July 23
Nik arrived a little early at the Hot Corner pub—a reference to the third baseman’s position—only to find the place nearly empty and dark as a grave inside. It took a minute for his eyes to adjust, and after they did, he found a seat at a booth and looked around, wondering if he got the wrong location, wrong time, wrong date, or possibly all three. He checked his email for verification. He had not misread the Balls to the Wall invite.
“Nik?” a husky voice came from behind him. He turned to see a slender, soft-eyed Black woman, her skin the color of cinnamon, wearing a Nats desert camo jersey and hat and holding two mugs and a pitcher of beer, a purse slung diagonally across her chest.
Nik tilted his head quizzically. “Yeah?”
“Lou,” the woman said, and placed the pitcher and glasses on the table and held out a hand.
“Ahhh, sorry, I was expecting a—”
“Guy?” she said, with an easy laugh.
“Yeah, or, at least, that’s what I inferred from your name and what you posted in the baseball group. Clearly I was wrong. My apologies.”
“None necessary. Lots of people make that mistake. Lou, it’s short for Louisa.” She motioned to the booth where Nik was seated and said, “May I?”
Nik nodded. “Of course. I’m really looking forward to meeting the rest of the group,” he said and filled the frosty mugs with beer. He scanned the bar. “By the way, shouldn’t the others be here by now? The invitation said seven o’clock.”
“Gonna get to that in a minute,” Louisa said, and pointed her index finger in Nik’s direction. “But first, a toast”—she hoisted her mug—“to the Nats,” and clinked his glass.
Louisa took a long pull on the beer. “Damn, that’s good,” she said and smacked her lips and smiled at him. “Well, see, the deal is, Nik, we’re it. Just you and me,” she said. “We’re Balls to the Wall.”
“Just us?” Nik said, confused. “I don’t understand. What happened to the others?”
“There isn’t anyone else. Never was,” she said.
Nik glared at Lou, but before he could respond, she said, “You might know me better by another name. A Patriot. I’m the anonymous military source who sent you those Pentagon files.”
Nik stammered, “Y-you?”
“Yup, me.”
Nik leaned back in the booth and studied the woman across from him carefully and more than a little suspiciously. “Why the charade? Why not just call me?”
“It’s not that simple. I have top-secret clearance. I was taking a helluva risk sending you those documents, and if they found out I was talking to a reporter, I could be court-martialed. I needed to be convinced you were a serious reporter, so I followed you online for several weeks. Gotta tell you, I had my doubts.”
“Oh, yeah, why’s that?”
“Maybe because you never did anything with the material I provided.”
Nik grimaced. “Got sidetracked.”
“I all but gave up hope on you,” she added. “You sure do take your sweet time. Are all reporters so slow?”
“No, I’m kind of unique that way,” Nik confessed, not bothering to defend the pace of his work. “Slow but steady.”
“Slow for sure,” Lou said.
Louisa then filled Nik in on the highlights of her military career—Officer Candidate School, Fort Benning, Georgia; quartermaster officer training at Combined Arms Support Command, Fort Lee, Virginia; two tours of duty each in Iraq and Afghanistan before transferring to the Pentagon, where she was handed the Bullwhip contract.
Or more precisely, tracking all the details and fine print in the thousand-plus-page original request for proposal and making sure the bids and final contract complied with military regulations.
“I wanted to get up to speed on the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence programs, so I pulled all the AI contracts for the past several years. Weren’t that many, and none anywhere near the size of Bullwhip, so it didn’t take long.”
“Learn anything interesting?”
“Couple things. US military needs to get its shit together or risk falling behind Russia and China in artificial intelligence, that’s for damn sure.”
“I interviewed Tanner Black. He’s a military expert. Said Russia more or less lit a fire under the Pentagon.”
“Yeah, I saw his name in the files. He’s persona non grata over there for bad-mouthing the brass.”
“He’d be pleased to know. Is that it?”
“Nope. Something else jumped out at me.”
“What was that?”
“Not what, who.”
“Okay, who was that?”
“Hold that thought. We need a refill,” Louisa said and held up the empty pitcher. She boosted herself out of the booth and headed to the bar, and Nik watched her stride off. His first thought was she was attractive. His second was he’d better slow down his drinking or he might say something embarrassing.
