Cold Frame (5 page)

He looked at his watch impatiently as the ancient steam radiators began to clank. Where
was
she?

As if on cue, a woman returned to the room. She carried her purse in one hand and a meeting tablet in the other. She closed the door behind her, noticed that the hummers were off, and then went around the room turning them all back on. Mandeville watched her move around the room with silent appreciation. She was a tall brunette with the body of an athlete—wide shoulders supporting lovely breasts, and beautifully sculpted legs. She had blue eyes that bordered on being violet in just the right light, and she favored clingy fabrics for her clothes. She wasn't beautiful in the traditional sense, but you wouldn't forget meeting her, either. He'd once heard one of the principals call her a slinky toy, behind her back, of course. In the same way that Mandeville projected power, she radiated a tightly controlled sexuality, assuming you were looking for it.

Her name was Ellen Whiting, and she was the Bureau's rep to the DMX. She'd replaced a much more senior Bureau assistant director, which made her the junior member of the committee. He remembered when she'd first shown up, nervous but putting on a brave face in a room full of assistant secretaries of various cabinet-level departments. He'd taken her under his wing after the first meeting, given her some pointers on how things really worked on the DMX.

She was also whip-smart, and he began to understand why the Bureau had sent her over. Three reasons: she was intelligent enough to understand the seriousness of the DMX's mission, and never hesitated when it came time for the fatal vote. Plus, if the DMX blew up politically one day, as it well might, none of the senior dragons over there in the Hoover building would have to be involved.

If she'd been some middle-aged, ultraliberal bulldagger he wouldn't have bothered, but she was somehow—memorable. He had never allowed himself to get into a relationship, much less marriage, with any of the professional women he'd met in the capital. In his view, relationships of any kind were to be carefully husbanded, and never established unless there was a clear prospect of benefit for his own career. That didn't mean he didn't keep a lookout for the possible exceptions, but after all his years in Washington watching other power players, and, in particular, watching too many truly dedicated people suffer through divorce or other marital distress, he'd decided to stay single. He'd met women over the years whom he had respected, admired, or even desired, but he felt that putting a woman in the mix was at best a distraction, and at worst a potential career liability.

Over time he'd begun to treat Ellen Whiting as if she was working directly for him as well as the Bureau, as sort of an apprentice prot
é
g
é
e, and after a while, she'd responded. It wasn't all that hard for him to win her confidence, being a senior White House advisor and a well-known power broker, but he'd been very careful to ensure that there was nothing romantic or sexual about it. She, on the other hand, was savvy enough to understand the value of being close to someone like him, especially when one of the other members of the DMX tried to pull bureaucratic seniority on her when she spoke for the Bureau. Beyond that, he'd thought that she might be useful one day if he ever had to go through with his very close-hold plans for weeding out the weak links at DMX. From the angry set of her jaw now, though, he realized he may have been wrong about that.

She came back to the table and sat down next to Mandeville and waited for him to say something. She was definitely angry, he concluded. But there was no way she could know.

“McGavin,” he said, finally. “What happened?”

“He died, that's what happened.” Her fine lips were compressed into a tight line.

“You were there? You saw it?” he asked.

“Not exactly. We'd met, ordered some wine, and then I went to the powder room. When I came back out of the bathroom door, he was on the floor.”

“And then you got out?”

She nodded.

“Any fallout?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not yet. But he was DHS, so…”

“They know the circumstances?”

“No,” she said. Monosyllabic answers. Shit, he thought. She's really pissed off. He should have expected this, he thought. She was Bureau, but had never been an operator in the CT world.

“Local authorities?” he continued.

She shrugged. It made her close-cropped, glossy dark hair shimmer as it moved in the late-afternoon light. He suddenly wanted to touch it. Down, boy, he thought. This one's too smart not to be dangerous. But it was also obvious that she was trying hard to control herself.

“Metro PD
should
treat it for exactly what it looks like,” she said.

“‘Should'?”

“The incident's being handled by some low-level detectives in Metro PD's Interagency Liaison Bureau.”

“What's that?”

“A channel between Metro PD and all federal LE. If a problem has the slightest link to anything federal, their job is to shop it out of MPD. Not exactly their top drawer.”

“Can they make problems?”

“I doubt it,” she said, after a moment's reflection. “Right now they're treating it as just another middle-aged white male getting overexcited at the thought that he might score with somebody who looks like me.”

Mandeville forced a smile. “I can relate to that,” he said.

“Don't,” she said, looking right at him. “Look what happens.”

He laughed out loud. She didn't seem to be that amused.

“We need to talk,” she said.

“Oh, yes?”

She leaned forward, her eyes suddenly intense. “I think you set me up.”

He did not reply.

“God-
dammit,
Mandeville!” she exclaimed. “You asked me to cozy up to him, see if I could talk him out of this policy-review business. McGavin's a known letch, you said, so show some leg, make him think that there were possibilities—your words, remember? You never said
anything
about killing him!”

“Killing him?” he said. “Calm down, Ellen. Consider the visuals: one assistant deputy under whatever-the-fuck keels over in a fancy restaurant—that's not news. Too many butter-laced lunches with vodka back.”

“That's
not
what I'm talking about,” she fumed. “I think you've just made me an accessory to a
fucking
murder!”

“What?” he asked. “Where the hell did murder come from? The guy died—he was overweight, mid-fifties, white—how is that murder?”

She glared at him. “It's too neat, that's how. You got me to play up to him, make him think we might get it on, I meet him in a restaurant, and he
dies
?”

“Just because you bought some flowers?” he said, his voice becoming smooth as silk.

Her eyes widened. “I don't know what you did or how you did it, or what the
fuck
flowers had to do with it, but I did
not
sign up to kill someone just because he disagrees with what the DMX is all about. Are you fucking
crazy
?”

