Nothing much the man could have said would have intrigued or surprised Robie.
But this did.
Robie had seen a lot of Blue Man lately. But before that—for twelve years before that, to be precise—he hadn’t seen him at all.
“Blue Man?”
“Yes. The car’s waiting.”
CHAPTER
4
JESSICA REEL SAT ALONE AT a table in the airport lounge. She was dressed in a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. Her flat shoes were black with a single strap over the top of each foot. They were lightweight and built for speed and mobility if she had to run.
Her only nod to eccentricity was the hat that sat on the table in front of her. It was a straw-colored panama with a black silk band, ideally suited for traveling because it was collapsible. Reel had traveled much over the years, but she had never worn a hat during any of those previous trips.
Now had seemed like a good time to start.
Her gaze drifted over thousands of passengers pulling rolling luggage and carrying laptop cases over their shoulders with Starbucks cups cradled in their free hands. These travelers anxiously scanned electronic marquees for gates, cancellations, arrivals, departures. And minutes or hours or days later if the weather was particularly uncooperative, they would climb into silver tubes and be flung hundreds or thousands of miles to their destination of choice, hopefully with most of their bags and their sanity intact.
Millions of people did this same little thirty-thousand-foot-high dance every day in nearly every country on earth. Reel had done it for years. But she had always traveled light. No laptop. Enough clothes for a few days. No work went with her. It was always waiting for her when she got there. Along with all the equipment she would need to complete her designated task.
And then she would make her exit, leaving behind at least one person dead.
She fingered her phone. On the screen was her boarding pass. The name on the e-ticket was not Jessica Reel. That would have been a little inconvenient for her in these suddenly troubled times.
Her last task had not gone according to plan—at least not according to the plan of her former employer. However, it had been executed exactly as Reel had envisioned it, leaving a man named Douglas Jacobs dead.
Because of this Reel would be not only persona non grata back home, but also very much a wanted person. And the people she used to work for had an abundance of agents who could be called up to hunt her down and end her life as efficiently as she had Jacobs’s.
That scenario was definitely not in Reel’s grand scheme, and thus the new name, fresh documents, and panama hat. Her long hair was colored blonde from the natural brown. Tinted contacts transformed greenish eyes to gray. And she had been given a modified nose and a revised jawline courtesy of a bit of ingenious plastic surgery. She was, in all critical respects, a new woman.
And perhaps an enlightened one as well.
Her flight was called. She rose. In her flats she was five-nine—tall for a woman—but she blended in nicely with the bustling crowd. She donned her hat, purchased her Starbucks, and walked to the nearby gate. The flight left on time.
Forty somewhat bumpy minutes later it landed with a hard jolt on the runway tarmac minutes ahead of a storm’s leading edge. The turbulence had not bothered Reel. She always played the odds. She could fly every day for twenty thousand years and never be involved in a crash.
Her odds of survival on the ground would not be nearly as good.
She walked off the plane, made her way to the cabstand, and waited patiently in a long line until her turn came up.
Doug Jacobs had been the first but not the last. Reel had a list in her head of those who would, hopefully, join him in the hereafter, if there was such a place for people like Jacobs.
But the list would have to wait. Reel had somewhere to go. She climbed into the next available cab and set off for the city.
The cab dropped her near Central Park. The park was always a busy place, full of people and dogs and events and workers, controlled chaos if ever there was such a thing.
Reel paid the cabbie and turned her attention to the closest entrance to the park. She walked through the opening and made her way as close as possible to where it had happened.