Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels)

by J. A. Konrath

  I kneeled, prying the gun out of her fingers, feeling her wrist as her pulse weakened and ceased. For a few seconds, I simply panted, waiting for my breathing to catch up, my heartbeat to slow down. The bright motes swimming in my vision faded, and I was able to study her body. She was about my height, my size. Her black bathing suit was a simple one piece, worn for function not flattery. Not that she needed fashion tricks to look thin and fit. Her body was as honed as mine.

  I frisked her, locating a bulge that contained an extra clip for her weapon. I also found something else. Something both intriguing and disturbing. In her right shoulder strap, sewn into the seam, was a fifty-dollar bill. In her left strap, two pieces of wire that felt like lock picks.

  Questions bombarded my mind. Questions I didn’t have time to address. I removed the towel to look at her face, intending to memorize it.

  I wouldn’t have to.

  Staring at her was like staring at my own reflection. The jaw, the haircut, the cheekbones, the nose, even the eyes were mine.

  This woman looked so much like me she could have been my clone.

  “After a lethal encounter, cleanup is your first priority,” The Instructor said. “If the area is still hot, leave immediately. But if you can take a few seconds to hide the body, that will buy you a few minutes or hours down the line. If there’s time to search the body, do so. However, distinguish between gathering intel and processing it. You can think about what you found after you’re safe. Dwelling on things while you’re still in danger will slow you down and get you killed.”

  My breath caught, and I spent five useless seconds just gaping at her. At me. This was impossible.

  Wasn’t it?

  I touched her hairline, looking for plastic surgery scars. Found none. No contact lenses either. I tugged down her suit, exposed her left breast. There, below the nipple, was a small, round mole.

  My mole.

  I felt dizzy, as if my thoughts were whirling around me. I was looking at myself, staring at my own face, my own body, dead. This couldn’t be happening. I wasted three more seconds attempting to process what I was seeing, and then a bell went off in my head reminding me I had to get out of here.

  Yanking out my phone, I took a quick full-body picture of the dead woman. Then I pressed her thumb to the phone’s screen and took a second pic of her fingerprint.

  After placing the bloody towel back over her face, I dragged her into the closest toilet. Hoisting her onto the seat brought the stars back, but I managed to get her balanced. Then I tore off the top portion of her bathing suit and tied it to the water pipe behind her so she’d stay in the sitting position. I locked the stall door, shimmied underneath it, and grabbed a fresh towel.

  A quick walk around revealed the locker room was empty. I located locker 352. My fingers were shaking, my whole body was shaking, and it took me twice as long as my normal eight seconds to pick the padlock. After grabbing the duffel bag inside, I toweled off, stuck the suppressed .22 into my khakis against the small of my back, and forced myself to focus on my next move. The hit woman must have a locker, but there were hundreds here. I had no time to break into them all. Whoever was after me could send someone else, or someone might already be in place.

  I needed to get to a safe house. Someplace I could absorb this, recover, plan my next move. I checked the clock on my encrypted cell. Only an hour and thirty-six minutes until my meeting with Cory.

  It was also ten minutes past the time Jacob had said he’d call.

  The tremor that had claimed my muscles delved deeper, centering in my chest. Jacob never missed a call. For the first time in almost a decade, I was on my own. With everything that had happened in the past hour, that made me feel the most off-balance.

  I relocked my locker, shouldered my duffel, and left the locker room, getting my breathing under control. The Pilates class was still going on. The woman at the front desk still had her nose in her magazine and didn’t bother glancing up when I approached.

  “It’s me again, Darla Thompson. Can you tell me when I first came in this morning?”

  Her sigh was slight but intended to be heard.

  “Last four digits of your social.”

  “Seven seven eight eight.”

  Another sigh. “You checked in at nine thirty, and again at ten twenty-six.”

  She looked at me now, raising an eyebrow at my wet shirt and pants.

  “Thanks,” I said, turning on my heels.

