by Greg Rucka
"Mr. Kodiak is a personal protection specialist based here in New York. Almost a year ago he headed the protection detail surrounding a man named Jeremiah Pugh. Pugh had been targeted by a member of The Ten, by the assassin now referred to as Drama. What is so remarkable about this, aside from the fact that Mr. Kodiak kept himself and his principal alive, is that he had personal contact with Drama on multiple occasions, mostly by telephone, but including three physical contacts, one of which was a conversation that occurred in his own home."
Everyone at Marietta's end of the table looked at me again. I raised my right hand and gave them a small wave. What Marietta wasn't telling them is that before Drama and I had chatted in my apartment, she'd stripped me to my underwear and that she'd held a gun on me the whole time. There was still a bullet hole in the couch from where she had fired a warning shot.
"As of this date," Marietta continued, "Mr. Kodiak is the only individual known to international law enforcement and intelligence to have had contact with Drama and survive. He is considered to have unique insight into the workings of The Ten..."
I tuned him out, mostly to keep from registering my disgust. I am an expert on The Ten the way Scott Fowler is a member of the Beach Boys. Drama had been hired to kill the man I'd been hired to protect, and the fact was, I didn't like talking about her, and neither did any of my partners. We'd miraculously survived the experience without harm, without losing life or limb. Mentioning her name at times seemed a little too much like tempting fate, as if she might be summoned from the depths where she slept to wreak havoc on all of our lives once more.
The Ten were stone-cold killers, ghosts of the modern world who murdered without pause or flaw, without politics or emotion to cloud their judgment. They did what they did for money, and they were good enough that they commanded millions for their services. Nearly nothing was known about them but for a handful of code names, a cloud of rumors, and a few very anemic and dubious facts. Even the name "The Ten" was misleading, since it referred to a theoretical ten best, and nobody in their line of work was particularly interested in providing an accurate census. There could be three or five or fifty of them, for all anybody knew.
People don't like to admit it, but death and killing have long been part of how power travels, how governments do business. The Ten were the logical and inevitable result of that; each had undoubtedly been trained by governmental or military programs, had learned his craft in service to a country or agency before going rogue. Which meant that, in some cases, the organizations hunting members of The Ten would be counting on the same people who had created the members of The Ten; and if the data those people provided wasn't accurate, or forthcoming, or useful, that was hardly a surprise. It made The Ten all that more dangerous, because in the face of total lack of knowledge, the few facts that might be discovered would almost always be viewed as suspect.
Worst of all, most of the time you never knew one of The Ten was coming until he or she had already gone, until the body was cold, and even then, maybe not. Got a witness you need to keep from testifying? Oh, look... he had an AMI in his sleep, how convenient. Member of parliament making things difficult for your business? Wouldn't be that same Right Honorable Gentleman who was found dead in his apartment, naked, with the body of his young lover, would it? Car crashes, fatal falls, mysterious illnesses, unexplained disappearances, tragic fires... The Ten could create them, it seemed, on demand.
Drama was one of them, and she scared the shit out of me. The only reason that Dale and Corry and Natalie and I hadn't blown town and taken to living in shacks in Antarctica after our encounter with her was that we knew it wouldn't do us a damn bit of good.
If Drama wanted us dead, we were dead.
Just the same, in the first weeks after protecting Pugh, all of us lived in perpetual paranoia. Natalie went to France for a month, saying she'd been meaning to get back to Paris ever since she'd lived there her junior year of college. Corry took his wife and son to visit family in Ecuador; Dale and his lover, Ethan, spent four weeks driving cross-country "in search of America." I stayed in the city, trying to pretend that everything was normal.
Nothing happened, and we all relaxed, though when Christian Havel came around to all of us, working on her book, asking for interviews, we'd gotten nervous again. Havel was a crime reporter for the New York Daily News, and had bullied her way into Pugh's protection, then spun that involvement into a feature story, and most recently, a soon-to-be-released book. Last I'd heard, she was calling it Drama: A Window into the World of Protection and Assassination, and from what I and my colleagues knew about it, Havel pretty much laid out everything that had happened. She hadn't bothered to change our names, as far as I knew, and I wasn't looking forward to the new wave of public scrutiny that would come with the book's release.
Somehow, I didn't think Drama was, either.
That I and my friends were still breathing I took to mean that we were beneath Drama's notice, and that was just fine by me.
That was just how I wanted it.
* * *
After Marietta's presentation they went to the slide show, the LCD projector shining grainy surveillance photos acquired from God-knows-where on the wall at the end of the room. The first set were of Drama, though in a couple of them it was impossible to tell if it was her or just a light gray smudge with breasts. Most of the slides were black-and-white blowups from security tapes or long-range lenses, but there were a couple of color shots, too.
She was a tall woman, my height, and fit, maybe around one hundred and forty pounds. Her hair had been blond the last time I'd seen her, shoulder length, though in the various photographs now projected on the wall that was constantly changing along with the rest of her appearance. Her eyes, as I remembered them, had been blue. She was deft with the little changes that make recognition difficult, though apparently didn't bother with advanced disguise techniques like latex and heavy makeup. In four of the photographs she wore eyeglasses or sunglasses, never the same pair twice, and the frames helped to hide and alter the shape of her face.
