CHAPTER
9
JESSICA REEL SAT ON HER bed in her hotel room. Her sweat-drenched exercise clothes lay on the floor. She was naked and looking down at her toes. The rain was hitting with increased velocity outside.
Like bullets. But unlike bullets rain leaves you alive.
She rubbed her hand over her flat belly. Her firm core had come from agonizing exercise and careful diet. It had nothing to do with appearance. The core was power central. And fat slowed you down. In her world that was poison. She was also proficient in every martial art worth anything in close-quarter combat.
She had had to use her fitness and fighting skills to survive many times. She didn’t always kill with a gun from long range. Sometimes her targets were right in front of her, trying to murder her as fiercely as she them. And they were almost always men. That gave them a genetic advantage in size and strength.
Still, up to this point, she had always been the winner. But that was only until the next time. In her field, you only lost once. After that, no one bothered to keep score anymore.
You just got eulogized. Maybe.
She debated whether to send Robie another message. But she decided that would be overplaying her hand. She didn’t underestimate anyone. And though her cell was presumably untraceable, the agency might buck those odds, track her back through communication channels and find her.
And what more was there left to say anyway? Robie had his assignment. He would do his best to carry it out.
Reel would do her best to make sure he failed. One or both of them might end up dead. That was the nature of the beast. There was nothing fair about it. It was just the way it was.
Reel slipped on a robe, crossed the room, and pulled her phone from her jacket hanging on the door. She began hitting keys. It truly was amazing what these devices could do. Trace your every step. Tell you exactly how to get to somewhere else. With a flick of a key Reel could get the most esoteric information in a matter of seconds.
But there was a flip side to all this freedom.
People had trillions of eyes now with which to watch you. And it wasn’t just the government. Or big business. It could be the man on the street with the latest gadgetry and a modicum of technical savvy.
That made Reel’s job harder. But it was hard to begin with.
She digested the information that had come up on the screen. She put it away, slipped into the bathroom, and took off her robe. The hot water in the shower felt good. She was tired, her muscles weary from a workout that had pushed her harder than ever.
There had been a couple of young guys in the gym doing one-armed curls while preening in the mirror. Another had put in twenty moderately active minutes on the elliptical and obviously thought that qualified him as a stud. She had gone into an adjoining room and begun her exercise. She had sensed two of them watching her after a few minutes. It wasn’t the way she was dressed. She didn’t wear tight-fitting spandex. Loose, baggy clothing that covered her completely was her thing. She was there to sweat, not find a husband or a one-night stand.
She sensed they weren’t a threat. They were simply astonished at what she was doing with her body. Thirty minutes later, when she was barely a third of the way through her routine, they turned and left, shaking their heads. She knew what they were thinking:
I couldn’t last five minutes at that pace.
And they would be right.
She turned off the shower, dried off, and put her robe back on, her hair wrapped in a towel. She scanned the room service menu and selected a salad and indulged herself with a glass of a California zinfandel.
When the young, good-looking man brought the tray in she caught his reflection in the mirror. He was checking her out.
Reel had slept with men on several different continents. All had been in connection with a job. A means to an end. If she could use sex to get her where she needed to go, so be it. She assumed that was one reason the agency had employed her. And they had encouraged her to use that weapon in her arsenal, with the caveat that she was never to become personally involved with any of them. Which translated into never feeling anything for them at all. She was a machine and they were simply convenient for the mission.
In that regard men were decidedly the weaker sex. Women could get them to do anything with a promise of action under the sheets, up against a wall, or on their knees, as the case might be.
She signed the bill and gave him a generous tip.
His eyes asked her for more.
She denied the request simply by turning away.
Once the door closed behind her she took off her robe, freed her hair, and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. She pushed a table against the door, sat down to her meal, and slowly sipped her wine as the rain pounded away outside.
She would soon have somewhere to go. It was always important to keep going. Stationary objects tended to get run over.
At some point soon Will Robie would come after her in earnest. That would then occupy much of Reel’s time and energy. Until that point, she would have a window of opportunity.
She intended to make the most of it.
Doug Jacobs was one level.
Now Reel was moving to the next level.
It wouldn’t be easy. By now they were forewarned.
Doug Jacobs had a wife and two young children. Reel knew what they looked like. She knew their names. She knew where they lived. She knew they were now suffering tremendous grief. Because of what Jacobs did, his family couldn’t be told the exact circumstances of his death.
It was just company policy. And that policy never varied.
Secrets to the last.
There would be a funeral and Jacobs would be laid to rest. And that would be the only normal thing about his passing. His young widow would go on with her life, probably remarry. Perhaps she would have more children. Reel would suggest that she marry a plumber or a salesman. Her life would be far less complicated.
Jacobs’s children might or might not remember their father.
For Reel, that wasn’t such a bad thing.
In her mind Douglas Jacobs wasn’t all that memorable.
Reel finished her meal and slipped under the covers.
She remembered as a child listening to the rain beating outside as she lay in bed. No one had come to check on her. It wasn’t that sort of a home. People who came to you in the night where Reel had grown up usually had ulterior motives, motives that were not benign in the least. This had made her suspicious and hardened from an early age. This had made her want to be alone, only summoning companionship on her terms.
When people came for you in the night the only response was to hurt them before they could hurt you.
In her mind’s eye she conjured the image of her mother—a frail abused woman who on her last day on earth looked forty years older than she actually was. Her death had been violent, wrenching. She had not gone quietly, but she had, eventually, gone. And Jessica Reel, then only seven years old, had watched it all happen. It had been traumatic in ways that even now Reel didn’t fully understand or appreciate. The experience had come to define her, and guaranteed that many normal things people did in life would never be part of hers.
What happened to you as a child, particularly something bad, changed you, absolutely and completely. It was like part of your brain became closed off and refused to mature any further. As an adult you were powerless to fight against it. It was simply who you were until the day you died. There was no “therapy” that could cure it. That wall was built and nothing could tear it down.
Maybe that’s why I do what I do. Engineered from childhood.
Her gun was under her pillow, one hand clenching it, and the table still against the door.
She would sleep well tonight.
It might be the last time she ever did.