The Capitol Game

13

The appointment was at eleven, and the escorts were standing and waiting at the stately River entrance to the Pentagon, ready to get the ball rolling as the black limo rolled up.

Bellweather emerged first, followed by Alan Haggar, and Jack brought up the rear. The escorts rushed them through security, then up two flights of stairs to the office of Douglas Robinson, the current secretary of defense.

It was the Dan and Alan hour from the opening minute. Bellweather, after a brief moment surveying the office, declared, “Doug, who’s your interior decorator? What an improvement over my time.”

“My wife.”

“Listen, be sure to give her my compliments.”

“I hate it.”

Bellweather laughed and squeezed his arm. “So do I. It’s godawful.”

A crew of waiters bustled in and began setting plates, glasses, and silverware on the large conference table off to the left. The secretary was busy, very busy; not a minute was to be wasted. To underscore that point, a uniformed aide popped his head in and loudly announced they had only fifteen minutes, not a minute more; the secretary apparently was due at a White House briefing of epic importance. Jack was pretty sure this was fabricated-the bureaucrat’s rendition of the bum’s rush. Another man, older, a scholar-looking gent of perhaps sixty, wandered in next and was introduced as Thomas Windal, the undersecretary of defense for procurement.

Jack first shook Windal’s hand, then the secretary’s. Windal’s shake was halfhearted but firm, while Robinson’s grip was limp bordering on flaccid. In truth, the secretary appeared exhausted, almost depleted: Jack thought he had aged considerably from the TV images of only a year before. He had large rings under his eyes, a dark suit that looked loose and baggy as though he had experienced a sudden weight loss, and a pale, resigned smile that suggested this meet-and-eat was at the bottom of his wish list. He’d far rather be taking a nap.

Robinson turned to Haggar, who, for a very brief period, had been his number two. “How you doing, Alan? Getting rich?”

“Working on it. That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Alan said with a wicked smile, making no effort to disguise their purpose. They began shuffling and ambling to the table.

“So what are you guys pitching today?” Robinson asked wearily, as if they were annoying insurance salesmen.

“Would you care to guess?”

“That polymer your blowhard Walters was bragging all over TV about a while ago? Am I right?”

“Yes, and we’ll get to it in a moment,” Bellweather said, falling into the seat directly to the right of Robinson. “So how’s the war going?” he asked, casually flapping open his napkin.

“Which one?” Robinson asked, a little sadly.

“We get a choice?”

“You do, but I don’t. Iraq? Afghanistan? The war on terror?”

“Why don’t we start with Iraq?”

“Just horrible. My in-box is crammed every morning with letters awaiting my signature. Condolence notes to parents about their kids that were killed. I can barely sleep. Do you know what that’s like, Dan?”

Bellweather quietly nodded. He thought it best, though, not to remind Robinson that he’d gotten 160 soldiers killed on that senseless lark to Albania. Truthfully, he couldn’t even remember what that was about. Albania? He must’ve been high or tanked when he ordered that operation.

Then again, he hadn’t sent any letters or even brief notes to the families. Why should he? Death was one of the things their kids were paid for. “Thank God I was spared that fate,” he replied, scrunching his face solemnly, munching on his salad. “How about Afghanistan?”

“More of the same.” A brief pained pause. “Just not as bad, thankfully, at least not yet. But there’s always the future not to look forward to.”

With only twelve minutes left, they weren’t going to waste more time or words commiserating with Robinson. Haggar, always the numbers man, worked up a concerned expression and launched in. “Do you know how many of those soldiers were killed by explosive devices?”

“Somebody, a month or two ago, showed me a chart. I don’t recall the numbers exactly. I know it’s a lot.”

“Well, you’ve had 3,560 killed as of this morning,” Haggar said casually, as if they were discussing ERA stats in baseball. “Twenty percent due to accidents, disease, friendly fire, the usual cost of business.” A brief pause. “Sixty-eight percent of the total were a direct result of explosives.”

“Is that right?”

“Yeah, well over half. Amazing when you think about it, and ninety percent of those were roadside IEDs. Another ten percent were killed by rockets or roadside ambushes.”

“Higher than I thought.”

Bellweather reached across the table for the ketchup. “That’s why we’re here, Doug,” he explained. “We want to help.”

Laughable as that claim was, nobody so much as smiled.

“And you think this polymer will make a difference?” the secretary asked.

