by Greg Rucka
What little remained of the media pursuit of Danielle and Christopher Morse became more and more infrequent, and then, almost as abruptly as it had come, ended.
I waited.
For almost a month, alone in a house in Charlotte, I waited, and it nearly killed me. I was worried for Alena, but it wasn't like it had been upon leaving Lynch. That had been fear, honest and true, and what I felt now was nervousness, nothing more. But I was stagnant, and once I took care of those few things that remained for me to do in Charlotte there was nothing else, and there was nothing to be done for it. I was stircrazy before the end of the fourth day, and on the fifth I risked venturing out and bought myself a membership at a Gold's Gym located two and a half miles from the house. Then I went in search of the local library and, finding it, began dividing my time between the gym and the stacks. I packed, unpacked, and repacked my go-bag multiple times. I cleaned the house. Thoroughly.
And everywhere I went, in everything I did, I walked with ghosts.
Pulling a book from a library shelf and seeing Natalie Trent with the blood trailing from her mouth, where it had formed a puddle on brittle, dry leaves. Doing the dishes and hearing the sound of her father's suddenly dead weight collapsing all at once to the hotel carpet. The shudder and wheeze of the dying hidden behind the threads of spring that had come to Charlotte.
I walked with ghosts, and they gave me no peace. The day before Earle was scheduled to lecture at Georgetown, I packed up my go-bag for the last time and drove north to D.C., in a used Honda that had been purchased for precisely the purpose two weeks earlier. I had a new ID provided by Panno, and the old ones that Sargenti had given us back in Boise, and I had eighteen thousand dollars in cash. I had two changes of new clothes, spring weight, because it was April and though the weather was forecast to be mild, it could just as easily turn hot.
I spent the night in a Red Roof Inn just off the Capital Beltway, and Panno met me in the bar there just past nine. He had another Budweiser and I had mineral water, and there were a couple of businessmen and women in there with us, and there was enough noise that we could talk.
"You're good to go," he told me. "She'll expect to hear from you tomorrow morning at oh-nine-hundred to confirm coms. I've got both your numbers, I'll keep you posted."
"You're not worried about putting this over a cell phone in the heart of D.C.?"
"Not the cell phones I've supplied you guys with, no." Panno slugged back some of his beer and cracked a grin at me. "You're covered."
I nodded, and we fell into silence for several minutes.
"Did you know Natalie?" I asked him.
"From the time we were kids," he said, running his eyes around the bar. "Right up until college, yeah."
"Didn't stay in touch?"
"Got difficult to. I was in the service, here and there. We fell out. My mistake, I could have reached out if I had wanted to, and I didn't."
"Why not?"
"I was in love with her." Panno quit his survey of the bar, brought his eyes to me. "We had a thing for a while, high school, like that. Ended when we went to college. She ended it. I didn't take it well."
"I thought you were in this because of Trent."
"It's as much about her as it is about him. Let me ask you something. You were in the Army. Why'd you leave?"
"I wasn't very good at it. You?"
"Special Forces."
"That wasn't what I meant. Why'd you leave?"
"I have a problem following the orders of idiots," he said. "There weren't a lot of them, but I seemed to have a knack for finding the ones that were hiding in the woodwork. My problem is I look like I'm dumber than I actually am, and I was dealing with people who were dumber than they looked, you know?"
"Too well."
"You got a future at this."
"I'm not sure I want it."
"You're good at it. That move the two of you pulled in Wyoming was fucking brilliant."
"That was her, not me."
"Not according to your wife. I asked her."
"What'd you call her?"
"C'mon, man, if you don't have a common-law marriage I don't know what one looks like."
I shook my head slightly. "She's being generous about Wyoming."
"She says that putting yourself out there in Montana, that was your idea, too. That took balls. That took more than just guts-that took passion."
I looked at him. It wasn't a word I was hearing much, and I wasn't feeling terribly passionate at the moment. I was feeling cold, to the world and to myself.
"Some people need killing," Panno told me.
"I've heard that before," I said. "I'm not sure I disagree with it. I'm just not sure I'm the guy to be making that call."
He nodded, then raised his beer.
"For Natalie and her dad," he said.
I met his glass with my own.
"For Natalie and her dad," I agreed. I didn't sleep well that night, and was up again before the dawn. I tried yoga and couldn't get myself to breathe properly. I took a shower and shaved off the beard, but kept the mustache, turning it into something that drooped deep around the sides of my mouth. I liked the look better than the full beard, but that wasn't saying much. After I had dressed again, I turned on the television and watched the news, and nowhere did my face or Alena's appear.
I checked out early, got into the car, and headed across the Potomac. I drove out to Arlington, parked, and waited for nine o'clock to roll around. When it did, I took the cell phone Panno had given me the previous night and switched it on, then dialed the number for Alena.
She answered on the first ring. "Hello."
"I love you," I said.
There was a pause. "Coms are working," Alena said, softly, and I wasn't sure if it was uncertainty or surprise in her voice. "Call me at noon to confirm."
"Noon," I said, and cut the connection.
