So the next step is to talk to C-Sharp?” Marjorie asked the following morning after she and Michaelson had exchanged telephonic accounts of the previous day’s escapades.
“That’s the plan. Phillips has agreed to try it at Club Chat Fouetté early this evening, when the band shows up to get ready for its performance tonight.”
“It couldn’t have been easy to talk him into that.”
“Best piece of negotiating I’ve done since I convinced you to try falafel,” Michaelson said.
“I’m sure you had your reasons, but I can see Phillips’ point. It sounds like a pretty complicated way to interview someone.”
“I want this to be an interview, not an interrogation,” Michaelson said. “Phillips has an occasional penchant for excessive enthusiasm. I thought it best to arrange for witnesses.”
“Fair enough,” Marjorie said. “Please let me know what happens. I’ll be passing my time running a bookstore and meeting a payroll. Do you have anything on your agenda between now and the rendezvous this evening?”
“I thought that all I had was a two o’clock symposium at Georgetown on the euro. During our conversation, however, the message-waiting light on my phone has come on, so my day may be filling up.”
“Let’s hope mine does. Ciao.”
The message was from Connaught. His unctuous recorded voice covered the same basic ground he had gone over before, sounding a bit hurt that Michaelson hadn’t returned his call. This time Michaelson wrote Connaught’s number down when he gave it. Over the past sixteen hours his interest in talking to the gentleman had increased considerably.
He reached Connaught’s voice mail when he called back. He kept his voice neutral to chilly as he recorded his own message.
“Richard Michaelson,” he said. “I can see you in my office between twelve-fifteen and twelve forty-five this afternoon. The receptionist will buzz someone to show you back.”
With plenty of time remaining before the arbitrary deadline he’d just given Connaught, Michaelson pulled out the investigative report on Demarest’s death that he’d gotten from Phillips. He folded it over to the thick packet of appendices.
Appendix A was the Calvert Manor floor plan that Wilcox had marked to show where the various conference call participants should park themselves. For seven minutes he studied page one, covering the first floor. He left his mind blank, letting the information flow in unfiltered. He did the same thing, but for twice as long, with the schematic for the second floor.
He continued this process through the remaining items in the appendices: the list of people on the conference call and the numbers for the telephones they had used; a photocopied page from a book, broken up by equations and chemical formulas, with text explaining how to compute the rate of carbon dioxide buildup in the bloodstream induced by smoke inhalation; an inventory headed tagged and bagged, listing everything the police had taken from Calvert Manor as evidence; copies of the written purchase offers that had been submitted for Calvert Manor at the time of the conference call; and a list of everyone known to have been on the property when the conference call started, with indications of where they were, which ones had been interviewed, and which ones hadn’t.
Prominent among the latter, of course, being Richard Michaelson, who still hadn’t been contacted. Which, the more he thought about it, was rather interesting. If any investigation worthy of the name was going on, why hadn’t anyone talked to him by now? If the investigation had effectively stopped, why? Or, more important, who had stopped it?
He turned back to the list of conference call participants. No surprises. Wilcox, Catherine, Cindy, Marjorie, and Willie, all on extensions using the phone number for Calvert Manor. Phillips at what the phone book verified was his office number. And Patrice Helmsing and Shepherd mère at numbers with exotic area codes.
He flipped to the two closely typed pages of the Tagged and Bagged section. Once again, nothing particularly striking: logs from the fireplace, fiber samples, a partial cast of the stonework in front of the fireplace, the Baggie that Marjorie had mentioned to him. The cover for the smoke detector in the guest room where Demarest had died. The clothes Demarest had been wearing. And, apparently, some clothes he hadn’t been wearing:
gym bag, 1 (nike), vinyl, zippered
Contents: Running shorts, 1 pr. (men’s L, Russell), n/blue; T-shirt, 1 (men’s L, Nike), yellow; jockstrap, 1 (L, Bike); running shoes, 1 pr. (men’s 10½, Nike Air), white w/black trim; tube socks, 1 pr. (knee length, Wigwam); street shoes, 1 pr. (men’s 10½, Rockport), dark brown; sweatpants, 1 pr. (men’s L, Russell), royal blue; hooded sweatshirt, 1 (men’s L, Russell), royal blue.
Michaelson turned back to the text of the report and scanned through it until he found a sentence fragment mentioning that the police had found the gym bag in Demarest’s car.
