the rest, the potential payoff must have seemed worth the risk. “And the Chinese government?” I ask. “Were they involved with this? Or was it just Azure Dragon Paper?”
Nadine laughs softly. “That’s like asking me if Putin knew his oligarch buddies were involved in election tampering. You think some Shanghai businessman would risk espionage against the U.S. without the sanction of his government? You get a bullet in the back of the neck for that in China.”
“All this is detailed in Sally’s cache?”
“Painstakingly. Her recordings of the Poker Club meetings contain several discussions about it, and her documentary evidence verifies it beyond doubt.”
Though I’m sitting, I feel dizzy, as though I’ve been whisked a thousand feet into the air. “This is bigger than . . . almost anything I can think of. Selling a U.S. Senate seat to a foreign power?”
Nadine has an almost beatific smile on her face. “If you think about it, U.S. Senate seats have been sold for a long time. Candidates have to spend millions to even have a chance at winning one. The Citizens United decision worsened the problem exponentially. And once a senator’s in office, lobbyists pay millions to get their votes. How big a leap was it, really, to start selling votes directly?”
“It’s not the first time, is it?” I realize. “Governor Rod Blagojevich tried to sell the seat vacated by Barack Obama. Went to jail for it. Fourteen years. Did you ever hear the FBI tape of what he said about that seat?”
She shakes her head.
“‘I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden. I’m just not giving it up for fucking nothing.’”
“He’d have been right at home in the Bienville Poker Club. At least Buckman and his crew are trying to help the city as well as themselves.”
Despite my earlier indignation over Nadine’s lack of trust, I can’t help but fantasize what breaking a story of this magnitude would mean to my career. It’s like being the only reporter with the Pentagon Papers story, or Watergate. I feel an irrational fear that I’ll be killed before I can write it up and get it out to the world. Or maybe that’s not so irrational—
“This crime is actually ancient history,” Nadine informs me. “The Romans had a specific law to deal with bribery of senators for their votes. Lex Acilia repetundarum. But our situation gets into ambitus, as well—all the illegal crap the Poker Club did to get Sumner appointed to that seat. All twelve members pulled every string they could reach to put his butt in that chair.”
“Where is the cache now?” I ask.
“A safety-deposit box.”
My fear ratchets up three notches. “Not here in Bienville!”
Nadine smiles. “Not a chance. I’ll bet there’s not a safety-deposit box in this town that Claude Buckman couldn’t get opened one way or another. No, it’s in Monroe, Louisiana, in a bank with no ties to the Buckman empire.”
Monroe is seventy miles across the river. “Okay, good thinking. How long have you had the cache?”
“Eleven days.”
We’ve come to the point where things are going to get personal. But before I can ask my first question about Sally’s motive, Nadine says, “What did they do to you in the jail? Come on. I see petechiae under your eyes.”
I might as well tell her. “Officer Obie and a black-hooded buddy waterboarded me.”
“Shit, they didn’t.”
“And Beau Holland was asking the questions.”
Nadine’s eyes narrow, but I can see hatred burning in them. “It’s guys like Beau Holland who make me want to use the cache to blow the Poker Club to hell and gone, no matter what it costs the town. How bad was the waterboarding?”
If I were in her place, I’d probably ask the same absurd question. “Worse than it sounds. The name sounds vaguely related to wakeboarding. They need to rebrand that little technique.”
She lifts a finger to her mouth and shakes her head. “I should have gotten you out of there faster.”
“You did fine. I survived.”
We both jump when her iPhone rings. She checks the screen, then answers and puts the phone in speaker mode.
“It’s me,” she says.
“Sorry it took so long,” Tim Hayden says. “I drove out toward Marsh—toward his house—and a police car followed me. It peeled off at the county line, and a sheriff’s deputy picked me up. When I turned back toward town, he stopped me. Searched my car, made me open my trunk. He was furious not to find anybody hiding in back. As if Marshall would fit in that shoebox.”
“But he let