Absolute Power (9 page)

He looked down at the carpet in front of the mirror.

He had gone over that area repeatedly with the vacuum until it was smooth; the carpet nape, already plush and expensive, had been a good quarter inch thicker by the time he was finished. No one had walked there since they had come back into the room.

And yet now as he stooped down, his eye discerned very rough traces of footprints. He hadn’t noticed them before because now the whole section was matted down, as if something had swept out. . . . He slapped on his gloves, rushed to the mirror, pulling and prying around its edges. He yelled to Collin to get some tools while Russell looked on stunned.

Burton inserted the crowbar about midway down the side of the mirror and he and Collin threw all their weight against the tool. The lock was not that strong, depending on deception rather than brute strength to safeguard its secrets.

There was a grinding sound and then a tear and a pop and the door swung open.

Burton plunged inside with Collin right behind. A light switch was on the wall. The room turned bright and the men looked around.

Russell peered in, saw the chair. As she looked around, her face froze on the inner side of the mirror door. She was staring right at the bed. The bed where a little while before . . . She rubbed her temples as a searing pain ripped through her skull.

A one-way mirror.

She turned to find Burton looking over her shoulder and through the mirror. His earlier remark about someone watching them had just proven itself prophetic.

Burton looked helplessly at Russell. “He must have been right here the whole time. The whole goddamned time. I can’t fucking believe this.” Burton looked at the empty shelves inside the vault. “Looks like he took a bunch of stuff. Probably cash and untraceables.”

“Who cares about that!” Russell exploded, pointing at the mirror. “This guy saw and heard everything, and you let him get away.”

“We got his license plate.” Collin was hoping for another rewarding smile. He didn’t get it.

“So what? You think he’s going to wait around for us to run his tag and go knock on his door?”

Russell sat down on the bed. Her head was spinning. If the guy had been in there he had seen everything. She shook her head. A bad but controllable situation had suddenly become an incomprehensible disaster, and totally out of her control. Particularly considering the information Collin had relayed to her when she had entered the bedroom.

The sonofabitch had the letter opener! Prints, blood, everything, straight to the White House.

She looked at the mirror and then at the bed, where a short time before she had been on top of the President. She instinctively pulled her jacket tighter around herself. She was suddenly sick to her stomach. She braced herself against the bedpost.

Collin emerged from the vault. “Don’t forget he committed a crime being here. He can get in big-time trouble if he goes to the cops.” That thought had struck the young agent while he peered around the vault.

He should have thought a little more.

Russell pushed back a strong urge to vomit. “He doesn’t have to exactly go and turn himself in to cash in on this. Have you ever heard of the goddamned phone? He’s probably calling the Post right now. Dammit! And then next the tabloids and by the end of the week we’ll be watching him on Oprah and Sally being shot on remote from whatever little island he’s retired to with his face blurred. And then comes the book and after that the movie. Shit!”

Russell envisioned a certain package arriving at the Post or the J. Edgar Hoover Building or the U.S. Attorney’s office or the Senate Minority Leader’s office, all possible depositories promising maximum political damage—not to mention the legal repercussions.

The note accompanying it would ask them to please match the prints on it and the blood with specimens of the President of the United States. It would sound like a joke, but they would do it. Of course they would do it. Richmond’s prints were already on file. His DNA would be a match. Her body would be found, her blood would be checked and they would be confronted with more questions than they could possibly have answers to.

They were dead, they were all dead. And that bastard had just been sitting in there, waiting for his chance. Not knowing that tonight would bring him the biggest payoff of his life. Nothing as simple as dollars. He would bring down a President, in flames and tatters, crashing to earth without a chance of survival. How often did someone get to do that? Woodward and Bernstein had become supermen, they could do no wrong. This topped the hell out of Watergate. This was too fucking much to deal with.

Russell barely made it to the bathroom. Burton looked over at the corpse and then back at Collin. They said nothing, their hearts pounding with increased frequency as the absolute enormity of the situation settled down on them like the stone lid of a crypt. Since they could think of nothing else to do, Burton and Collin dutifully retrieved the sanitizing equipment while Russell emptied the contents of her stomach. In an hour they were packed and gone.

*   *   *

T
HE DOOR CLOSED QUIETLY BEHIND HIM
.

Luther figured he had a couple of days at best, maybe less. He risked turning on a light and his eyes went quickly over the interior of the living room.

His life had gone from normal, or close to it, straight to horror land.

He took off the backpack, switched off the light, and stole over to the window.

Nothing—everything was quiet. Fleeing from that house had been the most nerve-racking experience of his life, worse than being overrun by screaming North Koreans. His hands still twitched. All the way back, every passing car seemed to bore its headlights into his face, searching out his guilty secret. Twice, police cars had passed him, and the sweat had poured off his forehead, his breathing constricted.

The car had been returned to the impoundment lot where Luther had “borrowed” it earlier that night. The plate would get them nowhere, but something else could.

He doubted they had gotten a look at him. Even if they had, they would only know generally his height and build. His age, race and facial features would still be a mystery, and without that they had nothing. And as fast as he had run, they probably figured him for a younger man. There was one open end, and he had thought about how to handle that on the ride back. For now, he packed up as much of the last thirty years as he could into two bags; he would not be coming back here.

He would clear out his accounts tomorrow morning; that would give him the resources to run far away from here. He had faced more than his share of danger during his long life. But the choice between going up against the President of the United States or disappearing was a no-brainer.

The night’s haul was safely hidden away. Three months of work for a prize that could end up getting him killed. He locked the door and disappeared into the night.

