Jack lived in Gloria House, which took its name from the Jesuit motto, Ad majorem Dei gloriam: For the greater glory of God. A four-story redbrick building overlooking Stanton Park on the edge of Capitol Hill, it had once been someone’s grand nineteenth-century mansion, but over the years a hodgepodge of additions with no particular vision transformed it into something that couldn’t be characterized by any architectural style. The facade still looked Victorian, but the back of the building, thoroughly modernized with gated parking underneath and rows of nondescript balconies, reminded me of a generic motel off the interstate. The Jesuits bought the old building after they built Georgetown Law School over by Union Station and also because it had been near St. Aloysius Catholic Church, which had been one of their parishes until the church closed. Then they renovated it, added a chapel, and turned it into a house of religious studies for about twenty or so seminarians and a few professors on the law school faculty.
The gate to the parking lot was open so I chained the Vespa to a metal post that supported the balconies and went around to the front entrance. Jack answered the door, a broad smile on his handsome face as he pulled me to him for a kiss and smothered me in a hug.
It had been two years since we’d seen each other, but he hadn’t changed. To be honest, he hadn’t changed since we were at St. Mike’s and he’d won the senior superlatives for “best eyes” and “best hair.” He also got “worst car” and “heart of gold.” He deserved all of them. Eyes the intense blue of sapphires and dark wavy hair that he still wore a bit long—he looked like a Shakespearean actor—but now going gray at the temples. Worst car—I’d been in it dozens of times when it died, so enough said. And the kindest and most compassionate soul I knew. Grace’s other nickname for him behind his back was “Father What-a-Waste.”
“He’s so damn gorgeous in that delicious dark Irish way,” she said to me more than once. “Why’d he have to decide to be a priest? What a waste of a good man. What a loss for womankind.”
He picked up my bag after that bear hug and looked me over. “You look great,” he said. “I’ve missed you.”
“Thanks. You don’t look so bad yourself and I’ve missed you, too.”
I followed him into the foyer, where a grand spiral staircase with a hand-carved railing coiled up four floors. The Jesuit IHS emblem hung on a shield above the stairs and a statue of the Virgin Mary stood on an altar table across the room flanked by flickering devotional candles in ruby hurricane glasses. Through the open doors to the chapel, the stained-glass silhouettes of the four Evangelists in the chancel window were backlit like a vision in the afternoon sunlight.
My breathing slowed as I followed Jack up the steps. Here I would find peace. We reached the second-floor landing and he opened a door on which a plain wooden cross was fastened below a sign that said GUEST.
“Here’s your room. Want to change so we can go for a run? I’m across the hall. Come on in when you’re ready. Door’s unlocked.”
My room was functional and spartan: a bed with a white matelassé coverlet, a dresser, a desk, a chair, a crucifix, and a window that overlooked Stanton Park. I had my own bathroom—no sharing—with a tiny stall shower. Jack’s suite, which I’d never seen, was also quite simple: living room, bedroom, and bathroom. An antique oak bookcase that I remembered from his parents’ home was filled with books on theology, ethics, law, and spirituality. A carved crucifix that looked African and an icon of Our Lady of Vladimir hung on the walls. A well-worn blue recliner I guessed was a favorite chair had a floor lamp next to it and a small table beside it with his leather breviary and St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises. He also had one of the building’s original west-facing arcaded balconies, which reminded me of a Florentine loggia.
“Rank has its privileges, I guess,” I said. “That’s a great balcony.”
“Yeah, I feel like the pope looking down on the crowds in St. Peter’s when I go out there.” He grinned. “It’s pretty cool.”
“Nice little garden you’ve got, too. Who knew you had such a green thumb?”
“I don’t. When those plants die, I buy new ones. If God intended geraniums to live forever he would have made them out of cast iron. But I do grow all my own herbs for cooking.”
I opened the balcony door and stepped outside. His hanging planter baskets of geraniums looked overgrown, parched, and leggy.
“You might try watering these sometimes. It does help, you know. But you do have cilantro, three kinds of parsley, chives, dill, sage, rosemary, and oregano. And a statue of St. Francis of Assisi.”
“My secret weapon,” he said. “He’s the only reason everything’s not dead.”
He got two water bottles out of a small refrigerator and tossed one to me.
“I haven’t been running much lately,” I said. “Except from gunfire in war zones—and that was a while ago. Be kind to me.”
“You look good,” he said. “You look like you’re in great shape.”
I turned red. “So do you.”
He grinned. “Don’t be such a girl, Medina. I’m not cutting you any slack.”
“Father,” I said, “that’s not a very charitable thing to say.”
