Sabotage (31 page)

Prologue

“A
re you going to kill me?”

Worry lines deepened into furrows as he stared at the short, silver barrel pointed at his forehead. When I didn’t respond, he struggled to break free from the handcuffs chaining him to the bed.

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other, and he froze. His eyes darted around the room, and his mouth opened.

Waving the gun, I regained his attention. “I wouldn’t if I were you.”

He blanched until the color of his face matched the white hair on his head, and beads of sweat popped out on his brow.

To be perfectly honest, he could have yelled his head off and no one would have come. Fancy hotels, with rooms the size of a bus depot, thick yellow drapes and deep pile carpet designed to suck every sound out of the air, along with the constant air conditioning hum, ensured cries of passion or lover’s quarrels went unheard.

And since he thought I was a killer, he wasn’t going to scream. He didn’t have to know there were no bullets in the gun. After all my misadventures, I didn’t carry a loaded gun when killing wasn’t on the menu.

I didn’t like pointing a gun at anyone, even an empty one. It didn’t make me feel strong. It didn’t give me a rush of power. It almost reinforced the futility of my position. But I wanted the illusion of power. He needed to be still and listen to me.

Because I needed his help.

I let him squirm for a moment, the trembling of his lips getting lost in the scruff of his beard, before I shook my head.

He breathed long and slow, easing down from panic into fear. After checking the wrist shackled behind him by the tight-clamped cuffs, he looked at me, eyes wide, trying for sympathy, and asked, “Then, why am I here? What do you want?”

Relief shuddered through me. The question I had been waiting for.

“That’s simple,” I said. I set the gun on the dresser and leaned against it. My eyes bore into his. “I want to tell you my story.”

Chapter

One

A
lmost everything in Washington was big and gray and ugly. I’m talking about the buildings, but a good number of the residents would also fall into the same category. The architects made everything look Roman and Greek, which might be all right if you were in Rome or Athens, but in DC the main part of the city looked like a bunch of poorly decorated wedding cakes.

The tourists, the players, and the street people, all converged uneasily every morning as I walked from my apartment on Capitol Hill to the Eastern Market Metro station. We all descended together beneath the Washington cement, waited impatiently for the next train, grabbed smooth steel bars, and held on as we rocketed in plastic cars through the belly of the town toward our jobs—to turn the wheels of bureaucracy in the most powerful city in the world. Some of the people clutched their seats and stared angrily, but most looked more like robots, reading the morning paper as they rumbled and shook toward another in a long line of work days. They were important people, the kind mothers and uncles in Poughkeepsie and Omaha and Boca Raton bragged on like crazy.

And I wasn’t one of them. Well, not exactly. I worked for the government, but I had no desire to climb the DC ladder. To the contrary, I had already begun to plot my escape. To get away from the traffic, the lines, and the endless stream of silly, boring people: Capitol Hill pages slouching in ill-fitting department store suits; straw-haired society types covered in beige blouses and adorned with pearls; scowling, powerful white men who scared me for no good reason. I paid ungodly money for my half of an apartment, smaller than some closets, and thanks to my location in one of the city’s “developing” neighborhoods, my car got broken into almost daily. I was tired of all that. I was tired of parking tickets. I was tired of humidity. I was tired of DC.

I worked for the NEA. No, not the education one—the artsy, standard-bearer of the Apocalypse, dirty-minded, potty-mouthed, slightly fruity one. A lightning rod to the closed-minded and a place for lovers of the perverse, the National Endowment for the Arts was different than most work places in DC—or so I thought.

I had worked at the Endowment for almost two months, and I wouldn’t have been so excited to take the internship had I known how depressingly normal it was to work there. Despite all the rhetoric and name-calling, there were no Roman baths, no noon-time orgies, not even a poorly covered nipple.

But there were some advantages. The dress code wasn’t as stringent as on Capitol Hill, so I got to wear jeans. Most of the people I encountered were smart, cool, funny, interesting, and enjoyed what they were doing. Maybe it wasn’t quite like other places in Washington, but it was a lot more like them than most people thought.

