Greg Rucka - Patriot acts

The second to last thing we wanted was for Earle to find out he was in our sights. If he knew-or for that matter, even suspected-that Alena and I had grown tired of being hunted and had decided to turn the tables on him, he wouldn't be simply a hard target; he would become an impossible one. He would go to ground, wrap himself up inside his protective bubble. Then there would be no way we could pierce it to reach him.

When Trent finally got us Earle's schedule, it took less than a minute to realize that what we'd feared was exactly what had happened.

"There's nothing here," I said. "No public appearances, nothing. He's got one trip with the President to Camp David, that's it."

"It's his tentative schedule for the next three months." Trent fixed me with his sunken eyes. "Tentative. Don't read too much into it."

Alena shook her head in disgust, tossing the paper onto our ever-growing stack of research, which now dominated the dining room table.

"He knows," she said. "Someone tipped him, and he knows."

"No one tipped him," Trent said. It wasn't defensive; it was defiant. He looked from Alena to me as if suspecting us of lurking betrayal.

"Then he suspects," Alena said. "For whatever reason, he suspects, Mr. Trent. Look at this schedule. There are no public appearances. None. He is the chief of staff at the White House, and yet he has not taken a single public engagement, not a single appearance. According to this schedule, he is behaving in all ways like a man who knows he is being targeted."

"The schedule's considered tentative, at best," Trent said. "It may change."

I shook my head. "Not unless he thinks the threat's gone."

"Then you'll just have to convince him it is."

"Well, the easiest way to do that, Elliot, would be to use the phone there and turn us over to the cops."

"No," Alena disagreed. "It would be easier to kill us."

"Don't tempt me," Trent said.

"We can't fake our deaths," I said to Alena, ignoring him. "Earle would never buy that."

"He will not expose himself until he is certain that our threat is removed," Alena said, flatly. "Until he believes without doubt that we pose him-or mean him-no harm. He can afford to wait."

"I can't," said Trent. "Stannous acetate," Alena said.

We were in bed, each of us on our backs, staring at the dark ceiling and listening to the not-so-distant waves. We weren't post-coital; we hadn't made love since moving into Trent's house, and it wasn't out of any deference to him or concern for what he might think. It was hard, I suppose, for either of us to feel romantic while planning what, in its most naked terms, was murder. It wasn't that we were no longer comfortable with each other, nor that we no longer felt as strongly as we once had. There was a time and a place for it, and that time and place just wasn't here and now.

"Tin?" I asked. It took me a moment. I'd been lost in my own thoughts, missing Kobuleti, and wondering how Miata was faring with the Raminisshvillis and their Internet cafe in Kobuleti.

When Alena spoke, her voice was soft, and her tone one of resolve. "You dissolve it in glacial acetic acid, you get a solid, stannous acetate." She rolled onto her side to look at me in the darkness. Her almost-blond hair seemed luminescent. "The CIA used it to induce heart attacks during the Cold War. It can be dissolved and then ingested as a liquid, or placed as a contact agent."

"How quickly does it work?"

"Ingested, it works very quickly. Within minutes. As a contact agent, absorption is slower unless aided by a solvent of some sort."

"How traceable?"

"Anything can be discovered if one is to look for it. The question is whether or not an autopsy will be performed."

"White House chief of staff dies of an AMI-"

"After complaining of chest pains and shortness of breath the previous year," Alena interrupted.

"-I'd think an autopsy is standard operating procedure."

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.