CHAPTER 103
Amtrak Maintenance Facility, Washington, DC
Elise Courville had swallowed Rowan Anderson’s explanation for their trip to the train yard—that the man in Paris “wants us to tell his guy how we’re going to do it. That’s all.”
The rail yard provided perfect cover for Anderson’s lethal intent, though navigating their way through the extensive construction on the facility’s north side proved difficult.
They crept along until the Peugeot found the gate in the chain-link fence surrounding the construction site.
Anderson was in hunter mode, her killing senses on high alert. This was a perfect spot to end the life of Elise Courville—ambassador’s daughter, senator’s wife, terrorist co-conspirator.
If Anderson felt any emotion about what she was going to do, she didn’t show it. Somehow she had always managed to talk Courville down from the ledge of her perpetual anxiety. She would lend the frightened woman her welcome strength and support this one final time.
“The message said the gate would be unlocked—just pull on the padlock and it’ll open. We can drive in and he’ll come to us. Would you get the gate, Elise?”
“They always want to meet in the nastiest places,” Courville half joked as she got out of the car.
Anderson kept her eyes on the woman as she screwed the suppressor onto her pistol. When the other woman tugged on the lock with no success, she mouthed, It’s locked. Then, true to form, Elise Courville turned to Rowan Anderson for guidance.
Anderson opened her window and told her to try again.
Courville tugged on the padlock a few more times, then shook her head in frustration.
“Come here and let me see if I can call him,” Anderson said, holding up her cell phone in her left hand.
Courville trudged over to the driver’s side and put her hands on the roof of the Peugeot, leaning toward Anderson’s open window.
Anderson looked up and noticed that her target was scanning the rail yard for potential threats. “You’re learning,” Anderson told her protégée. “But it’s a little too late for that.”
Rowan Anderson squeezed three rounds into Elise Courville’s chest, then put the car in Reverse and backed up a few feet, turning the wheel to the left to avoid running over the dead woman.
She leaned over to the passenger side and lifted Courville’s Birkin bag from the floorboard. Being the kind of person who might fly to Monte Carlo on a whim, Rowan knew, Courville carried her passport everywhere she went.
Anderson used a handkerchief to open the bag and pull out the passport.
Then she opened the door of the Peugeot and walked over to the body.
Elise Courville’s lifeless eyes stared into the darkness, and the bullets had made a mess of her chest. Gingerly, Anderson lifted the lapel of her coat and slid the passport into an interior pocket, making it a simple matter for the DC cops to determine the identity of the deceased.
Careful to avoid any blood, Anderson swept her foot side to side so as to erase her footprints. They might get one, and they might even identify her as its owner. But by then she would be living under non-extradition status in Morocco.
Rowan checked her watch. A particular sequence of events now needed to happen in order for her to make her escape. First, someone must find Elise Courville’s corpse. Second, they’d have to find Nat’s body and the gun, too.
She practiced her breathing during the hour-long drive north on the Capital Beltway and eventually I-95. It was just work, she told herself.
The bad music on the radio bothered her more than what she had just done to Elise Courville, a woman with whom she had laughed and cried on several occasions. Yet she had killed her without blinking an eye.
But Nat Phillips? Totally different. The connection Rowan Anderson felt to him was primal … instinctive … unfamiliar yet hypnotic. And now she was about to destroy perhaps the only bit of goodness she had ever experienced in her life.