Chapter 11
Jessica Reel had left New York and flown to D.C. She had done this because what she had to do next had to be done here.
There were three ways to approach the mission. For a mission was what Jessica Reel was on.
You could start from the bottom and move to the top.
Or start at the top and move to the bottom.
Or you could mix it up, be unpredictable, go in no particular order.
The first option might be more symbolically pure.
The third approach greatly improved Reel’s odds of success. And her ability to survive.
She opted for success and survival over symbolism.
This area of D.C. was full of office buildings, all empty at this late hour. Many high-level government executives worked here, along with their even more affluent private-sector counterparts.
That didn’t matter much to Reel. Rich, poor, or in between, she just went to where she needed to go. She had killed whoever they had tasked her to eliminate. She had been a machine, executing orders with a surgical efficiency.
She placed an earwig in her left ear and ran the cord to the power pack attached to her belt. She smoothed down her hair and unbuttoned her jacket. The pistol sat ready in her shoulder holster.
She looked at her watch, did the math in her head, and knew she had about thirty minutes to think about what she was going to do.
The night was clear, if cool, the rain having finally passed. That was expected this time of year. The street was empty of traffic, also expected at this hour of the night.
She walked to a corner and took up position next to a tree with a bench below. She adjusted the earwig and looked at her watch again.
She was a prisoner not only to time but also to precise time, measured in seconds. A sliver off here or there and she was dead.
Through her earwig she learned that the man was on the move. A bit ahead of schedule, he would be here in ten minutes. Knowing her agency’s communication frequencies was a real advantage.
She pulled the device from her pocket. It had a black matte finish, measured four by six inches, two buttons on top, and was probably—aside from her gun—the most important thing she carried. Without this, her plan could not work barring a major piece of luck.
And Reel could not count on being that lucky.
I’ve already used up all of my luck anyway.
She looked up as the car came down the street.
A Lincoln Town Car.
Black.
Do they make them in any other color?
She needed confirmation. After all, in this city black Town Cars were nearly as plentiful as fish in the ocean. She raised the night optics to her eyes and looked through the windshield. All the other windows were tinted. She saw what she needed to see. She lowered the optics and put them in her pocket. She took a penlight from her pocket and flashed it one time. A beam of light answered her. She put the light away and fingered the black box. She looked up and then across the street.
What was about to happen next had cost her a hundred bucks. She hoped it was money well spent.
She pushed the right-side button on the black box.
The traffic light immediately turned from green to yellow to red. She put the box away.
The Lincoln pulled to a stop at the intersection.
The figure darted out from the shadows and approached the Lincoln. He held a bucket in one hand, something else in the other. Water splashed on the windshield.
“Hey!” yelled the driver, lowering his window.
The kid was black, about fourteen. He used a squeegee to get the soapy water off the glass.
The driver yelled, “Get the hell out of here!”
The light stayed red.
Reel had her gun out now, its barrel resting on a low branch of the tree she was standing beside. On the gun’s Picatinny rail was a scope. The pistol’s barrel had been lengthened and specially engineered for a longer-range shot than most handguns could accomplish.
The kid ran around to the other side and used the squeegee to whisk off the water from that side.
The passenger-side window slid down.
That was the key for Reel, the passenger window coming down, because the man in the back was riding behind the driver. Angle of shot was the whole ballgame.
She aimed, exhaled a long breath, and her finger moved to the trigger.
Point of no return.
The black kid ran back to the driver’s side and held out his hand. “Super clean. Five bucks.”
“I said get out of here,” shouted the driver.
“My momma needs an operation.”
“If you’re not gone in two seconds—”
The man never finished because Reel fired.
The round zipped in front of the man in the passenger seat, cut a diagonal between him and the driver, and slammed into the forehead of the man in the back.
Reel put the weapon in her pocket and hit the other button on the black box.
The light turned green.
The Lincoln did not go.
The driver and the passenger started shouting. They jumped out of the car.
The squeegee kid was long gone. He had started to run as soon as the gun fired.
The men were covered in blood and brains.
Reel slipped away into the night. She was already disassembling, with one hand, the pistol where it was concealed in her pocket.
In the car Jim Gelder slumped forward, held in his seat only by his seat belt. A chunk of his brain lay against the back window.
The agency would have to find a new number two man.
As the twin security guards raced around looking for the shooter, Reel walked down into a nearby Metro entrance and boarded a train. Within a few minutes she was miles away.
She forgot about Jim Gelder and moved to the next target on her list.
Chapter 12
In Robie’s world there wasn’t much difference between day and night. He didn’t work nine-to-five, and so seven p.m. was as good a time as any to start his next task.
The Eastern Shore of Virginia was not an easy place to get to by car, bus, or plane. And no train went there.
Robie opted to drive. He liked the control.
