Page 17 of Hero

He had been up all night, but he had remained alert and determined. He enlarged the image of the blond woman with the overnight bag so it took up the full screen, and then zoomed in until her face was about half the picture and saved it that way. He had clear shots of her from the back and side, so he enlarged those too. It seemed likely that he would need to spot her from the side or back. There was no advantage to walking right up to her and staring her in the eyes. She should be dead before she looked in his direction.

He took up his phone again and used his fingerprint to sign into his bank account to check his balance. It was healthy. He didn’t need to deposit any of the money Mr. Conger had given him. He might not need money to get this job done anyway, but if he needed it, he had it.

He went back to the computer and looked at the rest of the pictures he had taken. He had accidentally turned on the video near the end,and he pressed the arrow and watched the women finish the walk into the building. He concentrated on the blonde. He watched her closely, concentrating on the differences between her and her friends. He didn’t want to shoot the wrong one.

The main difference between a professional like him and the amateurs was in the planning. No matter how much thought and effort he put into the kill, he put just as much into what would happen afterward, and how he would navigate the transformed environment—the noise, confusion, people in motion to run or hide—and disappear unidentified or, better, unnoticed.

When he was confident that he would recognize the blonde, even from a distance or in dim light, he decided to prepare himself with a fallback strategy. He printed ten copies of the best picture of her. He didn’t think he was going to need them, but he liked to anticipate needs before they occurred. If he needed to, he would show people the photo and say she was his sister, who had mental troubles and had wandered off a few times before, but this time she had left her medicine behind, so he was very worried. He would give a fake name and the number of whatever burner phone he was using at the time.

In midafternoon he prepared his equipment. He chose to bring his 5.56-millimeter AR-15 in case he had a chance to get her the easy way, from cover at a distance. The rifle was small, light, and easy to break down, and no pistol had remotely comparable range and velocity. With the night scope, he would see clearly and she would see nothing but shadows and shapes.

He knew what usually happened the instant when the deafening clap of a gun’s report shattered the silence. Most people nearby jumped or jerked and then swiveled their heads, looking for the place where the shot had come from. Often one of the people nearest to the dying personknelt by the body to provide help while others ran for cover. The biggest group would be paralyzed, apparently able to see everything, but unable to move.

The exceptions were the quick reactors, the few who could think clearly right away. They would instantly have a phone out, dialing 911 or trying to get a picture of him. Others would be trying to chase after him to see his license plate, or would even try to attack him. A couple of times he’d had to kill one or two of them to escape, and he was always prepared for more.

He knew how bystanders were going to behave, but almost none of them knew because they had never been to a murder before.

Sealy charged his night scope’s battery, his phone’s battery, and the battery of his bright tactical flashlight. He made sure his two pistols and rifle were fully loaded with rounds that he had never touched without gloves. This time his plan included a few defensive measures. He had seldom had any need to wear his bulletproof vest, but he planned to wear it tonight. The time to take out Justine Poole was in the hour before first light, when she and her friends had just ended a shift. He would choose a position that would give him the best view of the door they had used when he’d followed them home.

By early evening, he had his clothes and equipment prepared and laid out on the living room floor, and his mind was calm and resolved. He set his alarm for 3:45A.M.

At eleven he turned on the television news. He was excited to see the newswoman standing in front of Justine Poole’s condominium. “This morning I was at this condominium building, where Justine Poole lives. She’s the heroic young woman who foiled the armed robbery of the beloved Hollywood couple Jerry and Estelle Pinsky two nights ago. I spoke with her next-door neighbor Ally Grosvenor. And just this evening I spoke with her again. Here’s what she said.”

The lighting of the next picture seemed to be evening. The woman Sealy had seen on an earlier broadcast wearing a running outfit said, “It was chilling. My husband and I knew what she did for a living, but we never expected that the job would ever be so violent.”

“What about Justine herself?” the reporter said. “What can you tell us about her?”

“She’s a quiet, respectable young woman—very kind and soft-spoken, and pretty as they come, but bright too. One of those girls whose smile can light up a room.”

Sealy smiled. For some reason that was the cliché that somebody was sure to say about every murdered woman. This time it had come early. He hadn’t even killed her yet.

The newswoman said, “And you have a picture to show us?”

“Yes.”

Leo Sealy leaned forward in his seat and looked at the DVR to be sure the recording light was on.

In her hotel room near the airport, Justine was watching the interview with Ally Grosvenor. She heard herself whisper, “No, Ally. Don’t!”

But there it was. In the editing they had made the picture fill the screen. It was Ally and Justine smiling at the camera, both of them in bathing suits and cover-up tops holding plates of food from the barbecue grill on the building patio. Justine’s dark brown hair was wet and hanging very straight and stringy, because she had just pulled a comb through it after getting out of the pool. That picture was fresh, taken during the recent Fourth of July weekend. It was probably going to get her killed. Now the shooter would know her face.

Sealy stared, open-mouthed, at the television screen as he watched the news report scrolling rapidly backward. He stopped the image and pushed the arrow to play the segment forward, his thumb resting lightly on the pause button. When the photograph of the two women at the pool party reappeared, he stopped it, lifted his cell phone, framed the younger woman, rested his elbow on the arm of the couch, and took the picture. He took three more to be sure he had the best, steadiest version of it.

This was not the woman he had seen leaving the Spengler-Nash building. This was not any woman he had ever seen. He had been completely prepared to go out in a few hours and kill her, or all three of the women, if necessary, and none of them was Justine Poole.

13

Justine’s cell phone buzzed. She stiffened as though a high-voltage shock had gone up her spine, and opened her eyes, ready to fight. She recognized the sound and rolled over in bed to reach in the direction the sound had come from, and at the same moment remembered why she was in this strange room. She had been crying about the death of Ben Spengler for most of the night until she was too tired to be able to think clearly, and she must have dozed off with her clothes on. On her phone was a text message from Janice Fortner, night shift supervisor of communications at Spengler-Nash.

Justine was pretty sure she knew what this was going to be. Janice was undoubtedly getting in touch to say she was sorry that Justine had been fired.

There had already been about a dozen of those. All had included compliments, and some had offered to serve as references. Since some of the older ones had titles like shift commander or director of international operations, the offers were not worthless, but she was not thinking about her next job. She was thinking about staying alive until the end of the week.

She noticed her phone screen said 8:21A.M., which meant it was too late to go back to sleep anyway. She had a vague memory of noises in the hallway hours earlier, which hadn’t been annoying enough to bring her to full consciousness, but now she was awake. She touched the screen to read the text. “Justine, the security cameras in the garage picked this man up watching at shift change the night after Ben was killed. Maybe trying to find you? We’re not supposed to communicate with you, but you need to see these.”

Justine touched the symbol of the attachment and saw the first picture appear. It showed a man trying to stay in the shadows behind the last row of parked cars. The garage was dimly lit, but the security cameras made him clear and sharp. There were other pictures, but she wanted to answer right away. She typed, “Got them. I owe you. Take no more chances. Love, etc.” Janice was the last person in the world to make a mistake like using a Spengler-Nash account or a piece of company equipment for personal calls, but her job gave her legitimate access to the security recordings.

Justine looked at the first picture. She remembered that when Ben had ordered the newer cameras installed, he had said that they were to protect company clients. If someone was planning to stalk a client, one way to do it would be to track the car of the client’s bodyguard to wherever the client was. Ben would never admit he was also trying to protect the bodyguards, but he was still protecting her now.

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