Bellweather was smacking the bottom of the bottle hard, slathering his hamburger and French fries in ketchup. “Jack, tell him about it,” he ordered without looking up.

Jack quickly raced through a description of the polymer, briefly encapsulating the physics behind it, the years spent in research, the difficulty of getting it just right. He was careful to come across as factual rather than boastful. A light dissertation more than a sales pitch.

“You might want to look at this,” suggested Haggar as he handed the secretary a copy of the pictorial results from the live testing done in Iraq. Robinson was barely eating, Jack noted, pushing a fork aimlessly around on his plate. He slid on a pair of reading glasses, opened the book, and began quietly flipping pages while Haggar began to prattle about the miraculous results.

After a quick pictorial tour, he removed his glasses and handed the book to Windal, his undersecretary. “Take a look at these,” he said, obviously impressed. “So what do you want me to do?” he asked, ignoring Haggar and now looking at Bellweather.

“Jesus, Doug,” Bellweather said, as if the question were facetious. “This screams for a fast-track, no-bid approach.”

“That’s a big request, Dan.”

“Is it? Haggar’s statistics show we’re losing eight soldiers a week to bombs. It’s become the insurgents’ weapon of choice. Our kids are sitting ducks. That’s nearly forty soldiers a month, blown apart and butchered while we look for a way to protect them. Now we have it.”

Robinson turned to Windal, whose nose was still buried in the photographs. “What do you think, Tom?”

Windal shoved the book aside, shook his head, and scowled. “Damn it, I know how important this is. The generals have been screaming at me for over a year. We’ve thrown billions into this and it’s about to pay off. There’s a lot of promising programs out there right now. Uparmoring, three or four new bomb-resistant vehicles, even the use of robotics to locate the bombs and disarm them. The best minds have worked this problem and the results are coming in. It’s very competitive.”

“Yeah, and all of those ideas are crap. They take way too much time to make it into the field,” Haggar argued, quickly and vigorously.

“Time is a consideration, but-”

“New vehicles have to be tested, refined, built, then fielded,” Haggar continued, waving his arms for emphasis. “That takes years. And those programs are habitually plagued by big setbacks, maintenance glitches, and unexpected delays. The schedules aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Uparmoring kits aren’t much better. And when you add the weight of heavy armor on vehicles not designed for it, you pay the price in busted transmissions, collapsing frames, and faulty brake systems. You know that.”

Bellweather, chewing a big bite of his hamburger, said, “He’s right,” as if there was any chance of disagreement.

“Everything takes time,” Windal answered, almost apologetically.

“Not our polymer. Mix it, then paint it on. We could have it in mass production inside a month. Thirty days. How do those other programs stack up against that?”

“A no-bid, single-source contract is out of the question. I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“You know why, Alan. The competitors would raise hell. They have billions invested in their alternatives. A lot of their ideas are absolutely ingenious. They won’t let you end-run them this way.”

“Screw ’em. Lives are at stake and that’s all we care about,” Bellweather insisted, failing miserably to make it sound sincere.

“It’s not that simple. If this polymer’s as good as you say, you should be more than willing to expose it to testing and fierce competition.”

“Forty lives a month, Tom. Waste another year, that’s four hundred lives, minimum. Think of all those letters cluttering Doug’s in-box.”

“Look, I’d get raped if I caved in to your request. Your competitors are just as powerful, just as well connected as you fellas. They’ve got deep pockets and plenty of influential friends on the Hill.”

“So that’s it?”

“Yes, I’m afraid that’s it.”

Not looking the least frustrated or even disappointed-Jack thought, in fact, that he looked almost giddy-Bellweather pushed away from the table and got to his feet. Haggar also worked his way out of his chair. Jack had barely taken two bites of his hamburger, but taking the cue, so did he.

“Hey, I appreciate your time,” Bellweather said, sounding quite gracious and sincere.

“I can’t thank you enough for stopping by,” the secretary of defense replied, matching his tone.

A few peremptory handshakes later, they were being hustled back down the hallway and downstairs to their limousine.

Haggar was bent over, mixing a drink from the minibar as they raced over the Memorial Bridge into D.C. proper. He handed Jack a scotch. “What did you think?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“Anything you like. The truth.”

“All right, I’m badly disappointed. Crushed. The meeting was a disaster.”

“You think so?” Bellweather asked, eagerly grabbing a bourbon on the rocks from Haggar. He took a long cool sip and relaxed back into the plush seat.

