Long Road to Mercy

by David Baldacci

  She stood and faced him. “Who are you?”

  The man set his umbrella on the hood of a car parked on the street. “I must insist upon your accompanying me. I have a vehicle at hand.”

  “I’m not going.”

  Again, he moved so fast, Pine barely had time to attempt to block his kick. She was knocked backward and flipped over the car hood. She landed on the sidewalk on the other side.

  She rose quickly, but not quickly enough. The next blow lifted her off her feet, and she slammed back into a tree growing through the brick sidewalk.

  She rose, wiped the blood from her mouth, and set her hands and feet in a defensive posture.

  “You are quite stubborn,” said the man.

  Pine said nothing. She was conserving her breath. She’d never battled anyone as quick as this guy, not even her MMA instructors. He was five inches shorter and thirty pounds lighter than she was, and yet his blows were about the hardest she’d ever felt.

  She kicked out with a feinting roundhouse, which he easily blocked. Her momentum had carried her into a crouch, which was intentional. She exploded out of this position with an elbow strike aimed at his throat. It was a clever move, yet he simply edged away, and kicked her in the backside, sending her sprawling into the wet street.

  Pine slowly rose and brushed off her pants and blew on her scraped palms.

  The man said, “I think we can agree that this situation is becoming a trifle ridiculous.”

  Pine could see only one way out of this.

  She launched herself forward and took a vicious kick to the head, followed by one to her oblique.

  Both blows were staggering, but Pine’s skull was pretty damn hard, and a lifetime of lifting phenomenally heavy weights had made her core iron.

  She started to stumble, as though she was going down.

  At the last moment she lunged forward, wrapped her legs around the man’s torso and left arm, ripped his right limb straight up, and locked it down in an arm bar.

  The momentum of her charge and their comingled weights caused them to topple into the middle of the street. The man’s hat fell off.

  Pine squeezed her muscular legs around his torso, even as she levered his right arm over his head, trying her best to rip it from its socket.

  She could hear him breathing heavily. She locked down on his torso even more, her goal to stop his diaphragm from moving up and down. Without that mobility, one could not remain conscious or alive.

  She thought she could feel him weakening.

  She was wrong.

  With the index finger of his pinned left hand he jabbed hard into Pine’s inner thigh. As he dug into it, applying an immense amount of pressure, Pine lost all feeling in her leg, and then a jolt of pain shot through her muscle and joints and rocketed up her entire side.

  She cried out, helpless, as he forced her useless left leg off him.

  An instant later his elbow smashed against the side of her jaw with such force that her leg lock was completely broken. Another elbow strike and her arm bar also fell away, allowing him to roll to his left, get to his feet, crouch, and deliver a crushing stomp kick to her belly.

  She threw up what little was in her stomach.

  She lay on the street, so dazed that she could barely see the little man rise above her.

  “I misjudged you,” he said. He balled up his fist. “You are not quite so intelligent as I first believed.”

  The siren cut through the silence of the night. The sound seemed to be heading toward them at speed.

  The man looked toward the sound, which gave Pine the only opening she needed.

  Though he’d outmaneuvered her at every junction and was by far the better fighter, the man had made one mistake: He’d misjudged the length of her legs.

  She shot her right leg straight up and kicked him hard in the balls with the toe of her boot.

  He cried out, bent over, and staggered back.

  Pine watched from street level as, still hunched over, he snatched up his hat and moved haltingly into the darkness as the sound of the siren headed for them.

  Pine slowly stood and, dragging her still-numb left leg behind her, recovered both her guns, unlocked the Kia, collapsed inside, and then slouched down in her seat a few seconds before the police car turned onto the street and sped past her.

  Someone must have heard the fight and called the cops.

  Pine rolled down the window, spit blood along with part of a tooth out of her mouth, started the car, put it in gear, and slowly drove off.

  The fucking flash drive better be worth it.

  CHAPTER

  31

  Do you need any more ice, Agent Pine?”

  Blum was at the door to the bathroom.

  Inside, Pine was sitting naked in the bathtub, which she had partially filled with ice from the under-the-counter icemaker as well as the fridge’s icemaker.

  “No, I’m good,” Pine called out.

  “You still didn’t tell me what happened.”

  Pine moved her arms and legs gingerly in the ice bath. “I will. Just give me a little time.”

  The feeling had come back to her left leg, but it still throbbed like hell.

  “Can I get you something to eat or drink?”

  “I’ll take a beer.”

  “It’s seven in the morning.”

  “Make it two beers then. Thanks.”

  Pine heard Blum walk away, and she slumped back into the ice.

  She could sit in here for only a few minutes more. She’d been in and out of the ice several times for the better part of three hours. While she needed the ice to take the pain and swelling away, any person’s tolerance for this was limited.

  By the time Blum came back and knocked on the door, Pine was slowly lifting herself out of the ice bed. She wrapped a towel around herself, opened the door, and accepted one of the beers from Blum.

