The Hit

by David Baldacci

  19

  ROBIE LEFT THE FLOWER SHOP and headed on. He had a lot to think about. And he was angry. Flowers at both scenes. No, actually remnants of flowers at both scenes. The files he had been given were not the only thing his agency had redacted. They had policed the crime scenes and removed the white roses that Reel had left there, but they had missed a couple petals.

  In her message Reel had suggested that he watch his back. That there were other agendas on the table. Now he was thinking she was more right than wrong about that.

  The new location Blue Man had directed him to was west of D.C. in Loudoun County, Virginia. This was horse country, big estates behind miles of fencing, mingled with more modest homesteads. Interspersed throughout were small towns with upscale shopping and restaurants that catered to the well-heeled playing at being country squires. Alongside those establishments were stores that sold things people actually needed, like crop seed and saddles.

  Eventually Robie turned down a graveled lane bracketed by dense pines that had turned the ground underneath them orange with their fallen needles. There was a sign at the entrance to the lane that warned folks who did not have business down here not to make the turn.

  He came to a steel gate manned by two men in cammies and holding MP5s. He and his car were searched and his invitation to be here confirmed. The steel gate slid open on motorized tracks and he drove on.

  The complex was sprawling and all on one story. It looked like a well-funded community college.

  He parked and walked to the front door, was buzzed in, and a woman in a conservative navy blue pantsuit escorted him back. On her hip rode her security creds. Robie eyed them. When she glanced up at him and saw what he was doing she admonished, “I wouldn’t commit them to memory.”

  “I never do,” replied Robie.

  He was left in a sterile examination room by the woman, who closed the door behind her. He assumed it would lock automatically. He doubted they wanted him wandering the halls unaccompanied.

  A minute later the door opened and another woman came in. She was slender, in her late thirties, with long dark hair tied back, glasses, and red lipstick. She wore a white doctor’s coat.

  “I’m Dr. Karin Meenan, Mr. Robie. I understand you’ve sustained some injuries?”

  “Nothing too serious.”

  “Where are they located?”

  “Arm and leg.”

  “Can you disrobe and get up on the table, please?”

  She prepared some medical devices while Robie took off his jacket, shirt, pants, and shoes. He perched on the table while Meenan sat on a stool with rollers and moved closer to him.

  She looked at the burns. “You think these aren’t serious?” she said, her eyebrows hiked.

  “I’m not dead.”

  She continued to examine him. “I guess you have a different set of standards than most.”

  “I guess.”

  “Did you clean these?”

  “Yes.”

  “You did a good job,” she noted.

  “Thanks.”

  “But they need some more work.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I’m also going to give you some meds to prevent infection. And a shot.”

  “Whatever you think best,” replied Robie.

  “You’re a very cooperative patient.”

  “Do you get any other kind here?”

  “Not really. But I didn’t always work here, either,” said Meenan.

  “Where before?”

  “Trauma center, southeast D.C.”

  “Then you’ve seen your share of gunshot wounds.”

  “Yes, I have. Speaking of which, you have your share.” She eyed two spots on Robie’s body. She placed her finger in a divot on Robie’s arm. “Nine-mil?”

  “Three-fifty-seven, actually. Shooter was using an off-brand that luckily jammed on him the second time around, or else I might not be here talking to you.”

  Her gaze flicked up at him. “Are you often lucky in your work?”

  “Almost never.”

  “It’s not about luck, is it?”

  “Almost never,” he repeated.

  She spent the next hour thoroughly cleaning and then bandaging his wounds. “I can give you the first round of meds in the butt or the arm. The injection spot will be sore for a while,” she said.

  Robie immediately held out his left arm.

  “You shoot right-handed, I take it.”

  “Yes,” he answered.

  She stuck the syringe into his arm and depressed the plunger. “There will be a bottle of pills waiting for you in the lobby. Follow the directions and you shouldn’t have any problems. But you were lucky. You came close to requiring skin grafts. As it is the skin may not heal completely without plastic surgery.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t suppose I’ll see you again.”

