Against All Enemies (6 page)

Reeder pulled out the chair to Haynes’s left and sat. “May I join you?”

“Apparently so.” Haynes checked his watch. “You do know it’s seven-thirty, right? In a mere four and a half hours, you’ll have a whole new day for working.”

“This is important, Haynes.”

The senator pressed the button to darken his phone and slid it back into his jacket pocket. “I prefer
Leader Moncrief.
Make it short.”

“The president would like to speak to you about—”

“I believe he has a telephone, too. Even has my cell phone number. If it was as important as you purport, His Highness could be talking directly to me, and you could be at home with your dogs.” Reeder famously preferred the company of dogs to human relationships. It made him the perfect White House staffer.

Luis reappeared. “Excuse me, Senator. May I get your guest something to drink?”

“He’s not staying,” Haynes said.

Luis blushed and looked to the floor. And vaporized.

“What are you so pissed off about?” Reeder said. “You’re jumpy.”

“I’m not
jumpy,
Mark. I’m tired and much more sober than I care to be. You want to talk about work, when in fact, I just left fifteen hours of work.”

“That’s the job when you’re at the top of the heap.”

Haynes took another sip of his Manhattan. A much bigger one. “Right now, Mark, I feel like hitting you in the face. I’m tired of the games your team has been playing.”

“You’d feel differently if yours was the side that was winning.”

“That’s the thing, Mark. Until your regime moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, both sides understood that the game really was anything
but
a game. We have serious jobs to do, with serious consequences if we do things wrong. You guys just want to throw socialist, populist bullshit to the masses, and then call us names in the press when we save you from yourselves.”

“If it’s so bad for the country, why not just let us win?”

“Because you guys don’t blink. You’re already in your second term, and you know damn well that the damage you’re doing will be delayed in its effect, and then, when we take back the White House in four years, you’ll point to the new guy and the public will blame all the problems on him.”

Reeder grinned. “You’re right,” he said. “You really aren’t drunk enough yet. Still, my boss wants you to reconsider your resistance to the Defense bill.”

“That’s fascinating. Have your boss talk to my chief of staff, and we’ll arrange a special appointment for him to kiss my ass.”

“Jessica Reinhardt,” Reeder said.

The name hit like a gut punch. Haynes tried not to show it, but he knew he flinched. He said nothing, but as he lifted his drink, he saw the slight tremor in his hand.

“She was only sixteen,” Reeder went on. “Her son, Lance, found out who his father is, and he contacted us with the news.” He leaned in closer. “Turns out he’s a populist-socialist, and the stuff he’s reading about his daddy does not make him proud.”

Haynes felt his ears going hot. “This Lance fellow,” he said. “How old is he?”

Reeder shrugged. “Thirty-ish. Thirty-one, I think.”

“And I’m forty-nine.”

Reeder chuckled. “Ah, you want me to do the math. Yes, I understand that you were only eighteen yourself, but statutory rape is statutory rape. I don’t believe there’s a statute of limitations for sex crimes in Virginia.”

Haynes felt the room narrowing, the light dimming. You didn’t get to his heights in the political stratosphere without expecting cheap shots, but this one had come out of nowhere. Jessica had been his high school squeeze, and when they’d first done the Big Nasty, they’d both been minors. Then his birthday came first, and the rest was named Lance. Last time he’d heard, Jessica had married a lawyer in North Carolina and was living a happy life. She’d never sought anything from him. And now this.

“There’s a demand at the end of this,” Haynes said. “Understanding that I’m neither confirming nor denying, why don’t you cut to the chase?”

Reeder’s face peeled back into its lobbyist sneer as he leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “You are a cynical, cynical man, Senator Moncrief. I’m merely here to give you a heads-up on a threat that seems to be looming over your sterling reputation.”

The steak knife at Haynes’s left hand called to him. In a single stroke, he could drive it through the soft spot under this chickenshit’s jaw and into his brain stem, disconnecting his melon from the rest of his body before he’d even know to flinch.

“You’re attempting to blackmail me on behalf of your boss. Be careful, Mark. He has a security team. You don’t.”