Locking the report away again, Michaelson glanced at his watch. Almost eleven-fifteen. Two floors down from his office and seven minutes later, he found a nook where a young woman gazed serenely at a computer screen from beneath no-nonsense brown bangs and behind no-nonsense glasses with black plastic frames.
“Good morning, Ms. Dennison,” he said.
“Good morning, Mr. Michaelson,” she said warily, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Did you decide you’d like some visuals for your Georgetown presentation after all?”
“Oh no, nothing like that. For that kind of thing I wouldn’t change my mind on two hours’ notice.”
Leaning back in her steno chair, she folded her arms across her chest and looked up at him with undisguised skepticism.
“A one-eighty on minuscule notice wouldn’t exactly set a precedent around here,” she said. “What can I do for you?”
“You can answer a question, I hope,” he said. “Is it possible to take part in a centrally controlled conference call on a cordless phone, without anyone else knowing?”
“‘Centrally controlled.’ Like with an AT&T conference operator and so forth?”
“Yes. Specifically, could you be joined to the conference on a conventional phone and then somehow dial your own digital phone number and continue with the call on that phone?”
“Not without letting AT&T in on it,” Dennison said after a moment’s thought. “They know every number that’s in on the call because they charge for every number. The same electrical impulses that you’d make to connect your digital phone would tell AT&T’s computer that you’d connected it. If one of the numbers already dialed had multiple extensions, you could pick up one of the extensions without tipping any computers off, but not an entirely new phone with a new number, cordless or not.”
“I’ve seen something advertised on television where a call to your office number automatically bounces to your home number and then your digital phone number. Would that work on a conference call?”
“Sure. But AT&T would pick up the bounces, and their records would show all three numbers.”
“Thank you very much,” Michaelson said.
***
Corbin James Connaught was only about fifteen pounds overweight, but the way he moved combined with the arrangement of his extra baggage to create an impression of striking corpulence. He waddled into Michaelson’s office and settled heavily into the guest chair that Michaelson indicated. His sallow complexion emphasized puffy cheeks and saclike jowls. The first thing he did on sitting down was unbutton his suit coat. He seemed to wedge himself right hip first into the chair, so that he could brace his right forearm against the top of the chair back. He dispensed with amenities, which was fine with Michaelson.
“I think you know what I want,” he said.
“What I don’t know is how badly you want it,” said Michaelson, who wasn’t at all sure what Connaught wanted.
“I’m not going to kid you. I’m way down the food chain. Data security and opposition research. I can’t guarantee the kind of thing you’re after. Money I could do, but I expect that’s not where your interests lie.”
“Fair enough,” Michaelson said, shrugging noncommittally.
“But if you deliver you have a place at the table,” Connaught said. His eyes gleamed and his teeth showed in a passable smile as he spoke the last four words. “Not because I give you one but simply because you will have delivered. And because of where we are in the process. You’d be getting in very early.”
“That’s a little thin considering the risks, don’t you think?” Michaelson asked, bluffing ferociously. “After all, the last chap you sent after this material ended up in the morgue.”
Connaught didn’t bother pretending to be baffled or astonished by this comment.
“Demarest wasn’t our boy,” he said flatly. “He shopped what he had to us after he got it, but that doesn’t put us in a very exclusive club. He did everything but advertise the stuff in the classified section of the Post. But we didn’t send him after it.”
“Right,” Michaelson said. “And I suppose he got the psychiatric report from the Library of Congress.”
“I don’t know what report you’re talking about,” Connaught said. “But if he got a confidential report and I had to guess where, my guess would be the same as yours.”
Michaelson decided that Connaught wouldn’t have anyone in this year’s Oscar competition looking over his shoulder. Before speaking again, he briskly reviewed the relevant data he had. Marjorie might look at Cindy’s uncharacteristically intense reaction to traffic-snarling snow, note that Andrew Shepherd had killed himself on a snowy day, and feel that she had a sneak peak into Cindy’s psyche. Michaelson didn’t swing quite that freely in the psychological realm, but when it came to bureaucratic behavior, even a few pieces of hard evidence could provoke equally aggressive inferences from him.
Andrew Shepherd had given trip reports to Aldrich Ames at the CIA. Andrew Shepherd lived at Calvert Manor. Preston Demarest knew about the trip reports and, without being a rocket scientist, had somehow gotten the idea they were important. And, critically, he hadn’t made the Andrew Shepherd/Calvert Manor connection on his own. Someone had told him about it, and prepared him well to pursue it.
