by Greg Rucka
“Then he suspects,” Alena said. “For whatever reason, he suspects, Mr. Trent. Look at this schedule. There are no public appearances. None. He is the chief of staff at the White House, and yet he has not taken a single public engagement, not a single appearance. According to this schedule, he is behaving in all ways like a man who knows he is being targeted.”
“The schedule’s considered tentative, at best,” Trent said. “It may change.”
I shook my head. “Not unless he thinks the threat’s gone.”
“Then you’ll just have to convince him it is.”
“Well, the easiest way to do that, Elliot, would be to use the phone there and turn us over to the cops.”
“No,” Alena disagreed. “It would be easier to kill us.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Trent said.
“We can’t fake our deaths,” I said to Alena, ignoring him. “Earle would never buy that.”
“He will not expose himself until he is certain that our threat is removed,” Alena said, flatly. “Until he believes without doubt that we pose him—or mean him—no harm. He can afford to wait.”
“I can’t,” said Trent.
“Stannous acetate,” Alena said.
We were in bed, each of us on our backs, staring at the dark ceiling and listening to the not-so-distant waves. We weren’t post-coital; we hadn’t made love since moving into Trent’s house, and it wasn’t out of any deference to him or concern for what he might think. It was hard, I suppose, for either of us to feel romantic while planning what, in its most naked terms, was murder. It wasn’t that we were no longer comfortable with each other, nor that we no longer felt as strongly as we once had. There was a time and a place for it, and that time and place just wasn’t here and now.
“Tin?” I asked. It took me a moment. I’d been lost in my own thoughts, missing Kobuleti, and wondering how Miata was faring with the Raminisshvillis and their Internet café in Kobuleti.
When Alena spoke, her voice was soft, and her tone one of resolve. “You dissolve it in glacial acetic acid, you get a solid, stannous acetate.” She rolled onto her side to look at me in the darkness. Her almost-blond hair seemed luminescent. “The CIA used it to induce heart attacks during the Cold War. It can be dissolved and then ingested as a liquid, or placed as a contact agent.”
“How quickly does it work?”
“Ingested, it works very quickly. Within minutes. As a contact agent, absorption is slower unless aided by a solvent of some sort.”
“How traceable?”
“Anything can be discovered if one is to look for it. The question is whether or not an autopsy will be performed.”
“White House chief of staff dies of an AMI—”
“After complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath the previous year,” Alena interrupted.
“—I’d think an autopsy is standard operating procedure.”
She considered that, then rolled onto her back again.
“Bethesda,” I said, after a moment. “They’ll do the autopsy at the naval base in Bethesda.”
She turned her head to look at me. “Performed by military personnel?”
“Oh, yes.”
She almost smiled. “Problem solved.”
We were left with three questions—how, where, and when. It was one thing to have resolved that we would kill Earle by poisoning him with stannous acetate. It was another thing entirely to figure out how, exactly, we’d get the poison into his bloodstream.
The answer came while we were watching the video Panno had acquired for us. We watched it on the laptop, a random sampling of media appearances and round tables and talk shows, and the most recent was already four months old, from December of the previous year. There was nothing after that, which only reconfirmed what Alena and I now knew as true; for some reason, Earle suspected he had been targeted, and was taking steps to deny exposure. As a result, most of what we watched was older, dating from early in the first term of the current administration.
The piece that caught us was almost five years old, and shortly after it started I realized what I’d been looking at all along and stopped the playback, then rewound it. We watched it a second time, and then a third.
“You’re seeing that?” I asked her after the last time through.
“Yes,” she said.
“I think we’ve got him.”
“Yes.” Alena sighed, not unhappy, not pleased, just the sound of someone who had completed a particularly arduous and not particularly enjoyable job. “Yes, Atticus, I think we do.”
We had the how. We knew how we would kill Earle if we were ever given the chance.
But as things stood, there was no where and there was no when, and as best as any of us could tell, Jason Earle was doing everything in his power to make certain there never would be, either.
Three weeks and three days after we started, we sat down with Trent and Panno at the kitchen table. Panno had the latest version of Earle’s schedule he’d been able to obtain, and once again, it appeared that the White House chief of staff was far too busy chief-of-staffing in the White House to come out and play, let alone be murdered.
I passed the schedule off to Alena, who glanced at it, snorted, and set it aside. Getting Earle out into the open was something we’d come to later.
“We’re going to need some stannous acetate,” I said. “It’s easy enough to acquire from just about any chemical warehouse, any supplier to schools or labs. However you get it, you obviously don’t want it to be traced back.”
Panno took notes on a pad he had produced from a pocket. He took the notes in pencil. “Spell it.”
I spelled it for him.
“How much will you need?”
“Not much,” Alena said. “Five grams will do; it costs about one hundred dollars per gram. Ten grams would be ideal; it would provide a backup supply.”
“Done,” Panno said. “You want it brought here?”
“We’ll come to that.”
“What’s it do?” Trent asked.
“You’ll like this, Elliot,” I told him. “For all intents and purposes, it induces a heart attack. It’ll look like he had an acute myocardial infarction.”
Trent actually smiled.
