He saw no one. That didn’t mean they weren’t there. It was a risk he had to take. He needed to prove he was allowed to be in that home tonight, that it was all an exercise.
He took out the loaded pistol he’d pulled from the man who attacked him at Widener’s house and held it low in his right hand. He carried his bundled jacket in the left.
With a last look down the alley, he closed toward the entrance to his office. He put the jacket down, unlocked the door, then sprang inside, cutting sideways. He reached the corner and looked into the shadows, sliding around furniture by memory.
All he heard was the clink and sigh of the heating system over his own rapid breathing.
His office was empty, and he opened the desk drawer where he had left his knife. Gone, of course. But he needed to see it.
He quickly cleared the rest of the shop, working his way toward the back room with its bins of gear and finally the bathroom. No one.
He walked back and brought his jacket inside, then went to the cabinet safe and dialed in the combination. The door slid back, silent and slow. The steel shelf was bare where he had left the signed letter of authorization.
His shoulders drew back, and he let out a long breath. He shoved the panic away.
In his office, he checked his desk for the files on Widener. The plans were there for the attack he had so carefully rehearsed, but the copy of the contract was gone, along with anything that would prove he was working for a client.
He opened his laptop, logged in with his fingerprint, and pulled up his email. He searched for Alexandra Hart’s name. How many times had they met? Twice. Had they written? Maybe six. That was enough. That would tell the true story.
They were gone. He checked again, and then looked through his sent emails. Nothing. Alexandra Hart had stood in this room earlier today, but now any trace of her had been erased.
A bead of sweat ran down his ribs. What was happening? It was like he was diving down, the water pressing on his chest, his lungs, his eardrums, a killing pressure.
How much else pointed to him as the murderer? He couldn’t go to the police now, not until he understood just how deep he had been buried.
He went back to the safe and pulled out two boxes of Winchester rounds along with two extra magazines in a belt holster, then walked into his office. He pulled down the backpack he used for work trips, which already held his entry kit and the basic tools of his trade, and put his jacket with his knife and gun inside.
In the back room, he picked up a work shirt, a cheap smartphone, and a few prepaid SIM cards still wrapped and fixed to plastic cards.
He took a half step away, then went back and grabbed the medical kit.
He marched out and stopped in front of the open door to the bathroom. In the mirror, a smear of blood showed behind his earlobe.
Nick stepped inside and looked at his face, which was spectral, with a growing bruise staining his temple. He lifted his hand. Dried blood circled the nails.
The hot-water spigot on the sink turned with a creak. He needed a shower, needed to get clean, to wash away any trace of this blood and its old-penny smell, but not here. They might be back.
He scoured what he could from under his nails and washed his face and neck, then headed to the front room.
A shadow moved across the window. He waited for it to keep going, to see it pass the window on the other side of the front door. It didn’t.
Someone was here.
He had needed to come here. He’d needed those papers, this gear. But there was another reason. Part of him was straining toward the threat like a dog at the end of its leash. He wanted them to come, wanted to close in on whoever was behind all this and tear the truth out of them: Who are you and why are you fucking with me?
He stole toward the front door, staying close by the wall, moving silently. He didn’t stand in front of it. He knew a mining executive who had gone to answer a door in Medellín and was shot twice in the head by a cheap sicario before he even had a chance to open it up.
The knob rustled, then turned. The door opened. Nick aimed the pistol, looking through its sights, eye to eye with a woman, young, as she gasped in fear.
It was Delia Tayran.
15
Delia stepped back, hands rising, as he lowered the gun.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Wide eyes and a silent nod.
“Here,” he said. “Come inside.”
She entered without a word, and Nick shut the door.
“Jesus, Delia. I’m sorry.”
“Who were you waiting for, Nick?”
He stared at the window.
“What the hell is happening?”
“I’m handling it, Delia. You should go.”
“I didn’t hear from you after the job, Nick. You didn’t answer your phone.”
“The job got complicated.”
“I drove to Widener’s street. I’ve never seen so many cop cars in my life. The FBI was there, and a bunch of other feds I couldn’t even identify. What happened?”
Nick ran his hand along his jawline, felt the stubble scratch. “It was a setup, Delia. An ambush. Malcolm Widener was hurt very badly while I was there. Whoever did it is trying to make it seem like I’m responsible. I know that sounds crazy but it’s the truth.”
Delia brought her hand to her chest and said nothing for a moment, just looked at him. “We need to go to the police. We have the letter.”
“The letter is gone. Someone broke in here. They took every copy. They took anything that made it look like I had a legit reason to be there. Even the emails are gone. This is deliberate. Everything from that house points to me.”
“What?”
He didn’t answer.
“You said they tried to make it look like you’re responsible. How?”
“By planting my knife there.”
Delia braced herself against the desk. That made the violence real.
Her eyebrows drew together, and he tried to read her face: concern, sure, maybe disappointment. She looked like a kid who had just found out her parents were human beings after all. And there was something else. Was it fear?
