The Hit

  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.”

  CHAPTER

  28

  ROBIE 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.

  He laid the photo, the book, and the gun on the table and looked at them one by one as the rain once more picked up and banged against his window.

  He disassembled the gun and found it to be simply a gun. From the ease with which the elements came apart and went back together, Robie concluded that the agency had already taken it apart looking for clues as well. He had already checked the mag. It was a super-high-capacity configuration, thirty-three rounds. It was standard ammo that Robie had seen a million times, although the elongated mag wasn’t typical.

  Thirty-three rounds to do the job, Reel? Who would have thought?

  There was also a titanium safety plunger. It reduced friction, made the trigger pull lighter, and increased your accuracy. Robie used one on his own weapon, although it was probably overkill.

  Still, Reel clearly paid attention to the details.

  The grip was stippled for better tackiness. It wasn’t merely a slip-on; the frame had been altered with the embossed pattern etched right into the hardware.

  Robie figured a soldering iron had been used to make the stipple on the Glock’s polymer frame. He had done the same with his weapons early on. In fact, he and Reel had learned how to stipple from a senior field agent named Ryan Marshall, who swore by the process.

  He next looked at the customized sight. It was a nice piece of engineering. Robie squinted to see the name
on it. It bore the initials PSAC.

  He Googled it and came up with the Pennsylvania Small Arms Company. He’d never heard of them, but there were lots of such companies. Obviously, Reel had not been happy with the Glock sight for some reason. Again, details.

  He laid the gun aside and studied the photo. Reel was standing next to a large man, easily six-four. He looked about fifty, built like an athlete going to pot. There was an edge of red next to the man. It might have been another person dressed in that color or a sign or a car, Robie couldn’t be sure. And unless he had the negative or the photo card it came from he couldn’t see if there was anything there that could be enlarged.

  He studied Reel’s image. She was tall even in flats. And unlike her companion, there was not an ounce of fab on her. Her gaze was pointed straight at the camera. This was of course not the first image Robie had seen of the woman. But each time he did see her picture, it was like he was looking at a different person.

  We were all chameleons to a certain extent.

  Yet he felt like he was coming to understand Reel better each time he saw her likeness or learned a new bit of information about her. It was like layers of an onion being peeled away.

  She appeared calm, self-assured without being overconfident. The limbs were held loosely, but Robie could sense an inner tightness, signaling that they could be deployed as needed in a second. She seemed to balance herself on the balls of her feet, her weight equally distributed, whereas most people stood either too far forward or back on their feet. This would delay them maybe a second or two in movement. In most people’s lives that wouldn’t matter.

  In the lives of Reel and Robie it mattered a lot.

  The lips were fuller in this picture. The lipstick was red, nearly as red as that edge of something in the photo. Robie turned the photo at various angles to see if it helped him to discern what the thing could be.

  It didn’t.

  He put the photo down and turned to the book, a history of World War II. He paged through some of it looking for marginalia that Reel might have left there, but found none.

  And even if there had been something left in the book, Robie had to assume that the agency would have already deleted it somehow. That they had left the book, gun, and photo told Robie that they had found nothing in them. Otherwise the items wouldn’t have been left in the locker for Robie to examine. He was convinced that they wanted him to find and kill Jessica Reel. But he was beginning to doubt whether they wanted him to find out the truth behind her actions.

  He laid the book aside, rose, and looked out the window. Reel was out there somewhere, probably working out the details of her next hit. Julie was out there somewhere, probably doing her homework. But maybe she was also thinking of their encounter yesterday.

  And Nicole Vance was out there trying to find Reel, though she didn’t know it. That situation was only going to get more complicated.

  Two hours later, while he was still staring down at the items he’d taken from Reel’s locker, his phone buzzed. He looked at the message on the screen. Janet DiCarlo wanted to see him. But not at the last place they met. It was out in Middleburg. Probably her house, from the look of the address.

  Robie responded to the message, pulled on his jacket, locked up Reel’s gun, book, and photo in his wall safe, and headed out.

  He hoped DiCarlo was ready to give him some answers. If not, he wasn’t sure what his next step would be. But he could sense Reel pulling farther and farther ahead of him.

  CHAPTER

  29

  IT WAS GROWING DARK AS he set out, and the drive took over an hour with traffic. Robie picked up speed but then had to slow down as he wound his way through some small towns on the way to DiCarlo’s house. He wondered how the woman enjoyed the commute every day from here. He assumed she didn’t. Most Washington-area commuters spent years of their lives sitting in traffic plotting intricate ways to kill their fellow rule-breaking motorists.

  Robie slowed as he approached the turnoff. It was a long, winding gravel road that split two tall pine groves. The house was brick, old, and there were three cars parked in the front motor court.

  Considering what had happened to Jim Gelder, Robie had expected to be stopped before now, but maybe they had seen who he was on long-range surveillance. He turned off the car and got out, making no sudden movements because he didn’t want to be shot.

  Two men appeared from the shadows. They were Robie’s height, hard and muscled like tree knots. They checked his ID, let him keep his weapon, and escorted him into the house. They led him down a narrow, dark hall to a door and then departed.

  Robie knocked and a voice inside told him to enter.

  He opened the door and walked in. DiCarlo sat behind her desk. She looked worried and disheveled.

  That was the first thing Robie noticed.

  The second thing he noticed was the pistol resting on top of the desk.

  He paused at the doorway. “Everything okay?” he asked, although he knew it clearly wasn’t.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Robie.”

  He closed the door behind him, walked across a small square oriental rug, and sat in the chair opposite her.

  “Your security perimeter is a little soft,” he noted.

  Her expression told him that she was aware of this. “The two men out there I would trust with my life,” she said.

  Robie quickly read between those lines. “And they’re the only ones you trust?”

  “Intelligence is not a simple field in which to work, it’s always changing.”

  “Today your friend, tomorrow your enemy,” translated Robie. “I get that. I’ve actually lived that.” He put his hands over his stomach. He did so to allow his right hand to inch closer to the gun in his holster. His gaze went to her weapon and then to DiCarlo’s face.

  “You want to talk about it?” he said. “If the number two is worried about her security and can’t trust folks outside her immediate protection circle, that’s probably something I should know about.”

  DiCarlo’s hand went to her pistol, but Robie got there first.

  “I was going to put it away,” she said.

  “Leave it where it is,” said Robie. “And don’t reach for it again unless someone is shooting at you.”

  She sat back, clearly upset at what she probably deemed insubordination on his part. But then her features cleared.

  “I guess if I’m paranoid, why shouldn’t you be?” she said.

  “We can agree to agree on that. But why the paranoia?”

  “Gelder and Jacobs are dead,” she replied.

  “Reel did it. She’s on the outside.”

  “Is she?”

  “What do you know that makes you think she isn’t? When we spoke last you were more her advocate than anything else.”

  “Was I?”

  DiCarlo rose and went over to the window. The drapes were closed and she made no move to part them.

  Robie began to wonder if there was long-range surveillance out there.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  She turned back to him. “You’re probably too young to remember much about the Cold War. And you’re certainly too young to have worked for the agency during it.”

  “Okay. Is that what we’re back to here, the Cold War? Where people are constantly switching sides?”

  “I can’t answer that definitively, Mr. Robie. I wish I could. What I can tell you is that there have been troubling developments over the last few years.”

  “Like what?”

  She blurted out, “Missions that never should have been. Missing personnel. Money moved from here to there and then it disappeared. Equipment sent to places it should not have been sent to and it also disappeared. And that’s not all. These things happened in discreet quantities over long periods of time. Taken singly they didn’t seem to be all that remarkable. But when one looks at them together...” She stopped