Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

He jumped in and started it. The engine roared to life, and he took off, flashlights arcing toward him. He rolled the window down, the night air cool against the sweat on his neck and the blood drying on his skin.

  Two lefts on country lanes. A right. A highway. A two-lane road with no lights. A pitted street.

  He tried to power on his phone, but it was dead, the screen smashed when he went over the fence.

  He checked his mirror. He was clear, for a moment at least.

  And now?

  His knife was the murder weapon. His fingerprints were at the scene.

  Nowhere was safe.

  10

  Breathe. Just breathe.

  Nick loosened his grip on the wheel. The dread had worked into every muscle like rigor mortis, but he forced his shoulders back and filled his lungs.

  There was sympathy for the dead man in the chair, rage for his killers, fear for the future. They competed in Nick’s mind with a thousand possibilities of what had happened and what next what next what next, not thoughts anymore, just a maddening noise like a kennel full of barking dogs.

  Breathe. One step at a time.

  Finding calm in chaos. It wasn’t bravery; it was a tool he had learned to use like a gun or a Kevlar vest, a skill he had come to depend on and had practiced so long he could call it up even in the middle of all this.

  What now? he asked himself.

  Go to the police. You have done nothing wrong. Tell the truth.

  But those were desperate thoughts, naïve and hopeful. His mind flashed back to the blood painting the dead man’s skin, streaked with Nick’s hand- and fingerprints.

  He couldn’t go to the police until he had the contract, the whole paper trail showing that he had been authorized to be in that house.

  He shouldn’t have touched the body or the knife. But even as the blood flaked from his hands, he didn’t regret trying to save that man.

  The former CIA director. God, what was Nick into?

  He forced his breath to come slow and even, ordered his thoughts, and took a careful route on winding roads until he was sure that there was no one tailing him. He was in McLean, Virginia, a wooded enclave of wealth and power across the Potomac River from DC.

  At least he had stolen that man’s keys. The SUV Nick was now driving might tell him who was behind all this. He flipped open the glove box. It was empty except for the registration and proof of insurance. He pulled them out and glanced down. They were both in the name of a limited liability company: ARC Leasing.

  This was a well-orchestrated execution. The theft of his knife, the team at the house, the kind of people with the wherewithal to frame someone and the need to kill a CIA director. Thinking of it made the hair on his arms and neck bristle.

  They wouldn’t want him running loose. He was a capable man. They had meant to kill him then and there. That would have been the cleanest way to set him up.

  That would explain whatever drug was on that surgical glove: it was a way to take Nick down with no sign of a struggle so that they could stage the scene. They could have made it look as though he and the guard had killed each other as he tried to escape.

  He couldn’t see anyone following, but that didn’t mean they didn’t know where he was. The Suburban might have some kind of GPS beacon; fleet vehicles often did. He didn’t want to be stuck on foot, but he needed to get rid of it.

  But first the blood, dry now, stiff on his clothes. He turned the wheel to the right and saw a simple wooden sign he knew well: “Lewinsville Park.”

  He used to coach soccer here, pacing up and down the sidelines, shouting and cheering with the moms and dads.

  The bathrooms were locked, but the water fountain outside ran. He took off his jacket and shirt, both stained with blood. His undershirt was clean. He rinsed the soles of his shoes, then leaned down and splashed water on his face and his neck and his arm, washing the last of Malcolm Widener’s life onto the sidewalk.

  Tires hummed along the road. He lifted his head, wiped the water from his eyes, and saw headlights slashing through the trees.

  He walked back to the SUV, climbed in, and sat low, his eyes fixed forward as the lights swept toward him, that brightness all he could see. He waited, chest still, as the lights passed. A patrol car. It moved on, toward the baseball fields.

  He looked at the soccer nets, swaying in the wind, and savored a long breath.

  11

  Nick pulled the Suburban into the parking lot of a Metro station on the Orange Line, with trains running along Interstate 66. The roar of traffic washed through the night as he went past the sign for “Kiss and Ride” and parked in a short-term spot. He took the registration and insurance papers and left the vehicle behind.

  Taxis were hard to come by in the suburbs, but there would be some here. There was a good chance that his office was being watched, but Nick knew how to watch, how to spot a sentry.

  He flipped the bloodstained jacket inside out and carried it in a bundle with the guns and his knife and his button-down inside as he approached the line of taxis.

  He knew he looked off, walking around in his T-shirt despite the chill. He came at the cab from the passenger side, its blind spot. It’s harder to say no to someone who’s already inside.

  He opened the door and landed on the vinyl seat. It wheezed from its seams as he put the jacket on the floor.

  The driver didn’t say a word. Nick glanced at his ID badge; a Serbian name. He regarded Nick suspiciously.

  “Going into the city,” Nick said. “Just head for Logan Circle.”

  The man’s eyes drifted toward the Metro entrance. No one took a cab back into the city from a Metro stop in the suburbs. From here they took a cab to their warm little houses on cul-de-sacs, to their families.

  He should have been at home now, lying in bed with a history book propped on his chest while his wife, Karen, turned over, furling the covers around her shoulder.