  “Do you do autopsies here?”

  She looked surprised. “No, why?”

  “Then you probably won’t see me again.”

  Robie slipped his clothes back on. “Can you direct me to where I need to go next?”

  “Someone else will come in to do that. There aren’t many places here I’m cleared to go.”

  “Glad you signed up?”

  “Are you?” she shot back.

  “Keep asking myself that every day.”

  “And your answer?”

  “It changes depending on the day.”

  She held out her card. “My contact info is on there. Burns are not to be messed with. And you really need to take it easy. I would limit strenuous exercise, travel, and. . .” Her voice trailed off as he stared at her. “And none of that is possible, right?”

  He took the card. “Thanks for fixing me up.”

  She walked to the door and then turned back. “For what it’s worth, good luck.” And then she was gone.

  Robie waited there for another five minutes.

  The door opened.

  Blue Man stood there. Suit, modest tie, polished shoes, hair perfect.

  But his face was not.

  In those features Robie could see that Blue Man was not himself at all today.

  Which meant that things were about to change for Robie.

  CHAPTER

  20

  JESSICA REEL WAS ONCE MORE on the move.

  She had never liked to stay in one place for too long.

  She had taken a cab and then she had walked. She liked to walk. When you were being driven in a cab you gave up some measure of control. She never liked to do that.

  This day was cooler than the day before. The rain had come and gone yet it was overcast and still felt damp. But it wasn’t a humid damp. It was a chilly one.

  She was glad of the long trench coat. And the hat.

  And the sunglasses, despite the weak light.

  The car came down the street. It was a late-model hunter green Jag convertible. A man was driving. He looked to be in his late forties. His hair was short and he sported a small graying goatee.

  His name was Jerome Cassidy. He had overcome alcohol addictions and other problems to become a self-made millionaire. There were many lessons to be learned from the man’s personal triumph.

  But the person sitting next to Cassidy interested Reel far more.

  Fourteen, small for her age, with messy hair.

  When the car stopped and she got out, Reel saw that she wore torn jeans, cheap sneakers, and a sweatshirt. A large backpack was over one shoulder. It looked like it weighed as much as she did.

  Julie Getty looked like a typical urban teen going to school.

  A few words were exchanged between the two and then the Jag drove off.

  Reel knew that Jerome Cassidy loved Julie Getty as a father did a daughter, though they had just recently become acquainted.

  Now she forgot about Cassidy and focused on Julie.

  The first thing she did was scan the area. She doubted they would have thought that far ahead, but one never knew
.

  She saw no one watching Julie, and she was confident she would have if they had been there. She slipped her phone from her pocket and took some pictures of Julie and the school she was now heading into.

  School was out at three-fifteen.

  She knew that Julie did not ride in the Jag for the trip back home. She took the bus.

  Reel would be back at three-ten.

  She watched Julie disappear through the doorway of the school building and then turned and walked down the street.

  Killers sometimes returned to the scene of the crime. That was next on her agenda this morning. She wasn’t interested in the crime scene itself. She was more interested in someone who she knew would be there.

  When she arrived at her destination, Reel saw that the barricades had been pulled back until only the two buildings in question were still off-limits.

  She stepped inside a shop, bought a coffee and newspaper, and stepped back out. She sat on a bench, read her paper, drank her coffee, and waited.

  It took one hour before the woman came out. Reel had long since finished her coffee and the paper. She now just sat there looking idly around. Or so it seemed.

  She made no visible reaction to the woman’s appearance on the scene.

  Nicole Vance talked to one of her agents and signed off on a document. She stepped back and took a long look at the building from where the shot had been fired that had killed Doug Jacobs. Then she gazed toward the building where Jacobs’s life had ended.

  Reel knew that Vance was very good at her job. She knew that the woman had probably gathered all the evidence that was collectible at both sites. She would go over it and then look for the killer. She wouldn’t find the killer. Not because she wasn’t good enough, but because it just wasn’t the sort of crime that the police ever solved.

