CHAPTER 1
March 17, 2019
Had she still been living in the crumbling Adams Morgan apartment building with the shabby lobby, broken elevator, rickety staircase, and foul-smelling courtyard, she would have heard the rasp on the jamb as the window was forced open, felt the air’s cold sting on the back of her neck, noted the creak of the floorboards, but as it was, this new twenty-five-thousand-square-foot house was airtight, with reinforced concrete floors overlaid with old-growth timbers and thick Persian rugs, the ambient murmur of mechanical equipment drowning out any sound.
She didn’t hear a thing. Until he was on her. And then all she could hear was the thundering of her heart exploding in her ears.
One moment, she was at the bathroom sink gently cleansing her face, brushing her hair, softly humming a tune from Wicked, her favorite Broadway show; turning down the covers, looking forward to starting a new book. And the next, she was fighting for her life, the intruder’s hands at her throat, a knee shoved up in her crotch, a man’s body pressing down on her with all its weight.
She couldn’t think, let alone breathe, then survival instincts kicked in. She dug her nails into the intruder’s back, neck, and scalp and, when he momentarily loosened his hold, raked his face and drove her knee into his nuts. He groaned, and she slithered partially out from under him and clutched for the bedside table. She yanked out the drawer and thrust her hand inside just as he grabbed a fistful of her hair and kicked the drawer shut on her wrist. She screamed in pain, or at least she thought she heard herself scream.
He had a stocking over his face, and she could hear him panting hard. He tried to lever himself up on his elbow to get a better purchase but only wound up sinking deeper into the soft bedding, his foot slipping from the table. When it did, she withdrew her hand from the drawer. In it, she held a .38 Special stainless-steel revolver and shot him, point-blank, twice through the chest. She rolled out from under him, dropped the gun on the floor, grabbed her phone off the bedside table, ran down the stairs, out the front door, and dialed 911.
___________
A female deputy for the Northern Virginia County Sheriff’s Department was consoling her when Sheriff Jake Korum, investigator Samantha Whyte, and a heavyset detective walked out of the Georgian-style mansion, with its six twenty-foot columns, down the sloped lawn, past rippling fountains, to expansive gardens where the pair stood silhouetted by flashing blue emergency lights.
“You holdin’ up okay, Mrs. Tate?” the sheriff drawled, putting a reassuring hand on her shoulder, tilting back his signature wide-brimmed off-white Stetson, and bending over so he could look her in the face. She was fighting back tears, eyes red and watery, nostrils leaking, a heavy blanket draped over her back.
“I don’t know,” she said between whimpers and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, the blanket sliding from her shoulders to reveal a bloodstained lace negligee. A cold rain had fallen earlier in the evening, and the air was chilled, the ground wet, her slippers soggy, mud caked. “I think so. Is he dead?” she asked and closed the blanket back around her neck.
“Oh, yeah, he’s dead awright, Mrs. Tate,” the sheriff assured her. “Business end of a .38 at that range does the trick every time. One round would have gotten the job done.”
“Mrs. Tate,” the detective asked, “you call anyone else after dialing 911?”
“My husband, Geoff. He was on his way back from a business trip in Europe. His jet should have landed by now.”
The detective nodded his tree stump of a head knowingly. “That’s what I would’ve guessed, Mrs. Tate,” he said. “That’s what most people would do in a situation like this, I suspect. Call a loved one, or spouse, if they’re married. That’s what I’d have done. Called Patsy. You get ahold of Mr. Tate?”
“No, he didn’t answer his phone.”
“Figures.”
“Why’s that?” she sniffled.
The burly detective swept his eyes over the manicured gardens, stone paths, statuary, tennis courts, koi ponds, and said, “Mr. Tate, he’s lying up there on your bedroom floor, two slugs through his breadbasket. You killed your husband, Mrs. Tate.”
She wailed and collapsed.
“Your bedside manner needs work, Dee-tec-tive,” the female deputy spat angrily, struggling to support the slumping body as Mrs. Tate’s dog, a cockapoo with little red ribbons pinned to its ears, ran laps around her legs, yapping incessantly.
“Careful now, Deputy. You’re holding on to what just might be the world’s richest woman,” the detective said over the dog’s barking and tucked a pinch of Copenhagen tobacco in his lower lip. “And somebody better muzzle that goddamn mutt before I shoot it.”
CHAPTER 2
March 17
He hated crowds and preferred to work behind the scenes, undetected, but tonight was different. It was important he stood out, be seen. The Georgetown bar was packed and noisy with Saint Patrick’s Day revelers, and he had already bought the house one round of drinks to celebrate. Two drunk brunettes, in matching short green skirts and sequined tops, had him hemmed in as he stood facing the rowdy gathering, back to the bar, elbows propped up against the railing.
The heavier of the two flashed him a green thong she was wearing under her skirt. The other pulled him closer and whispered in his ear, “I don’t own green panties, so I’m not wearing anything at all.” She belched softly in his face and giggled. Her breath smelled like licorice.
He remained in the bar for another fifteen minutes, settled his tab, and ordered up an Uber, but not before buying a second round of drinks and engaging in some heavy petting with the two females, running a fleshy hand up the skirt of the pantyless one while the other massaged the inside of his thigh. He downed what was left of a mug of green beer, slipped the bartender a fifty-dollar tip, and escaped the claws of the two women.
The Uber driver was wearing a Washington Nationals baseball cap and kept up a running dialogue on the team’s chances to get back to the World Series as spring training approached. “I still can’t believe they got rid of Harper,” he said, referring to the perennial all-star and two-time MVP Bryce Harper. “Who would have thought.”
