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  Placing it on the table, he tapped it twice with the tip of his finger and said, “Last night, there was a robbery not too far from here and some items were taken.”

  Looking up, the young man’s mouth and eyes formed into matching circles as he shook his head to either side.

  “Officer, we would never deal with anything stolen here. I’m sorry if you heard otherwise, but they were mistaken.”

  Feeling his back teeth grind together, Reed glanced over his shoulder to the bell above the door, to the small closed-circuit camera hanging in the corner.

  Certainly, nothing stolen had ever walked through the door.

  “I trust you wouldn’t knowingly,” Reed said, “but the paperwork for these particular items was taken as well. I’m just checking with all the shops in the area to see if anything had been unloaded yet.”

  Whether any verifying data had been stolen – or if any even existed – Reed had no idea.

  All he knew was that it sounded official enough to get past this guy, his only concern being if any of the pieces had shown up yet. Maybe then he would have enough to subpoena the tapes for the camera.

  But before that, he had to have some form of probable cause to take to a judge first.

  “Not since I opened this morning,” the young man replied. “You’re actually only the third customer I’ve had come in today, the first two both left without buying a thing.”

  “Has anybody else been working today?” Reed asked.

  “No, just me. I own the place, lock up for an hour at noon for lunch, most days don’t even leave, just eat in the back.”

  Glancing down to the list again, Reed slowly read through the entries one at a time.

  Sapphire earrings.

  Ruby heart pendant necklace.

  Diamond tennis bracelet.

  Far from a purveyor of fine jewelry, most of the listed items sounded like things that would have far greater sentimental value than street worth, though that was hardly the point. With any luck, something would show up in one of the local shops, providing a name – or even better – a face for him to begin tracking.

  Less than eighteen hours had passed since he’d first been called at home by Grimes, but that didn’t mean his captain’s admonishments were any less true.

  They were on a timer, and they were being watched.

  “I like your dog,” the young man said, leaning forward to peer over the counter at Billie. “What breed?”

  Arching an eyebrow, Reed didn’t know if the man had any real interest or was just trying to play the part of being helpful.

  Either way, he had just stumbled into something Reed wasn’t about to let pass him by.

  “She’s a Belgian Malinois,” Reed said. “A little smaller than a German Shepherd, and as you can see, the color patterns are quite different as well.”

  Behind the counter, the man gave a small grunt, nodding along.

  “But the bigger difference between them is their smelling capabilities.” Flicking his gaze to the man, Reed said, “Now, take Billie here. In that nose of hers right now is over two-hundred-and-twenty-five-million scent receptors, more than forty-five times what you and I have.”

  Checking to make sure he still held the man’s attention, he continued, “Her nose sees the world the way our eyes do. Not just what is on the surface, but what was there yesterday, or even a week ago.”

  Rotating at the waist, he cast a hand around the pawn shop, again taking in the extensive collection of rubbish that seemed to be crammed into the space.

  “Now, take this place for example, if I were to give her a whiff of something, anything, and hide it, she could track it down in seconds.”

  Turning back to face forward, he saw the way the young man’s lower jaw had gone slack, most of the color drained from his face.

  “And even with all that natural ability, the Marines took her and made her better. Taught her to look for over two hundred different kinds of chemicals. Explosives, drugs, you name it.”

  Pausing, he let the insinuation hang in the air, watching as the man processed it, attempting to swallow it down without giving anything away.

  Clearly, high stakes poker was not in this man’s future.

  “Wow,” he managed. “That’s quite impressive.”

  “Pssh,” Reed said, leaning back at the waist, exaggerating his movements, “it’s one thing to hear about, but it’s another entirely to see it in action. Girl almost pulls my shoulder out once she latches onto something.”

  “I bet,” the young man managed, his voice barely audible.

  Again, Reed took a moment, glancing down to Billie, watching as she rolled her face up to look at him. Holding the pose, he asked, “So, you’re sure none of those things listed here have come by this morning? Nobody looking to unload things fast on the cheap? Make a quick buck and be gone?”

  “No!” the young man said, practically spitting the word across the counter, his relief that the conversation was moving ahead almost palpable. “But I’ll be sure to let you know if anything comes in.”

  Glancing up to him, Reed let the look that had first settled on his features as he walked in return to the surface, making it clear that he believed neither the promise nor the fact that Billie couldn’t find a mountain of whatever he wanted somewhere inside.

  He just had more important things to concern himself with at the moment.

  “Yeah, I’m sure you will.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  There were two ways the situation could be handled.

  If left to his preferences, Clarence Koob would have begun with surveillance. He would have had a constant visual on the second-story room in the dingy little motel not far from where Neville and Hirsch were still watching over the apartment complex he had infiltrated the night before.

  Monitoring all movement to and from the place, the moment the thin gray light of day was gone from view, he would have posed as a random visitor, or a delivery boy, or some other such nonsense, ascended the side staircase, and entered.

