Pace was sufficiently drunk that he had to close one eye to keep a focused view of where he was going, but he drove slowly and deliberately to the elegant home on R Street where he had attended two receptions. He knew it would be fruitless to try to find a parking spot on the oversubscribed and narrow Georgetown street, so he double-parked, blocking two cars against the curb. Their owners wouldn’t be going anywhere at this hour. And what he was about to do wouldn’t take long. Who the fuck cared, anyway?
Pace leaped up the nine front steps and leaned on the doorbell. Nothing. He slapped the brass knocker against the door’s metal sounding cap. Still nothing. He was about to press the bell again when the lights went on inside the house and on the front porch, and the door opened. NTSB Chairman Ken Sachs stood there, blinking in the brightness of his vestibule. He was wrapped in a satiny-looking red and black robe, his hair was tousled, and a heavy beard shaded his face.
“What the hell…” he started, and then he recognized his visitor. “Steve? What the hell do you want at this hour? I’ve got a plane to catch at Andrews at 6.”
“I don’t care what the fuck you have to do,” Pace snarled. “I came to tell you your little assassination squad did a real good job tonight.”
“What do you mean? Have you been drinking?”
“Goddamned right. So would you if a good friend of yours was murdered, along with some innocent people who did nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What are you talking about?” Sachs demanded. He was fully awake now, his eyes blazing. “Who was murdered? Where?”
“It was real smooth, too, you bastard. Even the cops and my editors think it was a drug stickup. But you and I know better, don’t we? You couldn’t let someone with Mike’s credibility stay alive with his suspicions. So you—”
“Mike? Mike McGill? What—”
“—planned a little scene in the drugstore to make it look like he was killed in a bungled drug robbery. I wanted to let you know I don’t buy it. And I’m not going to let it lie, either. You got rid of one problem, but you’ve still got me.”
“Steve, I don’t know anything about this.” There was an edge of anger in Sachs’s voice. “I want you off my property right now. I’ll call the police if I have to. I won’t have you standing out here cursing me in the middle of the night and waking up the neighborhood.”
“I’m going,” the reporter sneered. “Have a nice trip to Illinois. Give my regards to Michigan Avenue.”
Pace turned from the door, intending to make a dramatic departure, but the alcohol in his system conspired against him. He lost his balance and slammed into the wrought-iron handrail, the only thing that kept him from pitching headfirst down the brick steps. He continued with as much dignity as his condition allowed. He heard Sachs close the door behind him, and the porch light went out, leaving him to find the way to his car in darkness.
Pace let himself into his apartment a few minutes later. He closed the door and sagged against it, feeling triumph in the certainty he had found the mastermind behind the ConPac conspiracy and the murders of Mark Antravanian and Mike McGill.
He spotted his glass on the kitchen counter next to the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and decided to have a small victory drink. He dropped in ice cubes to the rim and added enough sour mash to cover the ice. He raised the glass in a salute to himself and walked back into the living room.
What had Avery said? We’ll push and push until someone pushes back. Well, the shoving match had started, and it would gain momentum when the Chronicle hit the streets the next morning. Most people reading Pace’s story would find it mildly interesting and possibly a little disquieting. But those readers weren’t the audience Pace was after.
Ken Sachs and a small number of others would be able to read between the lines. They would know the two deaths had nothing to do with coincidence, but more importantly, they would know Steve Pace knew it, too.
He went to the window that looked out across the city.
“You bastards,” he said. “Sleep well tonight. I’m coming for you in the morning.”
BOOK TWO
15
There is something very special about Washington, D.C. in the spring. Life blossoms in a frenzy of dazzling color, a gigantic, delicate floral celebration of the wonder of rebirth and renewal. It is a fragile, transitory thing, a sharp counterpoint to the permanence of the stone, granite, and marble housing the heart and history of the Republic.
Spring begins with the blooming of the very old Japanese cherry trees ringing the Tidal Basin of the Potomac River at the center of the city’s monuments area. So welcome is the event that the community created in its honor a festival that, regardless of its date, is never quite coordinated with the trees. An extra week or two of winter can keep the blossoms in bud, just as the early arrival of warm weather can coax them forth before they’re due. So fragile are the pale pink flowers that any blustery early-spring day will destroy them, and even in the best of years, they survive all too briefly. This year the warm weather arrived several weeks early. The blossoms were a memory by festival weekend.
As the cherry blossoms succumb, tulip magnolias, jonquils, daffodils, dogwood, and redbud throw yellow, white, pink and purple hues over the Capital, soon joined by acres of multihued tulips, lilac, flowering crab, weeping cherry, apple trees, and an array of azaleas.
From the organized gardens of the federal district, the eruption of color and fragrance snakes its way through the residential sections of the city and out the asphalt arteries into the most distant suburbs. On Massachusetts Avenue—known everywhere as Embassy Row—where the word “spring” is different in every tongue, it is the same in every garden, from that which graces the stunning modern architecture of the Brazilian Embassy to those that surround the staid old stone of the British and Vatican official residences. It washes through the postage-stamp yards of Georgetown and reaches onto the more spacious lawns of the quiet neighborhoods straddling Reno Road, where old azalea bushes are cared for with as much love as the old homes. They respond by blooming into a patchwork of red, yellow, coral, orange, lavender, purple, pink and white, drawing thousands of locals who come to admire this tutti-frutti treat for the eyes.
On this day, nearly everywhere in the city and its suburbs, redbud and the graceful, tiered branches of both wild and cultivated dogwood trees reached their peaks, making every patch of natural woodland seem a carefully tended Japanese garden.
Even in parts of northeast Washington and Anacostia, the city’s poorest neighborhoods, azaleas sprouted under crumbling brick and flowered amid the garbage. On streets frayed by age and apathy, for a short, post-equinox period in the spring, there was beauty.
It was a time when the pace slowed, when the populace abandoned good restaurants for brown bags and noontime places in the sun, when the city’s parks filled with softball games, Frisbees, footballs, soccer balls and lacrosse sticks, when carefully-creased pant legs were rolled to the knees and bare feet dipped into the Reflecting Pool, when yearning started for the days the Washington Senators played at old Griffith Stadium, when the air was filled with the rich fragrance of the new-mown grass, when every once in a while, if the wind was right, one could smell the salt water surging up the Potomac River from a random high tide in Chesapeake Bay.