Michael Prescott: Next Victim

LAX offered an additional asset, one that might prove critical-the ready availability of taxicabs. Not many places in this city were so accommodating.

But the taxis would be of use to her only if she could shake free of the people who had trailed her for a thousand miles, all the way from northeastern Oregon to southern California. The first step was to force them out of their cars so she could get a look at them and see how many there were.

The terminal was enormous, and despite the late hour, plenty of shops and eateries were still open. The place was like a garish shopping mall, crowded with stores and bars and luridly decorated restaurants. Palm trees were planted along the concourse under skylights and before wide windows. The floor shone beneath the bright overhead lights.

Toting her suitcase, Pierce entered a store selling magazines and souvenirs, then feigned interest in a selection of Dodgers T-shirts while watching the store entrance from the corner of her eye.

A man entered, glancing at her in a way that was not quite casual. He seemed to mutter something to himself, but she knew he was actually speaking into a throat microphone, reporting his reacquisition of the target.

She called him Alpha, using standard law enforcement code. Alpha lingered near the entrance. But there was another way of leaving the store, a second exit at the far end. Pierce wandered in that direction. Alpha did not follow. Some other agent must be covering that exit.

She got close enough to see a second man studying a rack of magazines a few steps inside the entryway. Call him Bravo.

Pierce left the store, knowing that Bravo would not be so conspicuous as to follow immediately. Another person would pick up her trail.

When she paused by the shop window just outside the exit, pretending to study a display of leather luggage, she caught the reflection of the third man, Charlie. He had started walking and stopped when she did.

Clumsy, Charlie. Poor technique. Time for you to take a refresher course at Quantico.

She entered a coffee shop and ordered a burger and Coke, her first food other than a couple of granola bars she’d consumed in the car. She sat at a small table with a view of the concourse and ate her meal, barely tasting it, knowing only that she needed nourishment to stay alert.

When she left, she took care to wad up her paper napkin and leave it on her chair.

In the concourse she paused to fiddle with her suitcase, a maneuver that afforded her the chance to see yet another man-Delta-approach her table and retrieve the napkin. There was nothing written on it or hidden in it, but her pursuers couldn’t know that. Observing what might have been a dead drop, they had to check it out.

A similar ruse revealed the fifth agent, Echo, who peeled off to follow an innocent traveler after Pierce bumped into him near the escalators. This could have been a brush pass, the surreptitious transfer of an item in a seemingly accidental moment of contact.

Pierce was pleased with herself. Not only had she forced Echo to reveal himself, but she’d sent him on a diversion, improving the odds.

Perhaps she could lose another one. She picked out a man at random and asked him the way to the taxi stand. This was information she did not need, having checked the airport’s layout in her road atlas while driving. The man snapped off an answer and bustled away.

Another bystander took off after him. The sixth agent. Foxtrot.

Pierce kept walking. She saw a woman break into stride just ahead of her, obviously having been posted there in an advance position.

Number seven.

She hadn’t expected to have to count that high. How many of them were there, for Christ’s sake?

A custodian was cleaning out a trash can. She caught the hint of a wire threaded from his ear to his collar. Stand-alone body rig. He was number eight.

There couldn’t be more. But watching her from an alcove near a candy machine, a man wearing a priest’s collar. Nine.

Was that all of them? She took out her compact. In the mirror she glimpsed a male figure watching her from an upper level of the concourse. He was an older man with the close-cropped gray hair of a military officer, and she had a feeling he was the one in charge, looking down from a high vantage point on his operatives, who had spread throughout the terminal while Pierce was eating her burger.

He made ten. And she had no reason to think she’d spotted them all.

She scanned the area and noted security cameras installed in the ceilings. By now, someone would be watching her on the monitors.

She had underestimated the bureau. They’d pulled out all the stops for her. Multiple redundant modes of surveillance. She was caught in a box inside another box inside yet another…

Even so, she wasn’t out of options. Not by a long shot.

She entered a ladies’ room, where two women were chatting at a row of sinks before a large mirror. One of them had flamboyant red hair that looked artificial. The other was dark-haired like Pierce herself.

Pierce nodded. They would do.

Taking a stall, she shut the door without latching it, then placed her suitcase on the toilet tank and stood on the lid. No one looking at the space under the door could tell that the stall was occupied.

She reached down to her belt buckle and opened the secret compartment that held the knife.

It was a switchblade, small enough to be folded inside the oversize buckle. The blade was two and a half inches long, a tiny tool, but she knew how to use it.

She opened the knife, then held it in her right hand and waited.

The two women left. The rest room was empty now. Pierce knew the feds would get curious after a while. They would send someone to check on her.

Footsteps.

Through the narrow opening in the stall door, she saw a woman enter the rest room-the same female agent she’d seen earlier. Number seven. Blond, young, her eyes wide and alert as she studied the room. A slight bulge in her belly-concealed weapon? No, something else. Something better.

Pierce waited until the woman had moved directly outside the stall, then pushed the door open and grabbed her from behind, pressing the knife against her neck.

"Shhh," she whispered, her voice nearly inaudible. The woman would be wearing a throat microphone sensitive enough to pick up almost any sound.

Slowly she lowered her free hand and ran her palm over the smooth, slightly rounded contour of the woman’s belly.

Pregnant, as she’d thought. That was helpful.

She lowered the knife to the bitch’s abdomen. "Do what I say"-her words barely spoken aloud by lips pressed against the woman’s ear-"or your baby dies."

She felt, rather than heard, the female agent’s sharp intake of breath, and she knew she had found the point of maximum emotional vulnerability she needed.

Softly: "Tell them you’ve lost the target. The bathroom is empty." The woman hesitated. Pierce teased the round belly with the knife’s edge. "Tell them."

"This is Kidder," the woman said in a low, husky voice directed at her throat microphone. "Have not acquired target. Rest room empty, target gone, repeat, target gone."

Pierce plucked the earpiece from Agent Kidder’s left ear and heard a gruff male voice initiating a lost-command drill. There was a flurry of responses from other agents, but Pierce wasn’t listening anymore. She was applying sudden strong pressure to Kidder’s carotid arteries, shutting off the blood flow to the brain.

The woman slumped. Pierce lowered her onto the toilet and quickly removed her own jacket, then peeled off the agent’s brown blazer and shrugged it on. She slipped out of her skirt and donned Kidder’s slacks. She fitted the earpiece in her own ear and secured the microphone to her jacket collar and the small transmitter to her blouse.