CHAPTER FOUR

A
T
SEVEN
A.M.
THE GOLD-COLORED ELEVATOR DOORS opened, and Jack stepped into the meticulously decorated expanse that was Patton, Shaw’s reception area.

Lucinda wasn’t in yet, so the main reception desk, solid teakwood and weighing about a thousand pounds, and costing about twenty dollars for each of those pounds, was unmanned.

He walked down the broad hallways under the soft lights of the neoclassical wall sconces, turned right, and then left and in one minute opened the solid-oak door to his office. In the background, a smattering of ringing phones could be heard as the city woke up for business.

Six floors, well over one hundred thousand square feet in one of the best addresses downtown housing over two hundred highly compensated attorneys, with a two-story library, fully equipped gymnasium, sauna, women’s and men’s showers and lockers, ten conference rooms, a supporting staff of several hundred and, most important, a client list coveted by every other major firm in the country, that was the empire of Patton, Shaw & Lord.

The firm had weathered the miserable end to the 1980s, and then picked up speed after the recession had finally subsided. Now it was going full-bore as many of its competitors had downsized. It was loaded with some of the best attorneys in virtually every field of law, or at least the fields that paid the best. Many had been scooped from other leading firms, enticed by signing bonuses and promises that no dollar would be spared when chasing a new piece of business.

Three senior partners had been tapped by the current administration for top-level positions. The firm had awarded them severance pay in excess of two million dollars each, with the implicit understanding that after their government stint they would be back in harness, bringing with them tens of millions of dollars in legal business from their newly forged contacts.

The firm’s unwritten, but strictly adhered to, rule was that no new client matter would be accepted unless the minimum billing would exceed one hundred thousand dollars. Anything less, the management committee had decided, would be a waste of the firm’s time. And they had no problem sticking to that rule, and flourishing. In the nation’s capital, people came for the best and they didn’t mind paying for the privilege.

The firm had only made one exception to that rule, and ironically it had been for the only client Jack had other than Baldwin. He told himself he would test that rule with increasing frequency. If he was going to stick this out, he wanted it to be on his terms as much as that was possible. He knew his victories would be small at first, but that was okay.

He sat down at his desk, opened his cup of coffee and glanced over the
Post.
Patton, Shaw & Lord had five kitchens and three full-time housekeepers with their own computers. The firm probably consumed five hundred pots of coffee a day, but Jack picked up his morning brew at the little place on the corner because he couldn’t stand the stuff they used here. It was a special imported blend and cost a fortune and tasted like dirt mixed in with seaweed.

He tipped back in his chair and glanced around his office. It was a good size by big-firm associate standards, about fourteen by fourteen, with a nice view up Connecticut Avenue.

At the Public Defenders Service, Jack had shared an office with another attorney and there had been no window, only a giant poster of a Hawaiian beach Jack had tacked up one repulsively cold morning. Jack had liked the coffee at PD better.

When he made partner he would get a new office, twice this size—maybe not a corner just yet, but that was definitely in the cards. With the Baldwin account he was the fourth biggest rainmaker in the firm, and the top three were all in their fifties and sixties, looking more toward the golf courses than to the inside of an office. He glanced at his watch. Time to start the meter.

He was usually one of the first ones in, but the place would soon be stirring. Patton, Shaw matched top New York firm wages, and for the big bucks, they expected big-time efforts. The clients were enormous and their legal demands were of equal size. Making a mistake in this league might mean a four-billion-dollar defense contract went down the tubes or a city declared bankruptcy.

Every associate and junior partner he knew at the firm had stomach problems; a quarter of them were in therapy of one kind or another. Jack watched their pale faces and softening bodies as they marched daily through the pristine hallways of PS&L bearing yet another Herculean legal task. That was the trade-off for compensation levels that put them in the top five percent nationwide among all professionals.

He alone among them was safe from the partnership gauntlet. Control of clients was the great equalizer in law. He had been with Patton, Shaw about a year, was a novice corporate attorney, and was accorded the respect of the most senior and experienced members of the firm.

All of that should have made him feel guilty, undeserving—and it would have if he hadn’t been so miserable about the rest of his life.

He popped the final miniature doughnut into his mouth, leaned forward in his chair and opened a file. Corporate work was often monotonous and his skill level was such that his tasks were not the most exciting in the world. Reviewing ground leases, preparing UCC filings, forming limited liability companies, drafting memorandums of understanding and private placement documents, it was all in a day’s work, and the days were growing longer and longer, but he was learning fast; he had to in order to survive, his courtroom skills were virtually useless to him here.

The firm traditionally did no litigation work, preferring instead to handle the more lucrative and steady corporate and tax matters. When litigation did arise it was farmed out to select, elite litigation-only firms, who in turn would refer any nontrial work that came their way to Patton, Shaw. It was an arrangement that had worked well over the years.

By lunchtime he had moved two stacks of drift from his in to his out basket, dictated three closing checklists and a couple of letters, and received four calls from Jennifer reminding him about the White House dinner they would be attending that night.

Her father was being honored as Businessman of the Year by some organization or other. It spoke volumes about the President’s close nexus to big business that such an event would be worthy of a White House function. But at least Jack would get to see the man up close. Getting to meet him was probably out of the question, but then you never knew.

“Got a minute?” Barry Alvis popped his balding head in the door. He was a senior staff associate, meaning he had been passed over for partner more than three times and in fact would never successfully complete that next step. Hardworking and bright, he was an attorney any firm would be fortunate to have. His schmooz skills and hence his client-generating prospects, however, were nil. He made a hundred sixty thousand a year, and worked hard enough to earn another twenty in bonuses each year. His wife didn’t work, his kids went to private schools, he drove a late-model Beemer, was not expected to generate business and had little to complain about.