“I see your light is on. Can you leave your desk long enough to let us in? It’s cold outside.”
Jonathan resisted the urge to look out the window. It would have been too… predictable. “Us?” he said. “Who’s ‘us’?”
“You’ll have to look to see,” she said. “But I’d rather talk in your residence than in your office.”
He sighed. The reality was that he welcomed any opportunity to so something other than the stuff he was doing. “Two minutes.”
Jonathan stood from his chair, triggering JoeDog to scramble to her feet, tail wagging, ready and anxious to find another place to lie down and sleep.
“Come on, Beast,” he said. “Come attack a government official.” They walked together to the office door, but upon opening it, he let JoeDog go first. It was better than being run over from behind.
He said good night to the guards and walked down to the residence. He pressed the code, and then he was home. He turned lights on as walked down one more flight to the main level, then across the living area to the foyer. He slid the latches and pulled open the door.
Irene Rivers stood wrapped in mink, the collar pulled tight under her chin, with a fuzzy fur hat down low over her ears. David Kirk stood next to her in a ski jacket, smiling from ear to ear. “Bet you didn’t think you’d see us again,” David said. On the other side of him stood Becky Beckeman in a poufy down coat that hadn’t been in style in Becky’s lifetime.
“Truer words,” Jonathan said. He stepped aside and ushered them in. “Have a seat. Get warm.” They entered and Jonathan scanned the area outside. “Where’s your detail?”
Irene peeled off her coat. “In the car,” she said. “And don’t feel too sorry for them. It’s a nice car.” JoeDog examined the visitors long enough to determine that they had no treats for her, and then she retreated to watch from under the coffee table.
Irene blew into her hands and rubbed them together. “I heard a rumor that you have an excellent collection of single malts.”
“Excellent is such a relative term,” Jonathan said. “But I think we could all agree on ‘fairly comprehensive. ’ What do you like?”
“Glenmorangie,” she said.
“Can I get in on this?” David asked.
“You’re not going to ask me to put ginger ale or Coke in it, are you?”
“No, I like mine neat and peaty. Got any Talisker?”
Jonathan smiled. “I might learn to like you after all, kid. Becky?”
“I’ll take the ginger ale.”
As his guests took their seats, Jonathan walked to the bookcase that housed the bar and poured three drinks of two fingers each, and a tall glass of ginger ale. His own glass, of course, contained Lagavulin. He served them with an apology. “I don’t have a freezer in the bar. Would you like me to get ice from the kitchen?”
Becky smiled. “No, this is fine.”
“I confess you’ve piqued my interest,” Jonathan said, lowering himself into a lush green leather reading chair. Irene sat to his right in another lounge chair, and David and Becky had taken spots on the sofa to Jonathan’s left.
Irene started. Sort of. “Mr. Kirk and Ms. Beckeman have something to tell you.”
The hairs on Jonathan’s neck moved. “Oh, yeah?”
David took a sip as he nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to tell you about the story we’re never going to write. It turns out that Nicholas and Josef Mishin have the wrong last names.”
Jonathan crossed his legs and took a sip of his own. This was going to be interesting.
“By DNA testing, their real last name should be Winters.”
Jonathan nearly choked. “You mean as in Douglas Winters? As in the president’s chief of staff?”
“Yep.”
Jonathan scowled and glanced at Irene for confirmation. She answered with her eyebrows.
“How can you know this?”
“During our research, we found out that Winters has been joined at the hip with Tony Darmond since the Mesozoic era — since before Darmond was even in Congress. And you know how everybody says that Nicholas is the image of his mother, with the light hair and the blue eyes? That given the president’s coloration, Nicholas got every recessive gene?”
Jonathan rocketed back to his first meeting with Winters in Arc Flash’s barn. The hair was going gray, but he had blue eyes and the complexion that suggested that he might have been a blond in his youth. “And because Winters has similar coloring, you’re suggesting—”
“We’re not suggesting anything,” Becky said, hijacking the narrative. “We’ve got proof. When the rest of us were left behind at the hospital, we got to talking with Joey Mishin — a nice kid, but man is he gonna need some counseling. Actually, he was afraid of David, but he talked to me. He told stories that he’d heard from his dad that Tony Darmond was never nice to him when he was growing up. He said he felt like — and this was the phrase he quoted — a redheaded stepchild. That’s when the lightbulb went on over my head.”
Jonathan scoffed, “But that’s hardly—”
“Jesus, are you going to let us finish or not?” David snapped. “We have a confidential source inside the White House who was able to bring me a soda can that Winters had drunk out of. We sent it, along with a sample of Nicholas’s blood that I got off my pants that night.” He paused for effect.
“It’s a match?”
“Perfect.”
Jonathan gaped, and then he chuckled and took a longer sip of scotch. “Holy shit. So why are you both here?” He looked to Irene for the answer to that one.
“Because you’ve got enough skin in this game to get really pissed off, and I wanted you to know that restraint is the key to everything.”
“I don’t follow.”
She explained. “David showed the courtesy of running this past me. Frankly, it’s not a suspicion that had ever occurred to the Bureau or anywhere else that I know of. We took it to Alexei — he actually prefers to be called Len — and he seemed shocked as hell that we knew. That had been the Movement’s trump card.”
“The Movement?” Jonathan asked.
“Sounds like the shits, doesn’t it?” David said with a laugh.
“That’s what the Russian expats called themselves. They found out about the truth of Nicholas’s paternity through Pavel Mishin, the man who was supposed to have been the kid’s father. Apparently, they’ve been sitting on it for a while, waiting for the best moment to hurt the president.”
Jonathan scowled again. “Nobody cares about bastard children anymore.”
“President Darmond didn’t know,” Irene said. “The president had always assumed that Mishin was the father, which was why he and the First Lady never got along, and why Nicholas the Younger was never treated well. Only Winters and Yelena knew the real truth — and Mishin — and Winters understood that if word leaked, he’d be toast in the administration.”
“Is he also involved with this terrorist stuff?” Jonathan asked.
“Yes,” Irene said. Her scotch was gone now, and she motioned for another. This time, Jonathan set the bottle next to her. “Apparently, Winters really loved the kid, and by extension, I guess he really loved Yelena, too.”
“Did he know about the witness protection stuff?”
“He does now, but he didn’t when they had their affair. He says he didn’t know until a guy named Dmitri Boykin approached him with that, and the knowledge of the true paternity. He was devastated and the bad guys knew it. That’s when they started applying the screws. They promised to hurt Nicholas if Winters didn’t pull strings to grant the Movement access to weapons.”
Jonathan recoiled. “Can a chief of staff do that?”
“A chief of staff can do anything he wants to. As a practical matter, he is surrogate president, so long as nothing has to be signed into law. That’s what chiefs of staff do. In Winters’s case, it meant alerting Alexei or Dmitri to the movement of materiel. Apparently, that’s a pretty simple matter.”