The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(56)

chapter

forty-two





DELILAH


Delilah was still trying to doze off when she felt a jolt and realized the plane had touched down. Her ears had been popping, but she hadn’t expected to arrive so soon. She checked her watch—not quite four o’clock in the morning local time.

She pressed the button to raise the seat. John stirred across from her, still reclined. Ordinarily he was a light sleeper—a survival reflex, she knew. But when he felt safe, as apparently he did inside an airborne private jet, it was a different story.

The plane began to decelerate. John opened his eyes, stretched, and raised his seat.

“Well,” she said. “At least you got some sleep.”

He pinched his nostrils, closed his eyes, and blew out to pop his ears. “I’m guessing that makes one of us?”

She nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. If I’d stayed behind, I wouldn’t have slept any better. And I would have been pissed on top of it.”

“Does that mean you’re not?”

She sighed. “I was thinking . . . I wasn’t being fair. It used to be you who tried to pressure me to get out of the life. And I wouldn’t, because I wasn’t ready.”

“You had your reasons. I shouldn’t have pressured you.”

She laughed. “Yes, that’s true. But I could be a little more understanding myself. I care about Dox, too. You know that. Livia . . . I’m mixed on.”

“Only because you’re protective of Dox. That’s no vice.”

He was right about that. “He’s a good friend.”

“The best. But don’t tell him I said that. When the opportunity presents itself, I still need to be able to give him shit.”

“What you said before . . . about how, if I needed help, I wouldn’t be able to stop him.”

John looked at her. “It’s true.”

She nodded. “I know it’s true. No one could. I don’t want to lose sight of that. Or anything else that really matters.”

While the plane continued to taxi, John used the bathroom. Delilah followed suit. When she came back, he was closing the laptop. He would have connected, she knew, through the plane’s satellite hotspot.

“All good?” she said.

“Yeah. Turns out we have two more people to pick up, not just this girl Maya.”

For a second, she thought she’d heard wrong. “You’re kidding,” she said. But it was a reflex. John never kidded about that kind of thing.

He told her about the other two—Marvin Manus’s woman and her boy. The woman had seen something worrisome and was afraid to go home. Manus was flying in to be with them, but he wouldn’t land for a few more hours.

“Is this really necessary?” she said. “This Manus . . . we don’t even know him.”

“Dox told him we’d do it.”

“Shouldn’t he have checked with us first?”

“I’m sure he had a good reason. And it’s only for a few hours.” He paused, then added, “I’m sorry.”

She suddenly had a bad feeling about all of this. It had been a nice moment on the plane after they landed. But now she could see in his eyes that the relaxed demeanor of Paris and Kamakura was gone. In its place was another facet of his personality, the facet she had first encountered a long time ago in Macau. She wanted that part of him to be confined to the past, and it was upsetting to see it abruptly recrudesce. It reminded her too much of how cold he had become, how much he had reverted, when that megalomaniac Hilger had rendered Dox. But she realized she was being stupid. They were operational now, whether she liked it or not. Did she want him to be sloppy?

She told herself there was nothing to worry about. This wasn’t like the thing with Hilger. Dox wasn’t being held. There was no gun to his head, at least not literally. John wasn’t going to spiral. They would pick up these three passengers, babysit them for a little while, and go back to Paris as though none of it had ever happened.

She hoped.

They got off the plane directly onto the tarmac less than fifty meters from the terminal. They were at Leesburg Executive Airport, about forty miles northwest of DC. Dulles would have been the more obvious choice, which was of course part of the reason Kanezaki had used this smaller regional outpost instead.

Just ten minutes after landing, they were driving out of the airport in the car Kanezaki had left for them—a Honda SUV she assumed he had selected because of its popularity in the region, and therefore its unobtrusiveness. Delilah was behind the wheel. She preferred to drive, and was glad John didn’t have the typical male need to be in control of the car. Besides, he was a better shot than she was, so it made sense that he would be their first line of defense with one of the two Glocks Kanezaki had left for them under the two front seats, each with a bellyband holster.

It was only a few miles to the meeting point—a Hampton Inn motel in Leesburg. But they took a circuitous route involving surface roads and several quiet neighborhoods. On this, she deferred to John’s instructions. She had never known someone with better countersurveillance instincts. Traffic was light, and it was easy to confirm they weren’t being followed.

They pulled into the motel parking lot and drove to the periphery, where there were fewer cars. She saw the vehicle they were looking for—a silver minivan. It was in one of the center spaces, no car left or right, room to drive forward or back as circumstances required. A good tactical spot. But that wasn’t unexpected.