The F*ck-it List by John Niven

Author:John Niven [Niven, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473507050
Publisher: Random House

FIFTEEN

‘You can’t kill a Camry.’

Frank had spent the last couple of days getting to know Fairfax, Virginia, pretty well. He’d seen the sights – the courthouse, the town hall, and the famous 29 Diner, operating on the same site since 1947. (He’d tried one of their cheeseburgers, but couldn’t get through it.) But most of the time he’d taken his coffee and his notebook and sat on a stone bench on Waples Mill Road, across the street from the huge glass-and-steel building, watching the comings and goings. He’d seen the target coming and going every day.

The bad news: the place was indeed a fortress.

The good news: the target was a man of habit.

Each morning he arrived a little before 9 a.m., in a blacked-out Hummer with two bodyguards. Each lunchtime, around 1 p.m., he left the building with a couple of colleagues, got back into the blacked-out Hummer with the bodyguards, and took a five-minute drive down the street to an Italian place called Beltrami’s, where he and his colleagues ate lunch while the bodyguards waited in the car. They usually spent about an hour in the restaurant. Frank had cased the place thoroughly, eating there twice. The front looked onto a busy shopping thoroughfare. An alleyway out back led to a residential street.

He knew from his research that the target’s home on the outskirts of Washington, about a twenty-five-minute drive from here, was out. It was a gated mansion, guarded 24/7. For the obvious reasons.

So here he sat, in a Denny’s off the freeway a little way out of town, reading the local paper, the local paper around these parts being the Washington Post. ‘NEW DIPLOMATIC TRIUMPH FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP!’ the headline screamed, above a story about Ivanka’s recent trip to Russia, where she’d been photographed fishing and hunting with the 74-year-old Putin, now in his fifth term in office. It was safe to say that it wasn’t the same Washington Post Frank had grown up with. The original paper had closed down in 2021, after they had printed a completely false story they’d been fed about Jared and Ivanka’s ongoing divorce. Kushner was in jail by then anyway but the Trumps – gearing up for Ivanka’s 2024 run – had thrown all their might and resources into suing the paper. They won the case and the paper was forced to close. The following year it was brought out of administration by Rupert Murdoch, making one of his last major investments before his death. Frank finished the Ivanka puff piece and skimmed the rest of the paper, a hodge-podge of human-interest stories, celebrity gossip and relentlessly pro-government political pieces. There was one (small) negative story about an outgoing cabinet member, a practice that allowed the Post to brand itself as ‘fair and balanced’.

Frank recognised freedompatriot1776 the moment he came through the door, because he was carrying, as he said he would be, a red umbrella. Frank waved to the guy and he came over and sat down in the booth.

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