by Tom Wood
Lavandier said, “What do you think of him?”
“I think I want to sleep with him.”
Lavandier felt warm with a rush of jealousy. “Even in his bed you wouldn’t be safe.”
“That’s precisely why I want to sleep with him.”
“And what do you think of him beyond his suitability as a sexual partner?”
Heloise settled back into the comfortable seat and closed her eyes. “When I was a little girl my father called me the queen and Maria the princess. As he lay dying, he called us this again. He said he loved us both equally.”
“I’m sure he did.”
“Maybe,” Heloise sighed. “He was a man of few words, but every word he said meant something.”
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“He said I was the queen and Maria was the princess. You see, a princess can become a queen, yet a queen can never become a princess.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“He may have loved us both the same, but he had more belief in Maria. I had peaked in his eyes, but for her he saw further greatness.”
Lavandier was as shocked as he was horrified. “You started the war because of something your father said on his deathbed?”
“You think so very highly of me, don’t you, Luis? No, the necessity of Maria’s demise is pure business. While she lives, there will never be peace and I will never be true patron.”
Lavandier said, “I’m relieved to hear you say that.”
“But need and want are two separate desires, and I want to kill my sister too. I want to kill her because of what my father said to us.”
“She didn’t put those words in his mouth,” Lavandier argued. “It’s not her fault.”
“I know that, of course. I don’t want to kill her to take revenge on her. I want to kill her to take revenge on him.”
Lavandier knew when it was best to keep his thoughts to himself.
Heloise said, “I think our new friend the Wraith can provide that revenge.”
“I’m no longer sure about his suitability. He’s too dangerous.”
“You’ve said that already.”
“I want to make you understand that from the outset. If things go wrong, I want you to remember I warned you about him.”
Heloise smiled at him. “Were you scared you might lose me in there, dear Luis?” She laid a hand on his midthigh.
Lavandier swallowed. “He could have killed you.”
“But he didn’t, did he? Truth be told, I found the whole experience thrilling. An unusual kind of fun, wasn’t it?”
Lavandier adjusted his seating position. “What about what he said at the end?”
She took her hand away, releasing him from the exquisite torture. “Are you referring to his stipulations that we stay out of it, that no one else is involved?”
“He was explicit on those points,” Lavandier said. “So do you still want me to meet with the second assassin when we return? The Russian?”
Heloise nodded as though she had not even considered the alternative. “The day I let a hit man tell me what to do is the day I’ll happily end my own life. Of course I still want you to meet the Russian. Why hire only one killer when we can have two?”
• Chapter 14 •
The dossier that Lavandier provided was perhaps the most extensive Victor had ever been given. It wasn’t a document, or even documents, but a link to a secure website on the deep Web. The site contained an autobiography’s worth of personal information on Heloise’s sister, Maria, as well as dozens of newspaper and online articles on her and her alleged criminal activities. Their father, Manny, had been the boss of the country’s largest and most violent cartel, acting as a go-between for the drug-producing cartels of Colombia and the distributors in Mexico. Guatemala’s geographical location made it a perfect staging ground to transfer product from the producers to the distributors. When Manny died of a heart attack, at the young age of sixty, his cartel became fractured by rival lieutenants vying for dominance. Amid this infighting his two daughters maneuvered unnoticed, creating alliances and encouraging the competition to wipe each other out, until they were unopposed. But instead of running the cartel together or dividing it between them, they turned on one another and had been at war ever since. Victor was not surprised to find that the information supplied by Lavandier blamed Maria for starting the war, but he neither believed this was without bias nor cared who had caused their conflict. All he cared about was that he had been hired to end it.
If there was an established playbook for cartel wars, Maria and Heloise had followed it. Their sicarios performed tit-for-tat ambushes, assassinations, and sabotage on almost a daily basis. Gun battles in the slums were commonplace. Roadside IEDs in the countryside were frequent. Drive-bys downtown occurred more often than not.
With a never-ending supply of poor young men desperate for drug money, casualties were irrelevant. Losses could be replaced within hours, weapons handed down to the newcomers before the blood of the previous owner was even dry. Knowing how poor some Guatemalans were, it wasn’t hard to understand how a youth with nothing to lose might be drawn into gambling his life away. It wasn’t hard to understand, because long ago Victor had been just like them.
The first step in Victor’s preparations was a week in Morocco. He rented a small but secure villa, and left the grounds only to procure food and bottled water. He slept in the morning, having spent his nights studying the site set up by Lavandier, and his afternoons on the villa’s grounds, swimming and lying on a sun lounger. He was no Latino, and had no intention of pretending to be one, but he also had no desire to stand out any more than necessary.
Traveling to Central America meant flying. The authorities naturally paid attention to people, especially lone men, traveling from certain countries, but as a Caucasian male, Victor tended to avoid scrutiny, although given his tan, he was fastidious in his shaving habits. He obeyed every airline rule to the letter. He never complained. He never reclined his seat. He never ate loud snacks.
