Mistress

Well, that’s close. I don’t have a wife or children and probably never will. Capital Beat is my only family. It’s the only thing I’ve ever created. If I print something I can’t prove, I deface something I love. And I risk a crippling lawsuit and the loss of the Beat’s reputation. We may not be the Washington Post, but we are hard-hitting, fair, and fearless, which is more than most news organizations can say these days. So if I go down in flames, I want to know that I’ve left behind at least one thing that is good in this world. And they can always print the story after my death.

But there’s another reason as well.

“I haven’t been indicted yet,” I say. “They haven’t issued a warrant for my arrest yet.”

“Okay. So?”

“So-Carney threatened to do that, right? The feds seem to be in control of this situation, and the deputy director basically promised that if I didn’t play ball with him, there would be cops serving an arrest warrant any minute. But they aren’t. They’re keeping their powder dry. So for the moment, I’ll do the same.”

“I’m not really following the logic,” Ashley Brook says.

“I think they’re as scared of me as I am of them,” I say. “Neither of us wants to pull the trigger, because once we do, the other side will respond in kind.”

“It’s like the Cold War with us and the Russians,” she says. “They didn’t nuke us because they knew we’d nuke them. Mutually assured destruction.”

Malkovich was mesmerizing in Dangerous Liaisons

and hilarious as the foulmouthed ex-CIA agent in Burn after Reading. Every time he cussed, I laughed out loud.

The light changes at the intersection from red to green. Traffic starts to move northbound. I start up again on the bike and pedal through the intersection.

“So you must be close to something big,” she says.

I pick up the pace on my bike. My destination is only ten minutes away now.

“And if I’m right,” I say, “I’m about to get closer.”

Chapter 71

I sit on a bench outside the Bender Library looking over the Quad, where I spent four years eating my lunch or throwing a Frisbee or playing Hacky Sack between classes. The Quad is sort of the heart of American University’s main campus, a rectangular lawn bordered by the library on one end and the Kay Spiritual Life Center on the other. It’s crisscrossed with pedestrian walkways and has a seating area in the middle, complete with concrete benches. Some of the main academic buildings are situated along the borders. I haven’t been here since, oh, I think it was 2008, when I covered a student demonstration protesting the genocide in Darfur, complete with a mock refugee camp and a “die-in,” where all the students lay across the lawn to simulate the mass casualties.

After I’ve told him my lengthy narrative-the tale of Benjamin Casper over the last two weeks-Professor Bogomolov, seated next to me, puts a frail hand on my shoulder. “A most troubling story,” he says.

He should know about troubling stories. Andrei Bogomolov was born in the Soviet city of Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, where he studied psychiatry and history. But he wanted to live free in the West. So in 1974, while serving as a psychiatrist on a Soviet boat, he jumped ship off the Ivory Coast and swam ashore. The KGB chased him through Ghana, where he reportedly was hidden by Peace Corps volunteers in a camp and later smuggled to the US embassy in Accra, where he was granted political asylum. The whole matter led to an international dustup in the heat of the Cold War period. (Can there be heat during a Cold War?)

Anyway, Andrei came to American University to get a PhD in Russian history and never left. He’s been part of the history department ever since. He’s one of those professors who likes to sit out on the Quad eating his lunch with the students, enjoying the sunlight on his face and, I suppose, the feeling of freedom as well.

I took one of his classes while I was an undergrad here, but the truth is, I’ve known Andrei since I was a kid. He and my father were colleagues in the history department for decades. Andrei would come to our house for dinner, always showing up with a present, usually some Russian coin and a story to go along with it.

After Mother’s death, he was particularly nice to me. I remember him telling me about harsh winters in Russia, hunger pains in his stomach, a feeling that he had no control over his own destiny, and how his faith in God got him through all of it. You can suffer anything, Benjamin, he used to tell me, if you believe in yourself and God.

I haven’t talked to Andrei in years, probably not since Father’s funeral, but I remember him being a man of understatement. After experiencing what he experienced, I guess most things pale in comparison.

“A most troubling story,” he repeats.

“Operation Delano, Andrei,” I say.