Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“Is that right?”

“Yep. We got up on a phone we found in the shed of her house in Silver Spring. There were hundreds of calls between her and Mark Evrard. Photos on there as well. Startling ones.”

“Of an intimate nature?” I said.

“The most highly intimate. She’d been sleeping with him for years, apparently. They met down at the pile after nine eleven.”

“Love among the wreckage,” I said. “Romantic.”

“She finally broke last night,” Paul said. “She had given Evrard the president’s route and itinerary, which he then passed along to the assassin through back channels. They’d been planning this for over a year.”

“She happen to mention why she and Evrard wanted to off their own country’s leader? Nothing new on Netflix?”

“She said it was about Buckland’s call to slice the federal budget to the bone and do a thorough audit of all the books, including Homeland Security. She said she had misappropriated a few dollars here and there over the years and didn’t want to wind up on the unemployment line or in jail.”

“Wow. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t she have a family?”

“Yep. Married, with three kids,” Paul said.

“How do you go from skimming off the top at the Secret Service to planning your boss’s funeral because there might be layoffs?” I said. “Are things really that corrupt, I wonder? Or have we gotten to the point where we don’t catch it anymore?”

“That’s if you even buy that story,” Paul said. “Evrard was a spy. And I think, like all spies, Evrard sold her and played her like an asset. Used her own fears and desires to manipulate her. He needed the info she could access.”

“Too bad we can’t ask him to confirm, huh?” I said.

Evrard had hung himself with a tied-together pair of sneaker laces in his cell down at the federal detention center in lower Manhattan, on the second night after his arrest. No one knew how the sneaker laces had gotten into his solitary confinement cell, but I wasn’t worried because it was “under investigation.”

“Why do you think Evrard did it? Was he a double agent? Hired by someone else?”

Paul shrugged. “He was hired by somebody. And my gut says not the Russian government. I think he just got the Russian mob involved in order to make it look like it was coming from Putin’s direction, but it wasn’t. It was just a smoke screen.”

“But who could fund an operation of this scale?” I said. “It would have to cost a pretty penny these days to assassinate a president. Who has that kind of juice?”

Paul looked at me. “You’re right. The Brit didn’t work cheap. I heard a rumor that he had a numbered account in the kind of Swiss bank they won’t let you into the lobby of unless you’re there to park eight figures. But don’t forget, Evrard’s been in the business a long time. He definitely had the connections.” Then he shrugged. “Buckland did mention he wanted to audit the Federal Reserve.”

“Ah, the central bankers,” I said. “That’s true. Auditing them is probably something they don’t want. Making money out of thin air must make it easy to fund an assassination. Let’s face it: there isn’t anything that’s really too much of a problem for them with that kind of power.”

“True,” Paul said. “But perhaps it’ll all come out in the congressional commission that’s being assembled.”

I stopped walking. A gust of cold wind blew up, hammering the trees as the branches cracked against one another like kids playing swords with broomsticks.

“We’ll never know, will we?” I said after a beat. “Just like JFK’s assassination, we’ll never know.”

“No, Mike,” Paul said. “I don’t think we ever will. But look on the bright side. Whoever it was, we squashed them. We checked their shit. We could be going to a presidential funeral right now.”

“We stood our watch.”

“We did. All of us. You, me, Matt, your detective friends. Sometimes it’s all you can do.”

Then I shook Paul’s hand and turned on my heel and went back down the drive toward the cheers and the field.

At this point, I was wise enough to no longer give a care. One day at a time and all that, and this one day was one of my favorites of the year. I wasn’t about to waste one more second of it on work.

Chapter 101

“And it’s no nay never, no nay never no more!” Seamus sang as he played the accordion in the living room after the turkey was demolished. Turkeys, to be exact.

“How do you like Irish Thanksgiving?” I said to Mr. Peters as I was stacking cleaned plates from the dining room table. “We also do an Irish Halloween, and even, impossibly, an Irish Fourth of July. Because nothing enhances a fireworks display like green beer and a hearty jig.”