“They were totally unreceptive, Dan. You pitched a great case. Both of you did, all the reasons for jumping right into this thing. It’s a no-brainer. They didn’t care.”

Bellweather and Haggar both enjoyed a good laugh, at Jack’s expense. Could he really be that naïve? After a moment Haggar said, “They were giving us the green light.”

“How do you get that?”

“We knew, and they knew, they couldn’t just give us everything we asked for.”

“And how is that favorable?”

“Well, Jack,” Bellweather said in a condescending tone, “they just described the roadblocks. They were begging us, virtually screaming for help.”

“Really?”

“Learn to listen better.”

“I’m all ears now.”

“A noncompetitive, no-bid deal is a certain invitation to scandal. We knew that going in. It draws reporters and muckrakers like flies. Drives them berserk.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Robinson and Windal were giving us a road map to make this happen. Clear a few hurdles in Congress. Muzzle our competitors, make sure they don’t have a chance to raise a big squawk.”

“And how do you do that?”

“That’s why we make the big money, Jack.”

Jack stared out the window. They were passing by monuments to Washington’s greats, Lincoln to their left, and off in the distance, Jefferson. Eventually he asked, “Where are we going?”

“To pay a visit on an old friend,” Bellweather answered, sipping from his bourbon and staring off into the distance.

Representative Earl Belzer, the Georgia Swamp Fox to his colleagues, had spent twenty-five long years on the Hill. For the past decade he had served as the feisty, rather autocratic chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, a roost from which he ruled the Defense Department.

He had avoided military service himself, for reasons that shifted uncomfortably over the years. During the wild and woolly seventies, it was ascribed to an admirable act of youthful conscience against the perfidious Vietnam War; in the more conservative eighties it morphed to a disabling heart murmur before a competitor discovered his childhood medical records. And there was his most recent excuse-screw off, none of your business.

He was now beyond needing an excuse.

He represented a backwater district in Georgia that hosted two large military bases. Twelve years before-a few brief years before he rose to the omnipotent job of committee chairman-the Defense Department had tried to shutter both of them. They were extraneous, ill-located, contributed nothing to national defense, two sagging leftovers from the First World War that had long since become senseless money sumps. The Army was begging to have them closed. They were hot and muggy, and the training areas were brackish swamps. Aside from a few ubiquitous fast-food joints and one overworked whorehouse, there was nothing for the soldiers to do. Virtually no soldier reenlisted after a tour at either base.

But they also employed twenty percent of Earl’s constituents. The federal money that funneled through the bases supported another thirty percent.

If the bases went away, his district and his political career would both become pathetic wastelands. Before he was elected, Earl had been a struggling small-time lawyer, filing deeds and scrawling wills, banging around hospitals and morgues, advertising himself on park benches and in the Yellow Pages, scraping by on $30K a year. And that was a good year. In truth, he admitted to himself, he really didn’t have much talent for the law. It was a miracle he’d done that well. If he had to return home in disgrace he couldn’t pay clients to give him their cases.

His appeals to his congressional colleagues elicited little sympathy and no support-the base closure list was nationwide, large, and expansive; almost two hundred bases were targeted, after all. It was every man for himself. In desperation, Earl eventually took a wild gamble; he marched over to the Pentagon and appealed directly to Secretary of Defense Daniel Bellweather.

The secretary seemed understanding. Both bases could easily be saved, Earl was informed. For the price of a small favor or two, Bellweather would take another close look at the closure list and make the alarming discovery that two posts of staggering importance in the middle of Georgia, a strategically vital state barely a stone’s throw from Cuba, had sloppily slipped onto the list. America would be defenseless against Castro’s hordes, he said with a wink.

What kind of favors? Earl nervously asked. Well, for instance, another House member badly wanted a new Army truck built in his district; one more vote, just one compliant lapdog to say yea, and his worthy dream would be fulfilled. Can we count on you, Earl? Bellweather asked with an ingratiating smile.

Earl thought about it a moment. The truck made even less sense than keeping his bases open-the Army had more trucks than it could drive, a whole new plant would have to be built, workers hired and trained, the cost would be mountainous, perhaps exceeding thirty billion dollars. And anyway, the Army despised the truck, a curiously idiotic vehicle, designed by a drug-addled moron, with twelve gears and twenty U-joints that was destined to become a maintenance nightmare. Earl had already come out loudly and quite forcefully against it. He had gotten a little worked up at a recent press conference where he termed it a disgraceful rip-off, an incomprehensible scandal, a mechanical insult to the taxpayers. Earl had run for office as a reformer, dedicated to root out waste and abuse. His campaign slogan was “Send a washing machine to Washington.” The truck was the ideal target, and he had pounced on it with a wordy vengeance.

