The Cause (20 page)

A scatter of bodies around the room. Hassani and Montgomery in the middle of them, hiding under the conference table. Finally dragged out of the room, the medics were already poised and waiting in the hallway.

Montgomery let his medic work, a curly-haired guy garbed in dull-green med clothes who pulled at his hand still crunched under his armpit. He saw a sweep of red over his uniform and a pool of blood trailing back toward the door. Collapsing onto a gurney, Montgomery stared down at the shards of his hand, the blood squirting up into his face in rhythm with his heartbeat.

The medic clamped the artery.

Montgomery’s head whirled. He felt discombobulated, the air around him pumping in waves. With his good hand he touched the shriveled fingers of the wounded hand, sensation only in three of them. The medic told him to lie back as he strapped a
tourniquet around his arm. Pain set in now, biting and deep. Montgomery welcomed it. The medic reached into his bag of supplies and pulled out an injection. Montgomery shook him off. The Charge Squad ran out of the conference room, radios booming. Through his ringing ears and relay of medical jargon between the two medics, Montgomery heard a staticky voice through the radios yelling commands of movement and perimeters.

“What the fuck is this?” Hassani yelled over to Montgomery, resisting the tug of the medic pulling him down onto a gurney. “You NSA fucks don’t have shit under control.”

Montgomery turned to Hassani who was being wheeled out of the hallway. He felt weak and inadequate. He saw The Dupe loping in a trot through the corridor with Davis. He cursed the security breach, the fools who somehow let the system be manipulated. He felt humble, and in a rare moment, he felt the need to blurt out an explanation. “I agree,” he replied to Hassani. “The ship’s gonna have to get fucking tighter.”

It was a marriage full of threats, burdened by promises of slander, divorce, and his nuts cut off should lines be crossed. Most nights Montgomery’s wife, Emily, would accuse him of coming home drunk, calling him a man carrying the trail scent of a Scottish single-malt distillery. These railings he could stand, partly because they were true. The other insinuations irked him more.

The accusations began after the New Year’s Eve party some four odd years ago; his boy Brandon only a baby then, Elisabeth not even born. After this event, he would come home to accusations of smelling like a fresh cunt, and Emily would wrangle him so hard that a couple of times he had to drop his pants and offer his dick for a sniff inspection. He responded poorly to guilt trips and began loathing her.

The New Year’s Eve party took place at their home on post when Emily could still stand living there. As 1:30 a.m. passed, the mostly-NSA crowd swimming in confetti, drunk on champagne and Aztec Punch, had stopped blowing on kazoos and started saying their goodbyes. A small clique of remaining guests from Emily’s modeling crowd and their old college school friends lingered. They stood around the living room wading in a pool of deflating balloons. The talk grew soft, and for the first time during the night, the volume of the stereo grew louder than the voices. At 3:13 a.m., Emily decided to call it a night, but going upstairs to bed, she wandered over and covered his glass with her hand and told him to, “Tone it down.” He might have tipped a few drinks during the course of the night, but he thought
himself well in control. The comment angered him. Some of their remaining guests had turned around, giving them sideways glances, but he was not in a position to retaliate. He laughed it off and moved across the room away from her.

At 6:30 a.m., Montgomery heard footsteps on the stairs. He had been mistaken assuming Smoltz and his girlfriend still lurked on the patio. Everyone had left. He had thought about shifting away from Ann Smith, an old college friend, but Emily’s earlier comment replayed in his mind. So he simply let her descend the stairs, hoping he’d have a little bit of payback.

Emily found him in the den with Ann under a low flickering candlelight. Ann sat in the cushion immediately adjacent to him. Soft music played from the stereo, something jazz and instrumental. Nothing was happening, but the scene with Ann’s laissez-faire sitting position (her shoes off, knees tucked under her chin, and feet snugly under his leg) he could understand looked a bit dubious.

Pretending she saw nothing unusual, Emily said hello and sluggishly moved to the kitchen. Montgomery watched her open the double-door chrome Whirlpool refrigerator, take out a carton of orange juice, and pour a glass. She sauntered lazily into the den saying, “Please, don’t let me interrupt your conversation,” when in fact the conversation had already fallen off a cliff. All participants in the room seemed acutely aware of this.