  How things played out from there would depend on what was on the other side of the door, but above all else, it would be handled discreetly.

  Unfortunately, his employer had other designs.

  Keeping Vinson Gerard from pushing ahead at warp speed the moment Nora Heatherington was first discovered had not been an easy task. Every single day Koob had been forced to sit with him, often having to endure the absurd grooming habits the man preferred, with the sole purpose of making sure to keep his ego and his anxieties in check.

  For a man with the wealth and resources of Gerard, there was no concept of a worthy adversary. In his insulated world of business and privilege, everything came down to a matter of who could out-procure the other.

  In his battles, people might hemorrhage money, but never actual blood.

  Growing up on the south end of London, his own story one that would make Oliver Twist cringe, Koob had no such delusions. From the day his mother disappeared at the age of six – not left, not fell ill, disappeared – he had been left to fend for himself.

  If all that conglomerated time had taught him anything, it was how to assess and respect a foe.

  And this was most certainly one that should not be underestimated.

  What had happened to Gerard’s son two years prior should have been enough to prove that point, time and distance having ebbed away some of the raw visual that had stunned the organization so many months before.

  If not that, then the encounter Koob himself had had, the scars he now wore on his skin to show for it, constant visuals that kept an inner fire burning with an intensity rivaled only by the sun.

  In their place, though, Gerard had again fallen prey to his own arrogance, thinking he could merely cross the ocean and take what he wanted, using sheer force of will and personality to impose his own particular brand of justice.

  Which meant that with each passing moment, the man’s patience and his ability to be reasoned with grew a bit more tra
nsparent.

  A fact that Koob was fast coming to loathe, could only hope wouldn’t be the undoing for everybody before it was all over.

  Seated in the front passenger seat of an anonymous sedan, Koob sat with the elongated suppressor of his Walther PPK pressed against his thigh, the color of the barrel blending seamlessly with the dark pants he wore. Despite the coiled energy inside the car – Hirsch at the steering wheel, Neville in the seat behind him – Koob’s nerves were even, his heart rate not experiencing the slightest bump in speed.

  One didn’t ascend to the position he was in by jumping at shadows.

  The hit had come in more than an hour before, a single ping that entered into the extensive search grid Neville had put into place on the internet.

  A man didn’t dabble in the sort of things Gerard did by broadcasting his actions to the world. For as much vanity as he took in his appearance and his surroundings, his work he preferred to keep tucked beneath the surface.

  Well beyond the sightlines of competition and the authorities both.

  Whatever did exist on the web was placed there for a reason, an ingenious method of tracking first devised long ago, perfected over time by Neville.

  Now, nobody could so much as follow an errant link from Google into one of the Gerard-controlled sites without raising a flag.

  Most of the time, there was nothing of concern to be had, the reason behind the intrusion just that simple, some poor computer illiterate individual wandering where they weren’t supposed to be.

  In this particular instance, Koob found it to be a bit too much of a strain on credibility to think that the case, not in a cheap motel like this, not miles from where Nora Heatherington’s body had been found.

  Koob’s prey was nearby. He could sense it, the anticipation doing far more to heighten his senses than either one of the murders he’d committed the night before.

  Finding her had been impossible, the woman too smart, too trained in her craft to ever willingly do something so foolish.

  Working backward, though, relying on her much less aware friends, had been a much easier path.

  If two long years of pursuit could be considered easy.

  “What do you think?” Neville asked from the backseat, his own voice a mix of London and South Africa, the sound not matching his menacing features in the slightest.

  The very reason he was known to be a man of extremely limited words.

  “Boss says we go now,” Koob replied, his gaze never leaving the motel.

  “Since when is he the one making the tactical decisions?” Hirsch asked.

  To that, Koob remained silent a moment, unable to argue. For the most part, all operational aspects of their work were left to him, the old man realizing his limitations, providing the resources that were needed before fading into the background.

  Given the extremely personal nature of this one, though, it was amazing he had managed to stay as removed as he had.

  “Since he’s the one paying the bills,” Koob replied, his tone letting it be known that there would be no further discussion on the matter.

  He didn’t like it any better than the other two did, but there wasn’t a thing to be done about it.

  “Neville, you’re with me. Hirsch, stay here, be ready for an ETD of eight minutes.”

  Chapter Twenty

  The free wireless internet at McDonald’s was a lot stronger than it had been at the motel, with enough force that Sydney Rye could sit in her SUV in the parking lot without having to venture inside and still get full connectivity.

  A blessing, meaning she wouldn’t be subjected to the occasional wayward gaze from those passing by, nor would she be expected to pay good money for the sorts of crap the place was trying to pass off as food.

  Running on granola bars or not, a woman still had standards.

  Folded up in the front seat of the rental, she sat with the chair reclined slightly, her left knee pressed into the dash alongside the steering wheel. On her right was balanced the laptop she had purchased that morning, the battery with just enough life to give her another hour of viewing time.