  “You look like hell,” said Blum. “Your jaw is swollen, your lip is cracked, and your left eye is puffy. And you’re moving like you’re a hundred years old. Were you in a fight or did you fall off a building?”

  “Sort of feels like both,” mumbled Pine as she sat down on the toilet lid and took a long drink of the beer. Then she wrapped some of the ice from the tub into a washcloth and held it against her face.

  “I’ll trade the second beer for the whole story,” said Blum, holding up the can.

  Pine glanced up at her and finally nodded. “Sit down, it might take a while.”

  Blum sat primly on the edge of the tub and looked at her expectantly.

  Pine laid out for her what had taken place, from the moment she’d stepped inside Priest’s home to getting the crap kicked out of her and driving away afterward.

  “He was the best I’ve ever seen,” said Pine. “Fought some pretty good ones. This guy was way out of my league.”

  “But in the end, you bested him,” pointed out Blum.

  Pine coughed, winced, put her beer down, and clutched at her side. “Doesn’t really feel like victory.”

  She got up, opened the medicine cabinet, took out a bottle of Advil, downed four with a swallow of sink water, and resumed her seat.

  Blum said, “This flash drive, have you opened it yet?”

  Pine shook her head. “I’m just hoping there’s something in there that will help us.”

  “Priest must have thought it pretty important, if he hid it away like that.”

  “That’s what I’m counting on. Otherwise, there was zip at his house.”

  “Can I make you something to eat?”

  “I’m good. I just need to check the flash drive, and then I need some sleep. The ice is working. I can feel the swelling going down.”

  Pine rose and gingerly walked into her bedroom after running hot water in the tub to empty out the ice. She dressed in sweats and ankle socks, and walked into the kitchen carrying her laptop and the flash drive. She still held the ice pack against her face.

  Blum put a cup of hot tea down in front of
her. “Peppermint. It’s good for anything that ails you.”

  “You don’t get a buzz from peppermint.”

  “It’s a different kind of buzz. Drink.”

  Pine set down the ice pack, took a few sips from the cup, then opened her laptop and inserted the flash drive into the USB port.

  She hit the requisite keys, and what was on the USB started to load on the screen. They both stared at the writing and blank box there.

  “Shit,” exclaimed Pine. “Of course, it’s password protected.” She shook her head. “I got my ass kicked for this?”

  “Can you figure out the password?”

  “Maybe. If it’s something personal to Priest. But if it’s a random computer-generated password, you need a lot of computing power to break it.”

  “Well, something will occur to us. Now, any idea who the two men at the house were?”

  “No, but I have a way of checking.”

  She took out her phone and dialed up the pictures she had taken of their weapons. “They don’t look like any pistols I’ve seen before. Hang on. I’m going to check this out online.”

  Blum said warningly, “They already hacked us once. Can’t they track us through your computer?”

  “They could if I weren’t using a variation of a VPN.”

  “VPN?”

  “Virtual Privacy Network. It’s like allowing your online footprint to be hidden in secure tunnels. The one I’m using is really top-grade. It allows me to use the Web virtually anonymously.”

  Pine brought up a database of pistols. She scrolled down page by page, all the time glancing at the photos she’d taken. She stopped on one. “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “Hold on.”

  Pine kept scrolling, and then stopped when she got to a photo that matched the other pistol. She looked up at Blum. “It’s no wonder I didn’t recognize them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One’s an MP-443 Grach. And the other’s a GSh-18.”

  “Those surely aren’t American pistols. I’ve never heard of them.”

  “No. They’re Russian. The Grach’s carried by the police, and the GSh by the military.”

  Both women stared at each other for an uncomfortably long moment until Blum said matter-of-factly, “Well, of course the Russians are involved. They’re always the bad guys.”

  “But why? And what does Moscow have to do with a dead mule in the Canyon?”

  Neither one had an answer to that.

  “You need to get some sleep, Agent Pine. You need to heal and rest. I have a strong feeling that you’ll need to be at your best.”

  “I think we both will.”

  Pine went to her bedroom and stripped off her clothes, because even the light, floppy sweats against her battered body hurt. She looked down at her oblique. There was a massive yellow-purplish bruise where the guy had walloped her. She felt along her leg to where he had applied the pressure with his finger to break her leg lock. Her limb was still tingling. He must have found a nerve there she didn’t even know she had.

  She gingerly lay back in the bed with the ice pack still cemented to her face. In her other hand, she clutched her Glock.

  She took several deep breaths, and the result was bruised ribs carping at her.

  Pine closed her eyes and let her thoughts wander back to the two men in the house.

  The two Russians.

  And then there was the umbrella-wielding ass kicker.

  He wanted her to go with him somewhere. He said he would explain things to her, the predicament she found herself in.

  She wanted to know how he had come upon her. Had he been watching the house and seen her enter? Or seen her leave and followed?

  That might be the likelier scenario, because she’d taken great care to ensure no one saw her going in.

  Was he connected to the other two men? Somehow, she didn’t think so.

  Then was he an adversary of theirs?

  The Russians were clearly just muscle. The Asian seemed to be something more than that.

