Hour of the Assassin
Page 23
Nick stepped toward it. Ali lay on the floor, staring at the ceiling, chest still. He’d seen it before on the dead, but it was still so strange: the look of peace on her face. Nick’s throat tightened. The floor shook as the guards outside pounded on the main door. He went back to Karen and Delia. They still had a chance.
“Can she walk?”
Karen nodded. “I think they gave her something, a sedative. Is there a way out of here?”
Nick peered outside through the small slit beside the blinds. He saw the lights and the smoke.
“Did all of these guards know that they were keeping you here?”
“Only Jeff and a couple of his men, I think. It seemed like he was hiding me from the regular security. He said they were taking me somewhere for my safety, but by that point I knew it was all wrong. They put me in a suite upstairs and locked me in.”
A boom shook the house. They were trying to break down that door. Nick looked out the window’s edge and saw a small lot behind the pool where two black SUVs were parked.
They were close. There was a way out.
105
Karen pulled open the east door of the guesthouse and walked out, guiding Delia.
A guard stepped toward them. “I’ve got her,” Karen said. “There are more people inside, injured. He’s in there. Upstairs!”
Nick pressed against the wall, just behind the door in the dark anteroom, gun held high by his chest as the lead guard pounded across the marble toward the center of the house.
He slipped around the door after two more men ran in, their attention fixed on the long hall and the bodies lying on the ground.
His arm was in agony with every step, but the cold night air felt like a deliverance. He moved through the shadows toward an access lane, covering Delia and Karen as they approached the black SUVs. He was ready to shoot their way out, but the guards’ first objective was clearing that guesthouse.
Nick had taken the car keys from Jeff’s body and given them to Karen. He scanned the grounds with his pistol as one of the Suburbans roared to life.
Nick came around the passenger side and climbed in. Delia lay in a reclined back seat. Nick pointed to the rear gate.
“There,” Nick said. “Keep the lights off.” Karen drove, gripping the wheel as the car leaped forward.
Nick kept the gun ready as they came closer to the exit. In the mirrors he saw lights converging on the guesthouse. One flashed their way, but the gate was already opening on its automatic sensor.
Karen hit the gas as soon as they could fit through, and they raced into the night.
Nick watched behind them, pointing Karen to the side roads that climbed into the hills surrounding the estate. He felt the pavement give way to gravel.
“Are they coming?” Karen asked as they neared the ridgeline.
Nick traced the narrow roads snaking toward them through the woods. No lights.
“We’re clear.”
He looked into the back. Delia’s eyes opened slowly. He reached with his good arm and took her hand. “There you are,” she said, and smiled in a merciful haze.
They drove on through the trees. A switchback gave them a view of the valley below. Smoke climbed into the air. Red and blue lights flashed through the forest, tracing Oak Hollow Road toward David’s compound. The blasts that Nick had used to get inside were big enough to draw attention for miles. The police were on their way.
The men behind all of this had been so careful with evidence, laying out a perfect story, but that house would offer no easy explanations: David Blakely dead on the ground, Sam MacDonough twenty feet away with gunpowder residue on his hand. He was a senator, a presidential contender. This was too big to go away now. There would be questions, and there would be answers. There was no one left to cover it up.
106
Nick stepped through the door of his office, cradling a five-inch stack of folders under his arm. He dropped them on the table and flexed his elbow, rubbing it with his left hand.
It had been eleven months since Jeff fractured the arm at David Blakely’s estate. Nick had finished all the physical therapy, but the joint still barked at him toward the end of long days when weather was coming in.
He heard Delia’s voice in the back. It sounded like she was finishing a call.
Ahead, light spilled from the meeting room. As he came closer to the door, a chair pushed back. Karen rose, a half smile on her face and a roller bag beside her. Her computer was open on the table.
She walked toward him, and he wrapped his arms around her.
“I thought you were going to be in meetings all day,” he said.
“I dropped the client. Life’s too short.”
“When’s your flight?” Nick asked.
“I have a few hours. I thought we could all get dinner.” She glanced at the stack of folders on the table. “Do you have time?”
Nick looked at the pile, then to her. “Always.”
