Shining City Read online

  Dedication

  For Rima, Leah, and Kira, always

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  Part One: Death and Beginning One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Part Two: The Scrub Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Part Three: Murder Boards Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Part Four: Hearings Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Fifty

  Fifty-one

  Fifty-two

  Fifty-three

  Fifty-four

  Fifty-five

  Fifty-six

  Fifty-seven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Rosenstiel

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Epigraphs

  Let us resolve tonight that young Americans will always . . . find there a city of hope in a country that is free. . . . And let us resolve they will say of our day and our generation, we did act worthy of ourselves, that we did protect and pass on lovingly that shining city on a hill.

  —Ronald Reagan, Election Eve speech, November 3, 1980

  Time, which is said to be the father of every truth, uncovers all.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

  Life being what it is, one dreams of revenge.

  —Paul Gauguin

  Prologue

  No one survives long in the city counting on it to be better than it is. That doesn’t mean, Peter Rena thought, you should make it worse.

  In Rena’s mind this attitude was more practical than moral. Maybe Martin Luther King was right and the long arc of history did bend toward justice. It was pretty clear to Rena you shouldn’t expect to recognize the curve in your lifetime. You just tug in the right direction, because if you do, others might, too. And if you don’t, the arc might bend the other way.

  Rena didn’t ponder such questions often. These meditations, when they came, tended to visit him at night, in his den, sometimes induced by John Coltrane and Grey Goose and Dolin vermouth. They usually appeared at the apex of some mess he and his partner had been hired to help wash up. Often after he had told some client to come clean and there was an argument about it. Even when the trouble was bad and the options limited, many clients still wanted assurance they would be rewarded for doing the right thing. Rena would tell them no: Do the right thing, because the alternative is the wrong thing.

  Rena and his partner were sometimes called fixers, but the term didn’t fit. They never fixed problems—they just ended them. Clients came to them because they were good at getting to the bottom of things, finding what others missed, and they didn’t mince their words. They also tended to calm people down; whatever the trouble, Rena and Brooks had usually seen worse.

  At night Rena would listen to his music and try to empty his mind. He would take another cauterizing sip of martini, and he would read. Inevitably his thoughts would wander back to his day. Many clients at some point would talk about destiny. They would wonder whether what was happening to them was fair. The most successful and powerful often struggled the most; they had more to lose. But those conversations didn’t interest Rena much. He didn’t believe in destiny, or fate, or anything else that suggested people hadn’t made choices.

  Rena believed in history. And preparation. He believed in will, and in the value of understanding the psychology of your opponents. And your allies, if you had to depend on them.

  Above all Rena believed in facts. Facts were real and had a habit of sticking around. And when there were a sufficient number of them, you could know the truth about something. Maybe not all of it, but enough.

  Plenty of people in town peddled something else. They promised they could create “new narratives” and control the cycle and guarantee the outcome. And they believed it, too, because of how the machinery of the city was arranged. It was positioned so the status quo mostly remained intact. Change was expensive and unpredictable. Failing to change, on the other hand, had subtle benefits. It generated more outrage, more fund-raising, and repeat business. It was even a kind of insurance: If everyone lost, all involved could claim victory in their enemy’s defeat.

  Washington is a city of promises. Some great and some sinful. Some so moving they are etched on monuments. From time to time Rena thinks about the city’s promises. His favorites are those the young come to town with; those promises are clean and hopeful. The most common promises are the ones made in public that offer big things for nothing and are not really promises at all. And then there are the promises no one is meant to hear, paid for in money or favor. When they go beyond what the city can abide, people call Rena and ask him to untangle what has been paid and to whom. There, in the hidden city, Rena makes his way.

  Part One

  Death and Beginning

  April 12

  One

  2:39 P.M.

  Washington, D.C.

  The key point in any interrogation is the moment of capitulation. The instant when the subject, exhausted of all other hope, concludes the interrogator is no longer someone to fear but a friend—maybe the only one.

  Peter Rena senses that Congresswoman Belinda Cartwright, freshman, R-Utah, is nearly there.

  “I don’t think you understand,” she says again with a beseeching look. “I was the victim here.”

  Rena stares back at her without expression.

  They are alone in an empty room of the Cannon House Office Building, on a Sunday afternoon, chairs pulled close together at one end of a long mahogany conference table.

  “Well, that makes all the difference,” she adds. “I was the one defrauded.”

