Ducking the rod aimed at her head, Judith jabbed her own fist up inside the sweeping circle of the woman’s arms. With a snap of her wrist, the blade jutted like a jackknife, slashing across the inside of the woman’s right forearm, through her coat sleeve and deep into her flesh.
Judith retracted her knife hand, flipping the hilt without thinking to a thrust grip. The woman’s right arm fell away, unable to clench now, with all the tendons slit. She held the bar only with her left. The inside of her good arm lay bare to Judith’s next rip. One more swift slice in the other coat sleeve dropped the iron bar to the sand.
No blood dripped yet.
The bar lay at the woman’s feet. She stumbled away from it, sliding down the auto’s bright beams toward the ocean. Now she was the one lit up. Snow spangled around her, a halo of fresh, dry crystals. She held her arms out, both hands dangling off the wrists like broken necks. She was open, begging. Judith closed the distance in three swift steps. The woman’s lips moved but she said nothing, or Judith did not hear her.
One cut across the windpipe, and Judith could move on out of these lights.
She waggled the blade to confuse the woman about where the final gash would be aimed. The woman stumbled backward, foolish, blood at last rolling off her dead fingers, spotty trails on the sand. Judith ignored the woman’s face and focused on her neck, the flowing carotids left and right. Backhand. Forehand.
Judith leaped.
She hung stymied in the air. Her knife hand swung and missed, her own head yanked backward, eyes wide on snowflakes.
“Get off her!”
A man’s bellow. A powerful hand clenched her hair.
A fist or knee buried hard in her kidney. Judith gasped at the pain, then arched. She saw false stars. The big hand in her hair combined with his other hand crushing her knife arm, forcing her to her knees.
“Otto!” the woman blubbered. “She... look what she did!”
“Shut up, shut up!” the voice behind Judith shouted. “I see!” The hand in her hair twisted. “Put the knife down, lady! Put it fucking down!”
The painful clasp in her hair hauled back more, stretching her neck as if the man had a knife, too, to slice her throat instead. Judith looked upside-down into the night, straining to get a fix on his silhouette.
The woman in front bleated, “Bitch!” Judith did not see the blow come; she fought to stay conscious when the boot smashed into her rib cage.
“Lady, one more time! Put down the knife or I swear to God I’ll snap you in two!”
Judith drew what breaths she could with her throat strained backward and her ribs on fire. She could not twirl on the man and slash at him, not with her head yanked back and her right shoulder pinned, her knees ground into the sand. She bent her elbow to hold out the knife, to show her attacker she was accepting his command. She lowered the blade slowly, gaining seconds, scrambling for fragments of clarity.
The fist tightened and twisted. She felt hair rip out of her scalp.
“Put it down! And I fucking mean now!”
“Bitch!” the bleeding woman screeched again.
Judith opened her hand to release the knife.
Before it could roll from her fingers to the sand, she flipped the balanced blade—a thing she knew intimately—to her waiting left hand. The move was instant; her left arm started before the knife arrived. Judith collapsed at the waist, allowing the man’s weight to buckle her. This brought him forward, locking him in place.
She stretched the blade behind him, then yanked the razor edge across the top of his boot, through the Achilles tendon. She carved as fiercely as she could. Bone scraped the blade. She pulled the knife through, then waited for the man to fall. She looked the bleeding woman in the face.
The big man bellowed and toppled to his left. His right hand scrabbled at Judith’s shoulder, his left stayed in her hair. She fell with him, keeping her gaze on the woman who’d kicked her, with a look that said I will attend to you in a moment.
Judith let herself fall to her left shoulder, still turned away from the man. When they were both down, he tried to regain his hold on her, flailing for a grip. Before he could attach his other meaty arm, she flicked the knife back to her right hand and, blind, just by the feel of where he lay behind her, raised the knife and pounded it down in one lightning arc, pegging hard into his heart.
The man reacted like he’d touched a live wire. His big body spasmed; the gushing left calf sprayed murky blood. Judith lost her grip on the wet hilt sticking out of his chest. The woman screamed again. Judith pivoted to her. Shrieking, the woman hoisted both arms. With the loose wrists, she looked like a chimp. Judith watched her turn and run out of the headlamps.
Judith leaped from the jerking body and took off. The woman ran awkwardly. She did not get far out of the beams before Judith caught up.
From behind, Judith dragged her down by the collar. Gamely the screeching woman beat her damaged hands in Judith’s face, slapping and slinging blood. Judith sat on the woman’s torso and strangled her. She left the body where it lay.
This had all gone wrong. She would need help making it right.
She trod over the beach toward the man’s body. He had crawled, backstroking out of the headlights. Now he lay motionless in the pale spill of the beams, only ten yards from the water’s edge. The falling snow thickened, dancing on the cold sea breeze. Judith ignored the big corpse for a moment and went to the idling truck. She opened the cab door and cut the engine and headlights. Fumbling on the floorboard, she found a rag to wipe her face, neck, and hands of blood, pocketing the cloth. She picked up her knapsack and walked along the man’s trail in the sand.
The knife was gone!
Judith dropped to her knees to look. He must have wrenched it out of his chest and thrown it. Some stupid, dying instinct. But where, how far?
She ran back to the pickup truck, got in, and started the engine. She shifted into gear and goosed the headlights around to stare across the body. Again on her knees, then on her feet running back and forth, she searched the ripples of sand for the knife. Nothing. She searched for as long as she dared. He must have thrown it into the water, that was the only answer. Good, she thought. In these breakers it will roll out to deeper water.
