Page 6 of The Hitman’s Final Job

I stand at the sink for a moment with the water running cold over my hands. The mirror gives me back the usual. The silver in my hair has been there long enough now that I’ve typically stopped noticing it. There are lines in my face I didn’t have ten years ago, but they’re earned lines.

For forty-eight, I don’t look bad.

The tension in my shoulders reminds me it’s been a while since I’ve treated myself to a massage, although I’m not going to lie to myself and believe it’s not a different kind of touch I’ve been craving for a while.

But my work is important, and living in a small town makes it really hard to find someone willing to have some fun between the sheets but who won’t stay long enough to warm them up.

I dry my hands and check my phone because I’ve been unable to do it since before breakfast. There are fourteen emails and a text from Rowan.

Rowan:

How’d it go?

It’s followed by a selfie of him giving a thumbs-up.

Only one thing in my life is more important than my work, and that’s my son.

Vaughn:

All good. Looking forward to seeing you when I’m back home.

Then I scroll through my emails, ignoring anything that isn’t important, and go straight to one from Priya, who runs my lab team back in Colorado.

The email gets straight to the point, and it’s the best news I could have had today.

I open the attached photos of the K-series trays showing germination. All twelve. Her note says that soil batches #7 and #9 both show root development as of this morning.

The time on my phone shows it’s too early in the day to call her, even though she sent the email an hour ago. I know both Priya and the team will be way too excited about this development. Answering the phone, even if it’s the boss, will be the last thing they’ll do.

Instead, I go back to the photos and enlarge each one. Small green shoots in trays of dark soil that three months ago was, by every metric we had, completely dead. The kind of land that grows nothing.

Batch #7 is particularly striking, with a dense cluster of seedlings in the upper-right quadrant where I’d concentrated the modified microbial solution. The green color against the brown looks aggressively alive. Impossibly alive.

That’s the point. It’s almost impossible, but we’ve done it.

I put the phone away with reluctance, wishing I was in my lab right now, and walk out of the restroom. The next session has already started, so the corridor is emptier now. A few people are still clustered near the tables, but most of the networking crowd has dispersed. I’m heading for the conference room when someone falls into step beside me.

“Excuse me, Dr. Reeves?”

I turn. He’s young—probably early thirties, dark hair, glasses that suit him, and a curious glint in his eyes.

He’s a good foot shorter than me so he has to look up. “Your slide with the mineral exchange rate data across the pH gradient,” he says, slightly breathless. “Was that— Were those figures from a single site or aggregate?”

His Australian accent takes me by surprise, but it’s the question that really impresses me. “Single site,” I say. “High-altitude Colorado, roughly nine thousand feet. The pH variation there is naturally significant because of the granite substrate, which is part of why we chose it.”

His face opens up with genuine excitement. “Because the stress conditions⁠—”

“Accelerated the response curves, yes.”

He’s nodding now. “That’s— Yes, that’s what I thought. I wasn’t sure if I was reading it right.” He holds out his hand. “I’m Seth. I’m a researcher at the Institute of Soil Research at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.”

“There’s very interesting research coming out of there. Do you work with Dr. Weisz by any chance?”

His face opens up even more. “Yes. She’s amazing. I study soil chemistry, and I’m three years into a project on degraded agricultural land in central Europe.”

We talk for another ten or twenty minutes about overlapping methodology, and it’s one of the best conversations I’ve had at this conference.

I don’t know if it’s the fact he knows his stuff, the accent, or how he seems to have gravitated closer, but I notice how attractive he is. The glasses don’t quite hide his big brown eyes, and his hair is messy, but not because he styled it that way. During our conversation, he keeps running his hands through it.