He was relieved when he saw Louisa clutching a couple bar menus along with a second pitcher of beer when she returned. Food would help dilute the alcohol in his bloodstream. She scooted into the booth and pushed a menu at Nik.
“You wouldn’t know it, but the food in this place is pretty decent. Oyster po’boy is exceptional.”
“You were saying,” Nik said as he studied the menu.
“Right. All the AI contracts I looked at had one common denominator. Care to guess what?”
“Geoff Tate?”
“Strike one.”
“Allan Trumbo?”
“Strike two.”
“Dwayne Mack?”
“Single, but you should have been thinking double.”
Nik smiled.
“It wasn’t just Mack. Every AI contract Blue Sky lobbied for had Lieutenant General Alexander Hiatt’s fingerprints all over it. Hiatt used to oversee all of the military’s technology budget.”
“Yeah, I know who Hiatt is,” Nik said disappointedly, and asked Louisa if she was ready to order. Their waitress was sitting on a stool at the end of the bar, sipping a drink, chatting with the bartender, whose arms and neck were covered with tattoos. She seemed put upon when Nik called out to her. “Excuse me. We’d like to order now.”
“Whatcha want?” she said when she finally ambled over to their table.
“Two po’boys and fries?” Nik asked Louisa.
“Perfect.”
The waitress sauntered back to the bar, plopped down on the stool, and started talking to the bartender again.
“Food’s good,” Louisa said. “Service sucks.”
“So, Hiatt?”
“He left the Pentagon just before the Bullwhip contract was let for bid. I thought the timing was curious, so I started digging into the archives, rooting through his old correspondence, searching his files that were still in storage, and this is what I found,” she said and withdrew a sheaf of papers from her purse and slide it across the table to Nik.
He recognized the documents immediately. They were the Pentagon’s internal cost projections and specs for the Bullwhip contract, prepared by the Pentagon’s analytics division, and were identical to ones he had back on file at his apartment.
“I’ve seen them already. In fact, I have these same exact documents back at my place. You should know that since you’re the one who sent them to me.”
“Not these, you don’t,” she said. “Take a closer look.”
Nik squinted at the pages and studied them for several minutes. He shook his head. “I don’t get it. What am I looking for?”
Louisa turned her smartphone’s light on and aimed it at Nik. “Hold the pages up to the light,” she suggested.
Nik did as he was told. “Wait a second,” he said, his voice rising.
“Bingo.” She nodded. “Those are Blue Sky Consulting documents. You can see the company’s faint watermark when you hold the paper up like that. Dwayne Mack and his boys cooked up those numbers and then handed them off to Hiatt just before he retired. Little wonder Yukon won the bid, since the military used Mack’s calculations to model the contract.”
“This is the smoking gun, then,” Nik said.
“Not quite. More like ammunition. You’ll notice there’s no date on the documents. They could always claim they arrived after the contract had been awarded.”
Their waitress appeared at their table with a heavy tray and plunked down condiments and two oversized plates brimming with fries and oyster po’boys in front of them. The pair hungrily attacked the food.
After they were done eating, Nik looked across at Louisa contemplatively, lips pursed.
“What?” she asked between sips of her beer.
“Umm, those Nats tickets you mentioned, that was just a ruse, then?”
“Ha,” Louisa barked. “’Fraid so. Series has been sold out for weeks.”
Nik stumbled out of the Hot Corner just before closing time with a slight buzz, a dull headache, and pockets stuffed with napkin scribblings from the all-night session with Louisa Dills.
“You gonna be awright, hon?” she asked as they walked out of the bar together.
“I’m fine.” Nik waved her off, but thought, Man, that woman can sure pack it away.
Nik crawled into the front seat of his Land Cruiser, powered down all the windows, and steered the vehicle toward Courthouse Road, praying he didn’t run into a cop.
He jogged left on Nutley Street before jumping on the I-66 ramp east toward the District of Columbia. He stayed in the far-right lane and kept his speed at a steady fifty-five miles per hour all the way home. When he got back to his condominium, he found a note tacked to his door. It was from Reese, his neighbor. She said she heard Gyp barking, looked in on him, discovered he had somehow locked himself in the bathroom, and took him back to her place to calm down. “Drop by when you get home. I work late,” the note read.