he broke into a jog, as if he’d needed to be somewhere five minutes before.
When he reached a T, he broke left, crossed the mouth of an even larger space, and started to slow as he moved toward the mannequin from the storage unit. He’d set it up at the intersection of two passages.
If he had to shoot early, it would be here.
Cruz walked confidently, hands out, palms up, toward the mannequin. Ten feet shy of it, he snapped the fingers of his left hand back toward his wrist.
A Kevlar-reinforced nylon bullet slammed into the mannequin’s throat and blew out the back of its neck.
Cruz did not stop to admire the destruction. Instead, he pushed on, reloading the graphite derringer and trying to see if he remembered the diagram past midpoint.
He went to a closet in the maze, gave himself sixty seconds to change clothes and credentials, and then hurried up another long passage. He hesitated at a door on the right and looked ahead a moment before going inside.
After waiting for ninety seconds exactly, Cruz exited the room, turned right again, then took two lefts and went through imaginary double doors into the largest space yet, so big he hadn’t bothered to tape it all in. He made his way toward the far-right corner, where a second and a third mannequin stood. In his mind, Cruz imagined the place packed and him shifting and slipping his way forward.
Cruz stopped fifteen feet to the right of the mannequins and waited, a smile on his face, his left hand poised as if resting on the shoulder of someone in front of him.
Cruz laughed, bobbed his head, extended his right hand in welcome, and then snapped his fingers back sharply. The web stretched and triggered the second single-shot gas derringer. It fired with a thud, and the nylon bullet penetrated the mannequin’s chest and knocked it to the ground.
A moment later, he fired the left-hand derringer at the rear mannequin and hit it square in the chest.
Cruz clicked the stopwatch on his phone and saw that nine minutes and eleven seconds had elapsed. He started the clock again, stayed cool as he backed up, slow, deliberate, then turned and headed back through the maze the way he’d come.
In the long hallway, Cruz broke into a slow jog. When he reached the mannequin with the hole in its neck, he stopped for fifteen seconds, then moved on, running fast now, and was soon back at the entrance to the schematic.
Cruz stopped the clock; his hard breathing left clouds pluming in the frigid air. Six minutes and fourteen seconds coming back. Fifteen minutes and twenty-five seconds total.
That will do it, he thought, and he stared at the door that led outside the factory.
Cruz shook off the idea that he was ready and told himself to run the route at least twenty more times. He had enough time to practice until he could do the whole thing blindfolded or in the dark. Before resetting the stopwatch and starting again, he decided he would do both.
CHAPTER
39
NED MAHONEY PULLED over at the curb and pointed diagonally across a busy street past a dingy strip mall to the Happy Pines Motel in suburban Gaithersburg, Maryland.
The Happy Pines was one of those no-tell joints you could rent by the hour, day, week, or month. A thirty-unit, two-story affair, the motel was badly in need of renovation, and the rain and gray skies made the place look even drearier than it was.
But according to Mahoney, a woman named Martina Rodoni bearing a Eurozone passport had registered at the Happy Pines two days before. Even though our contact at the CIA said there was zero chance Varjan would use the identity again, we decided to drive out to see if they were one and the same.
I said, “What are the odds she’s here?”
Mahoney turned off the car, said, “The clerk I spoke with said she’s in and out and hasn’t let them service the room.”
For a moment, I thought about Kasimov, the Russian, and how he’d been holed up at his hotel while his men put on disguises to go out on clandestine missions.
But I tucked that away and focused on the motel parking lot, seeing aged Ford pickups and beater Chevy sedans with tailpipes held on by coat hangers. Nothing newer. Nothing that screamed rental. Then again, Kristina Varjan could have parked on the street or in the alley behind the motel, where Mahoney had a squad of junior FBI