Patriot Acts (24 page)

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.

“It’s what was in the pot,” Trent countered, and I took some pleasure in the fact that he sounded as bitchy to Panno in that moment as he sounded to me and Alena in every other.

“You want another heart attack?” Panno took the mug from Trent’s hand and set it on the sill. “Lay off the caffeine.”

“Greed,” I said. “Money.”

Both Panno and Trent looked at me. Alena didn’t, but said, “It would have to be an incredible amount of money.”

I switched off the elliptical, stepped down from the rails. I was sweating, and I didn’t have anything to wipe my face with, so I used the front of my shirt.

“Money, sex, or power,” I said. “Those are the reasons for murder.”

“Protecting your own,” Panno said.

“We call that self-defense. It’s not sex, so it’s either money or power. And Hayner, that’s not enough to steal Earle’s power, not all of it, at any rate. So it’s money. And Alena’s right: We have to be able to threaten an incredible amount of money for Earle to go to the lengths he’s gone to.”

Panno glanced at Trent, who was staring at me as if waiting to see how many more words the monkey could string together.

“Gorman-North, is that it?” I said. “We’re not threatening Earle: We’re threatening Gorman-North.”

“All it took was spelling it out for you,” Trent said.

“So why don’t you spell out the rest?”

He made an almost contemptuous snort, then said, “John.”

“The three of you aren’t the only ones who want Earle taken care of,” Panno told me. “There are other people who have an interest. People who have been trying to get him removed from his position of influence for a few years now, and who haven’t been able to do it.”

The sound of the oars slowed, Alena coming to a stop.

“Phoenix Resource Consultancy,” I said. “Just who do you consult
for,
John?”

“Right now? Not working for anyone.” He smiled at me. “This is a favor for Mr. Trent. But if you’re asking for people I’ve worked with in the past, the only one who should interest you right now is a man at the Pentagon.”

Alena got to her feet. “The conflicting reports.”

I looked at Panno, at Trent, and then back to Panno. “Is there
anyone
who doesn’t know we’re planning to kill the White House chief of staff?”

“There are eight people who know,” Trent answered. “Four of them are in this room.”

“And the other four?”

“They’re in the E-Ring.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” I said. “You’re using us for a coup.”

“It’s called profiteering,” Panno said. “Whether you like it or not, whether you even believe it or not, we are at war, and will be for the foreseeable future. There’s something FDR said during World War Two that’s relevant. He said, ‘I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.’ Harry Truman called the act of war-profiteering treason.

“It is. People die as a result. Soldiers, civilians, ours, theirs. Our people don’t get what they need, or when they get what they need it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, or there isn’t enough of it, or it falls apart because the suppliers are cutting corners, massaging the bottom line.

“Gorman-North provides services to American military personnel all around the world. They build our bases, they staff our bases, they supply our bases and our soldiers with matériel and support services. They are everywhere in the system.

“And they’re making billions on the deal. Billions and billions of dollars, and when we talk about that much money, even one percent of it not reaching the battlefield is a problem. When we talk about that much money, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. And like I said, this thing isn’t going to end anytime soon. There are going to be more and more contracts. And more and more of that money isn’t going to make it where it’s supposed to go.”

Panno stopped speaking, his eyes locked on mine.

“It’s not a coup,” Trent told me. “Don’t make it worse than it already is.”

“It’s already pretty fucking bad,” I said. “If the Pentagon knows, if four fucking people there know, then that’s the fucking military moving against the civilian government. What else do you want to call it?”

“No one is talking about bringing down the government,” Panno said.

“Earle has been in the White House shepherding contracts for Gorman-North? You guys know this for a fact?”

“Yes.”

“And we’re just supposed to take your word for that?”

Trent gestured to the desk, the milk crate. “There’s the paper, you want to go through it.”

Alena seized on that. “So who exactly is it we’re working for, Mr. Trent?”

“I’m a private citizen,” Trent answered.

“Of course you are. Perfect deniability for your friends at the Pentagon. Where did this task originate? Somewhere oblique, I should think. The Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, perhaps? Something similar?”

“Earle can’t be budged,” Panno said, studiously ignoring everything Alena had said. “And nothing gets past him if it’s about Gorman-North. You’re going to do the job anyway. This doesn’t change that, because it doesn’t change why you’re doing it, or why Mr. Trent wants you to do it. It’s just an added benefit.”

“We’d be doing your friends in the E-Ring a favor,” I said.

“That’s probably a good way to look at it, Atticus,” he said easily.

“What do we get in exchange?” I asked.

“Logistical support, intelligence. Money, if it’s needed. All of it indirectly, of course.”

“We’re already being paid.”

“You’re going to incur added costs.”

“I want something more. Something else.”

Panno knew exactly what I was talking about. He didn’t even blink.

“For both of us,” I added. “For Alena and for me.”

