Chapter Seven
Seven
Washington, D.C., awoke to a slushy December morning; the deep gray dawn and foreboding skies warned of more harsh weather to come, but through the curtains of the bay windows on the second floor of the big row house on Dent Place in Georgetown, the man standing in front of the bathroom mirror had already showered, and that after two cups of coffee.
James Arthur Westwood III ran a comb through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, forming the part the same as he had done ever since he was in grammar school in New Hampshire.
He had just turned sixty the week prior, and although he’d forgone the elliptical trainer in his basement this morning because he had an early meeting to get to, he exercised almost every day, with long rides on his bike, in his home gym downstairs, or in his afternoon pickleball league at the club.
Westwood was proud of how he was holding up, but his quest for vitality wasn’t just for the sake of vanity.
One also had to look good for the cameras. Vigor conveyed authority, influence, relevance.
He hadn’t been in front of the media in a few years; he’d been a man in the shadows, but he held out hope that he’d soon enough be back in the light, and he wanted to be ready.
To that end, he told himself he’d go to the club on Massachusetts Avenue right after work, spend an hour on the free weights, then stretch before his dinner with a couple of senators (Indiana and Vermont) at Fiola, a Michelin-star restaurant in Capitol Hill.
Although Westwood did not presently serve as a member of the U.S. government, he had strolled the corridors of Washington power for nearly thirty years, and dinner with senators was a relatively common occurrence for him.
Westwood’s father, James Arthur Westwood Jr., had been a lawyer, a congressman, then secretary of energy in the Ford administration.
Westwood Jr. had run for governor of New York in the eighties and narrowly lost, then joined the boards of several Fortune 500 companies, living out the rest of his days on the lecture circuit when he wasn’t at home in his Greenwich Village brownstone on West 10th.
James the Third, “J.W.” to everyone who really knew him, had been raised in New Hampshire but then moved with his parents to Washington, then to New York. J.W. went to Harvard, then Harvard Law, and then spent a year clerking for a Supreme Court justice.
He practiced law in Concord, then ran for and won a congressional seat. He served four terms, was known as a dealmaker and a moderate, and was well liked by all, back in those days when friendships extended beyond party lines.
J.W. left Congress to move to the executive branch, serving two years as undersecretary of state before being appointed U.S. ambassador to Singapore by the then-president, a close family friend.
That stint lasted three years, and then he left the Department of State to take over as the director of an international think tank based here in Washington, D.C.
But running a think tank was a means to an end for J.W. Westwood. The vehicle that would take him where he really wanted to go.
A Senate seat would open up in New Hampshire in just two years, and J.W. Westwood had every intention of running, and of winning.
He’d be a senator in time, of this he was certain.
And then, God willing, he’d be president. He knew he had the right stuff.
And, perhaps more importantly, he knew that if he kept his end of a hard bargain, he would get all the help he needed to make it happen.
Westwood’s two children were both at Stanford; his wife had left him a year earlier to no great protest from him, and though their divorce remained unfinalized, he’d been living as a bachelor here in D.C.
for a lot longer than he’d been separated, so if anything, his breakup actually facilitated his lifestyle.
He had just pulled a dark gray sweater vest out of his closet and slipped it on over his crisp white shirt and red tie when he heard a noise downstairs. A door opening, male voices.
This was no cause for alarm; a man resided in J.W.’s converted carriage house apartment out back and had the run of the place.
The man’s name was Michael Scardino, but most of his friends and coworkers just referred to him as “Big Mike.”
Big Mike worked—nominally, anyway—as J.W.’s bodyguard, but Scardino was so much more than that.
Westwood cocked his head now, trying to make out the voices echoing through the two-hundred-year-old home.
Some weekday mornings J.W.’s driver, Hasan, would arrive early to take him to the office, then step in for coffee with Mike, and J.W. assumed that was what was going on, but then the phone in his pocket buzzed.
Looking at it, he saw that Big Mike was sending a text from downstairs.
The shithead is here.
Westwood made a face. At Big Mike, not at the shithead, because he knew a lot of shitheads and didn’t know who his bodyguard was referring to.
Just as he was about to ask Mike if he could possibly be more specific, another text came through.
Shaw.
Shaw? That shithead.
After a little sigh, J.W. typed back quickly.
