Pursuit of Darkness

By Jeff Gillenkirk

Power. Ambition. Vampires. Welcome to Washington, D.C.

Washington Post reporter Nate Hallberg is assigned to profile high-powered political consultant Jonathan Drees and uncovers the startling reality that American politics has been controlled by vampires for more than 200 years. Pursuit of Darkness follows Hallberg's heroic struggle to overcome his personal demons and expose the evil at the center of American politics. Could vampires take over the government? They already have. And they want more than your vote!

The collusion of politicians and vampires has a rich and largely untold history. The movie "Blade" brought this relationship to the forefront with its gory portrayal of the fight for control of the netherworld between powerful old-school vampires from Europe's economic elite and brash American "converts". While "Blade" introduced the modern world to the dark world of vampire self-government, Pursuit of Darkness reveals the blood-sucking forces behind the most powerful centers of American politics.

"At a time when politicians appear to be devising endless devious means to drain the lifeblood from the body politic, Jeff Gillenkirk's cleverly constructed vampires-in-Washington thriller is timely, enticing and, above all, a most enjoyable read," says Says Deborah Hayden, author of Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis.

This is not your 5th grade teacher's Civics lesson. Ask Roger Ailes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Gillenkirk
• Release date: Nov 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465927446

Jeff Gillenkirk

Jeff Gillenkirk is a former speechwriter for New York Governor Mario Cuomo, U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer and a political consultant and communications strategist for numerous public officials and non-profit organizations. He has lived in Washington, D.C., New York, San Francisco, Paris and other world capitals. His previous books include Bitter Melon: Inside America's Last Rural Chinese Town (Heyday Books) and the novel Home, Away (Chin Music Press). Pursuit of Darkness was chosen by former National Public Radio correspondent Margot Adler "as the best of the lot" in her book, Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side. You can read Margot's review at http://n.pr/2cGaBh4. Author photo by Lukatch

Book preview

Chapter 1

Researchers estimate that people dream between six and ten times each night, but the dream we always seem to remember is the one we are having right when we awaken. Hallberg’s was about his father, or at least his father was in it. He was standing in a doorway like he always used to do when Nate was a kid, yelling at him to pick up his room or get ready for school. We are all part of history, he said, which wasn’t surprising. His father was a historian.

That’s when the phone rang. It was the night editor, with the message everyone had been waiting for two years to hear.

They found a body on Western Ridge Trail. They think it’s her.

He was out the door as fast as he could dress, grabbed a coffee from the kiosk in front of Walgreen’s while the old Mercedes he called von Hindenburg idled roughly at the curb, then sped down Tilden Street and left onto rain-slicked Glover Road deeper into the park. Vehicles from the Metro Police, Park Police and FBI Evidence Response Team were scattered along the road. The site was near the area of Rock Creek Park where he jogged four mornings a week, though not this morning after the heavy rains that had drenched the Washington area the last two days.

The CSI crew was fanned across the steep hillside like early morning golfers searching for balls, combing through the dappled mat of wet leaves the storm had ripped from the urban forest. Two Metro K-9 Corps followed their leashed partners up the hill on opposite sides of the trail, the dogs straining to go deeper into the brush. The asphalt path curved away from the rain-swollen stream and up the hillside clotted with skunk cabbage and stands of slim beech and sycamores. The command center was obvious: two large men – one in a Metropolitan police uniform, the other dressed in his signature black slacks, black shirt and black overcoat – stood several feet apart on the trail, watching the proceedings. The one in uniform, a heavy-set assistant chief named Austin W. Parnell, nodded as soon as he saw Hallberg approach.

Looks like we found her, Nate.

Hallberg glanced instinctively towards the other man, whose slicked-back hair and pale angular face were fixtures at every homicide scene. They belonged to Enrique Barnes, FBI, known in the District as the Closer. When the Metro police or the Executive Protection Service or Capitol Police or Park Police, the Maryland or Virginia State Police or whatever hopelessly overlapping jurisdiction couldn’t solve or cooperate to solve a murder, Barnes was brought in to tie together the threads. He had a reputation he clearly relished, and the cops just as clearly hated. In his few months as a crime reporter for The Washington Post, Nate Hallberg had learned that law enforcement was as political as politics itself. The end justified the means, and the end was glory, not truth.

