Dirty Work (Stone Barrington 9)

“He is expecting me,” M-T replied.

“One moment, please.” The woman left the window and went to a telephone. She spoke a few words, listened, then returned to the window, filled out a pass, and pushed it through the narrow opening. “Take the elevator to the fourth floor. You will be met.”

“Thank you,” M-T replied. She turned and walked to the elevator, then rode it to the fourth floor. As she stepped out of the car two men in civilian clothes approached her.

“Your handbag, please,” the shorter of the two said. He was thickly built, with thick, black hair. Though clean-shaven, his beard showed through the skin.

She handed it over, then raised her arms for the search.

The shorter man emptied the handbag onto a small table in the hallway and quickly found the pistol and the ice pick. He picked them up in one hand and the handbag in the other. “Follow me, please.” He led her down a hallway to the rear of the building, stopping at a steel doorway. He tapped a code into a keypad beside the door, then opened it and motioned for her to follow. He climbed a flight of stairs, entered another code beside another steel door, then took her down a hallway to a comfortably furnished office, where a rather handsome man sat at a desk, writing on a pad. The shorter man set M-T’s handbag and weapons on the desk and left.

Without looking up, the man motioned for her to sit down. He kept her waiting while he finished writing, then closed the folder before him and set it aside.

“You have come to see us sooner than I expected,” he said.

“I had a little time on my hands,” she replied.

The man took a pair of latex gloves from a desk drawer, then picked up her little pistol. “Crude but effective, no doubt,” he said.

“It does very nicely at short ranges. I wouldn’t like to try to hit a target across a street.”

He stood up, took a clump of keys from his pocket, and unlocked a steel cabinet. From it he removed a black cardboard box and set it on his desk.

“I’m told that you are proficient with firearms,” he said.

“I am.”

He handed her a pair of latex gloves, then opened the box, removed a pistol from it, and laid it on the desk. “Have you ever seen one of these?”

M-T donned the gloves, picked up the weapon, and examined it. It was a .22-caliber semiautomatic with a slightly thicker barrel than she would have expected. She ejected the magazine and examined that, too. “I’ve never seen one like this. It has no markings of any kind.”

“We took it from a CIA agent in Beirut late last year,” the man said. He took a silencer from the box and handed her that, too. She installed it with a simple half turn. “Very nice,” she said. “An assassin’s weapon—light, easily concealed, and, I’ve no doubt, very accurate, especially with the silencer.”

“It was custom-manufactured for the CIA. Only a couple of hundred were made, according to the man we took it from in Beirut. While it has no manufacturer’s markings and there are no identifying marks on any of its parts, we have discovered that the barrel’s rifling leaves a very distinctive pattern on the bullets fired from it. Part of the inside of the barrel is a freely rotating cylinder, so every time the weapon is fired, a different ballistic pattern is etched onto the bullet.”

“I’ve never heard of that,” she said admiringly. “It’s ingenious.”

“We have also learned that if any American police department runs a ballistics check on one of its bullets, the FBI comparison program will flag it as being very special and highly classified.”

“So, when the police remove the bullet from your traitorous colleague, it will be known that he was killed with a CIA weapon?”

“Exactly. But if you fire more than once, each bullet will appear to have come from a different weapon.”

“And who is the gentleman? Do you have a photograph?”

“He is the man who brought you to this office,” the man said. “The shorter of the two who greeted you at the elevator. Do you remember him well enough, or do you still want a photograph?”

“I remember him very well,” M-T replied.

“He lives six blocks north of the embassy,” the man said, “and he always walks home after work, leaving at around five-thirty. He walks up the east side of Park Avenue, where the sidewalks are wide and not crowded, even at rush hour.”

“Will today be soon enough?” M-T asked.

“Today will be very satisfactory. What assistance do you require?”

“I will need an untraceable escape vehicle—a motorcycle, preferably—and someone to drive it. Can you do that in the time available?”

“We can manage that.”