The Hunter v-1

by Tom Wood

  Looking through the doorway he saw the assassin. He was crouched down in a hallway, his back pressed against a wall, gun in both hands, about to lean into the lounge and shoot Victor in the back. At least that’s what he thought.

  He was taking a series of deep breaths, summoning courage. He stopped mid inhale. Maybe he saw a dark shape in his peripheral vision, maybe some sixth sense warned him. He twisted to fire and Victor shot him in the chest. He slumped farther down the wall, still alive, the gun held loosely in his hand. On his face was etched an expression of amazement, as if he couldn’t comprehend he’d been shot. A red mist hung in the air.

  The slide was back on the. 45, so Victor released the empty mag and slammed the spare in, pulled the slide to load a bullet into the chamber, and shot the assassin twice more.

  Victor checked the body, took the earpiece and transmitter, but found nothing else. He headed to the floor’s other apartment. Inside the hallway he found the black sports bag; unzipping it he discovered a SIG556 ER rifle with scope and what looked like a custom-made suppressor. In a side pocket, he found a dry-cleaning receipt and an electronic door key. He took both. On the receipt it said: Hotel Abrial.

  Now he had something.

  He moved into the lounge and opened a window. Leaning out, he saw the blue van still parked by the kerb in the street below.

  A crackle of static. A voice came through the earpiece. The French was broken, strained. Another foreigner. The ones who could speak French probably used it as the common language. Maybe it had been a requirement on the application form.

  ‘R e pondez quelqu’un, quiconque.’

  In the background he could hear a police siren, close to the speaker. The last man was outside. Then the voice came through again. The same plea for contact. Again the police siren in the background, then the rumble of an engine as a vehicle passed the speaker. Victor watched a police motorcycle slowly pass the blue van before stopping right in front of the hotel.

  He took the rifle from the bag and extended the collapsible buttstock. With his left hand, he turned the radio’s frequency dial a fraction, to add some static. He held the radio up and pressed send, speaking in French, his accent deliberately off, sentence construction as basic as possible to make sure the guy would understand.

  ‘We’re the only two left,’ he said, sounding scared. ‘He’s killed everyone else.’

  He released the button, giving whoever it was chance to respond. The voice that came back was thin, desperate.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Inside the hotel.’

  ‘The target?’

  Victor began screwing the suppressor in place.

  ‘Heading for the front exit. He’s wounded. I shot him.’

  He made sure the suppressor was tight and attached the telescopic sight.

  ‘If you’re quick you can get him when he comes out. He’s not armed. Hurry.’

  He checked the scope’s magnification, made sure a bullet was in the chamber, and thumbed off the safety. Victor put the radio down, took up a seated position on the window sill, and held the rifle out of sight.

  The driver’s-side door opened and a man jumped out onto the kerb. He was strongly built, well over six feet tall, short hair, wearing a loose denim jacket. He quickly moved along the exterior of the van and leaned round the back end, looking toward the hotel across the street. He drew a handgun and held it out of sight under his jacket, attention firmly fixed on the hotel entrance. He was in good cover, between the van and the phone booth. Victor watched him, anticipating his movements. The man moved well, skill evident. They should have used him inside.

  For a long moment he remained perfectly still, watching, waiting. After a minute his posture stiffened and he glanced from side to side, eyes searching the crowds. He stepped back, out of cover, turned around, looked up.

  Straight at Victor.

  Through the telescopic sight Victor watched the man’s eyes go wide for an instant before a corona of blood erupted from the back of his head. He dropped out of sight, leaving half the contents of his skull sliding slowly down the van’s rear windows.

  CHAPTER 6

  08:45 CET

  Victor left the apartment building through the front door. In the street outside the crowd had grown considerably. He counted half a dozen police officers, but none of them were paying him the least bit of attention. Farther up the street Victor could see the red splash on the back of the van, but the body was hidden between the parked vehicles. Everyone was too preoccupied to notice it.

