Private Politics (The Easy Part) (12 page)

Chapter Twelve

Liam could have stayed in bed curled up with Alyse. They could have explored some more of those scenarios that kept playing out in his head. Hell, they could have watched
Millionaire Matchmaker
reruns for all he cared—it would have been better than this.

He really should have worked harder to convince her that together, far, far away from work, was the ideal way to spend a day. Instead, he was mediating a major dispute and feeling more than ever like he didn’t have any business managing people or deciding what constituted journalism.

“Now, Doug, surely you think Sunitha has a point?” he asked, eyes shifting between the two angry people sitting on either side of him.

The other patrons in the coffee shop were subtly watching the exchange. If Liam didn’t get a lid on this thing and fast, some local gossip blog was going to have quite the story about staff tension at Poindexter. These days, he was on TV often enough to be recognizable. He really ought to start saying no to the appearances if only to avoid the attention while he and his employees were playing scenes like this one.

“I most certainly do not!” Doug snapped.

So much for today being easier or his luck having improved.

Sunitha shoved her hair out of her face and spoke rapidly. “We can’t just run everything the instant you want to—particularly before all the facts are in. Pesky things, facts. And here I thought you journalists were interested in them.”

“While you two were busy dithering—” Doug gestured at them and then at his laptop, “—three other blogs published the story.”

“Hey, how did I get involved in this?” Liam asked in a desperate bid for objectivity, which was impossible. “I’m moderating from the sidelines.”

“It’s your blog, isn’t it?” Doug asked.

“Yes and my reputation,” Liam said. “Rumor and conjecture aren’t enough to publish. B-roll of the guy’s apartment isn’t enough. New journalism isn’t supposed to be faster, it’s supposed to be better.”

“Exactly. If the cable news guys are doing it, it’s wrong. Almost by definition.” Sunitha rolled her eyes. Liam knew that in other moments, better moments, Doug agreed.

Doug would never admit it right now, however. He scowled and crossed his arms. At least he had stopped shouting. “It’s not either/or—it’s both/and,” he ground out. “We have to be faster
and
better.”

Blogging hadn’t been like this at the start. When Liam’d been writing Poindexter in college, he had hoped to provide analysis. He’d been concerned with process and reflection. He’d seen it as a place to correct and talk about how journalism worked rather than where journalism happened. Now, page views were king. He chased them as much as anyone else.

“When we publish it, we’ll know the story is solid,” Liam said. “Plus, we’ll do a companion piece about everyone else jumping the gun. Get screenshots of all this stuff. Evidence that everyone is calling this guy the suspect within hours of the shooting, before he’s been named by police or even confirmed to be the same Wilfred Smoot.”

A driver’s license with that name had been found on the floor after a bank robbery in Southeast DC today. Within forty-five minutes, cable news was all over the apartment of some guy with that name in Falls Church.

“You think there might be more than one?” Doug’s face was so hard that the words didn’t have the humor they might have.

Of course there probably weren’t two Wilfred Smoots in the metro area. It was the principle of the thing. Smoot could be an innocent who’d fled the scene as soon as possible; it wasn’t fair or right to prosecute a man who hadn’t been named a suspect and Liam wouldn’t contribute to the white noise until they were certain.

“I’ll even write the process story,” Sunitha offered.

Doug relaxed against the booth. His glare now was good-natured rather than angry. “You two are the most naïve pieces of...” he trailed off and chuckled. “Seriously, what are you doing in journalism?”

“I got lost on the way to becoming a historian.” Sunitha delivered the line with a wink.

“I’m
not
a journalist,” Liam said. No wink with that one. Somehow, he doubted it would have the same effect coming from him.

“No kidding. You’re always asking how we could move to the forefront of the industry, right? The simple answer is by being more aggressive. We need to pursue more original reporting and we need to make bigger claims.”

Liam knew Doug was right, but he still worried about changing the nature of the blog too much or straying too far from his comfort zone. He made a non-specific noise and hoped it would mollify his employees.

Seeming to realize he wasn’t making any progress, Doug changed topic. “Look, I have an update on your girl.”