“What happens if someone gets paddles on him in time?” Panno asked.
“Won’t make a damn bit of difference, not if it’s still in his system. He’ll just arrest again. It’ll look like he had multiples, instead of just the one.”
“Vector?”
“It can be ingested, but we’re going to try for a topical application.”
Trent stopped smiling. “I don’t like that.”
“We’re talking about murdering a man, but that’s the part you don’t like?”
“It’s imprecise. What happens if someone else touches the surface in question first?”
“Won’t be a problem.” I looked at Alena. “Show them.”
Alena opened her laptop and switched on the video we’d cued up. It was the oldest of the clips we had, taped five years prior, and showed Earle speaking to an auditorium full of fresh young faces at the Harvard Business School.
“Watch his hands,” Alena told them.
They watched.
Alena cued the next clip, this time with Earle at a podium in front of a cluster of reporters.
“Again.”
They watched again.
She cued and played the next three, and at the last said, “It’s compulsive behavior, and entirely subconscious. He approaches the podium in each instance, he adjusts the microphone, and then he plants his hands on either side, as if to support himself. In every video where a podium has been present, Jason Earle does the same thing. Adjust and plant.”
“We get him at a speaking engagement,” I said. “We find the right venue, something where he’s speaking after dinner, say, then we apply the stannous acetate to the podium just prior to his taking the stage. We dose the ridges on either side, where he plants his hands.”
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br /> “He’ll be introduced.” Panno shook his head. “C’mon, Kodiak. He’s the featured speaker, someone will stand there to introduce him first. What happens if whoever is doing the introducing puts his or her hands on those sides?”
“The way we’ll fix the dose, it’ll require contact with both hands,” I said. “Ideally, we get him at a smaller function, something more intimate, where the introduction will be brief by necessity. If whoever does the introducing touches only one side, we should be okay. It’s the combination of doses that’ll do it.”
Trent stared at the monitor on the laptop for several seconds.
“How long will it take?” he asked.
“Fifteen minutes, maybe longer,” Alena said. “He will be well into his lecture when he goes into arrest.”
“Will it hurt him?”
“It is a heart attack, Mr. Trent. You have suffered several yourself. What do you think?”
“I think it’ll hurt like hell.”
“That is what I think, as well.”
“Good,” Elliot Trent said, pleased. “When do you do it?”
I closed the laptop.
“We don’t,” I said. “There’s no opportunity. You saw the schedule. He’s not speaking in public, and as far as we can tell, he won’t speak in public ever again if he thinks there’s even a remote chance that Alena or I will try to hit him. We’ve seen four versions of his schedule, and they’re all the same. Either he knows he’s being targeted, or he suspects he is, but whichever the case, he’s going out of his way to deny us any opportunity to hit him.”
Trent didn’t like that, shaking his head. “No. Dammit, no, not good enough. He doesn’t live in the damn White House. You can take him at his home.”
“According to your friend John, there, his home is now protected by the boys from Gorman-North,” I said. “If you want us to hit the house with RPGs and automatic weapons, then maybe—maybe—we can make it happen. But not without collateral damage. And not without making it look like exactly what it will be, which is a goddamn hit.”
“It’s not an option,” Panno said. “Needs to be clean.”
“Then why did you show this to us?” Trent demanded, gesturing at the laptop. “You tell us what you need to do it, you tell us how you’ll do it, and then you say you can’t do it? What the hell is the point of that, Kodiak?”
“To show you it’s possible—”
“You just said—”
“—just not possible at the present time.”
Trent started to retort, then stopped himself.
“Do you understand what I’m telling you, Elliot?” I asked. “I’m telling you that we can get you what you want. We can kill the man responsible for Natalie’s murder. I’m telling you that we can do it, and we can even get away with it. But not unless the situation changes. Not unless Jason Earle believes—absolutely, positively, and without question believes—that it’s safe to emerge from his bunker. He has to believe that the threat Alena and I pose to him is gone. One way or another.”
Trent’s mouth worked, as if he were tasting each of the things he wanted to say before swallowing them instead of sharing them. Then he found something that didn’t taste quite so bad.
“It’s you and Drama he’s afraid of,” he said. “Natalie died because he was coming after you. He’s afraid of you because he thinks you’re threatening him.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And all of this bullshit he’s pulled, it’s for the same reason. Because he’s afraid of the two of you.”
“Yes.”
“The son of a bitch is wrong. He should be afraid of me.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Alena said.
Trent closed his eyes, dropping into dark thoughts, and I was right there with him. Beside him, Panno was frowning, suspicious, as if sensing that suddenly Trent, Alena, and I were having an entirely different conversation from the one he’d been privy to.
“Then I’ll kill him myself,” Trent said, opening his eyes. “You two just tell me how.”
“The same way your daughter would have done it, Mr. Trent,” Alena told him. “With a rifle.”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
I woke early the next morning and found Trent already gone, and that Panno had presumably gone with him. There was no note, there was no message, but the two pictures that had formed the shrine to his family were missing. In the room Panno had been living out of on the ground floor I discovered a weapons bag tucked beneath the bed. Inside the bag were two pistols, both semiautos, a Colt and a Smith & Wesson. The Smith had been fitted to take a suppressor, and I wasn’t surprised to find one waiting for me in the side pocket of the bag. I left them where they were and went out onto the front porch to do my yoga in the morning mist.