  Reel knew that either the people after her would get to her first, long before the police would be made aware of her presence, or else she would finish her work and disappear forever.

  Reel was not afraid of much. She was not afraid of the police. Or the FBI. Or Special Agent Vance.

  She was afraid of her former employer.

  She was afraid of Will Robie.

  But she was most afraid of failing at the one mission that had come to define her perhaps as she truly was.

  She took some photos of Vance with her phone while pretending to make a call.

  She knew where Vance lived. A condo in Alexandria. She’d been there quite some time. Never married. Never close to being married. Her career apparently was her perfect soul mate.

  But she liked Robie. That was obvious.

  That could help Reel. And hurt Robie.

  She thought things through. Robie had sustained burns. That meant getting treatment at an agency facility. And with Jim Gelder dead, Robie almost certainly would have been summoned to meet with the one man above Gelder: Evan Tucker.

  She took a cab to a Hertz dealer, rented a car, and drove off, merging into traffic and, in her mind, merging the possibilities of the young teen and the FBI agent. There was nothing fair about what Reel was thinking about doing. Yet when one had few options, one had to go with them.

  She drove to Virginia and stopped in front of an imposing building that was relatively new.

  United States Courthouse.

  It was inside here that justice was supposed to be accomplished. It was inside here that wrongs were supposed to be righted. The guilty punished. The innocent absolved.

  Reel didn’t know if any of that happened in courthouses anymore. She wasn’t a lawyer and didn’t understand the intricacies of what lawyers and judges did.

  But she did understand one thing.

  There were consequences to choices.

  And a choice had been made by someone in that building and she happened to be the consequence of that choice.

  She waited for another hour, her car parked on the street, its engine running. There was virtually no parking around here. She had been lucky enough to snag a spot and didn’t want to give it up.

  The clouds had steadily moved back up the river and thickened. A few drops of rain plopped onto her windshield. She didn’t notice; her attention was riveted on the front steps of the courthouse. Finally, the doors opened and four men walked out.

  Reel was only interested in one of the four. He was older than the rest. He should have known better. But perhaps with age, at least in his case, did not come wisdom.

  He was white-haired, tall, and trim, with a tanned face and small eyes. He said something to one of the other men and they all laughed. At the bottom of the stairs they parted company. The white-haired man went to the left, the others to the right.

  He opened his umbrella as the rain became steadier. His name was Samuel Kent. His intimates called him Sam. He was a federal judge of long standing. He was married to a woman who came from money. Her trust fund fueled a lavish lifestyle with an apartment in New York, a historically important eighteenth-century town home in Old Town Alexandria, and a horse farm in Middleburg, Virginia.

  A year ago, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court had appointed Sam Kent to the FISC, which stood for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the most clandestine of all federal tribunals. It operated in absolute secrecy. The president had no authority over it. Neither did Congress. It never published its findings. It was really accountable to no one. Its sole purpose was to grant or reject surveillance warrants for foreign agents operating in the United States. There were only eleven FISC judges, and Sam Kent was thrilled to be one of them. And he never rejected a warrant request.

  Reel watched Kent walk down the street. She knew his Maserati convertible was parked in a secure section of the courthouse garage, so he wasn’t driving anywhere. His town home would have been within walking distance of the old federal courthouse in Old Town, which was now used by the bankruptcy court. But it was too far to walk from this courthouse. There were two Metro stops in the area, but Reel doubted he would be taking public transportation. He just didn’t seem the sort to mix with regular people. At this hour of the day she assumed he might be going to grab a bite to eat at one of the nearby restaurants.

  She pulled out onto the street and followed the judge at a discreet distance.

  In her head Reel had her list. There were two crossed off.

  Judge Kent was the third name on that list.

  She had covered the intelligence sector. Now it was time to move on to the judiciary.

  Kent was very foolish for walking alone even in daylight, she thought. With Gelder and Jacobs dead he would have to know.

  And if he knew, he should be aware that he was on the list.

  And if he didn’t know, he was not nearly as formidable an opponent as she thought.

  And I know that’s not the case.

  Something was off here.