Bloody River Blues

hours at my desk in our Alexandria office. And in the past month it had been closer to twelve or fourteen, as we coordinated the protection of five high-level organized crime informants, before handing them over to Witness Protection for their face-lifts.
    It was good to be back in the saddle, if only for a week or so.
    I hit a speed dial button, calling my protégé.
    “It’s Abe,” I said into my hands-free. “Where is he now?”
    “Make it a half mile. Moving up slowly.”
    The hitter, whose identity we didn’t know, was in a nondescript Hyundai sedan, gray.
    I was behind an eighteen-foot truck, CAROLINA POULTRY PROCESSING COMPANY painted on the side. It was empty and being driven by one of our transport people. In front of that was a car identical to the one I was driving.
    “We’ve got two miles till the swap,” I said.
    Four voices acknowledged this over four very encrypted com devices.
    I disconnected.
    Without looking at her, I said to Alissa, “It’s going to be fine.”
    “I just . . .” she said in a whisper. “I don’t know.” She fell silent and stared into the side-view mirror
    as if the man who wanted to kill her were right behind us.
    “It’s all going just like we planned.”
    When innocent people find themselves in situations that require the presence and protection of people like me, their reaction more often than not is as much bewilderment as fear. Mortality is tough to process.
    But keeping people safe, keeping people alive, is a business like any other. I frequently told this to my protégé and the others in the office, probably irritating them to no end with both the repetition and the stodgy tone. But I kept on saying it because you can’t forget, ever. It’s a business, with rigid procedures that we study the way surgeons learn to slice flesh precisely and pilots learn to keep tons of metal safely aloft. These techniques have been honed over the years and they worked.
    Business . . .
    Of course, it was also true that the hitter who was behind us at the moment, intent on killing the woman next to me, treated his job as a business too. I knew this sure as steel. He was just as serious as I was, had studied procedures as diligently as I had, was smart, IQ-wise and streetwise, and he had advantages over me: His rules were unencumbered by my constraints—the Constitution and the laws promulgated thereunder.
    Still, I believe there is an advantage in being in the right. In all my years of doing this work I’d never lost a principal. And I wasn’t going to lose Alissa.
    A business . . . which meant remaining calm as a surgeon, calm as a pilot.
    Alissa was not calm, of course. She was breathing hard, worrying her cuff as she stared at a sprawling magnolia tree we were passing, an outrider of a chestnut forest, bordering a huge cotton field, the tufts bursting. She was uneasily spinning a thin diamond bracelet—a treat to herself on a recent birthday. She now glanced at the jewelry and then her palms, which were sweating, and placed her hands on her navy blue skirt. Under my care, Alissa had worn dark clothing exclusively. It was camouflage but not because she was the target of a professional killer; it was about her weight, which she’d wrestled with since adolescence. I knew this because we’d shared meals and I’d seen the battle up close. She’d also talked quite a bit about her struggle with weight. Some principals don’t need or want camaraderie. Others, like Alissa, need us to be friends. I don’t do well in that role but I try and can generally pull it off.
    We passed a sign. The exit was a mile and a half away.
    A business requires simple, smart planning. You can’t be reactive in this line of work and though I hate the word “proactive” (as opposed to what, antiactive?), the concept is vital to what we do. In this instance, to deliver Alissa safe and sound to the prosecutor for her depositions, I needed to keep the hitter in play. Since my protégé had been following him for hours, we knew where he was and could have taken him at any moment. But if we’d done that, whoever had hired him would simply call somebody else to finish the job. I wanted to keep him on the road for the better part of the day—long enough for Alissa to get into the U.S. Attorney’s office and give him sufficientinformation via deposition so that she would no longer be at risk. Once the testimony’s down, the hitter has no incentive to eliminate a witness.
    The plan