Severance Package

Insane.

She reached out her hand to touch his cheek and he flinched.

“Shhhh,” she said, more quietly now. “Molly Lewis was married, yes. But I am not Molly Lewis. My name is Ania Kuczun.”

Anya who?

“You can be whoever you want, too. As easy as a snake shedding skin.”

Jamie had watched Molly survive a beating at the hands of Nichole. Watched her shoot David in the head. Felt the agony as she paralyzed him with just one simple move, then cut his fingers apart. Who was this woman? And what was she capable of? What did she really want?

Europe?

Wash away the blood, brush her hair, put it back in a conservative ponytail, get her dressed, and Jamie could almost see the old Molly. His office spouse. A quiet, thoughtful, pretty woman who was Andrea’s polar opposite.

Sometimes, though, it’s the opposites that get you. Draw you in, when you least expect it.

Like a few months ago.

On a walk home from an after-work happy hour.

Hey, I’ll walk you to your car. Well, here it is. Nice SUV. Guess I’ll be going. Yeah, good hanging with you, too … and that’s when it gets you, when you find yourself leaning forward to give her a kiss on the cheek but really you’re aiming for her lips, and she pulls back, a little startled. And you console yourself by saying, Hey, that would have been stupid. I have a pregnant wife at home.

Still, in that drunken moment, you really wanted that kiss.

The look on her face slides from puzzlement to embarrassment, and then she climbs into her car, and you walk home, and it’s really not that far away. The humid night air gives you time to think about what you narrowly avoided.

It’s not different in work the next day, or any other day, except maybe she sometimes looks at you oddly or warmly or knowingly. You forget about it. You’re about to have a kid.

You have a kid. You come back to work.

On a hot Saturday morning in August.

Those lips you momentarily wanted to kiss are now spotted with blood.

And she’s talking about shedding your skin.

“There’s something you need to leave behind,” Molly said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jamie said. “This building is burning. We need to leave. Now.”

She moved closer to him. Her lips. Smiling a little. “I have another way out. If you come with me.”

“How?”

“It won’t hurt much.”

Did she really know another way?

It didn’t matter. Jamie had trusted her before, and she’d ended up slicing his hand open like a roasted chicken. He wasn’t going to fall for the same ploy twice. He might be a public relations flack, but he wasn’t brain- dead.

Molly was closer now. Even with the spraying water, he could smell her. The copper penny scent of blood.

So Jamie did the only thing he could think of. He pushed her. Hard. Like they were schoolchildren in a playground.

She stumbled back to the ground.

Jamie bolted.

Keene opened the hall cupboard and lifted the false plywood bottom. Beneath it was his backup gun. A silver Ruger, Speed Six .38 Special. He never thought he’d need one here in Porty. Went through a lot of trouble to get one. Bought it from a fat guy from Haddington named Joe-Bob, as unlikely as that sounded. But he’d planted it months ago, nonetheless. It was hard to shake the Moscow Rules, even though he hadn’t been CIA in many, many years.

Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.

He stuffed the gun in his waistband, near the base of his spine. And as he headed up the stairs he recalled another old espionage chestnut:

Everyone is potentially under control of the opposition.

And as he put his hand on the doorknob and thought about killing McCoy …

There is no limit to a human being’s ability to rationalize the truth.

It wasn’t an entirely bad trip down; Vincent fell only once and dropped Rickards twice. If Rickards asked later, Vincent planned on shrugging his shoulders. I don’t know how you got those bruises, man. His muscles were trembling and it was hard to breathe. But there was no sitting down and taking a breather. The longer they stayed in this tower, the more likely they were going to die.

The guys from the Philadelphia Fire Department had begun to arrive by the time Vincent hit the ground floor. They were scurrying in the lobby and on the sidewalk outside the building. Crap. Two guys in full gear with pickhead axes and Nomex hoods came up to them, tried to take Rickards off his hands.

Vincent pulled back and warned them: “We’ve been dosed with chemical agents. We need a hazmat team or Homeland Security or whatever you guys are supposed to call out for this stuff.”

“Where?”

“I was up on sixteen, the north fire tower. Tell your guys now before they go charging up.”

“What about the other one?”

“No idea. And hey—there are people up there. I heard someone yell.”

“What floor?”

“I don’t know. Up higher than I was. Could be anywhere.”

“All right, let’s go, move, move!”

There, warning done … now he had to get Rickards back to the washup room and find that goddamned Terrorism manual. No telling how long it would take for the scientists to show up and analyze this stuff. If he lived through this—if it wasn’t blood he felt streaming down his cheeks, though Vincent kind of suspected it was—he was sure he was looking at weeks and weeks of blood tests and cheek swabs and anal pokes. His son would be fascinated. Ask all about it. Question is, does a dad tell his kid about stuff like this? Is it educational?

Vincent Marella was going to do two things after all this was over.

He was seriously going to quit.

And he was going to put Center Strike in a garbage can, piss on it, then light it on fire.

Jamie keyed the door code with his good hand, then yanked open the door. He ran down the short hallway and was immediately confused. Why was it dark outside? He couldn’t open the nearest office door—it was locked— but he looked through the slats of the window to the outer windows.

That wasn’t darkness. It was smoke.

And that was because the building was on fire.

He could see the flashes of red in the sky. Fire trucks.

Goddamn David Murphy.

Hang on now. Worry about that later. Jamie needed somewhere else to be, away from Molly. If he could circumvent her, he could make it to the other fire tower. Maybe it was rigged to explode, too. Maybe not. But it was his only option.

That’s not true, DeBroux. Molly told you that she has a way out.

Yeah, and she also said it wouldn’t “hurt much.”

Uh-uh.