  Had she thought about it before falling asleep, she would have plugged it in first thing after arriving at the motel.

  In its stead, she only hoped it would stay active long enough to reveal what she needed before forcing her to venture closer, using personal oversight to keep a view on things.

  All that assuming, of course, that there was anything to see.

  The original message sent from Nora had been such that Rye assumed she was referring to Gerard and his men, the family the same one that had terrorized the girl years before. After having spent almost a full day on the ground, though, that stance was beginning to relax a tiny bit.

  Of all the places in the world Nora could have picked to relocate, she had somehow come up with Columbus, had taken it a step further by offering to pose as a nun, reasoning that there was no chance anybody would bother her, or even give her a second glance.

  At the time, Rye could remember thinking it was an absurd choice, the sort of place locals didn’t even want to be. Seeing it up close, there seemed to be no shortage of people that could have still had Nora spooked, the streets rife with those that would have at a different point in her life left Rye glancing back over a shoulder.

  The sort of place now that left her thinking just how many people in this world could benefit from a good ass kicking.

  If any one of them had been the one to break in, to finish Nora and the old woman, it would be at once easier and much, much more difficult for Rye to make things right.

  Easier, in that her opponents would be nowhere near her level, a mere perfunctory exercise in vermin removal.

  Much, much more difficult in that they would be almost invisible, bordering on impossible to track down.

  An eventuality she would rather not think about at the moment, Nora deserving a much better fate than to have ended up on the wrong end of a tweaker in need of cash for their next fix.

  Not after all she’d already been through.

  Beneath Rye, the car shifted slightly to either side, her gaze going to the rearview mirror, seeing the entirety of it blocked by the tremendous bulk of Blue. Circling twice, he worked his way from one side to the other before settling himself on the rear seat, his body stretched the width of it.

  Raising his eyes to meet hers, he allowed his jaws to sag open, his tongue lolling out over his bottom teeth.

  “Yeah, I smell it, and no, you can’t have any,” Rye said, her humorless tone letting him know she was not in the mood to take any shit.

  Already she was going to have to buy another bag of dog food soon enough, the beast having finished the first one in just two sittings.

  No way was she going to let him get started on double cheeseburgers, not with his propensity for flatulence and the cramped interior of the car.

  With her attention on the rearview mirror, the dog doing his best to plead with her in silence, she almost missed the first flicker of movement on the screen.

  Starting as nothing more than a simple spin of the doorknob, a bit of light glinting off the brass, it soon gave way to a crack running the vertical length of the door, a bit of outside light peeking in behind it.

  Snapping her attention over to the screen, Rye reached down and adjusted the position of the chair back she was seated on. Bending forward, she peered down at the screen, Blue reacting in kind, pushing his head up between the front seats.

  There was only a single fiber optic camera to cover the entirety of the hotel room, the device one of just a few trade items she carried with her at all times, the sort of thing not impeded by airport security measures. Tucked along the top rim of the cheap lampshade on the nightstand, it was aimed at the front door, giving a visual for approximately three-quarters of the space.

  Not that she really needed it to do even that.

  If anybody at all showed, it would prove exactly who she was dealing with, nobody else having the capabilit
y or even the interest in tracking her to the motel room.

  Easing open no more than an inch, the door stopped, the light behind it blotting out, presumably as someone peered in. A moment later, the front end of a weapon appeared, starting just beneath the knob and rising, careful to be hidden from outside view.

  Just fifteen seconds after the first turn of the handle, the door moved open more than a foot, a figure sliding through. With shoulders square, they eased sideways along the wall, keeping the weapon extended before them.

  No more than a few inches into the space, a second individual appeared, closing the door behind them.

  In the dim light of the room, the black and white provided little complete detail of the figures, though Rye didn’t need it to.

  The first man she knew on sight just from the cut of his shoulders and the shape of his shaved head, the way he favored his left shoulder as he held his weapon at arm’s length.

  The result of an injury she herself had inflicted in their previous encounter.

  “Koob, you son of a bitch,” she muttered, her lips barely moving as she twisted her head to either side. “I thought we killed you once before already.”

  The man to his left Rye was fairly certain she had never seen before, his dark features and the glower he wore reminiscent of a hundred other men just like him.

  Men that thought a big gun and an ugly face were all they needed to survive.

  Men like the dealer she encountered the night before.

  Removing his left hand from the gun, Koob formed his fingers into a V, motioning from his face toward the back wall, oblivious to the camera watching his every ridiculous movement.

  “Yes, you dumbass,” Rye whispered, “I’m still in the room, just left the place unprotected while I took a shit.”

  Watching the scene play out, Rye couldn’t help but shake her head, animosity pulsating through her in undulating waves.

  Not only had they murdered Nora, they had also now insulted her.

  Taken together, there was no way things weren’t going to end very, very badly for them.