Дэвид Балдаччи - Mercy

Spector’s employer on this job had had this done to them once too often by the man. Before, they had agreed to his demands. This time, they had decided to cut their losses and also take the congressman out of any more deals, as well as the remainder of his years. And with his declining health, he was getting far more difficult to trust and control. And there was growing concern he would let something slip that would spark an investigation that would turn out to be inconvenient .

The far younger man replacing him at this pinnacle of power would not be nearly as duplicitous. Or stupid enough to think that he could get away with anything. They were all cookie-cutter drones. The only principles they believed in were the ones that benefited them. The question was simple: How much would they cost? They were just another line item in a budget, though that line item would never officially appear in any budget. Yet that made it no less critical.

The calculation was a simple one: Laws equaled money. If you made the laws, you made the money.

And this immoral and corrupt man, whose political decisions had harmed many ordinary citizens in myriad ways, would be buried, and his loved ones would mourn him; but then they would immediately fight over his money, the only thing of value he would leave behind.

Good riddance , thought Spector.

She finished with the body and took her time erasing all traces of her presence there. After that, she made her way out the way she had come, via an impossibly high window and down a wall that seemed to have no visible means of support for such a climb or descent other than a copper gutter. But that was for the average intruder, not Britt Spector. There were no signs of forced entry. And that would make it certain that the police would conclude the man’s death was an unfortunate accident.

She walked down the darkened street and arrived back at her hotel in short order. She took a shower, had a drink, and sent an encrypted message to her employer. Then she waited and checked an electronic bank account to make sure that the remainder of the agreed-upon funds had been deposited. When this was verified, she went to bed. She rose at six the next morning, showered and dressed, packed her bag, checked out, and was on her way to Dulles via an Uber.

She liked working for Peter Buckley. He was a class act who paid extremely well. And he never called her in for something that was not aligned with her elite abilities.

Spector caught the Uber driver checking her out in the mirror. Spector knew she stood out. Five ten, lean and willowy, she had driven herself hard most of her life to achieve her goals. Her features were exotic due to her Filipino father and Scandinavian mother. Her skin was olive and her hair blond. Her father had been an Olympic-caliber judo athlete. Her mother had been a tall, rangy biathlete, and she had taught her daughter how to both ski and shoot at the same time. Her parents’ athleticism had passed to their daughter, though she had not followed their paths in life. She had other goals.

She looked at the man’s hungry gaze in the mirror. Any woman would easily be able to read that look.

“You like what you see?” she said.

He nodded. “Very much.”

“Well, life is full of disappointment,” she replied. She turned away and thought no more of him.

Yes, men were easy. Women, women were hard. And apparently Peter had found a challenge for her to take on.

This was exactly what rocked Britt Spector’s world.

The wheels of the Bombardier jet solidly gripped the tarmac and held as it landed at the business aviation park. The aircraft taxied to a stop, the door stairs dropped down, and off stepped the sole passenger. Spector carried her black leather duffel over one shoulder, with a confident swagger in every stride.

Before joining the Bureau, she had completed college and then enlisted in the Army, jumping out of perfectly good airplanes with the 101st Airborne Division. Before every mission they would smear any exposed part of their skin with multicolor camo paint. It was a difficult process, and you had to get it just right or the entire purpose would be defeated. Irregular diagonal lines across the face. Two colors on the lips, nose, chin, etc. Don’t forget the ears, neck, eyelids, hands. Done right, even if the enemy hit you with a light, you would still be invisible. You could kill them before they killed you. Done wrong, you were a sitting duck with a Hollywood premiere-grade spotlight shining on your soon-tobe dead ass.

Yet the Army had never understood or appreciated her. When the promotions didn’t come as fast as she would have liked, and after some of her extracurricular activities had drawn the ire of those in command, she’d gotten her honorable discharge and moved on. She’d then taken her talents to the FBI. She’d stayed there long enough to realize it was also not a good fit for her personal goals. So she had become a freelancer in a field she had very much made her own. In doing so, she was deploying the same skills she had gained and burnished first in the military and then at the Bureau, but making far more money in the process. And, best of all, it was a life of her own making.

While her parents had been exemplary athletes, they had truly been disasters as parents and at providing for their only child. Thus, Spector had grown up poor and physically and verbally abused by a mother and father who had never achieved their dreams of athletic glory and had taken that failure out on her. After escaping their yoke, she had worked for all she had, and never wanted to be poor or abused again.

She climbed into the passenger seat of the waiting black SUV, and as soon as her butt hit the leather, they were off.

Driving was Peter Buckley, immaculate in pearl-gray slacks, a classic navy blazer, collared shirt, and pocket square. He turned to her and said, “Good flight?”

“Beats the hell out of a jump seat on a C130 wondering whether a SAM was going to blow you out of the sky.”

“Your work in DC went well?”

“As well as possible, thanks.”

“But now you’re on my clock,” he said.

“Same terms as before?”

“Double.”

She slid her sunglasses down to peer at him. “I sometimes forget what an attractive man you are, Peter, dear. But why double?”

“Because this job, I think, will be worth it.”

“You mean doubly hard?”

“You live for the challenge, or did I remember wrong?”

She slid her shades back up and looked out the window. “You never do anything wrong , Peter, do you?”

He handed her an iPad. “On the drive read the file I’ve put together. We’ll eat in my hotel suite. I’ve already booked you a room. You still like champagne with your niçoise salad?”

“Is there any other way to have it?”

As the SUV drove along Spector read the file once, then twice, and then a third time, which, she had been trained, was where the truly useful knowledge and nuance was gained.

“Who’s the FBI agent on the case?”

“That I don’t know.”

“Shouldn’t be hard to find out. I still have contacts there.”

“Even after what happened?”

She looked up from the iPad. “Nothing officially did happen. And I don’t burn bridges. At least not with people who matter.”

“Okay, see what you can find out, but leave no fingerprints.”

Spector smiled to herself, perhaps thinking about her last assignment. “I never do, Peter. Now that I’ve read the file, tell me what you think.”

He went through his theories about the woman named Rebecca Atkins being a prisoner in Georgia. When he showed her Atkins’s image, Spector scrutinized the screen and nodded. “Wooded area, the terrible state of her, surveillance camera, that would be my conclusion. So now she’s calling herself El Cain.”