If he reversed himself now, his reputation would be ruined. He would never be able to look himself in the mirror. He would be a laughingstock in the House, another pathetically corrupt pol to the press, a spineless hypocrite to the public.

“Sure, no problem,” he squealed after about two seconds of indecision. The important thing was, he would be a hero to his voters.

It had been the fatal “I do” that forever changed Earl’s political career. From that moment on, like a fallen woman, he had no reputation to protect, no grand cause to espouse, no principle that couldn’t be fudged or bought. He threw himself into an endless succession of deals and bargains and compromises, and made the swift ascent to the chairmanship of one of the House’s most powerful committees.

And he owed it all to Daniel Bellweather.

They met in a tiny, run-down Chinese restaurant three miles from the Capitol building, in a decrepit neighborhood better known for crack wars and corner hookers than meetings between the rich and powerful. Representative Earl Belzer was seated at the table and waiting when they arrived.

He was alone. No handlers. No harried-looking aides hovering over cell phones, carrying his bags, worrying about his schedule.

Said otherwise, no witnesses.

Belzer, a formerly skinny man, had packed on a world of weight, all of which seemed to have settled in his gut, which hung over his belt like a giant melon. His florid face, greased-back silver hair, and almost ludicrously elephantine ears gave him an odd resemblance to LBJ in his later years.

Together, the four of them looked sorely out of place in their expensive suits. Fortunately, few customers were around to notice-two, to be exact. One was a smelly, homeless wino enjoying a warm sanctuary from the chill, and the second a young Asian kid scribbling in a coloring book, probably the owner’s daughter.

Earl leaped from his chair and immediately began a vigorous round of handpumps. He greeted Bellweather and Haggar like old chums. “Pleasure to meet you,” he said to Jack, a little more coolly.

Bellweather quickly cleared the air. “He’s with us, Earl, you can trust him.”

“And the pleasure’s all mine, sir,” Jack said, smiling nicely.

“Call me Earl, boy.”

“Okay. Earl.”

“Long as we’re gettin’ in each other’s pockets let’s not be formal.”

An ancient waiter appeared, they tried to order coffee, and after being told it wasn’t on the menu, all switched to tea. Earl had already studied the menu and ordered four helpings of dim sum and General Tso’s chicken. Nobody objected: they weren’t here for the refreshments anyway.

“So, Earl, did you get the packet I sent over last week?” Bellweather dove in the instant he settled into his chair.

“Yep, sure did.”

“And what did you think about our polymer?”

“That stuff really work as good as the packet says?”

“We fixed up a batch last week and tested it. Shot everything at it, rockets and bombs and missiles, then threw in the kitchen sink.”

“Yeah?”

“The results were amazing. Stunning. Like wrapping yourself inside Superman’s cape.”

“You don’t say.” Earl was shoveling spoonful after spoonful of sugar in his tea. He was either double-tasking or had attention deficit issues.

“Look, this shouldn’t take long,” Bellweather assured him, sensing Earl’s lack of engagement. “Know why we’re here?”

Earl took the first sip of tea and nearly spit it out. After a moment he said, “Considerin’ that you picked this out-of-the-way craphole-in-the-wall, it ain’t hard to figure out.” He dumped in three more spoonfuls of sugar.

“Let me spell it out for you, Earl. We’ve got the hottest defense product of the decade. In no time, we can paint all the Army and Marine vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan and voilà!-they’re all bombproof.”

“That’s certainly a good thing,” Earl mumbled, still more interested in his tea than the polymer.

“No, it’s a great thing, Earl, an incredible breakthrough.” He smiled, then it flipped into a deep frown. “There are, however, a few issues. Start with the competitors. We’d like to know which one has the-”

“I know all about ’em,” Earl burst in, making it clear he’d already done his homework. He might not be overly fascinated by the qualities of the polymer, but he’d come well armed and wanted Bellweather to know it. He took another careful sip of tea, and appeared mildly satisfied. Then he put the cup down and faced Bellweather. “GT, General Techtonics, leads the pack. They got this weird armored vehicle with a triangular underside. Carries a squad of twelve men. A real nifty idea. Deflects all the blasts away from the troop compartment.”

