March 17
He hated crowds and preferred to work behind the scenes, undetected, but tonight was different. It was important he stood out, be seen. The Georgetown bar was packed and noisy with Saint Patrick’s Day revelers, and he had already bought the house one round of drinks to celebrate. Two drunk brunettes, in matching short green skirts and sequined tops, had him hemmed in as he stood facing the rowdy gathering, back to the bar, elbows propped up against the railing.
The heavier of the two flashed him a green thong she was wearing under her skirt. The other pulled him closer and whispered in his ear, “I don’t own green panties, so I’m not wearing anything at all.” She belched softly in his face and giggled. Her breath smelled like licorice.
He remained in the bar for another fifteen minutes, settled his tab, and ordered up an Uber, but not before buying a second round of drinks and engaging in some heavy petting with the two females, running a fleshy hand up the skirt of the pantyless one while the other massaged the inside of his thigh. He downed what was left of a mug of green beer, slipped the bartender a fifty-dollar tip, and escaped the claws of the two women.
The Uber driver was wearing a Washington Nationals baseball cap and kept up a running dialogue on the team’s chances to get back to the World Series as spring training approached. “I still can’t believe they got rid of Harper,” he said, referring to the perennial all-star and two-time MVP Bryce Harper. “Who would have thought.”
When he reached the entrance to his building, one of the new high-rise luxury towers off upper Wisconsin Avenue, he made sure to pause and chat up the doorman.
“Karl, my main man, how come you didn’t tell me about the hottie who moved into 2A? You been holding out on me?”
Karl smiled. “You plenty busy as it is awready, Mr. Mack. You not careful, your manhood like to fall off.”
“I do like the ladies,” he boasted.
“Good night, Mr. Mack.”
“Good night, Karl,” he said before taking the elevator up to his twelve-room apartment on the fifth floor.
Dwayne Mack kicked off his sneakers in the entryway, padded to the kitchen, poured two fingers of rye whiskey into a cut-crystal tumbler to wash the beer taste out of his mouth, dropped in ice cubes, selected a Fuente robusto from the humidor on the counter, and made his way to the living room. He flipped on the television and started scrolling through the stations to catch the local news, all the while monitoring Twitter.
The lead story on all three programs was about a gangland shooting that had left four people dead and six others wounded in southeast Washington. “That brings the number of murders to forty-four this year, and we’re only in March. At this pace, we will surpass last year’s record homicide rate,” the newsman said somberly.
Shame it was only four, Dwayne thought to himself and muted the sound.
He checked his watch. In an era of iPhones, he still preferred wristwatches and owned an expensive collection—Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe—because it was his experience that luxury sent an important message.
He was careful not to overdo the extravagance, lest he be considered vulgar, and offset the five-figure bracelets dangling from his plump wrist by purposely dressing down in flannel shirts, blue jeans, sneakers, baseball caps.
He was a good twenty pounds overweight, a fold of belly draped over his beltline like a water balloon, and looked like he belonged behind the wheel of a Peterbilt semitruck. Instead, he drove a restored 1966 Ford Mustang, canary yellow, hardtop. He avoided the sun, his skin as white as the underbelly of a fish.
Clients were intrigued by Mack’s eclectic style, but that’s not why they hired him. They hired him because he got results. Always. That, and he carried scores of politicians and judges in his pocket like loose change.
Most lobbyists and crisis communication firms in Washington, DC, are what those in the industry refer to as “relationship specialists.” Not Dwayne Mack. He was a cage fighter, and he didn’t give a damn who he crawled into the octagon with as long as their checks cashed. Technology monopolists, tobacco companies, industrial polluters, dictators, they all came knocking at Blue Sky Consulting’s door, and they always found it wide open.
Mack booted up his laptop and started surfing the web. It was one minute past midnight. On the third news site, Hush Now, a crime and political gossip rag that Mack often secretly spoon-fed tips, he saw the story. He clicked on the headline, and it took him to a page with scant details.
Yukon CEO Shot, Killed at Home
Geoffrey Tate, CEO of Yukon, the world’s largest artificial intelligence company, and one of the planet’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth estimated north of $150 billion, was shot and killed in his McLean, Virginia, home late this evening.
“At this time, we are still trying to determine the sequence of events that transpired prior to Mr. Tate’s death. We will release further details as they become available,” Samantha Whyte, chief spokesperson and lead investigator for the Northern Virginia County Sheriff’s Department, said in a prepared statement.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates throughout the night.
Mack unmuted his television. The local stations had now picked up the story and were broadcasting news of the shooting. They didn’t have many more facts than Hush Now’s online report, but they did have a dated mug shot of Tate, circa 1994, when he had started Yukon in his garage; aerial photos of his new walled-in ten-acre McLean, Virginia, estate; and a picture of Yukon’s distinctive headquarters building in downtown DC with its thirty-eight-foot steel sculpture of a mechanical prospector mining for gold, the pickax in his hand hypnotically striking a blow on rocks every seventy-five seconds.
Mack continued to monitor Twitter and waited five minutes before making a call. When a sleepy woman answered, he announced in a wounded voice, “This is Dwayne. Have you heard the news? It’s all over the media. Geoff’s dead. He’s been shot and killed.”
The woman gasped and said something, but Mack wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy calculating what impact the news of Tate’s death would have on the company’s stock price when markets opened on Monday. He figured it’d shave 20 percent off the market cap on the high side, or about $200 billion. He’d be sure to load up on the dip.
He turned his attention back to the blubbering woman on the phone and told her to pull herself together and start calling Yukon’s board of directors to notify them of the news. He hung up the phone, picked up his laptop, and pecked away at the keys, tapping out a statement for the board to release to the press that read, in part:
When he was satisfied with the statement, Mack clipped the tip of his cigar, lit it with a gold lighter inscribed with “The best is yet to come,” refilled his tumbler with the bottle of rye he carried in from the kitchen, and reclined back on the couch. Minutes later, the encrypted app on his phone signaled the arrival of an incoming text message with a piiiing.
He specifically chose this particular app because it didn’t store any bread crumbs in the cloud and contained no GPS monitoring code. He glanced down at the message. The text contained no words. Just an emoji. It was a four-leaf clover. The Irish symbol for luck.