  “That’s a long way,” the driver said, perhaps trying to buy time to take Nick’s measure.

  “I know.” Nick lifted his wallet, held out three twenties.

  The man locked eyes with him in the rearview, body still, hands resting on the wheel. “Cold, isn’t it?” His gaze moved down slightly, and Nick followed it. A mottled pink spot stood at the end of his sleeve. He had missed it at the park, but it was easy to catch here under the lights of the parking lot.

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “Can’t wait for spring.” He sat back and looked out the window—indifferent, untroubled.

  The man put the car in drive. The engine groaned to life, and Nick gripped the door handle as the taxi pulled out and headed for the city.

  12

  Gray stood alone in the office with Malcolm Widener’s body. He turned, eyes skimming over the blood, poring over every detail. This man was a Washington titan. Now he was two hundred pounds of dead weight.

  The room had been arranged as carefully as a Renaissance painting. Any trace of Gray or his men was gone. Nick’s fingerprints were everywhere, and his vehicle was still parked down the street. He would be the only suspect.

  Nick Averose. Malcolm Widener. Two men. One secret. They had both gotten too close to the truth, even if they didn’t fully understand the game they’d been drawn into. They both needed to go away. The past needed to go away.

  “Dust to dust,” Gray whispered.

  He raised his cell phone and tapped out a message in code.

  13

  David Blakely’s phone vibrated twice in his pocket. He ignored it as he put his hand on the senator’s arm and whispered in his ear.

  “It’s time.”

  Senator Sam MacDonough smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder as he rose from the table and strode across the marble floor toward the front of the room. Outside the windows, the moon hung low, a white sickle over the Washington Monument.

  David slipped along the side of the room, around the assembled dinner guests, then stood with his back to the wall. He wore a bespoke navy suit by Gieves
and Hawkes, outrageously and invisibly expensive with its Milanese stitches and a silk latch hidden behind the lapel.

  His eyes were narrowed slightly, as if scanning the horizon on a sun-bright day. He pulled his shoulder blades back and down. His bearing gave David, at five foot eleven, the impression of being taller.

  That was practiced. Everything was practiced even now, thirty-five years after he had arrived as an outsider in this world. David was an investor. Once he had financed real estate development, then whole industries through private equity, but all of his successes, all of his wealth—numbered in the billions and held mostly offshore—ultimately came from staying close to power. In the end he invested in men, men like Senator Sam MacDonough.

  The servers walked out of the room. The doors closed. The senator arrived at the front of the salon with his dog, a Rhodesian ridgeback named Theo, padding along beside him.

  MacDonough didn’t wait for quiet. He simply began to speak, and the room hushed in an instant. He moved loosely over the tiles, his blue eyes flashing from one listener to the next. This room—the former officials, the top donors, the party elite—felt as natural to him as a gathering of lifelong friends. This air of great and responsible men at the helm of the nation was the air he had been breathing his whole life. Sam was a senator’s son.

  David didn’t need to listen. He already knew every word Sam would say. It was more important that David watch the faces of the guests at the tables, reading them one after another. Because these thirty people had a rare power.

  Who picked the president in this country? Forget what they taught in high school civics. It wasn’t the voters. It was this room.

  Welcome to the money primary, the invisible primary. The real election wouldn’t take place until next year, but before a single citizen cast his or her ballot for the leader of the free world, the candidates had to win the only contest that mattered—the contest for the favor of the party machine. The people gathered here would anoint a front-runner after a series of one-on-one talks and dinners in homes and clubs around Washington and on jets streaking in and out of the private terminal at Dulles. Money and endorsements would herd around their favorite, giving him an advantage that in most years would be impossible to overcome.

  These insiders controlled the primary rules and the convention. They were retaking control of the party, prepared to shut out any outsider candidates, insurgents, and wild cards who could steal power away from them. Sam was one of three serious competitors for the nomination, an early favorite, though some thought the fifty-year-old senator needed to bide his time, wait his turn. Sam had to move quickly, to lock the key players down before the other candidates could strike their own deals.

  This was the back room full of smoke, the oldest American tradition. The founders had nailed the windows shut in Independence Hall one sweltering Philadelphia summer so that no one would hear the deals they struck as they laid out the Constitution in absolute secrecy. Now those kinds of talks took place here in the salon of an eight-bedroom Queen Anne, once an embassy, now a private home.

  This was American democracy at its finest, no real democracy at all. Whichever candidate the VIPs in this room chose would have a wide-open lane. Their party was the opposition. The incumbent president was polling in the low forties and the stock market was down 18 percent this year. The Oval would belong to whichever man they nominated.

  The chair of the national finance committee finished his glass of Dujac premier cru and sat back. A swing-state governor whom David had never once seen put down his phone now rested it on the table.

  Their eyes all went to Sam MacDonough as he spoke with that easy smile and the skeptical, slightly amused tone he so often used, like he and his audience were all in on the same joke. A golden boy. Trite, but politics was a trite business and it really was that simple. You could spend half a million on pollsters and image consultants, but in the end it came down to the schoolyard, to the hardwired logic of the tribe.

