Michael Palmer - The Last Surgeon

Neither of the men was inclined or able to duplicate his maneuver.

“Help!… Stop him!” they hollered.

Reggie, smiling now, had already reached the stairwell door from which he had entered the second floor. There might have been enough distance between him and the men to take the stairs, but instead he launched himself over the stairwell railing and dropped onto the stone landing below, crying out in pain as his ankle rolled beneath him. Limping, he reached the main foyer just as the two men were entering the stairwell.

“Hey, slow down, there, kid!” the security guard barked as Reggie hobbled past his desk.

“Sorry, sir,” Reggie shouted back. “Sorry.”

He hurried as best he could manage out the huge glass doors and down the outside stairs. He was in pain and breathing heavily when he reached Junie and Nick. Behind him, he sensed more than saw the security guard racing down the stairs.

“Go! They’re coming!” he managed, scrambling onto the backseat.

“Are you hurt?” Nick asked as Junie accelerated and turned at the next intersection.

Reggie patted the USB key in his pocket. “Not really,” he said.

It was going to be hard to thank Junie for the rush.

Koller kept pace behind Jillian Coates, close enough to breathe in her apricot-scented perfume. His shadow, stretched long and thin by the midday sun, occasionally overlapped hers. He liked touching her that way. Sometimes he walked in perfect synchronized step. She of course had no idea that for blocks she was being followed. Wearing a different disguise, far more doughy Robert Greene than urbane, intelligent Paul Regis, Koller felt confident that even if she did make eye contact with him, he would be unrecognizable to her. At worst, she would think he was just a typical letch, testing how close he could get to her and thinking dirty thoughts.

How wrong she’d be.

The Landrew non-kill had been a masterpiece, flawlessly researched, planned, and executed. Now, Koller’s bank account reflected his reward for that effort. There was no way of knowing how much more work Jericho intended on sending his way, but Koller had been in this business long enough to develop a sense for when a client’s well was about to run dry. Jericho’s pockets were extradeep, though, and he believed the work was far from over.

He decided it would be a wasted trip to return to the Panama City estate, his condo in Taos, or back to California to resume his life as a sedate but colorful substitute chemistry teacher. More jobs were bound to come his way and probably soon. Meanwhile, he was content to use the downtime to get to know Jillian Coates and see for himself how motivated she was to further investigate the cause of the fire that had ravaged her condominium. He applied simple mathematical logic to his plan on how best to deal with her: the pushier she was in her efforts, the less time she had to live. Even the students at Woodrow Wilson High could handle that equation.

Jillian left the crowded sidewalk and headed toward Anne Marie Cosco Hall, a nursing school dorm according to the signpost Koller read. Perhaps she’s living there now , he mused. His mind flashed on the chaos and havoc he could wreak if left to his own devices on a floor full of student nurses. The images, more horrible than any circle of Dante’s inferno, aroused him.

Koller occupied himself with The Washington Post , which he read on a nearby park bench while waiting for his quarry to reappear. She did so twenty minutes later and proceeded to head off at a more accelerated pace. He liked her choice of clothes-not flashy or excessively tight, but not at all dowdy. Her breasts, beneath a cotton blouse, were totally enticing-a nice C cup, he guessed. But it was her behind, moving unself-consciously in her chino slacks, that he found most appealing. The way her hips swayed with each step was inspiring. Koller moved even closer to her than he had been before, wanting to take in another whiff of her intoxicating perfume. He decided then and there that he would have her, a willing sex partner or not, before he killed her. He considered it a bonus for a job well done.

The notion made him smile.

Jillian took a left onto Twentieth Street and walked a few blocks north, stopping underneath a green awning. Koller walked past her, but turned just in time to see her slip inside Madame Jessica’s Psychic Readings Studio.

“Communing with the departed, are we?” Koller muttered to himself.

He wished it had been a private investigator she was visiting and not some medium who would take her money and toy with her emotions. Perhaps she could use someone to comfort her-someone like Paul Regis.

He was rock hard from following her, and from the taste of his last non-kill still fresh in his mind.

Of the five Manuel Ferris files Reggie Smith had obtained from his close call at the Veterans Administration building, only one seemed promising-a thirty-five-year-old with an address on H Street NW in Washington. There was no apartment number. The Internet and Nick’s maps placed the address in D.C.’s compact Chinatown. As his cab pulled up to the curb, Nick stared at the structure and checked Reggie’s printout again.

LUCKY BILL PEARL’S, the sign above the awning of a windowless, black brick building read. SERVING D.C.’S FINEST GENTLEMEN SINCE 1949. Below the fringed awning, the entrance was moderately discreet, with three glass-encased glossy photographs of women on each side, presumably advertising the headliners in their roster of performers and exotic dancers. Nikki… Sabra… Colette…

Before he paid off the cabbie Nick checked the address a final time. Lucky Bill’s hardly seemed like the residence for a man who had gone off for a top-secret covert military mission-unless the mission was here, in which case it hardly seemed likely the VA would be making the operative’s identifying information available in its database.

The façade of the building was four stories high. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine what the upper floors might be used for, but apartments were certainly one of the other possibilities. He scanned to the right and left, but there were no more entrances. Perhaps there was one on the far side of the building.

Nick tipped the driver 25 percent and went inside. He was carrying a small manila envelope containing several photographs of Umberto and one of Manuel Ferris, enlarged by Reggie from a unit snapshot Matt McBean had come up with. The original photo was creased and grainy, and the enlargement only enhanced the deficiencies. In addition, Ferris was wearing some sort of a cap, further obscuring his appearance. From what Nick could tell, he was a narrow-faced, swarthy man with deeply set eyes, and was about the same height as McBean-five-foot-nine.

Nick had last set foot inside a gentleman’s club with a group of fellow surgical residents. Bill Pearl’s was considerably more upscale than that place had been. Just outside the barred ticket window, a bald muscleman sat perched on a wooden stool. Above the collar of his tux shirt, the tops of a kaleidoscope of tattoos circumnavigated his tree-trunk neck.

“How’re you doing?” he asked the brute, who he realized had no eyebrows.

The man nodded without interest, and mumbled a reply. Nick fished a twenty out of his wallet, realizing as he did that he could have been much more subtle. The bouncer reached up a beefy paw and, instantly, the bill was gone.

“I’m looking for a man named Manny Ferris,” Nick said. “I was told he worked here.”

“Don’t you think you’re in the wrong club, sir?” the giant replied. “This is girls only.”

“No, no. What I mean is… is there a guy named Manny Ferris who works or… or maybe even lives here?”