“Help me to be certain that I’m clear on something, please,” Michaelson said after the four seconds that it took to run over this information. He leaned forward to plant his elbows on his desk, and his words became a little more clipped than usual. “I mention a psychiatric report and you act as if I’m talking Greek. Are you seriously asking me to believe that you personally had nothing to do with the Central Intelligence Agency sending someone to seduce Andrew Shepherd when the Aldrich Ames scandal was about to go public?”
“That was years ago,” Connaught protested, squeaking a bit near the end of the sentence. “Langley didn’t need any shrink’s notes to know that Shepherd swung with an occasional swish after his divorce. His predisposition was no secret, and once he got to be middle aged with thinning hair and a sausage gut, he was flattered by the attention of handsome young men. Not exactly a scoop. You’re confusing two completely different episodes.”
“Then please unconfuse me.”
Michaelson leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, treating Connaught as if he were a junior subordinate trying to bluff his way through a report without thoroughly knowing the file. A typical Washington reaction to this attitude is to start displaying how much you know. Connaught responded with Pavlovian predictability.
“When Ames was about to blow,” Connaught said with an exasperated sigh, “of course we checked to see if his contacts had kept any souvenirs. The kind of thing the director should know about before The New York Times did.”
“Especially contacts like Shepherd, whom you’d used to give false information to Ames,” Michaelson said.
“Well, duh,” Connaught shot back. “You’ve been reading John le Carré again, haven’t you?”
“That’s the part I’d figured out all by myself,” Michaelson said. “Tell me about the episode I’ve confused it with.”
“After I left the agency, and well after Ames was old news, Demarest started telling anyone who could write a check that he could supply some hot information from Calvert Manor. I was working for the national committee by then and the committee wasn’t interested. Demarest must have found someone who was interested because he apparently went back in. But it wasn’t us.”
“You mean the national committee wasn’t interested until you found out Avery Phillips was,” Michaelson said.
“That’s the whole point,” Connaught rejoined. “I’m deeply interested in what Phillips is after, which is emphatically not what Demarest was peddling on his own. That’s what I want from you, and I want it before Phillips gets it.”
“And you want it on spec.”
“Can’t be helped. I could tell you that if you come through, NSC or State is yours, but I’d be lying and you’d know it. All I can offer is good faith and no guarantees.”
“That’s what Jim Halliburton had, isn’t it?” Michaelson asked in a very quiet voice. “Good faith and no guarantees.”
Connaught snapped his head in a quick, angry shake.
“I’m not taking the rap for that,” he said with feral petulance. “The stakes were high. He knew what he was getting into.”
“Yes,” Michaelson said. “When a policy has been crafted by State Department professionals, legislated by Congress, and paid at least lip service by the White House, the risks associated with deliberately subverting it are indeed high. What Halliburton couldn’t know was that the people who convinced him that the fate of the republic depended on such subversion would abandon him the first time things got a little hot.”
“I know you’ll go to your grave convinced that the bad guys on that are across the river, but you’ve got the wrong target. The critical leaks came from Foggy Bottom, not Langley. Jim Halliburton went down because an alumnus from your own shop sniffed out the money, followed the paper trail, and then goosed Congress into making a stink about it.”
“I was talking about support, not exposure.”
“If there’s no exposure, you don’t need support. Langley ran for cover and left Halliburton hanging. Fine, not our most heroic moment. But without the leaker, there wouldn’t have been anything to run from. No scandal, no feeding frenzy in the media, no congressional hearings, no special prosecutor. Whoever leaked that story is the guy you ought to be saving all this festering resentment for.”
“Thank you for your candor,” Michaelson said with finality. “You’ve made your position clear. I know where to reach you.”
After seeing Connaught out, Michaelson returned to his office and began filling his briefcase with materials he’d need for this afternoon’s symposium. He brought a bit more vehemence than was customary to this process. There were two reasons for his irritation.
First, he’d been wrong about Connaught. He had assumed that Connaught was still working for the CIA and that his ostensible position with one of the political parties was a none-too-convincing cover. He now thought it plain that Connaught was doing exactly what he claimed to be doing. Whatever it was Connaught wanted, there was no earthly reason for the CIA to give two hoots about it. Besides, if Connaught had still been getting his checks from spook central, he could credibly have offered Michaelson bribes far more tangible than a vaguely limned place at the table.
The second reason was that, without realizing it, Connaught had fingered him. Connaught apparently didn’t know that Michaelson was the State Department alumnus whose covert bureaucratic action had saved an element of Near Eastern foreign policy at the cost of destroying Jim Halliburton’s career. And in some strange way, that just made it worse.