At 8:15 that same evening, as Claire was programming EPIC for its newest mission, and as Congressman Bryce Ridgeway was delivering a carefully tailored speech on race relations in a Birmingham church, Henry Arbogast left a steak house in the Golden Triangle district, a few blocks north of the White House.
He had reached his culinary limit, which for Arbogast was saying something. The porterhouse had been exquisite, and he’d downed more Pappy Van Winkle than any sensible man should. But then, when lobbyists were footing the bill, his proclivity to excess was always at its worst.
These indulgences came at a price. His stomach was churning, and it was a damning statement on Arbogast’s condition that the most alluring image he could conjure at that moment was the bottle of Pepto Bismol in his bathroom cabinet. He set out on the sidewalk along K Street, lacing ponderously through the evening crowd. An inelegant man on the best of days, Arbogast walked slowly, deliberately, the bourbon having had its effect. The disorientation he felt, thankfully, was allayed at the first cross street. He looked right, up the length of 16th Street, and in the distance saw a vision from a dream. Beyond the geometric paths of Lafayette Square, the White House stood in all its uplit glory.
Arbogast paused to appreciate the scene, if only for a moment.
Soon, he thought. Soon I’ll have the opposite view.
The excuse for the dinner had been business. Two back-slapping, Midland-based, oil lobbyists had been pushing for an easing of fracking regulations, although they seemed far more enthusiastic about a post-dinner rendezvous with a flock of three blondes from an expensive and, they’d been assured, highly discreet escort agency. Expense accounts were cyclic by nature, but right now, with the price of crude back to nearly a hundred dollars a barrel, the good times were rolling across the Permian Basin with no less authority than the subterranean tremors that made it all possible.
The lobbyists had implored Arbogast to join them for what they promised would be an epic night in their hotel suite. He’d been tempted, but in the end he explained that as head of the Republican National Committee he had to maintain a certain measure of decorum—or barring that, plausible deniability. His job, he confessed, put a target squarely on his back, and these days Democrats everywhere—to include bellmen, housekeepers, and, yes, even highly discreet escorts—had phones with cameras.
It was true, at least in part. Despite having divorced ten years ago, Arbogast tried to avoid compromising situations. That practical reasoning, however, was perhaps window dressing for the unhappy truth. Arbogast was fifty-eight years old, morbidly obese, and after a four-thousand-calorie dinner he felt like a stranded whale. In that moment, he wanted nothing more than to go home, pour a thimble of antacid and a stout nightcap, and go to bed.
He lowered his head and set sail eastbound. The air was cold, winter taking a hard grip. The wind stung his cheeks. All around him were buildings dressed for Christmas, lights and holiday displays in every window, wreaths adorning light posts. The crowds were heavy, thick-jacketed bodies bounding like frozen marbles over the sidewalks. He vaguely recalled something about a holiday concert tonight on the National Mall.
He searched for a taxi, and not seeing one right away, he decided to move to the next block. In his experience, there was no better quarter mile in town to find a cab than along the lobbyists’ lairs of K Street. He pinballed left and right, spotted the familiar curb ahead.
Arbogast was nearly there when he had the distinct impression of an express train crashing into his back. He went down hard, expelling a grunt as his rotund body smacked the sidewalk. Arbogast turtled onto one side, feeling pain in his right hip. He’d taken worse hits—probably a thousand when he’d played football at Duquesne. In those days he’d simply gotten up and jogged back into the game. Now he lay stunned and still on the sidewalk, taking stock of what might be broken. Happily, aside from the soreness in his hip, he seemed largely unscathed. People moved around him like water rounding a boulder in a stream. Then a thick pair of legs appeared next to him.
“You are all right?”
“Yes, I think so,” Arbogast croaked. Fortunately, he’d been wearing gloves—otherwise his palms would have been scraped raw. He tried to rise onto a knee, and was halfway there when two strong hands came to his aid, one under each armpit.
“Thank you, I—” before Arbogast could finish the words, he felt a sharp prick under his left armpit. It felt like a bee sting, but whatever it was, it dissipated quickly.
