"Death is softer by far than tyranny."
-Aeschylus
Two years later…
November 2
2:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Near the Tidal Basin-Washington DC
"Okay," the man said, his breath drifting away in plumes of white. "What are we doing here?"
It was late, and the night was chilly with a light rain falling.
The man's name was Patrick Norman, and he was talking to himself. He was an investigator, a man accustomed to spending long periods of time alone. Talking to himself was part of the job.
He stood on the concrete path along the water's edge. There was no one else around. A moment ago, what looked like a homeless man had been sprawled under some newspapers on a bench about fifty yards away. Now that man was gone, and the newspapers were all over the wet ground.
From where Norman was, he could see the Lincoln Memorial far to his right. Directly in front of him and across the tidal basin was the dome of the Jefferson Memorial, lit up in shimmering blue and green. Lights glinted on the water.
Norman had been in this line of work a long time, and these were the kinds of meetings he relished. Late at night, in a secluded place, with someone who was hiding their identity-risky, but this exact type of thing had paid off for him in the past. If it hadn't, he wouldn't be here now.
A man slowly walked along the path toward him. The man was tall, wearing a long raincoat and a wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his face. Norman watched the man approach.
Suddenly, there was movement behind him. Norman turned, and two more men were there. One of them was the homeless man from before. He was black, in ripped workpants and a heavy winter parka. The parka was wet and stained and dirty. The man's hair stood up in odd tufts and curls on the very top of his head. The second man was just another nondescript nobody in a raincoat and hat. He had a bushy black mustache-if Norman had to describe him later that was the best he was going to do. He was too startled at the moment to absorb a lot of details.
"Can I help you gentlemen?" Norman said.
"Mr. Norman," the tall man said from behind him. The man had a very deep voice. "I think I'm the one you want to speak with."
Norman felt his shoulders sag. They were playing a game. If these men wanted to hurt him, they probably would have already done so. That relieved him a little-these were government people. Spooks. Spies. Intelligence operatives, they would probably call themselves. That also annoyed him a little. There was no mysterious source with information for him. These guys had dragged him out here in the middle of a rainy night to tell him…what?
They were wasting his time.
Norman turned around again to face the man. "And you are?"
The man shrugged. A smile showed just below the shadow from his hat. "It doesn't matter who I am. It matters who I work for. And I can tell you my bosses are not pleased with the caliber of your work."
"I'm the best there is," Norman said. He said it without hesitating. He said it because he believed it. Much was open for debate. But one thing that was never called into question was the quality of the job he did.
"That's what they believed, too, when they hired you. I think you'll agree they've been patient. They've been paying you for a year with no results. But suddenly, all this time has passed, and it's very late in the game. They're forced to go in another direction, one they had hoped not to take. The election is five days from now."
Norman shook his head. He raised his hands, palms upward, at his sides. "What can I tell you? They wanted me to find evidence of corruption, and I looked. There isn't any. She may be many things, but corrupt isn't one of them. She has no ties to her husband's business interests, formal or informal. Her husband no longer even manages the day-to-day affairs of his company, and the company has no government contracts, here or anywhere else. All of her premarital assets are managed in a blind trust, with no input from her-a measure she took when she first won a seat in the Senate fifteen years ago. There's no evidence of pay-offs of any kind, not even a hint or a rumor."
"So you failed to find anything?" the man said.
Norman nodded. "I failed to-"
"You failed, in other words."
A flicker of light appeared inside Norman's mind, something he hadn't considered because it had never been asked of him before.
"They wanted me to find something," he said. "Whether it was there or not."
The men around him said nothing.
"If that was the case, why didn't they just tell me so from the beginning? I would have told them to stuff it, and we never would have had this misunderstanding. If you want to invent bad news, don't hire an investigator. Hire a publicist."
The man just stared at him. His silence, and the silence of his two henchmen, was unnerving. Norman felt his heart begin to pick up the pace. His body trembled the slightest amount.
"Are you afraid, Mr. Norman?"
"Of you? Not a chance."
The man glanced at the two men behind Norman. They grabbed Norman without a word, each putting a painful armbar move on him, one on either side. They wrenched his arms backward behind his back and forced him to his knees. The wet grass instantly soaked through his pant legs.
"Hey!" he shouted. "Hey!"
Shouting was an old escape technique he had learned in a self-defense class many years before. It had come in handy a couple of times. When under attack, scream as loud as you possibly can. It startles the attacker, and often brings people running. No one expects it because regular people rarely raise their voices. Most victims never do. It was a painful truth-many people in this world had been mugged or raped or murdered because they were too polite to scream.
Norman gathered his air for the loudest shriek of his lifetime.
The man wrenched Norman's head upward by the hair and stuffed a rag in his mouth. It was a big rag, wet and dirty with oil or gasoline or some other noxious substance, and the man rammed it in there deep. It took the man several violent thrusts to push it all the way in. Norman couldn't believe how deep it went, and how it filled his entire mouth. His jaws opened as wide as they would go.
He couldn't force the rag back out. The foul smell of it, the taste, made Norman gag. His throat worked. If he vomited, he was going to choke to death.
"Guh!" Norman said. "Guh!"
The man slapped Norman across the side of his head.
"Shut up!" he hissed.
The man's hat had fallen from his head. Now Norman could see his fierce and dangerous blue eyes. They were eyes without pity. They were also without anger. Or humor. They betrayed no emotion of any kind. From inside his coat, he pulled a black gun. A second later, he pulled out a long silencer. Slowly, carefully, in no rush at all, he screwed the silencer onto the barrel of the gun.
"Do you know," he said, "what this gun will sound like when it goes off?"
"Guh!" Norman said. His whole body shook uncontrollably. His nervous system had gone haywire-so many messages flooding it at once, trying to move through the infrastructure, that he was frozen in place. All he could do was shake.
For the first time, Norman noticed that the man was wearing black leather gloves.
"It will sound like someone coughed. That's the way I usually think of it. Someone coughed, one time, and tried to do it quietly so as not to disturb anyone else."
The man pressed the gun to the left side of Norman's head.
"Good night, Mr. Norman. I'm sorry you didn't get the job done."
* * *
The man gazed down at what remained of Patrick Norman, former independent investigator. He had been a tall, thin man wearing a gray trench coat with a blue suit underneath. His head was ruined, the right side blown out in a large exit wound. Blood was pooling around the head on the wet grass and running onto the path. If the rain kept up, the blood would probably just wash away.
But the body?
The man handed the gun to one of his assistants, the one who had pretended to be homeless earlier this evening. The homeless man, also wearing gloves, crouched by the body and pressed the gun into the right palm of the dead man. Meticulously, he pressed each one of Norman's fingers onto the gun in various places. He dropped the gun about six inches from the body.
Then he stood and shook his head in sadness.
"A pity," he said in a Londoner accent. "Another suicide. I suppose he found his work stressful. So many setbacks. So many disappointments."
"Will the police believe it?"
The Englishman offered a ghost of a smile.
"Not a chance."
