Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

Trent's expression changed, like someone was tugging its corners like smoothing the sheet on a hospital bed, and he lost his focus on her for a moment, considering her words. I had no doubt in the truth of what Alena had just said, though I hadn't consciously realized just how enormous a sin Trent was committing. For a moment, it seemed that Trent hadn't, either.

He got out of his chair, and he did it awkwardly, and it made me wonder if he'd had bypass surgery, and if so how many times, and how recently. At first, I thought he was heading to Panno, but then I realized he was after the shrine to his lost family. He picked up the photograph of his wife, staring at it for several seconds before setting it carefully back precisely where it had rested.

"You don't have children, do you?" He turned to look at us, on the love seat. "The two of you, wherever it is that you've been hiding, you haven't started breeding?"

"No," I said, and Alena glanced over at me, probably wondering why I'd bothered to even answer the question.

"Then you can't understand. You cannot possibly begin to understand. We're talking about my daughter, my only child, and the man who murdered her. We're talking about the life that her mother and I created between us. Our child. When Maggie died, I had Natalie and that was all. Breast cancer's genetic, you know that? It's not the only risk factor, but it's probably the most major one. There were times I'd look at Natalie and I swear my heart would stop at the fear of it growing inside her, too.

"You know how you can tell a real parent, Kodiak? It's not biological. I don't give a damn if you've adopted or warded or fostered, that's not it. You know how you can tell? It's a simple test, really. Doesn't take much to prove it.

"A parent would give anything, do anything, to keep his child from harm, to spare his child pain. That's what it means to be a parent. It means that the life of your child is more important than your own."

He stopped speaking, focused now on me, making certain I understood.

"If there was any chance the law would take the man responsible for what happened to her, I would let the law do just that," Trent said. "But the law won't. The law will never touch him, because he's protected himself from it. He's wrapped himself in it and then elevated himself high above it. He's not alone in that. There are a lot of them like that in Washington, there always have been, but these days I swear to God it's worse.

"That's why I want the two of you. We're at war here, the fucking country's at war, and there are bastards like this man more concerned with protecting what goes into his pockets than the people he purports to serve."

"I'm not taking your money," I said.

"You will," Elliot Trent told me. "Because I won't give you his name unless you do. I'm buying a murder, and I don't want any of us to have any illusions about it. And I don't want either of you forgetting that you're working for me on this. That's what my money's buying."

Alena moved her hand, resting it on the back of mine. I looked down, saw her long, strong fingers on my own. When I moved my eyes up, she met them with hers, and there was a sorrow in them unlike any I'd seen before, and it was all for me. Even if she forgave herself every other crime she had ever committed, this was the one she knew was coming and the one she would never allow to be absolved. This was what she had done to me.

I looked away from her, to Trent.

"All right," I said. "But we need the name."

"He's the White House chief of staff," Elliot Trent said. "His name is Jason Earle."

Jason Earle was born in Point Au Gres, Michigan, the eldest of four children, with three younger sisters. His parents were both deceased. His father had worked in insurance. His mother was a homemaker, and took home the blue ribbon at the county fair for her bread-and-butter pickles thirty-three years in a row, up until the year she died. I was born in San Francisco, California, the eldest of two children, with a younger brother. My parents and brother, to the best of my knowledge, are still living. My parents are both academics, my father a professor of religion, my mother a professor of English, which goes a long way to explaining how I ended up with a first name like Atticus.

Jason Earle grew up in Point Au Gres, with his family. He played football, was on the debate team, and was elected senior class president. He attended the University of Michigan, and graduated third in his class, with a bachelor's degree in economics. It was at Michigan where he first got involved in politics, working on both local and state campaigns.

Upon graduation, he was called up for service, but received a deferment, claiming undue hardship on a dependent; his wife of four and a half months, Victoria, was pregnant. He went to law school instead. Then he ran for the Michigan House of Representatives, and lost.

At twenty-nine, he took a job with Gorman Service Industries, a general service provider for gas and petroleum exploration and extraction. He remained with GSI for eleven years. For four of them, he was their assistant chief legal counsel.

He left to work at the White House, and served as the Deputy Assistant to the Secretary of Energy until that administration was voted out of office. He returned to the private sector, offering his services as a consultant. His services were sought by Northrop Grumman, General Motors, and again by GSI, and more specifically, by Gorman-North, the construction and contracting division of the parent company. He continued to practice law, and began to show an interest in policy and military affairs. He served as an advisor to the Defense Policy Board at the Pentagon.

He returned to the White House in the following administration, and, due in no small part to the number of connections and relationships he had forged in the last two decades, was named Deputy Chief of Staff. He held the position for two and a half years, until the then-chief of staff resigned, at which point he became the National Security Advisor to the Vice President of the United States until the end of the Vice President's term in office.

Again in the private sector, Earle pursued consulting work once more, his services now in wide demand. After three years, during which time he served on advisory commissions to the CIA, the State Department, and the President's Council on Economic Reform, he accepted a job with GSI as their Executive Vice President for Overseas Development and Policy. In this capacity, he also oversaw interests at Gorman-North, including Gorman-North's private military contracts.

He was with GSI when the newly elected President asked him to head his transition team, as a precursor to becoming his chief of staff.

Earle, of course, accepted immediately. I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, and I ran cross-country, and I did some track, and I tried my hand at soccer and basketball, and I wasn't bad at any of it, but I was never exceptional. The only thing I was voted in high school was "Most Likely to Say the Wrong Thing." I was, in all ways, unremarkable.

Because it had always been assumed I would, I went to college, at Northwestern University. I made it through freshman year, and part of sophomore, and like in high school, I was a good student, at least as far as my GPA was concerned. But, like in high school, I was aimless and bored, and I dropped out in the winter of my second year. I spent the next eight months wandering around Europe, working occasional jobs, before enlisting in the Army back home. My parents, who had barely managed to contain themselves at my departure from higher education, all but disowned me.

I completed basic and AIT, did a turn with the MPs, and then volunteered to go to Fort Bragg and do a new course in what the Special Forces Command was calling "Executive Protection." I completed it well, got my sergeant stripes, and was assigned an officer named Wyatt to protect and to serve. Things got complicated, and when my service was up, I passed on reenlistment, pissing off a wide variety of superiors who felt they had wasted a lot of taxpayer money on my training.