The Hit (9 page)

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.

T
HE 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 filed.

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.

H
E 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.