The Hit (17 page)

So now she had some breathing room and some observation time. She could find out things about Robie. More things.

As she followed him at a leisurely pace her mind drifted to the mental list of names.

Jacobs, done.

Gelder, done.

Sam Kent, a total disaster on her part.

She had one more name on the list. Kent would have communicated with the person by now. Gelder and Jacobs might have been chalked up simply as attacks on American intelligence. By missing Kent, she had clearly exposed her hand.

She had watched in admiration as Robie forced Vance to show her intentions with the traffic light feint. She would have done the same thing. Reel wondered if she could read Robie that easily by just assuming they would react to the same situation in the same way. Then she discarded that simplistic idea. Robie would probably figure that out soon enough and deliberately zig instead of zagging.

Then I’m dead.

About thirty minutes later she pulled to the curb as Robie stopped and Julie Getty climbed out of the car. She didn’t look happy, thought Reel. Julie hurried up the steps to the most imposing four-story town home in the affluent neighborhood.

Reel nodded in approval as she looked around at the high-dollar homes. The foster care child had climbed far.

Then she returned her gaze to Robie. He was still in the car, still staring at Julie. When the door closed behind her, he pulled away.

Reel took a photo of the town home with her phone, waited for Robie to get a bit ahead of her, and then followed.

This was clearly Robie’s Achilles’ heel. He cared about somebody. He cared about this young woman. He had broken rule number one in their line of work.

You don’t care about anyone. You have to be a machine because you have to kill without remorse. And then move on to the next one after quickly forgetting the last.

Yet Reel could understand Robie making that mistake, for a very compelling reason.

I made it too.

She followed him back into D.C., where Robie pulled into the underground garage of an apartment complex.

Reel didn’t go into the garage. That would be too obvious. She stared up at the nondescript eight-story building. It looked like a place where young people just starting out or older people downsizing might live mixed in with a healthy dose of middle-aged people who had simply never fully realized their goals in life.

It was totally unexceptional.

So that meant it was perfect for Robie.

He could hide in plain sight.

She had locked down his base and there was nothing more to be gained from staying here. Robie’s place might be watched. There were enough traffic and pedestrians around that she wasn’t overly worried about being spotted, but the longer she hung around the greater the risk.

And now Reel was confronted with a new problem.

She thought her list had been complete. But her gut was telling her there was someone else out there whom she hadn’t accounted for.

Jacobs was a small fry.

Gelder was a big fish.

Kent was in the mix because he was a special sort of judge who perhaps wasn’t simply a judge.

And there was a fourth person on her list.

But she sensed there was a fifth person, perhaps the most important one of all.

She needed more information. She needed to track the catalyst for all this right to its source. To do so she needed help.

A particular sort of help. And she knew right where to get it.

In the most unlikely of places.

Not the corridors of power.

She would find it at a local shopping mall.

R
EEL DROVE OFF HEADING WEST.
It would be tricky and delicate and perilous. But so was everything she did.

She gripped the steering wheel tighter. Not from nerves. She didn’t really possess them, not like normal people. When she entered the danger zone she actually grew calmer, her heartbeat grew slower, and her limbs became supple. Her field of vision seemed to gain such clarity that everything around her slowed, allowing her to analyze every factor seemingly at her leisure.

And then it was usually over in a blink of an eye.

And someone lay dead.

The drive took over an hour. The traffic was bad, with rain that alternated between bucketing and merely falling.

She liked shopping malls, particularly because they were filled with people and had many entry and exit points.

She also hated shopping malls, particularly because they were filled with people and had many entry and exit points.

She parked her car in an underground garage, then walked to a stairwell and up to the mall entrance. She moved past a group of teenage girls carrying multiple bags from a variety of stores. All were texting on their phones, oblivious to what was going on around them.

Reel could have killed them all before they could even hit send on their phones.

She walked into the mall and slowed her pace. She kept her glasses on, her ball cap pulled low. Her gaze darted everywhere, her mind a microprocessor clearinghouse of potential problems and what to
do about them. She could never again simply go into a building, take a walk or a drive without engaging this part of her brain. It was like breathing. She couldn’t not do it and expect to live.

She slowed even more as she neared the store she wanted. She walked past but not into the store. She made eye contact, flicked a finger under her chin, gave a slight nod, and kept going. She continued farther down the hall and then stopped, looking over some items in a kiosk. She looked up in time to see the person she had nodded at leave the store and turn in her direction.

Reel immediately walked in the opposite direction, eventually turning down a hallway toward the restrooms. She opened the door for the family restroom and closed it behind her. She entered the stall, pulled her gun, and waited. She didn’t like cornering herself in this way, but there wasn’t much choice.

The door opened a few seconds later. Peering through the space between the stall door and wall, she saw who it was.

“Lock the door,” Reel said.

The person locked the door.