“Did you just threaten me?”

Haynes leaned forward until his arms were on the table and glared at the little man with the big beard. “I would never do such a thing,” he said.

Reeder leaned back farther. “You don’t scare me,” he said.

“Yes, I do. And if I don’t, you’re more of an idiot than I think you are.”

“I don’t think you entirely grasp where you are, Senator.”

“Leader Moncrief.”

“Haynes. This story hasn’t hit the media yet because we talked your baby boy Lance into keeping it quiet until we could talk to you.”

“Which brings me back to your last lie,” Haynes said. “What do you want?”

Reeder took his time gathering his thoughts. “Pretty much anything we want,” he said. “We don’t want you to do anything overt, nothing affirmative. Just stay out of our way.”

A punch to the throat would kill him, too. Haynes felt his fist tightening as that thought passed through his brain.

Yet he relaxed his posture. He’d fought too many battles over the decades without a major loss to concede defeat to this chicken-neck asshole. “Give me a second,” he said. He reached into his pocket and withdrew his cell phone again.

“Take your time,” Reeder said. His face showed equal parts confusion and discomfort.

Haynes pushed a speed dial and waited, confident that the party on the other end would pick up before the third ring. “Stella Pence,” a voice answered. She had been Haynes’s chief of staff for as long as he’d had a staff that needed a chief.

“Hi, Stella,” he said. “Mark Reeder invaded my space at Morton’s. Tony Darmond knows about Lance Reinhardt.”

“Oh, no. Really? I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be,” he said. “It had to happen sooner or later. Sorry to put you on this particular spot at so late an hour, but make the calls you need to make. We’re going nuclear.”

Stella fell silent on the other end of the phone. “Are you sure?” she said. “There’s no going back.”

Haynes let her words swirl in his head for a while, mixing with his fantasies of reducing Reeder to a lifeless lump of tissue. “You’ve got a point,” he said at length. “Can I ask you to hang around your phone for a few minutes? I’ll get back to you one way or the other.”

“Of course. Do you—”

He clicked off, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and smirked at Reeder, who he knew had heard his conversation.

“What?” Reeder said. “Clearly, I’m supposed to be even more afraid than I wasn’t before. You’ve got a
nuclear
plan.” He feigned a body-wide shiver. “Ooh, how scary.”

“Did you know that the First Lady used to be a terrorist?” Haynes asked. “She killed people on behalf of her old friends from Russia. She also had an affair with Douglas Winters. You remember him, right? He
committed suicide
a while back?” He used finger quotes as he leaned on those words.

Reeder’s steely façade twitched. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Haynes allowed himself a laugh. “Wow, that surprises me. Well, be sure to watch the morning news shows tomorrow. It’s a very cool story.” He looked up for Luis’s attention and beckoned him over. “I might even mention something about a story you’re going to leak in a foolish effort to discredit me. I’m sure that the thirty-year-old innocent sex story will resonate far louder than the president’s wife trying to topple the government.”

Luis arrived at the table.

Haynes pointed to Reeder with an open palm. “My pale, trembling friend here was hoping someone could escort him to the door.”

Luis looked terrified. He clearly had no idea what to say.

“Are you okay, Mark?” Haynes asked. “You don’t look well.” He made eye contact with Luis, and indicated with a twitch of his head that he should make himself scarce.

When they were alone, Reeder said, “If you had evidence, you would have revealed it by now.”

Haynes sat taller. “I’ve known about your boss’s transgressions since he first decided to transgress. I haven’t revealed what I know because I thought it would harm the country that I actually love. That’s hard for you guys to swallow, I know, but there it is.”

“Yet despite this patriotic fervor, if we threaten to come at
you
—”

“I will tear off your head and shit down your neck,” Haynes said. “Count on that.”

“We’ll take you down with us.”

“No, you won’t,” Haynes said. “Despite all the tummy rubs you give to your lapdogs in the press, they’ll tear you apart to get to the kind of raw meat I’m prepared to dangle. It’s not as if the stage hasn’t already been set. Remember those ‘disproven’ blog posts from a while ago? That fire went dark, but I bet it would be easy to rekindle.”

