Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

  “With any of the Whitleys?”

  “One of the boys was at both. They would have overlapped.”

  “See if you can find out if they were friends—old newspaper articles, whatever you can find. MacDonough fits. He has his eyes on the presidency.”

  “Is that worth killing Widener?”

  “I can’t imagine what else would be. Are any of these connections rock-solid? Where we could point to a clear line between them and the LLC and the truck registration?”

  “No. It’s all patterns. Overlapping addresses, lawyers, banks.”

  “All right. This is great, Delia. Thank you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Nick?” Her voice was urgent. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ll call you later, okay?”

  “Be careful,” she said softly, and ended the call.

  He opened the browser on his phone. It took him two minutes to find Sam MacDonough’s address.

  45

  Nick drove by MacDonough’s town house on Capitol Hill, not far from where he had chased Ali Waldron. A Capitol Police officer was walking on the corner, so Nick kept his distance. He drove around the block, where he pulled into an alley that led back toward the house and gave him a view of its front facade.

  He parked and surveyed the white brick Federal-style home. He could see through the glass of the front double doors into the foyer. A couple in eveningwear walked out, and a handful of people lingered just inside the doors. It looked like the end of a dinner, something official.

  He checked his surroundings, then pulled binoculars from his bag. He could make out more of the room reflected in a front hall mirror and saw a woman and two men talking.

  Nick craned forward over the wheel. Sam MacDonough was on the right.

  Emma Blair knew MacDonough. Nick was certain. He remembered one spring night ten years ago, when he and Emma were dating. She was in the kitchen cooking a Moroccan dish Nick had never heard of, and he had just gotten back from the store with a six-pack and a couple bottles of wine. They were having friends over at her place.

  The news came on, and there was MacDonough, with his wife and two kids in pearls and plaids, announcing his run for the US Senate for the state of Virginia.

  “Would you turn that off?” she said.

  Nick asked her if she knew him.

  “Just turn it off.” She crossed the room and stabbed the power button.

  Nick figured it was an old acquaintance of hers, just another hypocrite she couldn’t stand to see doing the Norman Rockwell bit behind the campaign podium.

  He wouldn’t even have remembered it, except for the way she stood in front of the TV for a long moment after it was off, her fist held to her lips. She’d been quiet the rest of that night, all through dinner, when normally she would have been keeping every wineglass full, moving the conversation along with a joke here and a question there like a conductor working her way through an adagio.

  Before they went to bed, he heard her crying softly in the bathroom. He asked her what was going on, asked her to talk to him.

  “I can’t,” was all she said. “I can’t.”

  What if she had seen Sam MacDonough upstairs at that Fourth of July party? What if he had played a part in Catherine Wilson’s death?

  Emma was always troubled, always hiding something, always so scornful of the people she had grown up among. Because she kept their secrets for so long.

  She understood the dark logic of Washington. Some truths were too dangerous. They went too high and threatened the intertwined lives, the decades of shared confidences among the people who held real, hidden, permanent power, the ones you didn’t see on TV and couldn’t vote out.

  Nick knew it from Emma. He knew it from his time in the Service, when he was duty-bound to see all while pretending he saw nothing. Behind the ivy walls and marble facades and porcelain-veneer smiles, the establishment families all had their secrets, their betrayals, their pacts. They’d spent the bulk of their lives in this small town, this ten-mile-square bog. They all knew too much, had seen too much. And if one man fell, who would go next? How many would follow? It wasn’t blackmail. There was no handshake or bag of cash. It was deeper than that. It was the culture. It was the air they breathed and the blood in their veins.

  Emma had seen enough to know that things didn’t end well for women who tried to break that conspiracy of silence. The real power closed ranks. The capital destroyed you.

  That secret had tortured Emma for decades. But in the end the tragedy was that she might have been right to keep it.

  She’d tried to tell the truth. And now Widener was dead, and Emma was gone. The city was protecting itself, and now it wanted Nick, too.

  A black Capitol Police SUV with a light bar rolled by and blocked part of Nick’s view.

  He needed some answers.

  The right move was to get out of here, get some sleep at last, take cover until he could meet with a lawyer. But all those thoughts seemed so distant. He felt like he was watching himself move as he slipped the gun into one pocket and the suppressor into another, stepped out, and walked toward the house.

  46

  Nick stopped twenty feet out from the end of the alley, with a clear view of MacDonough inside the door. The last guests walked down the stoop. It looked like the senator was alone. He moved closer and could see half of the block in front of the house, and the Capitol Police SUV parked forty feet down, engine running, guard within.

  An officer walked past the end of the alley, breathing fog in the winter night. That voice in Nick’s head told him to run, but he drew closer, examining the senator’s face, blue eyes and bright teeth.

  His mind went to the mundane details of his work: locks and doors and windows, guards and blind spots, entry and egress.

  Nick listened to the retreating footsteps of the officer on his rounds.

  MacDonough. The man was a front-runner to be the next president.

  Nick watched him as he locked the front door and retreated down the hall.

