She didn’t really notice the routineness of her daily schedule. Cathy unlocked the door, got Sally into her seat, and made sure the seat belt was fastened snugly before closing and locking the door and going around to the left side of the car.
She looked up briefly. Across Ritchie Highway was a small shopping center, a 7-Eleven Store, a cleaners, a video store, and a hardware dealer. There was a blue van parked at the 7-Eleven again. She’d noticed it twice the previous week. Cathy shrugged it off. 7-Eleven was a convenience store, and lots of people made it a regular stop on the way home.
“Hello, Lady Ryan,” Miller said inside the van. The two windows in the rear doors — they reminded Miller of the police transport van; he smiled to himself at that — were made of coated glass so that an outsider couldn’t see in. Alex was in the store getting a six-pack of Cokes, as he’d done on a fairly regular basis the previous two weeks.
Miller checked his watch: She’d arrived at 4:46 and was leaving at 4:52. Next to him, a man with a camera was shooting away. Miller raised binoculars. The green Porsche would be easy to spot, plus it had a customized license plate, CR-SRGN. Alex had explained how license plates in Maryland could be bought to individual specifications, and Scan wondered who’d be using that code next year. Surely there was another surgeon with the initials CR.
Alex got back in and started the engine. The van left the parking lot just as the target’s Porsche did. Alex did his own driving. He went north on Ritchie Highway, hung a quick U-turn, and raced south to keep the Porsche in sight. Miller joined him in the right-side seat.
“She takes this road south to Route 50, across the Severn River bridge, then gets off 50 onto Route 2. We want to hit her before she does that. We’ll proceed, take the same exit, and switch cars where I showed you. Too bad,” Alex said. “I was beginning to like this here van.”
“You can buy another with what we’re paying you.”
A grin split the black face. “Yeah, I ‘spect so. Have a better interior on the next one, too.” He turned right, taking the exit onto Route 50. It was a divided, multilane highway. Traffic was moderate to heavy. Alex explained that this was normal.
“No problem getting the job done,” he assured Miller.
“Excellent,” Miller agreed. “Good work, Alex.” Even if you do have a big mouth.
Cathy always drove more sedately with Sally aboard. The little girl craned her neck to see over the dashboard, her left hand fiddling with the seat belt buckle as it usually did. Her mother was relaxing now. It generally took her about this length of time to settle down from a hard day — there were few easy ones — at the Wilmer Eye Institute. It wasn’t stress so much. She’d had two procedures today and would have two more the next day. She loved her work. There were a lot of people now who could see only because of her professional skill, and the satisfaction of that was not something easily communicated, even to Jack. The price of it was that her days were rarely easy ones. The minute precision demanded by ophthalmic surgery denied her coffee — she couldn’t risk the slight tremor in her hands that might come from caffeine — and imposed a degree of concentration on her that few professions demanded. There were more difficult medical skills, but not many. This was the main reason she drove her 911. It was as though in pushing through the air, or taking a tight corner at twenty-five in second gear, the car drained the excess energy from the driver and spread it into the environment. She almost always got home in a good mood. Tonight would be better still since it was Jack’s turn to fix dinner. If the car had been built with a brain, it would have noticed the reduced pressure on accelerator and brakes as they took the Route 2 exit. It was being pampered now, like a faithful horse that had jumped all the fences properly.
“Okay?” Alex asked, keeping west on Route 50 toward Washington.
The other man in the back handed Miller the clipboard with the new time notation. There was a total of seven entries, all but the last complete with photographs. Scan looked at the numbers. The target was on a beautifully regular schedule.
“Fine,” he said after a moment.
“I can’t give you a precise spot for the hit — traffic can make things go a little funny. I’d say we should try on the east side of the bridge.”
“Agreed.”
Cathy Ryan walked into her house fifteen minutes later. She unzipped Sally’s coat and watched her little — “big” — girl struggle out of the sleeves, a skill she was just beginning to acquire. Cathy took it and hung it up before getting out of her coat. Mother and daughter then proceeded to the kitchen, where they heard the unmistakable noise of a husband trying to fix dinner and a television tuned to the MacNeil-Lehrer Report.
“Daddy, look what I did!” Sally said first.
“Oh, great!” Jack took the picture and examined it with great care. “I think we’ll hang this one up.” All of them got hung up. The art gallery in question was the front of the family refrigerator. A magnetized holder gave the finger painting a semi-permanent place over the ice and cold-water dispenser. Sally never noticed that there was a new hanging spot every day. Nor did she know that every such painting was saved, tucked away in a box in the foyer closet.
“Hi, babe.” Jack kissed his wife next. “How were things today?”
“Two cornea replacements. Bernie assisted on the second one — it was a bear. Tomorrow, I’m scheduled for a vitrectomy. Bernie says hi, by the way.”
“How’s his kid?” Jack asked.
“Just an appendectomy, she’ll be climbing the monkey bars next week,” Cathy replied, surveying the kitchen. She often wondered if having Jack fix dinner was worth the wreckage he made of her room. It appeared that he was fixing pot roast, but she wasn’t sure. It wasn’t that Jack was a bad cook — with some things he was pretty good — he was just so damned sloppy about it. Never kept his utensils neat. Cathy always had her knives, forks, and everything else arranged like a surgical instrument tray. Jack would just set them anywhere and spent half of his time looking for where they were.
Sally left the room and found a TV that didn’t have a news show on.
“Good news,” Jack said.
“Oh?”
“I finished up at CIA today.”
“So what are you smiling about?”
“There just isn’t anything I see to make me suspect that we have anything to worry about.” Jack explained for several minutes, keeping within the bounds of classification — mostly. “They’ve never operated over here. They don’t have any contacts over here that we know of. The real thing is that we’re not good targets for them.”
“Why?”
“We’re not political. The people they go after are soldiers, police, judges, mayors, stuff like that –”
“Not to mention the odd prince,” Cathy observed.
“Yeah, well, we’re not one of those either, are we?”
“So what are you telling me?”
“They’re a scary bunch. That Miller kid — well, we’ve talked about that. I’ll feel a little better when they have him back in the can. But these guys are pros. They’re not going to mount an op three thousand miles from home for revenge.”
Cathy took his hand. “You’re sure?”
“Sure as I can be. The intelligence biz isn’t like mathematics, but you get a feel for the other guy, the way his head works. A terrorist kills to make a political point. We ain’t political fodder.”
Cathy gave her husband a gentle smile. “So I can relax now?”
“I think so. Still, keep an eye on the mirror.”
“And you’re not going to carry that gun anymore,” she said hopefully.
“Babe, I like shooting. I forgot what fun a pistol can be. I’m going to keep shooting at the Academy, but, no, I won’t be wearing it anymore.”
“And the shotgun?”
“It hasn’t hurt anybody.”
“I don’t like it, Jack. At least unload it, okay?” She walked off to the bedroom to change.
“Okay.” It wasn’t that important. He’d keep the box of shells right next to the gun, on the top shelf of the closet. Sally couldn’t reach it. Even Cathy had to stretch. It would be safe there. Jack reconsidered all his actions over the past three and a half weeks and decided that they had been worthwhile, really. The alarm system on the house wasn’t such a bad idea, and he liked his new 9mm Browning. He was getting pretty good scores. If he kept at it for a year, maybe he could give Breckenridge a run for his money.