The Housewife Assassin's Deadly Dossier (27 page)

The last thing Jack expected was to see Donna, twelve feet in front of him.
 

He froze.

She was in a pew, kneeling.

Jack thanked God her eyes were closed, in prayer.

When he took a step forward, a floorboard creaked.

Instinctively, she stirred.

Jack leaped into the confessional, closing the door behind him.
 

Please, don’t let her suspect I’m here.

He was on the priest’s side, so odds were his prayer would be answered.

He waited five minutes. He heard nothing.
 

Dead silence.

He was just about to leave when the door on the other side of the confessional opened. Through the scrim between the two booths, he could faintly make out Donna’s features.

Oh…hell.

“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” she murmured.

“Um…how long since your last confession?” He wasn’t Catholic, but he’d heard that in a movie, so he went with it.

She gave a low chuckle. “Hey, I’m not even Catholic but you’re the only game in town.” She paused. “You see, Father, I feel as if I’ve lost a big piece of me, somewhere along the way.” Her words were barely a whisper. “I guess it’s why I’m here.”

“I see.” He kept his voice at a low register. “Don’t feel guilty about having second thoughts. Not everyone is cut out to be an…an—”

“Assassin.” She said the word as easily as if she were saying
flower
. “Father, we both know every human has a dark side. We tamp it down. Sometimes we lose.” She was choking on her words. “But have I lost the fight, Father? Have I lost my soul? It feels
so good
…
to know I’m now prepared to avenge Carl
.”
 

Jack let her sob until finally she was silent. “This urge to avenge your…your loved one—I swear to you,
it isn’t healthy
.”

“You’re wrong! When I kill, it’ll be for Carl. Don’t you see? It will be my redemption! Because every mission will put me one step closer to moving on!”
 

“No, you’re wrong!” he hissed. “Others can do it. Others can make them…
make them pay
.”

She shook her head. “Others? What ‘other’? No one hurts like I do! No one misses him more than me. No ‘other’ bore his children, or listens to their sobs at night, when they try to remember him.” She wiped her face with her hand. “
But I remember him
.” The iciness in her voice sent a shiver down Jack’s back. “So you see, it has to be me. You know it, and I know it. So let’s not pretend otherwise.”
 

She was right. There would be no more pretending—on his part, anyway.

She bowed her head. “What is my penance, Father?”

It’s not yours to pay, he thought. It’s mine.

“Your turmoil isn’t going to be solved with a few Hail Marys. Please do some more soul searching. Before it’s…too late.”

She nodded.

He saw her rise from the bench. The curtain moved, indicating she was out of the booth. He listened for her footstep and then the door shutting behind her.

But of course, it was already too late.

There was nothing left he could do for her but pray.

Or take down the Quorum himself.

The latter was a given, but he knew the former would come into play along the way as well.

TWO YEARS LATER

Chapter 21
The Hit

A hit is an assassination, pure and simple.

No, take that back: there is nothing pure about killing someone. A hit by any other name—assassination, extermination, liquidation, termination, murder, homicide, slaying, the old F3 (find, fix, and finish)—stains the soul.

And there’s nothing simple about killing someone. Properly done, it takes planning, sometimes months at a time. And no matter how many details are presumed covered, there’s always some bit of minutiae that isn’t considered, only to rear its ugly head when it’s time to pull the trigger.

Afterward, the hit man—or woman—is never the same. The emotional scar tissue around the heart grows thicker with each hit.

But the heart is still in there, somewhere.

You just have to be brave enough and persistent enough to find it.
 

The prisoner, a former Serbian general known by the name of Ratko Zoran, insisted on being called doctor, in deference to his pre-war occupation. Jack readily accommodated his request: prior to taking a cattle prod to the good doctor’s genitals.

Using the man’s professional title and in a respectful tone, he asked for the name of Zoran’s Russian contact in the harvesting of human organs from the prisoners under his control during the Bosnian War.

Dr. Zoran’s anguished squeals had no effect on Jack. He was willing to bide his time. After all, he’d already elicited the only thing Acme’s client, the Yugoslavian government, had asked for—the name of the Swiss bank, which had handled the funds embezzled during Slobodan Miloševićs reign. At this point, any other knowledge the man, known throughout the country as “the Sadistic Serbian Surgeon,” was willing to part with was icing atop a pair of black and blue balls.

He was just about to prod Dr. Zoran again when a text came through on his cell phone:
 

KD down. ID. Sofia B.

