Page 23 of Girl, Remembered

She unwrapped the fifteen rounds from the rag she’d carried them in and set them on the tin lid beside her, in a row, and counted them again.

The stolen Ford was three streets over, backed into a gap between a dumpster and a chain-link fence where nobody would give it a second look for at least a day. She’d swapped the plates twice since Tuesday, and had completely removed the plates for now. Onlookers would just see an abandoned vehicle, and the bystander effect would do the rest.

She’d known about the tracker in Ella Dark’s pistol the moment she’d picked it up last night. She’d known because the weight was off. It was a service pistol carrying an ounce it had no business carrying, and a lifetime of carrying handguns had taught her hands things her brain didn’t need to be told twice. She hadn’t needed to be a genius. She’d only needed to have held ten thousand more guns than the person who tried to fool her with one.

That was the trouble with all of them. They thought she was clever because she kept winning, and she kept winning because nobody had ever tested her against people who paid proper attention. Even Ella Dark hadn’t been paying attention throughout. She was too busy looking elsewhere, too willing to accept any distractions that came her way.

Doyle picked up the radio scanner from the floor beside the tin and tuned it to the frequencies that the Metropolitan Police hadn’t bothered to encrypt. Voices came through, but nothing Doyle could use. The radio had been particularly active between four and six this morning; the hours that Joe Public stumbled upon the next batch of corpses. Doyle had then slept for a few hours, but the excitement of what today would bring woke her up after four brief hours of slumber.

Even so, it hadn’t taken four hours of unconscious reflection for Lindsey Doyle to accept one thing: today was, either metaphorically or literally, the last day of her life.

She’d known this the moment she had to flee the basement last night, right after Ella’s cronies had come looking for her. Lindsey didn’t know the fate of Simon Varro – or Subject #4, as she mentally referred to him as – but Ella Dark wasn’t a killer. It was one of the few morals she had. Doyle hadn’t stuck around to glimpse Varro’s fate, and the news or radio hadn’t been forthcoming with the details. She’d find out soon enough if Varro was still alive, but even if he was, there was nothing she could do about it. The FBI would have him locked down and on suicide watch twenty four hours a day, so she couldn’t run the Purification Protocol on him, like she had the others.

Had the Purification worked? Doyle was yet to get confirmation. She had small-time criminals on her books in Wisconsin, Louisiana and North Carolina, so they’d been the ones to give the drone signal to her boys behind bars. Doyle hadn’t done it herself, nor could she, given their locations. She’d gotten signals to all Tanner, Borden and Winters, but whether they were still alive or not was beyond her knowledge.

Would they even comply with the Purification? That was the question that plagued Doyle more than anything. Tanner and Borden were the ones who worried her. They were talkers, both of them. Tanner was a former psychologist, so he knew how to talk to people. Borden didn’t boast the same credentials, but he was quick enough to talk Doyle’s ear off when they first met in that prison support group. Put either of them across a table from someone with a badge and there was a version of the future where one of them talked himself into a plea deal by describing how they could find her in helpful detail.

Winters wouldn’t have said a word if they’d pulled his fingernails out one at a time, and neither would Varro. But Tanner and Borden had needed the promise spelled out to them in full, the exorcism, the new life waiting on the other side of the last breath. She’d used her mouth for some of it and her body for the rest, and she’d watched both men decide, independently, months apart, that they’d rather stop existing than betray the mother who gave them what they craved.

The other issue was that all of Doyle’s subjects knew about her hideouts, including this one.

There was no time to find a new one, either. Her face would be everywhere by now, and she didn’t have any disguises that could alter her appearance enough for her to risk braving the public.

So, what she needed was protection.

Fifteen bullets were in her possession, but she no longer had a functioning pistol.

When the morning rush hour died down, she’d head out and find some. Money had become an issue, but she didn’t need money when she had fifteen bullets that would fit into any handgun in the country.

The plan itself was simple in its design. Ella Dark had to come to her. That part was pivotal. Ella Dark chased things without deciding to, without being able to stop. She couldn’t help herself, and that would be her downfall. Every time Doyle had approached Ella, she’d been bested, which was why her sister was now presumably in a jail somewhere.

But before Ella arrived, there were debts owed elsewhere, older debts.

The people who’d made this possible in the first place had to go too. Most already had, but there was one more to come. They belonged on the pile as much as anyone, and Doyle intended to see every last one of them onto it before the day was finished.

So, let the games begin.

Whatever came out of today, and something would indeed, come, Ella Dark would be at the top of the pile when it was done. Doyle had built the whole plan around that one certainty and she wasn’t about to let herself doubt it now, nine months in, with her hands finally close enough to touch it.

She wasn’t deluded about the rest of it. She knew she wasn’t walking out of this city, not with every roadblock in the district holding a photograph of her face and every cop on the East Coast hunting for the credit of being the one who found her.

There was no flight to catch, no border she could reach before someone recognized her at a gate. That door had closed the moment the FBI worked out she was even in D.C., and she’d made her peace with.

Ella Dark had to die today.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Luca was waiting by the Bureau’s side entrance with a gym bag over one shoulder when Ella found him. She’d picked up a new Glock 19 which, this time, didn’t have a tracker inside it.

‘Thanks for this, Ell,’ he said. ‘Four hour drive just to sit in a prison. I’ve always wanted to know what that felt like.’

‘You’re a hero for agreeing to do this.’

‘Sure, like I had a choice. By the way, what have I actually agreed to? Because the specifics are sorely lacking.’

‘Nothing complicated,’ Ella said. ‘Get to Mount Olive, find whoever’s running the place today, and tell them Austin Creed might need to be moved to an interview room at short notice. Bureau’s orders. I want him available. I don’t want to be told he’s at lunch or in the yard or wherever.’

‘That’s it?’