  At least now I understood her earlier “It’s been a while” comment. She was being sarcastic. The hit woman—my double—had checked in as me, fifty-six minutes before I checked in myself. So she must have been on her way here before Jacob called me at the apartment. As a backup, in case the op failed? And how had she even known about this place?

  I stepped out onto the street. The wind was still up, raising gooseflesh all over my body, the wet clothes intensifying the chill. I headed west. Normally, after being ordered to go to ground, I would be on a bus out of town after picking up my duffel bag. But I had to meet with Cory and rescue Kaufmann, which meant I had to stay local.

  In the bag, I had ID and credit cards for Carmen Sawyer and for Betty Richards. But if the people after me knew about Darla Thompson, Betty might also be compromised. Betty was surely compromised if the people chasing me had gotten to Jacob.

  I needed someplace private, with Internet access, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a bed. Someplace that didn’t require any sort of identification or interaction with strangers. And I thought I knew a place.

  I hailed a cab, gave the driver the address. He was white, overweight, and his hack smelled like BO and onion breath. I dug through the duffel bag, made sure he wasn’t looking, and opened the med kit. I filled a syringe with Demerol and discreetly injected my bad shoulder. Blessed numbness seeped into the area, and I had the urge to slump back in the seat and heave a long sigh. But I couldn’t let my guard down, not yet. Instead I slipped on a silver Casio diver’s watch from my bag and synced it to the time on my phone. Then I put two zip ties and my lock picks into my front pocket and stared out the rear window, checking for tails.

  Twelve minutes later, the cab spit me out on Roosevelt. I paid with a fifty, got my change, and walked the last three blocks. There was a cool autumn breeze, but my hair was almost dry, my damp clothes warming up from the cab ride and my physical activity. I smelled car exhaust, sewage from a nearby drain, and cinnamon from a bakery up the street. The sky was overcast, but I sensed the barometric pressure, and it didn’t feel like rain. My hearing had almost returned to normal, with only a faint ringing. I kept my bad arm against my side as I walked. The pain was gone, but I had no idea of the damage, didn’t want to make it worse.

  The apartment building was typical of the area, five stories, redbrick, built with the design acumen of a three-year-old playing with blocks. From the outside, I judged there were forty units, eight per floor.

  I circled the building, didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Then I slipped into a neighboring building’s doorway and waited three minutes just to make sure no one was following, doing the isometric calf exercises I’d been taught to keep my muscles loose.

  I was clear.

  The front security door was cake, six seconds with my pick and tension wrench. No lobby, just a hall leading to the apartments on that floor, the elevator, and the stairwell. I smelled traces of mildew, roach poison, and fresh paint. Someone had cooked pancakes for breakfast. Voices and a jangle of music came from a TV on one of the upper floors. I took the stairs to apartment 304, listened at the door, then knocked. No one should have been home, so when I heard movement coming from inside, I stepped to the left of the doorway and tugged the .22 from my waistband.

  Victor opened the door, looked around, and then saw me. He smiled in recognition, then confusion took over. “Carmen?”

  I brought the gun up in a smooth arc. It caught him under the jaw even as he was flinching away. He backpedaled, and I followed him into the apartment
. I cocked back my right leg and fired it into his gut.

  Victor crumpled to the floor on all fours. I closed the door behind me and jammed the gun into his ear.

  “On your face, arms out, palms up.”

  “Carmen?” His voice had a quaver in it. “What the hell—”

  “If you make me ask again, I’ll shoot you.”

  He eased himself down and splayed out his arms. He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt. I noted he’d shaved since I’d seen him on my computer monitor, and I could smell cologne. Claiborne for Men. I put my knee on the back of his neck, pinning his face to the carpeting, and frisked him. Wallet in his back pocket. Cell phone in his front. I took both.

  “I have some cash,” he said, the fear still in his timbre. “In a box in my closet. A few hundred dollars.”

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  “What?”

  “Work. You said you were on call.”

  “Last minute thing. A buddy phoned, wanted to trade shifts.” He gave a strangled laugh. “Is this what you do, meet guys online then break into their homes when you think they’re at work?”