“You do this right,” John Panno told me. “You’ll get it.”

“Then let’s figure out how we’re going to kill this son of a bitch,” I said.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Several years ago, I was drinking at Paddy Reilly’s, just
sitting at the bar and killing the afternoon slowly. This was before Paddy’s got discovered and got hip and you couldn’t squeeze your way inside, and just after my car wreck of a girlfriend at the time had introduced me to the place. The bartender, who had come over from Belfast, and I got to talking, and the subject of my profession came up, as it does, when someone asks, “So, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a personal protection specialist,” I’d said.

“What’s that when it’s at home, then?”

“Bodyguard.”

Which had, in turn, led to a conversation about protecting people, and my thoughts on it at the time. Being from Belfast, and having grown up with all that entailed, the bartender had a very intimate view on violence, very different from that of most of the people you meet. In the course of the conversation, the difference between assassination and murder came up.

“I’ve known the rough shooters, mate,” the bartender told me. “They’d make you wet yourself you saw them coming.”

“That’s not what makes me wet myself,” I said. “What makes me wet myself is the ones I
don’t
see coming. The professional assassins, the ones you don’t know were there until they’ve already left.”

The bartender, who was a couple years younger than even I was at the time, shook his head. “That’s James Bond bullshit. You want somebody dead, whyn’t you just come at them with a bomb or a gun, eh? Why muck around with all that other garbage? Just seems to me like more ways it can go wrong.”

“You’re talking about killers, not assassins.”

“Same difference, mate.”

“No,” I said. “A killer is who you use when you don’t care if people know it was a murder. An assassin’s who you use when you don’t want
anyone
to know it was a murder.”

The bartender had digested that, then bought me another Guinness on the house.

The trick wasn’t simply killing Jason Earle, it was doing it in a way that wouldn’t look like murder, either before, during, or after the act. It was going to have to be a snow-white hit, with not even a smudge left behind. Trent and Panno were both very clear on this, which, I suppose, meant that whoever it was back at the Pentagon who had given this particular execution of nastiness his blessing had been, as well. (I was sure it was a him; to my knowledge there had yet to be an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, for example, who had been female.)

No blowback at all. Not even a hint of it.

Not that it would have been that much easier if we hadn’t much cared how it looked from the outside. While the White House chief of staff did not enjoy the same Secret Service protection as did the President, Vice President, and their families, he was a hard target all the same. Striking at him in the White House wasn’t only out of the question, it was patently impossible. Even if it had been, by some insane confluence of coincidences, chance, and luck, viable, I don’t think any one of us would have gone for it, anyway, including Alena. It was the White House. It wasn’t just off the table; it wasn’t even in the same room where the rest of the game was being played.

Panno and Trent had prepared a bundle of intelligence for Alena and me to start with, and for the first six days, that’s what we focused on. Trent had a wireless connection in the house, and between the documents in the milk crate and Alena’s MacBook, we must have reviewed several thousand pages of data on Earle, his life, his relationships, his family, and his work with GSI and Gorman-North. “Target immersion” was what Alena called it; learning everything so you can forget most of it later; learning everything because you didn’t know what might prove important.

“Video,” Alena told Panno after we’d been at it a week. “There’s little by way of photographs, and there’s no video.”

“Earle doesn’t like the spotlight.”

“We don’t care,” she told him. “We need both. Get it.”

Three days later, Panno handed us a CD of compressed video footage and various photographs of Jason Earle. The photographs weren’t so much to assist in a visual confirmation—we knew what Earle looked like, and unlike us, he wasn’t going to any lengths to conceal his features. As far as that went, there was still heat on Danielle and Christopher Morse, meaning there was still a manhunt ongoing for both Alena and me, but in the media, at least, the story had begun to play out. The world, being the world, had moved on, and once the Pentagon had thrown a spanner into Earle’s smear campaign, confusion had dampened the media enthusiasm for selling that flavor of fear.

That didn’t mean we were taking anything for granted. Alena bleached her hair, killing the glorious copper in it, then replaced it with something from a bottle that said it was “Superstar Blonde” but which came out looking like melted yellow crayon. She did her eyebrows, as well, which must have hurt like hell, but she didn’t complain.

“Cuffs and collar,” she told me, and I laughed at that.

For my part, I was letting the beard grow in while refusing to let the hair on my head do the same. The itching was finally beginning to pass, which made it bearable. The last time I’d done a beard, it had been a tiny and almost fashionable thing on my chin. This one wasn’t. This one was full, and combined with my cue-ball pate, remarkably unflattering.

I didn’t even like looking at myself.

With his place of work off-limits, we turned our attention to his place of residence, and rapidly discovered we didn’t much care for that, either. He maintained a home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and while it was by no means a fortress, it was alarmed and patrolled, and had to have been checked on a regular basis by White House Security, at the least.

