The Kill Chain

by Nichole Christoff

  I turned my back on it.

  The tail of a trench coat fluttered on my far left. Dr. Donahue was on the move, too. But whether she intended to help me or help herself, I had no idea. I couldn’t count on her in a pinch. And the slam of the Tahoe’s doors warned me that that pinch would be coming soon.

  I pressed a shaking hand to the cube hidden under my clothes.

  In that instant, I knew what I had to do.

  “You want this hunk of junk?” I yelled, jerking my shirttail free, catching the cube in my hand. “I didn’t drop it in the ditch. I’ve got it right here!”

  Silence met my statement.

  And the electric charge of excitement.

  “Give it to me,” the man called at last, “and I’ll let you walk away!”

  “Show yourself,” I ordered, “and you can have it!”

  In response, inky forms slid from the Tahoe. One dashed to crouch in the grass at the corner of the columns’ platform. Another flitted past my row.

  With his pals in place, the man from Eagle Nest Road stepped from behind a column and into the wavering moonlight. He kept his distance, drifting between the marble monoliths. But the deep wells of his eye sockets remained trained on me as I shifted to keep my own marble column between us. And his hateful pistol gleamed in his hand. Its black bore stared me down.

  “Time to pay the piper,” he said.

  “All right.” I brandished the cube, raised it high so he could get a good look at it. “Keep the change.”

  I spun on the ball of my foot, lobbed the object high and hard. It arced through the night sky, away from the monument, spinning like a neutron star. When it splashed into the reflecting pool, I was already racing in the opposite direction.

  With shouts and churning water, the man and his cohorts plunged into the pool. But I didn’t wait around to watch them. I pounded to the back end of the platform, toward the Tahoe abandoned by the road.

  I leapt onto the walkway below. In a blur of black, Madeline Donahue streaked from the columns four yards away. She beat me to the Tahoe. She climbed into its driver’s seat. The vehicle roared to life.

  She sped off, leaving me stranded.

  At any moment, the goons who’d ambushed us would find the submerged cube—or they wouldn’t. Either way, they would decide to take out their frustrations on me. And I couldn’t rely on the police to arrive before that happened.

  Across the road, more trees beckoned. I ran for them, covering the distance at a sprint. I pushed between them to find one of the arboretum’s research facilities and broad nursery beds. Angry voices hounded me. The men knew I was on the run.

  They hunted me now.

  “There she is!” one shouted.

  Past aisles of saplings and raised rows fostering new shrubs, the scrim of deeper forest loomed. I charged into it—and into darkness. I stumbled down a sharp embankment.

  Knocked from my feet, I tumbled. Sticks and stones stabbed at me. Still, I rolled like a lumberjack’s out-of-control log. I clutched at roots and leaf litter. I took handfuls of both with me.

  “Don’t lose her—”

  “Get a flashlight!”

  Without warning, the earth fell away. I plunged into icy water that cut into me with the sharp sensation of a thousand knives. I surfaced sputtering—and caught in a fast-moving current.

  Oily residue slicked my glasses. I swiped at the lenses, tore at a filmy mass wrapping my throat. Sopping shopping bag, my fingertips told me, and fishing line.

  This polluted body of water had to be one of a half dozen that threaded through the District of Columbia.

  This had to be Hickey Run.

  With headwaters covered over by concrete these days—and the flow from the city’s storm sewers washing all kinds of trash into it—Hickey Run still shot through the United States National Arboretum, past its boundary, and straight to the Anacostia River. Swollen with spring rain, the run was swift and deep. And it might be my ticket out of there.

  Crossing my arms against my chest, I lay back and let the rushing torrent take me where it would. The frigid water and the scent of antifreeze made my sinuses ache. Eddies of crushed soda cans, waxed coffee cups, and pine cones tugged at my clothes. Downed branches pulled at my ponytail. But all this was better than the alternative.

