Barnaby – Dr. Joseph Barnaby, her mentor, the last friend she’d known – had prepared her for the first attempt. But even with all his foresight, planning, and deep-rooted paranoia, it was just dumb luck in the form of an extra cup of black coffee that had saved her life.
She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d worked with Barnaby for six years at that point, and a little more than halfway through that time, he’d told her his suspicions. At first she hadn’t wanted to believe he could be right. They were only doing their job as directed, and doing it well. You can’t think of this as a long-term situation, he’d insisted, though he’d been in the same division for seventeen years. People like us, people who have to know things that no one wants us to know, eventually we become inconvenient. You don’t have to do anything wrong. You can be perfectly trustworthy. They’re the ones you can’t trust.
So much for working for the good guys.
His suspicions had become more specific, then shifted into planning, which had evolved into physical preparation. Barnaby had been a big believer in preparation, not that it had done him any good in the end.
The stress had begun to escalate in those last months as the date for the exodus approached, and, unsurprisingly, she’d had trouble sleeping. That particular April morning it had taken two cups of coffee rather than the usual one to get her brain going. Add that extra cup to the smaller-than-average bladder in her smaller-than-average body, and you ended up with a doctor running to the can, too rushed to even log out, rather than sitting at her desk. And that’s where she had been when the killing gas filtered through the vents into the lab. Barnaby had been exactly where he was supposed to be.
His screams had been his final gift to her, his last warning.
They both had been sure that when the blow came, it wouldn’t happen at the lab. Messy that way. Dead bodies usually raised a few eyebrows, and smart murderers tried to keep that kind of evidence as far removed from themselves as possible. They didn’t strike when the victim was in their own living room.
She should have known never to underestimate the arrogance of the people who wanted her dead. They didn’t worry about the law. They were too cozy with the people who made those laws. She also should have respected the power of pure stupidity to take a smart person completely by surprise.
The next three times had been more straightforward. Professional contractors, she assumed, given that they’d each worked alone. Only men so far, though a woman was always a possibility in the future. One man had tried to shoot her, one to stab her, and one to brain her with a crowbar. None of these tries had been effective because the violence had happened to pillows. And then her assailants had died.
The invisible but very caustic gas had silently flooded the small room – it took about two and a half seconds once the connection between the wires was broken. After that, the assassin was left with a life expectancy of approximately five seconds, depending on his height and weight. It would not have been a pleasant five seconds.
Her bathtub mixture was not the same thing they’d used for Barnaby, but it was close enough. It was the simplest way she knew to kill someone so swiftly and so painfully. And it was a renewable resource, unlike many of her weapons. All she needed was a good stock of peaches and a pool-supply store. Nothing that required restricted access or even a mailing address, nothing that her pursuers could track.
It really pissed her off that they’d managed to find her again.
She’d been furious since waking yesterday and had only gotten angrier as the hours passed while she made her preparations.
She had forced herself to nap and then drove all the next night in a suitable car, rented using a very weak ID for one Taylor Golding and a recently obtained credit card in the same name. Early this morning, she’d arrived in the city she least wanted to be in, and that had turned her anger up to the next level. She’d returned the car to a Hertz near Ronald Reagan National Airport, then walked across the street to another company and rented a new one with District of Columbia plates.
Six months ago, she would have done things differently. Gathered her belongings from the small house she was renting, sold her current vehicle on Craigslist, purchased a new one for cash from some private citizen who didn’t keep records, and then driven aimlessly for a few days until she found a medium-size city-town that looked right. There she’d start the process of staying alive all over again.
But now there was that stupid, twisted hope that Carston was telling the truth. A very anemic hope. It probably wouldn’t have been enough motivation on its own. There was something else – a small but irritating worry that she had neglected a responsibility.
Barnaby had saved her life. Again and again. Every time she survived another assassination attempt, it was because he had warned her, had educated her, had made her ready.
If Carston was lying to her – which she was 97 percent sure he was – and arranging an ambush, then everything he’d said was a lie. Including the part about her being needed. And if they didn’t need her, that meant they’d found someone else to do the job, someone as good as she had been.
They might have replaced her a long time ago, might have assassinated a whole line of employees for all she knew, but she doubted it. While the department had money and access, the one thing it had in short supply was personnel. It took time to locate, cultivate, and train an asset like Barnaby or herself. People with those kinds of skills didn’t grow in test tubes.
She’d had Barnaby to save her. Who was going to save the dumb kid they’d recruited after her? The newcomer would be brilliant, just as she had been, but he or she would be blind to the most important element. Forget serving your country, forget saving innocent lives, forget the state-of-the-art facilities and the groundbreaking science, and the unlimited budget. Forget the seven-figure salary. How about not being murdered? No doubt the person now holding her old position had no idea that his or her survival was even in question.
She wished she had a way to warn that individual. Even if she couldn’t spend all the time Barnaby had devoted to helping her. Even if it could be only one conversation: This is how they reward people like us. Get ready.
But that wasn’t an option.
The morning was spent on more preparations. She checked into the Brayscott, a small boutique hotel, under the name Casey Wilson. The ID she used wasn’t much more convincing than Taylor Golding’s, but two of the phone lines were ringing as she registered, and the busy desk clerk wasn’t paying close attention. There were rooms available this early, the clerk told her, but Casey would have to pay for an extra day, as check-in did not begin till three. Casey agreed to this stipulation without complaint. The clerk seemed relieved. She smiled at Casey, really looking at her for the first time. Casey controlled her flinch. It didn’t matter if this girl remembered Casey’s face; Casey would make herself memorable enough in the next half hour.
Casey used androgynous names on purpose. It was one of the strategies she’d gleaned from the case files Barnaby had fed her, something the real spies did, but it was also common sense, something the fiction writers had figured out as well. The logic was that if people were searching this hotel for a woman, they would start with the clearly female names in the register, like Jennifer and Cathy. It might take them another round to get to the Caseys and the Terrys and the Drews. Any time she could buy for herself was good. An extra minute might save her life.
Casey shook her head at the eager bellman who stepped toward her offering his services and wheeled her single piece of luggage behind her to the elevator. She kept her face turned away from the camera over the control panel. Once inside the room, she opened the bag and removed a large briefcase and a zipper-top black tote. Other than these two things, her suitcase was empty.