  Knowing he didn’t have much time, Victor hurried along the sidewalk, weaving around pedestrians who stood gawking at the commotion. The morbidity of the general public always amazed him. He closed the distance to the van, glancing down to see the corpse lain down in a heap between the van and the sedan parked behind it. No one was looking, but it wasn’t worth the risk to check the body’s pockets.

  He opened the door against the kerb and climbed into the driver’s seat. It smelled musty inside — the smell of too many men in an enclosed space for an extended period. Resting on the dash was a cardboard tray with six empty coffee cups. There was nothing else in the cab, so he opened the glove compartment. Inside was a manila envelope that contained his dossier, thankfully brief. It was a single piece of paper listing his details — race: Caucasian, height: six-one/two, weight: one hundred eighty pounds, hair: black, eyes: brown — and included a short paragraph stating he was a contract killer and a dangerous target. Scrawled by hand at the top of the sheet was the name of his hotel, his room number, and his current alias, Richard Bishop.

  Victor placed a hand to his stomach. More like one seventyeight.

  Beneath the dossier was his face, or at least a face that could have been his. It was a digital composite, close enough to the real thing to have been composed from reasonably reliable and recent information. A verbal description here, a grainy closed-circuit camera image there — add a dash of rumour and serve.

  The photo-fit was a worry, but he was relieved to find that their knowledge of him was so limited. If they knew anything else it would be here as well. Even the most amateur of assassins knows the value of a detailed dossier, and even the most cautious of clients wants his hirelings to have every advantage available. He folded the sheet up and placed it into his inside pocket. There were no postmarks on the envelope so he left it.

  In the back of the van were the greasy remains of takeout breakfasts but nothing else. He wasn’t surprised by this. The only thing of use he’d found had been the single laundry receipt. The other members of the team had been careful not to bring anything unnecessary with them.

  Victor looked in both side mirrors to make sure no one was watching and climbed out onto the sidewalk. A perimeter around the hotel was being set up by the police and he joined the crowds, allowing himself to be funnelled out of the street and away by a harried police officer.

  At the end of the road Victor hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Musee d’Orsay. The taxi driver asked him what had happened, gesturing to the adjoining street and its huge crowd.

  Victor shrugged. ‘ Ca a I’air serieux.’ Something bad.

  It was then that someone noticed the brainless corpse lying in the gutter and more screaming started.

  The man watching the taxi pull away was tall with gelled dark hair. He stood among the crowd outside the hotel, pretending to be as bewildered as the throng of Parisians around him. He shared their anxiety, but not their ignorance. His eyes tracked the taxi until it had left the street and he pulled a slim notebook from his inside jacket pocket. He flipped over a few pages and wrote down in clear handwriting the licence plate of the taxi and a brief description of the passenger.

  The face on the photo-fit hadn’t had a beard and the hair was different, but there could be no mistaking who it was. The tall man sighed heavily. This was bad.

  He negotiated his way through the ever-expanding horde of onlookers and finally came out of the crowd f
eeling hot despite the chill November air. The man was dressed in a suit and raincoat and looked like any other soldier of commerce. Unless absolutely necessary he wouldn’t speak with anyone around him. His French was good but not fluent.

  He walked away at a controlled pace, hurrying like the terrified crowd, though he wasn’t scared. He would have liked to have stayed longer but there were police everywhere, and more had to be on the way. Cops were already examining the crowds, narrowing in on potential witnesses and suspects. It would not be good for him to have to answer any difficult questions.

  He knew there was a payphone farther down the road, on a side street, which he headed towards. It was sufficiently out of the way to be used discreetly but close enough to the hotel so that he could report in promptly. The report he was about to give was far from what had been expected.

