Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

  “David, I didn’t mean—”

  “Sam, go.”

  He left David in that room. They never talked about what he did. Sam had always mocked David behind his back, the Jersey boy, so hungry to be a part of this world, his dad some kind of construction baron who was always talking about what things cost at the parents’ weekends. But in that room David Blakely risked everything for him.

  Sam didn’t know what kind of fucked-up world David came from that had taught him how to navigate a nightmare like that. But he was grateful.

  In the morning one of the Whitley sisters found Catherine’s body. No trace of Sam’s blood remained, but there was a near-empty bottle of Stolichnaya on the floor. The scene in the bedroom told a story: a girl trying to keep up, drinking too much, passing out. Some combination of the blow to her head as she fell and the high blood alcohol fatally depressed her breathing and heart rate. It all looked like an accident.

  Sam still spent the next six months waiting for the police to come for him, the knock on the door, the call that never came.

  But Catherine’s death was handled quietly. It was an embarrassment to her family. They knew the Whitleys. The Whitleys knew the local police. It was all done with tact, a cursory investigation and a sealed file. No one wanted a tox screen, to even open the possibility that drugs were involved, though they had been all over that party. Half of elite Washington had kids at that house and knew how a scandal could ruin lives forever, even the taint of it, even mere proximity.

  It was a tragedy, and not the kind that makes for a moving speech. The families drew a curtain around it, and Catherine Wilson was snipped out of the story.

  Even Sam let himself believe the official version, let the truth crumble like an old reel of film on a shelf. David Blakely never spoke of it. It had never happened, just faded into nothing with the rest of Washington’s secrets.

  But someone had seen him. Emma Blair. He didn’t even remember her there, but she must have watched him go upstairs, or seen him go into the room or step out in those desperate moments after Catherine stopped breathing.

  Emma had kept what she saw to herself all of these years. What changed? Did she watch Sam’s face on the news as the early speculation about the presidential campaign picked up? Could she not stomach seeing the man from that night in the highest office? A month ago, she had begun asking questions, looking for corroboration, building her case. She was going to talk. So David Blakely had helped Sam once again.

  The truth had been buried for twenty-five years, but it was worming into the light. Nick Averose was still out there. Half of the FBI Washington Field Office was digging into Widener’s murder.

  The past was coming for him now.

  He didn’t deserve the Senate, the presidency. He didn’t deserve his life. He had taken that young woman’s.

  He hadn’t spoken her name since that night.

  “Catherine,” he said.

  49

  Ali slid out of the sheets and crossed the bedroom to the chair where Sam had left his jacket. She found his phone and took it out. She already knew his PIN. People tended to underestimate her because of her looks, to lower their guard, but she was always watching. David Blakely had taught her the value of information.

  She unlocked Sam’s cell and started scrolling through his calls, his emails, remembering the names, everyone he was talking to.

  She put the phone back and moved toward the door, stopping a few feet shy, avoiding the dagger of light shining in from the living area.

  She watched Sam, caught the haunted look he had now, the one he wore when he thought he was alone.

  50

  Nick gave up on pretending to sleep and pressed the lever to bring the driver’s seat upright. It was predawn on Saturday in the Walmart parking lot, reds and blues painting the clouds like the sky in a Titian.

  He gathered the Clif Bar wrappers, apple core, and banana peel from the car, then walked toward the trash can, twisting from side to side to work out the knots in his back.

  The promise of sun and the sharp air lifted his spirits. As he tossed the garbage, he saw a newspaper in the bin.

  “Few Answers in Death of Former CIA Director.” He reached in and lifted it a few inches. There was no new information, no mention of his name.

  “Hey.”

  He spun. His car-camping preacher stood twelve feet to his left, hands clasped gently in front of him. Nick was ready for the beg, for the come-to-Jesus.

  “Do you need something to eat?”

  The question stunned Nick for an instant, then he looked to the trash can he had just reached into, and it made perfect sense.

  “No, thank you. I’m fine.” He gave the man an appreciative dip of the head and started back to Delia’s car.

  “God bless you.”

  “You too,” he said. He was going to need it.

  He checked his phone in the car to make sure his face wasn’t all over the news. The other papers didn’t have any more substantive information about Widener’s killing. Law enforcement must have been keeping a lid on it. A CIA director dead under suspicious circumstances would have the cranks swarming.

  He started the car, but before he could pull out, his phone rang.

  “Jeff,” he answered. “Is it still on?”

  “Yeah. Now, if we can make it.”

  “Where?”

  “His house.” Jeff read out the address.

  “I’ll be there in thirty,” Nick said.

  “I’ll meet you out front.”

  51

  Nick rolled through a neighborhood of plane trees and pines. He could tell the houses were out of his price range because none of them could be seen from the street. About half of the driveways had gates and call boxes.

  As he made the last turn, he saw Jeff’s Range Rover and parked across the street. Jeff gestured to the passenger side. Nick walked around and climbed in.

  Jeff slapped him on the knee. “You ready? I have the gate code.”

  “Can we trust this guy?” Nick asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s super connected politically. Did you ever hear of him working with Sam MacDonough?”