Alena joined me about fifteen minutes later, and since we were suddenly without baby-sitting, we decided to go for a run on the beach. We were back at the house ninety minutes later, and I made breakfast while Alena showered. We ate at the table, surrounded by our research and our notes.
“You want me to do it?” Alena asked me while we were doing the washing-up.
“No,” I told her, and went to take my shower.
The next morning Panno came back, driving a green Acura I’d never seen before. Alena and I were waiting for him at the door. He came onto the porch like he was preparing to slug me.
“Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel,” Panno said. “Inner Harbor. Room fourteen-oh-four.”
I held out my hand, and he dropped the car keys into my palm.
“You are a cold-blooded son of a bitch,” he said.
“We both know someone colder,” I told him.
Then I got in the green Acura and drove to Baltimore.
I parked a couple blocks away from the hotel, then walked the rest of the distance. It didn’t quite feel like spring yet in Maryland, and the wind off the water was cruel, and it made me wish I’d brought a watch cap or some other sort of cover for my naked scalp. I had the Smith tucked into my pants and the suppressor in my left pocket, and the metal of each conducted the cold. It was early evening, already dark, and there were plenty of people about, and I had to wait for a group of conventioneers to exit the lobby before I could make my way into the hotel.
It took a couple of seconds to find the elevator, and two minutes of waiting before a car came to carry me to the fourteenth floor. I rode up with three others, a very carefully prepared blonde in her mid-thirties and her two J. Crew-appointed children, the eldest of them perhaps ten years old. He accidentally stepped on his mother’s foot as they followed me into the car.
“Dammit,” she snarled at him. “It wouldn’t kill you to apologize.”
The boy looked at her with the same contempt she was directing his way, then backed against the wall of the car for a slouch. Without any sincerity whatsoever, he said, “Sorry.”
Mom sniffed, and then the car came to a halt on the fourteenth floor, and as I was exiting I said to the mother, “You treat him like a monster, he’ll become a monster.”
I lost her response behind the closing doors.
Trent let me into the room without a word, turning away as soon as I stepped inside, and I took the opportunity to pull the Do Not Disturb sign from where it was hanging on the knob and place it on the outside handle. Then I closed the door and followed after him, found him standing at the desk, pouring from a bottle of Maker’s Mark. He added ice to the drink, using his fingers instead of the provided tongs, then offered the glass to me.
“No, thanks,” I said.
His response was to tilt the glass and deliver half of what he’d poured down his throat.
The room was a queen, and Trent had kept it orderly. On the nightstand closest to the window he’d placed the photographs of his wife and daughter. The golf bag he’d used to transport the rifle was visible leaning against the wall beside the closet, and the weapon itself was lying on a bath towel on the bed, as if he had just completed a fieldstrip of
it. Perhaps he had. The rifle was a Robinson Armament M96, the same model that Natalie had favored, the same model that Alena had used to kill Oxford three and a half years earlier.
Trent finished his drink, and set the glass down on the papers resting on the desk. From where I was standing I could see the rows and columns of numbers Alena had helped him to prepare.
“She liked you,” Trent said, and he was looking at the pictures on his nightstand. “That counts for something, I guess.”
“She loved you,” I told him. “That never changed.”
“No, it wouldn’t have.” He kept his eyes on the photographs, speaking to them as much as to me. “I wanted to protect her. I hated that she followed me into Sentinel because I worried she would get hurt, and I loved that she wanted to follow her father.”
I rolled the suppressor out of my pocket and into my left hand, then took the Smith & Wesson from my waist. The suppressor fit it perfectly, tightening smoothly into place.
“She was the most precious thing in the world to me.”
Trent coughed, clearing his throat, then faced me again.
“I don’t care why you do it, Atticus,” he said. “Do it for your country. Do it for the money. Do it for her. But make that bastard pay.”
“We all do,” I said.
Then I shot him twice in the head.
CHAPTER
NINE
According to Panno, the fallout went like this:
Fifteen hours after I’d killed him, Elliot Trent was found dead in his room by housekeeping. The hotel called the police, and shortly after their initial analysis of the crime scene, a homicide lieutenant with the Baltimore Police Department in turn called the FBI. Said lieutenant then informed the Special Agent in Charge that he had reason to believe the murder victim discovered in the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel had been planning to assassinate White House Chief of Staff Jason Earle.
The FBI took over the investigation, and as a matter of course, took all of the evidence that the Baltimore PD had collected, including the victim’s personal belongings and those items deemed to be in his possession at the time of his death. They found a high-powered rifle, suitable for sniping. They found two maps of Chevy Chase, Maryland, and each had been marked with notations by a hand determined to be Trent’s, and each highlighted Earle’s home, as well as the most likely routes he was liable to take to and from work. They found three sheets of what at first glance were determined to be math computations, but were quickly identified as firing solutions of the kind that would be prepared by a sniper. They found two photographs, one of Trent’s late daughter, another of his late wife.