Chapter 30
Stuart was from a small town in North Carolina and had been to Washington only once in his life, a senior class trip fifteen years earlier.
He and two buddies were almost arrested for throwing water balloons from their hotel window onto taxicabs waiting below.
The stupidity of youth. Hopefully he had matured since then.
He was thirty-one years old, with college and law school under his belt, along with five years in the Department of Justice.
He was now an assistant federal prosecutor with the U.S.
Attorney’s Office in North Carolina, where he’d spent most of his fourteen-month career putting away Medicare scam artists, generally of the unsophisticated variety.
He wasn’t bored yet but it wouldn’t be long.
His future wife came down the row in front of him and took a seat.
As she was sitting down, she glanced at him with a pleasant smile, just a friendly hello that she could have flashed at anyone else.
However, it was not a friendly crowd. It was all business, all young professionals on their way up, consumed with advancing their careers.
But Stuart was from North Carolina, not some big city, and he was accustomed to folks being more polite.
The fact that she smiled at him, coupled with the fact that she was rather cute, piqued his interest. He glanced over her shoulder and caught her name on the seminar book: Rae Claire Russo.
What a beautiful name. Simple, yet elegant. Easy to remember and pronounce, yet slightly exotic.
Stuart was not blessed with stunning good looks, something he had finally come to grips with in high school.
He wasn’t handsome, but nor was he homely.
There was nothing remarkable, one way or the other, about his features.
His sandy-colored hair was thinning. He wore horn-rimmed glasses over his dark brown eyes.
His nose was a bit too pointed but his chin was not.
His teeth were okay. He never dated the cheerleaders in high school, and in college the hot sorority girls looked elsewhere.
At the age of thirty-one it was time to at least think about the future with a wife and kids.
Most of his friends were married. In short, Stuart was always on the prowl and looking for something more than a one-nighter.
He’d had his share of those, in his younger days.
One look at Rae Claire and he deemed her to be interesting, but probably not his type.
Nor was he her type, but she had a file on him, more information than he could begin to imagine, at least at that moment.
He’d been an excellent athlete in high school and a top student.
He had tried to play football at Davidson but wasn’t quite fast enough.
He was serious about fitness and had completed more than twenty triathlons.
Each week he ran thirty miles and went to the gym at least five times.
He stood six feet two inches tall and weighed two hundred pounds.
Physically, his exceptional body compensated for his lack of good looks.
It was as if he knew he could do little about his features so he concentrated on his muscles.
He was her top choice. She had reviewed and analyzed hundreds of prospects and finally settled on Stuart Nash. Now, finally, here he was in the flesh.
A professor of law at Georgetown addressed the crowd with a somber “Good morning.” All two hundred laptops sprang open and the workshop began. After a few minutes the first yawns could be seen.
Stuart glanced at Rae Claire again. She was about his age, no wedding band or ring.
A smartwatch, which she glanced at too often.
Conservatively dressed in a skirt to the knees and a sleeveless white blouse.
A wide belt was tight around her waist and punctuated her slender figure.
Tall, five feet eight, maybe. Really nice legs down to the designer sneakers like the ones his sister just bought at five hundred dollars a pair.
He didn’t stare and feigned interest in the lecture by typing meaningless notes, like most of the attendees.
About the only good thing with a weekend seminar, other than getting out of town, and the accumulation of hours the bar required for continuing legal education, was that it was impossible to flunk the course.
Register, pay the fees, show up, take a few notes, and then blow off the rest of it.
There was absolutely no one to squeal on anybody.
After twenty minutes, he was tired of horror stories about the creativity of hackers and crooks and spies, and his curiosity got the best of him.
He searched her name. Rae Claire Russo, Kenyon College in Ohio, class of 2006, ten years ago so she was probably thirty-two.
He smiled at his own cleverness. Nailed that one.
Evidently no law degree, nor post-graduate work.
Currently employed by Potomac Publishing Group, which he dug into and learned was a small press specializing in books about early American architecture.
It was a division of another division deep in the vast organizational chart of the Smithsonian Institution.
So far, Stuart was still interested in the whole package. He looked around the room and saw little talent. There was a blonde on the front row who had turned some heads minutes earlier, but all in all there wasn’t much potential.
Rae Claire’s colleague sat directly behind Stuart and watched his every move. She had the target’s attention.
At ten, they broke for coffee and fresh air. The crowd spilled out onto the mezzanine and little pockets of conversation erupted. Most of them were lawyers and they wanted to talk.
Stuart waited in line for coffee. The guy behind him said, “I’ll need a triple espresso to make it till noon.”
Stuart laughed, turned around, and said, “I thought cybercrime was supposed to be fascinating.”
“Me too. We must’ve picked the wrong seminar.” He shoved out a hand and said, “Webb McBride, from Philly.”
Stuart shook it and said, “Stuart Nash, Charlotte, U.S. Attorney’s Office. I’m with Justice, for now anyway. More seminars like this and I might give up the law for good.”
They got their coffees in paper cups and moved to a long table covered with pastries and doughnuts. Across the mezzanine, Stuart saw Rae Claire, but she did not look at him.
“Not much to look at around here,” Webb said, a bit too loud. “You married?”
“No. You?”
“No. I’ve exhausted the options in Philly and am now expanding my research.”
One of those big, fast-talking guys who are always ready with a quip or smart-ass retort.
“Good luck around here,” Stuart said, playing along.
“You alone or with a group?”
“You’re the only person I know in this hotel.”
“Same here. If we survive until five o’clock, let’s get a drink and hit the town.”
“Sounds like fun.”
A bell chimed in the distance and the herd shuffled back inside.
Webb sat directly behind Stuart, and they were still laughing over a comment about the first lecturer.
Rae Claire took her seat without a smile in their direction.