“There has to be some kind of trace. Some proof. That woman. Alexandra Hart. She can vouch for you,” Delia said, and went toward the computer.
He heard sirens in the distance and looked to the windows. Light moved across them.
“Delia,” Nick said. “We need to go. It’s not safe here.”
A car door closed outside.
“It can’t all just disappear.”
“Now,” he said. “Out the back.”
Her eyes met his, and she nodded. She grabbed two laptops and a bag from her desk, and he led her out the rear door.
Nick covered her with the pistol as headlights approached and they circled to her car.
Nick drove, speeding out of the alley. He took a winding route, eyes on his mirrors, looking for anyone following.
“Why don’t we call Alexandra Hart?” Delia asked.
“Give it a try.” She was the only real connection he had to whoever had set him up.
Delia looked up her number and dialed. He could hear it ringing. A soft prerecorded voice came on the line. “We’re sorry, you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.”
She ended the call. Delia flicked through her phone. “I’ll get her other number. She was on the Aegis directory.” She pressed her lips together. “Her page is gone. I was looking at it yesterday.”
Delia tapped her screen. “The LinkedIn is gone, too.” She turned to him. “What the fuck, Nick? How does someone just disappear?”
“I don’t think Alexandra Hart ever existed.”
16
Nick drove east as Delia kept searching for other traces of the woman who had come to their office.
He needed to find someplace safe where they could start tracking down the real Alexandra Hart, where he could get cleaned up and breathe easy long enough to
figure out what to do next.
He passed over the railroad tracks north of Union Station. Every year the line between rich and poor pushed farther out in this direction as new development turned over more of the city: the old warehouses near the train yards, the vacant buildings along New York Avenue. Cranes towered over them as Nick drove on through the night.
Delia saw it ten minutes later: a sign for a hotel that said it had HBO and color TV. “Just pull in there,” she said.
It was exactly what Nick wanted, an uncared-for and uncaring place. He could have gone to his house, but they would be looking for him there. Karen was on a business trip in Chicago. The only grace in all this was that he didn’t have to worry about her at home.
They checked in. The night clerk barely looked away from the TV that sat on his desk blaring out canned laughter. He didn’t seem to notice that their only luggage was two backpacks.
The hallway was painted in strange orange and brown tones. Through thin walls, Nick picked up the nighttime chorus of car subwoofers and raised voices.
They put their gear on the bed, and Nick bolted and chained the door.
He sat at a small table, logged into his laptop, and began to type, his eyes on the keyboard as he picked out the letters. He looked up to see Delia staring at him, pained.
He slid the computer toward her and gave her the chair. Her fingers danced over the keys. He watched her do something to the location settings on the laptop and then connect to the web using a VPN, an encrypted tunnel through the Internet.
“So what do we have?” Delia asked.
“There are the security cameras at our office. That’s all in the cloud, right? There might be backups of her emails. Any info from the headers. Can you get—”
“IP addresses. Maybe.”
Nick stepped to the side of the blinds and peered out. A gray Dodge Charger idled at the far end of the lot, smoke rising from its tailpipe.
Delia took in a sharp breath. He turned and walked toward the computer. A folder was open on the screen, full of images of Malcolm Widener. There were telephoto shots of Widener at breakfast with his wife, of him beside his bed, and a slightly out-of-focus picture taken through a bathroom window of him swallowing pills.
Nick had cased Widener’s house, but he hadn’t taken any of these. They went beyond anything he would need for a security audit. These were a stalker’s gaze.
Delia had a web browser up on the other side of the screen. She had typed in one word, “how,” and Google had filled in the rest as a suggestion, the text blue, indicating that it was one of his previous searches: How to clean DNA from a knife.
“What is that?” Nick asked.
“Your search history.”
“But . . . I never wrote that.”
She stood aside as Nick came to the table and pulled the computer toward him. He cycled through the images in the folder, then the searches in his history: killing and extradition and covering tracks.
Nick noticed a bookmark at the top of his browser. He had never seen it before. “Mail 2.” He clicked it, and it went to a web email provider. Nick had never heard of it, but the menu bar read: Free, anonymous email. He was somehow already logged into an account. He looked at the messages.
Each of them was addressed to Widener’s work email, and they carried no subject lines. He selected one.
Leave her alone, it read. He opened another message: I can get to you. I can get to anyone. A third email read simply, No one is safe. It appeared as though Nick had sent them all to Widener.
Nick had seen thousands of messages like that, from the stalkers and psychopaths who swarmed the famous and the powerful. That last email used a phrase that Nick said often. Whoever had set this up even knew how to sound like him.
The laptop was an assassin’s bible. Anyone who got their hands on the computer or subpoenaed his online history would have to conclude that he was guilty.
It was like he had blacked out, actually done the killing himself, and only now saw the traces. The walls began to waver and pulse, and pressure built in his temples.
