Deliver Us From Evil

10

THE NEXT MORNING Reggie woke early. She sat up in her bedroom on the third floor of Harrowsfield and shivered. This part of the house was never heated. She looked out the window. The rain had passed and she thought she could actually see some sunlight breaking through the cloud cover. She washed her face with water from the tap, changed into sweats and sneakers, left the mansion through the rear, and started her run. Five miles later, sweaty and her lungs percolating nicely, she returned to the house. The smells of coffee brewing and bacon and eggs cooking drifted out from the kitchen. She quickly showered, enduring the last minute of rinsing with only cold water as the old pipes muttered and clanked in protest of their usage. She changed into jeans, flats, and a black V-neck sweater with a white tee underneath and headed downstairs.

There sometimes could be as many as twenty people at Harrowsfield, though today she knew the number was closer to ten, some of them historians doing research in the library or in a set of offices set up on both the main and second floors. Their one goal was to identify the next monster the team would go after. There were linguists immersing themselves in some language from lands where new evil lurked. Still other researchers were poring over old cable communications, pilfered diplomatic records, and handwritten accounts of atrocities smuggled out of third world countries. The task was harder now, she knew. The Nazis had been meticulous record-keepers. Subsequent sadists, operating in many different places, weren’t nearly as accommodating in leaving a trail of their pervasive wickedness.

Mallory had used great care in vetting all of the people who worked here. There was no formal recruitment, of course. One couldn’t put an advertisement in the paper seeking justice-minded vigilantes comfortable with killing folks who desperately deserved it.

In her case, Mallory had sought Reggie out at university where he was a visiting scholar. After a months-long courtship of sorts, he’d broached the subject of bringing to justice Nazis who’d fled Germany before the fall. When she’d enthusiastically agreed with the goal, he’d gone a bit further, finally ending with the theoretical possibility of saving the world the price of a trial by also playing the roles of judge, jury, and executioner.

More months had passed while he allowed her to stew on that. When she’d voluntarily returned to him with more questions, he’d answered them, to a certain extent. When he could sense her commitment deepening he’d let her meet with some other folks. Whit was one and Liza another. Another month passed and then Mallory brought her some news clippings of an old man who’d been found slain in his lavish home in Hong Kong. Though it had never been made public, Mallory told her that the fellow had been identified as a former concentration camp commander and one of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand men. They had talked long into the night of the ethics involved in such an action. It was never explicitly said, but Reggie suspected that the professor and other people she’d met through him had been behind the killing. By then she desperately wanted to be part of it.

It was only then that he had brought her to Harrowsfield. She went through an array of tests to determine if she had the psychological makeup to be a member of the group. She passed that barrier easily enough, demonstrating a rigid coldness that surprised even her. Next was physical fitness. A fine athlete, she was pressed to levels of strength and endurance she never knew she possessed. Her lungs near collapse, she willed her battered body over treacherous terrain she didn’t realize existed in the bucolic English countryside. To his credit, Whit Beckham was next to her every step of the way, though he’d already endured this when he first signed up. After that was the specialized training: weapons, martial arts, and survival skills in myriad challenging conditions.

In the classroom she learned how to research a target and study their background to gain valuable intelligence. She was taught foreign languages and how to lie with aplomb; how to act out roles and discern when other people were doing the same. She came to learn how to trail someone so stealthily that they would only know they were being followed when she walked up to them. These and dozens of other skills were drilled into her to such an extent that she no longer had to think about them.

After her training was complete she’d acted as support on three missions, two where Whit was the lead and another where Richard Dyson, an experienced Nazi exterminator and since retired, had completed the final act. Her first mission in the lead had involved an elderly Austrian living in Asia who’d helped Hitler kill hundreds of thousands of people simply because they worshipped under the Star of David. She’d gotten into his circle by becoming a nanny to his young wife’s child. The monster had been married five times. He had enough wealth obtained through the theft of antiquities during the war that he could keep divorcing and remarrying and still live in great luxury. They had one child, a five-year-old boy conceived through artificial insemination using donated sperm. Reggie suspected that the old Nazi had selected the sperm donor based on the color of his skin, hair, and height-namely, white, blond, and tall.

She’d worked with them for one month, and in that time the husband had made a half dozen passes at her. From what he’d told her once while he was in a drunken stupor, she could easily become wife number six if she played her cards right. One night she came by prearrangement to visit him in his bedroom-by his choice he and his wife kept separate boudoirs. He was again drunk and easily handled by Reggie. When he was tightly bound and his mouth gagged, she pulled the pictures from a hiding place and showed him the faces of some of his victims, a strict requirement of all the missions. At the end of their lives the monsters had to know that justice had finally caught up to them.

The fear he showed had amused her at first. But when the time came to finish the job, Reggie had hesitated. She’d never told anyone this. Not Whit and certainly not the professor. Her encouraging words to Dominic had also left out this piece of personal history. The monster had looked at her with pleading eyes. His gaze begged her not to do it. During her training she’d been told that this moment would come. And she’d also been instructed that no training in the world could fully prepare her for it.

And they’d been right.

Her resolve seemed to pour out of her with each tear shed by what was now a harmless old man. As she lowered the knife, she saw the relief in his eyes. She could just say that her cover had been blown and the mission was a failure. No one would ever know.

There were two things that prevented that from happening. One was the mocking sneer that emerged in the man’s eyes as he saw her weaken. The second was the picture of Daniel Abramowitz, age two, with a bullet hole in his small head. The photo had come from the monster’s own archives, which he’d lovingly assembled over the years he ran the camp.

She had plunged the knife into his chest until the hilt smacked his sternum. She gave the blade first an upward and then a downward jerk, and performed the same motion horizontally, severing arteries and destroying heart chambers, as she’d been taught to do. The sneer was gone from the old man now. For one long second, while life still remained, she saw in his countenance hatred, fear, rage, fear again, and then simply the flat, glassy stare of death.

“May God understand why I do this,” she whispered, the words that had become a ritual for her at the end of each mission.

Reggie had never hesitated again.