“And what’s two?”

“That would be Orion Solutions.” Earl smiled. You’ve come to the right place, the smile said; ol’ Earl’s open for business and he’s got all the answers. Another sip of tea and he explained, “They build this wild-ass robot. Sensors on the front sniff out the bomb, it approaches, then blows itself up. Like mutual suicide. Know what they call it?” Bellweather shook his head, and the congressman chortled, “Jimmy Durante’s special.”

It wasn’t very funny, but they all laughed hilariously. “And those are the only two?” Bellweather asked.

A confident wink. “Only two that matter,” he answered.

“You’re sure? I need hard data. This is important, Earl.”

“A lot of other ideas are out there, none with any traction, though. These two are well into the appropriations stage. They’ve been tried and tested. The generals are thrilled with ’em.”

After a thoughtful pause, Bellweather asked, “Anything in the area of black programs we should worry about?”

“Nope, none that far along.”

“All right, good. Now how deep are these two into appropriations?”

“Well, GT is furthest along. Comes up for a vote next month.”

“Who’s pushing it?” Bellweather asked, much like a pro golfer asking his caddie about the lay of the green before he took his best putt.

Jack sat and watched them. He was obviously out of his depth, out of his milieu, out of his comfort zone, and doing nothing to mask his amazement at how the game was played. This was the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, after all. Here they all were in this filthy little wreck of a restaurant, huddled around a small, chipped linoleum table with Earl telling them everything they needed to know.

“That would be Drew Teller, from Michigan,” Earl explained, scratching an itch underneath a cuff. “Acts like he’s got a pocketful of GT stock, which might be he does.”

“That his motive?”

“Oh, hell, Teller’s got lots of incentive. Eighty percent of the vehicle will be built in his district. I’d guess about four thousand jobs at stake. He eases this through, he’s a shoo-in for reelection, for life.”

“I don’t know him. How powerful is he?”

“Straight answer? He’s not, at least not very. A big blowhard pretty boy.”

“But…?”

“But he spent the past year dolin’ out favors by the boatload, pandering to ever’body in reach. If you had a bill, he’d vote for it. Actually supported that nutty Rothman bill to ban Easter bunnies and Santa Clauses in department stores. Drove the Christian groups nuts. He’s runnin’ around now, callin’ in the chips.”

“Will it go through?”

A fast nod. “Appears so.”

“What about Orion?”

The old waiter reappeared, hobbling and creaking, bearing a large tray loaded with five orders of food. They stopped talking while he was in earshot. Given the situation, it paid to be cautious.

Earl snatched a beef roll off a plate before the old man could set it down. His thick fingers stuffed it between his lips and he chewed loudly and enthusiastically while the old man laid out the bowls and dishes, then waddled off.

After noisily sucking the grease off his fingers, Earl picked up where they’d left off. “Hell, you know them fellas.”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“Been stuffin’ lots a pockets lately. Bankrolled a few key elections, and they’re lending their corporate jets out like it’s the congressional air force.”

“Have they got the guns behind them?”

“Oh, probably about six or seven former senators and congressmen in their employ. The place is like a retirement home for former Hill staffers, so they know all the tricks. Hosted three big junkets this year. London, the Riviera, Bermuda.” Earl paused and awarded them a big wink. “Did Bermuda myself. Plenty of pretty women, enough champagne and caviar to sink a barge.” He shook his head, apparently reminiscing about the experience.

“How far along are they?”

“ ’Bout six months out, probably.”

“Six months,” Bellweather echoed, almost in disbelief. Six months! The boys from Orion would never know what hit them; two years spent perfecting this goofy little robot, and it was about to become an anachronism.

“Yeah,” Earl rattled on, filling in the now unnecessary details. “Seems their robot’s got a few awkward habits. They did this big test a few months back and invited ever’body. That crazy little robot apparently sniffed gunpowder, and began chasing one of the guards around, threatening to blow him up.”

Bellweather laughed. “And did the test have a happy ending?”

“Oh, he ran all over the place, screamin’ and hollerin’, for ’bout five minutes. It was real entertaining. After a while he got smart and dropped his piece, then, boom-the robot blew it to smithereens.”

After a few obligatory chuckles, the table grew quiet for a moment. Jack stared into his tea. Haggar was smiling. Bellweather was thinking, calculating the odds against him.

