Andrew Britton - The Assassin

“Sorry, I didn’t catch that. Say it again.”

“I need to get through a cipher lock. Room 304.”

She grabbed a handful of paper and flipped through it as quickly as possible. She wasn’t expecting a miracle, but when a page slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor, she snatched it up and saw it was the right one. “It’s on the list. The code is seven, four, one, three.”

“Okay.” There was a pause as he punched it in. “I’m in.”

“Right, the next thing you’ll need is the administrator password.” She was rifling through the loose pages. “If you’ll give me a second, I have it right here-”

“I remember it,” he said, cutting her off. She heard distant tapping over the line, then, “Okay, I just logged on. I’m bringing up the file now.”

She waited as long as she could, but the silence was too much. “Ryan, did it work? What came up?”

“Just a minute… Yeah, it worked. Everything’s here. Fitness reports, commendations, reprimands, even a forwarding address. He’s in Germany, Naomi. The bastard’s in Berlin.”

She breathed a prolonged sigh of relief. She was slightly amazed it had worked. Raiding the chancery had been a long shot from the very start, but now, against all odds, they had what they needed. “Okay, let me know when you… oh, my God.”

There was a short, uncertain pause, then, “Naomi? Naomi, what happened? What’s wrong?”

She couldn’t respond; she couldn’t even breathe. Her heart was in her throat, her eyes wide and locked to the rearview mirror.

A D.C. Metro police car had slowed to a stop directly behind her vehicle. As she watched with rising panic, the officer behind the wheel stepped out of the cruiser, adjusted his belt, and started toward the Taurus.

On the third floor of the chancery, Kealey had seated himself at one of the desks and was working the keys as fast as he could. He was struck by how easy everything had turned out once he was inside the building. The computer had readily accepted the password contained in the ORACLE file, giving him access to the entire database. There was a wealth of information at his fingertips. Normally, he would have taken the time to copy everything to a high-capacity zip disk, but given the circumstances, he wasn’t interested in learning which members of the German diplomatic community were actually professional intelligence officers. All he cared about was finding Thomas Ruhmann.

Using an integrated search engine, he narrowed the parameters to the two years that the Austrian arms broker had worked at the embassy. He was waiting for the computer to kick up the results when Naomi’s faint voice came over the radio. It was clear she was speaking to herself, but the edge to her voice was unmistakable.

At first, he thought she had come across something unusual in the file, but when the radio stayed silent, he knew something was wrong. He immediately pressed the TRANSMIT button and asked her what was happening.

“Ryan…” The single word was nearly inaudible, arriving as a strained wheeze over the line. She sounded like she was in the throes of an asthma attack. “There’s a police car behind me. I can see the officer through the windshield. I think he’s running the tags right now.”

“What?” His mind raced to find a solution, but he was stuck on the fact that she had the ORACLE file in the car. No matter what happened, they could not let that folder out of their hands. “You have to get out of there. Right now. You can’t let him-”

“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked frantically. “I can’t lose him. It’s too early. There’s no traffic. Oh, shit, he’s getting out of the car. What do I do? Ryan, what do I do? ”

“Naomi, listen to me. You have to… Naomi? Naomi!”

She was gone. He couldn’t hear anything over the radio. Even static would have been preferable to that terrible silence.

Breathing a soft curse, he exited the program with a few keystrokes, then deleted the history. Standing, he reached for his pack, slung it over his shoulders, and turned toward the door. Only then did he realize he was not alone in the room. Two men were blocking his path. Both were wearing the austere blue uniform of the embassy security detail, and both had 9mm pistols leveled at his chest.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

“2054, D.C. I need you to run a tag for me.”

Officer First Class Steve Lowe ran a hand over his fleshy, clean-shaven face and peered through the windshield, eyes locked to the car parked in front of his cruiser. The call had come in a few minutes earlier, and as one of just 8 beat officers in PSA (Police Service Area) 205 in the 2nd District, he’d had little choice but to respond. Two of the other cars were responding to an 11-6 — shots fired — which left Lowe to deal with this minor incident.

Suspicious vehicle reported in Senate Heights… He shook his head wearily. Like 90 percent of these calls, it was probably nothing: somebody locked out and waiting for spare keys to arrive, or a spurned lover parked outside her ex’s house, hoping to beg for a second chance. Everyone had a story, of course, but over the years, Lowe had learned how to tell the truth from the bullshit. He’d also learned how to interpret a scene on sight. The car he was looking at now — a late-model Ford Taurus — was not setting off his internal alarm. From what he could see, there was just one person inside, and it looked like a woman, as the call had suggested. This was something he could handle alone, which was a good thing. His partner was out sick, along with half of the force. Normally he would have picked up a spare man for the shift, but the flu had decimated the department’s ranks. Lowe didn’t mind in the least. Frankly, he preferred to ride alone. He despised his partner, and the feeling was mutual. In fact, he was barely on speaking terms with just about every officer in the 2nd District.

It had started a year earlier. The first whispers cropped up when several officers in his squad had been called into the lieutenant’s office to answer for minor infractions. Lowe had been present when each incident took place, which made him the only possible source of the leaks. The rumors had never been verified, but they had earned him the worst kind of reputation a cop could have: that of a man willing to narc out his fellow officers. Worse still, it appeared he was willing to betray them for nothing more than a chance to advance his career. The irony was that he had been angling for assignment to Internal Affairs all along. His aspirations were well known within the department, and they only reinforced the prevailing rumors.

Lowe didn’t care what they thought of him; he had the right pedigree, the right education, and the right connections, all of it hard earned. Nothing else mattered: not the disgusted look on the face of the lieutenant, which she’d worn even as she’d mouthed the appropriate words, commending him for doing the right thing; not the rejection of the so-called blue brotherhood, that supposedly upstanding group of ignorant, narrow-minded assholes; and certainly not this bitch of a dispatcher, who seemed to have made it her life’s mission to send his calls to the bottom of the list.

Irritated by the delay, he snatched up his radio and repeated the call. “2054, D.C. Can you run these tags or what?”

The woman’s voice, completely neutral, came back after a lengthy pause. “Go ahead, 2054.”

“I’m on Hoban Road in Senate Heights, just off the two thousand block of Reservoir Road. The car is a blue Ford Taurus, Virginia tag, Victor-Paul-David 7376.”

Half a minute passed, then, “2054, that vehicle comes back to James Dobson. It’s registered to an address in Richmond. № 29.”