Barnes quickly shook his head. Not sure what we got, Nate-O, he said, as much for Parnell’s sake as Hallberg’s. He waved his arm across the tangled hillside. There’s bones and body parts all the way over to there.

You mean some kind of mass grave?

Like I say, not sure what we got.

How’d you find her?

Some dog walker’s mutt dug up a thigh bone.

Hallberg gulped the rest of his coffee and pumped quickly up the trail. His own post-rehab jogging regimen took him past Pierce Mill then along Rock Creek and up this same incline to Western Ridge Trail. Out and back was 3.7 miles, the current limit for a man who had spent most of his twenties and thirties training with Johnny Walker Black and Mary Jane. This trail was his measure of progress, an irony not lost on him as he watched crews scouring the hillside for the bones of a presumed homicide victim. But not just any homicide victim. Sue Jae Ahn, the youngest daughter of South Korean media mogul and co-owner of the Associated Press, Ahn Chang Ho, had disappeared more than two years ago. Numerous public pleas had been made, ransoms offered, anonymous tip lines established but nothing had turned up, much to the embarrassment of the Metropolitan Police, assistant chief Austin W. Parnell, and the proud and prickly Closer. Until now.

From the top of the hill Hallberg gazed down to a creekside picnic area where the Post held its annual Memorial Day barbecue. Above him the hillside steepened, cresting at a wooded ridge that fell off to a steep ravine on the far side. There was a wild and remote feeling to this part of Rock Creek Park, a surprisingly primitive relic of nature in the heart of the nation’s capital.

He heard shouts to his left, and feet crashing through the underbrush.

No fucking running! Barnes shouted from below.

Hallberg followed the Closer and Parnell through the brush towards the voices below. Some fifty yards off the path, down the steep dripping hillside thick with saplings and brush, they came across half a dozen people in CSI windbreakers, three FBI, the two K-9 cops and three uniformed Metro police standing watchfully in a circle. The two officers pushed through and Hallberg followed quickly behind, pulling a notebook and pen from his jacket pocket.

Aw Jesus, he muttered. Death had made some spectacular appearances lately, but nothing had prepared him for this. Lying perpendicular to the curve of the hillside, carefully arranged with her arms crossed on her chest, fully clothed in a tasteful black cocktail dress and long black woolen overcoat, was the body of a woman in her mid-to-late 30’s. She had short blonde hair, a full pretty face, and a string of common white pearls around her neck. There did not seem to be any sign of struggle, with only small swatches of mud visible on the tips of her black high heel shoes. There was a strangely calm, nonchalant quality about the scene, despite the fact that the woman’s head was separated from her body with a clean, knife-thin cut. Her string of pearls rested below the wound on a shriveled, seemingly deflated corpse that was clearly drained of blood.

Photos! Barnes barked. He looked around with disgust. Every possible entrance to the spot had been trampled. It would be nearly impossible to tell how whoever did this got in or out of this hideaway.

The dogs strained at their leashes, excited by blood. Get them out of here! Barnes ordered. The dogs and their handlers moved quickly across the clearing, towards a large boulder visible through the trees.

The body obviously didn’t belong to Sue Jae Ahn. She wasn’t Korean, and this killing couldn’t have happened more than a couple days before. Hallberg stared, wanting desperately to be somewhere else. This was another story, not the one he was assigned to. Yet another random murder, a rip in the moral universe, a quiet personal narrative terminated with a senseless attack signifying nothing. As if the capital needed another blemish. The city was paralyzed with political gridlock. The nation’s economy was in the tank. Partisan rancor was so bitter that a Republican congressman had been caught with a gun in a committee hearing – a breach of law and etiquette defended vigorously by the leaders of his party.