Earl looked expectant-with one hand he was snatching and gobbling more rolled-up delicacies from the dim sum plate, while with the other he was drumming his chubby fingers on the table, impatient to hear the deal.

“Focus on GT first,” Bellweather suggested. He popped something loud and crunchy in his mouth.

“Yeah, good call,” Earl seconded as though he’d thought of it himself.

“We’ll lay the groundwork for you.”

“That’s important,” Earl noted. “How?”

“This vehicle… what’s it called?”

“The GT 400.”

“Right. It’s… well… a great idea with fatal flaws,” Bellweather said, mentally forming the idea as he spoke. “Rushed through design and development, hurried through testing. The usual sad story. Haste makes waste.”

“That’s the ticket,” Earl said. “What flaws?”

“Well… uh, it’s top-heavy, for one thing.”

“It is?”

“Sure. A major design snafu, an all too common misstep by combat vehicle designers. They piled on so much armor it’s subject to rolling. Can’t keep its balance on curves. You know, unsafe at any speed.”

Getting on top of the idea, Earl said, “A rolling death trap.”

“Yeah, I like that. It’s catchy,” Bellweather said, beaming at his student. “To achieve a safe distance from underground explosions, they kept raising the chassis off the ground. Now the center of gravity is too high.”

Earl had his fist stuck deep in a bowl of fried shrimp, or something that resembled shrimp. He was fishing around, hunting for the perfect mouthful. “Like that Ford SUV,” he mumbled, his eyes glued to one particular shrimp. “Tippin’ over all the time.”

“I’ll hire a couple of experts to build the case, maybe expound on it a bit to the press.”

Stuffing the piece in his mouth, Earl mumbled, “There’s gonna have to be some hearings, naturally.”

A pat on the arm and a grave nod from Bellweather. “Only responsible thing to do, Earl.”

Earl scratched his head and said, “ ’Course, I’d need ample justification. Y’know, a spark to get it rollin’.”

“Don’t worry, I’m sure one will come along.”

“How you figure to handle that?”

Bellweather thought about it for a moment. “I have a strong premonition that somebody in Defense’s procurement department is about to send you an anonymous letter. An insider, terribly bothered by the shoddiness of the testing. The vehicle was dangerously tipsy but nobody wanted to hear about it. He was brushed aside, and isn’t happy about it.”

Earl shook his head, dismayed by the horror of it. “Hell, that’d have to be looked into.”

“I like your logic. And were you to schedule the hearing for… oh, say about three weeks from now, a lot of critics will be ready to raise a noisy racket about it.”

Haggar, feeling like a third wheel, decided to throw in his two cents. “Make it a last-minute thing, Earl. No warning. In fact, announce an entirely different reason for the hearing.”

“You mean, call it a program review, maybe a cost overview. Something like that.”

“Perfect, something totally innocuous. GT won’t be expecting an ambush. They’ll send over a bunch of accountants and be totally off guard.”

“Great idea,” Earl mumbled, already picturing it in his mind. A bunch of number crunchers armed with spreadsheets and cost analysis proposals, gawking in shock as they were being pilloried about the intricacies of vehicular physics. Get a few staffers to work up a bunch of questions that would stump Albert Einstein. How fun. They’d be frozen in their chairs, peeing in their drawers, totally clueless. “Wonderful. What then?” Earl asked, popping a shrimp between his lips and clamping down hard.

Bellweather tackled this one. “But be careful. An outright program termination would incite too much resistance. Too much heat and noise. GT and the generals will scream murder.”

“Not just them,” Earl observed, sucking on a dim sum roll. “Teller’ll throw a real hissy fit. Don’t get between that boy and a TV camera.”

“So don’t kill it,” Bellweather advised, “delay it. Send it back for another year of rigorous testing until the safety concerns are ironed out and mollified. A good hard scrub before we waste all those billions, a reasonable pause before we expose our boys to uncertain dangers.”

Like that, Bellweather stopped talking. Earl stopped eating. Haggar began scribbling something on a napkin. The meeting seemed to lurch into a new phase. Jack knew enough to keep his face expressionless, his mouth shut.

By unspoken agreement, the ball had slid to Earl’s corner. He wiped his plump lips on a cheap white paper napkin and leaned back in his chair. “I believe it will work,” he concluded with a small, mysterious smile.

But there was nothing at all mysterious about it to Bellweather.

The former SECDEF who had first introduced Earl to this game looked slightly annoyed. “We will of course be very appreciative,” Bellweather muttered, sounding anything but. A long, awkward silence. “What do you have in mind, Earl?”

