Coyle swept the blade forward, an expert slash across the seated man’s throat.
The screams from the man in the chair echoed out into the street, but only for an instant.
Then they were muffled by a hand covered in a medical glove.
And soon, after a deep plunge of the knife into the man’s heart, slid expertly between the ribs, they ceased altogether.
A car pulled up out front and three young men leapt out, but by the time they made it upstairs, there was nothing for them to do but survey the horror show of blood and remains.
Fourteen
James Westwood’s eyes opened in the darkened room; he reached for his phone on the bedside table and checked the time.
It was just moments before his five-thirty alarm was set to sound, so he turned it off, then opened his weather app to check the current conditions.
Thirty-four degrees, cloudy skies.
Next, he scrolled through a couple of websites, looking at news headlines, opened theWashington Postapp and clicked on a tab that gave him the latest news in Latin America.
His eyes scanned the headlines, but he saw nothing of interest.
A quick review of X failed to show him what he was looking for, either, but he kept scrolling for nearly a minute before a message on his Signal app flashed on his phone.
J.W. sat up in bed; he was alone, as per usual, so he turned on a side lamp and spent the next two minutes crafting and then sending a reply to the text.
He rose for a trip to the bathroom, then dressed for his morning exercise, taking the weather into consideration. He slipped into his running shoes, then made his way downstairs in his Georgetown row house, where he gave a tired nod to Big Mike Scardino, who was already in from the carriage house, leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping coffee.
The Gauntlet operative wore a Gore-Tex base layer and warm-up pants, but his North Face hooded athletic coat hung over the back of a barstool, and this revealed the Smith and Wesson semiauto pistol in a shoulder holster under his left arm.
A pair of extra fifteen-round magazines hung under his other arm.
In a voice revealing that he was still in the process of waking up, Westwood said, “Wesley Heights Trail. Thirty minutes from now.”
Scardino did not hide his look of surprise. “Uh-oh. You know why?”
“She didn’t say. My guess is Nicaragua, but I didn’t see anything in the news.”
“Me, either. Not a lot of advance notice, but I can probably get Dunseth and Fields over to the meeting point, scope out the location before we arrive.”
J.W. filled his water bottle from the dispenser on the refrigerator door. “No. It’s fine. Even if she flexes her muscle, there’s no need for us to do the same.” He looked at Scardino’s pistol hanging under his arm. “Lose the piece.”
Scardino sighed, then unfastened his shoulder holster, took it off, and laid it, along with the pistol in it, on the kitchen counter.
Big Mike flung the remainder of his coffee into the sink, put the cup on the countertop, then donned his coat. “Let me grab my scanner and a couple of headlamps,” he said, and he left Westwood there in the kitchen as he hurried back to the carriage house.
—
They left the home on Dent Place and jogged at a steady pace to the north, rising through the narrow streets of Georgetown. They did not encounter a single runner or biker out this early, but they passed a man walking a dog on 35th Street NW, and a small group of workers stood huddled in their coats at a bus stop on Wisconsin.
On Davis Place they picked up the pace a little, running in the middle of the empty road. They continued west, past the elementary school J.W. had sent his children to decades earlier, past the apartment building of one of Scardino’s ex-girlfriends, and soon they approached Glover Archbold Park.
At the same time, both men reached to their foreheads, flipped on high-end headlamps, then jogged onto the Wesley Heights Trail that wound through the dense foliage of the park.
Scardino led the way now, his eyes alert, both for people here in the woods and for roots, stones, and railroad ties jutting up out of the ground that could have been a hazard, but they made good time, only slowing to navigate a couple of rocky streams, partly frozen over but shallow enough to be stepped through.
They went up and down hills, feet beating the winding unpaved surface that ran through the thick woods of the 185-acre park, and just as on the streets of Georgetown, they saw no runners out this early in weather this cold.
They had been alone for virtually the entirety of the twenty-five-minute run, but then lights appeared ahead of them, casting crazed shadows in all directions through the mostly leafless trees.