He watched Barnes move deliberately across the hillside, scouring the brush for clues. Parnell ordered his crew to begin searching a separate patch of brush. Again shouts erupted, this time from beyond the rock, along with pitiful, high-pitched whining from the dogs. Hallberg followed Barnes and emerged into a small clearing. Parallel rows of tulip poplars and thin white oaks clung to the edge of a chasm. It was difficult to measure how deep the ravine went without going to the edge, but the dogs were having none of it. Restless and rambunctious just moments before, they cringed at the ends of their leashes like whipped mongrels at the city pound.

Forward! one of the handlers shouted, gesturing forcefully towards the bushes. The dog hesitated and the man tried to physically drag him forward, but the clearly spooked Doberman Pinscher stiffened his front legs and dug in. The others paced and whined in place, literally shivering.

Barnes watched closely, then, Take them back to the trailhead. I want this hillside swept again, top to bottom.

Hallberg kicked over some wet leaves, then glanced towards the chasm. He heard more shouts from below, reports of more bones, the excited crashing of bodies through the brush. He turned and headed back towards the trail.

Chapter 2

The Palm was the capital’s current power restaurant, with the premier power tables lining the wall opposite the bar where image-conscious Washingtonians could see and be seen. Jonathan Drees, perhaps the capital’s most premier power player outside of the President and the Speaker of the House – indeed, he was recognized as the force most responsible for the election of the two presidents prior to the current one – rarely had any need to be seen, especially tonight. He’d requested the oak-railed booth in the far left-hand corner of the dining room, a dim enclave from which his presence would be intimated rather than broadcast. He, better than most, knew that a rumor is oftentimes more effective than a direct statement.

As always he had arrived early for his appointment, knowing that most self-important people preferred to arrive last and not be made to wait. As a blind person, he also preferred to be settled and in place, although his ability to navigate without any visible assistance – neither cane, nor seeing eye dog, nor human aide – caused people who didn’t know him to be amazed when they learned that he was blind, and those who did know him to respect him even more.

He slouched comfortably in the corner of the booth, one elbow resting against the wall, the other against the dark leather of the bench back. Suddenly a hush swept through the room, a sibilance of her name whispered across the tables, then a surge of chatter as people realized where she was headed. Drees straightened, his head cocked in anticipation. His guest had arrived.

She approached the table and took his outstretched hand. Jonathan, she smiled. Drees half rose to greet her. He was a large, fleshy man. A thick goatee, more black than white, circled his full, sensuous mouth. He wore a black turtleneck, black jacket and slacks, and thick, black sunglasses which accentuated his pale, old-world complexion.

Governor, he replied lightly, shaking her hand then sinking back into his seat. Thank you for coming down to the Land of Oz.

The Governor of Massachusetts, Kathryn Ames-Bertoli, smoothed her skirt and took a seat with her back to the room. She was a tall, attractive woman in her mid-fifties, with large blue eyes, a long, full face and short sandy-colored hair subtly highlighted. She wore a dark blue jacket and matching skirt with a white blouse, and gold hoop earrings that dangled pleasingly against her neck.

She leaned forward on her elbows and smiled. Of course she had been aware of how this would show up in the cyclotron of capital chatter as soon as she accepted the invitation. So, she was one million percent certain, was Drees. As he had every four years since Barry Goldwater’s campaign – and some say before that, all the way back to Eisenhower – Jonathan Drees was expected to be the mastermind behind the hand-picked presidential favorite of the Republican party – this time Winchester Buddy Holmes, nephew of former President Robert Jensen from Winchester, Virginia. The odd thing was, Kathryn was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, the daughter of former U.S. Senator Frank Wellington Ames, scion of the Wellington Paper empire in western Massachusetts, the Governor of one of the bluest states in the union, and current leader in the polls for the Democratic nomination for President.

How appropriate that you’re sitting at the intersection of all these angles, she said, striving to make sure that her smile could be heard in her voice. I’m anticipating a multi-banked shot here, Jon.

In that case, please have a drink.

