“We’ll be quiet,” David said. The Zanger townhouse looked like every other suburban Virginia townhouse of its era. A narrow center hallway stretched from the front door to a sliding glass door in the rear. A stairway with a wrought-iron railing rose parallel to the hallway on the right, and on the left, a small living area led to a small dining area, which dead-ended at the linoleum-tiled kitchen that appeared to span the entire width of the house in the rear. While not especially cramped, you could see nearly every inch of the main floor in a single glance.
“I don’t like you being here,” Zanger said. “This is twenty levels of inappropriate.”
“I have no idea what that means,” David said. He walked past his host and helped himself to a red-patterned sofa in the living room, where none of the furniture matched. “We’ll only be here for as long as it takes.”
“As it takes to do what?” Despite the suit — David pegged it as off-the-rack from Jos. A. Bank — Zanger looked more like a college student than a White House adviser.
“Please sit down, Billy.”
Zanger sat on the edge of the coffee table, of all places, ignoring the inviting brown La-Z-Boy that David wished he had chosen for himself. Becky took it instead.
“Who did you say you’re a friend of?” Zanger asked.
David smiled. “Promise me that you’ll never play poker,” he said. “Grayson Cantrell. And before you deny knowing him, may I remind you that you just let two strangers into your house on the power of his name?”
Zanger’s eyes flashed surrender. “Ask your question and get out.” He didn’t pull off tough guy very well, either.
“Okay, I’ll get right to it,” David said. “What did you think of Kirk Nation today?”
Zanger looked way too confused by the question. “Kirk what?”
David smiled. “Kirk Nation. The blog. What did you think of it today?”
Zanger stood. “I really have no idea what you’re talking about. You need to leave.”
David looked to Becky, who winked. “I’m not going anywhere, Billy. Not until we have this conversation.”
“You really think that you can just barge into my home and speak to me—”
“Billy, it’s your schedule,” David said. “I have all night. I have all the nights and days I need.” He made a show of checking his watch. “I believe that you, on the other hand, must be awfully tired.”
Zanger tried blustering again. “Who do you think you—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Billy. Be righteously indignant if you must, but you’re wasting time. I’m not buying it. Kirk Nation. What are your thoughts?”
Zanger’s eyes narrowed as he connected some important dots. “I know you,” he said.
David arched his eyebrows. He knew where they were going, but they hadn’t gotten there yet. “Not personally, you don’t,” he said.
You could almost see the Rolodex cards spinning in Zanger’s head. “You’re him,” he said. “You’re David Kirk.”
David smiled with only his mouth, making a conscious effort to keep any inkling of humor out of his eyes.
“You wrote that shit about the First Lady. You had no proof about any of that.”
David smiled.
“What’s the grin for?” Billy still had not sat back down.
“What you said,” David explained. “You just confirmed a lot of my story.”
“I did no such thing.” He seemed to grow taller. He most definitely grew redder.
“There’s no podium here, Billy. No microphones. Because it’s just you and me talking, there’s not even a record to stay off of. Yet, you just told me that I leveled accusations that I couldn’t prove.”
“That’s exactly right.”
“Yet you didn’t say that they were false.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Don’t parse words with me.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Billy, that’s what we both do for a living. Answer me this: Did you have anything to do with getting my site taken down?”
Zanger put both hands on the top of his head, his fingers disappearing in the tangled mop of brown hair. He started to speak, but then his filters kicked in, silencing him.
“If you’ve got something to say, say it,” David said.
Another aborted attempt. “Who’s she?” he nodded toward Becky.
“She’s my last remaining friend,” David said. “She’s my witness.”
“Are you armed?” Zanger asked.
It was a weird question, and David recoiled from it. “Maybe,” he said. “But if you’re thinking of starting some kind of fight, forget about it. I haven’t been in a fight since eighth grade, but I guaran-damn-tee that I could kick your ass.”
Zanger seemed to do the math in his head, and the results ended with a nervous smirk. “Okay,” he said. “You want the truth?”
“It’s as good a place to start as any,” David said.
Zanger took a few seconds to screw up his courage. “You’re a murderer, Kirk. You killed a cop last night. Now you’re concocting some kind of bullshit conspiracy. It’s nuts.”
“Then why did you deny knowing about my blog when I first asked you?”
The question hit Zanger like a slap. He clearly was trying to formulate an answer, but it wouldn’t come.
“Come on, Billy. You’re busted and you know it. There’s something huge going down on Pennsylvania Avenue, isn’t there? Something bad is going down, and you’re a part of it.” David watched Zanger’s face as his words hit home. “I’m not a murderer, Billy. And looking at you — looking at the absence of panic when you realized who I was — I’m guessing you already knew that. I’m guessing that you want to put a stop to whatever shit is going down. God knows I want to. So what do you say?”
Zanger went to a place in his mind that brought tears to his eyelids. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” he said. When he looked to Becky, they spilled in single tracks down both cheeks.
“I could go to jail for this,” he said.
“You’re too young for that,” Becky said. “You look like a clean-cut nice guy. Whatever this secret is, you shouldn’t have to pay the price for it.”
Zanger swiped at the tears with the heels of his hands. “I got into this for all the right reasons,” he said. “Nobody gets into government to kill people.”
David’s heart jumped, but he worked hard not to show it. “I know,” he said. “Nobody goes into anything to do harm.” He had no idea if that was true, but it sounded like the words he should say.
Zanger looked at David for a long time without saying anything. His smooth jaw — he was one of those twentysomethings who looked as if he hadn’t yet shaved for the first time — flexed the whole time. David didn’t know if the stories on the Internet about prison rapes were true, but it occurred to him that Zanger had a femininity about him that would make incarceration particularly difficult.
“It started out seeming like the right thing to do,” Zanger said. “You know, it started out as protecting people. This first time you think it might be spinning out of control, you sort of look the other way and figure that you just have to tweak a few things, you know what I mean?”
“I think so,” David said. Clearly, Zanger thought that David had more concrete knowledge than he really did, but David didn’t want to interrupt the confession. Oftentimes, if you just kept listening, the lost details would line themselves up into a logical order. If they didn’t, you could always catch up when the monologue was over.
“Then you realize that the fixes you tried to do caused more problems. And then you try to fix those problems and five more things break.” He looked directly at Becky when he said, “I never in a million years thought that people would die. Would be killed.”
“Who was killed, Billy?” Becky asked. She leaned forward in her lounge chair and reached for his hand. “Tell me.”