by Greg Rucka
They found nothing by way of evidence that might explain who had murdered Trent, or why.
Three days after the discovery of Trent’s body, a special agent from the Bureau’s headquarters in D.C. met with the White House chief of staff to brief him on what had been found. While the identity of Trent’s killer remained a mystery, the circumstantial evidence surrounding the discovery of Trent’s body led to an alarming conclusion. At the time of his death, Elliot Trent had quite clearly been planning to assassinate Jason Earle.
Whether or not the attempt would have been successful, the agent could not say. But without a doubt, Trent’s intention, ability, and willingness to attempt the act were clear. As to his motive, all the agent could offer was that, given the presence of the two photographs, it was possible that Trent felt that Earle was in some way responsible for the deaths of his wife and daughter. Why Trent would think that was anyone’s guess.
Upon being asked, the agent assured the White House chief of staff that every effort was being made to locate and apprehend Trent’s killer. The agent confessed that, without either witnesses to the crime or any evidence at the scene, he didn’t hold out much hope.
Even before Trent’s body was discovered, I was back in Alena and Panno’s company, this time in Charlotte, instead of Wilmington. With Trent’s death, the location on Peden Point had to be abandoned, and upon my departure the two of them had gone to work on the house. They’d removed all signs that anyone other than Trent had ever lived there, and left behind just enough of the research we’d done on Earle to hopefully support the FBI’s theory of the crime should a search of the premises take place.
Then Panno and Alena drove the almost four hours to Charlotte. By the time I met up with them shortly after one the next morning, they were already settled into the house Panno had rented off Commonwealth Avenue, opposite a power substation. It was a small place, two bedrooms and one bath, and with the three of us in it and the strange energy now flowing between us, it was going to be both awkward and intimate. Alena greeted me with a wan smile and a cup of herbal tea. Panno took my arrival as his cue to start drinking.
Panno left for D.C. the following afternoon, and for the next eight days, Alena and I occupied ourselves as best we could. Mostly, we stayed indoors. The Danielle and Christopher Morse story had all but vanished from the news cycle at this point, but we were still wary.
Elliot Trent had gambled his life on a chance at drawing Jason Earle out into the open. Neither Alena nor I wanted to do anything to diminish that sacrifice, nor to squander the opportunity we hoped it would create.
Panno returned nine days after Trent died, arriving in the early evening and driving yet another car, this one a big blue Ford pickup. He’d brought groceries and other household necessities to restock our stores, and as we unpacked everything in the kitchen, he told us the good news.
“Earle’s scheduling appearances again.”
Alena, who had been sorting the fresh fruit and veg into the refrigerator, actually blew out a sigh of relief.
“What do you have?” I asked him.
In answer, Panno handed over four folded sheets of paper, and I settled with them and him at the kitchen table. Alena finished with the groceries and then went to fetch the MacBook, and when she joined us I gave her the pages and booted up the Web browser, jumping online via a neighbor’s unsecured wireless connection.
“It’s a pretty full schedule,” I remarked to Panno.
“Figure he’s been saying no so often he was eager for a chance to start saying yes.” Panno scratched at the rough stubble along his cheek. “You guys took a hell of a risk. Hell of a fucking risk.”
Alena, looking over the schedule, said, “Earle had to believe the danger Atticus and I pose to him is ended. By making Trent the threat, and by allowing Earle to conclude that we were the ones who dealt with it, he can now believe the matter is finished.”
“And that’s not assumptive as all hell? You don’t think that Earle just looked at the situation and concluded that instead of just one threat—the two of you—there were actually two of them?”
“Assumptive or not, his schedule tells us he bought it,” I said.
“Or maybe his schedule is telling you that you’re being set up.”
Alena was on the third of the four sheets, and she didn’t look up. “That is, of course, possible.”
“But you don’t think it’s likely.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Earle’s spent four years trying to solve the problem of Alena and me, John. He’s burnt capital, connections, favors, and something like twelve of Gorman-North’s best guns. He has to want this over and done with as much as we do. He wants to believe we’re walking away.”
“I see it, Atticus, I get it, I really do.” Panno got up from the table, heading to the refrigerator. “But all of this is built on the assumption that Earle saw the report of Trent’s death, saw the assassination plot, and then concluded that it was you and Killer, there, who took care of Trent.”
“It’s a reasonable assumption on his part,” I said. “Earle knows about the Jacob Collins contact. The FBI will have told him that Trent had a home in Wilmington. If they did any search at all—and we all know they did—then they also learned there were at least three people living there, even if they don’t know exactly who those three were. It’s enough for Earle to make the connection, to put Alena, myself, and Trent in the same place at the same time. So he’s got to ask why we were together, and what’s he going to conclude, John?”
“That Trent brought you two in to help him plan or execute the hit.”
“And then Trent ends up dead,” I said. “Our peace offering to Earle, our way of saying that we’re quits.”
