David Baldacci: Deliver Us From Evil

It was only then that he had brought her to Harrowsfield. She went through an array of tests to determine if she had the psychological makeup to be a member of the group. She passed that barrier easily enough, demonstrating a rigid coldness that surprised even her. Next was physical fitness. A fine athlete, she was pressed to levels of strength and endurance she never knew she possessed. Her lungs near collapse, she willed her battered body over treacherous terrain she didn’t realize existed in the bucolic English countryside. To his credit, Whit Beckham was next to her every step of the way, though he’d already endured this when he first signed up. After that was the specialized training: weapons, martial arts, and survival skills in myriad challenging conditions.

In the classroom she learned how to research a target and study their background to gain valuable intelligence. She was taught foreign languages and how to lie with aplomb; how to act out roles and discern when other people were doing the same. She came to learn how to trail someone so stealthily that they would only know they were being followed when she walked up to them. These and dozens of other skills were drilled into her to such an extent that she no longer had to think about them.

After her training was complete she’d acted as support on three missions, two where Whit was the lead and another where Richard Dyson, an experienced Nazi exterminator and since retired, had completed the final act. Her first mission in the lead had involved an elderly Austrian living in Asia who’d helped Hitler kill hundreds of thousands of people simply because they worshipped under the Star of David. She’d gotten into his circle by becoming a nanny to his young wife’s child. The monster had been married five times. He had enough wealth obtained through the theft of antiquities during the war that he could keep divorcing and remarrying and still live in great luxury. They had one child, a five-year-old boy conceived through artificial insemination using donated sperm. Reggie suspected that the old Nazi had selected the sperm donor based on the color of his skin, hair, and height-namely, white, blond, and tall.

She’d worked with them for one month, and in that time the husband had made a half dozen passes at her. From what he’d told her once while he was in a drunken stupor, she could easily become wife number six if she played her cards right. One night she came by prearrangement to visit him in his bedroom-by his choice he and his wife kept separate boudoirs. He was again drunk and easily handled by Reggie. When he was tightly bound and his mouth gagged, she pulled the pictures from a hiding place and showed him the faces of some of his victims, a strict requirement of all the missions. At the end of their lives the monsters had to know that justice had finally caught up to them.

The fear he showed had amused her at first. But when the time came to finish the job, Reggie had hesitated. She’d never told anyone this. Not Whit and certainly not the professor. Her encouraging words to Dominic had also left out this piece of personal history. The monster had looked at her with pleading eyes. His gaze begged her not to do it. During her training she’d been told that this moment would come. And she’d also been instructed that no training in the world could fully prepare her for it.

And they’d been right.

Her resolve seemed to pour out of her with each tear shed by what was now a harmless old man. As she lowered the knife, she saw the relief in his eyes. She could just say that her cover had been blown and the mission was a failure. No one would ever know.

There were two things that prevented that from happening. One was the mocking sneer that emerged in the man’s eyes as he saw her weaken. The second was the picture of Daniel Abramowitz, age two, with a bullet hole in his small head. The photo had come from the monster’s own archives, which he’d lovingly assembled over the years he ran the camp.

She had plunged the knife into his chest until the hilt smacked his sternum. She gave the blade first an upward and then a downward jerk, and performed the same motion horizontally, severing arteries and destroying heart chambers, as she’d been taught to do. The sneer was gone from the old man now. For one long second, while life still remained, she saw in his countenance hatred, fear, rage, fear again, and then simply the flat, glassy stare of death.

“May God understand why I do this,” she whispered, the words that had become a ritual for her at the end of each mission.

Reggie had never hesitated again.

FROM THE KITCHEN Reggie grabbed some buttered toast and put it on a plate with fried sausages and a sliced apple. Also juggling a cup of hot tea, she carried it all to the library. As she entered, Professor Mallory looked up from a large book written in Polish, took out his pipe, and smiled. “I thought I heard you come in last night. Your car has a distinctive sound.”

“It’s called a wretched exhaust pipe.” She sat down next to him, lined her toast with the sausages, bit into it, and drank her tea. “Where’s Whit?”

“I don’t believe he’s here yet. But I expect him shortly.”

“I wanted to talk to you about the personnel for the Kuchin job.”

Mallory laid aside his book. His bow tie was still askew, but this morning his shirt-collar points were both directed to where they should be and it looked like he’d actually combed his hair.

“Do you have thoughts?” he asked.

“I believe Whit should play a prominent role.”

“Did he ask you to talk to me?”

“Not in so many words.”

“It’s difficult for you, I know. And him.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve supplanted him as the leader in the field, Regina.”

The professor was the only one among them who referred to her by her proper name.

“I don’t see it exactly that way.”

“But it is exactly that way.”

“You know, Professor, quite frankly, you could use a bit more tact.”

He smiled at this mild reproach. “If you try to gloss over the truth or massage the facts all you’re doing is heightening your chances of arriving at an erroneous conclusion.”

“Whit is a good asset.”

“I completely agree with you. And if it were women we were going after we would probably have greater use of him in the lead role. Unfortunately, our targets trend to the male and heterosexual side.”

“He’s gone after men. Successfully.”

“Successful to the extent that they were terminated, yes. But we like to handle our work under the radar. For example, if we left evidence behind of why we had ended the lives of these people and that became public, you know what would happen?”

“The remaining ones would hide even deeper. But there are no more Nazis.”

“It doesn’t disprove the point. And let me correct you. There are no more Nazis of which we are aware. New intelligence may lead to more work in that arena. But take Kuchin. We dispose of him and word leaks out, other Eastern European mass murderers with new lives-and there are at least a dozen we’re researching at present-would be forewarned.”

“But we don’t broadcast why we’re killing them. It’s never made public.”

“But that’s not the only way to warn someone.”

“I’m not getting what you mean.”

Mallory said, “Your first lead target was the old Austrian married five times. You tied him up and did your job, but you ransacked the house and busted a door lock, so it looked like a robbery. And you didn’t do a bunk and scamper away but rather stayed on during the investigation so no one suspected you of anything. Now, let’s take Whit. This was before your time, but in one lead assignment he killed a former Gestapo chieftain by shooting him in the genitalia. He was supposed to inject the fellow with a poison that dissolves in the body in two minutes and is untraceable. He claims that the bottle the poison was in broke. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that putting a bullet in a man’s private region and letting him bleed out is a revenge-style killing. In fact, it could well have jeopardized future targets.”