“Glad you asked, Dan.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Five million for my next campaign would certainly be nice.” Earl had dropped the country bumpkin and was suddenly the sharpy riverboat gambler. He was leaning across the table, eyes narrowed, gleaming with total concentration.

Bellweather threw down his napkin and nearly howled. “Christ, Earl, that’s too much.”

“Well… what’s enough?”

“Three million. That’s all we budgeted, all we can afford.”

“See, Dan, I’m also factorin’ the price of ushering this polymer of yours through the political thickets. I expect you’ll be looking for a noncompetitive, fast-track deal.” When nobody contradicted that, he continued, “I’m a one-stop shop, Dan, all that and a bag of chips.”

“Five is still too much.”

“Nah, it’s a real good deal and you know it. Kill the competitors, and grease the pole for your polymer. Nobody else can handle this.”

After a long, tense pause, Bellweather said, “Even you can’t do it alone, Earl.”

“Oh, damn, you’re right. I’ll need a little more to spread around. Throw another two million into my PAC.”

Bellweather looked ready to argue, but he didn’t have the strength. “You’ve learned this game too well,” he whispered.

“Yeah, well, I had a good teacher,” Earl said.

Martie O’Neal was happily hidden in the third stall to the left, comfortably ensconced on the toilet, when his cell phone began bleeping and rattling. He dropped the girlie magazine, lurched over, and spent ten frantic seconds trying to dig the phone out of the pocket of the trousers gathered around his ankles. “What?” he barked.

“Martie, it’s me, Morgan,” said the familiar voice.

“Whatcha got?”

“Gold, maybe, or maybe fool’s gold.” Morgan quickly filled in the story about Charles, omitting only a few insignificant details like how Charles found him, how he escaped, and that infuriating little stunt with the note in place of the glass. Some things are better left unsaid.

Martie asked the obvious. “He worth fifty K?”

“Who knows?”

“You, Morgan. You’re supposed to know.”

“I can’t vouch for his reliability,” Morgan answered, hoping he wouldn’t be called on that vague response.

“You got nothing? Fingerprints? A phone number? Anything?”

“Uh… he was very clever.”

“You mean he outsmarted you.”

“I just wasn’t expecting it,” Morgan stammered, trying to make it sound like no big deal.

“I don’t like that.”

“Me either. He was very slick. Could be a con.”

“That what you think?”

“I’ve been here three weeks handing out business cards by the bushel. It’s like a trail of breadcrumbs, an invitation to get rolled. What do you think?”

O’Neal had worked around the clock, without a day or weekend off since he got this job. The billings were great but the hours were killing him. Walters phoned nearly every day, pressuring for an update and hectoring him about the lack of results. His wife had begun bitching and moaning, about chores left undone, about dinner dates broken, about coming home too tired for conversation or sex. Jack Wiley was ruining his life.

Now the wife was threatening to have his battle-ax mother-in-law come for a long, miserable visit; things were about to go from terrible to horrible. All that hard work, effort, and expense and he had found nothing incriminating or even remotely distasteful about Jack Wiley. He was frustrated. He lay awake at night thinking about Wiley. He hated him, hated everything about him, the goody-two-shoes. He had been so confident he would find something; he had promised Walters instant results. “When are you going to meet him?” he asked Morgan, obviously committed.

Charles might be a shot in the dark, but O’Neal was past the point of caring. This was the first inkling that there might be some dark secret in Jack’s past, some chink in the saintly armor. He’d be damned if he’d let it slip by. Besides, it wasn’t his money.

“He said I better call today or forget it,” Morgan replied.

“He’ll insist on a meet tonight. Keep the initiative, limit our time to prepare. You know the game.”

“Yeah, that’s what I figure, too.”

“I’ll send two more guys up on the next flight. They’ll be hauling fifty thousand in cash. Can you handle this?”

“Kid’s play. Don’t worry,” Morgan replied, trying to sound calm and glib. In his Agency days, he’d done dozens of bagjobs like this. And all those operations were against real spies and terrorist thugs and bloodthirsty drug lords.

He’d only been fooled the first time, he reassured himself, because Charles had dropped in without warning.

They arrived fifteen minutes early for the start of the movie. His choice, Eva told him, whatever he wanted to watch. Then she raised her eyebrows over the flick he suggested-a brawling, manly epic filled with battles and slaughters-and argued for a different film, one that had received rave reviews, a blockbuster she coyly described as a warm old-fashioned western with a minor twist, called Brokeback Mountain.

