I glanced around the room.
Deutsch’s expression was focused and grim. She held my gaze and looked like she was about to say something, then seemed to decide against it and just gave me a slight, reluctant nod. Kurt and Gigi didn’t have anything to add either. They just looked at me with settled eyes and even expressions that told me they understood what I had to do. It also told me they were prepared to do what they could to help me.
I pulled the sensors off my chest. The monitors started beeping. Then I reached over to the IV bags, and slipped them off their stand. “Let’s go.”
I swung my feet off the bed and pushed myself to my feet. I felt dizzy-I’d been laid out for more than two days. I steadied myself against the bedside table, shut my eyes, and sucked in a few deep gulps of air. I let it go deep into my chest, and again, several big lungfuls, enjoying the sensation despite the tingling around my rib cage. Then I opened my eyes and padded over to the electrical socket and unplugged the monitor just as the nurse came rushing in.
“What are you doing?” she asked, her shocked eyes like saucers.
“National Security,” I told her, using Deutsch’s new favorite catch-all, get-out-of-jail-free card. I gave the nurse a dead serious look to make sure it sunk in, then I gestured at the IV bags that I was now holding. “I’ll keep these in as long as I can, but I’ll need whatever else you can give me as pills or injections to keep me going. Enough for forty-eight hours, tops. Then I’ll be back here and I’ll stay as long as you need me to. Deal?”
60
Nelson County, Virginia
Almost four hundred miles southwest of the hospital the Cessna Skyhawk broke through the low cloud cover and banked left as it positioned itself for a landing.
There was no tower here at Oakridge Field Airport. In fact, there was no airport either. It was just a privately owned tract of farmland on which an eighteen-hundred-foot landing strip had been fashioned out of the flat turf, and nothing else. To get to his hunting cabin, Roos normally flew in and out of the Eagle’s Nest Airport in Waynesboro, which was fifteen miles south of there. That was more of an actual airport than Oakridge, with an asphalt runway-cracked, but still more of a runway than the trail he was about to land on. It was also just as near, by road, as Oakridge was to the remote corner of mountain that was home to Roos’s retreat. Eagle’s Nest had no tower either, of course, but at least it offered hangars and tie-downs if the weather turned nasty. It also had a wind indicator, which would have been useful at Oakridge, given the crosswind that was currently buffeting the small prop plane. For today’s purposes though, Roos preferred a more discreet arrival. He knew the owner of the Oakridge strip and had called him to make the arrangements. He knew no other aircraft would be there and knew the man was solid enough to keep Roos’s being there that day a secret. If all went well, he’d soon be flying out of there without incident very soon, in time to settle back in and enjoy a quiet Christmas Day’s fishing out in the Gulf Stream.
If all went well.
As he approached the strip, he could feel the crosswind coming from the northwest and he scanned the ground to look for clues that would tell him if the wind direction on the ground was the same as it was up there. He spotted a thicket of trees swaying under the wind’s influence and quickly compared it to what the dial on his instrument panel was showing. They were more or less similar.
He drew on his considerable experience to maintain his wings level while keeping the plane’s nose facing the wind at a skewed angle to the runway’s centerline. It was disconcerting to watch-an aircraft crabbing its way down to a runway with its nose pointed off to one side, almost like it was flying sideways. The runway, he could see, looked like it was mostly clear of snow. The field’s owner had cleared enough of it to allow him to land. It looked like someone had run a razor down the white field that surrounded it.
Just before the flare, Roos applied opposite rudder to correct the crab while using opposite ailerons to keep the wings level. The plane aligned itself just as its wheels touched down with a barely audible squeal.
He taxied to a stop by the old farming warehouse where three black SUVs and eleven hard men were waiting for him. He killed the aircraft’s single engine and, without more than a nod, he got out, walked over, and climbed into the back of one of the cars.
If all went well he’d soon be driven back to his Cessna with one less major worry on his mind. He’d greet the New Year in a state of calm, his mind free to focus on new opportunities.
If all went well.
Which, given that it concerned Reilly, was-Roos knew-not at all a given.
SUNDAY
61
New York City
We had shopping to do.
Some of it was Kurt and Gigi’s doing. They had some ideas-good ideas, ones that would help us. They went out to stock up, mainly at the B &H Superstore by Penn Station, and came back to Deutsch’s place with a couple of large bags. Given what I knew about them in terms of their love of tech toys I was surprised they didn’t bring back a GoPro and a selfie stick. But what they did bring back would come in handy, no doubt. We needed all the help we could get.
Deutsch, on the other hand, went to a different kind of superstore: the armory at Federal Plaza. She finessed her way into signing out a small arsenal for me, which was now stored in the trunk of her car. When she got back I followed her down to the parking garage of her building to check out her haul, and that’s when I noticed the problem.
She’d managed to bring all the items we’d talked about: helmet, vest, gloves, night vision goggles, stun grenades, M4 carbine with suppressor, CCO optical gunsight, Springfield.45, extra mags for both weapons, spike strip, Smith & Wesson folding knife, comms package. Everything, in fact, short of an MRAP truck-a heavy armored Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, which would have been ideal, given what I imagined I’d be facing-though it might have raised eyebrows if she’d requisitioned one.
What she’d chosen wasn’t a problem.
The problem was that she’d brought two of each.
Standing there in the garage, I turned to her quizzically a second after she’d popped the trunk.
She cut me off before I spoke. “I’m going in with you.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Sean. I’m coming.”
I felt my insides contract. “Annie. I’ve had enough people around me die because of these pricks. I’m not letting that happen again. It’s not your fight.”
She didn’t flinch. “It is.”
“Annie, this isn’t Bureau business anymore-”
“Screw the Bureau, Sean. This is about me. And you. And Nick.”
She held my gaze, and for a second there, my eyes scoured her face for a better understanding of what she meant-then it sank in. Nick’s Tinder booty call had been nothing of the kind.
“You… and Nick?”
She didn’t react for a breath, then she nodded.
“The night I ended up at his place, after the shooting,” I asked. “He was with you?”
She nodded again. “He was going to spend the night, but he’d messed up his shirt with some pasta sauce and, well, you know how the guys at Twenty-six Fed can be total dicks.”
I pictured him walking in, his surprise at seeing me that night. “So you and-”
“Two months,” she said, anticipating my read, given Nick’s dating history. “We’d been seeing each other for two months. No one knew. Once we both got comfortable with what we were doing, with being together, he said he was going to tell you. I guess he never got the chance.”
All I could say was, “I wish he had.” I flashed back to Nick and I outside Daland’s house, all those long nights, and how he hadn’t spent those hours swiping through his Tinder, and I felt bad that I’d missed it, that I hadn’t realized he and Annie had a thing going and that we hadn’t had a chance to talk about it.