“Calm down, Ellen,” he said again. “Nobody's talking murder except you. All you were supposed to do was lure him into a faintly compromising situation and then sweet-talk him into voting against a policy review. You agreed to do that. I don't know what happened after that. I surely didn't tell anyone to kill him. What happened—happened. I'm not glad that he died, but I'm not sad, either.”

“What?!”

He leaned forward. “Look,” he said. “You, more than anyone else, know what our problem is these days. You know who our traitors are.”

“
Traitors?
Dissent's become treason now?”

“Goddamn right,” he said. “If I had my way, there'd be two more incidents just like that. The three stooges: McGavin, Logan, and Wheatley. Sitting here on the DMX and pretending to work with us, while all the time maneuvering backstage at the behest of their Senate masters to kill the DMX. Yes, two more prominent funerals would be just fine with me.”

“And how do I know
you're
not behind what happened to McGavin? He had two sips of wine. I went to the ladies' room. When I came back he was crashing to the floor.”

“Well, somebody better look at that wine, don't you think?” he said.

“I had had an entire glass of that wine,” she said. “I didn't flop and twitch. What the fuck did you do?”

“I didn't do anything. But I'll tell you this: if either Logan or Wheatley decide to stroke out in the middle of lunch in the near future, I'm going to make sure that everybody else on the DMX makes a connection, however bogus—fuck with DMX and bad things might happen.”

She sat back in her chair, staring at him, probably realizing now that he
had
in fact had the man killed. “I suspect they might manage that all on their own.”

“You think?”

“Of course they will,” she said. “And when they do figure it out, they will (
a
) take themselves off the committee, and (
b
) one of them will sit down with the
Washington Post
and raise the pregnant question.”

“And what's the most plausible answer to that question?”

She stared at him for a moment.

He waited.

She wilted just a bit. “Someone on the Kill List.”

“Bingo,” he said. “Look: the people on this committee are the people who decide who goes
on
the Kill List. We're the ones who send a name to the President. Surprise, surprise, one of the ‘nominees' or his black-hearted heirs entertained thoughts of payback for that singular honor.”

“Seriously?”

“I've done nothing wrong, Ellen,” Mandeville said. “But I will take advantage of this situation. If I can, I'll insinuate that McGavin's sudden demise just might—
might
—be related to his underhanded machinations against DMX. Washington runs on political paranoia. So: I'll throw some straws into the wind. In plain English, back off the DMX or bad things can happen. Most importantly, their puppet masters in the Senate will also get the message.”

“No doubt,” she said. “But they'll get the Bureau into it. Or the Secret Service. Hell, maybe both. What then?”

“Well, now, my dear coconspirator: that's the good news. If one of them gets into it, they'll
all
get into it—the Bureau, the Secret Service, the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the DHS—I can go on for fucking ever, when you think about it. How many different federal security organs are currently grappling against global terrorism—fifty-eight? No, wait, I've got the digits right, but the order wrong, don't I. It's eighty-five, now that I think of it. Yes, eighty-five.”

“So
what
?”

“Don't you see, Ellen? They'll
all
get into it, like a pack of scrabbling dogs. And because of that, they'll make a hash of it. Especially since McGavin's sudden death had nothing to do with DMX.”

“You light that fuse?” she said. “You insinuate that McGavin died because he opposed DMX? Somebody will definitely come after you.”

“There's nothing to find,” he protested.

“You can't have it both ways,” she said. “You start a rumor that McGavin died because he messed with the DMX, somebody in all those eighty-five agencies will start looking really hard at you. You're not known as a crusader for nothing.”

He sat back in his chair and gave her a cold smile. “Well, if that happens, you can count on the fact that I'll have some meat ready to be thrown to the pack, won't I, Ellen Whiting. Lunch date.”

“Meat?” she asked. “You mean me?”

“
You
were there, with McGavin,” he said. “You picked the wine. You bought the flowers.”

She just stared at him.

He held up his hands. “Let's go back to basics, here, shall we? DMX is all about taking out crazed Muslims who've spent too much time in the sun and who are bent on our destruction. DMX is not about jailing them, or prosecuting them—but
killing
them. Killing. Them. Dead. And doing so in as dramatic a fashion as possible. Like those Somali natives with their eyes out on stalks told CNN: there was a fire in the sky, then a flash on the ground, and Abdullah's car and everybody in it was just—gone. That's what the List is all about, remember?”

“But what you're saying equates legitimate dissent about DMX with the terrorists themselves.”

“Guilty,” he declared. “Because, in my opinion, there is
no
difference between an Al Qaeda boss ordering up an embassy bombing and some squishy liberal from the department of whatever trying to take down the one really effective weapon we have left against the terrorists: and that's the Kill List. These three political appointees—appointees, mind you, not professionals—are the main proponents of cranking up an interagency review. I've been fighting a rearguard action for almost two years now against those three worms and their sponsors in the Senate. They are especially dangerous to us because they are sitting members of the DMX committee, which gives them even more credibility. Their backers in the Senate are fully aware of that.”

She put her hands up to her face, finally realizing what she was seeing.

He took a deep breath. “I am determined to purify this committee. I want no civil-liberty lawyers in this room. No doubters. No nonbelievers. People like that are contagious. What we do here ends in murder. Full stop. And, dear heart, all of us crossed that threshold a long time ago, when the first name to make the List vanished in a ball of fire.”

“But he was a foreigner. A known terrorist commander, bloody up to his armpits.”

“You're quibbling,” he said. “Murder is murder. We vote a name onto the Kill List and he becomes proscribed—marked for death. Don't know about you, but I sleep just fine at night when we do that, because we're in a
war
with these people.”