Fortune and Men's Eyes

I said, getting irate, "Let me get this straight. My wife, who is a humble congressional staffer, was working a deal with the Saudis to move arms to Sudan. First of all, why is that a crime? And second of all; how in the world could she pull something like that off?"

The two feebs exchanged significant glances. The slick said, like he was explaining something to a moron, "It violates ITAR which falls under the Arms Export Control Act of 1976. It's the law that Ollie North broke back in the '80's. Sudan is on the blacklist, along with places like North Korea."

He added smugly, "Your wife was able to pull it off because the UAE wants the F-35 and her boss can make that happen. So, your wife worked out a deal with the Saudis to double their order of Lightning IIs at a very advantageous price. In return they were going to '"donate" a whole lot of US military hardware to the Sudanese."

I said, really angry now. "I don't see how that violates anything. What the Saudis do in their own sphere of influence doesn't affect us, or our laws."

The she-feeb laughed and said, "They do if the U.S. is subsidizing the sale of the jets and a huge amount of cash is transferred from Khartoum to off-shore accounts linked to efforts to overthrow the current Venezuelan government. That violates 18 U.S. Code 2339C, which prohibits the financing of terrorism"

Terrorism!!?? OMG this was just getting worse-and-worse. My wife, the hot little number I was married to, was leveraging the power of the U.S. arms industry to finance a revolution in South America with illicit funds funneled from a rogue regime in Africa??!! Unbelievable!!

I said totally flabbergasted, "And how do you know all of this?"

The slick said, "Our friends at Fort Meade listened to every word she said while she was setting it up."

I didn't need to ask how they did THAT. I'm in that business. There's no such thing as a private conversation either cell, or conventional if the NSA geeks have a FISA warrant. Encrypt it if you like. That's just red meat for them.

I said getting angrier by the second, "So why haven't you arrested her boss?"

McGhee was the real source of the corruption. Everybody in the room knew that. Karen was just the "fall-guy"- or "fall-person" as the politically correct case may be.

The she-feeb said ominously, "Because every conversation we have was between your wife and the various players. We have nothing specifically tying McGhee to any of this."

I sat there dumbstruck. That slippery son-of-a-bitch had set Karen up to be the scapegoat if any part of this deal went south.

I knew that McGhee'd been getting cozy with Big Oil. Karen and I had had a huge fight about that. And those guys wanted Maduro gone so they could plunder Venezuela's oil reserves. I wondered how much McGhee was paid to arrange THAT hit.

I was totally sandbagged. I looked at the two feebs, incredulity seeping from every pore. I said, "Three hours ago I was contemplating divorce. Now you're telling me that my wife wasn't cheating. She was the bagman for regime change in Venezuela."

I muttered ruefully, "I don't know whether to be glad that she was just committing treason; or sad that she might be going away for a while. Will you prosecute her?"

The she-feeb got a look that blended amusement with malice and said, "Oh, we're going to prosecute her all right. She'll be lucky if she gets out of federal custody before she hits menopause."

I'm a naïve nerd. But even I knew that was just a gambit, meant to squeeze Karen for all she was worth. They would plead it down to something that involved a few years. In return, Karen would give up everything that she knew about the sordid little deal. That's the way these investigations work.

I sighed and said bitterly, "I assume you know that I I'm totally innocent. So, I want to leave. I need to set up bail for my wife. When can I see her?"

The she-feeb got a disapproving look as she said, "You can't see her until she's arraigned."

****

Naturally, Karen's arrest was blood on the water for the press. So, all the major news outlets were camped in our front yard. And my wife was a hot mess.

Much of Karen's distress was due to the brutal way that McGhee jettisoned her. He was "OUTRAGED!! OUTRAGED!! I TELL YOU!!" by the unauthorized actions of one "rogue member of his staff."

Of course, McGhee claimed to have "no knowledge" of my wife's "reprehensible actions." Since he barely knew her. But he DID tell the press that he would have advised against her "unpatriotic deeds" if he had even a HINT of the evil creature's "nefarious plans."

After I bailed her, Karen went to bed for two days. I finally took some soup in. She was huddled crying in the dark. I took the poor broken thing into my arms and rocked her. I said, "We've gotten through everything together my love and we're going to get through this."

She sniffled and said pitifully, "You believe me, don't you? I was just trying to do something good for this Country."

She whimpered, "I was helping out the poor oppressed people of Venezuela and at the same time preventing a nuclear war. Maduro's working with the Russians to create a new Cuban Missile Crisis. We had to stop him. That's what McGhee told me."

I thought, "Of course he did. And he was riding on his magic flying unicorn when he sprinkled that pixy dust on you." It was classic Aristotelean hubris. The glaring sun of McGhee's influence had blinded my ordinarily sensible wife.