  The man who’d taught Rena interrogation in the army, Tommy Kee, called it the power of silence. “People get terrified when there are gaps, Pete, and you don’t fill them up. They take it as a sign of personal failure.” Tommy didn’t believe in intimidation or fire ants, sleep deprivation or water techniques—“all the enhanced interrogation bullshit.” He believed in what he called “fine listening”—looking for the parts that didn’t fit, “taking time and taking notes,” asking a few right questions, then letting people expose the parts of themselves they don’t mean to. “Learn to control silence, and you can control almost anyone.”

  Rena has been listening now for more than an hour. He had begun sympathetically: “Explain it to me from the beginning.” The congresswoman talked in the practiced way of someone who as a child was socially awkward, who under stress still talks too much—and who knows it. So he has let her go on, and she has tried to explain all of it—the missing money, how her husband had deceived her, how she was t
rapped. There is a lot to get through.

  Her formal service in the House of Representatives amounted to four months, one week, and six days. An account in the New Republican tallied her list of accomplishments in that brief time as misappropriation of public funds, criminal conspiracy, several House ethics violations, and breach of various campaign finance statutes. “Matching the list to length of service,” the magazine speculated, “it may set a record in the annals of public malfeasance.”

  Rena has spent most of the last two days learning every detail about Cartwright. She, on the other hand, knew little about her visitor. “He can help you with your problem,” Phyllis Martinson, the senior female member of the House, had said—which meant the meeting wasn’t optional. Drew Allman, the Capitol Hill veteran who had organized her office, had been more chillingly candid. “He’s a crisis consultant.” Some kind of PR expert, she asked? “No,” Allman had said. “The guy who comes in when PR won’t work.”

  A Web search revealed he was ex-military, Special Forces, one of those crazy guys who swim across alligator-infested waters to slit your throat and then swim back. He became some kind of military investigator, and spent time as a Senate aide. Now he runs a “consulting” company. “Research and Security”—whatever that is—the website doesn’t list clients. “What do you mean, ‘he comes in when PR won’t work’?” she’d pressed Allman. “I mean when things are really bad, Belinda,” he’d answered.

  In the empty meeting room, they make a contrasting pair. Rena has black hair, olive skin, and large melancholy brown eyes. He is dressed in the supplicant hues of a Washington aide—charcoal pinstripe and blue tie. Underneath the suit, however, she can see a lean muscularity. There is a quiet and vaguely menacing quality about him, like a black jaguar. She, by comparison, is pale and has a round face with a deceptively sweet and guileless set to it. And unlike her visitor, she is dressed to be noticed, in a made-for-TV pink-rose suit, picked to suggest innocence.

  “Mr. Rena, I was told you could help me,” she says, careful to say his name the way he’d pronounced it for her—“Rehn-nah.” “Can you help me?”

  When he doesn’t answer she finally utters what he considers her first honest remark. “Why are you really here?”

  In a way she is a victim, Rena thinks. The daughter of a prominent Provo Mormon family and a promising young attorney, Cartwright represented in her maiden campaign youth and conservatism. In the middle of the race, she married her family’s financial advisor, a doughy-looking character named Derek Knox. The wedding was a Latter-day Saints society event and a campaign public relations triumph.

  It was also her undoing. Knox turned out to be a con man. Cartwright and her family’s money were the mark. When the family money was gone, he tapped her campaign funds. Once in office, nearly destitute, she put Knox on her payroll as chief of staff to keep her personal finances afloat.

  The leadership, however, had noticed her. Cartwright was a member of the Common Sense movement, that surge of Americans alarmed the nation is declining and convinced that government is the reason. When she arrived in Washington, the Speaker of the House saw in her an eager but pliant political novice and an opportunity to connect with the conservative Common Sensers that didn’t run through his calculating majority leader. He made Cartwright a freshman member of the leadership team. National media began to profile her. Someone found a loose string about Derek Knox and pulled.

  “We need this to be over, Peter,” the Speaker’s chief of staff had said when he’d called two days ago. “She’s hurting the party. We need someone who can level with her and not lose their nerve. You’re good at that, Peter, at being blunt.”

  If he were answering her honestly, then, he’d say bluntness was one reason he’s here. That’s fine with Rena. Candor isn’t the worst reputation to have in a town where it’s in short supply.

  But it wasn’t the only reason they’d called him. The Speaker’s office also wanted distance from this—from cleaving a member of the Common Sense movement from the House. And Rena and his partner, Randi Brooks, offer that, too, if for no other reason than that they do something many consider immoral in modern Washington: work for people in both parties. Not anyone. But those they consider decent.

  That makes them a rarity in the city now—and somewhat ideologically suspect. Even lobbying firms now keep separate Democrat and Republican staffs.