As the second session began, she sent a text to Webb: I saw you made contact with SN. All good?
Webb could almost read her screen from eight feet away. He replied, Yep, all good. Nice guy. You’ll like him. Drinks as soon as we get outta here.
Out of boredom, Stuart checked out Webb McBride. Colgate undergrad, law school at Villanova, four years now with the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice office in Philadelphia.
The paltry info he was gathering on Rae Claire and Webb was a drop in the bucket compared to their files on him.
They had studied his family tree, down in North Carolina.
There was nothing remarkable about it, except that his grandfather owned over three thousand acres of land.
His father ran the family lumber company.
They were not wealthy but considered affluent for that part of the country.
He and his siblings all finished college.
They had his transcripts from Davidson University, as well as his complete file from law school at Wake Forest. They knew virtually everything about his five years with Justice, including summaries of the cases he had worked on.
He had one DUI charge in law school, but it’d been dealt with off the books, it seemed.
The only other criminal matter involved the water balloons.
—
They ate sandwiches from box lunches in their seats while they watched a video about a case in Arizona where some brilliant college boys scammed the state’s procurement office out of $40 million. From prison, the leader of the gang explained how they did it. The seminar was suddenly interesting.
Things improved with the afternoon’s first lecturer, an intellectual property whiz from a mammoth law firm in London. She was attractive and dressed like a model and held the boys captive for almost an hour.
When the last session finished at 5 p.m., Stuart and Webb hurried down two flights, crossed the main lobby, and beat the rush to the sprawling bar near the entrance.
They ordered beers as the place quickly filled up.
Webb enjoyed doing most of the talking and was in the middle of a story about an ex-colleague who got in trouble, got disbarred, got sent to prison, and that’s as far as he made it before stopping abruptly and waving someone over.
It was Rae Claire. He offered her a seat at their small table and introduced her to Stuart Nash, his new pal from North Carolina.
As the story went, Webb and Rae Claire had met months earlier at a friend’s wedding in Baltimore.
It sounded perfectly plausible and Stuart bought it. Why wouldn’t he?
Rae Claire wanted a diet soda and Webb left to find one at the bar.
Stuart was immediately aware that she was not a talker, preferred to listen, and seemed to analyze everything he said, which wasn’t much.
Just the usual background stuff about work, which he downplayed because it was not that exciting.
She was an editor, not a lawyer, and she and her publisher were dealing with cybercrime that involved the piracy of published works.
As they waited for Webb and chatted, it was becoming clear, at least to Stuart, that he was more interested in her than she was in him.
Webb returned with a round of drinks and launched into a bitch-session about how boring the day had been.
A complete waste of time. If things didn’t improve by noon tomorrow, Saturday, he might pull the plug, hustle back home, and get to Citizens Bank in time to catch the Phillies versus the Dodgers.
He had season tickets and so on. Rae Claire had no interest in sports and seemed content to relax, sip her soda, and listen to Webb ramble on and on.
She wasn’t especially beautiful and she had never stopped traffic, but the more Stuart looked at her the more he wanted to.
She was cute, with short dark hair, dark eyes, and a great smile that she tended to keep to herself.
She was serious and had little to say but seemed to absorb everything around her, not only the conversation, but also the happy-hour energy of the room.
Stuart had more interest in her than the Phillies and asked about her work and the books she published. When she began talking, Webb left for more beers and Stuart enjoyed listening to a description of the fall list from Potomac Publishing.
They talked books for a moment and what they were reading.
Her job required her to read some fairly dull histories of old houses, but, as an editor, she was nonetheless responsible for making them better.
She had little time to read for pleasure but liked historical fiction.
Stuart enjoyed biographies and was finishing a long one about Churchill, his favorite historical figure.
Her dream job was to run a major publishing house in New York, a place she wasn’t sure about, but after five years in D.C.
she was ready for a change. Stuart couldn’t envision a career as a prosecutor.
His plan was to put in five years, gain plenty of experience in the courtroom, then land a lucrative job as a litigator with a big firm.
Webb returned with two more beers and another diet soda, though Rae Claire had hardly touched her first one.
He also hauled over a tray of nuts and olives, and that prompted a conversation about how dreadful lunch had been, just thin sandwiches from a box, and that led to a discussion of what dinner might look like.
None of the three had plans. Rae Claire lived alone in an apartment in central D.C.
, several blocks away, and knew plenty of good restaurants.
Webb was the gregarious type who practiced inclusion, and he suggested they have dinner together and split the bill three ways.
Stuart and Rae Claire really had no choice and it sounded like fun anyway.
She picked a well-known pasta place and booked a table for 7 p.m.
They took an Uber to the restaurant and settled in for the evening.
Webb gazed at the wine list and offered it to the others.
Rae Claire admitted to being a light drinker and knew little about wine.
Stuart cracked that he was from North Carolina, where they preferred beer and bourbon.
Webb ordered a Barolo he claimed to know well.
During the salad course, his phone rattled in his pocket. He frowned, yanked it out, mumbled “Oh shit,” and stared at the message. “Sorry guys, but this is my boss. Gotta take the call.”
“Go ahead,” Stuart said, shrugging. Happens all the time.
“No problem,” Rae Claire said.
Webb jumped to his feet and stepped outside, onto the sidewalk.
Five minutes later he returned, looking even more frustrated.
Without sitting down, he said, “Got an emergency at work and I have to be on a video call with my boss in thirty minutes. My laptop’s at the hotel.
Got no choice. So sorry. The wine’s on me.
I hope it’s delicious. Tell me about it tomorrow. ”
They watched him weave between tables and leave again, already tapping his phone.
Stuart said, “Okay. Now, where were we?”
“We were about to have some wine,” she said, smiling as the waitress approached with a bottle.