  Jeff frowned, concentrating as he considered it. “The senator? Did you trace it to him?”

  “I think so.”

  “What do you have?”

  “A lot is circumstantial, but it’s enough to paint a picture. I have some dark-money movements, LLCs within LLCs.”

  Jeff nodded and looked out the window to his left. He breathed out through pursed lips. “I hope that’s not who we’re up against here,” he said as he turned back. “MacDonough didn’t send him our way, that’s for sure. I chased Ellsbury down. I had to beg him to get this meeting. And he doesn’t even know who you are. But if you’re feeling off, we don’t have to do it.”

  Nick peered at the hedges, trying to get a glimpse of the house. “What do you think?”

  “I say talk to him. Start working this the right way. But it’s your call.”

  Jeff’s eyes narrowed and he looked past Nick out the window.

  Nick turned his head. “What is it?” he asked, examining the hedges, the long shadows cast by the rising sun.

  “Nothing.”

  He turned back to Jeff. Suddenly, he saw a small aluminum canister with a spray top aimed straight at his face, inches away, held in Jeff’s hand. Nick flinched back with a sharp inhale of breath. It felt strangely cold in his lungs, like gas escaping under pressure.

  “What the hunnhh . . .” The last word froze in his mouth as Jeff’s hands moved toward his chest, bracing him against the seat like a protective parent. Nick went to throw the other man’s hands off, but his arms barely moved, hung like wet rope from his shoulders.

  He wanted to shout, but his mind was trapped inside a dead body, like he’d been caught in some hypnotist’s trick. Jeff’s face filled his entire field of view, eyes looking deep into his own, checking them like a doctor. Then it split in
two as Nick’s vision doubled, and drew back, at the end of a long tunnel, a diffracted star, a pinpoint in the black, and then nothing.

  52

  David Blakely walked down the aisle of the Gulfstream. A man emerged from the stateroom at the far end of the jet wearing a Henley shirt and a pair of black jeans. This was Alan Ambler, heir to a media fortune, chair of the party’s finance committee, and David’s most important ally in locking down the nomination for Sam MacDonough. He was the ringleader in the money primary. David’s day was stacked, so he was meeting Ambler here early, parked on the tarmac outside the private jet hangar at Reagan National Airport.

  Through the open stateroom door, David caught a glimpse of a woman reclining in a lounge chair, beautiful enough to make the breath catch, something vaguely catlike about the corners of her eyes and her retroussé lips and the way she perched as she flicked through some endless loop on her phone.

  It wasn’t Ambler’s wife or his daughter. David didn’t judge. He had protected him on that front before, and it was proving helpful now as Ambler rounded up the other donors for Sam’s candidacy.

  Ambler moved with loose-limbed ease as he walked between the white leather chairs. He sat and took a Vitaminwater from the flight attendant before she returned to the galley.

  “How was Miami?” David asked.

  “Debauched,” Ambler said. He tilted the bottle back and drank the entire thing in one go. “All the other donors are happy. It was seamless.”

  “How close are you to bringing everyone around to a decision?”

  “I think I can get them tonight. The others wanted to know how much skin you’re willing to put in the game. What’s the maximum you’d be willing to contribute for Sam’s presidential run, primary and general? I need your real ceiling. What’s he worth to you?”

  “I can go one hundred.”

  A smile pulled at Ambler’s tanned, too-tight skin. A hundred million would be a record. That amount had been pledged to a campaign once before, in 2016, though that donor ultimately gave only twenty-five.

  “Is that just to leak to the press, or would you really go that high?”

  “All of it,” David said. A hundred million was still only a tenth of what a presidential campaign would cost. David needed the whole party behind Sam, the endorsements, the data machine, the delegates, and the infrastructure in the primary states. But with David willing to prime the pump this much, the other donors would realize that the smart move was to bet with him.

  “Why are you so invested in him?”

  “I don’t need to give you the speech again. Bottom line: we go back, and he’s our best shot at the White House. You saw the polling. He’s won every election he’s ever contested by a landslide.”

  “I know,” Ambler said, leaning in a little closer. “How do you do it? Win with the margins you guys put up? I mean, every other candidate you and Sam throw your support behind ends up on top. You never lose.”

  “We have a good model.”

  “Everyone has a good model. What’s the magic sauce?”

  “You get your people to go in on Sam and I’ll share it with the whole party.”

  Success brought scrutiny, and David was ready. He had a whole script. He would talk about psychographics and data mining and social media targeting, going on and on with some TED talk bullshit about exploiting the deep psychology of voters.

  In truth, David was at the absolute frontier of all the dark, but legal, political arts: suppressing votes, spreading dirt on opponents, pouring dark money into statehouses and judicial campaigns to tilt the battlefield in your favor, redrawing districts, packing and cracking them.

  But winning sometimes required him to go further. It meant getting inside the opposition’s networks, stealing their polling, sending out spies like Ali Waldron. At the extreme it meant making someone disappear.

  All of that didn’t make for a particularly rousing after-dinner speech at a fund-raiser, though. Why was David so invested in Sam? Because he owned him 100 percent. David wasn’t proud of what he had done that Fourth of July, but he was proud of what he had done with it since. Covering for Sam then and now was a massive risk, and he would do anything it took to protect that investment.