We clomped down the stairs and went outside. The traffic light turned red at Massachusetts Avenue and we jogged across the street.
“Why don’t we make a big loop, head up Mass Ave for a few blocks, and then cut over and come down East Capitol so we finish in front of the Capitol by the Library of Congress and the Supreme Court?” he said. “We ought to make it in time to watch the sun go down behind the Capitol.”
“ ‘Where you lead, I will follow,’ ” I said. “Who said that?”
“Ruth. And Carole King. Ruth said it first, but Carole King got paid a bundle for saying it.”
I laughed and said as we ran toward 6th Street, “Now I’m going to have that song stuck in my head for the rest of the day.”
He seemed to be deliberately keeping a slower pace—Jack ran the Marine Corps marathon every year—to give me the opportunity to start the conversation. For a couple of blocks we ran side by side and I thought about how much I’d missed him, his unvarnished way of distilling a situation to its basic components, his clear-eyed sense of justice and why it was important to do the right thing, to be true to your values, to act with integrity and compassion for others.
“Want to talk?” he said after a while. “Or do you really want me to put on my stole and we can do this back at the house with all the bells and whistles?”
We turned onto East Capitol Street at 8th Street by Morton’s Pharmacy. Ahead of us, the Capitol dome filled the rosy evening skyline.
I smiled. “It’s not that. There are things I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”
“Anything you say stays with me,” he said. “I made a deal with the man upstairs when I became a priest.”
“It’s so complicated I don’t even know where to begin.”
Jack reached over and threw his arm across my shoulders in a brotherly hug. “Yes, you do, Soph. Just start talking. It’ll come out the way it’s meant to.”
Something in that sweet, comforting gesture undammed all the bottled-up secrets and loosened the constricted vise around my heart. He never would—or could—reveal a single thing I said, even if I’d just committed murder. We slowed to a walk and I told him everything, beginning with Nick’s clandestine work for the CIA, the truth about his disappearance, Colin’s death, and Crowne Energy’s problems with the increasing menace and threats from the Shaika in Abadistan. By the time I got to the rainy meeting with Baz Allingham in Westminster Abbey, we had reached 1st Street in front of the Capitol. To our left was the Library of Congress; the Supreme Court was on the right.
“There must be something going on at the library this evening,” Jack said. “All those people milling around . . . I think it’s the last outdoor concert of the season. Why don’t we go over to the Supreme Court and find someplace to sit where we can keep talking?”
We turned right and climbed the low steps to the sprawling plaza with its inlaid gray-and-white marble pattern of circles and squares that had been copied from the Pantheon in Rome. I’d read somewhere that the Vermont marble chosen for the plaza and the building’s exterior purposely had a high content of mica so the stone would shimmer with a near-blinding brilliance on sunny days. Directly in front of us at the top of the one-story marble staircase was the templelike entrance to the Supreme Court, the words EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW carved into the frieze below the pediment. Two flags on either side of the plaza fluttered in the light breeze, flanking identical fountains whose turquoise water looked tropical.
“How about if we take one of those benches by the fountains?” Jack pointed to two figures seated on enormous plinths on either side of the staircase. “The female statue on the left is the Contemplation of Justice. The male statue on the right is the Authority of Law. Which side do you want to sit on?”
“I’ll take justice,” I said. “I’ve had enough dealings with the authority of law today.”
We sat on the semicircular bench and watched the jet of water from the fountain cascade gracefully back into the pool and the thin strips of clouds turn orange and red behind the Capitol dome. Across the street, congressional staff and their bosses streamed out of the House and Senate, leaving work at the end of the day. Jack spun his empty water bottle in his hands and waited for me to go on.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” I said finally. “Baz told me there are people who believe Nick might have murdered Colin in order to get the well logs and now he’s selling them to the high bidder . . . I know that’s not true. But I don’t understand why I haven’t heard from him . . . it’s eating at me, Jack. I can’t stop thinking about it.”
It felt like a weight rolled off me to say it, to finally get it out in the open. Why hadn’t Nick contacted me? Why?
“Nick’s a good man,” he said. “I’d trust him with my life, Soph, and you know I’m a good judge of character. There could be a dozen reasons he hasn’t called or e-mailed or got word to you through someone he trusts. Maybe he was injured—you said there was a lot of blood at the house and in that car—and he’s got amnesia. Maybe he’s keeping silent to protect you.”
“I wish I knew.” I threw up my hands. “Sometimes I feel so alone.”
His arm went around my shoulders again. “You poor kid. I pray for you every day, you know that, don’t you? You and Nick.”
“I don’t know if this helps,” he went on, “but over the past couple of years people have started reaching out to me—from the White House, the Hill, administration policy makers, lobbyists. What they wanted was . . . I guess you’d call it spiritual guidance. How to deal with a professional conflict that troubled their conscience or went against their values and ethics.”
