Reilly, he was sure, hadn’t.
No one had made contact with the FBI agent. No one slipped him anything, old-school style. There had been no dead drop, no manila envelope or memory stick passed to him by some slippery contact.
Which was good.
It meant Padley hadn’t reached out to Reilly from the grave. Not yet, anyway. From here on they’d need to make sure that if he did, whatever he’d intended to give Reilly wouldn’t see the light of day. Not that they had any reason to think Padley had anything to reach out with. Sandman had stuck around long enough to watch Padley’s wife hurry out of the house when the call about his drowning came in. He’d sneaked in and searched the doctor’s home office and come up empty-handed. He’d need to do the same at the doctor’s office, as soon as he got a chance. Their inside man at the NSA had already gone through Padley’s hard drives and found nothing.
He watched as Reilly checked his watch and scanned the busy square again.
Still nothing.
As he studied Reilly, he wondered how he would ultimately choose to terminate the man. The agent was young, fit, outwardly healthy-and attuned to outside threats. It was an interesting and challenging assignment, to be sure. Unlike Padley. That had been a cakewalk. Sure, the doctor was being careful. But he was old, and although he didn’t look it or act it, at death’s door. And the cancer would have killed him anyway. Not that he felt he needed any self-justification, but Sandman knew he was simply bringing forward the inevitable. Indeed, that was all he ever really did, for any of his victims-hasten the sleep from which one never wakes.
A job description that, curiously, fitted his code name, even though it wasn’t how it had originated.
His buddies had christened him Sandman when the heavy partying had kicked in back in junior high, which was when he first started putting his unusual characteristic to use: he hardly needed any sleep. Three or four hours a night were plenty for him, and he could easily stay awake for two or three days without flagging, all of which came in handy when it was time to juggle partying and exams. His ability to remain energetic and upbeat when all those around him were conking out amused and bewildered his friends, and so he became known as Sandman. It was a jokey, light-hearted nickname at first, and it stayed with him after he was recruited by the CIA and sent to their training facility at Camp Peary in Virginia, the place affectionately known as The Farm.
An unusual side-effect of the estimated one- to three-percent of the population who can thrive on just a minimal amount of sleep per night is that they enjoy a high tolerance for physical and psychological pain. They’re also generally “behaviorally activated” due to subclinical hypomania, meaning they exhibit a mild form of manic behavior that is also characterised by euphoria, optimism and-useful for his chosen calling-disinhibition. Beyond his considerable talents, these innate qualities also contributed to his success at the Farm, and it was from there that he was handpicked by Roos and Tomblin for their unique assignments.
It was after he demonstrated how effective he was as a killing machine out the field that his nickname took on an entirely different connotation. It was also a handy code name to have: it had many common associations in popular culture and parlance, which was useful in an age of ever-increasing keyword voice and data surveillance.
Sandman watched Reilly walk off and tucked in behind him.
It was time to find the right opportunity to execute the second part of his orders.
11
Arlington, Virginia
I left the rental on North Highland, to the east of Lyon Village Park, just south of the tennis courts where the trees provided almost total cover. The temperature had hit zero, but there was no snow on the ground or forecast for the next few days. Which was lucky. Any snow and the drive from Union Station to Kirby’s neighborhood would have been a hellish nightmare of unintended donuts and stalled Priuses.
I was as low-key as I could be without attracting undue attention in this upscale neighborhood. Underneath the wool cap and winter parka I could have been anyone as I followed the curve of Twentieth Street North and around Lyon Village Community House with its colonial-style bell tower. I could see the Lee Highway behind a low cluster of pristine apartment buildings. It was the tail end of the route I drove to get here.
Passing a small, well-maintained parking lot before skirting a small cluster of trees and bushes, I turned left onto North Harvard Street.
The houses were large here. Between four and six bedrooms, worth anything upward of one and a half million apiece, easy. But there was a strong atmosphere of tradition and neighborly feeling. Of course, there was as much moral compromise here as anywhere else. Had to be. It was just better concealed.
As I turned in to Twenty-first Street North, I could see the gabled roof of the three-story house that I knew belonged to Kirby. A Stars and Stripes hung from the flagpole that stuck out from the central gable, same as it did on the Google Maps Street View when I’d checked out Kirby’s address that morning.
There were lights on inside and I assumed his wife and kids were already back home. Kirby himself was due to arrive back in the next half hour, or so Kurt had concluded after a thorough trawl of the Kirby family’s recent credit card statements.
I stepped off the sidewalk and walked over to a group of trees at the edge of a large lawn. Standing within them, I was pretty much completely camouflaged. The lawn rolled up toward a large, Dutch-style house, which stood across the street and a couple of houses down from the gabled house.
My watch showed twenty after six. Not long now.
I did a quick three-sixty sweep.
The street was quiet apart from a young couple pushing a baby buggy back home after a bracing walk around the block-probably with the intention of sending the buggy’s inhabitant to sleep.
No security lights that I could see. No cameras either. The residents obviously trusted their neighbors to be vigilant.
It wasn’t long before a dark blue Lexus sedan pulled around the corner. As it turned right onto the driveway of the gabled house, the garage door started to swing open, its mechanism activated from inside the car.
The driver remained inside his vehicle for a moment.
I broke from behind the trees and started to walk briskly toward the open garage door.
Kirby finally climbed out of the Lexus, a shopping bag clutched in his left hand, his keys held between thumb and forefinger.
The garage door started to close.
Kirby opened the rear passenger door and leant in to retrieve something with his right hand.
I sprinted quietly to close the final few yards, ducked under the open garage door and dragged the first thing I saw, a plastic box of rollerblades, level with the frame, blocking the safety beam and ensuring the door could not close.
Kirby, his head inside the car, hadn’t heard me enter the garage. He ducked out of the passenger door and straightened, a bouquet of roses in his right hand.
When he saw me facing him all the blood drained from his face. “What the hell are you doing here?”
I gestured toward the flowers. “Making amends?”
I could see him wrestling with his instinct to blow up in my face. After a moment he seemed to relax, choosing level-headedness over righteous indignation.
“What are you doing here?” he hissed. “I told you I never wanted to see you again.”
The garage door had already tried to swing shut then opened again.
“I need you to do something else for me.”
From inside a navy blue Chevy Malibu parked less than twenty yards farther along the street, Sandman was listening through a long-range directional pipe microphone. Accompanying visuals were provided courtesy of a sniper’s scope.