Ann whipped up a rapid anecdote of “Ben” (Montgomery’s middle name) falling out a Sweet Briar College all-women’s dorm window—the window belonging to her best friend at the time. She topped it off with, “Look at him now, on top of the world. I guess it’s kind of fun to remember him falling down a bit.”

Emily replied with a laugh, “Please go on. I’d love to know more about my husband’s past escapades.”

From Montgomery’s point of view, the incident was a misunderstanding, and whether or not Emily believed him or not—that he never slept with Ann and never wanted to—an itch began in
Emily to one day catch him, and therefore prove he was a lousy father.

Montgomery recognized Emily’s plight. Frustrated with a dead career, two kids to attend to, and the clock ticking on her good-looking assets, he understood she had given up a lot in the name of love. But once, she said the word love for her had devolved to “sour mash” on her lips whenever she kissed him.

The once long-legged, flaxen-haired, alabaster-skinned beauty, who previously graced the runways as a top model for the
Wilhelmina
agency in New York City; whose bouncy breasts and pinpoint nipples had made men’s heads turn, was now a mother of two with stretch marks. Her smooth, alabaster skin had once made it onto the cover of
Playboy’s
issue dubbed Snow White. Her body danced happily naked glowing like a moon. She blended like a chameleon into the fluffy white powdered snow of Les Houches. At the time, she dated the movie star Ryan Reynolds. She had lost her magical touch, and now he was the object of her wrath.

Over the years, his brain underwent slow erosion, turning her from coveted beauty to inchoate beast. She adjusted poorly to age. The benched model struggled with crow’s feet and felt the urge to tinker. A bit of corrective surgery turned into Botox in the lips and cheeks and more regular appointments to Ken Daly’s Rejuv Center where eighty percent of office visits were dedicated to battle-planning how to flank the rivulets of skin creasing around her neck. She was tanning herself, her patented snow-soft skin now a faux-brown mottled with tan lines.

At nights when he stumbled in after long days and endless meetings, he might start with a little provocation and needling sex talk, but normally she would say she didn’t feel like it and would simply push him away.

Two weeks ago, a few days after being let out of the hospital with a bandaged hand, he came home late. Long after the kids went down, he walked through the front door, exhausted. She
was waiting for him. In a rare moment of enthusiasm, she threw off his gabardine overcoat and slid her hands down his trousers. Perhaps she felt sorry for him and could sense a breaking point. Perhaps she had declared a momentary truce. But he remained soft and floppy. Even after she yanked his boxers down around his ankles creating a small puddle of clothes at his feet, and put him in her mouth, he felt as if he were standing in quicksand, sinking pathetically into a pit of his own failure. Ashamed, he pushed her away telling her it wouldn’t work for him like this, that he had to be the instigator. But in his heart he knew she had done exactly what he liked—the dirty, the unpredictable—and he wondered what in the hell was wrong. This rejection, and his subsequent silence aroused accusations, and soon they were back to the same stale argument, the tired row of his non-existent infidelity.

One thing was clear—he wouldn’t leave her and he wouldn’t cheat on her. He had seen what happened to Petraeus. A divorce is bad, but a wandering dick could ruin a career.

The event would carry large consequences, however. A couple of days later, he was discreetly given a tip that a couple of emails went from her to a P.I. He gave her credit for using a dummy email account, but she was a model who knew nothing about IP addresses. A couple of days later, she drove out to New York Avenue next to Job’s Liquors. He had Davis follow her. She parked her silver BMW on a side road and skittishly entered a brick building with a sign out front that read:
The Rudger’s Group—if you suspect it, detect it
. Montgomery had Davis check out the agent she had an appointment with. From his photos, Fred Muller was a meaty man with a boyish, nearly cherubic face that matched his frame to the same degree a bronze tan did Emily’s cocaine-white skin.

As Davis listened in from across the street, Muller explained the spousal services that could be provided—movement and GPS tracking, video surveillance, and computer forensics (cross-drive
analysis, file carving, steganography) along with the required retainer and hourly rate of $150. When asked what her husband did for a living, she said he was a private consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He credited her for doing a bit of research, for telling something close to the truth but not the truth. Once he remembered telling her about a Congressional Subcommittee hearing he had. He mentioned the best lie was always just short of the truth. After all of the other questions, Emily Montgomery accepted the contract, signed some papers, and left.

