CHAPTER 107

KATRINA WHITE AVOIDED LAW enforcement efforts to hem her in near the medical center by going through the woods, crossing Rock Creek Parkway, and calling an Uber to pick her up near Rose Park in Georgetown. The driver, a woman, took her up Wisconsin Avenue and dropped her at an all-night Whole Foods Market off Fortieth Street before the second and third series of checkpoints were erected in the city.

The Sparrow had walked out of the Whole Foods and immediately hailed a second Uber. It brought her out the River Road to Potomac and then northwest to a memorized address off the heavily wooded Lloyd Road.

She had the driver, a male, drop her at the mailbox. She waited for him to leave, then started up the darkened driveway, thinking how a routine was a weakness to be exploited. At least it was in her profession. Routine allowed a predator to learn the patterns of its prey and wait in ambush if it knew just the right spot.

White knew just the right spot. She’d known it for well over eight weeks, almost as long as she and other Maestro operatives had been studying U.S. Supreme Court justice Margaret Blevins’s day-to-day habits.

The justice, they’d discovered, wasn’t exactly an athlete, but she worked out on a daily basis, often with a three-and-a-half-mile run through her neighborhood and the surrounding area. She ran three or four days a week, rain or shine, cold or hot, darkness or daylight.

With or without a member of her security detail, Blevins always turned off St. James Road, ran northwest on Betteker Lane to a trailhead beyond Bevern Lane, then went down into the matrix of pathways that crisscrossed Watts Branch Park.

The creek that bisected the park and separated Lloyd Road from Gregerscroft Road was shallow enough to wade through in most places. But the paths Blevins liked to run all converged on the footbridge not far from the cul-de-sac where the justice lived. A thicket of dense fir trees grew on the near side of the bridge. But she loved the birches that grew on the far side near the bench where she often stretched before continuing the rest of the way home.

The Sparrow heard sirens begin to wail in the distance.

The Sparrow stayed well outside the yard of the house on Lloyd Road, paused, and dropped into the west side of Watts Branch Park. She studied the sky, which was turning a pale gray as the stars began to fade.

Dawn was coming. And the sirens were getting closer.

White pulled up a GPS app on the burner phone to take her to the path and the bridge. She plunged into the woods and headed downhill at a gentle slant. At the bottom, she quickly found the trail, turned on her flashlight app, and began to run.

When the Sparrow was almost to the footbridge, she stopped and listened, hearing the creek and little else save the sirens, which were whooping in the near distance toward Blevins’s house.

They’re coming for her, White thought, moving out of the pines and seeing the birches near the creek just ahead of her in the growing light. But I’m here first. If she went out for her run this morning, I’m here first.

With those positive thoughts coursing through her head, the Sparrow slipped in among four bushy hemlock trees on the creek bank by the footbridge. They were no more than six feet tall and the only conifers growing there.

Amid the hemlocks, there was a low spot that she’d hid in when she used the first sonic weapon M had bought in Havana, the one she’d trained on Blevins several times in the prior weeks as the justice crossed the bridge on her run.

But the sonic device in her pack now was different, far more powerful. It would do much more than make her sick. And if that didn’t work, she had a gun she’d stashed in that low spot in the hemlocks a month before.

The sirens died as White dug up the pistol from under the ground, removed it from its plastic case, and set it aside. Then she shrugged off the knapsack and turned on the device.

Malcomb had paid a fortune to one of her old corrupt bosses at the GRU for this weapon, the latest tool Mother Russia was developing to neutralize enemies of the state in public settings.

Feeling the hum of the device booting up, the Sparrow heard a squirrel chatter at the dawn and the faint sound of a distant car passing.

Then she heard the definite clicking of something metal against rocks and then footfalls amid the clicking. She peered through the hemlocks toward her back trail and the noise and saw the headlamp bobbing and coming closer.

White lifted the triggering device and aimed it toward the bridge, roughly twelve feet away, close enough to hit Justice Blevins hard, killing her outright or stunning her so badly the Sparrow could easily move in and follow up. She lowered it again and waited.

The clicking was louder, and the headlamp was closer, no more than fifty yards back, where the trail to the bridge left the pines. Suddenly the headlamp went off, but she could see the outline of her prey still running, still coming right at the footbridge.

The Sparrow took her attention off Blevins, raised the trigger again, aimed it at the west side of the little bridge. She quickly glanced to her right, saw the justice coming around the close bend in the trail.

Her thumb found the button.