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Upon being asked, the agent assured the White House chief of staff that every effort was being made to locate and apprehend Trent's killer. The agent confessed that, without either witnesses to the crime or any evidence at the scene, he didn't hold out much hope. Even before Trent's body was discovered, I was back in Alena and Panno's company, this time in Charlotte, instead of Wilmington. With Trent's death, the location on Peden Point had to be abandoned, and upon my departure the two of them had gone to work on the house. They'd removed all signs that anyone other than Trent had ever lived there, and left behind just enough of the research we'd done on Earle to hopefully support the FBI's theory of the crime should a search of the premises take place.

Then Panno and Alena drove the almost four hours to Charlotte. By the time I met up with them shortly after one the next morning, they were already settled into the house Panno had rented off Commonwealth Avenue, opposite a power substation. It was a small place, two bedrooms and one bath, and with the three of us in it and the strange energy now flowing between us, it was going to be both awkward and intimate. Alena greeted me with a wan smile and a cup of herbal tea. Panno took my arrival as his cue to start drinking.

Panno left for D.C. the following afternoon, and for the next eight days, Alena and I occupied ourselves as best we could. Mostly, we stayed indoors. The Danielle and Christopher Morse story had all but vanished from the news cycle at this point, but we were still wary.

Elliot Trent had gambled his life on a chance at drawing Jason Earle out into the open. Neither Alena nor I wanted to do anything to diminish that sacrifice, nor to squander the opportunity we hoped it would create. Panno returned nine days after Trent died, arriving in the early evening and driving yet another car, this one a big blue Ford pickup. He'd brought groceries and other household necessities to restock our stores, and as we unpacked everything in the kitchen, he told us the good news.

"Earle's scheduling appearances again."

Alena, who had been sorting the fresh fruit and veg into the refrigerator, actually blew out a sigh of relief.

"What do you have?" I asked him.

In answer, Panno handed over four folded sheets of paper, and I settled with them and him at the kitchen table. Alena finished with the groceries and then went to fetch the MacBook, and when she joined us I gave her the pages and booted up the Web browser, jumping online via a neighbor's unsecured wireless connection.

"It's a pretty full schedule," I remarked to Panno.

"Figure he's been saying no so often he was eager for a chance to start saying yes." Panno scratched at the rough stubble along his cheek. "You guys took a hell of a risk. Hell of a fucking risk."

Alena, looking over the schedule, said, "Earle had to believe the danger Atticus and I pose to him is ended. By making Trent the threat, and by allowing Earle to conclude that we were the ones who dealt with it, he can now believe the matter is finished."

"And that's not assumptive as all hell? You don't think that Earle just looked at the situation and concluded that instead of just one threat-the two of you-there were actually two of them?"

"Assumptive or not, his schedule tells us he bought it," I said.

"Or maybe his schedule is telling you that you're being set up."

Alena was on the third of the four sheets, and she didn't look up. "That is, of course, possible."

"But you don't think it's likely."

"Maybe," I said. "Earle's spent four years trying to solve the problem of Alena and me, John. He's burnt capital, connections, favors, and something like twelve of Gorman-North's best guns. He has to want this over and done with as much as we do. He wants to believe we're walking away."

"I see it, Atticus, I get it, I really do." Panno got up from the table, heading to the refrigerator. "But all of this is built on the assumption that Earle saw the report of Trent's death, saw the assassination plot, and then concluded that it was you and Killer, there, who took care of Trent."

"It's a reasonable assumption on his part," I said. "Earle knows about the Jacob Collins contact. The FBI will have told him that Trent had a home in Wilmington. If they did any search at all-and we all know they did-then they also learned there were at least three people living there, even if they don't know exactly who those three were. It's enough for Earle to make the connection, to put Alena, myself, and Trent in the same place at the same time. So he's got to ask why we were together, and what's he going to conclude, John?"

"That Trent brought you two in to help him plan or execute the hit."

"And then Trent ends up dead," I said. "Our peace offering to Earle, our way of saying that we're quits."

"It's a hell of a long path for Earle to follow to get where you want him to go."

"Has to be that way. Any shorter and it would've made him suspicious. The only way this could work was to let Earle reach his own conclusions."

There was a snap of a church key freeing a bottle cap, and Panno came back to the table with a long-neck bottle of Budweiser in his hand. "Maybe."

Alena finished with the fourth sheet, set it down, then motioned for me to slide the laptop over to her. "We have the schedule. Either it worked, or it did not. Either we will kill him, or he will kill us. But Trent's death has given us what we hoped it would. It has given us our opportunity."

"Or it's given Earle his," Panno said.

Then, having taken the last word, he left Alena and me to figure out when and where we would murder Jason Earle.

CHAPTER

TEN

We worked the schedule for two days, checking and double-checking the listed appointments, meetings, and appearances. There was a day near the end of April coming up, almost four weeks out, now, that we liked the looks of. Earle had two events scheduled, one out at Georgetown, the other at the Watergate, and when we had Panno double-check them it looked like nothing had changed, that neither had been canceled.

At the Watergate, Earle was going to be the featured after-dinner speaker at the national meeting of Women for the Preservation of the American Heritage. This was, apparently, something he was doing as a favor for, or at the request of, the first lady, as WPAH was one of her pet projects, a foundation that she had been active in even before meeting her husband. Earle, according to the schedule, was to speak for forty-five minutes following dessert, but the schedule had blocked time from five until seven-thirty that evening, apparently to provide wiggle room.

Georgetown, on the other hand, was far more tightly scheduled, at fifty-five minutes. It was another speaking engagement, from one in the afternoon until just before two, and there was nothing in the schedule specifying where he was speaking on the campus or what he was speaking about, only that he was going to. Using Alena's MacBook and the Georgetown Web site wasn't much help; the April calendar indeed had an entry for "Lecture by White House Chief of Staff Jason Earle," and said the lecture would be given in McCarthy Hall, in the McShain Lounge, but that was all.

"McShain Lounge," I said. "Sounds intimate."

"For alumni and alumnae," Alena remarked.

"Easy enough to fake that."

"You think?" She considered. "There are many other ways to gain access to the campus and the hall prior to the engagement."

"Sure."

"Many of them."

I could see the wheels spinning.

I let them spin. We had a fight about it the following morning, as we were finishing up our yoga in what passed for the living room. We'd shoved all of the furniture to the sides to give us room, and even with that accommodation there still wasn't nearly the room either of us would've liked. In the kitchen, I could hear morning radio and the sounds of Panno apparently making himself a very large breakfast.