“They get a lot of aid, and rightfully so. All I’m saying is that Danny and I had our agenda, and ours involved the
foreign
poor. Human beings are dying, Lee, by the millions. Children all over the world are perishing for no reason other than neglect. Every day, every hour, every minute.”
“And do you really expect me to believe you two did this out of the goodness of your hearts?” He looked around the house. “This isn’t exactly a soup kitchen, Faith.”
“The first five years I worked with Danny I did my job, represented the big clients and I made a lot of money. A
lot
of money. I’ll be the first to admit I’m one materialistic hardass. I like the money, and I loved what the money could buy.”
“And then what happened? You found God?”
“No, he found me.” Lee looked bewildered, and Faith quickly continued. “Danny had begun lobbying on behalf of the foreign poor. He was getting nowhere. No one cared, he kept telling me. The other partners at our firm were getting tired of Danny’s charitable endeavors. They wanted to represent IBM and Philip Morris, not Sudan’s starving masses. Danny came to my office one day, said he was forming his own firm and wanted me to go with him. We weren’t taking any clients, but Danny told me not to worry, that he’d take care of me.”
Lee appeared mollified. “That much I can believe: You didn’t know he was bribing people, or at least planning to.”
“Of course I knew about it! He told me everything. He wanted me to go into this with eyes wide open. That’s how he is. He’s not some crook.”
“Faith, do you know what you’re saying? You
went along
, even though you knew you’d be breaking the law?”
She fixed a cold gaze upon him. “If I could fix it so that cigarette companies could keep selling cancer on a stick to anybody with a fresh set of lungs and gun manufacturers could roll out machine guns to anyone with a heartbeat, I guess I felt nothing was beneath me. And the goal here was something I could actually be proud of.”
“Materialistic hardass goes soft?” Lee said with contempt.
“It’s been known to happen,” she shot back.
“How did you two work it?” Lee said in a baiting tone.
“I was Mister Outside, working all the people we didn’t have in our back pocket. I was also good at getting celebrities to appear at some events, even travel to some of the countries. Photo ops, meet-and-greets with members.” She sipped her wine. “Danny was Mister Inside. He worked all the people on the take while I pushed from the outside.”
“And you kept this up for ten years?”
Faith nodded. “About a year ago Danny started running out of money. A lot of our lobbying expenses he paid out of his own pocket. It wasn’t like our clients could afford to pay us anything. And he had to invest a lot of his own money into these ‘trust’ funds, as he called them, for the members we were bribing. Danny took that part very seriously. He was their trustee. Every cent he promised would be there.”
“Honor among thieves.”
Faith ignored the barb. “That’s when he told me to concentrate on paying clients while he carried the torch on the other matters. I offered to sell my house, and this house, to help raise money. He refused. He said I’d done enough.” She shook her head. “Maybe I should still sell it—believe me, no one could ever do enough.”
She fell silent for a bit and Lee chose not to break it. She stared across at him. “We really were accomplishing a lot of good.”
“What do you want, Faith? You want me to break out in applause?”
Her eyes flashed at him. “Why don’t you get on that stupid motorcycle and get the hell out of my life?”
“All right,” Lee said calmly, “if you thought so highly of what you were doing, how did you turn out to be a witness for the FBI?”
Faith covered her face with her hands, as though she were about to start bawling. When Faith finally looked at him she seemed so distressed, Lee felt his anger slip away.
“For some time Danny had been acting strangely. I suspected that maybe someone was on to him. That scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to go to prison. I kept asking him what was wrong, but he wouldn’t talk to me about it. He kept withdrawing, became more and more paranoid, finally even asking me to leave the firm. I felt so alone, for the first time in a long time. It was like I had lost my father again.”
“So you went to the FBI, tried to cut a deal. You for Buchanan.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “Never!”
“What, then?”
“About six months ago there was a lot of news coverage about the FBI breaking a major public corruption case, involving a defense contractor bribing several congressmen to help it win a large federal contract. A couple of employees at the defense contractor contacted the FBI and revealed what was going on. They were actually part of the conspiracy early on, but were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony and assistance. That sounded like a good deal to me. Maybe I could get a deal too. Since Danny wouldn’t confide in me, I decided to go for it. The lead agent was named in the article: Brooke Reynolds. I called her.
“I didn’t know what to expect from the FBI, but I knew one thing: I wouldn’t tell them much right away, no names or anything, not until I saw what the lay of the land was. And I had leverage. They needed a live witness with a head full of dates, times, names, meetings, records of votes and agendas to make this work.”
“And Buchanan was ignorant of all this?”
“I guess not, considering he hired someone to kill me.”
“We don’t know that he did.”
“Oh, come on, Lee, who else could it be?”
Lee thought back to the other men he had seen at the airport. The device in the man’s hand was a high-tech blowgun of sorts. Lee had seen a demonstration of one at a seminar on counterterrorism. The gun and ammo were constructed solely from plastic to allow passage through metal detectors. You hit the palm trigger and the air compression fired a tiny needle either tipped or filled with a deadly toxin, like thallium or ricin, or the all-time favorite of assassins, curare, because it reacted so damn fast in the body that there was no known antidote. In a crowd, the act could be carried out and the assassin gone before the victim fell dead.
“Go on,” he said.
“I offered to bring Danny into the fold.”
“And how did they react to that?”
“They made it very clear that Danny was going down.”
“I’m not following your logic. If you
and
Buchanan were going to turn witness, who were the Feds going to prosecute: the foreign countries?”
