The Hit

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.