On screen, Girlfriend continued to feign stabs at her quarry. Only now she had him on his knees, and was swiping her hooked blade across the space directly in front of his throat. His eyes. His abdomen. His genitals. Vicious, sharp little movements, leaving little margin for error. If the quarry were to so much as sneeze, he’d be ripped open in a flash.
The quarry, this DeBroux guy, was trembling. Hard to tell if it was fear or spasms of pain. His injured hand hung limply at his side, and blood dripped from his savaged fingertips in a Jackson Pollock pattern.
McCoy slapped Keene on the arm. “You know what she’s doing?”
No, I don’t, Keene thought. He’s waiting for me to say it. He wants me to say it. He needs me to say it.
Oh, this is childish.
“What?” Keene asked.
McCoy said, “She’s running us through her resume.”
Jamie was in the strange position of being close to death, expecting death, and slowly coming to terms with death, but unable to actually die.
The moment he saw the blade again, he knew it was going to enter his chest. An atom bomb of fear detonated in his heart.
He thought of Chase.
Chase and that cartoon duck in little boy pants.
Although he imagined it did, the blade didn’t seem to be cutting his chest. It whipped over the surface of his shirt above ever so slightly, then slipped away and plunged toward another spot on his chest. This failed to enter his body, too.
A flurry of motion followed, almost too quick for Jamie to comprehend, but with every stroke he expected that this would be the one, the blade would penetrate his flesh and his life would rapidly come to an end.
Even on his knees a few moments later, the blade dancing across his throat and face now, so fast, he actually felt the wind from Molly’s frenzied movements.
But the blade never penetrated.
This, more than anything else that had happened this morning—the gunshot, the sliced fingers—broke Jamie De-Broux’s mind a bit.
McCoy pointed out what he could. Keene was still a little mystified.
“That’s right out of the
“Why isn’t she taking him out?”
“Because he’s number seven. She doesn’t need to.”
“So why go after him at all?”
“To show off. She already lost one of her targets—number five, that McCrane guy. The one with the champagne?”
“Right.”
“That means she needs to make it up somehow. She promised that she’d demonstrate a full array of her techniques. She promised they’d be surprising yet economical. Wants us to know she could tear people apart any countless number of ways, from the undetectable to the flashy. First, she did a straight-on interrogation. Now, she’s being flashy.”
They continued watching the monitors for a while.
“Won’t they find evidence of these … mutilations?”
“Nah. Bodies were to be burned up anyway. Doesn’t matter.”
Keene sighed, then turned away from the screen. “Aye, she’s overdoing it.”
“Maybe, but I like to watch her work.”
“She should just kill him.”
Jamie DeBroux wished she’d just kill him already.
And then a funny thing happened.
She stopped.
For the third time that morning, Jamie collapsed onto the carpet. Through Molly’s legs, he could see that the door to the office had opened.
And there was another pair of legs standing in the doorway. Bare legs. Black flats.
“Busy, Molly?” a voice said.
He tried to see past Molly’s legs, but his view was obscured.
The voice sounded familiar, though.
It sounded like
“Nichole Wise, code name Workhorse.”
“That’s interesting,” Keene said. “I didn’t realize we did the whole gay nickname thing.”
“We do.”
“I was being facetious.”
“But you know who else does?”
“Well, the CIA.”
“The motherloving CIA.”
“Interesting. They send her to monitor the Philadelphia operation?”
“No. They’ve got a crush on Murphy, and they’re jealous he left them. In fact, I don’t think they’re aware we’re behind his operation. Probably better that way.”
“Does Girlfriend know about her?”
“She hasn’t said as much. If she’s figured it out, it’ll be all the more impressive.”
“Murphy’s office is full of wonders, isn’t it?”
“It’s what makes this line of work so much fun.”
Keene could see why McCoy got wrapped up in this sort of thing. The people assets. It could become as addictive as an American soap opera. Not that he watched those things. Who was screwing who. Who had a secret alliance with who else. You could work for a company—or the Company, as it were—for years and not unravel every sticky web.
“Think your girl can handle it?”
“From the looks of it, she can handle everything.”
“Care for a little wager?”
“Stop talking. I think Girlfriend is about to kill Workhorse, and I don’t want to miss it.”
ONE-ON-ONE
.
That little demonstration in the conference room only confirmed what she’d suspected for months.
She was one of
