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  "Is it?" I asked.

  He laughed again, in spite of the pain it caused him. "No, we're not going to work like that. I don't want favors from you. The last thing I want is you doing me a favor. I'm hiring you and your girlfriend there for this. I'm paying you. What's the rate?"

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. "Elliot-"

  "Dammit, what's the rate?"

  "It depends on the target," Alena interposed softly. "If we're talking about the President of the United States, you don't have that kind of money. Nobody does."

  "It doesn't go that high."

  "I'm somewhat relieved," I said.

  "Don't worry," Trent said. "What I've got for you will still shrink your balls to acorns."

  "So give me the name."

  "How much?" Trent asked. He directed it at Alena.

  "As I said, more information is required before that can even be discussed."

  "I want to do this right. The way it's supposed to be done. What happens now? We've made contact, what happens next? You vet me, right?"

  Alena hesitated, glancing to me as if to check for my permission to continue. I didn't move my eyes from Trent.

  "Yes," she said. "The next step would be to verify that you are sincere. And that you are not setting us up."

  "You do that how? General surveillance? Background check?"

  "That and more. But in this case it is unnecessary. You have already demonstrated your sincerity."

  "Have I?"

  "You once protected the President of the United States, Mr. Trent. No man who has done that job would even dream of joking about trying to assassinate him. It would be inconceivable to even suggest such a thing. Simply joking about the solicitation of such an act is a federal offense. Yet here we are, and you are ex-Secret Service, and you are talking about this to us here, now, in front of a witness. You are more than sincere, Mr. Trent. You may be insane."

  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."

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  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 Depa
rtment, 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.

  I moved to New York with an Army buddy, we got an apartment in the Village, and I tried to find work as a personal security agent, but everyone else called me a bodyguard. I went to the big firms-like Sentinel Guards, run by Elliot Trent-in search of work, and I got a couple of interviews, but they didn't go well. I was outspoken and probably too full of myself, and my resume wasn't anything to be crowing about. I ended up working alone most of the time, but every so often I would cross paths with others in the field, and that's how I met Natalie Trent, and that's how we became friends.

  I did pretty well as a bodyguard, and worked for a lot of people, some of them worth my time and more of them not. My Army buddy died and Natalie and I had some rough times as a result. I ran into the officer I'd protected in the Army again by running into his daughter first, and that changed my life, and I fell in love, or thought I did, on more than one occasion. I kept on trying to protect people, and a lot of the time I succeeded, and then Natalie and I and a couple of others found ourselves protecting a man from one of The Ten that everyone called John Doe, because no one had a better name for him.

  John Doe turned into Drama, and, later, Drama turned into Alena Cizkova.

  The number of people Jason Earle is responsible for killing, either with tacit approval or by direct order, either deliberately or inadvertently, is unknown. Only two were ever verified to my satisfaction. There are possibly hundreds more, if not thousands.

  He is suspected of committing Gorman-North resources to the forcible relocation of six hundred and seventy-three Goajiro Indians in northern Venezuela, in pursuit of an exploration contract given to GSI by the Venezuelan state-owned oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. The land this particular Goajiro tribe lived on had been ceded to them in a very well publicized treaty with their government, and their refusal to move was understandable.

  The story, unsubstantiated, goes that there was some sort of accident upriver, a chemical spill into the water supply for the tribe. Fish died first, and then members of the tribe began to fallill. Emergency aid workers arrived with uncharacteristic speed, attempting to treat those Goajiro who had already become sick and to secure a new clean-water source for the rest of the tribe. They delivered medicine and bottled water, food and blankets.

  Despite their swift arrival, however, almost all of the tribe perished.

  From drinking the contaminated water.

  Instead of the water in the bottles.

  Or maybe what made them sick was the water in the river, and what killed them was the water in the bottles.

  The emergency aid workers and their supplies were sourced from Gorman-North.

  There's another story, goes like this:

  In a country in the dry and hot and fairly sandy part of the world, where there is an awful lot of oil apparently to be found buried not all too deep beneath the ground, GSI had a very large contract to help build the machines that would bring this oil to the surface. They maintained certain fields of pumps and pipes, and they built a little piece of America in the middle of a very Islamic country so they could do their jobs in comfort, and without bringing offense to their hosts through any cultural insensitivity or inadvertent misunderstandings.