“No. Their representatives didn’t know what we were doing. As I said, the money didn’t go directly to the governments. And it’s not like CARE or the Catholic Relief Services or UNICEF would ever condone bribery. Danny was their unofficial and unpaid lobbyist-in-residence but they had no idea what he was doing. He represented about fifteen such organizations. It was tough going. They all had their agendas, took a scattergun approach. They typically proposed hundreds of single-issue bills, instead of a few comprehensive ones. Danny got them organized, working together, sponsoring a small number of bills containing more comprehensive legislation. He taught them what they had to do to be more effective.”
“So tell me exactly who were you going to testify against, then?”
“The politicians we paid off,” she said simply. “They did it just for the money. It’s not like they gave a damn about children with dead eyes living in Hepatitis Heaven. I saw it every day in their greedy faces. They just expected a rich reward—thought it was their due.”
“Don’t you think you’re coming down a little heavy on these guys?”
“Why don’t
you
stop being so naïve? How do you think people get elected in this country? They get elected by the groups who
organize
the voters, who shape citizens’ decisions on who and what to vote for. And do you know who those groups are? They’re big business and special interests, and the wealthy who fill the coffers of political candidates every year. Do you really think ordinary people attend five-thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners? And then do you really think these groups give all that money out of the goodness of
their
collective hearts? When the politicians get into office, you better believe they’re expected to deliver.”
“So you’re saying all politicians in this country are corrupt. That still doesn’t make what you did right.”
“No? What congressman from the state of Michigan would vote to do anything to seriously hurt the automobile industry? How long do you think she’d be in office? Or high-tech in California? Or farmers in the Midwest? Or tobacco in the South? It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. Business and labor and other special interests have a lot at stake. They’re focused, they have big dollars, they have PACs and lobbyists blasting their messages to Washington nonstop. Big and small business employ just about everybody. Those same people vote in elections. They vote their pocketbooks. Voilà, there’s your big, dark conspiracy of American politics. I see Danny as the first visionary ever to outsmart greed and selfishness.”
“But what about the foreign aid? If this story came out, wouldn’t that kill the pipeline?”
“That’s the thing! Can you imagine all the positive attention it would get? The poorest countries on earth forced to bribe greedy American politicians to get the help they so desperately needed because it was unavailable any other way. You get stories like that in the media, then maybe some real, substantive changes would be made.”
“That all sounds pretty far-fetched. I mean, come on.”
“Maybe so, but my options weren’t exactly flowing over. It’s real damn easy to second-guess, Lee.”
Lee sat back as he mulled this over. “Okay, okay. Do you
really
think Buchanan would try to kill you?”
“We were partners, friends. Actually, more than that. In many ways he was like a father to me. I . . . I just don’t know. Maybe he found out I went to the FBI. He would think I betrayed him. That could have driven him over the edge.”
“There’s a major problem with the theory that Buchanan is behind all this.”
She looked over at him curiously.
“I
hadn’t reported back
to Buchanan, remember? So unless he has someone else working for him, he doesn’t know you’re dealing with the FBI. And it takes time to set up a professional-caliber hit. You can’t just call your local shooter and ask him to pop somebody for you and charge it to your Visa.”
“But he might have known a hired killer already, and then he planned to somehow set you up for the murder.”
Lee was shaking his head before she finished. “He would have had no idea I would be there that night. And if you had been killed, he’d have the problem of me finding out about it and maybe going to the police with the result that everything gets traced back to him. Why bring all that misery on himself? Think about it, Faith, if Buchanan was planning to kill you, he would not have hired me.”
She slumped in a chair. “My God, what you’re saying makes perfect sense.” Terror seeped into Faith’s eyes as she thought about what all this meant. “Then you’re saying . . . ?”
“I’m saying that somebody else wants you dead.”
“Who? Who?” She almost shouted this at him.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Faith abruptly stood and stared into the fire. The shadows of the flames lapped against her face. When she spoke her voice was calm, almost resigned. “Do you see your daughter much?”
“Not much. Why?”
“I thought marriage and kids could wait. And then months turned to years and years to decades. And now this.”
“You’re not in your golden years yet.”
She looked at him. “Can you tell me I’ll be alive tomorrow, a week from tomorrow?”
“Nobody has that guarantee. We can always go to the FBI, and now maybe we should.”
“I can’t do that. Not after what you’ve just told me.”
He stood and gripped her shoulder. “What are you talking about?”
She moved away from him. “The FBI won’t let me bring Danny in. Either he goes to jail or I do. When I thought he was behind trying to have me killed, I probably would have gone back and testified. But I can’t do that now. I can’t be part of him going to prison.”
“If there hadn’t been an attempt on your life, what were you going to do?”
“I was going to give them an ultimatum. If they wanted my cooperation, then Danny would have to be given immunity.”
“And if they turned you down, like they did?”
“Then Danny and I would have been long gone. Somehow.” She stared directly at him. “I’m not going back. For a lot of reasons. Not wanting to die being right at the top.”
“And exactly where the hell does that leave me?”
“This isn’t such a bad place, is it?” Faith said weakly.
“Are you crazy? We can’t stay here forever.”
“Then we better think of another place to run to.”
“And what about my home? My life? I
do
have a family. Do you expect me to just kiss it all good-bye?”
“Whoever wants me dead will assume you know everything I do. You won’t be safe.”
“That’s
my
decision, not yours.”
“I’m sorry, Lee. I never thought anyone else would be dragged into this. Especially not someone like you.”
“There has to be another way.”
She headed for the stairs. “I’m very, very tired. And what else is there to talk about?”
“Dammit, I can’t just walk away and start over.”
Faith was halfway up the stairs. She stopped, turned and looked down at him.
“Do you think things will look better in the morning?” she asked.
“No,” said Lee frankly.
“Which is why there’s nothing left for us to talk about. Good night.”
“Why do I think you made your decision not to go back a long time ago? Like the minute you met me.”