At nine-thirty this evening, Billie sent Jim out to the Safeway to pick up some eggs and half-and-half for breakfast. Backing out of the driveway, he saw that Vic’s garage lights were on and he was putting some boxes in the open back doors of his Ford van. Jim shook his head. He’d never seen a guy stay so busy. He tapped his horn as he drove off.
*
He set the box down in the bed of the van, then heard a horn beep. He looked back to see Jim Rutherford’s car pulling away. He waved casually at the departing vehicle, closed the rear doors of the Ford, then went to the wall switch and lowered the garage door. For the next few minutes, he would need privacy.
He left the garage by its back door. He paused a moment in the darkness to savor the moonlight shimmering on the water of Connor’s Creek behind the house. A few Canada geese were honking out there in the marsh somewhere. Or was it the trumpeter swans? He wasn’t sure; he just didn’t spend enough time out here, much as he loved the place.
He moved behind a large pine near the house and over to the wooden shed. He opened the padlock and entered, closing the door behind him. By feel, he found and pulled a drawstring; a bare bulb lit the interior. He slid the door bolt, locking it from the inside.
The shed contained nothing but heaps of crumbling storage boxes. They were crammed with old file folders containing billing statements to a variety of companies. None of the paperwork meant anything; he’d retrieved it all from a Dumpster two years ago. He moved aside a stack of the boxes, one by one, clearing a space on the floor. You had to look very closely to see the thin slit across the dusty floorboards. He stuck a screwdriver into the crack, levered it up, grabbed the edge of the hinged trap door, and hoisted it the rest of the way open.
He made his way carefully down a crude set of wooden stairs into a small underground room with concrete walls and floors. He pulled another drawstring down there, and a second, brighter bulb illuminated his armory.
He drew two sheathed combat knives, one large, one small, from a leather-lined wooden case and placed them on a wide bench. He opened a cabinet and selected several makes of handguns and corresponding suppressors and ammo. He assembled an array of electronic equipment, burglary tools, and other useful items. These items he wrapped carefully in lint-free cloths and placed in a couple of olive-green duffle bags. Shouldering them, he turned out the light, climbed from the room, and replaced the trap door and the boxes over it. He left the shed as he had come and re-entered the garage.
He glanced at his watch. The timetable still allowed him plenty of time to get to D.C. and make the weapons transfer to the operations vehicle, so that the rest of the plan could proceed on schedule.
Ten minutes later, he backed the black Ford van out of the garage.
*
Safeway didn’t have the small size of half-and-half, so Jim had to go another mile to the Acme. By the time he returned home, he noticed that all the lights were off at Vic’s place.
That guy. Never gives it a rest. Always up to something.
NINE
Alexandria, Virginia
Saturday, September 6, 11:27 p.m.
The bearded man parked his nondescript old Chevy Metro hatchback on a side street just a couple of blocks from the Braddock Road Metro Station. Then he settled in for what would likely be several hours of surveillance outside the target’s place.
The Chevy was cramped and uncomfortable, even with the seat pushed back. But so was the motel room he’d stayed in down on Route 1 the night before. The stained, peeling wallpaper, once beige, looked as if it had acquired a case of jaundice over the decades. The cheap nightstands and bathroom sink were criss-crossed with brown scars from unattended cigarettes, and he had to work under the light of the room’s single functional lamp. One glance in the bathroom convinced him to pass on taking a shower, just as a look at the carpet convinced him to keep his sneakers on.
He’d had no choice, really. He needed a base nearby to run this op, but it had to be the sort of place where he could pay cash and not have to show a credit card or his New York driver’s license. It was out of the question to let the clerk see the name Shane Michael Stone-however unlikely it was that anyone would track him to a place like that. So he peeled off fifty-five bucks for two nights and signed in, using an alias that appealed to his sense of irony.
It had been very late when he arrived at the motel. But rather than get some sleep, he spent the remaining hours before dawn conducting a recon of this neighborhood. When he returned to his room, he covered the stained bed cover with newspapers before lying down fully dressed. He woke in the late afternoon, grabbed a bite at a Wendy’s up the highway, then returned to the motel to check his gear and mentally walk through the plan, which included contingency options at every stage.
After that, he dressed for the job with clothes from one of the two duffle bags delivered by the van from Maryland. Then he looked himself over in the cracked, full-length mirror barely attached to the bathroom door.
Scruffy-looking guy. Ragged red hair and beard, oversized blue pullover sweater, baggy jeans, Orioles baseball cap. Where he was headed, he’d fit right in.
As always, he was ultra-careful about leaving any prints behind. Before he left the room for the last time, he wiped down the place. Which was more than he could say for the cleaning staff, such as it was. He also carefully folded the newspapers covering the bed and took them with him…
He’d picked this place to park because it faced the street spur that extended straight back into the courtyard of the project, where it dead-ended a short distance away at a parking lot. That was the only route in, and from here he had a clear view of everyone who entered or left. It was a pretty safe spot, too. Though the cops patrolled regularly, his car was off the main street they mainly used, and it was shadowed from the nearest street light by a tree. In addition, the one upgrade he’d given the Chevy was extra-dark tinted windows. Even the cops were unlikely to spot him sitting inside.
Last night, the target had returned home to the projects with another guy about three a.m. They’d entered the courtyard in a battered silver Honda Civic, pulled into the lot and parked. He watched them through the latest thing in monocular night-vision scopes: the Xenonics SuperVision Digital Viewing System. When the pair emerged from the car about fifty yards away and stood chatting, he was able to zoom in and identify his target in a black-and-white, high-definition image. After a few minutes, they did a fist-bumping thing and parted company. He watched the guy unlock and enter a door in a brick row house on the right, not far from the street entrance to the complex.
Tonight, a bit earlier, he’d walked past the complex entrance and didn’t see the target’s car parked in the lot. This being a Saturday night, he figured he was in for another long wait. But now, just before midnight, he watched the Civic turn into the cul-de-sac and head back into an empty parking space. He picked up the SuperVision scope from his passenger seat and confirmed that the driver was his man. This time the target was alone; he crossed in the direction of the door to his apartment unit and disappeared inside.