  She put the bag of ice down, reached over, and plucked her shield off the nightstand.

  She knew every facet of the embossed metal. After she’d been awarded it upon graduating from Quantico, she had held it all night, fingering it over and over, like she was reading Braille.

  In some ways—no, maybe in the only way—the figure of Justitia represented all there was in the world to Pine. Justice. It wasn’t about the greater good. It was about what was right and wrong on an individual basis. Person by person. Because if you neglected the people, the idea of a greater good was a pipe dream created by those whose idea of the “greater good” almost always tended to favor themselves and people like them.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. The shield in one, the Glock in the other.

  Two critical components not only to her work, but also perhaps to her identity.

  Without them, what was she?

  The lost, bereaved little girl from Andersonville, Georgia?

  She closed her eyes and, as she went to sleep, mouthed the same words she had for nearly thirty years:

  I will never forget you, Mercy. Never.

  CHAPTER

  32

  It was still storming outside when Pine awoke early that evening. She rolled over and let out a groan as soon as all the aches and pains hit her.

  She shuffled into the bathroom and took a steaming hot shower, letting the water sink into her soreness. She toweled off, dressed, and walked out into the kitchen, where Blum was sitting with Pine’s laptop and a cup of coffee in front of her.

  “Your face looks a lot better,” noted Blum.

  “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “You want coffee? I just made a fresh pot.”

  “I’m good.”

  “Do you want something to eat?”

  “I got it.”

  Pine opened the fridge and grabbed some yogurt. She took a spoon from a drawer, sat down at the table, and started slowly spooning the yogurt into her mouth.

  “That’s not a lot of nourishment,” said Blum.

  “For someone who got kicked in the face with a sledgehammer made of flesh and bone, it’s just fine. I’m not up to chewing yet. Or hot beverages. The tea you gave me earlier did a number on the inside of my mouth.”

  “Oh, right.”

  Pine looked at the laptop screen. “Figured out the password?”

  “Not even close. And without Bureau resources, how do we crack it?”

  Pine set her yogurt and spoon down.

  “Let’s put this into some context. I found the flash drive in a basketball. Along with an old football trophy. There were also some gym socks and a basketball jersey.” Pine paused and thought back. “On the jersey was printed ‘Catholic Church League.’”

  “Catholic churches have basketball leagues?” said Blum.

  “Apparently so.”

  “What’s your friend’s Wi-Fi password?”

  Pine said, “Semper Primus.” When Blum glanced at her, she explained, “Latin for ‘Always First.’ It’s the Army motto.”

  Blum went online and typed in a search for Catholic churches near Priest’s home.

  “There’s the Basilica of St. Mary Catholic Church in Old Town Alexandria. It’s only a short walk from Priest’s house.”

  Pine rose and grabbed her jacket off the back of the chair.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To church.”

  “You want company?”

  “No. You better stay here.”

  “Since you’re going to a place of worship, I’ll say a prayer for you.”

  “Can’t hurt,” said Pine over her shoulder.

  * * *

  The Basilica of St. Mary was the oldest Catholic church in Virginia. It was located on South Royal Street and its gray stone facade was gothic in appearance. Its stark front was softened somewhat by four sets of wooden double doors with brass kickplates.

  The rain had slacken
ed when Pine pulled to a stop across the street and looked around. There were a few people on the sidewalks, and a truck slowly drove down the street before its taillights disappeared into the darkness.

  The sign in front of the church said it had been established in 1795. A white statue of the eponymous Mary was set in a niche of the building’s facade high above the main front door.

  Pine got out and walked across the street. She made a searching look all around and then headed up the steps.

  The door was fortunately unlocked. She stepped inside and shut it behind her.

  She moved through another set of doors and found herself in the worship area proper.

  The stained glass windows were immense and colorful. As she looked toward the front of the church she saw Jesus hanging on a cross, which was mounted to the wall behind the marble-floored altar. There were two sets of wooden pews set on either side of the broad nave.

  Pine really had no idea why she was even here. Just a reference to a church basketball league? A dubious connection if ever there was one. And yet what other leads did she have?

  She took a seat in the front pew and continued to examine the space, looking for anything that might help her.

  As she was sitting there, a man walked out from a door behind the altar.

  His white collar indicated he was a priest. He was tall, nearly six six, and young, maybe late thirties, with a shock of red hair and sprinkles of freckles.

  Maybe a classic Irish priest, mused Pine. She wondered how many of those were still around.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ve missed the last Mass.”

  “I just stopped in to, I guess, meditate a bit. I hope it’s okay.”

  “It certainly is. We are open for all those seeking a quiet space in which to think and practice their faith.”

  He drew closer and started when he saw her battered face. “Are you all right?”

  “Car accident a few days ago. Still a bit banged up.”

  He looked at her with a dubious expression. “I’ve had women come in before and tell me that. If things are not going well at home, I’m here to listen. No one should be abused by another. I can help you with that. We can offer shelter. And maybe you should think about calling the authorities.”