When he reached the entrance to his building, one of the new high-rise luxury towers off upper Wisconsin Avenue, he made sure to pause and chat up the doorman.
“Karl, my main man, how come you didn’t tell me about the hottie who moved into 2A? You been holding out on me?”
Karl smiled. “You plenty busy as it is awready, Mr. Mack. You not careful, your manhood like to fall off.”
“I do like the ladies,” he boasted.
“Good night, Mr. Mack.”
“Good night, Karl,” he said before taking the elevator up to his twelve-room apartment on the fifth floor.
Dwayne Mack kicked off his sneakers in the entryway, padded to the kitchen, poured two fingers of rye whiskey into a cut-crystal tumbler to wash the beer taste out of his mouth, dropped in ice cubes, selected a Fuente robusto from the humidor on the counter, and made his way to the living room. He flipped on the television and started scrolling through the stations to catch the local news, all the while monitoring Twitter.
The lead story on all three programs was about a gangland shooting that had left four people dead and six others wounded in southeast Washington. “That brings the number of murders to forty-four this year, and we’re only in March. At this pace, we will surpass last year’s record homicide rate,” the newsman said somberly.
Shame it was only four, Dwayne thought to himself and muted the sound.
He checked his watch. In an era of iPhones, he still preferred wristwatches and owned an expensive collection—Rolex, Cartier, Patek Philippe—because it was his experience that luxury sent an important message.
He was careful not to overdo the extravagance, lest he be considered vulgar, and offset the five-figure bracelets dangling from his plump wrist by purposely dressing down in flannel shirts, blue jeans, sneakers, baseball caps.
He was a good twenty pounds overweight, a fold of belly draped over his beltline like a water balloon, and looked like he belonged behind the wheel of a Peterbilt semitruck. Instead, he drove a restored 1966 Ford Mustang, canary yellow, hardtop. He avoided the sun, his skin as white as the underbelly of a fish.
Clients were intrigued by Mack’s eclectic style, but that’s not why they hired him. They hired him because he got results. Always. That, and he carried scores of politicians and judges in his pocket like loose change.
Most lobbyists and crisis communication firms in Washington, DC, are what those in the industry refer to as “relationship specialists.” Not Dwayne Mack. He was a cage fighter, and he didn’t give a damn who he crawled into the octagon with as long as their checks cashed. Technology monopolists, tobacco companies, industrial polluters, dictators, they all came knocking at Blue Sky Consulting’s door, and they always found it wide open.
Mack booted up his laptop and started surfing the web. It was one minute past midnight. On the third news site, Hush Now, a crime and political gossip rag that Mack often secretly spoon-fed tips, he saw the story. He clicked on the headline, and it took him to a page with scant details.
Yukon CEO Shot, Killed at Home
Geoffrey Tate, CEO of Yukon, the world’s largest artificial intelligence company, and one of the planet’s wealthiest individuals with a net worth estimated north of $150 billion, was shot and killed in his McLean, Virginia, home late this evening.
“At this time, we are still trying to determine the sequence of events that transpired prior to Mr. Tate’s death. We will release further details as they become available,” Samantha Whyte, chief spokesperson and lead investigator for the Northern Virginia County Sheriff’s Department, said in a prepared statement.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates throughout the night.
Mack unmuted his television. The local stations had now picked up the story and were broadcasting news of the shooting. They didn’t have many more facts than Hush Now’s online report, but they did have a dated mug shot of Tate, circa 1994, when he had started Yukon in his garage; aerial photos of his new walled-in ten-acre McLean, Virginia, estate; and a picture of Yukon’s distinctive headquarters building in downtown DC with its thirty-eight-foot steel sculpture of a mechanical prospector mining for gold, the pickax in his hand hypnotically striking a blow on rocks every seventy-five seconds.
Mack continued to monitor Twitter and waited five minutes before making a call. When a sleepy woman answered, he announced in a wounded voice, “This is Dwayne. Have you heard the news? It’s all over the media. Geoff’s dead. He’s been shot and killed.”
The woman gasped and said something, but Mack wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy calculating what impact the news of Tate’s death would have on the company’s stock price when markets opened on Monday. He figured it’d shave 20 percent off the market cap on the high side, or about $200 billion. He’d be sure to load up on the dip.
He turned his attention back to the blubbering woman on the phone and told her to pull herself together and start calling Yukon’s board of directors to notify them of the news. He hung up the phone, picked up his laptop, and pecked away at the keys, tapping out a statement for the board to release to the press that read, in part:
While tragic, Geoffrey Tate’s passing will in no way jeopardize or interfere with Yukon’s work on the $500 billion Bullwhip contract to provide the Department of Defense with advanced artificial intelligence capabilities for our nation’s fighting men and women. The company is on track to deliver state-of-the-art technologies on the initial phase of the project, which, when completed, will usher in the world’s first unmanned and autonomous fleet of war machines capable of seeking out, engaging, and neutralizing enemy forces in the field and skies without human intervention or risk.
Let this be Geoff’s everlasting legacy.
When he was satisfied with the statement, Mack clipped the tip of his cigar, lit it with a gold lighter inscribed with “The best is yet to come,” refilled his tumbler with the bottle of rye he carried in from the kitchen, and reclined back on the couch. Minutes later, the encrypted app on his phone signaled the arrival of an incoming text message with a piiiing.
He specifically chose this particular app because it didn’t store any bread crumbs in the cloud and contained no GPS monitoring code. He glanced down at the message. The text contained no words. Just an emoji. It was a four-leaf clover. The Irish symbol for luck.
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