  He seemed genuine. But all operatives took acting lessons. I could go from laughter to tears in an eyeblink, just like Meryl Streep. But I doubted Meryl could kill a man eighteen ways using just her thumb.

  “Hands behind your back. Cross them at the wrists.”

  I increased the pressure on his neck, digging a zip tie out of my pocket. It was a white plastic strip, eighteen inches long, made for bundling cable. In a quick motion, I stuck the .22 under my armpit and encircled his hands with the tie, snugging it tight.

  “I didn’t think I even gave you my address,” he said.

  “You didn’t.”

  He made a sucking sound. “I think you knocked one of my teeth loose. This is a pretty awful first date, if I may say.”

  I took note of his attempt at humor but didn’t acknowledge it. Nerves talking? Or cool under pressure? At this stage I couldn’t tell. “Ankles together, then bend your knees so I can reach your feet.”

  He obeyed, and I cinched another zip tie around his feet, noting he had on socks with a White Sox logo.

  “Now what? You kill me?”

  “That depends on you, Victor. I’d like to trust you, but some things are happening in my life that make me incapable of that.”

  “If you’d like to talk about some of those things, I’m a captive audience.”

  The normal me might have smirked. The normal me liked this guy. But I couldn’t afford to let the normal me do the thinking now. I unslung my duffel and fished out the med kit. It took a few seconds to find the vial of amobarbital. I judged his weight to be a hundred ninety, filled the syringe with an appropriate dose, and shoved it into his biceps as I pressed the plunger.

  Victor bucked, throwing me onto my ass, but I’d managed to give him the full dose. He twisted to face me, the needle still sticking out of his arm.

  “What did you do?”

  “It’s a sedative. You’ll sleep for a few hours.”

  He blinked, his eyelids already getting heavy. “W…why?”

  “I need your apartment for a little while. If you’ve been telling me the truth, when you wake up I’ll be gone. If I discover you’ve been lying to me, about anything at all, you won’t wake up.”

  “L…lousy first date.”

  Then his eyes fluttered shut, and his head hit the carpet.

  My to-do list was growing exponentially. I needed to toss Victor’s place to see if he was just an unlucky civilian or somehow part of this whole mess. I also had to tend to my injuries, find a shoulder bag like Cory had specified, figure out who that hit woman was, access the DOD database, try to contact Jacob, learn the extent of my frame-up, and form a plan to handle Cory and get Kaufmann back unharmed—a plan that was already way behind because my duffel bag only contained ten thousand and not the thirty thousand Cory had demanded.

  I prioritized, doing a quick tour of the apartment to make sure it was empty. It was, except for an incredibly obese calico who meowed when she saw me.

  “Hello, Mozart.” I tickled her chin and she purred.

  I found the bathroom, shedding my clothes and checking out the medicine cabinet. It was stocked full of bandages, first-aid supplies, and various professional equipment. Exactly what would be expected from a paramedic, which is what Victor supposedly was. I stripped off my bra, brushing away the remnants of the damp pills I’d stuffed inside earlier, and checked my injuries in the mirror over the sink.

  I was a mess, cut up and bruised and swollen over much of my body. The worst was my shoulder, bright pink and puffy. I didn’t have time to properly clean or tape any of my wounds, so I slathered on a whole tube of antibiotic ointment, gave myself a booster shot of Demerol, and swallowed four aspirin and some amphetamine salts from my kit. Then I shoved my clothing and gym shoes into the dryer in the closet near the kitchen.

  My encrypted cell had a touch screen, but it didn’t dial out like a regular phone. There was a nine-key sequence that changed according to the date, and entering a wrong number made it shut off for ten minutes. I pressed the buttons carefully, not hitting send, and waited for Jacob to answer.

  Jacob’s phone didn’t ring. Instead, it played a recording that the number had been disconnected. I silently counted five seconds after the message ended and said, “This is Yolanda. I’m in Ontario.”

  I waited. Jacob didn’t pick up.

