by Greg Rucka
He left to work at the White House, and served as the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Energy until that administration was voted out of office. He returned to the private sector, offering his services as a consultant. His services were sought by Northrop Grumman, General Motors, and again by GSI, and more specifically, by Gorman-North, the construction and contracting division of the parent company. He continued to practice law, and began to show an interest in policy and military affairs. He served as an advisor to the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon.
He returned to the White House in the following administration, and, due in no small part to the number of connections and relationships he had forged in the last two decades, was named Deputy Chief of Staff. He held the position for two and a half years, until the then-chief of staff resigned, at which point he became the National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States until the end of the Vice President’s term in office.
Again in the private sector, Earle pursued consulting work once more, his services now in wide demand. After three years, during which time he served on advisory commissions to the CIA, the State Department, and the President’s Council on Economic Reform, he accepted a job with GSI as their Executive Vice President for Overseas Development and Policy. In this capacity, he also oversaw interests at Gorman-North, including Gorman-North’s private military contracts.
He was with GSI when the newly elected President asked him to head his transition team, as a precursor to becoming his chief of staff.
Earle, of course, accepted immediately.
I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and I ran cross-country, and I did some track, and I tried my hand at soccer and basketball, and I wasn’t bad at any of it, but I was never exceptional. The only thing I was voted in high school was “Most Likely to Say the Wrong Thing.” I was, in all ways, unremarkable.
Because it had always been assumed I would, I went to college, at Northwestern University. I made it through freshman year, and part of sophomore, and like in high school, I was a good student, at least as far as my GPA was concerned. But, like in high school, I was aimless and bored, and I dropped out in the winter of my second year. I spent the next eight months wandering around Europe, working occasional jobs, before enlisting in the Army back home. My parents, who had barely managed to contain themselves at my departure from higher education, all but disowned me.
I completed basic and AIT, did a turn with the MPs, and then volunteered to go to Fort Bragg and do a new course in what the Special Forces Command was calling “Executive Protection.” I completed it well, got my sergeant stripes, and was assigned an officer named Wyatt to protect and to serve. Things got complicated, and when my service was up, I passed on reenlistment, pissing off a wide variety of superiors who felt they had wasted a lot of taxpayer money on my training.
I moved to New York with an Army buddy, we got an apartment in the Village, and I tried to find work as a personal security agent, but everyone else called me a bodyguard. I went to the big firms—like Sentinel Guards, run by Elliot Trent—in search of work, and I got a couple of interviews, but they didn’t go well. I was outspoken and probably too full of myself, and my résumé wasn’t anything to be crowing about. I ended up working alone most of the time, but every so often I would cross paths with others in the field, and that’s how I met Natalie Trent, and that’s how we became friends.
I did pretty well as a bodyguard, and worked for a lot of people, some of them worth my time and more of them not. My Army buddy died and Natalie and I had some rough times as a result. I ran into the officer I’d protected in the Army again by running into his daughter first, and that changed my life, and I fell in love, or thought I did, on more than one occasion. I kept on trying to protect people, and a lot of the time I succeeded, and then Natalie and I and a couple of others found ourselves protecting a man from one of The Ten that everyone called John Doe, because no one had a better name for him.
John Doe turned into Drama, and, later, Drama turned into Alena Cizkova.
The number of people Jason Earle is responsible for killing, either with tacit approval or by direct order, either deliberately or inadvertently, is unknown. Only two were ever verified to my satisfaction. There are possibly hundreds more, if not thousands.
He is suspected of committing Gorman-North resources to the forcible relocation of six hundred and seventy-three Goajiro Indians in northern Venezuela, in pursuit of an exploration contract given to GSI by the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. The land this particular Goajiro tribe lived on had been ceded to them in a very well publicized treaty with their government, and their refusal to move was understandable.
The story, unsubstantiated, goes that there was some sort of accident upriver, a chemical spill into the water supply for the tribe. Fish died first, and then members of the tribe began to fallill. Emergency aid workers arrived with uncharacteristic speed, attempting to treat those Goajiro who had already become sick and to secure a new clean-water source for the rest of the tribe. They delivered medicine and bottled water, food and blankets.
Despite their swift arrival, however, almost all of the tribe perished.
From drinking the contaminated water.
Instead of the water in the bottles.
Or maybe what made them sick was the water in the river, and what killed them was the water in the bottles.
The emergency aid workers and their supplies were sourced from Gorman-North.
There’s another story, goes like this:
In a country in the dry and hot and fairly sandy part of the world, where there is an awful lot of oil apparently to be found buried not all too deep beneath the ground, GSI had a very large contract to help build the machines that would bring this oil to the surface. They maintained certain fields of pumps and pipes, and they built a little piece of America in the middle of a very Islamic country so they could do their jobs in comfort, and without bringing offense to their hosts through any cultural insensitivity or inadvertent misunderstandings.