  It felt so natural, the drive to slip right into that house, to put a gun in his face and get the answers.

  He had spent a decade in the shoes of those guards, protecting VIPs, constantly searching for unreasoning men with guns, stalkers in alleys, killers as deranged as he probably looked right now. It wasn’t all that strange to be on the other side. For years he had stopped threats by stepping into the role of adversary. He had played the assassin, and he felt suddenly cold as he realized he wasn’t playing anymore.

  Nothing was perfect. No one was safe. Not Senator Sam MacDonough, heir apparent to the Oval Office.

  Maybe you can’t bring people like that down with the truth, he thought. Emma tried that. They can make the truth disappear. Maybe there’s only one way to stop them.

  He watched until the lights went out, then stood in the dark feeling the weather settle into his bones, the gun weighing by his side.

  No. There was a right way to do this. The evidence he had wasn’t conclusive, but it was a beginning. He didn’t know for sure that MacDonough was involved. He had to be careful. He wanted so badly to get back at the people behind all of this. It was warping him. He wasn’t that man, that threat.

  He walked back to Delia’s car and started rolling through the alley. He looked in his rearview and saw the Capitol Police SUV pull up at the far end.

  He drove off, took a few turns to make sure he was clear, then headed east on Maryland Avenue.

  The next thing he noticed was the car veering over the center line. Nick brought the wheel back straight. He was fighting to keep his eyes open.

  He needed to rest, to crash somewhere. He had just rolled up on MacDonough’s house with a loaded gun and no plan. He was losing control, stripped down to pure impulse. He’d been running too hard for too long.

  He drove across the Anacostia, then along a highway until he found a Walmart parking lot. They always
let people sleep in their cars. It was an old RVers’ trick.

  Dinner was three Clif Bars, an apple, and a banana that he had bought at the CVS.

  He ate slowly, looking to his mirrors, then straight ahead. There were a few cars scattered across the parking lot, transients, people running from something like he was.

  About a hundred yards off, a man with a beard down to his chest stood outside a Ford Taurus wagon. Cardboard covered the rear windows, scrawled with Magic Marker, quotes from the Book of Revelation. He was unloading cardboard boxes from the back seat, arguing with somebody Nick couldn’t see and that Nick guessed might only exist in that guy’s mind.

  My people, he thought, and shook his head.

  He imagined Emma out there in the night, running, living like this. Maybe she had gotten away, finally escaped this city.

  Living. Please, just give him that.

  He was meeting with Ellsbury and Jeff early. Tomorrow he would have more names from Delia of who was there that Fourth of July. He had the lawyer who would connect the shell companies. He was going to find someplace where records were kept, where the answers lay, someplace where he could break in and get the truth. Or force it out of someone if need be. He knew what he was up against. He was getting closer, assembling the pieces. He would need proof, hard proof, the kind that couldn’t be buried.

  He rested his head against the seat. He had enough to start the counterattack.

  47

  Sam MacDonough walked through the apartment bedroom wearing a pair of boxers and a V-neck T-shirt. After the dinner at his town house, he’d come here to meet Ali Waldron, to forget the campaign for a few hours.

  He came up to the side of the bed and looked down into Ali’s eyes, studying the curves of her face, the one dimple that appeared as she smiled.

  She laughed and pulled the sheets up. “What?”

  “Just looking at you,” Sam said, and ran the back of his fingers softly across her cheek. She shut her eyes for a moment.

  “Are you all right, Sam?”

  He cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

  “I can tell. You seem . . . troubled. Is it work? The campaign?”

  He patted her shoulder. “You’re sweet. It’s a lot, but I’m fine. Much better now,” he added, and smiled.

  “Come back to bed,” she said, and rolled onto her side. “For a while at least.”

  He put his hand on her side, felt her warmth through the sheets. “Maybe in a bit,” he said, then turned and walked toward the door. “You want the light out?” he asked.

  “Please.”

  He switched it off, left the door open a crack, and crossed the living area, the artfully matched rugs and sofa. It was a four-thousand-dollar-a-month furnished apartment that Blakely leased through one of his dark-money groups—off the radar, discreet.

  Ali worked for David’s political operation. She was on the payroll as an event manager, but she didn’t do much party planning.

  That was the beauty of keeping things like this within David’s realm. He would make sure they stayed hidden. And with what he already knew about Sam, what was one more secret?

  Sam’s wife was down in Richmond, taking care of her mother. That was the official story, but she was sick of DC, the same faces, the same parties. She didn’t like how Sam seemed to retreat into a persona as he prepared for his candidacy, how he wore the mask all the time now, even with her. They still loved each other, but not as they once had. The children were grown. It was a partnership now.

  He walked toward the window. The blinds were down, showing only a sliver of the view down the street: the old Carnegie Library in the distance, a Beaux-Arts gem that had been turned into an Apple Store.

  His mind went back to the image of Ali’s still form, of her lying in that bed.

  The election. The scrutiny. Ali was worried about him. She could see the strain he was under, the sins weighing on him, pressing down so hard he felt like he couldn’t breathe. It was too much.

