ELEVEN
Remington’s Empire-style house with white Romanesque columns was on Whitehaven Street between the Danish and Italian embassies. Its furnishings were straight out of an
She’d married her husband because of his British title — his father had been the ninth Earl of Paxton — and because of his accent, which she considered pure class. And he had married her because of her money; his father had squandered on gambling what little money the family had left, losing the country mansion finally to back taxes when Gordon was ten. He’d been sent to an uncle in London and had been forced to work his way through Oxford, mostly by a series of illegal but brilliant scams, including a numbers racket, the details of which he’d learned from watching old American gangster movies. If anything, he’d always been a quick study.
It was shortly before five in the afternoon when he emerged from his bedroom suite in his brocaded dressing gown to find his wife heading out the door. She came back and pecked him on the cheek.
“Don’t wait cocktails for me, I’ll be in town.”
“Kennedy Center?” he asked indifferently. Because of her family she was on several boards, including the Kennedy Center Foundation, which was the money-raising arm of the center. Tall, for a woman, slender with a narrow face but wide, chocolate eyes like Audrey Hepburn’s, she had conquered the Washington social scene within the year after she and Roland had married and moved down from New York.
She nodded with just as much indifference. “Don’t forget we’re at Senator Worley’s reception at eight and afterward we need to pop in at the Chinese embassy, their new ambassador has arrived.”
Her unspoken message was for Gordon to behave himself and stay at least reasonably sober. At fifty he was already beginning to develop one of the vices that had led to his father’s downfall; drinking every day, starting usually around noon, sometimes earlier, but normally not to such an extent that he was falling down drunk. Not yet anyway.
“Sure,” he said. “See you in a couple of hours.”
She nodded then left.
Remington stood in the vestibule for a long moment, alone as in reality he’d always been since his father’s death, listening to nothing. The cook and housekeeper did not live in the house and were off for the evening and he had two hours alone now to invent some sort of strategy for the next stage of the damage control, the tone of which would depend on what was in Givens’s computer.
He headed back to his study, hesitating for just a moment at the wet bar in the alcove between the kitchen and living room. Today, or at least this afternoon until he talked to Roland, he needed his wits about him. All his wits.
The primary parts of the problem — Josh Givens and Todd Van Buren — had been taken care of in a totally satisfactory manner, which had given him some much needed time. Today at the office his day had been consumed by the Baghdad contracts, which Roland was on site to finalize, so he’d had no chance until this moment to look at the things Kangas and Mustapha had brought him.
Sitting down at the antique Rosewood desk that his mother had liberated from the estate and from whom he’d liberated it after she’d been placed in a public dole nursing home outside London, he unlocked a bottom file drawer and took out the
He began with the recorded conversation at the hotel, sitting back and listening to it several times to make sure he missed nothing, especially not the reactions of the young CIA officer.
If nothing else Administrative Solutions under Sandberger had the well-deserved reputation for thoroughness. No messy shoot-outs in which innocent bystanders were gunned down. No trips to the Hill to answer intrusive questions by some congressional subcommittee. No tax audits by the IRS. No complaints from any foreign government. And damned few disaffected employees walking out the door threatening to
He’d argued against taking on Foster’s Friday Club as a client, but Roland had been adamant to do just that, arguing that the club’s powerful members and connections would lead to a lot of lucrative contracts.
“We can’t lose,” he’d promised.
Except that the media was all over the club and Admin was starting to come into the reflected glare. Something they didn’t want or need. Look what all the media attention had done for Ron Hachette and his company Task Force One. Some of his people had been brought under indictment for murdering supposedly innocent civilians in Baghdad. And Hachette himself was still under intense security by Justice.
What Givens had told Van Buren at the restaurant was as bad as they thought it would be, based on the information they figured the reporter had managed to gather over the past several months.
But Remington felt the first sense of buoyancy listening to the young CIA officer’s reaction. Van Buren had been, at the very least, skeptical, as he had every right to be. What Givens had told him was nothing short of fanciful — except of course for the fact that everything he’d said, plus much, much more, was true. He’d not yet stumbled upon the most important aspects of the Friday Club’s activities, especially not the reasons for what had been done and what was being done, nor the ultimate goals.
Science fiction, had been Remington’s initial reaction when Sandberger had brought him into the Friday Club’s fold. And even at that Remington suspected that he hadn’t been told the half of it.
Setting the recorder aside, he fiddled with the reporter’s BlackBerry, but after a few minutes finding only a long list of telephone numbers with nothing more than cryptic notations after each, along with several dozen Web sites, which he didn’t want to bother looking up at this point, he moved on to the laptop.
It was a high-end Toshiba, slim, lightweight, and wide open. After booting up, then hitting the file manager, Remington’s mouth dropped open. He was inside with no encryption program, not even a simple password to block access, which told him that Givens was either a man highly confident in the power he wielded as a newspaper reporter, or incredibly naive, or terribly stupid, or all three.
Out of more than three hundred documents, fully one third of them had the notation “FC” in front of them: FC: Foster; FC: Weitman; FC: DoD; FC: Pentagon; FC: Homeland Security; FC: Atlanta — which Remington realized were files that involved the Friday Club and its members and associations.
Opening the FC: McCann file, he was struck dumb after the first page or so and he sat back in his chair to catch his breath. Givens had somehow stumbled onto payments made to the now deceased CIA deputy director of operations by the club to a Cayman Islands account from something called Littoral Associates, Ltd., which had been suggested by Sandberger two years ago.
The FC: Pentagon file contained similar lists of payments to several important generals in various accounts, mostly in Switzerland.
The FC: Atlanta file contained a detailed account of a highly complex and still ongoing program of gerrymandering that to this point had resulted in swinging seven of Georgia’s districts from solid Democrat to Republican. The manipulations had not helped in the last presidential election, but there was little doubt in Remington’s mind that given time the political climate in the state would change. It was about the long term, something Remington and Sandberger had not discussed in any detail. Admin’s job, vis-a-vis the Friday Club, was to provide security. Keep the media at bay. Keep the walls unbreached.
Keep a lid on investigators like Givens and his friend Van Buren.
But this now, this information in the reporter’s computer went beyond the pale. Givens had gotten far too close.
Remington telephoned Sandberger’s sat phone, which was answered on the second ring.
“Yes.”
“It’s Gordon, we need to talk.”
“Trouble?” Sandberger asked without hesitation.
“It has the potential.”
“I’ll be at the Steigenberger, first thing in the morning.”
“See you then,” Remington said, and he phoned his night office number to arrange for his travel to Frankfurt
