Eight months of file on the Deacon, and Liz read the worst of it out loud across the dinner table because she couldn’t stand to hold it by herself.
“Nine that we’re confident about.
Probably twenty.” She had a fork in one hand and hadn’t used it.
“A stairwell.
A single-car accident on a dry road.
A forty-one-year-old with no history who has a heart attack in a parking garage the week before he testifies.
Every one of them closed by a local ME who had no reason to look twice.”
“They’re all witnesses?”
“That’s the whole signature.
Not defendants, not informants.
People who saw something and were nine days from saying it in front of a jury.” She put the fork down.
“He isn’t a killer for hire, Tom.
He’s a delay.
Somebody pays him and a case stops existing.”
“And Reddington gave him to you.”
“Reddington gave him to us with a name and a methodology and a level of detail that Cooper has decided not to think about.” Liz rubbed her thumb along the edge of the table.
“One of the Deacon’s jobs took a witness out of a case Reddington had money in.
That’s it.
That’s the entire reason a man is on a list.”
“So it’s personal.”
“It’s accounting.
With him, I’m starting to think those are the same word.”
Tom asked the next question in the voice of a husband making conversation, which is the only voice he had available.
“Do you have somebody in a room right now?”
“Carla Gomez,” Liz said.
“Thirty-six.
Moved cartel money through four dry cleaners and a soccer league for six years, decided she wanted to see forty, and gave us a lieutenant.
She’s in a row house in Northeast with two of ours on the front door and a court date on Thursday.” She looked up.
“She asked me if it was safe.
I said yes.”
“Was that true?”
“It was true when I said it.” Liz pushed the plate away.
“Ressler wants her moved.
Cooper says moving her is how they’ve lost the last three, because the move is the only hour anybody’s off a wall.
So she stays, and we sit on the door, and Thursday comes.”
“What does Reddington say?”
“Reddington says the Deacon has already decided, and that we should stop asking where he’ll be and start asking who told him.” She shook her head.
“Cooper hates it when he’s the sane one in the room.”
“And you?”
“I think a woman I promised is going to sleep on a rented mattress for three nights and I have no idea whether I lied to her.” She looked at him with the flat, straight tiredness she never showed anybody at the Post Office.
“Tell me something about denominators.”
“Tell me you’ll eat first.”
“That’s not the trade.”
“It’s the only trade on offer.” Tom pushed the plate back toward her.
“Eat, and I’ll tell you about Marcus, who this week correctly identified an improper fraction and then bit a boy.”
“He bites.”
“He bites.
There’s paperwork.”
He drove out at eleven the next night and parked six blocks off, and the whole way there he ran the arithmetic on a body he couldn’t fully afford.
Tradecraft was free now.
The routes, the angles, the habit of clocking a parked car by the depth of dust on its windshield, all of that had stopped being a skill and become ordinary posture.
Combat was a different account.
The reflexes were there, at the bottom, at the level the pressure under his sternum priced as Familiar: enough to defend himself badly, not enough to end anything.
Deception sat in the one slot he owned, and Berlin’s cutout was ninety minutes of driving and one phone call away, and dropping the mask tonight to pick up a fist meant walking into that meeting as a stranger.
So he kept the mask and went in soft.
He knew he was doing it.
That was the part he’d remember.
The row house sat mid-block with two agents on the stoop, and the alley behind it was eleven feet wide with a dogleg, and every threat assessment the Bureau had written called it too narrow to work.
The Deacon came down it at twelve-forty.
Tom took him at the alley mouth, forty feet short of the rear door, and got exactly one clean second before it went wrong.
The man moved like a surgeon with a schedule.
The first pass came underhand and inside, a curved blade shaped for a carotid, and it went past Tom’s throat close enough that he felt the air move against his jaw.
The body saved him.
Not Tom.
The body dropped its weight and turned inside the arc because the Major had spent someone’s adolescence teaching it to, and the two of them went into the brick wall together hard enough to knock a downspout loose.