  When five people tried to talk at once, everyone would turn to Sam. David had first seen it when they were in prep school at St. Albans, on the sports fields and at the keg parties behind McLean mansions when he and Sam were kids. Lacrosse captain then, president-in-waiting now. It was the same shit. Built as solid as a column, Sam had his own gravity, drew people in, engulfed them with charm.

  It made you want to hate him at first, give in to the jealousy, look for the smugness, the prick vibes, and that was the worst part. There were none. Sam MacDonough wanted to know how you were doing. He would invite you along, even if you were David Blakely, a St. Albans boarder from New Jersey with no class whose father was in the construction business. Sam was really fucking nice. He didn’t work at any of it. Too nice, perhaps. He was second-generation-Washington soft while David Blakely was first-generation hungry. That was why they needed each other.

  The room was small enough that Sam required no microphone or podium, and Blakely had had the property swept for any other kinds of mics. For tonight, he wanted a private residence—so hard to wire up, so few staff who could be compromised, not like a hotel or club.

  A leak from inside this room could be fatal. This was no ballroom or banquet hall or prime-time debate. That would all come later, during the public campaign. Tonight was thirty people in someone’s home, a real dinner. No stump speeches or poll-tested messages. These were friends, old friends. This was real talk, the one time in MacDonough’s campaign when he wouldn’t be delivering overworked bullshit.

  Tonight the donors’ money was on the table. They could speak frankly about what they would give and what they expected from him, always dancing at the edge of an explicit quid pro quo. The promises now would be policy later, and everything in between—the campaign that the rest of the world would see—would just be tactics, a performance to get from one to the other.

  Sam’s dog wandered toward David, nuzzled its head against his leg, and David gave it a rub behind the ears as he scanned the room. These people all had their needs: a ban on online gambling, a cabinet post, a little break on the media monopoly rules for the big merger. The host was in it for an ambassadorship, a good one: western Europe or the Caribbean.

  David knew each of these players, what they wanted, what they feared. He knew how to prod them, how to build heat around a moment like this: get the money thinking that the party folks are already going for Sam, get the party thinking the money’s already in motion. David whispered in their ears, stoking this fire, playing on everyone’s fear of missing a moment they’d write histories about, like Franklin Roosevelt in ’32, Nixon in ’68, Reagan in ’80.

  This wasn’t about a president. It was a realignment. It was the work of David’s life. He had poured tens of millions of dollars into MacDonough’s campaigns, starting with his first House race, had blocked and tackled for him since they were in high school. After each day at St. Albans, Sam would go back to his family town house on Capitol Hill, and David would return to his bunk bed in the dorm rooms with the international kids and the other boarders. Now he was Sam’s chief financier and ran a network of political action committees. His little empire had paved the way for Sam’s rise from congressman to Senate cardinal to presidential front-runner.

  David turned to the front of the room and listened as Sam MacDonough’s voice grew grave.

  “I know what every one of you has at stake in this election,” Sam said. “And I don’t need to convince you that I will take care of you and your issues, because you know me. Most of you have known me for decades. But this is about more than any one cause.

  “That’s thinking too small. This isn’t about me. That’s too small. This isn’t about the presidency. That is too small. Locking down the White House”—he raised one finger—“is step one, our beachhead, our D-Day, the crucial battle in a larger war. We’re not stopping until we have everything. You’ve seen the money I give to vulnerable candidates. You know I can win unwinnable races. If you give me your support, we can take that wide. I’m tal
king about the Senate, the House, the statehouses, the governors’ mansions. I’m talking about building a wave from the bottom up.”

  Sam’s eyes met David’s as he glanced around the room.

  “Elections like these only come every ten years. A census year. Which means we redraw the districts after we win. I will lead the charge. I’m talking about permanent control, a permanent majority, and now is your chance to get on board.”

  Sam stopped. No blandishments, no needy applause lines, no thank-yous. David crossed his arms, concerned for an instant that this kind of naked confidence wouldn’t play.

  The crowd didn’t clap. They stood and moved toward Sam, surrounded him, a polite little mob. They could’ve been back on Steuart Field at St. Albans after a win, except now they were playing for the highest stakes. Sam had the shine of the inevitable, of a man on the cusp. Everyone wanted a piece.

  Sam looked his way, and David gave him a nod. He’d been building up to this moment for twenty-five years. He could win this election before it even began.

  David had sold his soul so long ago for a night like tonight. He needed Sam MacDonough to win. He loved that man. He would do anything to protect him. It was about politics and power and money, sure, but there was something deeper, hungrier, in David. It was about his own survival.

  He stepped out, crossed the hall to the library, and shut the door. He took out his second cell phone, unlocked it with his fingerprint, then opened an encrypted-messaging app.

  “319,” it read. It was a message from Gray. A code. It referred to Genesis, chapter three, verse nineteen. “For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. It was done. Malcolm Widener was gone. The secret was safe.

  14

  Nick stalked down the alley toward his office. He’d had the cabdriver drop him four blocks away, and then he’d spiraled in closer to the carriage house, sticking to the shadows, searching out every hidden place where someone might be waiting, watching.