Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The man in the office was not Senator Broderick. He was a tall slim black man in his early forties. He had a longish nose, short hair, and a goatee. His eyebrows were slightly arched and, combined with the goatee, this made him look like a handsome, dark, brooding devil.

The man didn’t rise from his seat or shake DeMarco’s hand. He pointed to a chair in front of his desk and said, ‘Sit down, DeMarco. I’m Nick Fine, Senator Broderick’s chief of staff.’

‘I thought the senator wanted to see me,’ DeMarco said.

‘Fortunately for you, the senator doesn’t know who you are, and I think it would be in your best interest if the situation were to remain that way.’

Now this pissed DeMarco off: getting jerked over to the Dirksen Building by a guy who had used his boss’s name to get him there. Most folks come a-runnin’ when a senator says he wants to see them, DeMarco being no exception, but he might have ignored the call from Broderick’s office if he’d known he’d been summoned by someone on Broderick’s staff.

Before DeMarco could say anything, Fine opened a folder on his desk. ‘Your personnel file is amazingly … terse. It says you’re a lawyer, a GS-Thirteen, and have a House position called Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs. The file doesn’t identify your supervisor, and your job description is a single paragraph of absolute gibberish, which makes it impossible to tell what you do. So maybe you could clarify that for me, Mr DeMarco. Exactly what does the Counsel Pro Tem for Liaison Affairs do?’

DeMarco’s title, the one in flaking gold paint on his office door, had been Mahoney’s invention and it was completely meaningless. In order for DeMarco to get paid by the federal government he needed to be a civil servant. But as Mahoney didn’t want it known that DeMarco worked for him, he made up an imaginary function that had nothing to do with the Speaker of the House, devised an incomprehensible title to suit the function, and then forced his will upon some minor bureaucrat who was responsible for establishing legitimate positions in the legislative branch of government. The consequence was that DeMarco received a paycheck every two weeks, but, as Nick Fine had discovered, nobody could tell exactly what he did or for whom he worked.

In response to Fine’s perfectly logical question, DeMarco said, ‘I do exactly what my title says. I liaise for congressional affairs.’

DeMarco didn’t think he’d ever used the word liaise in a sentence before.

Fine stared at DeMarco for a minute, stroking his goatee. ‘Don’t try being cute with me, DeMarco.’

DeMarco didn’t say anything. He just stared back at Fine, all the time thinking he might be in a shitload of trouble here.

‘I’ve heard,’ Fine said, ‘that you’ve been asking questions about the terrorist attacks that have occurred in the last few weeks. What authority do you have for asking these questions?’

There was an old saying that Mahoney had introduced him to: Tell the truth as often as you can. That way it’s easier to keep track of all the lies you tell . In keeping with this adage, DeMarco said, ‘I’m basically an odd-jobs guy. If a member of the House wants something checked out, something he doesn’t want to assign to his staff for whatever reason, and in particular something dealing with other government agencies, he may call me. In this case, a member asked me to find out a little more about the attacks.’

‘Which member?’ Fine said.

‘I can’t tell you that. I’ll let the congressman — or congress woman — know that you’re interested, and if he or she wants to tell you, he or she can.’

Fine shook his head. ‘What you just told me is pure bullshit. If a member of Congress wanted to know something about the attacks, he would have called the FBI directly. The second thing is, there’s virtually nothing that Congress does that doesn’t deal with other government entities, so I find it difficult to believe they need someone like you to do their staff work for them.’

Since the half-truth didn’t work, DeMarco decided to ask his own question. ‘Why do you care who I’m talking to?’ he said.

Fine smiled as if amused that someone of DeMarco’s rank would be so impudent. ‘Senator Broderick, as I’m sure you know, is spearheading America’s war against radical Muslims. He’s the only person in this government who’s actually trying to do something other than lament the situation. And because the senator’s bill is so significant, it’s understandable that there’s a lot of healthy debate over the issue. But it appears to me, based on the sort of questions you’ve been asking, that what you’re trying to do is muddy the waters. It appears that you’re attempting to develop scenarios related to these attacks that don’t fit the evidence. I think your goal may be to mislead the American people regarding what really happened.’

Mislead the American people? DeMarco didn’t have the power to mislead anybody. And who the hell had Fine been talking to? How did he know what sort of questions DeMarco had been asking?

‘Look,’ DeMarco started to say, but Fine didn’t let him finish.

‘I’ll tell you something else,’ Fine said. ‘Getting a bill passed, any bill, is difficult. My job is helping Senator Broderick get this particular bill passed, and I don’t like someone like you — someone with no authority, someone unconnected to any elected position — making my job harder.’

‘You’re way off base here,’ DeMarco said. And sticking to his previous lie — a liar has to be consistent — DeMarco said, ‘Some congressman was just curious about a few things. I’m not trying to screw up the entire legislative process, and I’m sure as hell not trying to mislead anyone. I’m just-’

‘ Some congressman , you say. It just occurred to me that the speaker has close ties with one of the terrorists’ families. Are you investigating these incidents because the speaker asked you to? We know Mahoney doesn’t support the bill.’

This was dangerous ground.

‘The speaker hasn’t asked me to do anything,’ DeMarco said. ‘I doubt if he even knows who I am.’

DeMarco got to his feet.

‘We’re not through yet,’ Fine said.

‘Yeah, we are,’ DeMarco said.

‘DeMarco, I don’t know what your game is, but you will stop doing whatever you’re doing. I’m not going to allow you to become an impediment to something as serious as this legislation. And if you don’t tell me who you’re working for, I’m going to talk to the Bureau and suggest that you become someone they need to take a hard look at. You may actually be committing a crime by interfering in a federal investigation. I may also have a quiet word with a man I know at the IRS and suggest your tax returns be audited. I noticed you have a home in Georgetown, and I’m trying to understand how you can afford it. I’m sure my friend at the IRS will be curious as well. And I’m definitely going to talk to OPM and suggest that they review your federal position and determine exactly what you do that warrants your current salary. That’s just for starters. There are probably a dozen other things I can do to make your life miserable if you don’t crawl back under the rock you came from.’

DeMarco had encountered a lot of staffers like Fine, guys who liked to throw their boss’s weight around, but this guy was taking things to a whole new level. He was also a total asshole.

‘Gotta go, Nick,’ DeMarco said. ‘Talk to you later.’

That sounded pretty good, like DeMarco wasn’t at all concerned about Fine’s threats, but the truth was that DeMarco was very concerned. He’d prefer that Fine not talk to the Bureau or the IRS about him. Those agencies worried him, but they didn’t scare him. But OPM — the Office of Personnel Management — scared the hell out of him. One of OPM’s jobs was establishing pay standards for civil service positions. They had these absurdly rigid rules that specified, more or less, what one had to do to merit a GS-13’s salary, and one of those rules was that people in those positions usually had to supervise other people or as a minimum be a specialist with some clearly defined function. If OPM ever took a hard look at DeMarco’s job, he’d be reduced from a GS-13 to a GS-3. And if that happened he wouldn’t be able to afford the house in Georgetown, which was already mortgaged to the hilt.