Drees’s voice was gruff and playful at once. When he spoke he held his head at an elevated angle, as if focusing on some point above the person he was addressing. He was known as the Prophet, a man who for decades had shown he could sense the currents of voter sentiment and harness them on behalf of his adopted candidate. Despite his physical handicap he was considered the foremost expert on the use of television in politics. I wasn’t always sightless, he’d been quoted in one of the few articles that appeared about him, although no one knew exactly when or how he had gone blind.

Ames-Bertoli ordered a glass of white Bordeaux, Drees a Perfect Manhattan. They traded small talk about her family – mostly her father, who had retired in Boca Raton and was working on his memoirs. I always liked Frank, Drees offered, to which Kathryn said nothing. Her father had hated Jonathan Drees with every fiber of his being. Drees’s method of relentless attacks and the use of cultural wedge issues on behalf of his inevitably conservative clients represented to Franklin W. Ames everything that had gone wrong with American politics since avatars of reasonable republicanism such as Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller and Gerald Ford had faded from the scene. Kathryn knew that her father would never approve of this meeting, no matter what it was about. But she had come anyway. When you’re running for president, you don’t turn down a dinner invitation from a man who had helped elect five of them.

Let me cut to the chase, Drees finally said. I asked you down here for only one reason: I want to help you.

Help me do what?

Get the Democratic nomination.

That’s one angle I wasn’t anticipating. What game are we playing here, Jon?

You know me, Governor –

Actually I don’t know you. We’ve never really spoken before. And please, call me Kathryn, she added. I don’t want you to get used to calling me by my former title.

Of course, Kathryn, Drees said admiringly. He moved his drink from one side of his place setting to the other without taking a sip. The tables around them had grown quieter as people strained to hear their conversation, but the background noise shielded them. What I meant to say is, he began again, I don’t play games, at least not political ones. Politics is a deadly serious business –

The waiter arrived to take their orders. Ames-Bertoli asked for poached wild salmon, Drees a filet mignon disgustingly rare. When the waiter left, the Prophet turned back to face the candidate. Buddy Holmes is an idiot, he said. But I can’t do anything to stop him. The No-Goes are a No-Go, he added, sourly dismissing the group that Buddy Holmes was the titular head of – No Government is the Best Government – No-Goes. Buddy actually believes that crap – that people should elect him to do nothing. The frightening thing is, we’ve been so successful denigrating government, voters are going to fall for it.

I knew the number of angles was going to be perplexing.

There aren’t that many angles here, Governor … Kathryn. The signs are very clear. The economy’s not going to recover on its own. If Buddy Holmes is elected, everything I’ve worked for my entire life comes crashing down. The economy, the military, the whole social contract in this country will hit ground zero under the No-Goes. I know – you and every blue stater hold me responsible for taking us to this precipice, but that doesn’t mean I want us to jump off. Civilization is not something to be willfully destroyed. There’s a balance, as tenuous as it is … Drees held his large, pale right hand steadily over his plate. I’m looking for a way to push the pendulum back – not all the way to FDR. Maybe as far as Clinton, but without the libido. You’re a reasonable woman. I wish you were tougher on Iran but I think you’ll come to your senses on that. All in all you have a wonderful political pedigree, and a realistic shot at being president.

Ames-Bertoli glanced up and met the eyes of half a dozen people sneaking peeks at their table. I’m honored you think so, Jonathan. It confirms my own instincts – and our polling. But I don’t understand how you could possibly help me. I’ll drop ten points in the primaries just on news we’re having dinner.

Drees smiled. You wouldn’t be here if you thought that was true.

The arrival of their meals distracted their attention. Kathryn’s plate contained a succulent pink fillet on a bed of lightly sauced greens, circled artfully with a cushion of whipped potatoes. Drees had only a thick medallion of nearly uncooked beef sitting in a pool of its own juice. She watched as he carefully sliced the thinnest of slivers, wiped it in the blood-red juice, and chewed slowly.