Still dazed, he tried to steady himself. He turned to face his benefactor, a big amorphous man in an overcoat and baseball cap, who said in accented English, “You are okay. Good night.” The man melded into the crowd and was gone.
Breathing in gasps, Arbogast began to get his bearings. He couldn’t say if the man who helped him up was the one who’d knocked him down, but he decided the point was moot. Gingerly, he moved toward the curb and, as hoped, quickly found a cab.
The drive to his Chevy Chase condo took fifteen minutes. He used the time to continue his self-assessment. Any lingering thoughts of dinner faded, and the prospect of blond escorts had fallen completely off his radar. His hip seemed better, yet he did feel a certain generalized discomfort. By the time the cab pulled in front of his building, he was strangely anxious. His chest felt tight and he was sweating beneath his jacket.
His building was a six-story affair, each floor containing four luxury apartments. Owing to its limited size, a coded entryway took the place of a doorman. He made his way to the elevator, sank the call button, and immediately faced more bad news. It appeared to be out of order.
Arbogast cursed under his breath and headed for the stairs. Because he lived on the top floor, and because he abhorred all forms of exercise, he’d only used the stairs twice before. He took his time, yet was sweating profusely when he reached the third-floor landing. By the time he reached the sixth, he was breathing in ragged gasps. His front door lay thirty feet away. It seemed like a mile. He put a hand on the wall, trying to steady himself as he moved, but was soon overcome by a rush of dizziness. That was when the real pain stuck.
Arbogast clutched his chest, his hand clawing at his overcoat, and collapsed in a great heap in the middle of the hall.
Arbogast was found twenty minutes later by a woman returning with her dog from “last call.” Seeing her neighbor collapsed and unresponsive, a shaken Mira Rosenbaum set down her Maltipoo, Prince, and dialed 911. The EMTs arrived twelve minutes later—it would have been sooner had they not been forced to take the stairs—and registered no signs of life in the immense body on the hallway floor. They went through the motions all the same, removing Arbogast’s coat and shirt, and made an honest effort to resuscitate him before yielding to the protocols of death on the scene.
At that point it was a matter of removing the body, which presented no small challenge—lifting three-hundred rolling pounds onto a transport gurney. To their relief, a policeman showed up and offered to help. Better yet, by the time Arbogast was loaded and secured, the elevator was again working.
The ambulance made its way to George Washington University Hospital with flashing lights, a few burps of the siren, but little sense of urgency. The same could be said for the emergency room doctor who certified Arbogast to be dead from what appeared to be a massive heart attack.
It would be another forty-eight hours before the cause of death was finalized by the city’s last responder, the D.C. medical examiner. The ME reviewed an incident report that could not have been more telling: one white male, fifty-eight years old, who weighed twice what he should have, and who, in the minutes before his death, had climbed five flights of stairs while deeply intoxicated. The death certificate that bookended the life of Henry Arbogast was little different from a hundred others the ME had signed that year.
IMMEDIATE CAUSE OF DEATH: Myocardial infarction
UNDERLYING CAUSES: Coronary artery disease, morbid obesity
Straightforward as it all seemed, there were three points of interest that might have given the medical examiner pause had he known of them. The first involved a tiny puncture wound deep in a fatty fold of Arbogast’s left armpit. As a rule, it was his duty to seek out such evidences, but in this case the obesity of the victim, perhaps combined with the ME’s predisposed thought process and an impending dinner date, left the needle mark undetected.
The examiner could never had been held responsible for the second missed detail—a malware, inserted into the building elevator’s control software, that had disabled the lift for precisely thirty-two minutes after Arbogast arrived.
The third discrepancy, too, would have necessitated an investigation far beyond any ordinary postmortem. It involved the existence of an account in a Bahamian bank into which an eight-figure deposit had recently been stuffed. As it turned out, this final clue was perishable: by means that not even the bank’s executives understood, the account was zeroed out in an electronic transfer the day after Arbogast’s passing. The bankers were justifiably alarmed, but relief came some months later when they learned that Arbogast’s estate made no mention of the transfer, or for that matter, the very existence of the account. Very quietly, the account was closed and expunged from the bank’s records. No further questions would ever be asked.