He drove south until he got to the Norfolk, Virginia, area. From there he headed north across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel that connected the Eastern Shore to the rest of the commonwealth. The bridge-tunnel’s low trestle bridges dipped down into mile-long tunnels running inside man-made islands and then back onto high-level bridges soaring over a couple of navigation channels. Sometime after eleven, Robie finally left the bridge-tunnel behind and drove onto firm land.
Virginia’s share of the Eastern Shore was comprised of two rural counties, Accomack and Northampton. They were as flat as a table and made up the “-va” in the Delmarva Peninsula. The two counties had a combined population of about forty-five thousand hardy souls, whereas the geographically smaller Fairfax County, Virginia, alone had over a million. It was nearly all farmland: cotton, soybeans, and chickens on a large scale.
The Eastern Shore also was home to a NASA installation, Wallops Flight Facility, and a place for wild ponies to roam, Chincoteague Island.
Robie was looking for something wild tonight, a rogue assassin who was working for someone else.
Or maybe herself.
Robie drove for another ten miles until rural became seemingly uninhabited. In the distance, very near the coastline, he saw a black speck that was darker than the night around him. He turned down a dirt road, drove on, and then stopped in front of the speck, which up close was revealed to be a cottage with shingle siding turned gray by the sun and the salty air. Behind it was the Atlantic, pounding the shore, sending up sprays of water as it collided with large boulders that formed a crude bulwark.
This was oceanfront all right, but Robie did not think it would be a tourist destination anytime soon. He could understand why Jessica Reel would want to live here. The isol
ation was complete. To her, companionship must have seemed highly overrated.
He sat in the car and took it all in, side to side and up and down.
Up revealed a storm coming. Down was loamy soil, good for growing things, not so good for building homes. No basements here, he concluded. Robie imagined that at some point the ocean might reclaim this spit of land.
Side to side revealed only a small outbuilding. There was no garden, no lawn really.
Reel must live simply. Robie had no idea where she would even go to get her provisions. Or a plumber. Or an electrician. Maybe she didn’t need any of those things.
He didn’t even know how often she was here. He certainly didn’t expect her to be here now. But expectations were not the same things as facts.
He climbed from his car. His gun was already out. He moved away from every sight line the door or windows in the cottage would provide. There were no trees around for someone to line up a shot. It was flat land, no place to set up a clandestine nest and wait until he walked into the crosshairs.
All that should have made Robie feel good.
It didn’t. Because there was also no cover for him.
And because it meant he was missing something.
A place like this, you had to have some plan. A defensive bulwark even if it didn’t look like one. If this had been his place he would have. And he didn’t think he and Reel were all that different when it came to survival measures.
He crouched down and looked around. The cottage was dark. It was probably empty. But that was not the same as being safe to enter.
Jessica Reel did not have to be at home in order to kill an intruder.
He circled the cottage twice, moving closer with each sweep. There was a pond on the ocean side thirty yards away on a ruler-straight line off the back door. As he shined his light on it he could see that its surface was clear, although the ground around was slicked with a slimy coating of algae.
Other than that, there was not a single element to capture his interest.
Except for the cottage.
Robie squatted in the middle of a field and mulled over the situation.
He finally arrived at a plan of attack and went back to his car to get what he needed. He collected these items in a long brown leather pouch that he slung over his shoulder. He crept within a hundred feet of the front door of the cottage and stopped.
He took out a short-barreled rifle and slipped in a round. He took aim and fired at the front door. The round passed through the wood and entered the cottage.
Nothing else happened.
He slipped a second round in and aimed at the front-porch floorboards. He fired. Wood shot into the air.
Nothing else happened.
He loaded a third round, took aim, and shot the front-door lock off. The door swung open.
But that was all.
He put the rifle away in his bag and put it back in the car. But he slipped another device from the bag into his jacket pocket.
He took out his pistol and moved forward but keeping low. When he reached the cottage he took the device out of his pocket and aimed it at the building. He looked at the readout screen on the device.
No thermal images appeared.
Unless Reel had managed to freeze herself, she was not in the cottage, nor was anyone else.
But that still didn’t mean it was safe.
Robie couldn’t scan the entire place for bombs like at the airport. There were no explosives-sniffing dogs handy. At some point he would have to risk it. And that point was upon him. He put the thermal imager away and pulled from his pocket a short metal object and turned it on.
He opened the door and entered, placing his feet carefully and using the electronic device to reveal any invisible-to-the-naked-eye trip wires. He also scrutinized each section of the floor before stepping on it to see if the wood looked new. Pressure plates under floorboards could not be detected by his device.
He moved through each room, finding nothing. It didn’t take long because the place was not very large. What struck him was it looked just like his apartment—not in size and design, but in what was in it.
Or rather what wasn’t in it. No personal effects. No photos. No souvenirs, no knickknacks. Nothing that showed Reel belonged to anyone or to anywhere.