It’s important for you to be seen as a moderate, he said after a moment. Someone who can work both sides of the aisle. I couldn’t think of a better way to establish that credential than to arrange dinner with Ghengis Khan himself.

She nodded as she ate. I think you’ve got something altogether different in mind. You believe Frank Landon can beat Buddy, so you want me to get the nomination – then beat my brains out in the general. Frank Landon was the junior Senator from Minnesota, a charismatic newcomer considered heir to the progressive legacies of Gene McCarthy and Paul Wellstone.

Landon can’t beat Buddy, Drees said dismissively. And even if he could, I consider that as problematic from the left as a Holmes victory from the right. Landon would set off a new round of class warfare, pitting poor against rich, turning our country inward at a moment we need to be looking outward. We can’t afford that.

Kathryn sipped her wine, listening carefully. Drees hadn’t even touched his Manhattan, though he continued to eat thin slices of the nearly uncooked beef. The silence continued, which Drees seemed to take as affirmation.

I will do everything within my power – and your interpretation of the law – to see that you are the Democratic nominee. And if your opponent is Buddy Holmes, to help elect you president.

Why not just take out Buddy in the primaries?

Can’t be done. The No-Goes have taken over the base. Buddy’s going to be the nominee no matter what anybody does. I want to make sure you beat Landon.

Kathryn shook her head. I just can’t see you doing this. You’ve got such a long history with Holmes and his people. You’ll be punished.

I’ve reached a point where whatever anyone decides to do to me is monumentally irrelevant, Drees said with great hubris. Besides, Holmes and his people don’t need me. They’re convinced they already have all the answers, all they have to do is let Buddy be Buddy.

That might work. He’s a charming guy.

He’s an imbecile. Someone like you comes along, with enough money and a moderate platform, Buddy ends up looking like a tractor salesman from Kansas.

If memory serves me, you elected someone like that once.

Drees’s expression didn’t change. I can elect anyone I want.

Kathryn Ames-Bertoli drank the last of her wine and set the glass down. I have to catch a plane. Drees didn’t have to be blind to pick up the dismissiveness in her voice.

I know it’s difficult to imagine trusting me, but circumstances change, Kathryn, he said sympathetically. History changes.

"Of course it’s difficult to trust you. How would I even begin?"

Drees gestured towards the crowded room. I could have asked to meet in private. This way Holmes will hear about it within the hour. He won’t know what it means, but he won’t trust me now as far as he can throw me. Half of what I tell him he’ll do the opposite, the other half he’ll ignore. I’ve already shot his campaign in the foot.

Kathryn reached across the table and touched Drees’s sleeve. Maybe he’ll think we’re having an affair.

Is that possible? he smiled.

Goodnight, Jonathan. Thank you for dinner.

One more thing.

Yes?

I recommend that you change your hair. Something less severe.

I’m running for president, not Miss America.

As a woman, you’re running for both.

She tried to peer into his impenetrable dark glasses. How do you know what my hair looks like?

I can hear your earrings chime against your skin.

She touched her neck beneath her ear and blushed. She liked the way she looked. She’d been compared to Ashley Judd and other attractive women. She knew that was part of her appeal and accepted it.

Grow it longer, Drees said confidentially. You’ll appear more accessible ... and sexier.

Kathryn Ames-Bertoli pushed her chair back. Sarah Palin had long hair and look where that got her.

Imagine if Sarah Palin had a brain and a father named Franklin W. Ames.

Chapter 3

The lights in the Washington Post newsroom didn’t hum and flicker as they did in the old days. The remaining staff worked in a pool of white LED light that was not unlike the sterile illumination at the D.C. morgue. Hallberg leaned back in the faux leather chair he’d rescued from the recycling stream during the last employee buy-out and surveyed what remained of the once teeming Metro Department. Three empty desks away Stacy Eckstein stared intently at her computer, scrolling through dense screensful of data from a government web site. Behind him Ron Langford was wrapping up a background briefing with a staffer on the House Intelligence Subcommittee. Impressions, innuendo, inflections … how much of what they dealt with was fact, how much bullshit? Despite access to more information through more portals than at any point in history, journalism seemed to be more art than science than ever. Especially here. It was impossible to get anyone in this city to simply state a fact. You had to be some kind of savant to divine the truth. Even an old-fashioned gumshoe reporter like Bob Woodward couldn’t be assured that his technique of consulting multiple sources wasn’t simply re-arranging panels in a vast hall of carnival mirrors. Yet for some reason Hallberg missed all that. Finding the truth in politics seemed more wholesome – and more feasible – than finding whoever was responsible for the Rock Creek Park murders.

