The Hit (10 page)

She took a cab to a major intersection and then got out. The rest of the way would be on foot. It took her thirty minutes to walk it, unhurried, seemingly out for a casual stroll. Along the way she used every skill she possessed to attempt to see anyone watching her. Her antennae never quivered.

She reached the spot ahead of schedule and surveyed it from a hidden observation point. If something were going to happen, here was where it would transpire.

Twenty minutes passed and she saw him approach. He was dressed in a suit and looked like a bureaucrat. Which he was. He didn’t carry a bulky manila file with him. That would have been the old days.

And I’m old enough to remember some of the “old days,”
she thought.

He bought a newspaper from a machine and clanged the metal and glass door shut, checking it once to make certain it had closed properly. It was a routine sort of thing and would not warrant any attention from anyone.

He turned and walked away.

Reel watched him go and then strolled over to the machine, inserted her coins, opened the door, and withdrew the next paper that sat on top of the pile. At the same instant her hand closed around the black thumb drive the man had placed there.

It was an old-fashioned drop procedure to retrieve modern-day digital info. Her informant was an old friend who owed her a favor and was not yet aware that others in the intelligence field were after her. It had worked to her advantage that the agency had chosen to close ranks on her little detour from duty. This she had confirmed by using electronic back doors into the agency’s databases, back doors she had set up a long time ago. Soon these back doors would be firmly closed and her old friends would be doing their best to kill her. But for now, she had access.

Reel turned and walked away, her steps unhurried, but every sense on alert. She slipped inside a fast-food restaurant and made her way to the ladies’ room. She took out the drive and a device in her other pocket, which enabled her to check the drive for malware
or an electronic tracker. An old friend was an old friend, but in the spy business you really didn’t have any friends, just enemies and people who could become your enemy.

The thumb drive was clear.

She took a circuitous route back to her hotel, using a cab, a bus, the Metro, and finally her feet. Two hours later she was back in her room, nearly certain that all that had elapsed during the last three hours had passed by unobserved by anyone looking for her.

She kicked off her shoes and sat at the desk set against one wall. She opened her laptop and plugged the drive into the USB slot. She opened the file on the drive and the information started to spread across her screen.

This was Will Robie’s life—well, as much as his employer knew of it. Some she was already aware of, but there was much fresh information on here. In many profound ways, his early life mirrored her own.

Neither had had a real family growing up.

Both had been loners.

Both had gone down certain paths in life, only to be pulled from what would probably have been early deaths, to serve on behalf of their country.

Both had problems with authority.

Both liked to go their own way.

Both were extremely good at their job.

Neither had ever failed.

Now one of them would be guaranteed to do so.

Only one winner per contest.

No ties allowed.

She scrolled down until she came to two photos on the screen.

The first was an attractive, tenacious-looking woman in her late thirties. Even if Reel hadn’t known she was a federal cop, she would have assumed it from the look.

Special Agent Nicole Vance, known as Nikki to her friends, of which she didn’t appear to have many, according to the notes accompanying the picture.

She was a die-hard FBI agent. She had bucked the gender bias
that lived in every agency and workplace. Her professional star had risen like a shuttle rocket blasting off from Florida, all based on pure merit and sheer guts.

She was the one investigating the death of Doug Jacobs.

She knew Robie. They had worked together.

She could be a problem. Or an unlikely asset. Only time would tell.

Reel memorized every feature of Vance’s face and all the accompanying information as well. Memorization was a skill that one grew adept at in this field, or one did not survive in this field.

She focused on the second photo.

The girl was young, fourteen, the notes said.

Julie Getty.

Foster care. Parents murdered.

She had worked with Robie, in an unofficial capacity of course. She had shown herself to be resilient, quick-witted, and adaptable. She had survived things most adults would have succumbed to. Most importantly, Robie seemed to care about her. He had risked a lot to help her.

Reel rested her chin on her knuckles as she gazed into that youthful countenance. In its depths she saw age beyond the official years. Julie Getty had clearly suffered much. She had clearly survived much. But the suffering never really left you. It became a part of you, like a second skin that you could never shed no matter how much you wanted to.

It was the shell one showed to the world every day, hardened, nearly puncture-proof, yet nothing really could be. That was not how humans were built.

We have a heart. We have a soul. And they can be obliterated at any time.

Reel ordered some room service. After it came she ate her food, drank her coffee, and stared at that photo.

The facts behind the face she had already memorized. She knew where Julie Getty lived, whom she lived with, and where she went to school. She knew that Robie had not once visited her.

And she knew why.

He’s protecting her. Keeping her separate from his world.

My world.

It was no place for amateurs, capable or not.

But she wasn’t separate.

She had ceased to be separate from the moment she met Will Robie.

Julie was an only child. An orphan now, with her parents killed. That was something Reel could relate to. Being on your own.

She had really been on her own since she was younger than Julie. One didn’t do what Reel did for a living by growing up in ordinary ways. There had to be a hurt present, a pain that never left you, to make you take a gun or a knife or your hands and force the life out of another human being over and over and over. You didn’t go to school and play sports and join debate team or become a cheerleader and then go home to a loving mom and dad and end up doing what Reel had spent most of her adult life doing.

