“The front door just opened. We have a twenty on Nichols.”
“He’s leaving early,” Vic observed, stamping his feet against the ground. “Are you ready to move, Terri?”
“Already on the road,” the woman’s voice replied over his headset.
Harry felt the lock click behind him and then he was out, into the darkness. There was something he loved about this time, the early morning before the world was awake. He was a creature of the night, at his most comfortable when surrounded by darkness.
But something was wrong. He could feel it in the air. He was wearing a light jacket, the.45 holstered underneath close to his side.
He picked up the pace, jogging out onto the country road that ran past his house. The countryside had changed greatly since his parents had been alive, the urban sprawl spreading out from Alexandria and Richmond in all directions. But Cypress had somehow escaped, remaining a largely rural community. At times, that was a good thing.
“Start moving, Vic. I’m on him.”
At her words, he leaped from his cover and ran toward the back door of the manor, ducking low to minimize his silhouette against the moonlight.
The security system was sophisticated, but nothing he wasn’t capable of handling. His only problem was time-Nichols’ early departure had thrown them. Was he going to stick to his routine, or cut the run short today?
The woman had been behind him for ten minutes. She wasn’t a local, Harry knew that much for certain. It was the main reason he still lived in Cypress, despite the commute and other disadvantages. Someone who didn’t belong stuck out like a sore thumb.
Speaking of sore… He slowed down and limped to the side of the road, sitting down and breathing heavily.
Her pace never slackened as she ran toward him and he watched her come, his hand across his stomach and near the butt of his Colt.
“You all right?” she asked, slowing as she came up. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, a pleasant if not pretty face gazing down upon him. A wire ran from her ear to what looked like an MP3 player at her waist.
“Stomach cramps,” he responded with a grimace.
A look of concern came into her eyes. “Are you going to make it all right?”
“Yeah, just need to catch my breath. The doctor said I needed to run every morning and I’m going to do it if it kills me,” Harry joked.
“Hopefully it won’t come to that,” she replied, chuckling at his humor. “Good luck and enjoy your run.”
She seemed to pass on almost reluctantly, hitting her stride again only when she was twenty yards beyond him.
“I’ve been made,” she hissed into her lip mike once she was out of earshot of Nichols.
“You’re sure?”
“He had a case of stomach cramps and sat down by the edge of the road,” was her bitter retort. “Fine actor, but-”
“But fifteen-year spec-ops veterans don’t get stomach cramps from running three hundred yards,” the other man finished for her.
“Exactly. And he’s packing.”
“Vic, are you hearing this? Are you in?”
“Yes to both questions. Where is he now?”
“He just passed me, I’m laying here in the stubble of a corn field.”
“Be more careful next time.”
She was behind him again. He could feel her, a palpable presence there in the darkness and he pressed on. Just a couple hundred yards more.
A mailbox loomed ahead of him and he turned in, his feet pounding down a gravel driveway. The building at the end had started life as a barn until it had been renovated in the ‘60s as a country house by an enterprising lobbyist in the Johnson administration.
Harry went up to the front step and slid back a metal hinge on the door handle, exposing a biometric scanner. A quick scan of his thumbprint and he was in, closing the door carefully behind him.
The front rooms were nicely-furnished, giving the impression of middle-class occupancy. He didn’t spend much time there within view of the windows, making his way through the darkness to the basement door.
“He went into a house,” Vic heard the woman declare, giving his partner an address to run down.
“Stay there and stay out of sight,” she was instructed. Vic diverted his attention from the conversation in his ear, focusing instead on Nichols’ desk. A laptop computer sat closed in the top drawer of the desk and he took it out, doing a careful examination of it for any possible hazards.
His partner’s voice came back on the network. “The deed was registered in the name of Manuel Diaz in 2005.”
“And?” Terri asked.
“He’s not your average Joe Sixpack. Nichols served with this guy when he first joined the CIA.” There was a long pause, silence filling up the other end of the network. “We’re looking at something strange here-running cross-check now-Diaz died in 2003. Somebody used his identity to buy the house.”
“Nichols?”
