of Fame hangover in the morning. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, because she felt sorry that he should make all that effort and not get anything for it.

Then she began rifling through his files. She started with the ones in his office, trying to be systematic and yet also remaining aware the clock was ticking. The moment she determined a file was not relevant — either to the Alabama Future Fund or the appropriations rider — she moved on to the next.

An hour down, she still had nothing. She had been through all the donor files and had moved on to others. She kept checking for false fronts to the filing cabinets or for unmarked files. But everything was straightforward. And dull. And, worst of all, legal. It was feeling increasingly fruitless.

Two hours in, she was starting to panic. She considered calling Storm, but what was he going to tell her? He wasn’t there. He couldn’t see what she could see. He’d be guessing even more than she was.

She sat down in the great man’s chair, trying to clear her mind, staring at the top of his desk as she did so. That’s when she saw a yellow legal pad with “ROLL TIDE PAC” written atop it — and nothing else. Curious, she started leafing through it. The next four pages were either nonsense or irrelevant.

Then, on the sixth page in, she hit gold. The words “ALABAMA FUTURE FUND” were prominent at the top of the page. Underneath was “$5 MILLION” and “SPLIT INTO FIVE LLCs.”

And then, underneath that, was what she and Storm had come halfway across the world to find. It was the name of the man who had funded the PAC, the man who had hired Gregor Volkov, the man whose orders were directly responsible for the deaths of five bankers and their families, the man who planned to inflict financial turmoil on the entire world.

It was underlined three times, and it was as plain as the senator’s block handwriting:

“THANK YOU WHITELY CRACKER.”