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."
"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."