Otto turned his battered old Mercedes diesel over to the valet parker at the Hotel George, just down the block from Union Station, and went inside to the bistro and bar. He gave the name Tony Samson to the maître d’, who had a server take him to a table upstairs, where an older woman with gray hair, sagging eyelids, and drooping jowls was just finishing a martini.
“Mrs. Fegan,” Otto said.
The woman looked up and then smiled uncertainly. “Actually, it’s been Ms. for the past five years. You’re Mr. Samson?”
Otto nodded and sat down. The waiter came, and Otto ordered a house red. She ordered another Tanqueray martini straight up.
“I don’t know how much help I can be. I don’t have any proof. Only things I heard.”
The woman had been on Robert Benning’s staff when he was the assistant ambassador to the UN. Her job had been to expedite the briefing papers and books he used. She’d made it clear during their two Skype conversations before she agreed to meet that she had never created any positions, or even interpreted the raw data that came into the office. Her job was just a small step above a secretary’s.
Louise had dressed Otto for the occasion, with new boat shoes, crisply ironed jeans, a spotless button-up white shirt, and a dark blue blazer from Brooks Brothers. His long frizzy red hair was tied in a ponytail. She assured him he looked fashionable.
“I’ll work on finding the proof. I’d just like to hear your story.”
“I looked up your name. You don’t work for the Post.”
“Samson’s not my real name. Not at this stage of this story.”
“I’ll deny everything if you use my name,” she said. “I just want you to know that from the beginning. You won’t use a recorder or take written notes, anything like that.”
Otto nodded. Last year Pete had coached him on the primary principle of being a good interrogator. “Keep your mouth shut,” she had told him. “Know the answers to the questions you ask, and then let the subject do all the talking. And especially don’t say a thing when it seems like they’re done. Let them fret. They’ll fill in the silences, because they’ll either be afraid of you, or more often than not, they’ll try to impress you.”
The woman stared at him but then looked away as their drinks came.
“Would you like to order?” the waiter asked them.
“Not yet,” she said. She took a deep draught of her martini, and Otto nearly winced, seeing her lack of reaction to the raw alcohol.
“You must have already guessed what was going on; otherwise, you wouldn’t have sought me out.”
Otto sipped his merlot. It wasn’t bad, though when he’d lived in France, even the table wines—the vins ordinaires—were better.
“Everyone was so frantic to find Saddam’s WMDs, they jumped on the yellow cake story. And even when it looked as if that wouldn’t pan out, they couldn’t just walk away. They started looking for nerve gas and biological weapons mobile factories.”
Otto wanted to talk for her, lead her to cutting to the chase, but he just nodded.
She finished her second martini and held the glass up to the waiter for another. The alcohol was like water to her.
“They needed the justification so badly, they were willing to lie to make it true. But you can’t imagine the pressure all of us were feeling. It even filtered down to the janitors, who weren’t allowed into the offices until someone signed off that any scrap of paper with the least bit of sensitive material had been accounted for—either locked up or shredded.
“Finally people started whispering about the it. ‘It was in place. It would convert the critics. Make believers out of them all. It showed we had been right from day one. Saddam had sold out his own people. Something Israel had been warning about from the start. After all, bin Laden was only one problem; we had much bigger fish to fry.’”
She fiddled impatiently with her empty glass. “It was about then that my husband and I began having our troubles. I was spending too much time at work, and he was traveling all the time. And not alone.”
Pete did caution that if they seemed to be wandering off course, to jog them. “But lightly,” she’d said.
“Any idea what the it might have been?” he asked.
She laughed, the sound ragged. She was a big drinker, but Otto figured she was also a heavy smoker. “No one wanted to come out and actually say something specific. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Otto sipped his wine.
“Someone was going to have to find the damned thing before it was too late, for Christ’s sake. Don’t be dense.”
Otto waited for nearly a full minute, until the waiter had brought Ms. Fegan’s third drink, before he pulled out folded sheet of paper and laid it on the table.
“I won’t talk to you if you try to take notes,” the woman said.
“No pencil, no pen,” Otto said. Though he’d played around with superthin tablets that could be rolled up or folded and still record sounds and video, this was only plain paper.
“The last I heard, it had been moved, and only a handful of people on the ground knew where it was, and just about everyone was frantic to find out.” She took a drink, her hand steady. “But that was more than ten years ago.”
She knocked back her drink and looked for the waiter.
“Why don’t we have some dinner first?” Otto said.
“Fuck you,” she said, but not harshly.
Pete had warned that sometimes an interrogation would come to a dead end, and then you’d have to pull a rabbit out of the hat.
“What if there’s no rabbit?” Otto had asked.
“There’s usually at least one right under your nose.”
“Have you ever heard of the sculpture Kryptos, over at the CIA?”
She nodded. “I went over one time with Bob, and we were given a tour. It’s in one of the courtyards, as I remember, some sort of a coded message chiseled into the plates.”
“Four plates, actually, three of which have been decrypted, but the fourth has stumped all the code breakers until a few days ago.”
The woman just looked at him.
“We think it has something to do with what was hidden in the hills above Kirkuk.”
“That’s not possible. I remember we were told that the sculpture was dedicated in the early nineties.”
“The message on the fourth panel was changed in the past five years or so,” Otto said. “Would you like to know what it says?”
“This is bullshit,” the woman said. But she nodded.
Otto read from the paper. “‘And God said let there be light, and there was light, and the light was visible from horizon to horizon. All was changed, all was never the same. And God said let there be progress.’”
The waiter came and asked if Ms. Fegan would like another drink, but she declined and he left.
“The last line was: ‘And there was peace.’” Otto looked up at her. “About what you guys were working for, wasn’t it? A reason to take Saddam out, so Iraq could be rebuilt?”
“But it didn’t work out that way, did it? In more ways than one. And now we’re stuck with one hell of a big problem no one knows how to fix.”
“What’s buried out there?”
“Figure it out for yourself,” the woman said as she got her purse and started to rise.
“Someone thinks they know, and is willing to kill for it. So far at least eight people are dead.”
“Not my problem.”
“I think I know who moved it and why, but at least tell me who buried it in the first place.”
She was frightened, and she started to move away, but Otto jumped up and caught her arm.
“Why did you agree to talk to me in the first place if you weren’t willing to tell me something I already didn’t know?”
“Leave me alone,” she said. She pulled her arm away and scurried downstairs.
Otto left a fifty-dollar bill on the table and followed her just as she was leaving through the front door.
She turned and spotted him, then darted out into traffic at the same time a black Range Rover accelerated down 15 E Street NW, hitting her full on, tossing her body in front of a taxi coming in the opposite direction.
The SUV continued up toward Union Station, its license plate light out.