Marietta ran through the slides, finishing with the most recent picture of her, taken just minutes after I'd seen her last. The shot was focused on a fire engine that had parked outside of a building on Broadway, and had been snapped by a tourist who was passing by at the time and merely interested in capturing the FDNY in action. Drama was barely in the frame, walking north up Broadway, and it was clear she didn't know the camera was there, because she wasn't hiding her face.
There was a click, and the slide was replaced with an enlargement of the same, now cropped around Drama. This was the only truly good picture of the batch. The FBI had managed to obtain the negative from the previous shot, and working from that had finessed the current image. She was mostly in profile, looking straight ahead, her right hand coming up with a set of sunglasses ready. She was wearing tan slacks and a black unstructured blazer, and her hair was dirty blond, straight, and to the base of her neck. Her mouth was just a tad open, as if she was speaking, and the corner of her upper lip was tugging back, as if in the first or last moments of a smile.
I'd seen it before, and every time I saw the shot I wondered what her expression meant. She had just tried to kill me and Dale and Pugh with a bomb, and there was a chance that, as she was walking up Broadway, she believed she had succeeded, that we were dead. Maybe it was satisfaction, that she'd done what she'd set out to do. Maybe it was pride in her work.
The laptop chirped and the wall where Drama had been was bathed in white light. There was a pause while Marietta concluded his narration, and then he opened the floor to questions. The woman from Interpol seemed fascinated that I'd spoken with her face-to-face.
"How did that come to pass?" she asked.
"She ambushed me in my apartment."
"Why would she do this? Why did she not merely kill you?"
"She had bugged the apartment, and that was where we'd been planning most of our operation. I was more useful alive."
/>
"And she spoke with you? For how long?"
"About ten minutes."
"Why?"
"My theory is that I'd come home just after she'd placed the bugs and she wanted to distract me, to keep me from noticing that anything was out of place in the apartment. And she wanted to psyche me out. Most of her phone calls were for the same purpose, to gain a psychological edge."
The two Koreans spoke to each other quietly. One of them asked, "Could you determine her national origin?"
"No. Her English was colloquial and fluent. She spoke with a slight mid-Atlantic accent, so it's possible English is her native language."
"Anything about her training?" the other Korean asked.
"She implied she might have been a bodyguard, once. She didn't say where."
"How old would you say she was?"
"I'd put her around my own age, say early thirties. That's a guess."
"Which hand did she favor?"
"The right."
"Would you say she's technology-dependent?" Interpol asked.
"No, I think she uses the best tool at her disposal. If a pointed stick will do the job she wants done, she'll use it. But she's adept with technology, on the cutting edge. The mains transmitters she used to bug my apartment were maybe two millimeters long, half that wide. She also built her own explosives."
Interpol liked that answer and made some notes on her pad. "You spoke with her for ten minutes. Could you comment on her personality?"
"She made a couple of jokes, morbid ones, and she seemed to enjoy engaging in wordplay. At the time we -- meaning my associates and I -- were operating on the premise that she might have a partner, though that turned out to be mistaken. She had fun with that. She was almost flirtatious."
They all stared at me and I waited it out. It was the word "flirtatious" that did it. Whenever I used it, the people asking the questions would look at me like I was holding out on them, as if something more had happened, though nothing had. The conversation with Drama had ended not with a roll in the hay, but rather with me getting 120,000 volts from a stun gun, which pretty much put me out of the amorous mood until well after her departure.
Marietta cleared his throat, and the questions resumed. This took most of the next hour, and covered everything from the equipment Drama had used and the ways in which she'd used it, to what techniques we'd found effective in combating her and which ones had been failures. The Koreans were very interested in our countersurveillance procedures, and wanted to know all the specifications on the devices that Drama had planted in my apartment.
When that was finished, the lady from Interpol handed Marietta a CD-ROM, and he loaded the new images, then ran them through the projector.
"We have some people we would like you to look at," Marietta told me. "Let us know if you recognize any of them."
"I won't," I said. "I never have before."
"Yes, we know," Interpol said. "Please, humor us."
There were forty-seven pictures, mostly surveillance shots, presumably all of men and women suspected of being members of The Ten. The ethnicities were broadly mixed, though whites seemed to predominate.
As predicted, I didn't recognize a single face.
Interpol took a piece of paper from her briefcase and set it in front of her on the table. "I'm going to read you a series of names we've compiled. Tell me if you've heard of any of them, if, perhaps, Drama mentioned any of them."
"You got it."
"Pontchardier, Claude? Also known as Dupuis, Jean-Claude and Breda, Marlon? Sometimes called The Fireman."
"No."
"Holcomb, Benjamin? He might be referred to as Dancer."
"No."
"Ebbertine, Jennifer or Garza, Teri -- it's with one 'r' and one 1' Sometimes referred to as Lilith?"
"Nope."
"Rai, Ravi. Also Munez, Roberto? Called Gomez..."
"You mean from The Addams Family?"
