The lights were on in the ground-floor living room of Briggs’ house, and she watched as he reposed in a green silk bathrobe, reading the paper, a bottle of expensive cognac on the table beside him. Upstairs, she could see a woman in her fifties sitting at a makeup table brushing her hair, her face a mask of unhappy resignation as she considered her reflection, a glass of wine near her right hand.
A dog barked several homes down the row, and she waited until the animal settled down before edging to the rear dining room door, next to the room where her target sat scratching himself. She reached into her backpack and pulled out plastic bags, which she quickly slipped over her feet, holding them in place with a rubber band on each ankle, then donned a pair of latex gloves. The lock took twenty seconds to open, and then she was creeping into the house, the soft soles of her Doc Martens boots inside the plastic sheathes soundless on the hardwood floor.
Briggs must have sensed her presence a few moments before she looped the wire over his head. He was in the process of turning when she wrenched it tight, the wire biting into his skin as he writhed in an attempt to get free. A line of blood trickled from the gash it had sliced, and then a geyser sprayed forth as the garrote severed his carotid artery.
“Honey? What’s going on down there?”
The woman’s voice sounded worried, but obviously not enough to descend the stairs. Briggs’s blood sprayed the painting that hung lavishly on the wall in front of him; a stern nobleman rendered in ancient oil — now with crimson splatter marring the surface.
Briggs stiffened and then went limp.
“Honey? Answer me.” Annoyed now, the words slightly slurred.
Jet dipped her finger into Briggs’ blood and scrawled Lawan’s name across his forehead, then pulled the wire free and glided quietly back to the dining room door, leaving blood-smeared footprints on the polished hardwood as she went. Once outside, she retrieved a liter water bottle filled with gasoline from her backpack and unscrewed the top, then stuffed a rag into the neck and lit it with a disposable lighter, leaning it next to the home’s wood siding before vanishing into the dark.
A minute later, Jet heard the woman’s scream even through the closed windows, a muffled high-pitched bleat of shock and horror. She slid the bloody shoe bags off her boots and packed them into a third bag along with the gloves and the garrote, and then bolted for her bike as flames licked at the outside of the house, the gasoline having erupted a few seconds before, igniting the shingles in a fiery blaze.
By the time the police arrived, there was no trace of her, a phantom come to exact a terrible retribution before disappearing into the night.
She looked at her watch as she pedaled hard through the woods. She would be at the second target’s home within ten minutes. Jet turned onto the pavement a quarter mile away and pointed the handlebars east.
The assistant director of the CIA stirred and turned onto his side, his small frame dwarfed by the ornately- wrought headboard of the king-sized bed. An antique that had been chosen by his third wife, he’d battled her for the bed during a bitter divorce and eventually won. It wasn’t so much that it was important to him as it meant a lot to her. She loved the damned thing. Not that she ever seemed to enjoy being in it with him.
Something caused him to start, and he slowly came awake, opening his eyes to see the shadowy outline of a figure standing at the foot of the bed. A figure dressed entirely in black. He tried hard to focus without his glasses and saw that it was a woman. A beautiful woman.
Pointing a gun at him.
He sat up.
“I…I have some money in my wallet, and my watch is a Piaget,” he stammered.
“That figures. Piagets are crappy watches for rich morons with no taste.”
“It’s…worth a lot of money. Take it. And I have a few thousand dollars here.”
“That’s good to know.”
Confused by her tone, he reached for the bedside lamp.
“Move one more inch and I blow your head off.”
He froze, then slowly resumed his sitting position.
“What do you want?”
“I’m here with a message.”
“A message?”
“Yes. It’s a short one. Either you die by the gun tonight, or you die by the needle. Your choice.”
He swallowed with difficulty, his throat suddenly dry.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m here to kill you. But I’ll give you a choice. Do you want a bullet, or a shot of the heroin you’re responsible for selling to millions of kids all over the world?”
“Look, lady, you’ve got this all wrong…” The pistol didn’t waver. “Do you have any idea who I am? You’re making the biggest mistake of your life,” he snarled.
She ignored him.
“What’s it going to be? Bullet or needle? I don’t have all night.”
He lunged for the bedside table, and she shot him in the leg, shattering his kneecap. His scream was cut off by another round directly between his eyes. The back of his head blew onto the coveted headboard. She stepped to the bedroom door and flipped the lock closed, then moved to the window and slid it open. His scream would bring his two bodyguards and his maid within seconds, but by the time they got in, Jet would have vanished.
With a final look at the dead man on the bed, she climbed through the window and lowered herself until her feet were ten feet above the grass, then dropped softly, rolled backwards, and took off at a full run to where she’d left her bike in the dense cover of the park.
Five minutes later, she was in the Explorer, driving the speed limit on her way to Washington.
“Yes?”
Silence greeted Arthur’s interrogative. He held the handset out and stared at it, then clenched it to his ear again.
“Who is this?” The line was unlisted.
“Wake up, Arthur,” Jet finally said.
“Who…where are you? I haven’t heard from you for a week,” Arthur demanded into the phone.
A sound rattled from downstairs, and then the line went dead.
Arthur rose from his bed and wrapped a robe around his pajamas, then slid his nightstand open and removed a small pistol — a Ruger LCP 380. He lifted the handset again to call for help, but there was no dial tone. And he’d left his cell phone downstairs to charge overnight, as was his custom.
Mitzi, his pug, whined and stretched, peering up at him in confusion. Was it time to wake up and go for a walk?
He crept cautiously down the steps and turned the corner at the base, entering the living room, where Jet sat in the dark in one of his colonial-era chairs, a briefcase in her lap, one foot swinging lazy circles. He flipped on the light and regarded her, the pistol trained on her head. Mitzi yelped happily and ran to her. Jet reached down and scratched her furry little head. Mitzi pushed her face into Jet’s hand and then lay by her side with a plop.
“You won’t need the peashooter,” she said with a smile.
Arthur looked worse than she remembered, the mottled skin puckered around his neck, which had thankfully been covered by his shirt and tie before.
“Perhaps. But this is highly irregular.” He appeared to consider the situation and then dropped the pistol into his robe pocket — but kept his hand in it, she noted.
“I suppose. So is having your baby kidnapped and being blackmailed. I guess we live in an irregular world…”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“I lost the number.”
He studied her calm face, and then took a seat across from her with a sigh.
“And?”
She lifted the briefcase and put it on the coffee table between them, and then lifted the lid, turning it towards