But that was all water over the dam now. My only goal was to get Karen to stop beating herself up. I said, "I believe you my love. You were set-up by an amoral guy, who used your altruistic instincts, naïve idealism and raw ambition for his own corrupt purposes."

Then I added meaningfully, "People fly too close to the sun all the time around here. And most of them end up like Icarus."

I said, trying to be practical, "Cooperate with the feds and I'm sure they'll go easy on you. And I'll be with you every step of the way. I just wish there was something that I could do to put that lying, cheating scumbag in the frame with you."

Then it hit me. I said, "Did you discuss any of this with McGhee, while you were on your trip?" Karen looked at me like I was an idiot. Some of her spunk was coming back.

She said, "Of course. Parker Westbrooke was coordinating directly with McGhee the whole time. Why do you ask?" Westbrooke was McGhee's personal attorney. He would have been the guy I saw her with.

I said, "When and how did you discuss it?"

Karen said, still mystified, "We talked strategy after dinner every evening. Parker had a secure VPN connection on his laptop. We'd conference with McGhee to report progress and then he'd brief us on what he wanted us to do next."

I thought, "Aha -- I'll bet the FISA warrant was only for phone traffic, not voice-over-IP." They just had the intercepts from Karen's cell, not McGhee's laptop. More importantly, I had recorded every word that Karen and McGhee had said and stored it in a huge file in the cloud.

I hadn't bothered to listen to the recordings after Karen's arrest. They weren't germane anymore. Now, I was going to go through every minute with a fine-tooth comb. I said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat, "Go back to sleep my love. I think I have something that will help us."

*****

I spent all night listening to seven days of Karen's conversations. Because I'm a petty-minded and insecure little nerd, I was particularly gratified by the number of times that my wife told some chancer that she was a married woman and she loved her husband!! But that's another conversation.

Along with being a slimy piece of shit, McGhee was also a control freak. He clearly didn't trust Karen to be anything but his pawn. So, she and Westbrooke would meet in his room every evening. And no, that wasn't a ploy for Westbrooke to seduce her. He'd been out and proud for over a decade.

The call was through a simple VPN tunnel. The feds wouldn't even be aware that it was being made, let alone listen in. Maybe that was genius on McGhee's part. But I heartily doubted it. The dude just didn't want to pay the conventional overseas calling rate.

Whatever the motivation, Karen and Westbrooke would sit and listen to McGhee lay out the next day's marching orders. My rat recorded everything "loud and clear."

It was ironic really. I'd set a trap to catch a cheating whore and instead I'd caught an unscrupulous douchebag. Still, short of old Lawton standing over his victim with the smoking gun in his hand yelling, "I did it!!" my evidence was as close as you can get to the term, "Dead to rights!!"

So, the very next day I fought my way through the cloud of pests encamped on my front lawn and took the Metro down to Federal Triangle. From there, I walked over to the Hoover building and asked to talk to whoever was in charge of my wife's case.

There was some hemming and hawing and a few, "who the fuck are you's?" But my little recording quickly got me an audience with an Associate Director and a bunch of his minions.

It was like throwing a skunk into the ladies bridge club. The good news was that the feebs now had incontrovertible proof of a major Washington power-player committing high crimes and misdemeanors. The bad news was that it was like going fishing for trout and landing a great white shark.

You don't just haul a guy like McGhee down to the hoosegow and toss him into a holding cell. So, as Roy Schneider put i, the feebs were, "Gonna need a bigger boat."

They told me to sit tight and they'd get back to me. I told THEM to take all the time they needed. Since it would give ME the opportunity to saunter around the corner to the Post and see what THEIR people made out of my recordings. It was time to play hardball.

The head feeb didn't miss what I was angling for. So, he said, "Why don't you give me the evidence and forget you ever had it. In return we let your wife plead to some minor regulatory violation. It'll cost her a couple of months inside, but that way she'll be able to keep her law license."

Then he added with grim resolution in his voice, "Otherwise she's looking at twenty years and we WILL prosecute her to the fullest extent."

I pondered it for a second. It was a pretty good deal. So, I said, "Done!!

Three weeks later Karen pled guilty to a couple of minor banking infractions and was sentenced to a six-month all-expenses-paid trip to Camp Cupcake. Her record would be expunged once she finished her sentence.

More delightfully; shortly thereafter McGhee resigned from his seat. He told the press that he wanted to spend more time with his family. He also paid a federal fine of almost $10 million dollars for unspecified "campaign violations" -- read, "blood money."

McGhee got off lightly in the end. That was because he gave up all of the people involved in his little scheme. That didn't make him popular with his co-conspirators, most of whom resided within U.S. jurisdiction.