He shoved his chair back from his desk strewn with Styrofoam cups, sandwich wrappers, empty Diet Pepsi cans and piles of briefings and reports summarizing the Sue Jae Ahn case, and perched on the edge of his seat. It was nearly seven o’clock. Fartstain – Aaron Ferstein – had been going over his piece for more than an hour, which was a bad sign. After that amount of time there would be more red ink than a federal budget summary, with lines criss-crossing paragraphs and blocks of texts moved pages away accompanied by the editor’s scrawled exhortations – ‘you buried the lead!’ ‘Facts before conclusions!’ Nine times out of ten Ferstein’s edits made his writing better, but it was that one time that usually led to shouting matches and a subtle but distinct erosion in the foundation of their trust. Hallberg had no idea when that one time out of ten would appear. Sometimes it happened when the story he turned in was, in his estimation, the most solid, poignant, well-stated and well-documented piece of prose the world had ever seen. In fact, that’s when it most commonly happened. Other times the flattest, most fatuous and flimsily documented piece of shit sailed through with an OK! flared across the top. Hallberg honestly couldn’t figure it out.

In short, he had no idea how this particular story was going to play with his editor. Some of the bones found on the hillside did belong to Sue Jae Ahn. The two years of media speculation and massive police bungling in the search for her were over. Unfortunately, bones belonging to at least five other people had been found at the scene as well, and only two of the people had been identified so far. As if that weren’t confusing enough, placed front and center of the Sue Jae Ahn saga and the Garden of Bones – as he had lyrically, or lamely, or distastefully labeled the hillside crime scene (that determination would be up to Ferstein) – was the body of Michelle Masterson, an executive assistant at the Department of the Navy who had left a bachelorette party at a Georgetown nightclub three years before and re-appeared beheaded in Rock Creek Park.

Where had she been for three years? How had her body been drained of blood? And by whom – or what? Parnell publicly speculated that a serial killer was at work, without offering evidence of any kind of pattern that linked the deaths. Preliminary analysis showed that the bones had been scattered across the hillside by wild animals, a specter of frontier savagery at the very center of the industrial world. In his story about the discoveries, Hallberg had characterized the case as a paradox in which the unearthing of such a vast store of evidence seemed to be leading investigators further from the truth. Strangely, after years of searching for Sue Jae Ahn, writing about her body – or at least her bones – seemed oddly cheap and anticlimactic. There had always been the hope that she was alive. Now, discovering that not only was she dead but that her remains were scattered around the park with the remains of people whose names no one knew, the story was transformed from tragic to macabre.

He watched Ferstein’s door open and imagined the editor as the walking incarnation of the brash and inspiring glass of Johnny Walker Black, no ice, that he craved at this moment and so many other moments of his life. Fartstain wasn’t a bad guy. Hallberg knew that the epithet was egregiously unjust. Aaron Ferstein was actually a patient and congenial fellow who was called Fartstain only by Nate Hallberg – and never to his face. He was a tall, slim man in his mid-40’s, with a long face and large brown eyes that gave him a look of perpetual curiosity. He was neither old breed nor new, simply a professional journalist who had graduated from the University of Missouri J-School at a time when someone could still find a toehold at a daily paper. After eleven years working at the Ames, Kansas Tribune, Omaha’s World Herald and then the Kansas City Star, he’d been thrilled out of his mind to land at the Post even though the paper, like almost every paper in the country, was going downhill. He