I went for a long walk after I left Marcus’s office. It was still winter outside; spring hadn’t yet broken through. The sky was a low overcast that seemed to hang just above the treetops like a lid. I walked down Seventeenth Street, past the gray columns and turrets of the Old Executive Office Building. Once they had been able to fit the entire executive branch into that one building; now it couldn’t even hold all the White House staff. I continued down the slope of Seventeenth Street toward the Tidal Basin. In a month it would be a tissue-paper collage, as the pink and white cherry blossoms burst from their buds. Now it was just bare branches clustered around an empty, dirty pond.

I hadn’t expected that Bowman would be so clumsy. It was risky to intervene to keep a story of mine out of the paper. That was stupid, and it was a sign of the pressure Bowman was under.

When I got back to the office, I called the private telephone number Rubino had given me. It was just before 5:00. He was smooth as silk on the phone. Soft, easy, gracious. I said I needed to see him urgently. When he asked what the subject was, I just said “Arthur Bowman,” and he seemed to understand what I was talking about. He could see me the next morning, he said, but not at the agency. He gave me an address in a high-rise building in Shirlington, just off I-95 south of Washington, and asked me to meet him there at 8:00 A.M.

I suppose I realized that he was asking me to meet him at a safe house, but I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong.

23

23

Josette Towers was one of the dozens of apartment buildings that were clustered along I-95 in northern Virginia, at the southern entrance to Washington. It was a land of cars and concrete and unmarried soldiers, more like San Diego or Norfolk than the nation’s capital. I found a space in the parking lot that surrounded the building and walked toward the front door. A stream of women was leaving as I arrived. They were young, dressed neatly but inexpensively, heading off to work. They examined me curiously, correctly sensing that I didn’t belong there. This was where Washington’s secretaries lived, in modest, low-rent efficiencies and one-bedroom apartments stacked in plain brick blocks. People didn’t arrive at Josette Towers at 8:00 A.M. unless they were plumbers or real estate agents.

At the front door I searched the directory for Apartment 636, punched in the assigned number and waited for the intercom. “Who is it?” asked a voice that was unmistakably Rubino’s.

“This is Bob,” I said, following the instructions he had given me the night before. The door buzzed open, and I walked into the building.