"So I'm thinking the best way to do this is to go up to D.C. in the next week and get into position," I told Alena. "Get a job on the campus, maybe, doing maintenance or something similar, get the layout."
"Agreed."
"Verify that everything is as we think it is."
"Yes."
"Then the other one follows maybe a day or two prior to the hit, prepares the exfil and stands by."
"Again, agreed. We stay only long enough to verify the kill."
Each of us stretched, turning into new poses. From my angle, she was now upside down.
"That's about a month without contact," I said. "That's a long time."
"We will survive it."
"I'll be careful," I told her.
Alena bent backwards, the move smooth as a line of molten glass. "You are not going to do it."
"Like hell, Alena."
"No, you are not thinking. I am better for this, and you know that." She left the position, exhaling long, then getting to her feet. "I have the experience, and I am marginally harder to recognize than you are, at least at the moment."
I tumbled down and got my own feet beneath me. "I need to do this."
"Why? Because Natalie was your friend? Is it not enough that Jason Earle will die for what he did to her? Is it not enough that you will be as guilty as I or Trent or Panno in this?"
"No, it's not. I need to do it. I need to see him die."
"That is unprofessional."
"Fuck professional. This entire thing is unprofessional. Elliot Trent let me shoot him in the goddamn head to give us this, you think he was giving a rat's ass about professional? Nothing about this is professional, Alena! Nothing."
Alena stared at me, unblinking, a sheen of sweat on her skin.
"Don't talk to me about professional," I said. "Not about this."
"Yes, Atticus, about this. If no one is being professional, then one of us must be. That person is me."
"This isn't Oxford; this isn't you trying to save me from what I might become. I've become it, Alena. For better or for worse, I've become it."
"I know. And you know that I am better for this. If a job cannot be obtained, I can pass as a student. I can get onto the campus, I can place the poison, and I can get out again. And it is not that you cannot do these things, Atticus, it is that I can do them better, with less risk to myself."
The thing was, she was right. She was absolutely right. She could pass for ten years younger if she tried, with the right clothes, the right hair. She could play the Russian emigre and get a job on the maintenance staff, or she could play the postgrad student, or she could play the alum. And maybe I could do all of those things, too, but I wouldn't be able to do half of them as well.
And it was unprofessional, and she was right about that, too. Whatever the reasons behind the crime, when it came to the task, the task was the only thing that should have mattered. Anything else, any agenda or emotion, would only get in the way of that, and make it harder to do the job right.
"You're right," I said, and I left it at that. Alena left two days later, with Panno. She left with a new cell phone and a new identity to match her blond hair, and eight days after she arrived in D.C., she had a job in custodial services on the Georgetown campus. That information came from Panno, not from her, because she was running silent now, and would until I arrived in advance of the hit.
Panno's job was to serve as the link, and on the day of the hit, to provide the overwatch, to confirm that Earle was en route, that we were good to go. For the next three weeks he gave me updates at regular intervals, and he came down to Charlotte twice, to meet face-to-face and keep me posted. He had dead-dropped the stannous acetate to Alena before the first week was out, and confirmed that she had retrieved it and brought it back to the apartment she was subletting in Annandale. To the best of his knowledge, she was running safe, and had not been made.
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."