“It’s a hell of a long path for Earle to follow to get where you want him to go.”
“Has to be that way. Any shorter and it would’ve made him suspicious. The only way this could work was to let Earle reach his own conclusions.”
There was a snap of a church key freeing a bottle cap, and Panno came back to the table with a long-neck bottle of Budweiser in his hand. “Maybe.”
Alena finished with the fourth sheet, set it down, then motioned for me to slide the laptop over to her. “We have the schedule. Either it worked, or it did not. Either we will kill him, or he will kill us. But Trent’s death has given us what we hoped it would. It has given us our opportunity.”
“Or it’s given Earle his,” Panno said.
Then, having taken the last word, he left Alena and me to figure out when and where we would murder Jason Earle.
CHAPTER
TEN
We worked the schedule for two days, checking and double-checking the listed appointments, meetings, and appearances. There was a day near the end of April coming up, almost four weeks out, now, that we liked the looks of. Earle had two events scheduled, one out at Georgetown, the other at the Watergate, and when we had Panno double-check them it looked like nothing had changed, that neither had been canceled.
At the Watergate, Earle was going to be the featured after-dinner speaker at the national meeting of Women for the Preservation of the American Heritage. This was, apparently, something he was doing as a favor for, or at the request of, the first lady, as WPAH was one of her pet projects, a foundation that she had been active in even before meeting her husband. Earle, according to the schedule, was to speak for forty-five minutes following dessert, but the schedule had blocked time from five until seven-thirty that evening, apparently to provide wiggle room.
Georgetown, on the other hand, was far more tightly scheduled, at fifty-five minutes. It was another speaking engagement, from one in the afternoon until just before two, and there was nothing in the schedule specifying where he was speaking on the campus or what he was speaking about, only that he was going to. Using Alena’s MacBook and the Georgetown Web site wasn’t much help; the April calendar indeed had an entry for “Lecture by White House Chief of Staff Jason Earle,” and said the lecture would be
given in McCarthy Hall, in the McShain Lounge, but that was all.
“McShain Lounge,” I said. “Sounds intimate.”
“For alumni and alumnae,” Alena remarked.
“Easy enough to fake that.”
“You think?” She considered. “There are many other ways to gain access to the campus and the hall prior to the engagement.”
“Sure.”
“Many of them.”
I could see the wheels spinning.
I let them spin.
We had a fight about it the following morning, as we were finishing up our yoga in what passed for the living room. We’d shoved all of the furniture to the sides to give us room, and even with that accommodation there still wasn’t nearly the room either of us would’ve liked. In the kitchen, I could hear morning radio and the sounds of Panno apparently making himself a very large breakfast.
“So I’m thinking the best way to do this is to go up to D.C. in the next week and get into position,” I told Alena. “Get a job on the campus, maybe, doing maintenance or something similar, get the layout.”
“Agreed.”
“Verify that everything is as we think it is.”
“Yes.”
“Then the other one follows maybe a day or two prior to the hit, prepares the exfil and stands by.”
“Again, agreed. We stay only long enough to verify the kill.”
Each of us stretched, turning into new poses. From my angle, she was now upside down.
“That’s about a month without contact,” I said. “That’s a long time.”
“We will survive it.”
“I’ll be careful,” I told her.
Alena bent backwards, the move smooth as a line of molten glass. “You are not going to do it.”
“Like hell, Alena.”
“No, you are not thinking. I am better for this, and you know that.” She left the position, exhaling long, then getting to her feet. “I have the experience, and I am marginally harder to recognize than you are, at least at the moment.”
I tumbled down and got my own feet beneath me. “I need to do this.”
“Why? Because Natalie was your friend? Is it not enough that Jason Earle will die for what he did to her? Is it not enough that you will be as guilty as I or Trent or Panno in this?”
“No, it’s not. I need to do it. I need to see him die.”
“That is unprofessional.”
“Fuck professional. This entire thing is unprofessional. Elliot Trent let me shoot him in the goddamn head to give us this, you think he was giving a rat’s ass about professional? Nothing about this is professional, Alena! Nothing.”
Alena stared at me, unblinking, a sheen of sweat on her skin.
“Don’t talk to me about professional,” I said. “Not about this.”
“Yes, Atticus, about this. If no one is being professional, then one of us must be. That person is me.”
“This isn’t Oxford; this isn’t you trying to save me from what I might become. I’ve become it, Alena. For better or for worse, I’ve become it.”
“I know. And you know that I am better for this. If a job cannot be obtained, I can pass as a student. I can get onto the campus, I can place the poison, and I can get out again. And it is not that you cannot do these things, Atticus, it is that I can do them better, with less risk to myself.”
The thing was, she was right. She was absolutely right. She could pass for ten years younger if she tried, with the right clothes, the right hair. She could play the Russian émigré and get a job on the maintenance staff, or she could play the postgrad student, or she could play the alum. And maybe I could do all of those things, too, but I wouldn’t be able to do half of them as well.