Just like me.
He moved into the kitchen at the same instant his phone buzzed.
He looked down at the screen.
The text on the screen was in all caps:
GELDER SHOT DOWN IN CAR IN D.C. REEL SUSPECTED.
Robie put the phone away and considered this.
Alarming news under any circumstances, but he had been trained not to overreact to anything. His primary thought was to get out of here. He had risked much and gotten little.
He looked to his right and saw a door. It looked like a pantry or storage closet. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed it before, and then saw that it was painted the same color as the wall of the kitchen.
It was imperfectly closed, leaving an inch gap. He nudged it open with his foot while his pistol was trained directly on it.
The pantry was empty.
The trip had been a waste of time.
And while he’d been down here, Reel had likely killed the number two man in the agency. She was scoring touchdowns and he didn’t even have a first down yet.
He shined his light inside the space for a better look, although it was obviously empty. That’s when he saw the word written on the rear wall:
SORRY.
Robie kicked open the back door, figuring this was the easiest way out and would allow him to exit without retracing his path through the cottage.
Seemed like a good idea. Safer.
But then he heard the click and the whoosh, and the good safe idea instantly became a nightmare.
Chapter 13
The dark, calm night over the Eastern Shore was disrupted by a flame ball.
The little cottage disintegrated in the fire, the dry wood providing a perfect fuel for the inferno. Robie leapt from the back porch, rolled, and came up running.
In disbelief he watched as a wall of flames rose on either side of him, forming a straight corridor that he had to run down.
This was all by design, of course. The fuel for the fire had to have been carefully piped under the dirt, and the trigger for it must have been tied to the same one that had erupted in the cottage.
Robie sprinted ahead.
He had no choice.
He was heading right toward the small pond that he had seen before. The walls of fire ended there.
An instant later the remains of the cottage exploded. He ducked and rolled again from the concussive force, almost pitching into the right side of the wall of fire.
He rose and redoubled his efforts, thinking that he would reach the water.
Water was a great antidote to fire.
But as he neared the edge of the pond, something struck him.
No scum. No algae on the surface although the ground around was full of it.
What could kill green scum?
And why was he being forced to run right toward the one thing that could possibly save him?
Robie tossed his gun over the top of the wall of flames, pulled off his jacket, covered his head and hands with it, and threw himself through the wall of flames on the left side. He could feel the fire eating at him like acid.
He cleared the flames, and kept rolling, over and over, to beat out any fire that might have attached itself to him. He stopped and looked up in time to see the flames reach the pond.
The resulting explosion threw Robie through the air, and he landed on his back, thankfully in about an inch of water that softened the impact.
He rose on shaky legs, his shirt shredded, his jacket gone. He had no idea where his gun had landed. Thankfully, he still had his pants and shoes.
He looked in his pocket and snagged his car keys. Immediately he dropped them, because the plastic top was searing to the touch.
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He gingerly picked the keys up and stood there mutely watching the pond burn.
No algae—although it was growing everywhere else—because of the fuel or accelerant that had been placed in the pond. He wondered why he hadn’t smelled it when he’d made his recon around the small body of water. But then there were many ways to mask such odors. And the smell of the nearby ocean was pungent.
He looked back at where Reel’s cottage had once stood.
Sorry.
Are you sorry, Jessica? Somehow Robie didn’t think so.
The lady was definitely playing for keeps. Robie would have expected nothing less.
He found his jacket and his gun. The gun was okay. It had missed a puddle of water and landed on a pebble path. His jacket was burned up. He felt the lump of metal and plastic inside.
His phone. He doubted the manufacturer’s warranty would cover this sort of mishap.
His wallet was luckily in his pants and not damaged.
He limped back to the car. His right arm and left leg felt so hot they seemed frozen. He got into the car and closed the door, locking it, though he was probably the only human being for miles. He started the car and turned on the interior light. He checked his face in the rearview mirror.
No damage there.
His right arm had not been so lucky. Bad burn there.
He slipped his burned trousers down and examined his left leg: red and slightly blistered near his upper thigh. Some of the pants fabric was embedded in the burn.
He kept a first aid kit in the car. He pulled it out, cleaned the burns on his thigh and arm as best he could, applied salve to the damaged areas, covered them with gauze, and then threw the first aid kit on the floorboard.
He turned the car around and headed back the way he had come. He had no way to contact Blue Man or anyone else. He couldn’t stop to get medical care. Too many explanations and reports fled.
As isolated as the Eastern Shore was, flame balls rising twenty feet in the air would attract notice. He passed a police car, rack lights blazing and siren blasting, on his way back. They wouldn’t find much left, he knew.
He made it back to D.C. in the wee hours of the morning, reached his apartment, retrieved a spare phone, and called Blue Man. In succinct sentences he told him what had happened.
The Hit wr-2 Page 6