CHAPTER 95

KATRINA WHITE WALKED WEST on Constitution Avenue as brazenly as she’d walked through DC’s Union Station, as brazenly as she’d gone to a security locker and retrieved a runner’s pack with an empty water bottle and drinking hose, knowing that the security cameras there and indeed all around Capitol Hill would pick up her image again and again.

But they would never match her up biometrically.

Not a chance. Ryan Malcomb is a god at these kinds of things.

The Sparrow had changed clothes in the bathroom at the Baltimore train station. She’d left her ski togs in a wastebasket and now wore gray wool pants, sturdy insulated shoes, a pink turtleneck, a single strand of pearls, an off-white cashmere vest, a puffy blue parka, a darker blue neck gaiter, and an insulated blue ball cap with earflaps. She’d also bought a lapel button celebrating the inauguration of Sue Winter and one of the small American flags being waved by nearly everyone crowding the sidewalks and crosswalks of the broad avenue that led from Capitol Hill to the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials.

A few blocks behind her, along Pennsylvania Avenue, a crowd roared. It was nine fifteen. The presidential motorcade must be approaching.

White did not care. She kept walking away from Capitol Hill, against the flow of pedestrian traffic and away from the heart of the inauguration activities.

Once she crossed Twelfth Street, the crowds began to thin. Independence Avenue was virtually empty except for police cars parked sideways, their lights flashing.

The Sparrow could barely hear the U.S. Marine Corps band playing over speakers when she neared Fourteenth Street and the Washington Monument. Her attention jumped to the intermittent wailing of an approaching ambulance’s siren.

White stopped by a small knot of tourists staring up at the monument and watched several black Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows lead a private ambulance through the various police blockades, heading toward Capitol Hill.

The Sparrow checked her watch. Half past nine now.

She got out the burn phone again and texted: Half past nine on the dot!

There was a pause, and then: We aim to please.

She smiled, texted, And I will be pleased to aim.

Several moments passed before a reply came: Patience, my little Sparrow. Patience above all.