Page 7 of Until the End

Her rib cage loosened, her sternum relaxing with anxious breaths.

Three blocks to the NoMa–Gallaudet U Metro station, but they might look for her there. She’d have to push seven blocks to Union Station. The massive transportation center housed DC’s busiest Metro station, hubs for commuter rail lines, Amtrak, and Greyhound, and bristled round-the-clock with a sea of traffic. There, she could disappear.

Kit pushed off the wall and hurried down the alley. Her throat clogged with grief, pain, and a rage the likes of which she’d never known.

No matter what, she’d get justice for the Outliers. Some way, somehow, she’d stop whatever Bravo had in the works and see his crew behind bars or dead.

So help her God, even if she had to die trying.

02

Washington, DC

Sunday, 8:30 a.m. EDT

The bells of the Taft Memorial Tower pealed with deep, resonant tones, marking the half hour and fracturing the quiet of the early Sunday morning.

Castle Kinkade scanned his sector of the Upper Senate Park in the heart of DC across from the U.S. Capitol. His gaze combed over gnarled cherry trees, empty pathways flanking the long panel of lawn he occupied, the expansive paved plaza surrounding an elaborate fountain to the north, stone benches, and a vagrant huddled in the dense shade of mature trees to the east.

No sign of either target, although his team only had a physical description of one of the two. And he wasn’t even sure if this was the park where the meet was supposed to take place.

“I’ve got nothing,” Castle said into the mic concealed on the collar of his leather jacket.

His gaze trained on the homeless chick wrapped in a fleece blanket, sitting beside a tree. If not for a long swath of hair falling from the black hoodie pulled over her head and the shock of pale, porcelain skin from a partially exposed bare leg, he wouldn’t have been able to guess at the person’s gender. The brownish-gray color of the blanket blended so well with the bark, her small body almost looked like a natural extension of the tree.

Odd for a vagrant to camp out this close to the Senate buildings, since the Capitol Police did a sweep at sunrise and sunset. In this part of town, the homeless usually hunkered in Columbus Circle near Union Station.

“Dull as watching paint dry on my end.” Alistair Allen’s smooth Queen’s-English accent was loud and clear over Castle’s earpiece.

“I’ve got a vagrant concealed by a blanket near the trees on the—”

“East side. Yes, I have a visual,” Alistair said, sounding even more bored than Castle, as if that were possible. “Here’s a possibility—twentysomething female jogger. Rainbow Brite just jumped out of a Lululemon ad and is coming your way. You should have eyes on in three, two, one.”

The jogger crossed the plaza, wearing pants and a matching jacket with neon bands of pink, orange, purple, and blue. She ran by at a steady pace, eyes straight ahead, passed an elderly man feeding pigeons, and left the park.

The older gentleman hadn’t been there a moment ago. He must’ve come from the southwest side off the street. Maybe he was their mark, trying to appear casual while waiting for his contact.

Castle patted the dog he’d brought with him, keeping the potential suspect under surveillance. The white-bearded man took his time scattering grains of rice for the birds. Once his paper bag was empty, he glanced around as if looking for someone. Castle stayed loose and ready, but the man merely picked up a cane from a nearby bench and moseyed on without making contact with anyone.

Alistair sighed. “You’d think with our dynamic duo, we’d get lucky.”

The Brit, staking out the Lower Senate Garden on the other side of the fountain, wasn’t Castle’s first, second, or even third choice of partner on any assignment. To Alistair, lucky equated to getting shot at. And when the MI6 castoff turned Gray Box operative was involved, bullets were guaranteed to fly.

But desperate times, desperate measures.

Since the Gray Box had discovered a shipment of government-manufactured bioweapons had been hijacked, their off-the-books covert organization had been doing everything possible to track down the thieves and recover the bioagents. Their techie, Willow Harper—a hacking, coding, fact-finding genius—had recently struck pay dirt when her keyword-hunter program nailed two online messages. Both contained the text string Z-1984, the top- secret name for the nastiest of the stolen bioweapons.

The messages had been sent via a spoofed IP address through an encrypted IRC—Internet Relay Chat—a real-time-only sea of thousands of chat channels where text history could disappear like ripples in the water. Both messages had gone from a Kit01Y0L0, their first lead and primary target, to Illuminati411, a conspiracy theorist blogger. The last communication had established the specifics for a face-to-face meet at an unnamed park near Massachusetts Avenue, set to happen now.

One problem. There were six parks near Massachusetts Avenue, spread over ten miles spanning from one end of the District to the other.

The Gray Box was comprised of elite talent, running the gamut from former spec ops such as himself to ex-CIA, NSA, and external foreign intelligence services. But they weren’t magicians capable of cloning themselves and were stretched bare-bones-thin on this op.

Castle threw a frisbee across the manicured grassy lawn of the upper section of the park. Achilles shot over the public lawn after it like a black-and-tan ballistic missile. The team’s four-legged buddy officially belonged to Knox Cody, their second-in-command and currently on assignment in the sandbox. Castle had helped Knox train the dog. The Doberman-German shepherd mix caught the frisbee midair and bounded back, happy to stay warm in the crisp air and play along, giving Castle a cover for his presence.

Blending in required substantial effort. At six four and packing two hundred forty pounds of lean muscle, he was taller and broader than most men and stood out like the Washington Monument if he loitered.

Add a dog and a game of fetch, and he became an ordinary Joe enjoying the fall weather. Far easier to disregard. Making it possible for him to get close to a potentially skittish target he needed to bag and drag back to headquarters for questioning.