Panno called five minutes later, also to confirm that coms were working, and that everything was still on schedule. That left me most of three hours to kill, so I drove over to the Mall. It was the heart of spring in D.C., and it was already muggy, but that wasn't stopping the tourists. It took me a while to find a place to park, by which time it was a little past ten. I started at the Lincoln Memorial and walked from there for the next hour and a half. I stopped for twenty minutes or so at the Vietnam Memorial, found it as affecting as I always did, and spent much of it just staring at the three soldiers, at their fatigue and their honor and their sorrow.
I took my time heading back to the car, and if I was being surveilled, it was beyond my ability to spot it. It was twenty-three minutes to noon as I was climbing back behind the wheel, and that was when the phone Panno had given me began to ring.
"Go," I said.
"He's canceled," Panno told me. He was doing a very good job of keeping the frustration from his voice.
My heart jump-started again.
"Is he spooked?" I asked. "Did he get tipped?"
"Fuck if I know. My information says he's just canceled the Georgetown gig, that's all. Could be a thousand reasons why he would do that, it doesn't mean he knows anything."
"Can you find out if he's still planning on being at the Watergate?"
"He only canceled-"
"No, I know that, I'm asking can you confirm that he will be at the Watergate tonight?"
"I'll get on it. You'll tell her?"
"I'm heading out there now," I said, hung up, and then hit my redial. Alena answered as she had the first time, before the first ring was through. "He's canceled."
"Why?"
"We don't know. I'm trying to confirm that he'll still be going to the Watergate."
"What are you thinking?"
"I don't know yet. Where are you?"
"At work, on campus. It's confirmed, he's not coming?"
"He's not coming," I said. "I'll be there as soon as I can."
"There's a lot on the north side, just off Reservoir Road. I'll meet you there."
I h
ung up and started driving. After a second, I switched on the radio, punched my way through the AM presets, finally landing on an all-talk station. Nobody was saying anything about any new crisis in the world, and that was a good sign, I thought, because it meant that whatever the reason Earle had canceled his trip out to Georgetown, maybe it wasn't a reason that would cause him to cancel his evening plans as well. And I needed him to keep his evening plans. I needed him to go to the Watergate.
If we didn't hit him today, I didn't know when, or if, we would get another chance. It had taken almost three months and Elliot Trent's death to put this together. Another three months would be all the more complicated, and all the more dangerous for us. It didn't matter that we weren't in the news anymore. The public's memory is for shit, but it's not that much for shit. Alena was exactly where she said she would be, wearing her custodial coveralls and carrying a ratty-looking backpack that went with the ensemble. She had cut her hair very short, and maintained the blond look, and I guessed that was why she'd had to cut her hair; it had been bleached one too many times.
I pulled in and stopped, leaving the engine running, and she opened the passenger door and slid in, dropping the backpack at her feet. I started to turn back to the wheel, but she surprised the hell out of me by reaching out and grabbing me with both hands. She put her mouth to mine, kissed me fiercely and for not long enough, then released me.
"I love you, too," she said. "Drive."
I pulled back onto Reservoir, turning right, heading once again in the direction I had come.
"Has he called you back?"
"Not yet. I'm trying to get confirmation about the Watergate."
"You want to try to hit him there?"
"You see another alternative?" I asked. "There's no way we can take him at his house, and I'm thinking the window on this is rapidly slamming shut."
"We can't dose the podium there," she said. "The first lady will be speaking, we can't take that risk."
"We won't dose the podium. We'll find another way. How do we get to your place?"
"You're heading the wrong direction. Turn left up ahead."
I took the left, followed her directions, turning towards Annandale. "You've already packed up?"
"There wasn't much to pack." She nudged the backpack at her feet with her sneaker. "Why are we going there?"
"We need to stage," I said. "And you're going to have to change clothes."
"Then we'll need to stop somewhere to buy some. How nice?"
"Watergate nice."
"You do have a plan."
"I'm working on one."
"If we don't do this today, we're going to have more than just Earle as a problem," Alena said. "I don't think Panno's friends will be very happy with us."
"I'm trying not to think about that."
"Probably wise."
My phone rang, and I handed it to Alena to answer, heard her side of the conversation. It lasted all of eleven seconds before she was hanging up.
"According to his information, Earle will be honoring his commitment to the first lady this evening."
"Call him back, tell him that we're going to need to know the second he's on the move, and then tell him that he's going to need a suit, and he needs to meet us at the Watergate."
She did so, relaying exactly what I'd said. There was a pause, and then she handed the phone back to me. "He wants you."
"What?" I asked him.
"I'm not playing on the field," Panno said.
"Like hell you aren't," I said. "You want to use a sports metaphor, here's one: You're off the bench. We may need you there."
"You're seriously going to try this?" Panno asked. I couldn't tell if he was impressed or worried. "You're seriously going to try to do this, there?"
"Hell yeah."
"If he's twitched-"
"Then I'll die trying," I said.