The next day while in the car, Davis told Montgomery they were being followed. Davis spotted the tinted-windowed sedan on the long cruise up Pennsylvania Ave. He asked Davis to divert to M Street to see if the guy was any good. After crossing the

Potomac on the 14
^th
Street Bridge on the way to the Pentagon, the guy still clung on. He made a phone call to Hendricks and gave him the license plate. At the Pentagon, he met with the Joint Chiefs and the Security Council, did his briefings, and left.

That night, Davis drove him home. When they arrived, Davis opened the door for him, and he hoisted himself out of the car, taking care with his wrapped up hand. Two more sentries had been posted on his roof. A BigDog guarded his front door. Davis told him it was a gift from General Walcott. Montgomery thanked him and strode by the huge mechanical beast whose red eyes followed him up the pathway. When he got inside, he was spent, his energy sucked dry. He found Emily on the couch reading a magazine.

He was too tired to think. His head throbbed, but he couldn’t help himself. He said, “I found out about your P.I. today.”

She jerked her eyes to him. “What P.I.?”

“Honey, do you even understand what I do for a living?”

“What do you know?”

“I know you went there, Emily. I know the stupid fuck was trying to tail me this afternoon. Why are you doing this?”

“Someone called. They hung up after I answered, how do you
explain that?”

“A crank caller, perhaps?”

“It was a woman’s voice. I heard the giggle.”

“I don’t know who it is,” he said, completely exasperated. “I’m not cheating on you. I’ve told you this I don’t know how many times.”

“You lie, Ben,” she said sarcastically, bringing up the old nickname. “It was
her
on that phone.”

“Do you have any idea how ludicrous that is? I’ve tolerated your insecurities, but fucking no more. No more of this insane paranoia. I’ve had enough!”

She jumped up from the couch and scampered into the adjacent dining room. Something purposeful in her gait stood out, an angry catwalk but this time she wasn’t faking it. From the china cabinet, she unearthed the prized titanium-plated cutlery and threw it in handfuls at him. Forks, knives, teaspoons—shrapnel flung at him in arrowed silver streaks. He picked up a leather sofa cushion with his good hand and used it for cover. When a knife caught him in the leg, he snapped. He darted toward her as clanging silverware bounced off him onto the hardwood floor. He chased her around the dining room table. After the first circle, she armed herself with more plates and teacups while he threw a chair out of the way to clear a wider path. On the second turn, he banged his wounded hand on the table, and as he winced in pain, she caught him in the head with a teacup.

The room now a helicopter crash of ceramic, she armed herself with more plates while he threw another chair, this time directly at her. Something in his look must have scared her. She began to scream. On the third rotation, he dove under the table and caught her, bonking his head on a rafter underneath in the process of catching her ankle. He heard crying in between screams. At first, all he wanted to do was shut her up. Grab her wrists and shout into her face to
stop!
Then, as he was crawling out from under the
table, his grip slipped, and he absorbed a punishing kick to the nose. Still, he managed to hang on to her ankle as she tried to kick out of his grasp. Blood streamed from his nose as he tried to stop the flow with his bandaged hand. His eyes watered and his bloodied hand printed the white, sheepskin rug red. A primeval surge of anger jolted him into another level of fury. Through the whop and bone crunch he suffered, the ankle was still his. Most men would have let go, caved. This thought excited him as he gripped more meanly. She stepped into new kicks desperately trying to dislodge her trapped leg. He hung on tightly, as if clinging from a high-rise scaffolding with only air beneath. Now she twisted and tried to hop away, using her arms to grip both china cabinet and edge of the table to yank herself out of his grasp.

Finally, he slid out from the table and towered above her. When he picked her up in a bear hug, his wounded hand now bloody and seeping through the bandages, he received a couple of wild kicks to the chins, but he wasn’t even feeling them. He suddenly released her and both of them went quiet. Elisabeth and Brandon stood at the foot of the stairwell gazing at them open-mouthed and horrified. Brandon was crying while Elisabeth seemed stuck in a stupor. Both of them rushed to scoop up the kids, explaining to them it was only a game, a stupid game that meant nothing.

When it was over and the kids were tucked in, he went for a shower. As the hot water streamed over his back, he gazed down and saw himself hardening. He laughed, scratching the thought from his mind, telling himself it was a good thing they had fought. No matter how ugly and bloody it got, no matter the consequences of his children seeing them, he would have to remember how to get these dirty things done. He was sick of being the target. It was
Kill ’em all
again, and there was much to do. Way too much still left to do.