“Ray’s?” Delia asked, standing in the door to the back hall, coiling a cable. That place was Nick’s favorite, a no-frills Arlington steak joint that carved everything in-house.
Karen nodded.
“Deal,” Nick said. “I’ll drive.”
He locked up the files, then took Karen’s bag as they walked toward the door.
He and Karen were in a good place now, so far from that house, those desperate hours as they fled.
Jeff had manipulated Karen from the beginning. He came to her the day after Malcolm Widener was killed and said he was worried about Nick, that her husband might be having some kind of breakdown and might have been involved in the death. He needed Karen’s help to get Nick into custody safely. Jeff told her he could talk Nick down at the park without anyone getting hurt.
They had framed him so well. Everything she had seen herself and heard from Jeff pointed to Nick as a murderer or a madman. He’d put a gun in a senator’s face and refused to turn himself in, telling Karen not to go to the police, to trust no one but him. He understood why she believed Jeff, his old friend, when he came to her full of false concern.
She and Nick would never fully forgive themselves for what happened that night, even as they found a way to forgive each other.
He’d started reaching out to attorneys the morning after they escaped David Blakely’s house. With Sam and David and Jeff gone, it was finally safe for Nick to come in from the cold.
His lawyer had once been the deputy head of the FBI criminal division and now worked for Williams & Connolly, the DC litigation and defense powerhouse. Nick knew how unlikely his story sounded as he laid it out beginning to end in a glass-walled conference room on the firm’s seventh floor, along with all the evidence and leads he and Delia had tracked down.
It was a high-profile case, and high-risk, but the attorney saw that if he handled it well, he might earn himself a spot in the history books, up there with the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. He arranged for Nick to turn himself in at the federal courthouse in Alexandria and face charges. He talked about making a plea, once. But Nick would only accept the full truth, even if that meant a trial.
Piece by piece, Nick’s account was confirmed as the FBI unfolded what had happened at David Blakely’s country house. The forensics sketched out the disturbing scene—Sam MacDonough killing David Blakely and Jeff Turner shooting Ali Waldron, one of David’s employees who was being held at the compound.
The evidence response team searching David’s property eventually found a safe, and in it the insurance policy that David Blakely had kept for so long: a torn piece of fabric stained with the blood of both Catherine Wilson and Sam MacDonough. It was proof that something dark had happened on that Fourth of July twenty-five years ago.
They’d dropped the case against Nick by the end of summer. Now he was a key witness in the congressional investigations into Malcolm Widener’s murder and the other crimes that David Blakely had committed as he paved the way for Sam MacDonough to take the presidency.
Every so often
a scandal breaks that is so brazen the whole town can turn against it, let it draw attention away from the everyday graft. Lawmakers were desperate to control the damage and show they were on the side of sunlight as the affair took over every front page and went wall-to-wall on cable news.
Men who a few months before had rubbed shoulders with David and Sam now pointed their fingers and read out somber statements to the press. It was easy enough. Sam and David were dead. They had no more favors to give or secrets to trade.
A bill was working its way through Congress to clean up dark money and campaign finance. They were piecemeal measures, not nearly adequate, though still more than Nick had expected.
He didn’t know how deep the investigations would go, how far they would extend beyond Sam and David to others who had benefited from their tactics. The politicians and appointees might try to tell only half the story, to let those two carry the sins of the whole town.
That was the only good to come from all the bloodshed at David’s country house—Sam and David had already paid for what they’d done. Their crimes had come to an end. Nick didn’t have to count on Washington to bring justice. If they had survived, all of this might have been kept hidden forever.
Still, he wasn’t going to stop until everyone who’d played a part in David’s political machine was exposed, until Emma Blair’s and Catherine Wilson’s stories were brought into the light.
The truth rarely came as a revelation from on high, changing everything in one bolt. Nick knew that the truth was a long battle, an up-before-dawn daily grind. He was glad to play his part, to join all the others who got up every morning, fought traffic and crammed into Metro cars, trying to do something decent in this city in spite of it all.