The culprits were mainly a pack of high-level staffers at DoD and in the defense supplier community and a few C-levels with the oil companies. They all had sticky fingers around the jam jar and a "who me?" grin on their face. A series of grand jury indictments followed.

Most of them did three-to-five at federal expense. And of course, since McGhee'd more-or-less changed his last name to "Stool Pigeon," he was persona non-grata everywhere.

I hated the fact that the worst that happened to the slimy motherfucker was that he would spend the rest of his life sitting in his palatial manor in the great north woods contemplating the error of his ways. But still, total disgrace was deliciously fitting punishment for an egomaniac like him.

*****

Alderson West Virginia is the home of FPC Alderson. It is a really scenic part of that State. It was raining hard as I drove through the gate and down the drive to the main administrative building. My wife was waiting there. She had her little suitcase with her, and she was wearing a simple blouse and skirt without makeup. She looked gorgeous.

I had the tickets to St. Lucia in my suitcoat pocket. We walked out the door to the car. I opened it and she slid in. She hadn't said a word. I started the car, drove over to a less public part of the lot and parked. We needed to talk.

I could see that Karen was deeply depressed. Up until recently, her career had been a continuous march to success. Now she would have to begin again from its ashes. It's just natural for a high achiever like her to feel like her life was over. So, I wanted to tell her that we were going to the sunshine and that we would stay there until we came up with a new plan.

Of course, as I'd proven over-and-over, I'd completely misread my wife. It wasn't her career that she was mourning. It was her marriage. She turned sideways and threw herself onto my chest, weeping piteously. She said, "How can you ever love me again?"

That was perhaps history's most ridiculous statement. I kissed her tenderly and said, "Love doesn't have conditions or an expiration date. I fell in love with my study buddy twenty years ago and that love has only deepened and grown over the succeeding years. We've been together through thick and thin and that will never change."

I grabbed her little finger in a "pinky swear" and added, "Just like always, back-to-back, horns pointed out. Now we have a date to get naked, live on the beach and not even think about anything more important than where we're going to have dinner. Then we can talk about the kids."

EPILOGUE

There are two important things about fiftieth wedding anniversaries. The first is the fact that you've been married that long. But perhaps the more important thing is that you're still alive to enjoy it. Karen and I had just celebrated ours.

I couldn't complain. At the end of a man's life, it's critically important to believe that you've justified your existence. I'd done some important research and created a whole new field of academic study. I suppose that's about all a fellow like me could ever ask for.

The best part was that professor types are never put to pasture. They just drop in the harness. So, at age seventy-two I was at the peak of my career. I was a very satisfied old man.

Karen was as accomplished at motherhood as she was at the sex that had created our two kids. Both of them were like shiny new pennies. They were different from each other. But they were equally successful in their respective field.

Karen's only goal when they were growing up was to make certain that each was true to their destiny. People are born with innate strengths. Karen insisted that our children recognize what those gifts were and honor them.

My wife also had a notable legal career. She never went back into politics. She could have. But she simply had no interest in selling her soul again. Instead she became a national activist for criminal justice reform. And she wasn't shy about publicizing the reasons why she had such intimate knowledge of the U.S. penal system.

She was a powerful advocate for righteous causes. But unlike most crusaders she knew a lot of important people. And even more relevantly, she knew how things worked on the Hill.

So, Karen was the angel of mercy for people who had run out of options. And over a thirty-year career, my splendid wife changed the world; all from a storefront in Adams-Morgan.

In the end, her crusade to empower the powerless brought her the honors that she deserved. That was why my daughter Brooke and I were sitting together in the East Room of the White House, waiting for the Presidential Medal of Freedom award ceremony.

Brooke was an exact replica of her mom. A tiny power-packed bundle of stunning beauty, penetrating intelligence and savage wit. With her Harvard Law degree and her unconquerable soul, Brooke should be making serious money in corporate America. Instead, she was an even more terrifying version of her mother in defense of the wrongly accused.

Her brother Paul was two years older. Physically and intellectually, he's my spitting image. But he burns with Karen's fierce desire to do great things.

So, he joined the Air Force after getting his Master's in aerospace engineering from Michigan. Now, he is one of a select few who fly the B2 Spirit. He hated to miss the ceremony. But the best-of-the-best must ever keep vigilant watch on the walls.

The Marine Band started in with Ruffles and Flourishes and segued into Hail to the Chief, as the President walked into the room. The little group of honorees rose together on the dais.

The seventy-year-old woman in the middle was smaller than the rest. But she radiated the serene beauty and forceful spirit that told the world how special she was.

Karen stared unwaveringly into my eyes as the President hung the medal around her neck. In that moment, it was just the two of us together in that room. I knew what she was telling me. I thought back to her shining eager face asking for a simple set of directions and remembered it all. I thought to myself, "Well done old girl. We built quite a life together."