Текст книги "The Hit"

Автор книги: David Baldacci

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

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 isolation 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.

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.

“You’re lucky, Robie.”

“I feel lucky,” he replied. “Part good, part bad. Fill me in on Gelder.”

Blue Man took a few minutes to do so.

Robie said, “So that’s all. Just where and how? No eyes on Reel anywhere?”

“Come in and we’ll see to your injuries.”

“No theories on why she would target the number two?” Robie persisted.

“That’s all they would be right now, just theories.”

There was something in Blue Man’s voice that began to concern Robie. “Something going on between the lines here?” Robie asked.

Blue Man didn’t answer.

“I’ll be in in a few hours. Want to check some things out.”

“Let me give you another location to go to.”

“Why is that?” asked Robie.

Blue Man gave him the address without elaboration.

Robie put down the phone and walked over to the window.

Reel had been in town last night to gun down Gelder. That was officially speculation, but something in Robie’s gut told him it was true.

If so, she could still be out there. Why she would hang around was not easy to answer. Typically, whenever Robie had killed he had left wherever he was immediately, and for obvious reasons.

But this wasn’t typical, was it?

Not for me and not for her.

Robie took off the gauze around his burns, showered, put on fresh dressings and fresh clothes.

Blue Man had told him where the shooting had taken place. The area would be full of cops. Robie couldn’t do much more than observe. But sometimes observations led to breakthroughs. He would have to hope that would be the case here.

As he walked down to his car he knew one thing. He would not be able to survive many more nights like the last one. Reel seemed to be one step ahead at all times. That was often the case with the person being chased and the one doing the chasing.

Reel knew why she was doing what she was doing.

Robie was still playing catch-up.

Maybe that’s all I’ll be doing on this one.

So right now the odds were definitely stacked in Jessica Reel’s favor. Robie couldn’t see any development that would easily or quickly change that state of affairs.

He drove off right as the sun was starting to rise.

Just another beautiful day in the capital city.

He was glad he was still alive to see it.

CHAPTER

14

HE HAD LIVED. Reel had watched it on her laptop.

Inside the outbuilding near her cottage was a camera on a tripod pointed at the cottage and uplinked to a satellite. Through it she had seen Robie drive up, get out, and recon the property.

He hadn’t looked inside the outbuilding, which had been a mistake on his part.

It was gratifying to her that Robie made mistakes.

But then he had done the remarkable. He had figured out that the pond was a trap and risked throwing himself through a wall of fire to survive.

She clicked some computer keys and watched it again, in slow motion.

Robie burst from the house and then her view of him was gone, blocked by the wall of flames. It was designed to lead him right to the pond, which looked like a safe harbor but would be his grave.

Yet under the most intense pressure he had kept his wits, deduced the safe harbor was a trap, and executed on the fly a maneuver designed to keep him alive.

And he had succeeded.

She froze the screen on the image of Robie walking back to his car.

Could I have just done what he did? Am I as good as he is?

She stared at the screen, looking into Robie’s face, trying to read the man’s mind, to delve into what he was thinking at just that moment in time.

But the face was inscrutable.

A good poker player.

No, a great poker player.

She closed the laptop and sat back on her bed. She pulled a Glock nine-millimeter from her belt holster and started disassembling it. She did it without looking, as she had been trained to do.

Then she started to put it back together, again without looking.

This exercise always served to calm her, make her think more clearly. And she needed to think as clearly as possible right now.

She was fighting an engagement on two flanks.

She had her list with more names on it. These people were now forewarned. Their protective shells were being hardened as she sat there.

And she had Will Robie, who was now more than a little angry at almost being killed by her. He would be coming hard on her rear flank.

That meant she had to have eyes in the back of her head, see both combat fronts at the same time. Difficult, but not impossible to do.

Robie had gone to her cottage on the Eastern Shore to learn more about her. He had found nothing except an attempt on his life.

But now Reel needed more information on Robie. She had thought he would be the one to come after her. The episode at the cottage had confirmed this.

She rose, made a phone call, and then slipped into jeans, sweater, boots, and a hoodie. Her gun rested in her belt holster. A Ka-Bar knife rode in a leather sleeve wrapped around her left arm and hidden under the hoodie. She could pull it free in a second if need be.

Her main problem was that despite her changed appearance there were eyes everywhere. Much of the United States and the civilized world was now one big camera. Her former employer would be using sophisticated search and facial recognition software, going through databases housing billions of images, in a 24/7 attempt to track her down.

With that many resources leveled against her, Reel had no margin of error. She had built a nice bulwark of defenses, but nothing was perfect. Nearly every defensive line in every war had been pierced at some point. And she was under no delusions that she would be one of the rare exceptions.

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.

CHAPTER

15

MORE POLICE TAPE. IN 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.