Page 73 of The Night Of
All in all, it was a classic roll-up operation. Plug the leak, destroy the evidence. Save the spy. And, for a while, they must have thought they had.
Until Steven Baker called on his old friend Carl Rose, and Rose dug, and dug, and dug into Hardacre, until he found what Paul had found in Helsinki.
And everything unraveled from there.
The Russians needed to roll up the leaks again. They needed to protect their best spy, preserve her legacy, and preserve her sister’s position as Andrew Rees’s wife. It was astounding, really, to think about how much intelligence Moscow had sucked up over the years thanks to those two women running a con on the men they’d married. Manipulating them under the guise of supporting them, all the way to the top.
This time, the Russians needed to kill not just Carl Rose, another CIA officer, but the man Rose had shared his information with: President Steven Baker.
The notes Carter and Wilcox had stolen detailed Baker and Rose’s meeting. First, Baker’s shock, then incredulity, and finally, his cold assessment of what came next. Finding proof. Confronting the First Lady. Rose was supposed to join him at Camp David. They were going to arrest her the next day.
She’d struck in the nick of time to save herself.
What had Baker thought as he stepped out onto the Oval Office patio after his and Rose’s meeting? After he’d asked Rose to bring him a gun because of who the woman he’d shared his life with truly was? After he’d learned everyone who found out about her secret was murdered, and that he had tripped the edge of her spiderweb? That the black widow was creeping closer to him. Eyeballs were everywhere, men she’d manipulated over the years working under her delicate, deadly influence. Carter and Wilcox. Andrew Rees. Others through the years, I was certain.
How alone had he felt in that moment? Not knowing who he could turn to or who he could trust, save for Jonathan? Why hadn’t he told Jonathan and asked for his best friend’s help?
Everyone who had found out about Yekaterina’s secret had been killed. Baker had to have known he and Rose had just fixed targets to themselves. Would he have willingly painted Jonathan with a target, too? Put his friend’s life in the center of the crosshairs?
No. Never.
A secret note. A hidden gun.Flowerterrible. Signals to Jonathan.
And the rest? I kept going, holding Yekaterina’s cold and furious stare. “Before you called Rees to meet you at the pool, you called someone else. The only other person at Camp David who could have killed President Baker. You called Georgi Morozov.”
Georgi Morozov—one hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet, Nguyen had said. When I’d gone to Aspen, I’d checked the ceiling panels, and I’d crawled up through one in the bathroom. I hadn’t gone into the attic, though, because a big guy like me would go right through those panels. But a slim, lithe woman? They could hide up there for hours. And she had. The smudge I’d found in the corner of the panel? A team was up there right now, pulling that panel down and testing that smudge. I would bet my life’s salary on what was going to come back: a single drop of Baker’s blood.
After shooting the president, Morozov must have pulled herself into the open ceiling panel and hid in the attic for hours, waiting for her chance to escape in the confusion and the chaos. We hadn’t been at our best after the shooting, and she’d taken advantage of that. Counted on it, even.
“You left the bathroom window unlocked. Right next to the bathroom is the toolshed. It was a dark night. The Russian president came out for a smoke, and Georgi slipped away. At the same time, you were out of the cabin, perfecting your alibi, making sure your movements were recorded on the radio and the movement logs. Using Rees, again.” And drawing attention, too. When I had turned my gaze on Aspen, I’d been fixated on the image of a man and woman in a clandestine embrace on the patio. I hadn’t been looking in the shadows. I hadn’t been looking for the slightest, most hidden movement on the edges of that night.
She sneered. Shook her head. “You can’t prove I was involved in anything. You can’t prove any of this. It’s a fairy tale!”
I shook Rees loose and shoved him behind me. He collapsed, falling to his knees as his sobs continued, pathetic animal noises hiccuping out of him. I crossed the Oval and squared off in front of Yekaterina. Jonathan came, too, standing right beside me.
I grabbed her wrist and jerked, holding it between us. Her watch—her heavy, diamond-crusted watch with the thick, raised bevel around the face—gleamed.
“You left Steven Baker there for Georgi Morozov. You left him unconscious so she could get in and finish him off, kill him with the gun he asked for to protect himself from you.” I shook my head. “How did you even know he had it?”
“Do you think there wereanysecrets Steven was able to keep from me? Do you think he was able to keep anything from me at all,ever?”
“Killing him with his own gun was a good touch. It made the suicide much more believable. You were going to try and overdose him first, weren’t you? That’s why his blood levels came back so high with benzos.” Silva had brought the president’s toxicology results back, and I’d filled him and Keith in on what Dr. Fernandez had told me. Baker’s prescriptions for sertraline and lorazepam. Yekaterina would have had access to both.
Irritation, frustration, and depression were all side effects and symptoms of short-term benzo overdose and withdrawal: the roller-coaster swings of feeling drugged and then falling off the cliff.
“You’d been drugging him for two days. And you did so again that night, once you were alone. You were trying to knock him out.”
She said nothing.
“But he just wouldn’t fall unconscious. Which is why you had to put him in a choke hold.”
The bruise, the partial semicircle on the back crease of Baker’s neck. If I took her watch and laid it over that bruise, the curvature of the watch face would line up perfectly.
It was one of the aftereffects from a choke hold, the bruising in a very specific spot, left behind when the person choking someone out wore a heavy watch with a thick face and clasped their hands together to increase the force and pressure. Yekaterina was much smaller than Baker was. She’d needed to brace herself, bear down with all her might. Even drugged, when he felt her arm go around his neck, he must have tried to fight. Until she squeezed and brought him down.
She’d used the slightest bit too much pressure. Not enough to break his hyoid. Just enough to leave behind that telltale bruise on the back of her husband’s neck. And leave behind a bed pushed two inches off center as he struggled and fought and tried to save himself… but couldn’t.
Yekaterina left him there, lying on the floor in Aspen until Georgi Morozov dropped in, picked up his gun, and pressed it into his mouth.