Liam’s chest tightened. Did he mean Alyse? Was she his girl? He certainly hoped so. He didn’t correct Doug, though he felt certain the lack of protestation would be obvious. He waited for the story to unspool.

Doug sipped his coffee. “As I poke around the committee and Ryan Scott, I’m hearing a lot about a Marc Rynsburger. He’s foreign, from South Africa. He runs a transnational construction company the State Department contracts for various jobs around the world.”

“Building schools?” Sunitha asked, voicing the question in Liam’s head.

“Among other things. They put up all sorts of stuff. Embassies. Even defense installations. And yes, charitable projects.”

“Why would Rynsburger need to funnel the money through YWR?” Liam asked. “Aren’t foreign lobbyists less regulated than domestic ones?”

“Rynsburger ran into some problems a few years back with FARA”—Liam was fairly certain FARA was the act that allowed the federal government to regulate foreign lobbying in the name of national security. DC was such an alphabet soup that even after years there, he still got confused—”so he’s scaled back the company’s direct lobbying expenditures. They still have a lobbyist—”

“Ryan Scott?”

“No, a senior VP at Cunningham Sloane. But when Scott worked at Cunningham, he was on Rynsburger’s account.”

Liam and Sunitha sat back with identical thunks.

Sunitha gave Doug a smile Liam felt a little embarrassed to witness, a smile that spoke to lust and affection and longing. It was the kind of smile he knew something about, the kind he was certain he gave Alyse. He suspected that somewhere north of seventy percent of the antagonism between Sunitha and Doug was related to unexplored attraction, but he didn’t want to pry. And in exchange, they joked merrily about his private life. The ungrateful bastards.

“Damn,” Liam said finally. “That’s good work.”

“Oh, I’m just getting started. I don’t have anything hard yet. Just a feeling.”

“Okay, well, tell us what you need,” Sunitha said.

“Will do.”

For twenty minutes, they managed to chat cordially and work out a few more story assignments for next week. Liam reluctantly signed off on the new editorial process, which would allow Sunitha and Doug to publish stories without his explicit approval.

“You know how much trust I’m putting in you?” he asked Doug.

“I do. But I think we’ve earned it,” Sunitha said.

“At this point, man, I can hear you in my head whenever I’m working on anything,” Doug said. “I know how you’ll react to everything. I won’t jump without checking on anything that’s a potential problem.”

“I know.”

At the moment, that was the least of his worries. Far more of his thoughts were occupied by Doug’s hunch about Rynsburger. Liam wasn’t surprised precisely to find out that someone else was involved but now, he was more concerned about Alyse.

The whole warning note on her bed had been a surprise and not just because it had been, well, a warning note on a bed. Who did that? It was a level of aggression he’d never encountered before.

No, it had also shocked because neither Geri, whom admittedly he didn’t know at all, nor Ryan Scott, whom he’d only met the once, seemed all that dangerous.

Liam had assumed one of them had overplayed his hand with that move and that the entire thing was about to unravel. If someone else were involved, suddenly they were playing a different game—one with unpredictable stakes.

After Sunitha and Doug left, he called the girl in question.

“Hey,” she answered. “Are you up for dinner tonight with Millie and Parker? I was thinking Lauriol Plaza.”

“Um, sure. Sounds good. Did you tell Millie about...us?” He hadn’t heard from Parker, so he guessed the answer was no, but still it was intriguing.

“No.” She sighed deeply. “I wasn’t sure what to tell her. It was a super-brief conversation, actually.” That last bit was defensive.

He answered back with some defense of his own. “I’m a secret?”

“I love secrets,” she said coyly. “Maybe that’s why I’m so distracted today.”

She was awfully hard to stay mad at, particularly when she implied he was distracting her. He certainly couldn’t concentrate.

“Let’s just see how things go. We’ll improvise,” she said.

He decided to focus on the fact that they had a double date. Okay, so he wasn’t sure it was a date, and Millie and Parker didn’t know it was, but still, he and Alyse were...eliding toward a relationship. It was certainly going to be different from any other evening the four of them had spent together.

