She allowed herself one deep breath and thirty seconds of concentrated thought. The focus was supposed to be her next move – getting out of this library, this town, this state, as soon as possible – and whether that was enough. Was her current identity still safe, or was it time to relocate again?
However, that focus was derailed by the insidious idea of Carston’s offer.
What if…
What if this really was a way to get them to leave her alone? What if her certainty that this was a trap was born from paranoia and reading too much spy fiction?
If the job was important enough, maybe they would give her back her life in exchange.
Unlikely.
Still, there was no point in pretending that Carston’s e-mail had gone astray.
She replied the way she figured they were hoping she would, though she’d formed only the barest outline of a plan.
Tired of a lot of things, Carston. Where we first met, one week from today, noon. If I see anyone with you, I’m gone, yada yada yada, I’m sure you know the drill. Don’t be stupid.
She was on her feet and walking in the same moment, a rolling lope she’d perfected, despite her short legs, that looked a lot more casual than it was. She was counting off the seconds in her head, estimating how long it would take a helicopter to cover the distance between DC and this location. Of course, they could alert locals, but that wasn’t usually their style.
Not their usual style at all, and yet… she had an unfounded but still pressingly uncomfortable feeling that they might be getting tired of their usual style. It hadn’t yielded the results they were looking for, and these were not patient people. They were used to getting what they wanted exactly when they wanted it. And they’d been wanting her dead for three years.
This e-mail was certainly a policy change. If it was a trap.
She had to assume it was. That viewpoint, that way of framing her world, was the reason she was still breathing in and out. But there was a small part of her brain that had already begun to foolishly hope.
It was a small-stakes game she was playing, she knew that. Just one life. Just her life.
And this life she’d preserved against such overpowering odds was only that and nothing more: life. The very barest of the basics. One heart beating, one set of lungs expanding and contracting.
She was alive, yes, and she had fought hard to stay that way, but during her darker nights she’d sometimes wondered what exactly she was fighting for. Was the quality of life she maintained worth all this effort? Wouldn’t it be relaxing to close her eyes and not have to open them again? Wasn’t an empty black nothing slightly more palatable than the relentless terror and constant effort?
Only one thing had kept her from answering Yes and taking one of the peaceful and painless exits readily available to her, and that was an overdeveloped competitive drive. It had served her well in medical school, and now it kept her breathing. She wasn’t going to let them win. There was no way she would give them such an easy resolution to their problem. They would probably get her in the end, but they were going to have to work for it, damn them, and they would bleed for it, too.
She was in the car now and six blocks from the closest freeway entrance. There was a dark ball cap over her short hair, wide-framed men’s sunglasses covering most of her face, and a bulky sweatshirt disguising her slender figure. To a casual observer, she would look a lot like a teenage boy.
The people who wanted her dead had already lost some blood and she found herself suddenly smiling as she drove, remembering. It was odd how comfortable she was with killing people these days, how satisfying she found it. She had become bloodthirsty, which was ironic, all things considered. She’d spent six years under their tutelage, and in all that time they hadn’t come close to breaking her down, to turning her into someone who enjoyed her work. But three years on the run from them had changed a lot of things.
She knew she wouldn’t enjoy killing an innocent person. She was sure that corner had not been turned, nor would it be. Some people in her line of work – her former line – were well and truly psychotic, but she liked to think that this was the reason her peers were not as good as she was. They had the wrong motivations. Hating what she did gave her the power to do it best.
In the context of her current life, killing was about winning. Not the entire war, just one small battle at a time, but each was still a win. Someone else’s heart would stop beating and hers would keep going. Someone would come for her, and instead of a victim he would find a predator. A brown recluse spider, invisible behind her gossamer trap.
This was what they had made her. She wondered if they took any pride at all in their accomplishment or if there was only regret that they hadn’t stomped on her fast enough.
Once she was a few miles down the interstate, she felt better. Her car was a popular model, a thousand identical vehicles on the highway with her now, and the stolen plates would be replaced as soon as she found a safe spot to stop. There was nothing to tie her to the town she’d just left. She’d passed two exits and taken a third. If they wanted to blockade the freeway, they’d have no idea where to do it. She was still hidden. Still safe for now.
Of course, driving straight home was out of the question at this point. She took six hours on the return, twisting around various highways and surface roads, constantly checking to be sure there was no one following. By the time she finally got back to her little rented house – the architectural equivalent of a jalopy – she was already half asleep. She thought about making coffee, weighing the benefits of the caffeine boost against the burden of one extra task, and decided to just muscle through it on the vapors of her energy supply.
She dragged herself up the two rickety porch steps, automatically avoiding the rot-weakened spot on the left of the first tread, and unlocked the double dead bolts on the steel security door she’d installed her first week living here; the walls – just wooden studs, drywall, plywood, and vinyl siding – didn’t provide the same level of security, but statistically, intruders went for the door first. The bars on the windows were not an insurmountable obstacle, either, but they were enough to motivate the casual cat burglar to move on to an easier target. Before she twisted the handle, she rang the doorbell. Three quick jabs that would look like one continuous push to anyone watching. The sound of the Westminster chimes was only slightly muffled by the thin walls. She stepped through the door quickly – holding her breath, just in case. There was no quiet crunch of broken glass, so she exhaled as she shut the door behind her.
The home security was all her own design. The professionals she’d studied in the beginning had their own methods. None of them had her specialized skill set. Neither did the authors of the various novels she used as implausible manuals now. Everything else she had needed to know had been easy to pull up on YouTube. A few parts from an old washing machine, a microcontroller board ordered online, a new doorbell, and a couple of miscellaneous acquisitions, and she had herself a solid booby trap.
She locked the dead bolts behind her and hit the switch closest to the door to turn on the lights. It was set in a panel with two other switches. The middle was a dummy. The third switch, the farthest from the door, was patched into the same low-voltage signal wire as the doorbell. Like that fixture and the door, the panel of switches was newer by decades than anything else in the small front room that was living area, dining room, and kitchen combined.
Everything looked as she’d left it: minimal, cheap furnishings – nothing big enough for an adult to hide behind – empty counters and tabletop, no ornaments or artwork. Sterile. She knew that even with the avocado-and-mustard-vinyl flooring and the popcorn ceiling, it still looked a little like a laboratory.