I sat up and looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for example, do you take money from a corrupt government or a company that uses child labor in China that wants to hire your public relations firm to promote their interests in America? Or what if you work for a senator who supports the Second Amendment because of all the hunters in his state and you’re in favor of gun control because your niece was killed by an illegal handgun bought on the street?” he said. “That sort of thing. A lot of the people I’ve counseled have been from the intelligence community.”
“You never told me this,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s not like I hung out a shingle. Now I guess it’s word of mouth because all of a sudden someone calls and wants to talk. But let me tell you this: All of them are tremendously challenged and conflicted about where trust and honesty fit in their lives and marriages. Sometimes they can work it out. Other times, they choose loyalty to country over loyalty to family, believing that’s the greater good and the honorable thing to do. Except the spouse can’t handle being frozen out, never knowing what’s a lie and whether he or she—and maybe their children—are being set up or used as bait.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it’s a hard life and that the choices aren’t always easy. You know that better than I do, especially after everything that’s happened to you. But you’re going to make it through this, Sophie, however it turns out. You’re tough as nails, you always have been.”
I gave him a twisted smile. “I hope you’re right.”
“I know I’m right.”
“There’s something else,” I said.
“What?”
“The receptionist who worked for us at Focus was found in the Potomac River this afternoon,” I said. “Her name was Alicia Jones, Ali. She was just a kid, twenty-one or twenty-two.”
“I’m so sorry.” Jack made the sign of the cross. “What happened to her?”
I told him, and about my gnawing worry that I was indirectly responsible. “What if someone made a mistake and thought it was me? Ali said we looked like cousins and even Bolton made a comment about it.”
Jack shook his head. “You’re not accountable for the actions or the behavior of anyone but yourself. Not for Ali, and certainly not for whoever did this to her if it was a homicide. So don’t go there or you’ll tear yourself to pieces.”
“That’s easier said than done, Jack . . .”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Soph. I mean it.” He stood and held out his hand. “Come on. Let’s go back to the house and get showered and changed. We can have cocktails in my room until the kitchen and dining room clear out downstairs. Then I’ll wow you with my fabulous gourmet skills.”
“I’d like that.” I let him pull me up. “I don’t know if I ran off enough artery-clogging calories. We did a lot of walking. And sitting.”
“We can remedy that,” he said as we jogged down the steps. “Last one back to Gloria House does the dishes.”
* * *
We sat by candlelight on Jack’s balcony drinking a bottle of Antinori Chianti Classico, a birthday present from a parishioner at Holy Trinity in Georgetown, where he occasionally helped out saying Mass. Afterward, we brought our glasses and the rest of the wine downstairs to the large communal kitchen, which we had to ourselves. Jack put me to work making pasta dough and showed me how to run it through his pasta machine and turn the thin sheets into fat strips of linguine.
We were standing across from each other at an old marble worktable in the middle of the kitchen and my apron was spattered with flour, as was my side of the table. He’d put newspaper on the floor under my feet and it looked like I was standing in a dusting of snow.
“What’s this dish called again?” I asked.
He dumped a can of tuna in oil into a food processor. “Linguine with tonnato sauce and arugula. You’re gonna love it.”
“Do you have to use the anchovies?”
He opened the tin. “The anchovies make the sauce. Take my word.”
“I hate anchovies.”
“Suck it up, cupcake. More wine?”
I nodded and he filled our glasses.
“Something else on your mind?” he asked. “You’ve been kind of quiet.”
“I didn’t tell you everything when we were at the Supreme Court,” I said. “There’s something else.”
Jack stopped working and stared at me as I told him about the assassination plot and Scott Hathaway’s name being mentioned.
“You overheard two guys planning a murder that might involve the Senate majority leader?” he said.
I nodded. “I ended up telling Luke about it, and this morning he ran into a neighbor who works for Homeland Security and casually brought up a what-if hypothetical situation. Then voilà, an hour later Special Agent Napoleon Duval, my CIA contact, who now works for a counterterrorism task force, showed up at the studio for a little chat like someone rubbed the magic lamp.”
“What did Agent Duval say when you talked to him?”
“I think he believes I’ve been listening to the strange voices in my head,” I said, “and that Nick’s disappearance has made me a little unhinged. He also thinks I deliberately went after the job at Focus so I could meet Arkady Vasiliev.”
“That’s crazy,” Jack said.
“Tell that to Duval.”
“What makes you think the person these guys want to assassinate is Taras Attar?” Jack asked.