  And this was well and good for a great number of years, and GSI found themselves making pretty good money as a result of this arrangement.

  Then, one day, the Old Prince who was the country's Minister of Oil died, and a New Prince took his place. The New Prince looks around, and cannot help but notice that everywhere his country's oil is coming to the surface, it's coming there through no fault of his own nation. There are a lot of young people in his nation looking for work, and this is their most precious resource, the New Prince reasons, and he announces his intention to end his country's contracts with those foreign service providers who are doing what, he now believes, could be done just as well by his fellow countrymen.

  This affects not only GSI, but other companies like it. Needless to say, GSI and the other companies like it are not happy at this news. They feel it's imperative that the New Prince understand the relationship is a mutually beneficial one, and that terminating it would be detrimental to all the parties involved. The New Prince reportedly responds by saying that, while he sees the detriment to their interests, he fails to see it to his own.

  Men at GSI and the other companies like it begin to do everything they can to stop the New Prince. They entreat him, and his father, the King, and failing both, then turn to their own governments in the hopes of bringing appropriate political pressure to bear. Nothing works.

  Then the New Prince's plane goes down in the desert, and there are no survivors. No one sees the plane go down. It just disappears from radar. There's a lot of desert, and not a scrap of wreckage is ever found.

  The concessions remain in place.

  Then there's the story about the reporter from Der Spiegel, a man named Kurt Hayner.

  Herr Hayner, it seems, had asked himself one day just how it was that a certain nation in Central America had been able to suddenly crush a revolutionary movement that had plagued it for almost two decades, and that, in recent months, had begun to gain more and more popular support. How it was that, after years and years of combating these revolutionaries to no appreciable result, the country in question had so quickly solved its problem.

  In the course of his investigations, Herr Hayner learned that an envoy from the country in question had paid a visit to certain representatives in Washington, D.C., asking for their assistance. The envoy argued that the revolutionaries in his country certainly would not have a good relationship with the United States as their political ideology was not one the United States approved of, and perhaps, for that reason, the United States might wish to offer some assistance in dealing with the problem.

  The answer the envoy received was, at first, not at all what he had hoped for. No, he was told by these representatives, we cannot help you, much as we wish we could. Politically, it's impossible for us to get involved at the present time.

  But, they told the envoy, you might wish to talk to someone at Gorman-North.

  So the government of the country in Central America paid Gorman-North an immense amount of money to come and "advise" its military on methods to combat the revolutionaries.

  This is not what made Herr Hayner a threat. What ma
de him a threat was when he learned just how Gorman-North had been "advising." The words "intimidation" and "fear" and "preemptive action" and, most of all, "coercive interrogation techniques" were going to most likely feature very prominently in his piece for Der Spiegel.

  That made him a threat.

  So someone called a man in Wilmington, and asked if he could speak to Jacob Collins. No, the caller was told, I haven't heard from Jake in twenty years, not since high school, I figure. But, hey, what the hell, you can leave your name and a number, and if I bump into him, I'll make sure to give him the message.

  Herr Hayner died in a house fire at his home outside of Berlin sixteen days later. My crimes are yet to be numbered.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  At Trent's insistence, we were staying with him at his home, and his arguments for us doing so were both persuasive and logical. Regardless of what CNN might be reporting, Alena and I were still ranking high in the Most Wanted category, and while we'd made it this far without anyone picking up the trail, there was no reason to push our luck. The last thing Trent wanted, now that he had us, was a sharp-eyed police officer or a concerned citizen with a memory for faces making us as we were moving from point A to point B. For the duration of the planning of the job, at least, we were going to remain his guests. It was, he insisted, one of the things he was paying for, the right to look over our shoulders.

  It was his way of dealing with his guilt, I knew, though what, precisely, he felt guilt over was less clear. He knew he'd bought himself a murder, and that couldn't have sat well on his already weakened heart, no matter how much he wanted Natalie's death answered. Or perhaps it may have come from the fact that Alena and I were now his surrogates, commissioned to do the thing he wanted done, but could not himself do.