“That’s fair,” he said. “Look, I called to see if you had heard of a guy named Marc Rynsburger. He’s a...” Since Ryan Scott was coming by soon, Liam glanced around to make sure he didn’t have an audience before saying quietly, “Well, he owns an international construction company and
the lobbyist
,” he imbued the words with heavy meaning, “knows him. Rynsburger’s South African.”

“Nope. He’s a stranger to me. Do you want me to skim our guest and mailing lists?”

“Yes. That would help.
The guy
will be here soon so I should let you go.”

“Good luck! See you at 7:30?”

“Of course.”

There was a heart-shuddering pause before she spoke. “Later.” Her voice was gratifyingly low and soft.

“Later,” he echoed.

Liam set his phone on the table and stared at it. It didn’t possess any magical qualities. It couldn’t even do as well as a Magic 8 Ball at predicting where this was headed, but he knew he was in the tall grass where she was concerned, already in too deep to even think reasonably about the potential danger.

Luckily, before he could freak out anymore over how much he cared about Alyse and how worried he was she would break his heart, Ryan Scott showed up to piss him off.

The lobbyist threw himself in the chair across from Liam, struggling to fold an expensive-looking scarf that the day’s weather didn’t require.

“Thanks for coming by,” Liam offered. “I can’t wait to learn more about your work.” That, at least, was true.

“Oh, my pleasure. Where do you want to start?”

“Why don’t you tell me a bit about your background?”

“I always knew I wanted to work in politics.” Liam got the sense this first part of Ryan’s autobiography had been polished through many tellings and retellings.

Ryan went on, “I love the game, the hustle. I love people who care about politics. College debate and College Democrats was my life at school. I went to law school right after college, back in Minnesota. I was thinking about working for a local DA and running for office there, so it made sense to stay in state. But DC beckoned.”

He got a distant look in his eye as he narrated the events for Liam. He was probably imagining the entire thing as a soft-focus convention speech intro video. So far, it was a pretty typical DC story. Knowing that it would end with money laundering was more than a bit sobering given how, well, relatable it was.

Ryan blinked as if the montage in his mind had ended. “So I got a job with a House member from Florida. Answering phones for a few months, then I went into the press office and worked my way up from there. Six years ago, he lost reelection. Gerrymandering.”

They both shuddered before Ryan said, “I went to K Street, which by then was what I knew I wanted to do more than anything. I worked at Cunningham Sloane for a while, learning my way around the city. I started my own boutique shop two years ago.”

He’d broken out on his own right when the weird stuff started at YWR. Convenient.

“What kinds of accounts do you handle?” Liam asked.

“We represent mostly international NGOs and others who have business with the foreign affairs subcommittees. Specializing is the only way a small shop can compete with the big guys. And the staff and members need a lot of support on international issues.”

That was probably true. Lobbyists supplied an astonishing amount of legislative language. When congressional staff either didn’t have enough information, or when lobbyists had a great deal of power, outside interests could more or less write bills directly. The self-righteous anger Alyse had expressed when she’d learned something was wrong at YWR made perfect sense.

Liam scratched some of this down on his notebook and formulated his next question. “How many employees do you have?”

“Four.” Something serious flashed on his face then. Responsibility, perhaps. Again, Liam understood and the empathy disconcerted. He didn’t want to feel like he had anything in common with this guy. “The past few years have been tough for small businesses, but we’re doing fine.” This last utterance was defensive and Liam absolutely understood.

“I, uh, asked around the Foreign Affairs Committees getting ready for this interview.” That was true enough as far as these things went. Plus if somehow wind got back to Ryan, this would help cover for him and Alyse. “I heard a lot about your relationship with Marc Rynsburger.”

Ryan’s mask clicked into place. Gone was the slightly vulnerable, relatable guy. The smarmy corporate lobbyist was back. When he spoke now, his voice had the chilly edge of an axe blade in winter. “He was a client when I was at Cunningham Sloane. As far as I know, his business is still with them.”

Liam had pushed too far too fast. “Oh, my bad,” he said with a toss of his hand as he looked down at his notes. “He was just one of the clients people knew you had worked for. You have a great reputation. Smart, helpful, all those things.”