Hour of the Assassin

by Matthew Quirk

  “Did you talk to anyone? The FBI? Justice? Any lawyers?”

  Sam cleared his throat. “No, this was just for me. I wanted insurance.”

  David bounced the recorder in his palm. This clearly was no professional job, no FBI wire. “I like you trying to soften me up with the nostalgia. That was good. Who have you talked to about what’s going on?”

  “No one.”

  “And what? You get some evidence, and then you look for a bigger fixer? Some crisis lawyer? Lanny Davis? Randy Mastro? You put it on me and say I freelanced the whole thing?”

  “I haven’t said a word. I was taking precautions.”

  David tapped the recorder against his palm like it was a pack of cigarettes. “I understand, you know. You thinking you can throw me under the bus. That’s DC. That’s logical. But since you decided to take the gloves off, let me tell you that it will never work.

  “You have blood on your hands, Sam. I saw it. I cleaned it off the floor of that fucking room. We are in this together. We live or die together. All right?”

  This was what Sam feared, what consumed him as he stared at the ceiling in the early morning dark.

  Sam and David had gone for decades without the full terms of their arrangement ever being spelled out, an unspoken pact.

  David was always out there, working on his behalf without even being asked. Everything always seemed to turn in Sam’s favor. A golden boy. He never wanted to probe too deeply into what David did for him, in order to insulate himself, but also because he never wanted to face this fact. David had evidence of what had happened that night.

  That was why he’d invested so much in Sam’s rise. Because he’d owned him ever since that Fourth of July. Now he could use Sam to turn the executive branch into his own personal criminal enterprise if he wanted.

  “What do you have on me?”

  “Everything. But that route doesn’t end well for anyone. That’s not what’s happening here. I’m not leveraging you. I’m protecting you.”

  “You can drop the good-friend shit. I know what this is.”

  “I can understand why you would feel desperate after what Averose did to you. We’re almost through this, Sam. You may not see it. But this”—he raised the recorder—“is how everything falls apart. Nixon was getting away with it. He won in a landslide in 1972. He would have been fine except for the paranoia and the panic and the tapes. Always the fucking tapes. Look at everything the Kennedys got away with, and now they’re saints. No one wants a scandal. This city heals itself. Everyone knows not to go digging because everyone has something buried. You are within hours of having the party behind you. The whole machine—the money, all the officials, the real power—will have your back.”

  Sam took a few steps along the platform. “But Averose is out there. And Ali Waldron. She knows way too much and now she’s working with him.”

  “I have that under control now.”

  “How?”

  “So far we’ve been measured.” He raised his shoulders. “But the clock is ticking. There is a way to get our arms around this tonight, before we close with the donors, and before you announce.”

  “I want to know what you’re going to do.”

  “We need to get a little rougher,” David said.

  Sam kneaded the bones of his right hand with the fingers of his left.

  David held up the recorder. “I like this hardball shit, Sam. I like that you’re ready to do what it takes.

  “Forget optics and insurance, okay? This man is trying to fucking kill you. This is what he does. He gets to people. We need to get you someplace safe, out of the city, someplace he can’t touch you. We meet with Ambler there. Everything stays on track.”

  “And Averose?”

  “Once we’re protected, my man makes this all go away. All of it. We go to war.”

  Sam looked at him and felt strangely calm. David had proof. David could destroy him. What Sam had feared for twenty-five years had finally been spoken aloud. There was relief in knowing at last, so clearly, that he had no choice.

  73

  Sancerre. It was a French wine, but for Nick and Karen it could only mean one place: the hidden stream valley of Dumbarton Oaks Park, where they had gone on their first night together.

  He walked down a dirt road with an old stone wall rising high to his left. The sun was down, the last traces of blue gone from the sky. He was in the heart of Georgetown, a neighborhood of centuries-old town houses, Middle Eastern money, and establishment families, of endless crowds buzzing the luxury shops of M Street, and yet here, only a short walk from the main drag, it all fell away in silence.

  A family that combined a political dynasty and a patent-medicine fortune had built up the Dumbarton Oaks estate, once home to Vice President John C. Calhoun, into a little paradise of gardens and a world-class Byzantine art collection, all now run as a museum and research library by Harvard. The valley behind the Oaks, a pastoral landscape of small waterfalls and pools, had ended up in the hands of the Park Service, mostly forgotten and open to all—if they could find it.

  The entrance was at the end of an old lovers’ lane, a dirt road, all so out of place in the middle of DC’s congestion.

  He walked along the gravel. A white sign hung from a post outside the Dumbarton Oaks Park entrance. The park was closed, but he pushed apart the gates, the chain rattling as he squeezed through and entered. The trees arched overhead like a cathedral.

  They had left Ali’s car in the neighborhood, the closest spot they could find, and Delia and Ali were acting as lookouts at the foot trails leading into the park. A cheap pair of earbuds hung from his right ear, hooked up to his phone so he could stay in communication with them.

  He moved deliberately, gliding through the shadows in silence and listening for Karen, or an ambush.