  The swift stream swept me away from the goons with their automatic weapons and ugly intentions. And when the Hickey widened and slowed, I fought to my feet. I scrambled through the culvert at the end of the run and found myself free on the sloping side of the Anacostia’s cement levee.

  Soaked to the skin and panting, I bent at the waist to catch my breath. I listened hard, heard no signs of pursuit. I looked and surveyed the industrial blight that had left this section of the District barren.

  I’d never seen anything lovelier.

  Chapter 4

  A hot shower and a change of clothes didn’t solve all my problems.

  But they kept me from getting thrown out of the Nightingale Hotel when I arrived on its wide welcome mat.

  Tucked into a spiderweb of streets around Northwest’s busy Logan Circle, the Nightingale was the establishment where Madeline Donohue had dropped her baggage before coming to see me. Or so she’d claimed. But since her disappearing act in the arboretum, I didn’t exactly believe it.

  A pair of the Nightingale’s doormen, in their smart black-and-green livery, beamed at me with broad smiles as they bid me good evening and hauled open the oak-and-ornate-brass doors for me to enter the place. Plush carpet, as lush as a golf course fairway, swallowed my footfalls as I crossed the lobby. In a paneled nook, just past a cut crystal vase overflowing with yellow forsythia, I snagged a courtesy phone.

  “Front desk,” the perky young woman on the other end of the line said. “How may I assist you?”

  I could hear her smile even before I peeped from my cranny to see her across the cavernous reception area. She was stationed behind a sleek computer monitor at the travertine check-in counter. Her green blazer gleamed with gold buttons and her black hair had been smoothed away from a face still soft with baby fat.

  I said, “Madeline Donahue’s room, please.”

  The clerk tucked the receiver beneath her chin.

  Her fingertips clicked and clacked across a keyboard hidden by the veined stone.

  “I’m sorry.” Despite the apology, the young woman’s smile didn’t slip a fraction of an inch. “We have no one here registered under that name.”

  “Doctor Donahue,” I stressed. “I believe she arrived this afternoon from California.”

  The chipper clerk typed on her keyboard some more, then frowned. “I’m sorry, no. Perhaps she hasn’t checked in yet.”

  That was a definite possibility.

  But I doubted it.

  “In that case,” I said, “please connect me with Anthony Bennedetto.”

  Tony Bennedetto was the Nightingale’s chief of security. We’d worked together three years ago when one of my clients—that political commentator on that big cable network—had received death threats after moderating a presidential debate and needed a place to lie low for a while. If anyone would be willing to give me a sneak peek at the hotel’s registration log, or at its in-house surveillance footage, it would be Tony.

  But the young woman shook her head. “I do apologize. Mr. Bennedetto has gone for the day.”

  Of course he had. Tony had a personal life. He didn’t get into scrapes in the United States National Arboretum just shy of midnight and arrive unannounced at a DC hotel to try to sort them out.

  “I can put you through to his voicemail,” the clerk offered. “Or connect you with one of his colleagues…”

  By colleagues, she meant underlings. For the night shift on a Thursday, they’d be well-muscled young men working on their law degrees in the daytime. Tonight, their bi
ggest concern would be redirecting tipsy businessmen who’d exited the elevator on the wrong floor and tried their key cards in every door. My request for information and cooperation would make them worry. They didn’t have the experience to assess some guests as threats, but they’d know they didn’t have the authority to give me what I wanted.

  Thanking the desk clerk for her time, I hung up and headed for Plan B.

  The hotel bar.

  After my dunking in Hickey Run, I was overdue for a preventative snort of something or other. And the Patriot’s Cup, tucked into the side of the Nightingale, was just the place to get it. Plus, it had one more thing going for it: I could belly up to one of its high-topped tables and still keep an eye on the hotel’s lobby. If Dr. Donahue put in an appearance, I’d know it.

  At this hour, the Cup was crowded with Washingtonians who needed to unwind after working late. Their dark suits and loosened ties marked most of them as government grunts who’d escaped from the federal offices that crammed this corner of DC. And the atmosphere that hung over the occupants of the deep club chairs and green leather-upholstered barstools suggested that everyone wished it were Friday evening already instead of just after midnight.