  He didn’t know exactly what happened inside the hotel, but he could make a reasonable enough analysis. The target had escaped in such a manner as to attract a huge police presence, and there was no sign of the team that was supposed to do the job. He’d overheard people in the crowd talking about bodies. None of the team members had left the hotel. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

  He passed a group of young women heading towards the commotion and took a left into the narrow side street, where a cafe released a myriad of exotic smells into the air. The phone booth was unoccupied and he stepped inside, closing the door behind him, thankful for the muffling of the exterior noise that allowed him to think more clearly.

  He dialled a number, and while he waited for the line to connect he thought about how best to phrase that the job had been a spectacular failure.

  His employer was not going to be pleased.

  CHAPTER 7

  09:15 CET

  Less than a mile away Alvarez looked down at the corpse on the steel tray before him and sighed heavily. The wrinkled skin was pale, the eyes closed, the lips tinged with blue. A small red hole marked the skin of the left temple. Entry wound. The hole in the right temple was larger, rougher. Exit wound.

  ‘Yeah,’ he breathed. ‘That’s the poor bastard.’

  The French assistant mortician responded with a brief nod. He stood a few feet away, on the other side of the table, a young man in his twenties, and despite the cool temperature Alvarez could see there was sweat on his brow. The mortician shifted his weight, fidgeted. Alvarez pretended not to notice.

  The American realized he wasn’t helping calm the kid. Alvarez knew he had a face that seemed to be perpetually scowling and made people who didn’t know him better feel uncomfortable. Even smiling didn’t help, and his size only exacerbated the problem. Alvarez had a neck wider than his skull and shoulders that filled a door frame. When it came to confrontation his appearance gave him an edge, but the rest of the time it was simply a hindrance. He had to work twice as hard as anyone else just to get people to trust him.

  He had the pathologist’s report in hand. He glanced over the details to where it described the bullet wounds. There were two more to the chest. He gestured.

  ‘Show me.’

  The mortician looked around nervously before carefully gripping the white stain-proof sheet. He folded it backward from the body’s neck to reveal the torso.

  Alvarez examined the two neat holes in the sternum. ‘They look small calibre to me. Twenty-twos?’

  ‘No,’ the mortician answered. ‘All three wounds. Two to the chest, one to the head. 5.7 mm rounds.’

  ‘Interesting.’ Alvarez leaned forward for a closer look. ‘What kind of range are we looking at?’

  ‘No powder burns so it wasn’t point blank, other than that I can’t tell you. Listen, I’m just an assistant here. I’m not a ballistics expert. I… I don’t know very much.’

  No shit, Alvarez thought. He considered for a moment. That the rounds were 5.7 mm meant an FN Five-seveN, one of the world’s slickest and most expensive handguns. He pictured the scene in his head. Double-tap to the heart, then, as the victim was prone, head to one side, the killer put one extra through the frontal lobe. Not taking any chances. Alvarez was no stranger to professional killings, and this execution was about as thorough as they came. He blinked the image away.

  ‘Look,’ the mortician began, ‘my boss is going to be back soon.’

  Alvarez could take a hint. He opened his wallet.

  Outside the hospital he buttoned up his coat against the drizzle. Where the hell was Kennard? It took a couple of minutes before the dark sedan pulled up outside.

  ‘Sorry,’ Kennard said, as Alvarez climbed into the passenger seat.

  Alvarez rubbed some of the rain from his buzz cut. ‘It’s Ozols,’ he said. ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Kennard exhaled. ‘The package?’

  Alvarez shook his head. He summarized what he’d seen.

  ‘What do we do?’ Kennard asked.

  Alvarez chewed on his thumbnail for a moment. He reached into his jacket for his cell phone. ‘I’ve got to speak to Langley.’

  CHAPTER 8

  09:41 CET

  Hotel Abrial was located on the Avenue de Villiers, north of the Seine. Victor had caught a second taxi at the museum, and it was a long, slow drive through the Parisian traffic. The driver was thankfully silent, and Victor gave him a moderate tip. A generous tip or no tip at all and the driver might remember him if asked at a later date.