  They’d come here on their first date, though this place was the last thing he’d expected that night. He had first met her through a friend of Emma’s he used to play softball with and would run into her on the political scene in DC: she with her husband, Nick with a gun, guarding. She was always friendly to everyone, with none of that attitude a lot of VIPs had, where anyone on the payroll was treated like a servant and anyone who wasn’t in a position to do them a favor may as well have been invisible.

  Years after her husband died, Nick had run into her again at the Safeway on Wisconsin Avenue. Many of the Safeways in DC had a joke nickname that locals used, and this Georgetown outpost was known, true to form, as the Social Safeway. They ended up talking for fifteen minutes in the produce aisle, and he finally screwed up his nerve to ask her out.

  He wanted to impress her, so he made a reservation at Citronelle, the best spot in Georgetown at the time. While they had a drink at the bar, waiting for their table to open up, she looked around the room. To Nick the place was a well-earned luxury, but he later understood what it must have looked like to her: full of loud, laughing lobbyists with their personal reserves of wine, and well-cured Washingtonians in their bow ties and pearls looking as if a new century hadn’t started and Perle Mesta might pop over for dessert.

  “Can we go?” she asked, and Nick started trying to figure out how he had managed to screw up the date that quickly.

  “Sure. Is everything okay?”

  “It’s fine. I just—” A cackle as a man in a collarless shirt insisted the sommelier try his wine. “I could use some air.”

  Nick put down cash for the drinks, and they stepped out.

  “Sorry,” she said as they went down the sidewalk. “That just felt a little stuffy. I grew up here. Sometimes you see those characters, the look-at-me power stuff, and it kills me. I deal with them for work nonstop. You probably think I’m crazy, but can we just walk?”

  “Of course,” he said, relieved, actually. He’d spent more than enough time in Washington power lairs like that, though usually he was standing by the wall, on guard and going hungry.

  He and Karen walked north. Georgetown still had a few head sh
ops and fake-ID places and thrift stores back then.

  She pointed out a modern cinder-block house, standing out against the Georgian and Federal mansions. “Joseph Alsop’s. You know, Kennedy, the night of his inauguration, is at the White House, a little buzzed, and Jackie goes to sleep, and he’s in that huge house all alone, and he just walks out, comes up here, and knocks on his friend’s door, looking for a drink and a bite to eat.”

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s how I heard it,” Karen said. She always went with the most colorful version of an anecdote. “Sometimes you just want to drop all the pretense and raise a glass, you know?”

  They went into a wine and liquor store, where she said she used to come with her fake ID and buy cheap beer for her and her friends from National Cathedral before they went to hang out after school.

  But tonight, she picked out a bottle of Sancerre from the fridge. “Trust me on this one, okay?”

  He bought it, and a couple of plastic cups. They walked down this dirt road, and sat on the stone footbridge over the stream, and he poured them each a glass.

  He remembered how the wine tasted, like a summer picnic that had stretched out lazily until the sun went down and the sky turned red. They sat like that, talking until midnight, when a flashlight came down the trail from the Wisconsin Avenue side, some poor guard, and they ran off like two kids who had just ding-dong-ditched a house, trying not to laugh, her hand in his as they cut through the trees.

  74

  Nick walked through the empty park. He heard movement to his right and stood still, searched the darkness. Two eyes flashed toward him like glowing coins.

  A raccoon. It ran past him and disappeared in the undergrowth. He watched where it had come from, trying to find out if something had spooked it. There was no sign.

  He went to the intersection of the trails that led into the park, his best vantage. High fences and walls surrounded most of the park, separating it from the museums and embassies all around.

  A soft ring emerged from his headset. He had barely placed it in his ear so he could hear his surroundings better. He clicked the button on the cable to answer the call.

  “I talked to Ali a second ago,” Delia said. “We’re clear.”

  “Good. Hang tight.”

  His nerves turned every rustle of wind into someone approaching. He held his pistol by his thigh and watched the trail behind him, shifted his weight from one foot to the other, tried to keep at bay the worst of his imagination: that they had taken Karen, too.

  In the distance, a figure seemed to materialize out of the dark. The moon was the only light in the park. Karen came into the far end of the clearing.

  He started toward her. She took three more steps and stopped, but he kept approaching. She looked devastated, and he hated himself for bringing this threat down on her.

  Her eyes went to his right, to the darkness. He looked, and heard footsteps coming through the leaves in that direction. His phone rang in his ear—he was so focused it barely registered, but he clicked the mic button. Delia spoke as he scanned the woods.

  “There are men heading for you, Nick. Down a side path, the way you went in. I don’t know where they came from. You need to get out of there.”

  “Karen,” Nick called, and waved her toward him as he raised the gun. “We need to go.”

  Her face changed. There was no panic or shock. She already knew that someone else was there. And even as he grasped what was happening, he couldn’t overcome the instinct to protect her.

  “Karen, come on!” She stepped back, three paces, without turning away, her face stricken with an awful blend of pain and guilt and pity.

  “Get out, Nick!” Delia said.

  His hand was still held out to his wife. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed, and stepped back into the dark. He let his arm drop as he heard the men moving toward him from both sides, then he turned and ran.