Reel took another sip of coffee and cocked her head as the rain started up outside. As it pelted against the windows she kept looking at the image of Julie Getty.

You could be me like me
, she thought.

And like Robie.

But if you have to make the decision, if the opportunity presents itself… Walk away.

No, run away, Julie.

Reel closed the laptop and the image of Julie vanished.

But not really. It was still there. Burned right into her brain.

For in some ways, when she looked at Julie Getty, it seemed Jessica Reel was simply staring at herself.

M
ORE POLICE TAPE
. I
N THE
wind and rain it looked like golden strands of rope shimmying against the dark. FBI vans, police cars, barricades, press people trying to push through, uniforms pushing them back.

It was always the same.

At the center of it was always at least one dead body, usually more. It was getting to the point that every day brought a new slaughter for people to dissect.

Robie watched all of this activity with an informed eyed as he stood behind the barricades. He had thought about many things since nearly dying on the Eastern Shore. One in particular was nagging at him.

I didn’t clear the outbuilding before going into the cottage.

He imagined there might have been some interesting things in that outbuilding. But there was no way to go back there now. The police would be all over the place. He wondered what they might find.

He called Blue Man and asked that very question.

“The outbuilding is no longer there,” Blue Man said.

“What do you mean it’s no longer there?”

“About two minutes after you left, it disintegrated into flames. Accelerant plus perhaps a phosphorus-based incendiary component. The temperature would have been so hot it would turn metal to liquid. I just watched the feed from one of our satellites. The police are there now, but finding nothing.”

“She covered her tracks well.”

“Did you expect anything less?”

“I guess not.”

“Don’t forget to come in,” said Blue Man.

“You’ll see me at some point.”

Robie clicked off and watched the police and FBI go about finding nothing.

The Town Car sat in the same spot, but it was partially blocked from view by a blue plastic tarp shield that had been erected around it.

Blue Man earlier had filled Robie in on the details of the execution, for that’s what it had been. Some kid had come to clean the windshield. First the driver’s-side and then the passenger-side windows had come down, through which the security agents had warned the kid off.

The shot had come through the passenger side, hit Gelder in the forehead, and ended his life. Neither of the security guys had been touched.

It was only Gelder she had been after. That made sense. He was number two. If he were the number one guy at the agency, Robie would have started to feel more than a little nervous, because he might be next on the list.

The kid had run off. They were looking for him, but even if they found him Robie was certain he would have nothing to tell them. He’d been paid to do what he’d done. But there was no way he ever would have seen who paid him.

To go from a desk banger like Douglas Jacobs and leapfrog all the way up to the man holding down the number two slot at the agency was a jump of impressive length. Robie wondered about the rationale behind it. For he figured Reel had to have some reason. He didn’t think she was simply picking her targets out of a jar.

And that meant that Robie had to come to understand her logic. And to do that he had to come to understand not just Reel, but also the men she had killed.

He figured Gelder’s file would be much thicker than Jacobs’s, and most of it would be classified. Robie wondered how much of it would be kept from him. At some point he might have to start
pushing back against the natural secrecy that the personnel of the agency carried in their DNA. He couldn’t solve what he couldn’t understand.

He glanced up at the traffic light. It was green now, but no cars moved through because the road had been closed down.

He looked back at the car and then at the traffic light.

He nodded. She’d covered that as well.

He made another call to Blue Man. “Have someone check the cycles on the traffic light the car was stopped at. I’m betting she interfered with it to get the car to stop where it did when it did. Otherwise, she’s shit out of luck if the light was green.”

“We already did. And they were manually overridden, presumably by her.”

Robie put his phone away and started walking off. But he kept looking back over his shoulder to judge the likely path of the bullet, reversing that route to get where he needed to go.

He stopped near a tree. It was far away from the crime scene, so the police had not gotten to it yet, but they would.

He eyed the lowest branch, looking for any recent marks where a gun barrel had been laid. He saw none, but that meant nothing. He next examined the little dirt patch the tree was set in and the sidewalk around it.

Blue Man had said there were no witnesses. Well, actually there were three: the two security agents and the kid. But the guards had seen nothing. Didn’t even know really from precisely which direction the shot had come. The kid would be of no help because he would know nothing.

Robie did a sight line to the car window. A fine shot on a diagonal line between two stationary objects at distance.

At night.

In less than ideal conditions.

The margin of error he calculated to be nonexistent.

She had to have used a scope and a hybrid weapon, something between a pistol and a rifle. This was not the Eastern Shore, after all. There were potential witnesses everywhere. Pulling out a long-barreled rifle was problematic at best.

She’d gotten the shot off and then was gone. Like smoke. That didn’t just happen. You had to make it happen.

His gaze went to the bushes surrounding the tree, and he saw it on his second pass. He knelt down and picked it up. It was white, falling apart. He put it to his nose. It had a scent.

His mind went back to the town house where the kill shot on Jacobs had come from. Same thing.

He put it in his pocket. It was the only clue he could see and he was not going to leave it for the police to find. They were not his ally in this.

He looked around. There were four directions on the compass, and they translated into thousands of potential escape routes for Reel to take.