And this was well and good for a great number of years, and GSI found themselves making pretty good money as a result of this arrangement.
Then, one day, the Old Prince who was the country’s Minister of Oil died, and a New Prince took his place. The New Prince looks around, and cannot help but notice that everywhere his country’s oil is coming to the surface, it’s coming there through no fault of his own nation. There are a lot of young people in his nation looking for work, and this is their most precious resource, the New Prince reasons, and he announces his intention to end his country’s contracts with those foreign service providers who are doing what, he now believes, could be done just as well by his fellow countrymen.
This affects not only GSI, but other companies like it. Needless to say, GSI and the other companies like it are not happy at this news. They feel it’s imperative that the New Prince understand the relationship is a mutually beneficial one, and that terminating it would be detrimental to all the parties involved. The New Prince reportedly responds by saying that, while he sees the detriment to their interests, he fails to see it to his own.
Men at GSI and the other companies like it begin to do everything they can to stop the New Prince. They entreat him, and his father, the King, and failing both, then turn to their own governments in the hopes of bringing appropriate political pressure to bear. Nothing works.
Then the New Prince’s plane goes down in the desert, and there are no survivors. No one sees the plane go down. It just disappears from radar. There’s a lot of desert, and not a scrap of wreckage is ever found.
The concessions remain in place.
Then there’s the story about the reporter from Der Spiegel, a man named Kurt Hayner.
Herr Hayner, it seems, had asked himself one day just how it was that a certain nation in Central America had been able to suddenly crush a revolutionary movement that had plagued it for almost two decades, and that, in recent months, ha
d begun to gain more and more popular support. How it was that, after years and years of combating these revolutionaries to no appreciable result, the country in question had so quickly solved its problem.
In the course of his investigations, Herr Hayner learned that an envoy from the country in question had paid a visit to certain representatives in Washington, D.C., asking for their assistance. The envoy argued that the revolutionaries in his country certainly would not have a good relationship with the United States as their political ideology was not one the United States approved of, and perhaps, for that reason, the United States might wish to offer some assistance in dealing with the problem.
The answer the envoy received was, at first, not at all what he had hoped for. No, he was told by these representatives, we cannot help you, much as we wish we could. Politically, it’s impossible for us to get involved at the present time.
But, they told the envoy, you might wish to talk to someone at Gorman-North.
So the government of the country in Central America paid Gorman-North an immense amount of money to come and “advise” its military on methods to combat the revolutionaries.
This is not what made Herr Hayner a threat. What made him a threat was when he learned just how Gorman-North had been “advising.” The words “intimidation” and “fear” and “preemptive action” and, most of all, “coercive interrogation techniques” were going to most likely feature very prominently in his piece for Der Spiegel.
That made him a threat.
So someone called a man in Wilmington, and asked if he could speak to Jacob Collins. No, the caller was told, I haven’t heard from Jake in twenty years, not since high school, I figure. But, hey, what the hell, you can leave your name and a number, and if I bump into him, I’ll make sure to give him the message.
Herr Hayner died in a house fire at his home outside of Berlin sixteen days later.
My crimes are yet to be numbered.
CHAPTER
SIX
At Trent’s insistence, we were staying with him at his home, and his arguments for us doing so were both persuasive and logical. Regardless of what CNN might be reporting, Alena and I were still ranking high in the Most Wanted category, and while we’d made it this far without anyone picking up the trail, there was no reason to push our luck. The last thing Trent wanted, now that he had us, was a sharp-eyed police officer or a concerned citizen with a memory for faces making us as we were moving from point A to point B. For the duration of the planning of the job, at least, we were going to remain his guests. It was, he insisted, one of the things he was paying for, the right to look over our shoulders.
It was his way of dealing with his guilt, I knew, though what, precisely, he felt guilt over was less clear. He knew he’d bought himself a murder, and that couldn’t have sat well on his already weakened heart, no matter how much he wanted Natalie’s death answered. Or perhaps it may have come from the fact that Alena and I were now his surrogates, commissioned to do the thing he wanted done, but could not himself do.
It didn’t matter; we were staying, whether we liked it or not. While unspoken, the implicit threat of what would happen if we refused was perfectly clear.
It was Panno who drew the line from Hayner to Alena, from Alena to Gorman-North, and from Gorman-North to Jason Earle.
Panno had run back to the hotel the previous night to gather our things and check us out, and had gone out again early this morning to chase down the shopping list Alena had prepared. The list wasn’t anything fancy, but it had been specific, with the groceries we wanted, the nutritional supplements and the like that she and I both now made a habit of taking. Panno had rolled his eyes when he’d looked over the list.
While he was out, we tried to get some exercise in without actually leaving the house. There was some workout equipment in a sunroom on the first floor, an elliptical trainer and rowing machine, both of them with only the barest signs of use. We did our yoga and then used the machines, and Panno returned from his errands as we were coming up on ninety minutes. Seven minutes after that, according to the timer on the elliptical, he joined us in the sunroom, a cup of coffee in his hand. He walked slowly around us, watching Alena rowing steadily away and me running at a good clip to nowhere. Then he sat on the windowsill in front of us, so we could both see him.