  David had kept evidence from the night Catherine Wilson died, evidence that would condemn Sam MacDonough. He had never had to use it. He had never thought he would. Sam knew what he knew. It went unsaid. If David Blakely got this done, he would have power over the most powerful man in the world. Sam would be in charge of the FBI and the Department of Justice. They would be untouchable.

  “Come on,” Ambler said, and swatted David’s shoulder with the empty bottle. “What’s the secret?”

  David leaned in and waited a beat to up the suspense. “Shitloads of money,” he said.

  Ambler grinned and sat back. “Fair enough. The other candidates are making moves, but that breakthrough on the spending deal will help him. We need to get him out front. I’m talking to the rest of the donors today. And I’ll need to meet Sam one more time, a look-him-in-the-eyes thing.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Tonight’s great. And he’ll be ready to announce?”

  “Any moment. He has all the key staff lined up.”

  “There’s nothing else to worry about here? No problems?”

  “None,” David said.

  “Good. If we can get him out first, he’ll be unstoppable, but we should move today.”

  “What’s your gut?”

  “With the way he’s tracking, I’ll just say I have a good feeling about it.”

  David put his hand on Ambler’s shoulder, gave it a squeeze. “That’s my man. The White House is only the beginning.”

  Twenty minutes later, David was walking away from the hangar, back to his Audi.

  Tonight. He needed everyone who knew the truth taken care of by tonight, and now he had Nick Averose under control.

  53

  Strange dreams took hold of Nick. Fireworks blooming across the sky over the Mall, lighting up the worn stones of the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It was a memory from ten years ago, Fourth of July. He and Emma had biked down the Virginia side of the Potomac and found an empty spot beside a grove of oaks where they could lay out a blanket and see the show.

  He remembered watching the exploding lights shine across her face, her eyes wide and, for a moment at least, untroubled.

  In the dream he looked at the fireworks overhead, like burning willows, and then back to her. She was crying, and suddenly she was gone, and a sick feeling overwhelmed him.

  The vision dissolved. Reality pushed in, the hiss of gas, the dull ache in the center of his forehead.

  A figure passed in front of Nick, but he couldn’t see clearly. Everything was blurred, slowly coming back into focus.

  Voices to his left. What looked like a fireplace ahead. There was a mattress on the floor. He was inside a house. Something was on his face, covering his nose and mouth. The rush of a ventilator. The rhythmic ping of a heart monitor.

  He was seated at a table. His wallet lay on it, alongside two books, a gun—his gun—and a photo: Emma looking over her shoulder, wearing her beat-up Orioles cap and smiling.

  His wrists were bound to the arms of the chair with duct tape over towels. It was nothing, yet he could barely move. The monitor was clipped to the tip of his finger.

  A hand emerged and placed an orange pill bottle on the table, then tipped it over. White tablets skittered across the surface.

  “Those restraints won’t mark him up?” It was Jeff’s voice.

  “Not with the sedative.”

  Nick looked down at the strange breathing apparatus over his mouth and nose. It reminded him of something he had seen at the dentist.

  A man stepped into view, preparing something on a stainless-steel tray. A scar showed on his neck, running out from under the collar of his shirt.

  He seemed so familiar, South Asian or from the Gulf, Nick guessed, about six-one and bu
ilt like a bricklayer.

  Nick’s eyes went back to the titles of the books. Cicero. De Officiis. Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates.

  Tyrannicide. Suicide. The drugs left his thoughts murky and disordered, but he forced himself to focus, to understand. Those were fit subjects for a madman who had just killed the former CIA director. They were staging his death, making it look like this was where he was hiding out. He hadn’t been meant to survive on that first night.

  The beeping picked up. His own heartbeat echoed through the room.

  “Gray, he’s awake.”

  Jeff crouched over him. He wore surgeon’s gloves.

  Why was the other man calling Jeff by the name Gray? Nick’s mind moved slowly. Gray. It was Jeff’s alias. Jeff was working with the killers. He was one of them. “Jeff,” he whispered. “What are you doing?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “What happened to you?”

  Jeff picked the gun up off the table and checked the brass.

  He stood in front of Nick and looked into his eyes. “You get used to anything,” he said.

  He sealed his lips together and turned to the side. “Singh, let’s get this over with.”

  The other man slit the tape with a scalpel—a disposable blade in a plastic handle—and Jeff put the gun in Nick’s hand.

  Nick’s heart rate jacked up, and the monitor screamed through the room like a fire alarm. He tried to push back, but he was so weak. Jeff’s hand guided his own, as if he were teaching him: the finger through the trigger guard, the barrel swinging up. The muzzle of the gun flashed at the edge of his vision and pressed in, tenting up the skin under his jaw, pulsing against his carotid.

  His heartbeats merged into a continuous cry.

  54

  Another sound filtered into the room: sirens, getting louder and louder. The gun pulled back from Nick’s throat.

  “What the fuck is that?” the other man asked. Jeff had called him Singh.