Sinatra waits on the front porch as Bishop and Lewis walk across the front lawn, to their squawking SUV. The vehicle’s lights flash, illuminating the street with false emergency. As Martin appears on the porch, he uses the car’s remote to silence the alarm. Sinatra and the others look up and down the block, suspicious of the alarm’s mysterious activation.
“It didn’t just ‘go off,’ ” Martin tells Sinatra, who definitely didn’t need to be told this assessment. “What do you think?”
Sinatra’s posture is rigid. His intuition tells him the alarm was a diversion. He pivots on the balls of his feet and stares inside the house, seeing nothing amiss there. But then, he wouldn’t see anything amiss if the alarm was indeed a diversion. They would have already been scammed. He turns again and surveys the dark lawns and dimly lit street of his immediate surroundings. A clandestine operative for most of his adult life, Sinatra now has the very real sensation of being watched. But hanging around Scott’s house any longer than is absolutely necessary and potentially arousing the curiosity of neighbors would be unwise. He gestures silently to his men, and they troop back inside the house.
The incidents of the last few hours have convinced Sinatra that the operation is dealing with a counteragent of not insignificant talent and skill set. This revelation will require an alteration of tactics at every level, in addition to a demand for a 15 percent increase of his fee. As the realization takes hold, Sinatra begins the process of adjusting each and every future action and operational decision.
Escaping from the home through the kitchen door, which she was careful to lock on her way out, Hayley crouches in the dense shrubbery between the houses and watches the hit team investigate their vehicle alarm’s activation. Six in number. All male, between the ages of thirty and forty-five. All fit, with rigorously athletic frames. Hayley knows the species well. Even a casual observer could see the unit is composed of military or former-military personnel. The man who remains on the porch most certainly is in charge. His dark, wavy hair and melancholic expression strike Hayley as oddly attractive. As he disappears inside the house with his men, she wonders what it would be like to kiss him. She wagers he’s a good fuck, his sadness a reservoir from which he draws an off-kilter passion. She quickly dismisses the thought with a self-reprimanding urgency. No more sleeping with the bad guys.
After the men have withdrawn into the house, Hayley scampers from the bushes into the neighbor’s yard and heads toward the rear of the property. A dog barks frantically as she passes through the backyard, but dogs are always barking in any neighborhood. Hayley isn’t concerned about alerting the hit team. She finds the Prius parked on the next street over. The vehicle’s lights and engine are off, but Asher’s silhouette is visible inside. Hayley watches him watching her approach. She opens the door and climbs inside.
The expression on Asher’s face is similar to the spouse whose partner has returned home at two a.m., stinking of well bourbon, stripper perfume, and regret. “Talk,” he demands.
* * *
SHE HAS ASKED for help only three times in her life. Growing up in Lincoln County, you learn to swim or you sink. For some, opioids are the answer, but Hayley refused to take that way out. With a mother sick and in the grinding process of not quite dying, responsibility for the family fell on her shoulders. But even an independent and fiercely capable Hayley Chill might find herself in a predicament so intractable, so excruciatingly relentless, that a stranger’s charity is her only hope. Three times the need has arisen, and in each occasion, unexpected assistance was her salvation.
Among the numerous medical ailments Hayley’s mother suffered, one of the most problematic was angioedema, painful swelling of the tissues beneath the skin, and neither state nor county was willing to foot the bill required for treatment. With Cinryze costing well into the six figures, relief for Linda Chill was absurdly beyond the family’s reach. Watching her mother writhe with pain and waste away, a desperate twelve-year-old Hayley asked anyone she could for help. The only person to respond was the sixty-year-old corner grocer, who had once called the cops on Hayley’s next youngest sister when caught shoplifting in his store. Childless and a widower, the man paid the entire cost for one year’s medication and essentially saved Linda’s life.
Another occasion arose in Hayley’s first year in the army, when an unusually brutal master sergeant, wanting sex from the recruit and rebuffed, made life a living hell for her. The military is the ideal social environment for abuse of authority. There was nothing Hayley could do to escape the sergeant’s harassment short of going AWOL or physically retaliating. Going above her abuser, to a commissioned officer, would have made matters worse. With no other recourse, Hayley appealed to another sergeant on base, a man with whom she was barely acquainted but who had a reputation for fairness and decency. Master Sergeant Stanley Oakes listened calmly to Hayley’s complaints and then, without discussion or fanfare, confronted the abusive sergeant, expressing the unacceptability of his actions in no uncertain terms. The abuse ended that day, never to be repeated. An unintended but significant consequence of that small heroic act was Hayley’s career as amateur boxer.
The third occasion of Hayley’s requiring the compassion and help of her fellow man is tonight. Sitting beside Asher Danes in his six-month-old Prius, Hayley decides she cannot battle alone against the forces confronting her. As much as she prefers complete independence, Hayley possesses few resources to control her present situation. By any estimation, she needs Asher’s help.
She relays the full story to Asher as he drives them back to the city from Falls Church. “The boot print below Peter Hall’s dash window was suspicious. Scott trying to kill me confirmed that suspicion, to say the least.”
“Confirmation of what?” he asks.
“That Peter Hall did not die from natural causes. Why kill the president’s chief of staff? I’m not sure. Perhaps it means there’s a conspiracy to undermine the administration, or even to assassinate the president himself,” she tells him, struggling for clarity and failing.
“That’s a bad thing?”
Hayley responds to his glib inquiry with only a look. Asher adopts a different but no less skeptical tack. “So who’s behind this mysterious plot of indeterminate nature? The Deep State?” he asks, as if about the Easter Bunny.
Hayley ignores his incredulity. She only needs Asher’s assistance, not his affirmation of what she knows to be true. “I don’t think Scott Billings was actually Secret Service.” Again she ignores his arched eyebrows and sidelong look. “If they were willing to kill Peter Hall, what’s to stop them from assassinating the president?”
“And why am I hearing about this now?” he asks with some justification.
“I was trying to protect you, Asher. I’m sorry.”
“Oh, save your apologies. It’s not like my feelings are hurt or anything. It just surprises me someone of your intelligence wouldn’t see the need of collaborators. I mean, you are just an intern.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” she grinningly tells Asher. “Hiding in a closet with that military-trained assassin seconds from opening the door, I almost forgot.”