Still, traveling was not without danger. There were no relaxing journeys for Victor. There were no easy routes. And there were no shortcuts. He did everything he could to avoid straight lines. He had a good legend. The documents supplied by Poison were excellent. Perhaps the best he had ever used. Airports were still dangerous, however. Facial-recognition software was improving at an exponential rate. He couldn’t hope to stay ahead of it even with his regular surgeries, and there was only so much even the best surgeons could achieve. There was no point avoiding the technology making a match of his face if it drew the wrong kind of attention—which was any attention.
There were other ways, besides changing his face, to reduce the chances of a hit. Avoiding airports was the best precaution. Not always possible, of course, but he did so where viable. It was one of the reasons he had operated in continental Europe so much. The Schengen Agreement meant he could cross dozens of borders without showing documents or being scanned.
From Marrakesh, he took a ferry to Gibraltar, then trains through Spain and France and then to London, before he sat down on a flight to Jamaica. A stop-off in the Caribbean was always good protocol when crossing the Atlantic. Incoming travelers from Europe were almost all tourists. No one he needed to concern himself with paid any attention to such travelers. He blended in with ease, too. Having to engage in a little small talk with an old Jamaican woman was the extent of his difficulties. She didn’t have much of an accent.
“Twenty years in Europe will do that do you,” she felt the need to explain. He hadn’t mentioned her accent. “But it’ll be back with a vengeance as soon as I get home. You won’t be able to understand me.”
She gave him a taste of her rapid-fire Kingston patois.
“You’re right,” he agreed. “I have no idea what you just said.”
She laughed and touched his arm. The Jamaican woman called herself Belle. He didn’t believe it to be her real name. She had a necklace that spelled Belle in shiny nickel. The letters were flowing to imitate handwriting. She put her fingers to the necklace as she introduced herself. Maybe it was short for Anabelle. Perhaps it was just a name she liked. There could be a story behind it, but she didn’t tell him and he didn’t ask.
He respected people’s privacy when it came to chosen names.
As much as Victor didn’t like to travel in straight lines, he didn’t like to do what would be expected. The most common entry point into Guatemala, from the Caribbean or elsewhere, was by plane, flying into Mundo Maya airport outside of the capital, usually via the United States. If anyone was waiting for his arrival, it would be there. Which was why he paid cash to a fisherman to ferry him across the Caribbean Sea to Honduras. From there, he traveled exclusively by bus, first to San Pedro Sula, where he took the daily bus that ran from Honduras’s capital all the way to Guatemala City. There was no border check. The facilities were there—huts, barriers, posts, and so on—but they were unmanned. The bus trundled along without so much as slowing down.
Trains were Victor’s preferred method of traveling long distances, but there were no passenger trains in the country. Cars were pretty uncommon too, which meant buses were the main form of transportation.
He swapped buses at the first available opportunity. He was heading to Guatemala City, but he was not prepared to take a single bus all the way there. He waited in a small border town for the next available transport, which was a camioneta, or chicken bus.
The driver’s helper, the ayudante, was a malnourished boy who scaled the bus to fix luggage to the roof with boundless energy and improbable strength. Some bags were bigger than he was. The fat man behind the wheel never stopped yelling at him. “Faster, faster.”
The ayudante wanted two dollars from Victor, who had already noted the Guatemalans were paying one. Victor paid him the fare without argument or complaint—he knew it wasn’t the kid’s policy—and tipped him the same amount. “Don’t tell the driver.”
The bus was so overcrowded Victor had to stand with his head pressed against the roof and bodies pressed against him. He couldn’t help but overhear the crisscross of loud conversations in Spanish. He heard other languages too, K’iche’ or Mam—Mayan languages—but he didn’t understand the words. The ignorance was rare for him. He spoke so many languages he wasn’t used to failing to recognize even a single word. He was operating outside his comfort zone, however. He would have to get used to it.
The acrid scent and taste of exhaust fumes were ever present. As was the blare of music seeping from poor-quality headphones, chickens clucking, and the screeching voice of a vendor selling homemade snacks. There was no room for him to squeeze along the aisle, so the food and drink had to be passed down from passenger to passenger to get from seller to customer, as did the cash for payment and sometimes the change as well. Victor played his part, staying in character, fitting in as might any other tourist, while keeping a nervous guy with fidgeting fingers in his gaze. The nervous guy was skinny and small and, unlike the snack vendor, he could work his way between passengers and seats. It was no surprise when he ended up standing next to Victor.
Sometimes it was better to be himself.
Victor leaned close and whispered, “Take my wallet and I’ll take your eyes.”
The nervous guy couldn’t get away fast enough.
The bus rattled and the exhaust sputtered and rasped. Victor didn’t have a chance to enjoy the countryside—he could see almost nothing through the mass of passengers—but he wasn’t here to sightsee. He wasn’t comfortable with so many intrusions into his personal space but he tolerated them. He pretended to be at ease because he only felt at ease, only relaxed, when by himself. He had to be a loner because he was a killer, but he had been a loner long before that.
Every time someone hailed it from the side of the road, the bus stopped and more space was somehow found.