  Victor noted that it was a nice area, glowing with all the positive things that tourists tell their friends about Paris but without the rain, the dirt, and the sour-faced Parisians. Victor made his way along the busy street, passing the hotel. He found a pharmacy a couple of blocks away where he purchased a bar of soap, disinfectant, tweezers, cotton balls, and deodorant. He then found a quiet bar where he bought a lemonade and used the bathroom to wash himself.

  He then turned his attention to the wooden splinters embedded in his face. At the time adrenaline had blocked the pain, but Victor no longer enjoyed such luxury. The splinters were small but rough and snagged in his flesh. With gritted teeth he drew them from his cheek with the aid of the tweezers. He would have preferred to get it over with quickly, but he had to work slowly to avoid their breaking. When the last one was out, he held a cotton ball soaked with disinfectant against the tiny wounds for as long as he could stand it.

  If the bullet had struck the door frame a few inches higher, he would’ve been pulling splinters from his eyeball instead of his cheek. Not a pleasant thought. He withdrew a small bottle of eyedrops from a pocket and splashed some silicone solution onto his hands and rubbed it in. It dried in seconds. He allowed himself to light a cigarette outside and smoked it leisurely as he walked along the sidewalk. The hit of nicotine was just what he needed. Being alive felt good.

  He promised himself it would be the first and last one today. He’d been trying to keep up a one-a-day rate for the last week and was determined to stick with it this time, maybe even cut down further in a couple of weeks. Or maybe not. Either way, he wasn’t going to ruin the postbattle elation worrying about his little addiction. Victor discarded the smoked cigarette, momentarily feeling bad for littering but eased his guilt by conscientiously disposing of the toiletries, but in several different trash cans.

  The hotel lobby was simple but tasteful, thankfully quiet. He caught the eye of a happy-looking receptionist behind the desk who was scratching his bleached goatee and walked over.

  ‘Puis-je vous aider, monsieur?’ the guy asked.

  ‘Oui, avez-vous un t e l e phone public?’

  The receptionist pointed to the far end of the lobby, toward the sign for the bathrooms. ‘L a — bas.’

  Victor thanked him and crossed the lobby. Around a corner there were two outdated payphones. Victor checked the inside line number for room service and called it. A cheery female voice answered.

  ‘Hi,’ he said back. ‘I have some laundry to deliver, but I can’t read the room number.’ He gave the reference code on the receipt.

  There was a strai
ned sigh. ‘I wish they’d sort that out.’ Victor heard fingers punching keys with rapid efficiency. ‘Mr Svyatoslav.’ It took a couple of attempts to pronounce. ‘He’s in room 210.’

  It was a pleasant room with a comfortable-looking bed, spacious en suite bathroom, and elegant decor. Victor switched on the TV and used the remote to flick to a news channel. So far nothing about the shootings. He doubted it would be long before a story about the killings aired. He turned the set off and looked around the room. The assassin hadn’t been in any hurry to leave. Clothes hung on the outside of the wardrobe, toiletries still lined the sink in the bathroom. Maybe he had planned to do a little sightseeing after he’d shot Victor. A foreigner in Paris, why not take in some of the culture? Now the only sightseeing he’d be doing would be in hell.

  Victor looked forward to the postcard.

  He expected the other assassins would have rooms at different hotels throughout the city. Less conspicuous that way, especially for a multinational group whose members, Victor believed, didn’t know one another before they had been assembled to kill him. Without any clues to where they had been staying, he would have to make the most of his current location.

  There was nothing on the tables by the bed or in the drawers next to it. He ran his fingers between the mattress and the frame, finding and removing a brown leather wallet that was empty except for a few euros. No passport or plane ticket. He supposed that would have been too easy.

  Victor searched the room thoroughly, first checking the toilet tank to see if the assassin used the same security methods as himself, but nothing was hidden there. A shame. It would have been nice to share a little kinship with the man he’d killed.

  Every other feasible hiding location proved to be empty. The hotel safe then. That made sense. No chance of the maid or anyone else walking away with something valuable or incriminating.