It was also occupied by his wife, and she didn’t like to be alone. While both Jason and Victoria Earle, it seemed, were entirely faithful to one another, she was the social butterfly he was not. She had a wide number of friends who came to visit, she enjoyed entertaining, and she was active in several groups and societies. The house was heavily trafficked, and that meant while it might be easier to slip in or out with a crowd, the possibility of collateral damage was enormous. We didn’t want to set the trap for Earle and end up killing his wife by mistake.

So hitting him at home was out, too.

“Schedule,” I said to Trent. “Can you get us his schedule for the next few months?”

“How many months are we talking about?”

“I don’t know. If you can get it out to three, great. Six, even better.”

“It’s going to take you six months to do this?”

“It’s going to take as long as it’s going to take, Elliot, and rushing it isn’t the way to see this done right.”

Trent told me he would see what he could do.

The White House chief of staff is one of those jobs that everyone has heard about, and most people have no idea what it entails. Considering that the person holding the position has often been called “The Second-Most Powerful Man in Washington,” that’s a little disconcerting.

The chief of staff is the highest-ranking member in the Executive Office of the President of the United States. He is responsible for controlling access to the President—a duty that has oftentimes earned him the nickname of “the Gatekeeper”—because there are always people who want the President’s time. The chief of staff vets these requests, turning away those that, for one reason or another, do not meet either his own, or, more importantly, the President’s requirements.

He oversees the work of the White House staff. This means everyone—the maids, the butlers, the gardeners, the staffers in the West Wing, and the caterers in the galley. He makes the White House run, each and every day, and he deals with preparations for all state visits and the like.

He often is one of the President’s closest advisors, which goes a long way to explaining why he is considered to be such a powerful figure. Given that he oftentimes has a front-row seat for and even participates in major policy decisions, he needs to be reliable, smart, and frank. He must be willing to offer his own opinions, while ultimately abiding by the President’s final decision.

These things being said, not every administration has had a chief of staff. In some instances it has been deemed unnecessary; in others, the position has been simply unfillable. Where there is a strong and actively involved President, the chief of staff can find himself with little to do, especially with regard to formulation of policy and issues of governance. By the same token, there have been Presidents who had demonstrated very little interest in the day-to-day minutiae of governing, and as a result the chief of staff becomes very powerful indeed, sometimes even referred to as a “quasi-prime minister.”

Most of them don’t last in the job very long, the average time of service being two and a half years. There’s high burnout due to stress. Jason Earle had the distinction of being the longest-serving chief of staff, at seven years, beating out the previous record-holder, John Steelman, who served under Harry Truman for six.

Panno found that as ironic as I did.

Then there are the unofficial duties. A good chief of staff maintains strong relationships with both the first lady, the Vice President, and the wife of the Vice President. He is trusted by all, and endeavors to facilitate communication between each of their staffs. In many cases, he adopts some of their projects and preferences as his own. A bad relationship with any of them can undermine his key relationship with the President, and therefore, a good chief of staff—or, at least, a chief of staff who wants to remain in the position—makes it a point to work with, and to make himself available to, the other three.

“He was hospitalized for chest pains last spring,” Alena told me. “He complained of shortness of breath and a sharp pain in the side while in the office last April, and was taken to Bethesda for examination and observation.”

“And?”

“There was no complication, and it was attributed to stress on the job.”

“You think they’re covering up a heart attack?”

She shook her head. “There is no shame in it, so why bother concealing it?”

“Still.”

She gnawed on her lower lip. “Worth considering.”

Trent, via Panno, via whoever, got us a copy of his schedule. We were in the beginning of the third week, now, and Panno was spending more and more time away from the house, presumably running between us and whoever he was messengering for in Washington. I hoped whoever it was he was reporting to—if he was reporting at all—was discreet. The last thing we wanted was for our location to be blown.

The second to last thing we wanted was for Earle to find out he was in our sights. If he knew—or for that matter, even suspected—that Alena and I had grown tired of being hunted and had decided to turn the tables on him, he wouldn’t be simply a hard target; he would become an impossible one. He would go to ground, wrap himself up inside his protective bubble. Then there would be no way we could pierce it to reach him.

When Trent finally got us Earle’s schedule, it took less than a minute to realize that what we’d feared was exactly what had happened.

“There’s nothing here,” I said. “No public appearances, nothing. He’s got one trip with the President to Camp David, that’s it.”

“It’s his tentative schedule for the next three months.” Trent fixed me with his sunken eyes. “Tentative. Don’t read too much into it.”

Alena shook her head in disgust, tossing the paper onto our ever-growing stack of research, which now dominated the dining room table.

“He knows,” she said. “Someone tipped him, and he knows.”

“No one tipped him,” Trent said. It wasn’t defensive; it was defiant. He looked from Alena to me as if suspecting us of lurking betrayal.

“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.”