He stopped by the big Rodin in the garden, took my hand, and shook it in an oddly formal way. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Mahoney, you’re freaking me out a little here—”

“See what you can get done. I’ll find out what I can, but don’t depend on the Bureau in the meantime. For anything. Do you understand?”

“No, Ned, I don’t. What about this bank list you were just talking about?”

He was already walking away, up the stone stairs toward Jefferson Drive.

“Don’t know what you mean,” he said over his shoulder, but he was patting his coat pocket when he said it.

I waited for him to leave, then checked my pocket. There, along with my keys, was a black-and-silver thumb drive.

Chapter 69

NED COULD LOSE more than his job for handing over the kind of sensitive information he’d just given me. He could go to jail too. I owed it to him to do as much with the list as I could. So I took his advice and started right at the top—with Tony Nicholson’s biggest single “benefactor.”

If someone had told me a month ago that Senator Marshall Yarrow of Virginia had a connection to a scandal like this, I would have been highly skeptical. The man had too much to lose, and I don’t mean just money—though he had plenty of that too.

Yarrow was a billionaire before he was fifty, riding the dot-com wave in the nineties and then getting out. He’d turned part of his fortune into a Bill Gates–style foundation, run by his wife, focused on children’s health initiatives in the United States, Africa, and East Asia. Then he leveraged all that goodwill, and another big pile of money, into a Senate campaign that no one took too seriously—until he won. Now Yarrow was in his second term, and it was an open secret in Washington that he’d already formed an off-the-books exploratory committee, with his eye on the next presidential election.

So yes, plenty to lose—but he wouldn’t be the first Washington politician to blow it all on hubris, would he?

With a little calling around, I found out that Yarrow had a working lunch in his office that day, followed by a one thirty TVA caucus meeting, both in the Russell Senate Office Building. That would put him in the southwest lobby just before one thirty.

And that’s when and where I went after him.

At one twenty-five, he came off the elevator with a retinue of power-suited aides, all of them talking at once. Yarrow himself was on the phone.

I stepped into his line of sight with my badge out. “Excuse me, Senator. I was hoping for a minute of your time.”

The one woman in the group of aides, strikingly blond, attractive, late twenties, stepped between us. “Can I help you, Officer?”

“It’s Detective,” I told her, but kept my eyes on Yarrow, who had at least put a hand over his Treo. “Just a few questions for Senator Yarrow. I’m investigating a large credit card fraud case in Virginia. Someone may have been using one of the senator’s cards—at a social club out in Culpeper?”