When I walked through the door, I expected everyone to be in grant panel mode. Hundreds of grant applications, which had been handled with such care by those who had written them, would be scrutinized by a dozen or so arts professionals. Panel mode meant a great deal of running around and shouting, but there were clusters of people talking quietly, which was somehow unsettling.

The head mofo in charge in our office, Joe, calmly talked to Kurt, the office manager. Joe, with his beard, barrel chest, and brassy baritone voice, reminded me of a young, svelte, Jewish Santa Claus. Kurt was young, blond, extremely handsome, and extremely gay, the kind of guy women spend their whole lives wanting to convert. He was always full of expensive coffee and owned a taste in clothes I envied greatly.

“Just the man we’re looking for,” said Kurt, motioning me to follow him and Joe.

We walked around the maze of dividers, the tiny cubbyholes of bureaucracy, toward Joe’s office, past a stack of used copy paper which was supposed to be recycled weeks ago. Joe had the only divider with a door, a sign of his status, and it was my favorite office, with lots of great posters and buttons and pictures of him when he was working in the theater. He sat down and shook his head, and I wondered what I could’ve possibly done.

“This thing is becoming such a headache.” He spat the word “thing” out.

When Kurt both nodded and shook his head, almost at the same time, I was willing to bet Joe was talking about all the furor surrounding Regionarts.

“The Chairman told me before she left for the art mecca known as Las Vegas we are still supporting the program.” The sarcasm dripped off Joe’s tongue. “I don’t think anyone believes it.”

The Chairman reminded me of a mother-in-law in a TV sitcom: she was over fifty, wore long dresses she thought were hip, and had pretty brown hair, but if she were carrying a large purse, I would’ve been very afraid of her. The reason for Vegas? She had vowed to visit arts institutions in all fifty states during her reign—nice work if you can get it.

“We’re supposed to have a teleconference next week, and we need you to gather all of the information on the project up to this point, make some sort of outline, send it to everyone involved, and set up the conference call.”

To be put in charge of hand-holding and conference calling actually sounded halfway interesting; it was better than stacking and filing, anyway. Regionarts was a good program that gave gobs of money to regional groups who divided it among lesser-known artists. Some of the artists did really bizarre things with their money—like decorating a gallery space with used condoms—and “bizarre” was not our Chairman’s favorite word.

“Want me to start now?”

Joe shook his head. “Nah. Go in and listen to some of the panel. You know most of the stuff, so it won’t take too long.”

I nodded and headed out of Joe’s office and down the hall toward the panel room.

The actual granting took place in the panel, where someone’s year of hard work was determined in a matter of minutes. Creative arts types mixed with those who handled the business side of things for the panel makeup. I had worked a couple of panels earlier, easy work from an intern’s point of view—I sat and listened—but it was still rather nerve-wracking because people’s livelihoods depended on what we were doing.

Walking into the room, I knew immediately who the artists were—the steel-sculpted black man with the blond dreadlocks, the Indian woman wearing a large scarf and larger glasses, poring over her grants book, and the robust black man in native African dress with a fatherly expression. The tables were arranged in a rectangle with everyone facing the middle. I took a seat on a corner, next to the tape recorder absorbing all of the madness, and smiled at the woman sitting next to me.

Pretty, conservatively dressed in a tweed blazer and a pair of jeans, she could have been twenty-five or forty. I couldn’t make up my mind whether she would be overly serious or not.

Glancing down at the table, I caught a glimpse of the nameplate I’d made the day before. “Hi, Ann.”

“Hi,” she said, “You’re …?”

“Trent, I work here.” I never told anyone my intern status unless I had to. “How was your trip?”

Her lip curled. “Crowded. I hate flying NationAir because it’s so cheap,” she said. “But I love the hotel.”

I had booked the flight but had nothing to do with the hotel. She didn’t need to know either thing.