The driver made good use of his horn and took a liberal approach to traffic laws. The going was slow, however, with the dirt roads and intermittent stops to pick up more passengers or drop them off. One stop was for neither. The driver waded into a field and pulled down his shorts.
Victor couldn’t reach his destination in the camioneta, nor did he want to, so he disembarked with a group of other passengers when the dirt road intersected with a paved road, and he waited at an ad-hoc bus stop for another service. This one was provided by a gray-haired man driving a pickup truck. Two passengers had already taken the prime seats in the cab, so Victor climbed into the load bed with some locals. Mats had been provided to take some of the sting out of the inevitable bumps, but most of the other travelers perched on their bags or jackets.
Victor sat with his knees to his chest and watched the clouds shift and change above him as the locals sang songs about pretty girls and sunny days.
• Chapter 15 •
The final bus was better on every level. Unlike the rattling chicken bus that had taken him along dirt roads, this was a new vehicle, a double-decker, with clean paint and plenty of leg room. The seat even reclined. It was quiet too, with every passenger in an allocated seat, enjoying a smooth ride and air-conditioning. Victor had purchased his ticket in advance—something he didn’t like doing—but the benefits were many. On this bus he was indistinguishable from the other tourists. Most were from North America or Europe, picked up from their hotels for a nonstop journey across the country, happy to pay a premium for faster, more comfortable service. In this instance, they were heading back to Guatemala City and Antigua, having visited the Mayan temples in the east.
Sitting next to him was an American woman named Joanna, who was returning to Guatemala City from a few days at the beach. They had exchanged some words as they had taken their seats. The inevitable “Excuse me” and “Sorry” and “Was that your foot?” She introduced herself soon after they were settled.
“It’s a long journey,” she said. “I figure we get the awkwardness out of the way right from the start.”
Given he was nearing his ultimate destination and had a name printed on his ticket, he stuck to his plan instead of making up a name on the spot. He had a standard backstory designed to stifle conversation—accountant, divorced—but Ryan Mathus was neither. He was a commodities trader, newly separated after a long-term relationship. It wouldn’t have mattered, he soon realized, because Joanna gave up midway through a film she was watching and set her sights on him instead.
She was watching on a tablet while he read his book—Sapiens—and when she took off her headset she exhaled and shook her head.
“That was a giant waste of my time.”
He gave a corresponding expression of sympathy.
“If I’d have wanted to watch a cartoon, I’d have picked one. It all looks so fake. Why do they bother?”
“I agree,” he said. “But people like those films.”
She sighed in response. Victor turned a page.
He remembered meeting a woman on a flight to Berlin who had been telling herself over and over that she wasn’t going to die. She had a phobia. They had talked statistics and passed the time in polite conversation. For a brief moment, he wondered how she was doing, whether she had overcome her fear or if she was performing the same ritualistic chant, unnerving whomever she was sitting beside. She had made Victor curious, intrigued, but not scared. He didn’t scare easily. Maybe at all. He was sure he had been—he had to have been—but he couldn’t recall the time or the place or what had scared him. In his previous iteration then, before he had become Victor, before he had stepped so far away from a regular existence there was no turning back.
Thinking of the flight to Berlin gave him the compulsion to glance around the bus once more, looking for well-dressed men over forty, but of those he saw, he recognized none. He caught
Joanna’s gaze in the process.
“Boring book?” she asked.
“I’m easily distracted.”
“Then I’ll try harder.”
Joanna smiled and he found himself holding her gaze longer than he should. She wore a colorful dress and a denim jacket she removed halfway through their conversation. The curls of her hair were bunched up on top of her head and secured with a glittering band. Her ears had many pinprick scars but no earrings. The only jewelry she wore was a necklace. Her feet were bare—she had slipped out of her sandals early in the journey—and her nail polish was gleaming ivory.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“It’s about human history, human behavior. That kind of thing.”
“Interesting?”
He nodded. “I’m learning a lot.”
“You’re studying?”
“Not exactly. But the more I read, the more I understand.”
Her eyebrows rose. “About human beings?”
“Let’s call it a hobby,” he said with a nod. “I like to understand how they work.”
She smiled because she thought he was joking, and continued to ask him questions.
Victor didn’t meet new people often. At least, he didn’t have conversations with new people often. When he did, it was almost always on public transport. It made sense that it would be the way he interacted most. Confined, bored, with little to do. Most passengers kept to themselves. They played with their phones. They read. They snacked. Victor didn’t present himself as someone interested in small talk with a stranger, but he marked himself out by the simple fact he didn’t have his gaze on a screen or buds in his ears. Some people took that as license. He was also smart and respectable. He spent so much effort appearing unthreatening that the side effect was some mistook him as personable. There was little he could do about it. He gave off as many subtle cues to leave him alone as possible. He avoided eye contact. He never spoke unless there was a need. He never smiled. He carried himself in a dominant way because this made him less approachable, but this was a reserved dominance. A quiet strength. He made people neither uncomfortable nor comfortable. But it was an imperfect system. There was no way to maintain an exact balance.