Near Dupont Circle in Washington, DC, a man calling himself Pablo Cruz, a fit man with hawkish features wearing a Washington Nationals hoodie, jeans, and work boots, adjusted the shoulder straps of the heavy, black dry bag on his back.
He ambled down New Hampshire Avenue, then made a right on M Street. Near the bridge into Georgetown, he took a right onto Twenty-Sixth Street and went to the dead end.
Cruz glanced around before hurrying past a sign that said Rock Creek Park was closed after dark. Twenty yards downslope, he left the path, cut to his right, and peered up at the lights in the nearest apartment building, focusing on two windows on the third floor on adjacent walls of a corner.
When he got the angle on that corner right, still watching those two windows over his shoulder, he backed down the slope woods. He shuffled his feet through the leaves and wondered if his read of the city’s drainage schematics was correct.
His left heel found the edge of the corrugated drainpipe, and he smiled. Cruz got around and below it. He felt for the edge of the cover, found it, and retrieved a hammer, a chisel, and a headlamp from the dry bag.
Cruz turned on the lamp’s soft red light feature and waited until he heard a bus crossing the M Street Bridge over the park before attacking the spot welds that held the cover in place. Twenty minutes later, he pried the cover off and set it aside.
He turned the lamp off and returned it, along with his tools, to the dry bag, then sealed the bag and put it inside the drainpipe a few feet back. Then he replaced the cover and tamped it into place.
Done, he climbed above the pipe and looked at those windows on the third floor of the apartment building again. Cruz fixed the image in his mind.
He left then, angling back across the slope to the path up to Twenty-Sixth Street and telling himself he could find his way here again, even in the pitch-dark, even under the threat of death.