“The timing fits. He’s coming to the States in the next few days on a book tour.” I shrugged. “Though Luke says it can’t be Attar because he and Hathaway are such good friends—and Hathaway supposedly knows about this plot.”
“A friend of mine, another Jesuit who teaches at the university, knew Hathaway and Attar when they were Georgetown undergrads thirty years ago. Hathaway’s pretty loyal to his old alma mater.”
“That’s right. Hathaway and Attar went to Georgetown, didn’t they?”
“Go Hoyas.”
“I wonder how they got to be friends.”
He shrugged. “I could ask Sully, my friend. He seemed to know them pretty well.”
I brushed my hair off my face with a floury forearm. “Would you mind?”
“Nope.” He pulsed the food processor. “But getting back to Vasiliev—and you—why are those well logs so valuable that Vasiliev called you in to talk to you last night and someone tossed your place today? Crowne Energy must have found something when they drilled for oil.”
“Nick couldn’t talk about it, but I know he and Colin were really excited about some development right before he disappeared. When Crowne Energy decided to drill that test well in Abadistan, they were the laughingstock of the industry. The geology in that part of the world wasn’t considered conducive to finding hydrocarbons—a large quantity of hydrocarbons, that is—meaning you’d also find oil or natural gas. Any drilling is a bit of a guessing game—there is only a ten to thirty percent chance of finding anything anyway. When you throw in the ethnic violence between the Russians and the Abadis, the threats and intimidation Crowne had to deal with from the Shaika, and Abadistan being a major supply route for drugs and arms from Afghanistan and Pakistan, on paper it looked like a terrible decision to go in there. No one could understand why they took such a huge financial—and personal—risk.”
“Maybe because the reward on a long shot like that would be worthwhile if it panned out?” he said.
“Nick used to say that for a small company like Crowne Energy it would be like hitting the jackpot.”
“If they did find oil—which it sounds like they did—then what?” Jack asked.
“Once you make what they call ‘a discovery,’ it takes another few years to drill more wells and build the infrastructure to develop them,” I said. “It’s not like some Looney Tunes cartoon where the oil gushes like a big black geyser and suddenly everyone’s rich.”
“So maybe Arkady Vasiliev wants to cash in on the risks Colin and Nick took, get in on the ground floor, and take over their operation?”
“I don’t think there’s much ‘maybe’ about it after what he said to me last night,” I said. “I guess what I’m wondering now is whether he’s also behind the plot to get rid of Taras Attar.”
“If Attar’s gone, it’s a huge blow to the Abadi independence movement,” Jack said. “Abadistan remains Russian and so does the oil. No one benefits from that more than the guy who owns the biggest oil production company in Russia. I don’t know much about this, but I would imagine it wouldn’t be hard for Vasiliev to take out a contract on Attar, especially with all his connections to the Shaika.”
“But why would Scott Hathaway be involved?” I said. “Luke’s right about it not making sense.”
“Maybe Sully could shed some light on that.” Jack put mayonnaise, capers, and the anchovies into the food processor. “I think the water’s ready. Did you finish making the pasta?”
“Yup. Want me to cut the lemons?”
He nodded and poured a steady drizzle of olive oil into the food processor. I handed him the lemons and he added the juice to his sauce.
My phone vibrated in my jeans pocket and I pulled it out. A text message from a phone number I didn’t recognize. Can you meet me tonight to talk? It was signed Moses Rattigan.
I wrote back. About what?
Will explain. At KenCen fund-raiser. Do you know Bar Humbug? Barracks Row, 10:30pm?
“Something wrong?” Jack asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “The public relations director at the National Gallery wants me to meet him tonight at a place called Bar Humbug after he leaves a fund-raiser at the Kennedy Center. He says he needs to talk about something. Luke was going to send everyone a link to our photos this afternoon. I hope there’s not a problem.”
“Are you going to meet this guy?” Jack asked. “At least Barracks Row is only on the other side of the Hill, so it’s not far away.”
“I think I ought to. Maybe this isn’t about the pictures. Maybe Moses talked to Duval . . . or Bolton. I guess I’d better find out.”
“All right, but you’re not going alone,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. I love you, but I’m a big girl and I can do this. I’ve been in war zones. I can handle Capitol Hill.”
Jack shook his head. “Did you think you’d drive through this neighborhood on your windup scooter at this time of night? No way, sunshine. I can nurse a Perrier in a corner while you talk, so I won’t cramp your style.”
“Jack—”
“Someone broke into your place today and a car chased you down the Mall last night.” He was using his don’t-mess-with-God’s-earthly-representative voice. “I’m coming with you.”
“Okay. You win.”
My phone buzzed again. Are we on?
I sent a reply. See you at 10:30.