  But the taint of bipartisanship that is attached to the consulting firm of Rena, Brooks & Toppin is also not entirely un-useful. Messages still need to be delivered. Frank talks had. Deals struck. It can be hard to make the first move. If possible, the go-betweens should be trusted by both sides.

  Most of their work isn’t political: corporations wanting background checks on potential CEOs or troubled executives, law firms with big cases, sports teams with stars in a fix or draft prospects surrounded by rumors. Not the profession he expected when he enrolled at West Point. He once tracked down criminals, traitors, and terrorists for the army. But that had ended more than seven years ago.

  Cartwright dabs her eyes with the remnants of the tissue and slowly shakes her head back and forth.

  “I’m here, Belinda,” Rena says finally in a voice just above a whisper, “because your career in the House is over.”

  Two

  11:23 A.M.

  Bethesda, Maryland

  The seventeenth green on the Blue Course at the Congressional Country Club sits atop a gently rising hill guarded on both sides by a series of enormous bunkers. Elliott Hoffman sees his father, Julius, standing between the two sand traps on the right side of the green studying his next shot, a slippery chip of about thirty feet.

  The old man, dapper in an elderly kind of way in his white Ben Hogan–style cap, is holding his sand wedge in one hand, dangling it back and forth, lost in thought. Elliott can see his father’s mind working, studying the contours of the green, the elevation change, the way the ball is sitting on the grass, concentrating, thoroughly caught up in this one moment, pondering the many variables affecting the shot.

  Elliott feels a wave of affection. There was a time he and his father barely spoke. Then somewhere in his forties—after the children were gone and the divorce from Ellen was final—they rediscovered each other. They let go old grievances, what his father called “the forgotten business,” and just came to appreciate each other. Sundays with his dad were the best part of his week.

  The moment of reverie passes, and Elliott looks at his father. Julius Hoffman is six months past eighty-five now. Everyone marvels at his vigor. He has become leaner with age, and the leanness makes him look brittle, the gray wisps of hair over his bald head adding to the effect, but all that is deceptive. Julius Hoffman is not only strikingly fit for a man of his age. He is still working, still handling his case load, still admired, even feared. “A steely tower of conviction,” as the Economist had put it last year, catching that mixture of intimidation and integrity that Julius Hoffman now seems to represent in the public mind.

  For all that, his father’s greatest pride might be that he occasionally shoots his age in golf. He no longer hits the ball far—his drives go barely 150 yards—but his short game—the shots around the green—has actually improved.

  Elliott begins to eye his own putt and doesn’t watch his father swing. He can tell, however, that the shot is poor. Pop has either misjudged how hard to hit his chip or skulled the shot by hitting the ball with the lower edge of the club face. Either way, the ball flies too far, past the hole, and doesn’t check up from backspin, but skids off the opposite side of the green.

  The sound Elliott hears is also odd, not the usual amusing groan of mock agony his father makes after hitting a bad shot. The sound has come earlier—during the shot rather than afterward—and resembles a gurgling moan.

  Elliott looks up. His father, a weird look on his face, is trying to climb the slope up to the green, but about halfway up he staggers and begins to make a brief, stiff-legged march backward down the hill. His
momentum carries him down the slope, his legs start to cross, his knees separate, and he falls.

  “El—” Julius Hoffman cries out to his son, failing to get out the full name.

  By the time Elliott reaches him, Justice Julius Hoffman, the senior sitting justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America, is dead.

  Three

  “A man would have survived this.”

  Cartwright’s voice is lower and harder than before.

  “A man falling romantically for a manipulative woman is a victim. But a woman duped by a man, that is unforgivable.”

  She may be right. It doesn’t matter.

  “You’re past that now,” Rena says.

  She looks at him with an intelligence that was missing before.

  “I thought everything in politics is perception,” she says.

  “Only the guilty argue that.”

  Cartwright shifts in her chair. Rena touches the top of her shoulder.

  “If you go,” he says, “I won’t be able to help you.”

  “Don’t patronize me, Mr. Rena.”

  “Do you know why you have to resign, Belinda?” He wants to reward her candor with his own. “Because you lied to your colleagues about when you knew about your husband. Then, when they vouched for you based on that, you made them liars, too. That is when you lost your claim of innocence.”

  She begins to cry silently.

  The phone in Rena’s jacket begins to vibrate and he can tell she’s heard it. He lets it go.

  “How you end this will determine how people remember it.” She looks up at him. He has her attention now. “If you begin to tell the truth, people will know you are leveling with them. The press coverage will change instantly.”