Past midnight and beneath a chill, driving rain, a pile of leaves stirred in a gully in Rock Creek Park, below Twenty-Sixth Street. A hand emerged slowly and pushed the sopping dead leaves off the cowl of dead skin Pablo Cruz still wore.
The skin and the jacket had kept his upper body mostly dry, but when Cruz sat up, he was drenched from the waist down and using every breathing skill he knew to keep his core warm.
His feet were numb, and when he stood, his knees were stiff. The narcotics the doctors had given him were wearing off. His face ached. His broken teeth screamed.
An ordinary man might have succumbed to hypothermia by now. A weaker man might be focused on finding drugs to kill the pain.
But Cruz was neither ordinary nor weak. He’d long ago trained himself to be a superior man, one who could control his emotions, mind, and pain. Whatever it took to survive, he would do, and he would deal with the physical damage later.
The assassin peeled off the cowl of skin and buried it before he crawled out of the gully about three-quarters of the way up the slope above the creek bed. Blue lights flashed far to the northwest, down through the trees, down there on the parkway.
Forcing his mind to his contingency plans, Cruz figured he had only one chance of getting out of the nation’s capital alive. He’d heard all the sirens heading toward the hospital and seen the roadblocks at the bridges to Virginia from a distance.
Cruz expected that all major and minor roads leading out of the District were now closed. The Metro was down. He hadn’t heard a plane in the sky in hours. Few cars had passed, and even fewer helicopters were flying in the relentless rain.
He traversed north along the muddy slope, using the shadows thrown by streetlights and buildings up on Twenty-Sixth to make out downed logs and low-hanging tree branches. He reached the M Street bridge and crawled through the brush and up the side of the embankment by the abutment.
Above him on the bridge, he heard two distraught-sounding women hurrying toward Georgetown and talking about President Hobbs’s death. Cruz allowed himself a moment of congratulation, a mental pat on the back for a job not only complete but well executed. All in all.
He considered climbing the rest of the way up to the street and just crossing it with his head down to the rain, the way he imagined the women who’d just passed him had done. But instinct overruled the idea. He scrambled back down and beneath the bridge.
Cruz stopped there when he heard a mechanical noise in the distance. Tanks!
They were bringing in soldiers and tanks. Of course they were. Larkin had declared martial law, hadn’t he?
For a moment, the assassin felt unnerved. It was one thing to evade police and even federal agents, but an army?
It won’t be an army, he told himself. They’ll be brought in as a presence, a threat. There won’t be a soldier on every corner. Or will there?
Cruz shook off the questions. In dire situations such as this, he’d always found it better to stick to the plan and execute it rather than ponder it to death.
He kept on to the north of the bridge where Twenty-Sixth hit that dead end. When he climbed up to the edge of the park, he could see back to M Street, where one tank had blocked the entrance to the bridge. A second was continuing on toward Georgetown.
Cruz crept across the slope, peering up at the lights in the nearest apartment building, then focusing on two windows on the third floor on adjacent walls of a corner. When he got the angle right, and still watching those two windows, he slid down the hill and shuffled his feet through the leaves, wondering if the dry bag could have been found by a kid exploring in the park or by a nosy dog. Or maybe the rain had flushed the drain cover off and then out and…
His heel found the edge of the corrugated drainpipe, which was belching water. Cruz got around and below it, felt for the edge of the cover, and pried it off. The dry bag slid out and fell at his feet before he could reach inside. He knew smiling would be torture, but he grinned anyway.
Cruz did his best not to moan at the pain as he stooped to pick the dry bag up, thinking, Now? Now I’ve got a real chance.