B right down
Westwood had had his entire day planned, but with that text, he wondered if his entire day was out the fucking window.
—
He took his time descending into the kitchen, and when he did so, he was fully dressed, suit and tie and vest and coiffed hair and expensive cologne.
He saw Big Mike in the kitchen; at six-four he was hard to miss. A former army major and then an overseas high-threat security contractor, he commanded attention without even trying.
The other man in the kitchen, sitting at the table, was the polar opposite. Small, shabbily dressed, and bleary-eyed, he looked to J.W. like a college student who’d been out all night on a bender of cheap beer and Jell-O shots.
Though he was, in fact, thirty years old, Lewis Shaw looked nearly a decade younger. Big Mike put a mug of coffee in front of Lewis, and the younger man looked at it.
“Little cream, lots of sugar,” he said, and Big Mike flashed annoyed eyes to Westwood.
J.W. sighed, then said, “Indulge our guest, please. We’ll warm him up so if I need you to toss him back out into the snow, he won’t catch cold.”
Big Mike headed for the fridge with a hopeful glint in his eyes.
Westwood leaned against the kitchen island, addressing the visitor. “Well…you always look like hell, but today it appears you’ve visited the ninth circle. That mean you didn’t get any sleep last night?”
“What’s sleep?” Lewis Shaw replied without batting an eyelash.
The older man himself did not hesitate in his response. “I’ve got to get to the Center. Have a seven-thirty teleconference with staff in London.”
“You might not, actually.”
“What does that mean?”
Big Mike poured half-and-half into Shaw’s mug, then gave it a long shot of sugar from a pourable container. He put a spoon on the table and Shaw stirred his own coffee.
Though the younger man looked wiped out, he somehow retained an air of confidence. He licked coffee off his spoon and put it down, then tilted his head towards the bodyguard.
“We talkin’ in front of the help?”
“I’m out,” Scardino said, his voice conveying the loathing he felt for the younger man, and then he left the room before Westwood kicked him out.
When he was gone, J.W. sat in front of his guest, who drank the scorching-hot coffee like it was tap water.
The sixty-year-old said, “Why do you always have to be such an asshole to Mike?”
Shaw didn’t hesitate. “He works for Gauntlet Group, what do you want me to say?”
When J.W. just looked at him, the young man said, “I’m a government employee working in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence; he’s a contract goon working for you, but the company he really works for has replaced over four thousand positions in the intelligence community, including over three hundred in my building.
A lot of our best and brightest have been let go, replaced with those pricks.
What am I supposed to think of a Gauntlet goon like Big Mike?
“Plus, that’s guy’s a bodyguard. I’m data analytics. I’d say we are a different skill set, but what Scardino and the thousands of those Gauntlet security types do isn’t much of a skill, in my opinion.”
Westwood began to respond, but then he stopped himself, changed course. “Anyone see you come in?”
The young man sniffed out a little laugh. “Before I started at ODNI, I was a DIA field tech for four years. I know how to watch my back.”
J.W. moved the conversation along. “What do you have for me?”
“Nicaragua.”
Westwood didn’t say What about Nicaragua? Instead, he said, “You passing over some intelligence?”
“Yes.”
“From what agency?”
“The Agency.”
“Actionable?”
“Very.”
Westwood leaned closer, drummed his fingers on the table a moment. “What have you got?”
“It’s definitely a ‘hair on fire’ type of thing on the seventh floor.”
The seventh floor of CIA headquarters was where the executive suites were and therefore where the highest-level decision-making happened.
Lewis went on. “There’s an asset in Nicaragua who’s demanding to be pulled out. Claims to have been burned.”
“Related to which operation?”
Shaw downed the rest of his coffee, rose, and poured himself another cup. “I don’t know.”
“Who burned the asset?”
Shaw shook his head as he reached for the creamer.
“Dunno. In this case I only have visibility into the op orders themselves, not the intel that initiated them. I’m spoofing the credentials of a midlevel staffer; she’s got some of the raw data but not all.
I can make inferences, of course, but there’s no explanation about who burned them or what they were working on. Only that it happened.
“I can tell you that this came out of nowhere. The CIA is scrambling to put a package together to make the extraction happen. Like, fast.”
“Like…how fast?”