Reel came out, gun in hand.

The man looked up at her. He was short, maybe five-six and a hundred and thirty skeletal pounds. Physically he would have no chance against her, even without the gun. But she hadn’t come here to pick a fight. She needed information.

The man’s name was Michael Gioffre. He worked in a GameStop store at the mall, principally because he was an expert gamer and loved the thrill of the competition. He was in his early forties and had never really grown up. He wore a T-shirt stenciled with the title “Day of Doom.”

He also had been a spy. He could talk out of both sides of his mouth glibly and could sell sand to a man dying of thirst. Now retired, he looked out only for himself.

And for Jessica Reel.

Because she had saved his life, not once but twice.

He was her gold card, one of the few she possessed.

Gioffre eyed the gun. “Serious shit?”

She nodded. “Is there any other?”

“Wouldn’t have recognized you without the chin flick signal. Nice plastic surgery, by the way. Very becoming.”

“When someone’s cutting you, only go with the best.”

“I’ve heard the official story. Gelder and another guy dead.”

“That’s right.”

“Your doing?” His expression showed he did not expect an answer. “What can I do for you, Jess?”

Reel put her gun away and leaned against the sink. “I need information.”

“Big risk you coming here.”

“Not as big as three years ago. You’ve been off the grid for a while, Mike. I know where your cover team sets up. They’re not there. In fact, they haven’t been there for six months.”

Gioffre folded his arms and leaned back against the door. “I
have
been feeling a little naked out there. But I guess they figured I was really retired after all and am officially into my retail gaming career. So no more cover. What information?”

“You knew Gelder?”

He nodded. “Lots of us did. He’d been there a long time.”

“What about the other dead guy, Doug Jacobs? Cover was at DTRA?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“They knew each other. And not just in agency circles.”

“How do you know that?” asked Gioffre.

“Not relevant. But it’s true.”

“What’s that got to do with me?”

“Nothing, but I need you to do something for me,” said Reel.

“What?”

“Like I said, information. Not anything you know. Something you have to find out for me. And I need it right away.”

“I don’t have many contacts left inside.”

“I didn’t say it was on the inside. At least not anymore.”

R
OBIE SAT BACK AND RUBBED
his eyes. Janet DiCarlo hadn’t yet sent him new files electronically, so he had gone over the redacted ones several times looking for things that might have escaped his notice before.

But there was nothing.

Reel’s last several missions had all been outside the country. Robie could travel to each of them, but he wasn’t convinced it would benefit his investigation.

He would have to go back the two years in her life that he had set as the outside time parameter. The only problem was, that would take time too.

How many more people would she kill in the interim?

If she kept the body count going, Robie could imagine himself being dismissed from the task of finding her. And maybe that would be perfectly fine with him.

He had called the number DiCarlo left him, but it had gone to voice mail. He wondered about the rose petals and what they might mean. He doubted Reel had left them as symbols of her pious lifestyle. Had she left them as symbols of bloody deaths with funerals certain to follow? That also didn’t make sense to him, which meant he was looking at the issue in the wrong way.

So what was the right way? he asked himself as he poured out a cup of fresh coffee. He checked his watch.

Two a.m. He poured the coffee into the sink.

It was time to go to sleep. Without some shuteye he was going to be of little use to himself or anyone else.

Five hours later he awoke reasonably refreshed. He spent several hours going back over the files he had been given. Even with the redactions he felt there might be something in them that could help.

Again he didn’t find much. He made some calls that were similarly unproductive. He worked out for a quick thirty minutes in the gym in the basement of his apartment building and then snatched a meal, eating it standing up in his kitchen. That’s when he got the call from the agency. They had something for him that might help his search, but he needed to come and get it. He showered, gunned up, and was on his way.

He arrived at a CIA facility that Reel had used during her mission before killing Doug Jacobs. It was about an hour outside of D.C. There was a locker there with a few possessions that Reel had left behind. Considering the redactions and the policed crime scenes, Robie held no hope that the locker would offer any useful details, but he had to check them out regardless.

He was processed through the facility’s security and escorted to the locker. It was opened for him and he was left alone with the contents. They were few, and Robie had no way of knowing if these were the only ones that had been in the locker. Right now he trusted no one.

There were only three items: a photo, a book on World War II, and a nine-millimeter Glock 17 semiautomatic pistol with custom sights. The photograph was of Reel standing next to a man whom Robie did not recognize.

He collected all the items and made the hourlong drive back to his apartment to go over them.

Robie was feeling out of his depth. His specialty was preparing, in a scorched-earth way, to kill another human being and then successfully exiting that situation to live to kill another day. Sleuthing, painstakingly going over minutiae looking for clues, traveling here and there, questioning people simply wasn’t his thing. He wasn’t a detective. He was a professional trigger, but they were expecting him to investigate and so he would.