Deliver Us From Evil by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online Page B

he’d let her meet with some other folks.
     Whit was one and Liza another. Another month passed and then Mallory brought her some news clippings of an old man who’d been
     found slain in his lavish home in Hong Kong. Though it had never been made public, Mallory told her that the fellow had been
     identified as a former concentration camp commander and one of Heinrich Himmler’s right-hand men. They had talked long into
     the night of the ethics involved in such an action. It was never explicitly said, but Reggie suspected that the professor
     and other people she’d met through him had been behind the killing. By then she desperately wanted to be part of it.
    It was only then that he had brought her to Harrowsfield. She went through an array of tests to determine if she had the psychological
     makeup to be a member of the group. She passed that barrier easily enough, demonstrating a rigid coldness that surprised even
     her. Next was physical fitness. A fine athlete, she was pressed to levels of strength and endurance she never knew she possessed.
     Her lungs near collapse, she willed her battered body over treacherous terrain she didn’t realize existed in the bucolic English
     countryside. To his credit, Whit Beckham was next to her every step of the way, though he’d already endured this when he first
     signed up. After that was the specialized training: weapons, martial arts, and survival skills in myriad challenging conditions.
    In the classroom she learned how to research a target and study their background to gain valuable intelligence. She was taught
     foreign languages and how to lie with aplomb; how to act out roles and discern when other people were doing the same. She
     came to learn how to trail someone so stealthily that they would only know they were being followed when she walked up to
     them. These and dozens of other skills were drilled into her to such an extent that she no longer had to think about them.
    After her training was complete she’d acted as support on three missions, two where Whit was the lead and another where Richard
     Dyson, an experienced Nazi exterminator and since retired, had completed the final act. Her first mission in the lead had
     involved an elderly Austrian living in Asia who’d helped Hitler kill hundreds of thousands of people simply because they worshipped
     under the Star of David. She’d gotten into his circle by becoming a nanny to his young wife’s child. The monster had been
     married five times. He had enough wealth obtained through the theft of antiquities during the war that he could keep divorcing
     and remarrying and still live in great luxury. They had one child, a five-year-old boy conceived through artificial insemination
     using donated sperm. Reggie suspected that the old Nazi had selected the sperm donor based on the color of his skin, hair,
     and height—namely, white, blond, and tall.
    She’d worked with them for one month, and in that time the husband had made a half dozen passes at her. From what he’d told
     her once while he was in a drunken stupor, she could easily become wife number six if she played her cards right. One night
     she came by prearrangement to visit him in his bedroom—by his choice he and his wife kept separate boudoirs. He was again drunk and easily handled by Reggie. When he was tightly
     bound and his mouth gagged, she pulled the pictures from a hiding place and showed him the faces of some of his victims, a
     strict requirement of all the missions. At the end of their lives the monsters had to know that justice had finally caught
     up to them.
    The fear he showed had amused her at first. But when the time came to finish the job, Reggie had hesitated. She’d never told
     anyone this. Not Whit and certainly not the professor. Her encouraging words to Dominic had also left out this piece of personal
     history. The monster had looked at her with pleading eyes. His gaze begged her not to do it. During her training she’d