Nick had already started handling different kinds of jobs at his shop. He’d spent so much time whiteboarding and drinking bad coffee with congressional investigators, FBI agents, and assistant US attorneys that it only seemed natural to volunteer his help after he was cleared. He began advising them on witness protection, cold cases, and public integrity investigations, using his talent for getting inside the head of an adversary and the law enforcement training from his Secret Service days. He’d always been more of an ops guy, more bullet catcher than investigator, but something had changed in him that night between the hospital and David Blakely’s country house.
Karen let a lot of clients go and started focusing more on nonprofits and foundations. She encouraged Nick, as he went back to the law, to help find people who had gone missing and with crimes that had never been solved. Between the FBI and state and local police, there were thousands of them, reports filling archives and basements around DC and in Quantico, cabinets stacked with case file after case file. Every one might hold a hidden truth, a story that needed to be told.
At Ray’s, they talked long after the plates were cleared. Karen had helped Delia through her recovery, and now the three of them would gather for dinner every Sunday, so close after all they had been through, family in all but name.
They dropped Karen off at the airport for her overnight trip. Nick carried her bag onto the sidewalk and then held his wife for a long time, at peace amid the passengers and planes and cars rushing by.
A light rain started falling as Nick and Delia drove back to the office and went inside. He sat at his desk, unlocked his drawer, and took out the files. Delia came in a few minutes later and put a cup of coffee down beside his laptop.
“I figured you’d be going late.”
“Thanks.”
She clapped him on the shoulder and stepped out.
The streets were quiet now, a cold night in Washington. Nick pulled up his chair and got to work.
Acknowledgments
My profound gratitude goes out to my editor, David Highfill, whose insights absolutely transformed this novel, and to Dan Conaway, my agent, for his guidance, humor, and the extraordinary care he takes with his authors. Thank you to the incredible team at William Morrow and HarperCollins—Liate Stehlik, Tessa James, Kaitlin Harri, Andy LeCount, Rachel Weinick, Joe Jasko, and so many more—for all their support, and to Aja Pollock for copy editing the manuscript. Eliza Rosenberry works wonders in spreading the word about these books.
Thanks to Julian Sanchez, Matt Yglesias, and Tom Lee for the many years of poker, the welcome in the District, and technical advice. Tom introduced me to the hidden alleys and workshops of Shaw and shared with me his hacking know-how. And thank you to Delia Kashat and the rest of the SAIS crew for pulling back the curtain on so many DC worlds.
Thanks to Allison Archambault, Steven Davis, and Thea, and to Rick and Eileen Burke for the homes away from home. To KC Higgins and Peter Higgins for their encyclopedic knowledge of all things DC, and to Mona Lewandoski for her help with Senate details. Ray’s the Steaks closed while the book was in editing, but I kept it in as a little send-off. And a special thanks to Cornell Riley, Eileen Burke, Tisha Martz, and Lauren Carsley for generously taking the time to read the manuscript and give terrific suggestions.
Thank you to the red-teamers and security experts who’ve advised me on the books over the years and helped inspire this one: Deviant Ollam, Chris Gates, Matt Fiddler, and the folks at OnPoint Tactical. I did take a few liberties with tactics and techniques. And yes, Nick Averose’s particular specialty is a real one.
One of the great joys of this work is sharing stories and scenes with my family. They are brilliant and hilarious and don’t let me get away with anything, for which I am enormously grateful. My mother, Ellen, offered excellent advice over many drafts of this novel. My wife, Heather, saved the day on this one with her wisdom, love, and encouragement. You’re the best, HB.
About the Author
MATTHEW QUIRK is the New York Times best-selling author of The Night Agent, The 500, Dead Man Switch, Cold Barrel Zero, and The Directive. He spent five years at the Atlantic reporting on crime, private military contractors, terrorism prosecutions, and international gangs. He lives in San Diego.
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Also by Matthew Quirk
The Night Agent
Dead Man Switch
Cold Barrel Zero
The Directive
The 500
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
hour of the assassin. Copyright © 2020 by Rough Draft, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
first edition
Cover design by Jae Song
Cover photographs © Doug Armand/Getty Images (Capitol building); © Liderina/Shutterstock (man)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
Digital Edition MARCH 2020 ISBN: 978-0-06-287554-9
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-287549-5
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