No longer kind, but still simple.
No longer kind, because he endeavored to cut a bloody swath across this earth to achieve his mission.
But still simple, because his one singular objective in life was to find and kill the man who had murdered his son.
Seven
Washington, D.C., awoke to a slushy December morning; the deep gray dawn and foreboding skies warned of more harsh weather to come, but through the curtains of the bay windows on the second floor of the big row house on Dent Place in Georgetown, the man standing in front of the bathroom mirror had already showered, and that after two cups of coffee.
James Arthur Westwood III ran a comb through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, forming the part the same as he had done ever since he was in grammar school in New Hampshire.
He had just turned sixty the week prior, and although he’d forgone the elliptical trainer in his basement this morning because he had an early meeting to get to, he exercised almost every day, with long rides on his bike, in his home gym downstairs, or in his afternoon pickleball league at the club.
Westwood was proud of how he was holding up, but his quest for vitality wasn’t just for the sake of vanity.
One also had to look good for the cameras. Vigor conveyed authority, influence, relevance.
He hadn’t been in front of the media in a few years; he’d been a man in the shadows, but he held out hope that he’d soon enough be back in the light, and he wanted to be ready.
To that end, he told himself he’d go to the club on Massachusetts Avenue right after work, spend an hour on the free weights, then stretch before his dinner with a couple of senators (Indiana and Vermont) at Fiola, a Michelin-star restaurant in Capitol Hill.
Although Westwood did not presently serve as a member of the U.S. government, he had strolled the corridors of Washington power for nearly thirty years, and dinner with senators was a relatively common occurrence for him.
Westwood’s father, James Arthur Westwood Jr., had been a lawyer, a congressman, then secretary of energy in the Ford administration. Westwood Jr. had run for governor of New York in the eighties and narrowly lost, then joined the boards of several Fortune 500 companies, living out the rest of his days on the lecture circuit when he wasn’t at home in his Greenwich Village brownstone on West 10th.
James the Third, “J.W.” to everyone who really knew him, had been raised in New Hampshire but then moved with his parents to Washington, then to New York. J.W. went to Harvard, then Harvard Law, and then spent a year clerking for a Supreme Court justice.
He practiced law in Concord, then ran for and won a congressional seat. He served four terms, was known as a dealmaker and a moderate, and was well liked by all, back in those days when friendships extended beyond party lines.
J.W. left Congress to move to the executive branch, serving two years as undersecretary of state before being appointed U.S. ambassador to Singapore by the then-president, a close family friend.
That stint lasted three years, and then he left the Department of State to take over as the director of an international think tank based here in Washington, D.C.
But running a think tank was a means to an end for J.W. Westwood. The vehicle that would take him where hereallywanted to go.
A Senate seat would open up in New Hampshire in just two years, and J.W. Westwood had every intention of running, and of winning.
He’d be a senator in time, of this he was certain.
And then, God willing, he’d be president. He knew he had the right stuff.
And, perhaps more importantly, he knew that if he kept his end of a hard bargain, he would get all the help he needed to make it happen.
Westwood’s two children were both at Stanford; his wife had left him a year earlier to no great protest from him, and though their divorce remained unfinalized, he’d been living as a bachelor here in D.C. for a lot longer than he’d been separated, so if anything, his breakup actually facilitated his lifestyle.
He had just pulled a dark gray sweater vest out of his closet and slipped it on over his crisp white shirt and red tie when he heard a noise downstairs. A door opening, male voices.
This was no cause for alarm; a man resided in J.W.’s converted carriage house apartment out back and had the run of the place.
The man’s name was Michael Scardino, but most of his friends and coworkers just referred to him as “Big Mike.”
Big Mike worked—nominally, anyway—as J.W.’s bodyguard, but Scardino was so much more than that.
Westwood cocked his head now, trying to make out the voices echoing through the two-hundred-year-old home.
Some weekday mornings J.W.’s driver, Hasan, would arrive early to take him to the office, then step in for coffee with Mike, and J.W. assumed that was what was going on, but then the phone in his pocket buzzed.
Looking at it, he saw that Big Mike was sending a text from downstairs.