  At the bar proper, I managed to find enough room to squeeze an elbow between a balding lobbyist nose-deep in a martini and a pair of congressional staffers quaffing shapely glasses of stout. In my case, Hennessy X.O would be good for anything that ailed me, so I ordered a double. And then I settled in to watch for Dr. Donahue to cross the wide wedge of lobby visible through the Patriot Cup’s arched entrance.

  “It’s Jamie, right? Jamie Sinclair?”

  I turned, took a long look at the grinning man beside me.

  He was tall and tan and his rich brown hair could’ve used a trim. Horn-rimmed glasses made the most of his puppy-dog eyes. He wore a tweedy sports coat over a pale-blue oxford shirt like a college professor. The vodka-on-the-rocks in his right hand might’ve been his first of the evening. But probably not.

  “It’s been a long time,” he said.

  “Not long enough,” I replied, and dismissed him with a cold shoulder.

  Really, it had been an eon since a man had tried to pick me up in a bar.

  I hadn’t gone for that sort of thing in my twenties, however, and I certainly wasn’t going to go for it tonight.

  “Uh-oh,” Vodka Rocks said. “You don’t remember me.”

  I didn’t.

  Because I was fairly sure I’d never seen him before.

  “We met at your father’s fundraiser,” he assured me. “At the National Press Club. Last autumn.”

  That part could’ve been true. My father had had a series of fundraisers in the fall and one of them had been at the NPC. After all, my father was a sitting US senator—and US senators usually run for reelection sooner or later. To mount those kinds of campaigns takes a lot of cash. And a lot of cash takes a lot of donors.

  My newfound friend stirred his drink with a swizzle stick. “Rumor has it your father’s planning to run for president. Care to comment on that?”

  “You’d have to ask him what he intends to do.”

  Because if my father were planning a presidential campaign, I’d be the last to know. I may’ve been his only child, but our relationship had never been a warm and fuzzy one. As a single dad and a soldier on his way to becoming a two-star general, he’d worked hard to raise me—and to mold me in his image. Growing up, I’d never thought twice about that part. Eventually, it dawned on me that other girls rarely spent time on the firing range, and even fewer read Sun Tzu or von Clausewitz. In my house, however, those things could happen on a standard Saturday afternoon.

  “Well, I’m not surprised you don’t remember me,” Vodka Rocks said. “As I recall, some army type seemed to be taking up a lot of your attention that evening.”

  He grinned again to take the sting out of his statement.

  But now I knew he was lying.

  Adam Barrett had made it to only one fundraiser last autumn, and he hadn’t gone anywhere near the National Press Club. Instead, he’d taken on a risky off-the-radar assignment that had put the two of us on a collision course. When our paths had crossed again, Barrett had insisted on serving as my backup as I’d gone after a murderer in the federal wilderness—and he’d ended up with his leg broken in three places.

  “My name’s Nathan Rappaport,” Vodka Rocks said, and the name sounded vaguely familiar. “I’m still in communications.”

  Communications could be shorthand for a lot things. Like public relations, network design, or cellphone sales. Here in Washington, it could even mean working for the Federal Communications Commission.

  The Federal Communications Commission—or FCC—was a regulatory body under Congress’s purview. It set policy and established law governing every aspect of American radio, television, telephone, cable connectivity, wireless communication, and satellite technology, from assigning bandwidth to charging fines for banned words late-night comedians would blush to utter on air. No one could broadcast a news program or offer Internet service without the FCC’s say-so. For that reason alone, the Commission had drawn the ire of more than one media mogul looking to get a leg up on the competition in the Information Age. The FCC even set aside certain frequencies for military use.

  I didn’t get the opportunity to pin down what Nathan Rappaport meant when he used the word communications, however, because he chose that moment to say, “Since we’re both alone, Jamie, why don’t I buy you a drink?”