They settled on a compromise, a forgettable romantic comedy with a pair of even more unexceptional stars. “So, how was your day?” Eva asked as they settled into their seats.

It was a weeknight. The crowd was sparse, so they had two prime seats all to themselves in the middle of the front row. They had come straight from work and met at the theater.

“Long, interesting, extremely profitable,” Jack said, noisily rummaging through a large box of popcorn poised on his lap. He’d missed dinner and this would have to suffice.

“What did you do?”

“Drove around town mostly. Bellweather has plenty of friends.” Very few of which they had met at their places of work, Jack might have added, but didn’t.

Bellweather and Haggar had given him an enlightening tour of the city’s hole-in-the-wall restaurants, splendid places to conduct illicit business in plain sight. By day’s end, Bellweather was suffering a murderous case of heartburn. Haggar twice had bolted from the table to contend with bouts of diarrhea. Making illegal deals apparently wasn’t for those with weak stomachs.

“Washington is a small town, at least among those that matter.”

Jack laughed. “So I’m seeing.”

“You sound disenchanted.”

“Then I’ve given you the wrong impression.”

“Have you?”

“Yes, I’m having a ball. It’s a side of democracy I never imagined.”

This was their second date since Eva dropped by his house that first time: they were beyond the getting-to-know-you phase, not quite at the I’m-very-comfortable-in-your-presence stage. After a moment, Eva said, “The rumors around the office are that you’re going to salvage our annual earnings.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“It’s a very big deal, Jack. They say Bellweather is spreading around a lot of cash to set this up.”

Jack looked away. “Rumors like that are dangerous.”

“Oh, you know accountants. We always need something to discuss at the watercooler.” After a moment, Eva asked, “Is it true?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jack lied. It was more than a lie, it was a mountain of untruth. To the best he could tell they’d spread around promises of nearly twenty million that day-seven to Earl Belzer, five to an obnoxious, boastful, crotchety senator on the Senate Armed Services Committee, then another eight distributed judiciously among a variety of think tanks and reputed watchdog groups, in return for vigorous vows to tarnish and smear the GT 400. Jack lost count of all the promises, all of the handfuls of cash to be laundered through third parties, then doled out to the usual array of PACs and 527s, the capital city’s equivalent of money laundering. Haggar, with his passion for numbers, made careful notes after each meeting.

At one point, Bellweather bragged to Jack that CG had a highly respected specialist in such matters, a magician who could make money disappear off the corporate books, then reappear in politicians’ pockets without a trace of its source.

Jack was too amazed to be shocked. They made it look so easy. No, it was easy. In only a few short hours Bellweather and Haggar had bagged two of the Hill’s most powerful legislators and arranged the almost certain sabotage of their most threatening competitors. At the bargain price of only twenty million bucks, they would rake in billions. So little capital for such a mammoth gain.

After a moment of tense quiet, Eva put her hand on Jack’s. “If I’ve gotten too personal, Jack, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I am worried, about you.”

“Why should you?”

“Because I like you.”

“I mean, why worry?”

“This town is rough, maybe rougher than you think. Don’t let the smiles and backslaps lull you. You might be getting in over your head.”

Jack smiled. “In New York people cross the street when they see me coming.”

“Do they?”

“There are warning signs all over the city-watch out for big bad Jack. Mothers threaten their kids to be good or Jack will get you.”

“Oh, you’re that Jack.” Eva pretended to recoil back in her seat. After a moment she said, “Look, I’m sure you’re a terror to behold, up there. This is a different world, with different kinds of players.”

“Do you think they’re trying to hurt me or set me up?”

“I didn’t say that. No. As long as your interests are aligned with theirs you should be fine. It’s just that I care about you. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“Eva, this country prints billionaires like postage stamps. Why shouldn’t I be one? Besides, this polymer will save the lives of hundreds or thousands of soldiers. If we have to cut a few corners to get it into the field, so what?”

“Be careful. That’s all I’m saying.”

“I’ll start wearing body armor tomorrow, thank you.”

“And I’m offering my services,” Eva added, gripping his hand a little tighter. “I know these people, Jack. They’re sharks. Confide in me and I can help.”

“If I need a watchdog, you’ll be the first one I call,” Jack promised vaguely, but not the least bit unfriendly.

The movie was even worse than its reviews.