Page 59 of Dead Fall

This close to the front, however, replacements were few and far between. They might be stuck with the one they had for a little longer. The question was, could she hang on? Hearing his men howl once more, he decided to go inside and see what they had found.

As he walked, he smiled. He knew the American woman wasn’t going to survive, but prolonging her life might very well make for an exquisitely painful and entertaining game.

CHAPTER 18

BOSTON

Greg Wilson was nervous. The last thing he wanted to do was to speak to the FBI before he had spoken with his handler. Should he have a lawyer present for the interview? Would they believe his story about why he and Burman were having dinner at the yacht club? What if they didn’t? What if they pressed for more information? He needed answers and until he got them, he planned to stay out of D.C. and to give the FBI the widest berth possible.

That’s why his handler had suggested Boston. It was an hour-and-twenty-minute flight for both of them. Halfway between Hancock County–Bar Harbor Airport in Maine and Reagan National in D.C. They settled on Come A Casa, a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant off Prince Street in the city’s Little Italy neighborhood, known to locals as the North End.

The handler had suggested that Wilson take the ferry from Logan International Airport across the bay to the Hyatt and catch a cab to a small bookstore a few blocks down from the restaurant.

Upon his recruitment, the former Senator had been taught the basics about tradecraft. It was important that he knew how to move, meet, and communicate without tipping off U.S. Intelligence. While many American politicians weren’t very bright and were about as deep as a puddle, Wilson was different. He showed promise.

But to hear him speak, Wilson believed his value was limited, that he had a very short “shelf life.”

The scandal that had engulfed him had been humiliating. He had been outed for having had multiple extramarital affairs. One had been with his pastor’s wife, another with a porn actress, and the third with a staffer in his Senate office.

All of the relationships had been consensual. None of the women had accused him of forcing himself on them. The one considered the most potentially damaging had been the affair with his staffer and she had gone public claiming that she had pursued him and not vice versa.

The timing of the revelations couldn’t have been worse. They had come, drip, drip, drip—one after another—in the closing days of a bruising primary battle. There was no time to knock them all down, to get his rebuttals properly circulating. His constituents saw him as a liar and a hypocrite.

They had no idea how dirty the laundry was that hung in every congressional office closet on Capitol Hill. Nor were they aware of the forest of skeletons you had to battle through just to get to it.

He wasn’t a “dirty” politician. He was merely a weak man who had succumbed to his passions. Power was the ultimate aphrodisiac and he had been unable to say no to the women who had wanted to bask in it.

He had known it was wrong. He knew he should have shown character and stopped things before they went too far, but he didn’t. The fact that he could have these women was as far as his thought process had gone. Character, and all the other virtues, had left the building. And because of his weakness, he had been made to suffer.

In addition to losing his primary, he had lost his wife—the only woman to ever love him for who he really was. She had loved him before he had ever dreamed of running for office and would have stayed with him long after he had decided to retire from politics.

As a wise person, most probably a woman, once said, God gave men two heads, and they often do their most important thinking with the wrong one. That was Greg Wilson in a nutshell.

But instead of allowing the experience to humble him and forge a better man, Wilson blamed everyone else and allowed his heart to be hardened.

He blamed the pastor’s wife, who couldn’t keep her guilt-riddenmouth shut and confessed the affair to her husband. He blamed the money-grubbing porn star, who wanted to make a quick buck and was shopping her story to the tabloids. He blamed the staffer in his office, who was dumb enough to admit the relationship to a gossipy friend, who in turn hinted at it over lunch with a reporter from theWashington Post.

Finally, he blamed his opponent, his opponent’s campaign manager, and their opposition research person. None of these stories had yet seen the full light of day. Someone had toiled in the shadows to source and secure them before perfectly orchestrating their release. It had taken a lot of skill, a lot of money, or both to make that happen and it had ruined Greg Wilson’s political career.

The only saving grace had been that while voters wanted nothing further to do with him, his former colleagues were more than happy to take meetings with him as long as it furthered their interests. It wasn’t lost on a single one of them that, but for the grace of God, the same thing could have happened to them. Because of this, Wilson was able to remain among the powerful in D.C. and earn a lucrative living.

That living, however, was not lucrative enough. He had a target in mind—$10 million. Enough to disappear and be comfortable on.

His constituents and, in his opinion, his country had not only turned their backs on him, but they also never deserved him in the first place. They could all go screw themselves. As soon as he had amassed his ten million, he would be gone.

There was a small Caribbean nation that, in exchange for making a large deposit in their national bank, would fast-track him to citizenship. Their passport was accepted worldwide by all the countries he would ever want to visit. The country also didn’t have an extradition treaty with the United States.

While that hadn’t been something he was originally looking for, it did become an added benefit once he went to work for the Russians.

The kicker for Wilson, the real knife through the heart, had been when his children had stopped talking to him. They silenced his calls, ignored his texts, and refused to see him. They even sent back the birthday and Christmas gifts he had sent them. As far as he was concerned, therewas nothing left worth living for. That was when the Russians had made their move.

Wilson had been caught a bit flat-footed, unaware that he was being softened up. He had wrongly believed that he had a new client on the hook and that all he had to do was reel him into the boat. Then his would-be handler had laid everything out on the table.

It wasn’t an obscene pitch—not even for an ex–U.S. Senator who was being asked to work against the interests of his country on behalf of a hostile foreign power. It came down to a question of ideology, of the path that could best secure a peaceful and prosperous future for both countries.

At one point in his life, the first thing Wilson would have done after such a recruitment attempt was to immediately reach out to the FBI. But not now. These were different times, he told himself. He was a different man. And as far as he was concerned, the United States was a different country. He was ready to cash in. He accepted Russia’s offer.

His handler’s name was Joe Nistal. He was a handsome man in his early forties—tall, with broad shoulders and a thick head of wavy brown hair. He wasn’t exactly the picture that sprang to mind when one thought of a Russian Intelligence officer.

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