“You’re not federal,” the Deacon said, conversational, working the blade back toward Tom’s hand.
“Federal shouts.”
Tom didn’t answer.
Answering costs air.
“Somebody hired you for her.” Another pass, shorter.
Tom took it across the collarbone and the whole left side of his shirt went warm.
“That’s poor planning.
She’s paid for.
There’s no second buyer on a paid contract, it makes the market unusable.”
They went down together into standing water and the blade came out of the Deacon’s hand and skittered somewhere behind a dumpster.
After that it stopped being a fight and became work.
Tom hit him with an elbow, then a knee, then the heel of his hand, and none of it was clean, and twice he got hit back hard enough that the alley tipped.
He won because the other man had come to do a quiet job with a scalpel and had no plan for a brawl in standing water, and Tom won by ten seconds and one bad decision on the Deacon’s part, and there was no version of this he could tell himself had gone well.
He knelt in the water afterward, bleeding, breathing like a machine with a fault, and made himself look at the number instead of the outcome.
Half an inch.
The blade had missed the artery by half an inch and the difference had been supplied by the wall, not by him.
The gap was real, and it wasn’t going to close by wishing.
He could name it now, which was worth something.
The body could survive one round against one unprepared professional in a confined space with a wall to help.
That was the ceiling.
It would not survive two men.
It wouldn’t survive one man who had come expecting him.
And on the night Berlin worked out that his mole had turned, what arrived would be neither of those things.
It would be four contractors with a floor plan and thirty seconds, and this body, at its current price, would last about eleven of them.
He dragged the Deacon to the far end of the alley and put him behind the dumpster, alive, breathing, folded so the FBI would find him within the hour.
Then he went up onto the loading dock in the shadow and started to leave.
“Federal agents!” Ressler’s voice, at the alley mouth, weapon up.
A flashlight beam came down the brick, swung, stopped on the wet ground and the loose downspout.
“Somebody was standing here.”
A second voice, further back.
“Sir?”
“Blood.
Not much.
It’s fresh.” The beam swept the dumpster and stopped ten feet short.
“Get me lights.”
Tom went over the dock rail and out through a service gate and didn’t run, because running is a sound.
He should have kept going.
He didn’t.
From a stairwell across the street he watched the alley for eleven minutes, and at minute four, two men came into it who were not FBI.
Dark clothing, no markings, unhurried.
One took the Deacon out from behind the dumpster and carried him to a van with the ease of a man moving furniture.
The other worked over the ground with a bottle and a brush, the blood, the downspout, the water, until the alley read as an alley.
They were gone before the Bureau’s lights arrived.
Tom sat on the stairs with his hand pressed against his collarbone and understood exactly nothing about what he’d just watched.
Reddington had put the Deacon on a list for the FBI to hunt and then taken him off the street before the FBI could close a hand on him.
Both moves cost money.
Both moves were his.
There was a reason, and it was consistent, and Tom couldn’t see a millimeter of it.
He drove to Arlington on back streets, let himself into Christopher Hargrave’s apartment, and put eleven stitches into his own collarbone at the bathroom mirror with a field kit and a bottle of lidocaine three months past date.
Nothing under his sternum moved while he did it.
No new slot.
No second competence.
No credit for surviving something he’d walked into underequipped, because the pressure in his chest had never once paid him for intent, and intent was most of what tonight had been.
He tied off the last stitch, washed his hands, and drove home to be a husband by four, with the cut wrapped under a T-shirt and a lie ready about a nail in the garage.
Streets talk.
Want the next move before the cops, the heroes, or anyone else?
The Syndicate reads first.
Hustler.
$5.
Twelve chapters ahead.
Enforcer.
$9.
Nineteen chapters ahead.
Kingpin.
$15.
Twenty-six chapters ahead.
Drops are periodic.
Schedule’s on the page.
Don’t snitch.
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓
P.S.
— there’s a back alley where the rest of this story runs cold and free.
address: unwrittenrealm.com.
you know what to do.