The Hit - Страница 11

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.