The Reluctant Assassin Read Free Page B

still have friends in Quantico.
    Usually federal agents had to be twenty-three years of age minimum before they could wear the shield, but Chevie had been part of a trial programme to combat the increasing problem of terrorist infiltration of high schools. A hand-picked group of state wards had spent a semester in Quantico, and had then been placed undercover in various schools attended by suspected sympathizers, in a strictly observational capacity. No infiltration, no confrontation. Chevie had spent six months in LA keeping tabs on an Iranian family whom the Feds believed were trying to start a cell in California. The assignment had ended with a public disaster outside a Los Angeles theatre where Chevie had used her training to disarm a drunken teen who’d been threatening the Iranians. Unfortunately the teen had been wounded in the process and the entire fiasco was captured on a camera phone. The hothouse programme was hurriedly shut down and Chevie was whisked off to London for babysitting duty so a senate committee would not cotton on to the fact that the agent involved in the Hollywood Centre Affair was a minor.

    •••

    Chevie did thirty minutes of cardio, thirty minutes of core, then shadowboxed in the mirror until her Lycra leggings and vest were dark with sweat. She was in good enough shape to whip the top ten percent of law-enforcement officers anywhere in the world. And she could shoot an apple off a tree at a hundred paces.
    Do I look seventeen?
    As far as Chevie could see, she looked pretty much the same as she had at sixteen. At five feet six she was a little short for an FBI agent, but she was lithe and fast, with a delicate oval face and the glossy black hair typical of Native Americans.
    I am going to get through this assignment, she thought. They don’t get rid of Chevron Savano so easily. There are worse things than boredom.
Which was the last routine thought she was to have for a while.
    Riley could not for the life of him have described his predicament. Had there been a Bible handy, he could not have testified on it as to whether he was alive or dead. His thoughts were a jumble of fear and confusion, and he found that the tough, stoical core of his spirit, which had kept him going through the terrifying years with Garrick, was totally absent.
    His senses were spun together like the muddy streams flowing into the Thames, and he felt an urge to vomit that was somehow in his mind and not his gut.
Is this the pit? he wondered. Has the devil claimed me?
    He ordered his hand to wave, but nothing happened; or perhaps it did and he could not see it.
    It seemed somehow that there was a light up ahead, glowing like a streetlamp. Though Riley could neither see the light nor calculate in which direction “up ahead” lay, he somehow knew these things to be true.
    I am about to arrive, he realized.
    Chevie stood in front of the mirror and watched her image split in two. For the briefest moment she thought that she had finally gone stir-crazy; then she realized that the mirror had cracked from roof to ceiling.
    That’s bad luck for someone, probably me.
    Then more cracks appeared, jagged black lightning rents that divided the room into sections.
    Could it be an earthquake? Do they have those in London?
    The mirror cracked once, twice, a thousand times with a sound like automatic weapon fire. The cracks raced past the edges of the mirrors, streaking across the walls. Chevie finally moved when the lacquered floorboards beneath her sneakers began to splinter and fall in torn chunks through to the hallway below.
    “What the hell . . . ?” she cried, picking a safe path to the door.
    Overhead the lights flickered, then exploded, showering Chevie with glass and sparks. Through the window, she could see streetlamps exploding all along Bayley Street and around the square itself. Beyond the square the blackout rippled down toward Covent Garden and Soho as though some giant night creature was swallowing chunks of