Page 128 of The House of Cross

She had the driver, a male, drop her at the mailbox. She waited for him to leave, then started up the darkened driveway, thinking how a routine was a weakness to be exploited. At least it wasin her profession. Routine allowed a predator to learn the patterns of its prey and wait in ambush if it knew just the right spot.

White knew just the right spot. She’d known it for well over eight weeks, almost as long as she and other Maestro operatives had been studying U.S. Supreme Court justice Margaret Blevins’s day-to-day habits.

The justice, they’d discovered, wasn’t exactly an athlete, but she worked out on a daily basis, often with a three-and-a-half-mile run through her neighborhood and the surrounding area. She ran three or four days a week, rain or shine, cold or hot, darkness or daylight.

With or without a member of her security detail, Blevins always turned off St. James Road, ran northwest on Betteker Lane to a trailhead beyond Bevern Lane, then went down into the matrix of pathways that crisscrossed Watts Branch Park.

The creek that bisected the park and separated Lloyd Road from Gregerscroft Road was shallow enough to wade through in most places. But the paths Blevins liked to run all converged on the footbridge not far from the cul-de-sac where the justice lived. A thicket of dense fir trees grew on the near side of the bridge. But she loved the birches that grew on the far side near the bench where she often stretched before continuing the rest of the way home.

The Sparrow heard sirens begin to wail in the distance.

The Sparrow stayed well outside the yard of the house on Lloyd Road, paused, and dropped into the west side of Watts Branch Park. She studied the sky, which was turning a pale gray as the stars began to fade.

Dawn was coming. And the sirens were getting closer.

White pulled up a GPS app on the burner phone to take her to the path and the bridge. She plunged into the woods and headeddownhill at a gentle slant. At the bottom, she quickly found the trail, turned on her flashlight app, and began to run.

When the Sparrow was almost to the footbridge, she stopped and listened, hearing the creek and little else save the sirens, which were whooping in the near distance toward Blevins’s house.

They’re coming for her,White thought, moving out of the pines and seeing the birches near the creek just ahead of her in the growing light.But I’m here first. If she went out for her run this morning, I’m here first.

With those positive thoughts coursing through her head, the Sparrow slipped in among four bushy hemlock trees on the creek bank by the footbridge. They were no more than six feet tall and the only conifers growing there.

Amid the hemlocks, there was a low spot that she’d hid in when she used the first sonic weapon M had bought in Havana, the one she’d trained on Blevins several times in the prior weeks as the justice crossed the bridge on her run.

But the sonic device in her pack now was different, far more powerful. It would do much more than make her sick. And if that didn’t work, she had a gun she’d stashed in that low spot in the hemlocks a month before.

The sirens died as White dug up the pistol from under the ground, removed it from its plastic case, and set it aside. Then she shrugged off the knapsack and turned on the device.

Malcomb had paid a fortune to one of her old corrupt bosses at the GRU for this weapon, the latest tool Mother Russia was developing to neutralize enemies of the state in public settings.

Feeling the hum of the device booting up, the Sparrow heard a squirrel chatter at the dawn and the faint sound of a distant car passing.

Then she heard the definite clicking of something metal against rocks and then footfalls amid the clicking. She peered through the hemlocks toward her back trail and the noise and saw the headlamp bobbing and coming closer.

White lifted the triggering device and aimed it toward the bridge, roughly twelve feet away, close enough to hit Justice Blevins hard, killing her outright or stunning her so badly the Sparrow could easily move in and follow up. She lowered it again and waited.

The clicking was louder, and the headlamp was closer, no more than fifty yards back, where the trail to the bridge left the pines. Suddenly the headlamp went off, but she could see the outline of her prey still running, still coming right at the footbridge.

The Sparrow took her attention off Blevins, raised the trigger again, aimed it at the west side of the little bridge. She quickly glanced to her right, saw the justice coming around the close bend in the trail.

Her thumb found the button.

CHAPTER 108

BREE WAS LESS THANtwo hundred yards from Alex and Mahoney when she spotted Justice Blevins’s headlamp coming through the woods. At the same time, she spotted a gray smudge she thought could be a person crouched amid hemlock trees on the opposite creek bank.

She slipped down the bank into the running water, ignoring the wet and the cold, using the sounds of the creek to mask her movement, closing the gap in the low light, wanting to be sure she wasn’t seeing things.

Then she saw the headlamp go off and the form on the far bank shift as Justice Blevins came closer to a footbridge that spanned the creek. At ten yards away, Bree brought up her pistol, popped up, aimed it over the bank at the figure in the hemlocks, and shouted, “Put the weapon down, Katrina! Down!”

What happened next unfolded in a matter of seconds.

Justice Blevins heard the shout, startled, and skidded to a stop on the path, blocked from White’s view by the hemlock trees but mere feet from her waiting assassin. The Sparrow shifted toward her target.

“I’ll put one through the back of your head, Katrina!” Bree shouted. “It’s over!”

Alex and Mahoney came charging onto the scene, drawn by the shouting.

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