From reading the panelist biographies sitting in front of everyone, I learned she hailed from Nebraska. So I started a conversation about the Midwest, which eventually worked around to Midwestern punk bands like The Replacements and Husker Du, and I had a friend for the panel. Nothing is more important in Washington than having someone you can write notes to.

As the panel was called to order, I grabbed the pad of paper in front of me and uncapped the ballpoint pen—I had set the paper and pens out when setting up the room. I scribbled the first note and slid the page toward Ann.

Who is your favorite Charlie’s Angel?

Her eyes met mine and she smirked. She replied and slid the page back.

Kate Jackson. Duh.

While Nancy Cho, the young Asian panel chair, went through the panel ground rules, Ann went straight for the juicy meat.

Any truth to the rumors about the torrid affair over in Education?

I struggled to keep a laugh from breaking out. It wasn’t the free-wheeling Arts department providing the best gossip of the moment, but the snobby, reserved, and conservative Education department. I scribbled a response with glee.

The scuttlebutt is they were caught going at it in the mail room last week during lunchtime.

Neither of us were green enough to commit names to paper.

The panel reviewed applications for dance organizations to find those who were both interesting and financially stable.

Nancy dragged the stack of applications directly in front her. “Do we have consensus of what the panel is looking for?”

One member practically banged the table. “Financial stability.”

The person to their left nodded. “No one should be granted money unless they are stable.”

Rather ironic for them to want the applicants to be financially stable when they were asking for money.

Ann leaned forward. “We tend to give most of the money to the bigger organizations. I’d like to see the smaller groups benefit for a change.”

The comments became a free-for-all.

“We need more cutting edge. The avant-garde.”

“Ballet, for goodness sake. Can we focus on more traditional dance for once?”

The mustachioed agent across the table interjected nonsensical statements. “Dance … creative expression … freedom of movement.” He waved his hands in the air.

Nancy checked her watch. “Let’s get started, shall we?” She grabbed the first file off the top of the stack and read from the application.

As the morning wore on, I sat and listened, learning what got some people lots of extra money and got others shit-canned. Nancy checked her watch with increasing frequency and read the applications faster and faster, cutting short the discussion after each one with a call for decision.

Interesting.

Ann’s face turned red when Nancy cut her off in the middle of yet another comment. She wrote furiously on her tablet and slid it across to me.

Gina Parks, the current dance flavor of the month, is performing tonight.

Understanding dawned. Nancy had been an amazing dancer before becoming badly injured. She rocketed through the grants—without giving them enough consideration—in hopes she could somehow make it to Gina’s performance. Highly unlikely, unless she could convince the group to decide the applications by the rock-paper-scissors method.

Nancy grabbed the next application and read through it, her granny glasses sliding to the end of her nose. “I don’t think we need to take the time for discussion on this. All in favor of passing?”

A woman across the table stood with such force, her chair nearly toppled. She planted her hands on the table and leaned toward Nancy. “That’s enough. I am not going to stand by and watch as you rush your way through the application process.”

Nancy looked like a snake just up and bit her, and a tendril of hair escaped her tight bun.

The woman took advantage of Nancy’s moment of surprise. “The applications we are reviewing took months, sometimes nearly a year, to prepare, and we are obligated as the panel to give
each and every one
due consideration.” Red spots appeared on her cheeks. “These are not simply words written on the form, but the culmination of hopes and dreams, and I refuse to crush anyone’s dreams lightly.”

James Rogers, the large man in traditional African dress, stood up and clapped his hands. “All right,” he boomed. “Everyone out in the hall.”

That was not what I expected.

His words were not a suggestion. I followed James, and Ann came out a moment later. Three other panelists walked dutifully out into the hall. What was going on?

“Make a circle,” James said, a hint of a smile on his face.

We did.

James then led us through half an hour’s worth of African tribal dances: moves to honor the sun and moves to honor the parents. Some looked like yoga, others more closely resembled modern dance. These were the first dance steps other than the box step I had ever attempted, and although some of the others picked up quicker, I soon had most everything under control.