And it was unprofessional, and she was right about that, too. Whatever the reasons behind the crime, when it came to the task, the task was the only thing that should have mattered. Anything else, any agenda or emotion, would only get in the way of that, and make it harder to do the job right.
“You’re right,” I said, and I left it at that.
Alena left two days later, with Panno. She left with a new cell phone and a new identity to match her blond hair, and eight days after she arrived in D.C., she had a job in custodial services on the Georgetown campus. That information came from Panno, not from her, because she was running silent now, and would until I arrived in advance of the hit.
Panno’s job was to serve as the link, and on the day of the hit, to provide the overwatch, to confirm that Earle was en route, that we were good to go. For the next three weeks he gave me updates at regular intervals, and he came down to Charlotte twice, to meet face-to-face and keep me posted. He had dead-dropped the stannous acetate to Alena before the first week was out, and confirmed that she had retrieved it and brought it back to the apartment she was subletting in Annandale. To the best of his knowledge, she was running safe, and had not been made.
What little remained of the media pursuit of Danielle and Christopher Morse became more and more infrequent, and then, almost as abruptly as it had come, ended.
I waited.
For almost a month, alone in a house in Charlotte, I waited, and it nearly killed me. I was worried for Alena, but it wasn’t like it had been upon leaving Lynch. That had been fear, honest and true, and what I felt now was nervousness, nothing more. But I was stagnant, and once I took care of those few things that remained for me to do in Charlotte there was nothing else, and there was nothing to be done for it. I was stircrazy before the end of the fourth day, and on the fifth I risked venturing out and bought myself a membership at a Gold’s Gym located two and a half miles from the house. Then I went in search of the local library and, finding it, began dividing my time between the gym and the stacks. I packed, unpacked, and repacked my go-bag multiple times. I cleaned the house. Thoroughly.
And everywhere I went, in everything I did, I walked with ghosts.
Pulling a book from a library shelf and seeing Natalie Trent with the blood trailing from her mouth, where it had formed a puddle on brittle, dry leaves. Doing the dishes and hearing the sound of her father’s suddenly dead weight collapsing all at once to the hotel carpet. The shudder and wheeze of the dying hidden behind the threads of spring that had come to Charlotte.
I walked with ghosts, and they gave me no peace.
The day before Earle was scheduled to lecture at Georgetown, I packed up my go-bag for the last time and drove north to D.C., in a used Honda that had been purchased for precisely the purpose two weeks earlier. I had a new ID provided by Panno, and the old ones that Sargenti had given us back in Boise, and I had eighteen thousand dollars in cash. I had two changes of new clothes, spring weight, because it was April and though the weather was forecast to be mild, it could just as easily turn hot.
I spent the night in a Red Roof Inn just off the Capital Beltway, and Panno met me in the bar there just past nine. He had another Budweiser and I had mineral water, and there were a couple of businessmen and women in there with us, and there was enough noise that we could talk.
“You’re good to go,” he told me. “She’ll expect to hear from you tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred to confirm coms. I’ve got both your numbers, I’ll keep you posted.”
“You’re not worried about putting this over a cell phone in the heart of D.C.?”
“Not the cell phones I’ve supplied you guys with, no.” Panno slugged back some of his beer and cracked a grin at me. “You’re covered.”
I nodded, and we fell into silence for several minutes.
“Did you know Natalie?” I asked him.
“From the time we were kids,” he said, running his eyes around the bar. “Right up until college, yeah.”
“Didn’t stay in touch?”
“Got difficult to. I was in the service, here and there. We fell out. My mistake, I could have reached out if I had wanted to, and I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I was in love with her.” Panno quit his survey of the bar, brough
t his eyes to me. “We had a thing for a while, high school, like that. Ended when we went to college. She ended it. I didn’t take it well.”
“I thought you were in this because of Trent.”
“It’s as much about her as it is about him. Let me ask you something. You were in the Army. Why’d you leave?”
“I wasn’t very good at it. You?”
“Special Forces.”
“That wasn’t what I meant. Why’d you leave?”
“I have a problem following the orders of idiots,” he said. “There weren’t a lot of them, but I seemed to have a knack for finding the ones that were hiding in the woodwork. My problem is I look like I’m dumber than I actually am, and I was dealing with people who were dumber than they looked, you know?”
“Too well.”
“You got a future at this.”
“I’m not sure I want it.”
“You’re good at it. That move the two of you pulled in Wyoming was fucking brilliant.”
“That was her, not me.”
“Not according to your wife. I asked her.”
“What’d you call her?”
“C’mon, man, if you don’t have a common-law marriage I don’t know what one looks like.”
I shook my head slightly. “She’s being generous about Wyoming.”
“She says that putting yourself out there in Montana, that was your idea, too. That took balls. That took more than just guts—that took passion.”