  He put his hand to the molding beside the window and closed his eyes.

  A woman lying still.

  He was back in that country house that Fourth of July.

  48

  That night followed Sam like a shadow for the rest of his life. The sick joke was that he could barely remember it. The party was held at the Whitleys’ place on the Eastern Shore, more like a resort than a second home, a ten-acre estate with a main compound and two guesthouses, hidden on its own neck jutting out into the Chesapeake.

  Fourth of July at the Whitleys’ had been happening ever since they were in high school. It was an institution, and a drinking game called boat races was the main tradition. A hundred of Washington’s best and brightest would line up on both sides of a long row of folding tables. They would start at one end with a toast. The facing players would have to chug from their cups, then flip them over with one finger before the next person could go, a race all the way down the line.

  Everyone was bleary. That night Sam was twenty-five, out of law school and working a job on the Hill, but he could have been seventeen again, back in the glory days. The party hadn’t changed. Roman candles fired off the end of the dock and at some point, John Carroll would always end up on the second-floor balcony in his American flag trunks and make the suicide leap to the pool.

  Sam’s friends just wanted to get hammered, catch up and smoke cigars by the water, but Sam spent half the night talking to a young woman, Catherine Wilson, after she was posted across from him while they flipped cups. She beat him every time.

  She was still in college, Princeton premed, and had gone to National Cathedral across from St. Albans, though she was five years behind him. She was quiet, more so as the party got rowdier, though her laugh would come out suddenly, loud and unguarded.

  Then Sam’s old lacrosse friends called him over for a photo by the dock. Someone passed him a bottle of Haitian rum as a jangling Tom Petty guitar line blasted from the speakers. Catherine slipped away, and he lost track of time by the water.

  He saw her go inside, later on, but by then Sam was feeling the liquor, and the night had sped up in his memories, the images strangely all black and white, jerky and incomplete, some moments missing and some suddenly clear, like a silent movie getting tangled in the projector’s reels.

  He saw her upstairs through a window, the blinds going down, the light going off. Bailing early. Premed. Lightweight. Sam’s best prospect bowing out. More than that. He liked her.

  He remembered going into the guesthouse later, lying on the couch, and then leaving, moving like a sleepwalker, his brain so clouded, at the edge of a blackout, his appetites running the show, prowling for more trouble, another bottle, someone up.

  He was back in the main house, upstairs, his hand running over the floral-print wallpaper to keep himself upright. It seemed to breathe under his fingertips. He was in that room at the end of the hall where Catherine slept, her face so perfect in the faint silver light filtering through the blinds. He climbed into the bed, felt the curve of her body, the beautiful S, against him.

  Then everything was in motion, who knows how long after he got in beside her. She was sitting up, her hands on him. She was pushing herself backward to get away, moving toward the edge of the bed, falling, hitting the nightstand, the floor.

  He was on top of her, trying to keep her quiet. A low strange sound came from the back of her throat. He must have been afraid it would draw attention. Though maybe he was so far gone he was still trying to make it with her, a notion so shameful he would always shove it back as soon as it surfaced. His body weighed down on her chest, and his hand was over her mouth, lightly, so lightly, for how long he didn’t know.

  She was silent, still.

  He raised himself on one arm.

  “Cathy?” he said. She didn’t answer. “Catherine?” Nothing had really happened, nothing unforgivable. That’s what he thought at that moment. He’d been too drunk to go that far.

  She wasn’t moving. “Hey,”
he said, and ran his hand over her hair, then felt a sting of pain in his finger. He reached up and turned on the light, and saw the fine china shards on the floor, a dish that had been knocked off the nightstand’s green marble top.

  He’d nicked his finger, just barely bleeding, but as he looked down, he saw the red streaked across her cheek and lips. A few shards had scratched her neck.

  He thought he might be sick but choked it back. He watched her chest, willing it to move. Reeling away, he looked to the door, then back. He was too fucking plastered to do anything but hurt her. He took a step into the hall, looking for help, or for an escape—he didn’t know. There was no one.

  He was trapped in this room with this girl with no breath. In that instant, even with his mind a black fog, he understood his life was over. Everything that had been handed to him, the money, the opportunities, the friends, the jobs—it was gone. He would be a disgrace, a stain on the family. His father was right, had been right about him his whole life. He wasn’t worthy of the name. Born on third base and too soft to make it home.

  He turned back into the room, his hands shaking, his own breath coming too fast, too shallow.

  A voice came from behind him. “Sam, are you all right?”

  David Blakely stood in the doorway. He saw everything: her body, her face. He would know, tell someone, tell the police.

  “Sam?”

  “I fucked up, David,” he said, and held out his hands, one palm painted red. “I need your help.”

  David was calm. “Sam. I want you to go out to the guesthouse and go to bed.”

  “But what about—”

  “Sam.” David put his hands on his shoulders. “This is your whole life, this moment. I know you’re drunk but you need to listen to me. Go down the hall, go out the back, go to bed. I will take care of this.”