The Blonde

4:22 a.m.

Philadelphia International Airport

Within three minutes of his plane landing at Gate A22, the Operator was walking through the ridiculously oversized international-arrivals hall, with its images depicting Philadelphia as America’s birthplace. Cute.

His seatmate on the plane hadn’t been so lucky. He was a pale Scot with some kind of strange rash on his hands. His eyebrows were so faint, you could hardly distinguish them from the pasty flesh of his forehead. It wasn’t that he talked so much as that he scratched … and scratched and scratched, for most of the flight down from Toronto. Must have caught some kind of deal over from Edinburgh. The Operator didn’t do connecting flights. If there wasn’t an available flight between the two points he wanted to travel, then he simply chartered a plane. Which he probably should have done in this case. Sitting next to Mr. Itchy for the one-and-a-half-hour flight… maddening. Then there was that problem of changing his destination from D.C. to Philly at virtually the last minute. So yeah, he was in a bad mood. And maybe he had acted a little harshly when he decided to take it out on the Scot by pulling a stewardess aside and showing her his Department of Defense badge and telling her about the Scot sitting next to him, who, he said, was talking about all of the Pakis he was going to blow up on his trip to America with nail bombs and … and that was all it took. It would be a long while before the itchy Scot and his rucksack would see the beautiful patriotic artwork inside the international-arrivals hall. If ever.

Escalator to hallway and directly to a cab outside. No bag to claim; whatever the Operator couldn’t carry with him at any given moment, he bought.

Interestingly enough, the cab had a Paki driver. “My friend the Scot would have loved you,” the Operator said.

“Sir?”

“Don’t mind me. I often get lost in my own fictions. Pennsylvania Hospital, please.”

He wondered about her. What two weeks of running would have done to her face, her body. He’d been used to seeing her every day in the lab. Would she look the same to him? He remembered a certain college girlfriend who’d dumped him; he’d been able to score revenge sex six months later, but it wasn’t the same. She looked different. Even tasted different. It was quite unsatisfying.

So would it be the same with her? With “Kelly White,” as she’d been calling herself?

See there. Even the name was different. That alone would have taken its toll on her features.

His contact within CI-6 had said she’d been “incapacitated.” The Operator hoped that she wasn’t too far gone to be brought back. They had unfinished business, the two of them. Maybe they could go to a secret prison in Thailand. Where it would be just the two of them, once again. Even for a few hours.