He put his hand on the table, took a deep breath, and looked to the side. Delia stood halfway between him and the door, all the blood drained from her face. Her eyes moved back and forth between Nick and the evidence staring back at them from the screen.
The photos. The searches. He had known her for most of her life, had looked out for her like a father after her parents passed, but that didn’t mean she should ignore what was right in front of her eyes. She had to believe she was in this room with a killer, and he couldn’t blame her.
He raised his hands. “I know how this looks, Delia. I don’t know what’s happening, but none of this is mine.”
It sounded so false coming out of his mouth, like the words of a con in the back of a police car.
“What happened at that house, Nick? You can tell me anything, you know that. I need the truth.”
“Someone killed Malcolm Widener. It wasn’t me.”
She took a step back, and her eyes went to his gun.
“I understand if you don’t believe me,” Nick said. “I wouldn’t.”
17
Delia lowered her head. Her hand covered her mouth. “No no no,” she said, and took a few paces away from the door.
She looked up at him. “God, Nick. This is so bad. This”—she pointed to the computer—“is next-level, like NSA or foreign intel. I believe you. Of course. I saw her. I saw those papers. But no one else in the world will. Why didn’t you tell me he was dead?”
“I didn’t want to drop too much on you at once. You should go. I don’t want this coming back on you.”
“Tough. After everything you did for me, for my family, I’m not going to bail on you in the middle of all this.” She tried for a smile. “And I’ve seen you type.”
She tossed her phone on the bed and sat at the laptop. “There might be a way to turn this around on them.”
She opened a command terminal on the screen and began typing. A moment later she glanced at the clock, and then to Nick, studying his face.
“You know what we need?” she said.
“Shoot.” He moved toward her bag.
“Food and caffeine.”
An hour later Delia was hunched over the computer, finishing her second waffle. Nick’s burger was already gone. Most tech people he knew ran on energy drinks or Mountain Dew, but Delia’s preferred brew was insanely strong green tea.
They had ordered delivery on her phone from the chain diner across the highway. Delia was her mother’s daughter in that way; she thought all problems could be solved by an enormous meal. The coffee and the hot food and Delia’s presence offered the first respite he’d had since he had heard the gunshots at Widener’s house.
He used the second laptop to check the security camera at his office. The footage of Alexandra Hart had been deleted.
Nick still had the registration from the Chevy Suburban he had taken at the house. That was his most solid link to the killers. He searched for any public information related to the leasing company, but that only led to a registered agent, a limited liability company out of Delaware. Its owner was another LLC, out of Nevada.
Shells within shells. It was effectively anonymous. That LLC could be held by another one in the Caymans or Luxembourg. There were ways to pierce the veil, but it meant days if not weeks of work. Everyone makes mistakes, uses the same address twice, leaves a real name on a registration.
He showed Delia what he had found.
“We can pattern match,” she said, peering at the screen. That meant looking for shared addresses, other shells linked to this one, finding any lawyers or banks they held in common.
“I’ve done it manually,” he said. “But it takes days, at least.”
“I don’t do anything manually,” Delia said, and he handed her the computer.
Nick stood up and went to the window, searching for a hint of dawn.
He shut his eyes. That woman was real,
even if everything about her was a lie. She was out there in the world, and she must have left a trace. He put himself back in that moment: Alexandra Hart signing the papers, tucking them in her attaché, and walking out, Delia rolling her eyes at him.
He listened to his breath coming and going, and replayed the scene in his head, looking for any detail he could exploit. He remembered a few stray white hairs he’d noticed near the hem of her dress: a dog owner, maybe.
He came back to one instant. The carriage house had a good view of the street across a church parking lot. He’d seen Hart once more, or thought he had, driving by after she left, just a flash. He didn’t know how useful that would be. He wasn’t even certain of the make of her car. But as he thought about it more, he realized that it might give him what he needed.
“She drove a silver car,” he said. “Alexandra Hart.”
“Did you get the tag?”
“No. But she went by right after she left. Unless she ran, she was parked on our block, to the west.”
Delia nodded. “If we had the security camera footage, maybe we could get a shot of her license plate, but the footage is gone, right?”
“Ours is, but the other stores have cameras.” There were two or three businesses between them and the corner that would have eyes out.
“Right. We can get a shot of her coming and going, maybe the tag on her car. It would be proof at least that she existed. You can ID people from an image, too.”
She came toward the window and stood beside him. “We’re going to find whoever did this, Nick.” She looked up. “Nothing is perfect.”
18
David Blakely pulled his Audi over on C Street Southeast, a block up from Sam MacDonough’s town house. He killed the engine, a five-hundred-horsepower twin turbo hidden under the sedan’s unassuming black exterior.
Sam MacDonough sat on the passenger side, and his dog brought its head out from the back seat as if it wanted in on the conversation. David rubbed the sleek fur of the ridgeback’s neck. It twisted against him and then lay down in the rear.
Hour of the Assassin Page 4