The Hit

Chapter 4

Jessica Reel sat alone at a table in the airport lounge. She was dressed in a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. Her flat shoes were black with a single strap over the top of each foot. They were lightweight and built for speed and mobility if she had to run.

Her only nod to eccentricity was the hat that sat on the table in front of her. It was a straw-colored panama with a black silk band, ideally suited for traveling because it was collapsible. Reel had traveled much over the years, but she had never worn a hat during any of those previous trips.

Now had seemed like a good time to start.

Her gaze drifted over thousands of passengers pulling rolling luggage and carrying laptop cases over their shoulders with Starbucks cups cradled in their free hands. These travelers anxiously scanned electronic marquees for gates, cancellations, arrivals, departures. And minutes or hours or days later if the weather was particularly uncooperative, they would climb into silver tubes and be flung hundreds or thousands of miles to their destination of choice, hopefully with most of their bags and their sanity intact.

Millions of people did this same little thirty-thousand-foot-high dance every day in nearly every country on earth. Reel had done it for years. But she had always traveled light. No laptop. Enough clothes for a few days. No work went with her. It was always waiting for her when she got there. Along with all the equipment she would need to complete her designated task.

And then she would make her exit, leaving behind at least one person dead.

She fingered her phone. On the screen was her boarding pass. The name on the e-ticket was not Jessica Reel. That would have been a little inconvenient for her in these suddenly troubled times.

Her last task had not gone according to plan—at least not according to the plan of her former employer. However, it had been executed exactly as Reel had envisioned it, leaving a man named Douglas Jacobs dead.

Because of this Reel would be not only persona non grata back home, but also very much a wanted person. And the people she used to work for had an abundance of agents who could be called up to hunt her down and end her life as efficiently as she had Jacobs’s.

That scenario was definitely not in Reel’s grand scheme, and thus the new name, fresh documents, and panama hat. Her long hair was colored blonde from the natural brown. Tinted contacts transformed greenish eyes to gray. And she had been given a modified nose and a revised jawline courtesy of a bit of ingenious plastic surgery. She was, in all critical respects, a new woman.

And perhaps an enlightened one as well.

Her flight was called. She rose. In her flats she was five-nine—tall for a woman—but she blended in nicely with the bustling crowd. She donned her hat, purchased her Starbucks, and walked to the nearby gate. The flight left on time.

Forty somewhat bumpy minutes later it landed with a hard jolt on the runway tarmac minutes ahead of a storm’s leading edge. The turbulence had not bothered Reel. She always played the odds. She could fly every day for twenty thousand years and never be involved in a crash.

Her odds of survival on the ground would not be nearly as good.

She walked off the plane, made her way to the cabstand, and waited patiently in a long line until her turn came up.

Doug Jacobs had been the first but not the last. Reel had a list in her head of those who would, hopefully, join him in the hereafter, if there was such a place for people like Jacobs.

But the list would have to wait. Reel had somewhere to go. She climbed into the next available cab and set off for the city.

The cab dropped her near Central Park. The park was always a busy place, full of people and dogs and events and workers, controlled chaos if ever there was such a thing.

Reel paid the cabbie and turned her attention to the closest entrance to the park. She walked through the opening and made her way as close as possible to where it had happened.

The police had taped off great chunks of the area so they could perform their little forensics hunt, collect their evidence, and hopefully catch a killer.

They would fail. Reel knew this even if New York’s Finest didn’t.

She stood shoulder to shoulder with a crowd of people just beyond the official barricades. She watched the police methodically working, covering every inch of ground around where the body had fallen.

Reel looked at the same ground and her mind started to fill in blanks that the police didn’t even know existed.

The target was what it was. A monster who needed killing.

That didn’t interest Reel at all. She had killed many monsters. Others took their place. That was how the world worked. All you could do was try to keep slightly ahead in the count.

She was focused on other things. Things the police could not see.

She lined up the taped outline of the body on the trail with trajectory patterns in all directions. She was sure the police had already done that, Forensics 101 after all. But soon thereafter, their deductive ability and even their imagination would reach their professional limits, and thus they would never arrive at the right answer.

For her part, Reel knew that anything was possible. So after exhausting all other possibilities and performing her own mental algorithms to figure the shooter’s position, she focused on a stone wall. A seemingly impenetrable stone wall. One could not fire through such an obstacle. And the doorway into the place that was surrounded by the stone wall had no sight line to the target. And it was no doubt securely locked. Thus the police would have discounted it immediately.

Reel left the crowd and started a long sweeping walk that angled her first to the west, then north, and finally east.

She drew out a pair of binoculars and focused them on the wall.

One would have to have two holes. One for the muzzle allowing for the greater width of the suppressor sleeve. And one for the scope.

Reel knew precisely where and how large those holes would need to be.

She worked the thumbwheel on her optics. The wall came into sharper focus. Reel looked at two areas of the wall, one higher than the other, both located in mortar seams.

The police would never see it because they would never be looking for it.

But Reel was.

There was no surveillance camera that she could see pointed at the wall. Why would there be? It was simply a wall.

Which made it perfect.

And on that wall were two patches of mortar that were a slightly different color, as though they had been more recently applied than their neighbors. And they had been, Reel knew.

As soon as the shot was fired the holes would be refilled. The hardening compound would work its magic. For some hours, even some days afterward, the coloration would be slightly, ever so slightly, different. And then it would look just like the rest.

The shot had come from there.

The escape would have also come from there.

Reel looked down at the ground.

Maintenance shed. Pipes, tunnels.

Underneath the park was a maze of tunnels—water, sewer, and abandoned subway tracks. Reel knew this for a fact. It had figured into one of her kills years ago. So many places to run and hide under America’s largest city. Millions of people above were jostling for space, while down below you could be as alone as though you were on the surface of the moon.

Reel began to walk again after putting her binoculars away.

The exit would have probably been in some far-off part of the city. Then the shooter would rise up to street level. A quick ride to the airport or train station and that would be it.

The killer goes free.

The victim goes to the morgue.

The papers would cover it for a while. There might be some geopolitical retaliation somewhere, and then the story would die. Other stories would take its place. One death meant little. The world was too big. And too many people were dying violent deaths to focus for long on any one of them.

Reel walked toward a hotel where she had reserved a room. She would hit the gym to work the kinks out, sit in the steam shower, have a bit of supper, and think about things.

The jaunt to Central Park had not been without purpose.

Will Robie was one of the best, if not the best they had.

Reel had no doubt that Robie had pulled the trigger that morning in Central Park. He had covered his tracks. Made his way aboveground. Taken a plane to D.C. Checked back in at the office.

All routine, or as routine as things got in Robie’s world.

In my world too. But not anymore. Not after Doug Jacobs. The only report they’ll want about me now is my autopsy results.

Reel was fairly sure Robie would be summoned for another mission.

His mission will be to track me down and kill me.

You send a killer to catch another killer.

Robie versus Reel. Nice ring to it.

It sounded like the fight of the century.

And she was certain it would be.