“Civilian in play.”
Henry froze and the universe froze with him. Except for the goddam train speeding toward the tunnel as if it were desperate to reach safe haven.
The good news was the little girl had finally stopped running up and down the aisle. The bad news was she was now standing in the aisle right beside Dormov and his party, staring at them as if transfixed. Dormov stared back at her, apparently disconcerted by her unabashed curiosity.
She’s going to stand there and save his life, Monroe thought, horrified. The little shit’s going to save this bastard’s life. She’s going to blow our only chance to prevent a foreign power from getting hold of classified material, and she’s going to do it just by being a goddam little kid.
Monroe was about to get up and find some pretense to make her move even if he had to knock her down, when her mother finally materialized to take charge of her. There was a strong resemblance between the little girl and the pretty young woman dressed in a white blouse and blue skirt but somehow her mother had managed to remain invisible until now. She took her daughter by the shoulders and ushered her away, admonishing her gently in French that sounded musical to Monroe.
Monroe’s sigh of relief cut off sharply when the two of them took seats in the next row, the girl sitting directly behind Dormov. She was far too close for Monroe’s comfort but it didn’t matter as long as she was outside the kill box.
“Clear,” Monroe said under his breath.
Looking through the scope, Henry felt himself dare to resume breathing. “Confirm that,” he said as the first car entered the tunnel. And do it fucking now, he added silently.
“Confirmed. Clear. Go to green,” Monroe said, his voice tight and urgent.
“Copy.” Henry’s finger curled around the trigger and squeezed.
The moment of the shot was always the moment, The One True Moment when the universe was finally in order, when it finally made sense. All cause was aligned with effect, everything was in the right place, and every place was in the right position in relation to his own. He knew when the bullet left the barrel and visualized the path it took through the softly sunlit air all the way to the train, where, like everything else in the universe, it would be exactly where it was supposed to be.
Except it wasn’t.
Henry took his eye from the scope. The immutable calm, clarity, and conviction that always enveloped him on a job had vanished. Everything in the perfectly ordered universe had slipped out of alignment; The One True Moment had not come together. There was no calm around him. He was only a guy holding a rifle, lying on his belly in the dirt below an uncaring sky somewhere in northwestern Europe.
He’d missed the shot.
He didn’t know how he knew, he just did.
Monroe was unaware of Henry’s frame of mind. The entire carriage was in an uproar. The little girl’s mother was screaming as she held her daughter in her arms, one hand over her eyes even though the child couldn’t see anything, not even the hole in the window beside Dormov. Dormov himself sat with his head cocked at a rather inelegant angle while blood dribbled down onto his shirt from the gunshot wound in his throat.
The bodyguards sat frozen in place as if the shot had turned them all into statues, even the one who had been so attentive, and they were still frozen when the train emerged from the tunnel. There was going to be hell to pay when they reported to their superiors. They’d had one job and they’d failed spectacularly.
Tant pis—for them. A bad guy had been capped. Now Dormov would never spill his guts about everything he’d gained from thirty-five years of government-funded research in America. Everything Dormov knew about chemical-biological warfare had died with him. Disaster averted, everything was as it should be. All was right with the world.
“Alpha, mike, foxtrot,” Monroe said cheerfully.
Henry removed the tiny earpiece without responding. Normally Monroe’s sign-off was the cherry on top but he wasn’t feeling it today. He was on automatic pilot as he disassembled the rifle, without the satisfaction he should have felt after eliminating a terrorist—and a bioterrorist at that, thus making the world a safer place. Something had gone wrong, and for now, he and Monroe had nothing more to talk about.
CHAPTER 2
Henry had been around the world more times than he could count, first as a Marine and later for his current employer, but unlike many other well-travelled people, he did not subscribe to the belief that one place was pretty much like another. Anyone who did, in his opinion, wasn’t paying attention. Every place he’d ever visited had characteristics and features found nowhere else, with one exception: abandoned buildings.
If someone had blindfolded him and taken him to an abandoned building anywhere in the world, then put a gun to his head and told him to guess where he was without looking out a (broken) window, he’d have been dead. There always seemed to be the same detritus on the floor, the same wood fragments from stairs or railings, the same scattering of shattered glass, and the same trash indicating it had been the site of more than one underage drinking party as well as shelter for someone in transit from nowhere to nowhere else. The abandoned building where he was now was no exception.
Abruptly he realized he had been standing over the crate marked fish oil like a man in a trance, holding the components of the Remington as if he didn’t know what to do with them. Maybe he should take a few of those tins home with him, boost his brainpower with omega-3, instead of just using them to camouflage a weapon. Probably wouldn’t help his aim, though, he thought ruefully as he stuffed the Remington’s parts into the packing material.
“Shipping to the same place?” Monroe asked cheerfully from behind him.
“Yup.” In spite of everything, Henry couldn’t help grinning. Monroe had that effect on him. The guy was like a beagle—always glad to see him, full of good spirits. He was young, of course, but not that young. Most DIA agents his age had already begun to have their shiny-happy worn off but not Monroe, not yet. Henry wanted to believe that Monroe might be tougher in that respect than the average twenty-something. In which case, the agency would only work that much harder to wear down his spirit. You just couldn’t win.
“Gotta say, that was your best ever.” Monroe had a look of ineffable happiness on his young face as he joined Henry next to the open crate. Yeah, a human beagle. “Windage, minute-of-angle, redirection from the window. I was—”
Henry hated to burst his bubble but he had to. “Where’d I hit him?”
“Neck. On a moving train.” Monroe showed him his iPhone.
Henry drew back, horrified. “You took a picture?”
“Me and everybody else,” Monroe assured him.
An image popped into Henry’s head of a crowd of people who were so busy jockeying for position around the dead man that none of them, including the conductor, called for help, and felt even more revolted. What the hell was wrong with people? Bunch of ghouls.
“Delete it,” he ordered Monroe. “Jesus.”
“Henry, four shooters whiffed on this guy before you got the call and they were all studs. Then you ring him up on the first try.” He put a hand over his heart, pretending to sniff back a tear. “It got me kind of emotional.”