Knapsack on his back, he was disassembling his weapon as he walked. In the center of the room was a manhole cover. Underneath Central Park were numerous tunnels, some from old subway line construction, some carrying sewage and water, and some just built for now unknown reasons and forgotten about.

Robie was about to use a complicated combination thereof to get the hell out of there.

He slid the manhole cover into place after he lowered himself into the hole. Using a flashlight, he navigated down a metal ladder and his feet hit solid earth thirty feet later. The route he had to follow was in his head. Nothing about a mission was ever written down. Things written down could be discovered if Robie ended up dead instead of his target.

Even for Robie, whose short-term memory was excellent, it had been an arduous process.

He moved methodically, neither fast nor slowly. He had plugged the barrel of his rifle with the quick-hardening solution and pitched it down one tunnel; a constant flow of fast water would carry it out to the East River, where it would sink into oblivion. And even if it were found somehow the plugged barrel would be ruined for any ballistics tests.

The stock of the weapon was dropped down another tunnel under a pile of fallen bricks that looked like they had lain there for a hundred years and probably had. Even if the stock was discovered it could not be traced back to the bullet that had just killed his target. Not without the firing pin, which Robie had already pocketed.

The smells down here were not pleasant. There were over six thousand miles of tunnels under Manhattan, remarkable for an island without a single working mine of any kind. The tunnels carried pipes that transported millions of gallons of drinking water a day to satisfy the inhabitants of America’s most populous city. Other tunnels carried away the sewage made by these very same inhabitants to enormous treatment plants that would transform it into a variety of things, often turning waste into something useful.

Robie walked at the same pace for an hour. At the end of that hour he looked up and saw it. The ladder with the markings DNE EHT.

“The End” spelled backward. He did not smile at someone’s idea of a lame joke. Killing people was as serious as it got. He had no reason to be particularly happy.

He put on the blue jumpsuit and hard hat that were hanging on a peg on the tunnel wall. Carrying his knapsack on his back, he climbed the ladder and emerged from the opening.

Robie had walked from midtown to uptown entirely underground. He actually would have preferred the subway.

He entered a work zone with barricades erected around an opening to the street. Men in blue jumpsuits just like his worked away at some project. Traffic moved around them, cabs honking. People walked up and down the sidewalks.

Life went on.

Except for the guy back at the park.

Robie didn’t look at any of the workers, and not a single one of them looked at him. He walked to a white van parked next to the work zone and climbed in the passenger side. As soon as his door thunked closed, the driver put the van in gear and drove off. He knew the city well and took alternate routes to avoid most of the traffic as he worked his way out of Manhattan and onto the road to LaGuardia Airport.

Robie climbed into the back to change. When the van pulled up to the terminal’s passenger drop-off, he stepped out dressed in a suit with briefcase in hand and walked into the airport terminal.

LaGuardia, unlike its equally famous cousin, JFK, was king of the short-haul flights, handling more of them than just about any other airport outside of Chicago and Atlanta. Robie’s flight was very short, about forty minutes in the air to D.C.—barely enough time to stow your carry-on, get comfortable, and listen to your belly rumble because you weren’t going to get anything to eat on a flight that brief.

His jet touched down thirty-eight minutes later at Reagan National.

The car was waiting for him.

He got in, picked up the Washington Postlying on the backseat, and scanned the headlines. It wasn’t there yet, of course, although there would be news online already. He didn’t care to read about it. He already knew all he needed to know.

But tomorrow the headline on every newspaper in the country would be about the man in Central Park who had gone out to jog for his health and ended up dead as dead could be.

A few would mourn the dead man, Robie knew. They would be his associates, whose opportunity to inflict pain and suffering on others would be gone, hopefully forever. The rest of the world would applaud the man’s demise.

Robie had killed evil before. People were happy, thrilled that another monster had met his end. But the world went on, as screwed up as ever, and another monster—maybe even worse—would replace the fallen one.

On that clear, crisp morning in the normally serene Central Park his trigger pull would be remembered for a while. Investigations would be made. Diplomatic broadsides exchanged. More people would die in retaliation. And then life would go on.

And serving his country, Will Robie would get on a plane or train or bus or, like today, use his own two feet, and pull another trigger, or throw another knife, or strangle the life out of someone using simply his bare hands. And then another tomorrow would come and it would be as though someone had hit a giant reset button and the world would look exactly the same.

But he would continue to do it, and for only one reason. If he didn’t, the world had no chance to get better. If people with some courage in their hearts stood by and did nothing, the monsters won every time. He was not going to let that happen.

The car drove through the streets, reaching the western edge of Fairfax County, Virginia. It pulled through a guarded gate. When it stopped Robie got out and walked into the building. He flashed no creds, and didn’t stop to ask permission to enter.

He trudged down a short hall to a room where he would sit for a bit, send a few emails, and then go home to his apartment in D.C. Normally after a mission he would walk the streets aimlessly until the wee hours. It was just his way of handling the aftermath of what he did for a living.

Today he simply wanted to go home and sit and do nothing more exacting than stare out his window.

That was not to be.

The man came in.

The man often came in carrying another mission for Robie in the form of a USB stick.

But this time he carried nothing except a frown.

“Blue Man wants to meet with you,” he said simply.

Nothing much the man could have said would have intrigued or surprised Robie.

But this did.

Robie had seen a lot of Blue Man lately. But before that—for twelve years before that, to be precise—he hadn’t seen him at all.

“Blue Man?”

“Yes. The car’s waiting.”

CHAPTER

4

JESSICA REEL SAT ALONE AT a table in the airport lounge. She was dressed in a gray pantsuit with a white blouse. Her flat shoes were black with a single strap over the top of each foot. They were lightweight and built for speed and mobility if she had to run.

Her only nod to eccentricity was the hat that sat on the table in front of her. It was a straw-colored panama with a black silk band, ideally suited for traveling because it was collapsible. Reel had traveled much over the years, but she had never worn a hat during any of those previous trips.