She looked up from the sheet at me. "What?"
"Nothing, sorry," I said. "That's a nope."
"Pallios, Andreas or Ben Havar, Simon? Known sometimes as Lawrence."
"No."
She frowned at Marietta, then replaced the sheet tidily in her attache case. I thought about asking Interpol where they came up with these code names, and if she really thought that The Ten used them amongst themselves. Somehow I couldn't see Drama picking up a phone and, say, giving Lilith a ring to swap tips about neck-snapping and checking the going rate for a car bombing. The code names are used by law enforcement and intelligence, just a way to label people who had lost their true names long ago and now went through aliases the way water passes through coffee grounds.
Everyone at the far end of the table now had their heads together, and were speaking intently. I looked over at where Scott was seated, and he shrugged, so I cleared my throat. The conversation continued, so I did it again, louder. Marietta raised his head.
"Yes?"
"It's been fun," I said. "But I have somewhere to be."
"Of course," he said, getting to his feet. "Thank you for coming in and taking the time to speak with us."
"My pleasure," I fibbed.
Scott rose, and we headed for the door. Just before we exited, I heard Interpol asking Marietta if it was true that I was dating Skye Van Brandt.
Chapter 4
Scott was kind enough to drive me back uptown, to the office. The clear morning sky had vanished, replaced with a low-hanging gray that seemed to drip water.
"That wasn't so bad," he said, as he turned the car onto Canal Street.
"Not for you," I said. "But you got to catch up on some sleep."
"I was never actually asleep. I just didn't want to strain my eyes."
"Who were the two in the back?"
Scott shrugged. "Pick three letters of the alphabet, mix them together, there's your answer."
We turned off Canal before we hit the traffic battling to get through the Holland Tunnel, and Scott circled the block until we were on Hudson, parking opposite the building where KTMH had its offices. The building took up the entirety of the small block, and once had been the home of some serious printing, with the presses right on the premises. Now the printing industry in Manhattan was dead, and as a result the building was in the process of major renovation. Seventeen stories tall, the property was owned by Trinity Church, and they were doing their best to turn the location upscale. Construction had begun on an additional two floors at the top, and scaffolding surrounded the building on three sides.
Scott let me out and told me he'd try to call in the next few days, and I crossed the street and got pelted by drops from the air conditioners working in the windows above me. A new coat of paint had been put down on the walls in the lobby since I'd left for El Paso, and the smell of it was still rich. I waited at the elevator with a small cluster of people, mostly students from the New York Restaurant School, which was located on the sixteenth floor. There seemed to be a lot of people about for midday, and then I looked at my watch and saw that it was six past one, and realized that this was the lunch crowd returning from their meal.
The car came and I rode up in a mass of students, mostly black and Latino, listening as they talked to one another about their "mad skills with the bearnaise." I left them at fifteen and made my way to the solid wooden door at the end of the hall. There was a plaque mounted on it, brass, that read, "KTMH Executive Protection." The door was unlocked, and no one was in the reception area, not even a receptionist, but that didn't surprise me. We'd been having bad luck finding someone who could master the intricacies of answering the phone, taking messages, handling light typing, and greeting visitors to our offices. More often than not the receptionist's desk was vacant.
For a moment I stood still, listening for voices from down the hall, and then I heard the front door click behind me. Corry Herrera came in, carrying a box of doughnuts from Krispy Kreme, one in his mouth.
"Why aren't you in L.A.?" I asked him.
His response wa
s lost in the doughnut, and he gestured with his head to indicate that I should follow him as he went down the hall, so I did. We've got a lot of space, enough so that each of us has our own office with windows and nobody had to fight for a good one. We also have a coffee room, a file room, a conference room, an equipment and storage room, two bathrooms -- one with a shower -- and three more rooms that are empty until we decide what to do with them. The walls are off-white and most of the floor is a fake wood laminate from Sweden that looks like the real thing but doesn't get scratched. It's a pretty nice space, and I like to think that when you enter it for the first time, it's comfortable rather than officious.
Corry made for the coffee room, and after he'd set down the box and finished his doughnut, said, "We got back this morning."
"Obviously. But you were supposed to be in L.A. until next week." Both Corry and Dale had gone out on a consulting job shortly before I'd left for El Paso, contracted by one of the major studios to act as technical advisors on some sort of production. As they'd explained it to me, this meant teaching young actors how to hold fake guns in a realistic manner. "Did something happen?"
"No, they just finished with us early, said we could leave." Corry opened the cupboard and got down a plate and three mugs. The coffeemaker on the counter had a full pot, and it smelled freshly brewed. "Dale couldn't get out of there fast enough. He's at home now, but I thought I'd come in, just check things out around the office."
"And bring doughnuts and make coffee," I said.
"These aren't for me. Will you grab the pot? My hands are full."
I took the pot and followed him out of the coffee room and back down the hallway, which I thought meant we were heading for Natalie's office.
"What happened to your forehead?" he asked, over his shoulder.
"Nonsmoking incentive program."
"Natalie said you and Skye Van Brandt had a falling out."
"Skye Van Brandt and I never had a falling in. Where's Nat?"