Reeder looked deflated—literally, like he needed air. “Is this really the way you want to play the game?”

Haynes laughed long and hard. “Really, Mark? That’s your question to
me?
Do you remember who invaded whose private space here?”

Haynes could almost hear the gears in Reeder’s head grinding for an exit strategy.

“Tell you what, Mark,” he said. “Why don’t you leave me alone?” He checked his watch. “I don’t want an answer from you now. I’ll give you till eight-thirty to say that you’re sorry and that I never have to worry about some bogus statutory rape charge. At eight thirty-one, I’m going to tell Stella to start calling newsrooms.”

Reeder sat there, looking dejected, as if the evening had gone any way but how he had anticipated, which was no doubt the case.

“This is your time to walk away,” Haynes said. He motioned for Luis to show Reeder the door.

The meal tasted even better than usual. In addition to being one of the final bastions that recognized a perfect Manhattan, Morton’s likewise understood the meaning of medium rare—it meant just north of rare, not just south of medium. When applied to a good cut of beef, the difference meant everything. Haynes received the phone call he’d been waiting for at eight-fifteen. The timing itself confirmed the value of the information he guarded. Nowhere else on the planet did the old saw,
information is power,
resonate louder.

With his belly full and his head appropriately buzzy, he stepped off the escalator into the lobby of the building that housed the restaurant, and from there, out into the stifling humidity of the evening. He turned right onto Connecticut Avenue and headed toward Farragut Square, beyond which another escalator would take him down to the subterranean bunker that was the Farragut West Metro station. His status as Senate minority leader qualified him for a car and a driver and a security detail, but he’d never wanted any of that. The voters he served were commuters themselves, and he’d hung at least two reelection bids on the fact that he endured what they endured every day. Oh, that the clueless, tone-deaf management structure of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority could find a way to make the nation’s second-busiest commuter rail run on time with equipment that worked. Haynes had actually asked the question, in session, why it was that Metro officials granted themselves raises when fifteen percent of their elevators and twenty percent of their escalators were out of service on any given day.

He’d been shamed into abandoning that theme when someone on Twitter made the news by asking why he should be paid at all, given the dysfunction of Congress. It was the kind of taunt that felt like it could have legs, so he abandoned the Metro theme before the media forced him into an unfortunate sound bite.

Now that the public was politically illiterate—where sound bites on the bedtime comedy shows were the largest source of news for the under-thirty crowd—there was no longer such a thing as an innocent slip of the tongue.

He was making this walk through Farragut Square later in the evening than he’d planned. The indigents and homeless were reappearing from their daytime hideouts and beginning to set up camp. At an intellectual, intuitive level, Haynes understood that these poor souls were largely harmless, but he also understood that a good many of them would be better off in a mental hospital than on a filthy tarp on the grass. They made him uncomfortable.

As he traveled the brick walkway, he kept his hands in his pockets, his right fist wrapped around the grip of his Ruger LCP .380 pistol. He carried it in a pocket holster that always rested on his right thigh—literally inside the pocket of his suit pants. He never told anyone about it because it was none of their business, and he could get away with carrying it to work because members of Congress bypassed the magnetometers and security checkpoints. He harbored no fantasies about shooting it out with bad guys, but if an active shooter got loose inside the Capitol, or some nut job started shooting up a rally, he at least wanted a fighting chance if the murderer made eye contact.

Haynes knew the raggedy man up ahead was trouble the instant he rose from his bench. It was something in the way the man carried himself. His posture was too good for a homeless guy, his neck too athletic. His eyes too intense. And he was looking directly at Haynes. And he wasn’t dressed properly. No one needed a coat when it was this hot outside.

Haynes knew that he was about to get mugged. He stopped and set his feet for a fight.

The raggedy man clearly saw that Haynes had made him, and he sped up his pace to close the distance. He reminded Haynes of a torpedo in the water, its course set and its mission irreversible.

Haynes reacted without thinking. The LCP was out of his pocket and in his hand. His left hand joined his right for support, and he bent slightly into an isosceles stance, just as he’d been trained, and just as he’d practiced.