  I disconnected by pressing zero and tucked the phone away, walking to the bedroom closet. Among the men’s shirts, sweaters, and suits, there was a small selection of female clothes. Jeans, culottes, some shirts and blouses, a sweater, a pants suit, and a jacket. All size six. I took the jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. They smelled like L’Air du Temps and fit me perfectly.

  Then I headed for the second bedroom. Sure enough, Victor had transformed it into an office of sorts. I recognized the beige sofa I’d seen on the webcam. Some free weights cluttered the floor under a small window. I sat at his desk in front of his computer. Windows 7 and IE were already running. While I downloaded Google Earth, I accessed the back door for the Department of Defense, which almost certainly wasn’t aware it had a back door. Jacob changed the passwords several times a day to make sure no one else could use his entry route. He’d told me Diciassettesimo papa. I knew Italian but hadn’t brushed up on my Catholic history in a while. Wikipedia informed me the seventeenth pope was St. Urban I. That password got me in.

  For one of the most encrypted, expensive websites on the planet, the DOD database was a bitch to navigate. It took me a minute to access their facial recognition software, and six more to create an adequate likeness for the scarred hit man who had knocked on my door.

  I had to give our government some credit, though, because it only took seven thousandths of a second to get me a match.

  Alex Sokolov. Ex-KGB. Records reported he died seven years ago, but most Russian records said that. I didn’t have time to go through the whole dossier, so I saved it as a text file, named it Alex, and buried it on the C drive.

  In a separate window, I accessed www.NBC5.com for local news. There was a link about the two-week manhunt after the prison break at Stateville, but that wasn’t what I clicked on. Instead, I fixated on the lead story.

  3 DEAD IN NORTH SIDE KILLING SPREE

  I quickly skimmed the details about the three assassins I’d retired at my apartment. It didn’t give out names, but there were the obligatory pictures of the corpses, sanitized for the public, low resolution, no gory details. In the case of the two men, just bodies, no faces. The woman in the elevator must have had a lot of her body torn up by the grenade, too gross for the website. But I was sure someone had taken a photo of her.

  I logged onto Usenet, and after downloading an NZB reader, I quickly located a pirated FTP program with a keygen. I snatched it, installed it, and accessed the FTP URL for Channel 5 News. It was a site I’d hacked before, and the passwords were still th
e same. Their FTP address was where the www.NBC5.com server was located and all their online data was stored, and it took me less than a minute to open the file locker with the full-size unused PNG photographs of the death scene.

  I found what I was looking for on the fifth photo I viewed: a close-up of the woman from the elevator. Her lower body was a mangled mess, but her face was largely untouched.

  Like the hit woman at Stretchers, she had short, dark hair and blue eyes. And like the woman at Stretchers, she was a dead ringer for me.

  “My job is to train you,” The Instructor said, “but I don’t know what I’m training you for. I can guarantee you’ll be told to do things you do not want to do. Things that violate your principles, your humanity, even your patriotism. But a weapon doesn’t question why it was fired, or what it was fired at. You’re a weapon, a tool to be used by the government or the military. I pray your handler has enough principles, humanity, and patriotism for the both of you.”

  Two hit women, both with my face and body. A former KGB assassin. Jacob compromised. Stretchers compromised. My ID blown. Cory on the loose. Kaufmann kidnapped.

  I had no idea what it all meant and which facts were related to each other. Nor did I have time to dwell on it. Protocol dictated I establish a perimeter, interrogate my unwilling host, then evaluate the intel.

  Kaufmann threw a wrench into normal operating procedure. If I were on a mission, things would be different. But the only bright spot in the fact that I was operating on my own, not under any direct orders, was that I could make saving him my first priority.

  Whether Uncle Sam approved or not.

  The ICU—a spook acronym that wasn’t actually an acronym at all but rather a literal meaning—was a net of spy satellites that could be aimed by field operatives. Any agent with a laptop computer and the required longitude and latitude could zoom in on almost any area on the planet within two minutes of giving the command.

  Unfortunately, Jacob was cut off before I could get the latest ICU uplink data. But Google Earth wasn’t a bad substitute.