  “No thanks,” I told him. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “That figures.” He extracted a ballpoint pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and scribbled on a cocktail napkin. “But here’s my number in case you ever have a communications problem.”

  He presented the napkin to me.

  Without bothering to look at it, I stuffed it in the besom pocket of the admiral-blue blazer I’d donned when I’d run home to change.

  “Well,” Rappaport said, “it was good to see you again—even if we only got to talk for a few minutes.”

  He knocked back the remainder of his drink and departed, hooking a left when he reached the lobby. Maybe he was headed for the parking garage. Or maybe he had a room upstairs.

  It didn’t matter to me.

  All that mattered was Madeline Donahue and sorting out what she’d been up to. But I didn’t get to ask her. Because although I hung around the Nightingale Hotel’s bar until the bartender sounded last call, Dr. Donahue didn’t set foot in the place.

  Chapter 5

  Just short of 4 A.M., I woke from a dead sleep in my own bed, my home security system screaming like a banshee and six armed men—clad in riot gear—bursting into my bedroom.

  “Federal agent! On your knees!”

  “Keep your hands in sight.”

  “Get on the floor. Move! Move!”

  Blinded by the skinny beams of blue light shooting from the right side of their helmets, I did as they said and knelt on the bedside rug in my pink rose-sprigged pajamas. Without so much as a howdy-do, one of my assailants wrenched my arm behind my back. I felt the bite and snap of cold metal handcuffs circling one wrist and then the other.

  A strong arm hauled me upright, spun me around to face the crowd, just as my house alarm fell silent. Someone must’ve clobbered it. I had little doubt they’d do the same to me if I gave them the opportunity.

  The bright, white glare of a heavy-duty flashlight hit me full in the face. I squinted against the sudden pain skittering along my optic nerve. I could just make out a new arrival coming through the door.

  He wore an open-neck dress shirt as if he’d lost his necktie on his way from his office—and a blue windbreaker. The windbreaker was a dead giveaway. It was an FBI raid jacket.

  “Jamie Sinclair?” He brandished a trifold piece of paper, waved it under my n
ose. “I’m Special Agent McIlvoy. This is a warrant to search your domicile.”

  “Knock yourself out,” I told him, and felt relief when my voice didn’t shake. “But if you’re not confiscating my street clothes, do you mind if I get dressed? I’m not in the habit of throwing parties in my PJs.”

  The flashlight beam swept along the soft knit I wore—and I got a better look at the FBI agent behind it. He’d shaved in a hurry and nicked his chin. The spot was red and angry against his pale skin. His eyes were glassy and gleamed like beads. He wore his drab brown hair brushed straight back from his forehead.

  That forehead might’ve been his best feature.

  “Have a seat on the foot of the bed,” he said. “Don’t move until I tell you to.”

  The agent gripping my arm gave me just enough leeway to follow the order.

  And that’s when someone got the idea to hit the room’s lights.

  In the instant illumination, special agents in their own raid jackets and latex gloves set to work. Some opened my bureau drawers and fumbled through the contents. Others stripped the cushions from my easy chair and ottoman, and felt through the stuffing. Three more examined every nook and cranny in my bookcase—but those agents bypassed the books themselves. They didn’t open the covers and they didn’t shake the spines to see what might drop from the pages—and that told me a thing or two.

  Contrary to popular opinion, law enforcement officers can secure only the kinds of items spelled out on the warrant they use to execute their search and seizure. Even suspected-but-unidentified objects have to be described in general. In other words, the officers investigating a stabbing death on your doorstep might know they’re on the trail of a long, thin blade, and the warrant can authorize them to collect anything from your letter opener to your carving knife to your great-granddad’s dagger, but they can’t appropriate that tire iron you’d left lying in the garage. Because, before the search, a judge has to agree that certain kinds of items could be pursuant to the crime. If His Honor doesn’t see a plausible connection, he won’t sign the warrant.