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
There are certain constants to be found in hotels around the world. They differ, of course, in levels of service, in the amenities they provide. Some offer twenty-four-hour room service, or same-day laundry, or an on-call masseuse, or a video library for your viewing pleasure. Some have concierge services that will literally bend over backwards to get you anything you could need or desire. Some have more, some have less.
But all of them-all of the good ones, at least-have two other things, and you can rely on them being there every single time.
They have a housekeeping staff, and they have a maintenance staff.
They have to. Otherwise, they can't call themselves a hotel.
It took us until three minutes to three to reach the Watergate, and because Alena had bought new clothes at Abercrombie amp; Fitch on Wisconsin, and because I didn't look that ratty to begin with, no one paid us any attention at all when we walked into the lobby. It wasn't crowded, but it was busy, and it was easy to pass without drawing notice, just a couple looking at the famous hotel, the woman carrying a natty, new backpack over her shoulder, the man with a small duffel in one hand.
We spent nine minutes walking through, admiring the decor and using the opportunity to scope out the hotel security. Once we'd made the guards and the cameras we headed for the elevators. Nobody stopped us because nobody had a reason to.
We went down, not up, and when the elevator stopped we got out like we knew where we were heading, moving down a slate-gray cinder-block corridor lined with laundry carts and pieces of broken furniture stacked atop one another. There were signs posted saying that this area was for employees only, and there was a bulletin board near where we'd exited with various notices posted, some of them official, some of them not. I stopped long enough to scan the board, and not finding what I wanted, moved on.
At the end of the corridor was a T intersection, and another bulletin board. We could hear the sounds of the hotel's engines working away, the physical plant nearby. The Watergate has two hundred and fifty rooms, and when it's hot, every one of them that's occupied is running its air conditioner. That's a lot of stress on the compressors, and it makes a lot of noise. Add to that the demands for power to all of those rooms, and to the kitchens, and the laundries, and the common areas, and the front desk, and it's amazing that more things don't go wrong in such places.
There was another corkboard, outside a locker room, and while Alena glanced through the door to confirm it was for the housekeeping staff, I found what I was looking for, thumbtacked beneath an admonishment to always wash my hands. It was the master room list, prepared each morning for the housekeeping staff, and it indicated which rooms were in use and which ones weren't, and in some hotels, it would even list the last name of the occupying party. The Watergate's list wasn't that generous, confining itself to providing room numbers and a notation as to whether they were occupied or not.
I heard a jangling of keys, glanced to my left to see a Latino man maybe in his late forties coming our way down the corridor. He was wearing a gray maintenance uniform, baggy on him, a radio on his belt beside his ring of keys, and I saw a lanyard hooked to his belt loop, disappearing inside his left rear pocket. He glanced our way with curiosity, but he didn't say anything. Class is a factor in hotels, and more often than not housekeeping and custodial services are handled by recent immigrants. The last thing a new arrival wants as he works his new job, trying to build a new life, is trouble.
The hallway was narrow, and he had to squeeze to get by, and as he did I reached out with my right hand and caught the clip on his lanyard between my thumb and index finger, squeezing to free it from his belt loop. It came loose, and I snapped my wrist up, and the key card the lanyard was holding came free from his pocket. I made the move as quick and sure as possible, and once I had it, I stuffed the card into my own pocket, the lanyard after it.
If he knew he'd just been pickpocketed, he didn't show it, and he didn't stop.
Alena moved back to my side, and I indicated the list, and she pulled it from the board. I glanced after the man who'd passed us by onc
e more. He was heading for one of the service elevators, and he wasn't looking back, so I checked the direction he'd come, and saw a second locker room. While Alena scanned the papers she'd freed from the corkboard, I peered into the room, and confirmed it was the men's locker room, and that it was empty. No one was within. If the shift hadn't changed at three, then it likely wouldn't be changing until four, at the earliest. I stepped inside, pulled Alena in after me, and closed the door.
Here's something else you can count on in hotels. They have security in the lobby, and maybe they have a security office on the ground floor, or in the basement, or in the subbasement. But that's it. Where the worker bees congregate, they don't have cameras; certainly not in the locker rooms.
"Anything?" I asked her.
She was scanning the list quickly. "There are over one hundred suites."
"It'll be marked, it'll have a notation of some sort. 'VIP' or a star or something."
She grunted her agreement, kept scanning the pages. While she did so, I moved along the lockers. Most of them were padlocked closed, but a couple weren't, and in one of the unlocked I found a maintenance jumpsuit that I thought I could squeeze into. I pulled it free and bundled it up, stuffing it into my go-bag.
"They're marked with a star, you were right," Alena said. "There are four of them."
"Unoccupied?"
"Two."
"It'll be one of those," I said.
She glanced from the sheets to me, worry in her eyes. "You're so certain."
"He blocked two and a half hours for this on his schedule. He's the featured speaker; he's the main attraction. They're catering to him, they'll have a suite for him to rest or get some work done, whatever, but he sure as hell isn't going to stand around outside the banquet hall waiting to be called and they're not going to ask him to, just in case the dinner goes long. They'll call him when they're ready. He'll go down then."