My mother slapped me twice at my own engagement party and threatened to expose my secrets—then a general called me “Captain,” federal agents seized my sister’s phone, and a message from my father who’d been dead for six years appeared on the screen.
Chapter 15
Hollis Grant had a house on a creek south of Annapolis, at the end of a gravel lane, with a dock and a Boston Whaler and a kitchen window that looked out at the water. I had seen fourteen photographs of it in eight hours of surveillance imagery by the time I finally walked up his driveway.
We did it properly. That took eleven days. Eleven days of Marsh, Pell, Chen, the FBI’s Baltimore field office, the U.S. Attorney’s offices coordinating in Maryland and the Eastern District of Virginia, and a federal judge who read the affidavit twice and asked me one question: “Captain, is this your father’s case or your case?”
I said, “Both, Your Honor.”
He signed.
The plan was simple, and it had exactly one moving part that could break: my sister had to walk into Hollis Grant’s living room and get him to say, out loud, on a recording, that he had bought her mother’s silence with four hundred thousand dollars and a threat. And she had to do it as the person he already knew — the panicking woman with a fraud charge and a public defender, coming to beg the person who had always been the fixer for one more fix.
The cover story was hers. I want that on the record. She built it in three days with Chen in a room with a whiteboard and no windows. She was going to tell Grant that her mother’s arrest had blown everything open, that an investigator had showed her photographs of the funeral with handwritten notes on them, that she was going to be indicted in eleven days unless somebody made a call. And then she was going to put a phone on the table — her own phone, with her own case number on the screen, a real case, a real charge paper, everything authentic — and ask him what she was supposed to do.
The wire was in her bracelet. A silver cuff, thin, the kind of thing a twenty-four-year-old wears without anyone looking twice.
The morning of, she stood in the parking lot of the field office and chain-smoked two cigarettes in a row and I stood next to her and did not tell her to stop, because she is twenty-four years old and she was about to walk into a house alone and there is no version of that where the big sister gets to be in charge.
“Nora,” she said, staring at the gravel.
“Yeah.”
“If he says something that hurts you. About Dad. Don’t—” She stopped. Took a breath. “Don’t listen to it live. Wait for the transcript. That’s what Chen said. She said don’t listen live.”
“All right.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
She dropped the cigarette and crushed it and said, “Okay,” and walked to the car, and I have never been prouder of anybody in my life and I have never told her.
I listened live. Of course I listened live. I have never once in my life done the thing that was good for me.