Rules of Betrayal

71

In Georgetown, snow fell as Jake “the Ripper” Taylor approached the three-story gray-brick town house at the corner of 34th Street and Prospect Street. A Ford Grand Victoria sat parked directly in front of the stairs leading to the front door. The car was unoccupied, and he assumed that the federal marshals to whom it belonged were inside, minding their prisoner. A second Grand Vic waited around the corner, two officers in the front seat, drinking their afternoon coffee. The feds were not winning points for being inconspicuous, thought Taylor, and he was sure to make a full and complete stop at the intersection before continuing on. In that time he cracked his window and looked to his right. The alley was right there behind the town house, just as the boss lady had said it would be, and there, poking its head above the fence, was the old wooden shed.

“There’s a back entry that’s accessed through a shed in the neighbor’s yard,” she had informed him. “You can see it from the alley behind his home. Mr. Connor is a sneaky fellow, and he uses it when he thinks someone’s checking up on him.”

A sneaky fellow. The boss lady using that upper-class accent he knew so well from the university-educated camel jocks he’d met over in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And how the hell did she know that about the shed and the alley? Taylor wondered with grudging admiration. Probably the same way that she knew Connor was under house arrest and had just returned from questioning at FBI headquarters. The same way she’d known about his visiting Mr. Malloy at the NGA. The boss lady had someone inside Division. Someone deep inside.

“Take out Connor,” she’d said. “Not your usual way. It must appear natural. He has a heart condition. It shouldn’t be too hard. But be careful. He’s a cornered animal, and cornered animals are dangerous.”

He’s also pushing sixty and has a belly the size of a boulder, retorted the Ripper silently. Frank Connor would not be a problem.

The Ripper turned left up 33rd Street, then left again at P Street, taking his time to circle round and eventually finding a parking spot two blocks from Connor’s place. Opening the glove compartment, he removed a chamois cloth, balled it up, and shoved it into his pocket. For good measure, he took his carpet cutter, too.

Exiting from his car, he pulled his navy workman’s cap low over his forehead and dug his hands deep into the pockets of his pea coat. Setting off up the brick sidewalk, he looked no different from any undergraduate en route to the Georgetown University campus, a few blocks away. He turned right on N Street and spotted the address of Connor’s neighbors. He let himself in the side gate and came upon the shed at the back of the garden.

Though the shed abutted the back fence and appeared to belong to the neighbor’s home, it was in fact linked by an underground passage to Connor’s house. The Ripper jimmied the shed’s lock and slipped inside. The beam of his flashlight shone on an old stone stairwell leading steeply downward to a low, damp tunnel redolent of the Potomac River, which flowed barely fifty yards to the south. A door blocked his way at the far end of the passage.

“No alarm,” the boss lady had said. “The tunnel is Connor’s secret. If he doesn’t acknowledge it, no one else will.”

The Ripper defeated the double-action bolt lock inside thirty seconds. With infinite patience, he turned the knob and opened the door. He stepped inside, his feet landing on a hardwood floor. His hand withdrew the carpet cutter from his pocket, and he advanced the triangular razor from its metal sheath. He wasn’t disobeying orders. As far as he was concerned, suicide was a natural cause. Disgraced spy-masters killed themselves all the time.

Step by step, he climbed to the third floor. Step by step, his heart beat faster as he closed in on his kill.

The Ripper marveled at how much blood spilled out of a wrist when you cut the vein properly: vertically, long and deep; never horizontally.