  75

  Nick sprinted along the path, then stopped, leaning back hard to check his momentum. They would expect him to run. They would be waiting, would sweep toward him, close in on all sides.

  He needed to do what they wouldn’t expect. He slipped silently to his right, where almost no light fell, toward a tree growing over the stream, just beside the footbridge where he and Karen had sat that first night.

  They were doing a careful search, closing in on him. He didn’t know how many of them there were; at least four from the sound of it. He needed stealth for the moment, needed to stay out of sight until they passed, to get behind them so he could get away or take them silently one at a time.

  He stepped into the water, so cold it burned, then waded in as flashlight beams moved through the park, flickering between the trees. His phone was on silent, and he tucked it out of sight on one of the stones under the bridge.

  He lowered himself into the stream down to his waist, felt the water soak into his clothes, his skin and muscles tensing against the chill, heels slipping into the muck of the streambed.

  He crawled back, under the bridge. The light shot across the surface as the sound of men running grew louder. The beam came around the bridge, to where he was crouched. He lay back, took a long breath, and sank his head below the water.

  Boots pounded the earth. Voices above. Below the surface they sounded like murmurs. The light flashed by, warm red through his closed eyelids, and then black again. He waited, lungs squeezing, air running out as his heart raced. Each beat boomed like a kettledrum in his submerged ears.

  He brought his face closer to the surface, and the light returned. He sank down.

  Hold. Calm. Hold.

  The darkness returned, and he risked a breath, brought his face above the water and filled his lungs.

  Thump . . . thump.

  One man on the footbridge overhead, pacing slow. Nick rose, his wet clothes weighing him down. All he wanted to do was move, act, rush, but he forced himself to go inch by inch, to stay silent. He felt for the underside of the span and twisted his head to get a glimpse of the man above.

  He was facing the other way, holding a pistol fitted with a suppressor. He halted. The light shone into the water on the far side, then turned Nick’s way.

  Nick came from under the bridge, snatched him by the legs, and hauled him to the side. The man dropped hard, striking the stones with the sound of a well-hit line drive.

  The flashlight fell, cast a half circle along the path and through the trees as it rolled to a stop. Nick stepped onto the bridge as the man rose on one knee.

  Nick punched him in the jaw, twisting his head to the left. He sprawled unconscious on his stomach.

  Nick grabbed the pistol from his hand, then killed the light.

  Had the others heard? They must have seen the light. He jumped down to the side of the stream and retrieved his phone. The lights were deeper in the park now. He had made it behind them and might have a path to the exit.

  He cut through the woods, closer to the museum fence line, with its brick walls and wrought iron gates. The flashlights turned his way, but he was far from them now, hard to spot in the brush. He ran, the air freezing against his damp skin, back to the gate where he had entered and the dirt road.

  The gate was too obvious an exit, so he slipped along the fence toward a neglected corner of the park thick with undergrowth. He ran hard at the wall, jumped, and planted his foot against the brick, getting his hands up over the top, his palms grinding into the old stones. He pushed himself up, stayed low, and dropped toward the sloping dirt on the far side.

  He ran back to the street and saw the glow of a dome light down the block: someone getting into an SUV. He stayed close to a brick wall and ran toward it, a Chevy Suburban. He could make out Jeff’s profile through the back window. Karen sat next to him.

  He kept the gun at a low ready as he closed in, fifty feet away. She held her hand out and placed it on Jeff’s shoulder. A few words passed. No fear. No threat.

  Nick ran as the truck pulled out, a hundred feet of
f now. There was no way to shoot through the glass at this distance without being as likely to hit her as Jeff. The red glow of the truck’s taillights disappeared over the hill.

  If he had been trying to find some way not to believe what he had seen in the park, to not believe that she had betrayed him, there was no hope now. It left him in shock, as numb as his fingers.

  76

  Delia was calling. He put the headset in his ear and answered.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, her breath rapid, the words clipped.

  “I made it out. Where are you?”

  “On the move. R Street. They got Ali.”

  “What?”

  “Two men. I saw them throw her in the back of a car, a black Suburban. She fought them, and god, one of them punched her in the head so hard. She just dropped. It was . . .” Delia cursed under her breath.

  “Did they see you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Go toward the car. I’ll find you.”

  He was already running down the brick sidewalks, the quiet tree-lined streets, sprinting as hard as he could, his lungs burning.

  He raced on, dodging a car as he shot across an intersection, and then saw a woman moving, away from the streetlights. Delia.

  He crossed the street. She turned toward him, her face full of fear, and then a sad relief.

  He led her south toward the car. “Which way did they take Ali?”

  “Toward Wisconsin Avenue. But they have too much of a lead on us now. What happened to Karen?”

  “She . . .” He couldn’t get into it. “What’s the last location you got on Sam MacDonough’s phone?”

  “I just checked it,” Delia said as they crossed the street. “They were heading northwest into Maryland, way out of town.”

  “Ali said David had a country place out there in the mountains. On the way to Camp David somewhere. It’s secluded. It sounded like it could have been where he brought Emma Blair.”