—
Spiral went directly past the elevators to the stairs, and he began climbing. He’d gone less than one floor when a call came through his earpiece. “Uhh…Spiral, this is Three on the east side. I have one male subject entering the Carriage House loading dock off New Hampshire. He disappeared inside. He wasn’t wearing a hotel uniform, but he looked like he did have a tool belt on.”
“Did he have a coat on?” Spiral asked as he kept climbing.
“Affirmative.”
“Might have had a uniform on under it. Where did he come from?”
There was a pause. “Unknown. Didn’t see him before he entered the property.”
Shit,Spiral thought.Some support.
“You see any new vehicles on the streets?”
“Negative. Just the one man. A lady with a dog returned to the Carriage House just before this.”
Spiral discounted both the lone man with the tool belt and the woman with a dog as any sort of threat. He was more worried about SWAT teams, government cars, massive surveillance operations. If there was a threat to him, it wasn’t going to present itself as a lone wolf.
He continued past the third-floor landing, still heading up to the eighth floor. The coke coursing through him now felt good; it made him sharper, stronger, more aggressive.
This job was going to go down quickly and cleanly, he could feel it in his bones.
—
Court had spent some of the day in and around the Carriage House Condominium building, plus he’d studied blueprints of the other buildings composing the entire block: a couple of restaurants and the massive Ritz-Carlton hotel.
He knew his way around the area: the parking garages, the stairwells, the back employee-only entrances.
As he walked through the darkness of the covered tunnel-like area, he climbed a stairwell entrance to the loading dock of the Ritz, the building connected to the Carriage House. He had taken a look at the lock to the door there earlier in the day and determined he’d need about thirty seconds to pick it if he wanted access to the hotel next to the condo building.
He could even take a back staircase in the Ritz that could put him near a hotel suite with a balcony right next door to Irene’s condo.
But he did not move for now. He just positioned himself in a dark corner in the loading area tunnel, out of the dull lights here and there in the cavernous space, and just behind a steel support beam. He watched the Ford Expedition across the street, and he called Travers.
“Teddy? Report status?”
“I’m twenty-five yards from the Audi. I’m at their six o’clock, they don’t see me. I think I tally two pax in this vic, but I’ll have to get closer to be sure.”
Hanley’s disembodied voice came over both men’s earpieces—“Hold position, all call signs”—and Court and Travers both acknowledged.
Court kept himself hidden in the dark, his eyes back out towards the street and the SUV parked there.
—
Seven miles to the northeast, a forty-seven-year-old Northern Irishman stood over a thirty-three-year-old American, watching dispassionately as the man on the pavement took his last agonizing breath.
Campbell Coyle was in Hyattsville, Maryland; the victim had come out of a brewpub at eleven p.m., ordered an Uber on his phone, and then lit a cigarette as he waited there on the sidewalk.
The dossier on the iPad that Mike had given Coyle earlier in the evening said his target here in Maryland had military experience but no relevant tradecraft experience, and he worked for the National Security Agency. Other than that, Coyle had no idea why his employer wanted the man dead, and he absolutely did not care.
Coyle had stepped up behind the man as he waited alone outside the bar, a mask pulled down over his face, and then he dragged a four-inch knife across the victim’s throat from behind.
The target fell, blood gurgling out of him as he struggled to breathe, and Coyle stood there for ten seconds, making sure the wound was absolutely fatal, taking neither pleasure nor pain from the act. This man—his name was Miles Jorgensen—was a means to an end. Coyle wasn’t in the United States for him, but killing him would get him closer to what hewashere for.
Coyle pulled out his phone as he sheathed his knife; he looked up and down the street and saw no one else around. He took a photo, then turned, slipped the phone back into his pocket, and walked off through the frozen night.
A few moments later Campbell Coyle found himself on Gallatin Street, heading towards a dark blue Jeep Cherokee that idled there in the dark. He climbed into the backseat and sat down next to Nolan Walsh and just behind Jack Donnelly, who sat behind the wheel. Alfie Donnelly rode shotgun; he held a Glock pistol down between his knees, his eyes scanning left and right.