“You killed him,” Panno told her. It was a simple statement, devoid of judgment.
“Who are we talking about?” Alena asked. She asked it the way you ask after the health of someone you barely know, as a courtesy, a little breathless from her exertion.
“Kurt Hayner, with Der Spiegel. You turned him into a crispy critter.”
She continued rowing, staring at a point past his shoulder, then nodded slightly.
“You killed him for Gorman-North,” Panno said.
“When was this?” I asked.
“Six years ago,” Panno said. He was watching Alena for a reaction, and not finding one. “She toasted him in Berlin, made it look like an electrical fire. Took everything in the house, including his notes.”
“Yes.” Her expression hadn’t changed, nor had the pace of her strokes, and for a moment there was only the clack of our respective machines and the resistances they posed. Panno was watching her exactly as before. Today he was wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt, and in the daylight, I could make out the details of the dragon living on his upper left arm. The scale work on it was excellent, and it must have taken a lot of ink and a lot of time, and a fair threshold for pain.
On the face of it, the murder of Kurt Hayner gave Jason Earle his motive for wanting Alena, and by extension me, dead. GSI had wanted Hayner dead and Earle had been the head of GSI at the time of the murder. She was carrying knowledge that could certainly destroy Earle and, depending on how it came to light, even collapse the administration in which he served. Knowing that I had been with her for several months, suspecting that she had taken me into her confidence completely, he had added my name to Earle’s hit list right beside hers.
It was a motive.
I just wasn’t certain it was a very good one, and at this point I knew Alena well enough to see that she didn’t, either. Yes, it was possible the truth of Kurt Hayner’s death could threaten Earle, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that was really all it could hurt. The administration would survive it, the way administrations seemed to more and more. Unless there was oral sex involved or photographs or video, the public would let it pass, and the rest of the White House could spin it any way they wanted to; they could disown Earle, fall on him like the proverbial ton of bricks, even ignore it.
That was without considering whether or not Earle could truly be damaged by such an allegation. His reputation would take a hit, certainly, but I couldn’t see the man himself facing criminal proceedings. Where was the evidence? It wasn’t as if Alena could be relied upon to testify in court about Earle’s involvement, assuming he’d been directly involved in commissioning the murder at all.
I tried not to think too much or for too long about Kurt Hayner, whom Alena had taken money to kill for doing his job.
“Doesn’t work,” I said. The elliptical was on a random hill climb, and I took that moment to raise both the angle and the resistance I was working with. I tried to, literally, take it in stride.
Panno sniffed, squinting at me, as if surprised I had anything to offer. “You don’t buy it?”
“This guy may be chief of staff, but he’s been burning through favors and money for three-plus years now trying to get at us. That’s a huge expense, not just in dollars but in influence. Jesus Christ, first the guy covers up murders in Cold Spring, then he dumps the media on us in Montana? That’s not done through official channels, not most of it, at least. It doesn’t track. You don’t burn that much power just because you’re afraid either she or I might go talking about something we probably couldn’t prove to begin with.”
“You’re talking like you know the guy,” Panno said. “You don’t know
the guy.”
“I know the job,” I said. “I know what the White House chief of staff does, at least in the abstract, and we’re talking about a man who’s been in that position for nearly seven years, now. Most chiefs of staff make it for, what, two or three? This guy’s smart, he’s discreet, he’s not going to go to these lengths on the basis of something that never would happen.”
“You both had heat coming down on you.” Panno pointed a finger at Alena. “She had a goddamn book coming out about her. How long you think it was going to be before someone connected the dots?”
“Until the end of time. You hire one of The Ten, one of the things you’re buying is their silence. That’s assumed, it’s part of the contract, or else the whole mechanism falls apart, nothing is ever done. Even if Alena had been taken into custody and interrogated, she never would have copped to the crime, nor named names. Not in a million years.”
“I never met with Jason Earle,” Alena added. “I would not have been able to indict him directly even had I desire to do so. The job you’re speaking of was acquired through the channels. It was delivered by a woman named Audrey Daudin, a Swiss national and private banker. She had many clients, and I was unable to determine which of them I was serving.”
From behind us, a voice said, “God, you’re both such arrogant fucks, it disgusts me.”
Panno grinned. Past him, in the reflection on the window, I could see Trent standing in the doorway behind us. He was dressed, a coffee mug in hand.
“Bowles called me the same thing,” I said, without turning around.
“That’s because Bowles knew more than the both of you put together about what’s going on.”
“Obviously,” Alena remarked, still continuing her steady row.
Trent moved between the machines. Panno got to his feet as he approached.
“That’s decaf?” he asked Trent.