The news was depressing. Apparently, an Acme agent, Kiril Dragonov, had been murdered in the neighboring country of Bulgaria. And because Jack was the closest operative, he was in charge of identifying the remains.

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Kiril—full of life, quick with a joke, and insightful on the matters of human character—was lying on some cold steel slab. On the other hand, Ratko—who had murdered tens of thousands and profited handsomely off the sale of their body parts—might walk away a eunuch, but he’d walk away nonetheless.

Life just wasn’t fair.

The cattle prod next landed on Zoran’s right cheek. Jack held it there until even he was sick from the stench of searing flesh.
 

It was in just the right place to nudge a vain man into spilling his guts. The contact’s name poured out of him.
 

So did the promise to reveal other contacts—those in Russia who had provided aid and arms. “But—but please! Not my face again—please! I’m a plastic surgeon, and I’ve got to look my best!”

“Don’t worry about the fucking scar, Doc. Now that you’ve given up this guy, he’ll come looking for you so that he can skin you alive.” Jack slid a pad and pen in front of Zoran. “If you come through with the intel, you’ll get a new face and a ticket to the United States, courtesy of the State Department’s Witness Protection program.”

The doctor hesitated before writing. “How do I know you’ll honor this promise?”
 

Jack smacked Zoran’s cheek with the cattle prod. “Doctor, one way or another, I’ll get the information.”

The man pursed his lips. Finally, he nodded.
 

Jack untied Zoran’s restraints and watched as he scribbled furiously on the pad in front of him. What the man didn’t know, but Jack did, was that he’d been given authority to make the offer without the use of torture.

In other words, the cattle prod was Jack’s idea.

When Zoran was done, Jack took the pad and nodded to the Yugoslavian guards to take the prisoner away. He’d be held until the intel was verified.

As he headed out the door, Jack turned back to Zoran. “Remember one thing, doctor—they may not find you in your new life, but I’ll always know where you are.”

The doctor grimaced—not from the pain, but from a problem that would last him a lifetime—Jack.

The man sent by Bulgaria’s intelligence agency, HPC, to meet Jack’s flight was a bearded hulking giant of a man named Nikolay Krastevich. In broken but serviceable English, he informed Jack that HPC had its own morgue, where Kiril Dragonov’s body was being held for identification. Nikolay also assured him that before the webcam footage was deleted, it was downloaded onto a thumb drive, as per Ryan’s request.
 

He tossed it to Jack, who caught it with one hand.
 

Through the years, Jack had shared missions and beers with Kiril. He would sorely miss his friend, personally and professionally. Like Jack, Kiril had been an excellent sharpshooter. Over the past few months, he had been assigned to follow up on their Eastern European leads related to the Quorum.
 

Should he meet Kiril’s fate one day, he wondered who’d be sent to retrieve his body, and where it would be sent, since there was no place he called home, let alone anyone to mourn him.
 

Having arrived in the middle of Sofia’s rush hour, Jack and Nikolay fought the traffic all the way between the airport and HPC. Jack didn’t understand Nikolay’s curses, but the hand gestures that went with them were understood in any language.
 

“You live now in Paris?” Nikolay asked between honks.
 

So that Nikolay could keep his eyes on the road, Jack resisted the urge to nod instead of talk. “Yes—for now.” As if he had anywhere else to go.

Nikolay nodded sagely. “My kind of town. Land of lovers, eh?”

Jack wanted to tell him,
I wouldn’t know.

But that would be a lie. He’d been in love in Paris, once.

He didn’t have to answer because Nikolay pulled into the parking lot of the morgue.

Considering Kiril’s face had been blown away, there wasn’t much to ID, so the process took all of five minutes. It was more of a formality, really, since they’d already identified him from his fingerprints.

Jack asked Nikolay to cremate Kiril’s body and have the ashes interred in a local cemetery.

“No family, eh?” Nikolay shook his head as he genuflected.
 

Jack was silent all the way back to his hotel room.
 

Someday, the operative sent to ID Jack’s body would say the same about him.

The webcam footage showed that the shooter was a woman.
 

Jack turned white when he realized who he was looking at.

But...how could that be?
She was presumed dead.

He zoomed in to make sure.

But of course, he’d know her anywhere.
 

When she was done, she strolled away from the car, toward another parked across the street.

He also recognized the man in the driver’s seat.

Somehow, they had survived—

Both of them.

Anger surged through him. He slammed his computer shut.
 

He wondered how Ryan would react when he heard the news. He’d never seen his boss lose his cool, but there was a first time for everything.