"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
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?"