Judith shut off the headlights washing over the bigger corpse on the beach, then cut the motor. She shouldered her pack, looked once at what she’d done, and set off jogging for the road to town, to make this right.
* * * *
SHE DODGED ONLY ONE car, seeing it come from a long way off on the Plum Island Road. She moved from the paved surface to wait beneath a bridge, out of the snow. She caught her breath in steaming wisps. The car rumbled overhead. Judith noted it was a police car, cruising New Year’s morning, probably looking for locals stumbling away from parties, to take them home and tuck them in, in that American small-town way. She watched to make sure the police car did not go all the way out the beach road, to check on the man and woman guarding the sands with their lives. Instead, the car turned left, north toward the Coast Guard station and the few rows of ocean homes there. Judith clambered out from under the bridge and resumed her run.
On the outskirts of town, she slowed to a quick, quiet walk. The snow ghosted the streets and earth and began to build. Judith stepped through the blacked-out central village, keeping to the narrow residential lanes of old clapboard seamen’s homes from another century, pastels and battered shutters, some finer homes in brick. She located Woodland Street, and found the house on a rise with a view of the river.
She crept behind the house to the garage. The combination in her head worked the lock. She parted the slat doors and peered inside. The building smelled musty and unused, but there in almost complete darkness sat the car. Judith slipped inside the garage, feeling down the driver’s side for the door handle. She opened it. The keys were in the ignition.
Closing the garage, she crunched across the mounting snow to the back door of the house. An old step creaked under her boot.
Before she could reach the knob of the screen door, the inner door flung open. The hammer of a pistol cocked.
“What are you doing here, dearie?”
Judith stopped at the bottom of the steps.
“Something went wrong at the beach. I need to come inside.”
“No. You need to get in that car and drive away, like you’re supposed to. Now be a good girl.”
The voice issued through the screen door, from the blackness of the house. Judith could make out only the snub barrel of a revolver and a white, steady hand.
“I need your help.”
“I’ve been plenty of help already. You’ve found the car. A map’s in the glove compartment with a gas ration book. The registration’s over the visor and it’s an excellent fake. Everything else you asked for is in a bag in the trunk. That’s all I was told to do, and I’ve done it.”
Judith moved her hand to the screen door handle.
The voice hissed, “If you open that door, my dear, I will shoot you where you stand and tell the police you were a burglar. You’re certainly dressed like one.”
Judith pulled open the screen door and spoke up the peeling painted steps, into the inky house and the black eye of the pistol.
“If you do that, I think someone might come and ask for their money back. And perhaps a bit more than money.”
Judith laid her boot on the step.
“Ten minutes. No more. Then I’m gone. Now put that away before I take it from you.”
Judith strode into the house. The revolver floated backward, still trained on her, then disappeared. A match scratched and flared, drifting to a lantern on a table. Judith stood in a kitchen, facing an old woman in a cotton nightdress
The old woman said, “Wait here. Don’t touch anything.” She set her gun on a countertop beside a toaster and left the kitchen. Judith eyed the revolver, an out-of-place thing, like her.
The woman returned garbed in pants and a blue flannel shirt.
“What happened?” she asked.
The old woman pulled out one kitchen chair for herself and sat at the table. She slid the lantern out of the center of the table, and in this way told Judith to sit opposite her. Judith did not know her name and would not know it.
Judith pulled off her wool cap, letting her hair fall. The gesture was intended to tell the woman she was the younger and more powerful, and for the woman to be careful. Judith shrugged off her knapsack, dropped it, and sat.
“Your information was wrong.”
“No,” the woman denied. Judith gazed at the liver spots on the woman’s hands spread on the table, tiny shadows between the creases of her knuckles. The hands flexed.
“No, I’m sure everything was right. Two o’clock to six, every night. Mile-and-a-half walk each way, one hour back to the truck. I been taking cookies and coffee out to that goddam beach in the middle of the night a dozen times. Every time the same. No.”
The woman stirred in her chair. She wiped a hand over her lips. Judith watched.
“Tonight was Bonny and Otto. I know those two. Otto’s a stickler; he would’ve been on time, no matter what.”
The woman put her hands in her lap, below the table. An unsteady breath escaped her. She took the measure of Judith with a searching glance, then said:
“Oh, my God, girl. What’d you do?”
Judith would remember them now as Bonny and Otto. She had their blood in her pocket, on a rag.
“Bonny stayed in the truck tonight. She saw me leaving the beach.”
The old woman dropped her eyes.
“Otto?” she asked.
“Both of them.”
The lantern guttered, the room jittered to the flame. The old woman looked up. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’ll find out when everyone else does.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
The old woman cut her eyes across the kitchen to the pistol on the counter.
“This wasn’t my fault,” Judith said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
The old woman looked confused. She could not tell if this was forgiveness. Judith passed a hand between them, a gesture to wipe away blame. The woman nodded.
“What next?”
“I need more information.”
“Then?”
“Then you do what I tell you. After that, you go back to sleep.”
The old woman snickered at the notion.
Judith said, “Bring me some water.”
“Get it yourself. Cabinet to the right of the sink.”
Judith rose. She found a glass and drank from the tap. She kept her back to the woman, looking out at the flurries. She imagined the beach, snow flattening and covering everything by now. It would be useless to go back and search. No, that was done.
“Were Bonny and Otto lovers?”
Judith waited, assuming some silent reaction behind her back, marvel perhaps. The old woman could not know what emerges in the last seconds of a stolen life. Secrets, truths, purity. This old woman knew only coffee and cookies, lies and greed, and this little town.
“There might’ve been something going on. Everyone figured.”
“They were both married?”
“Yes.”
Keeping her back turned, Judith asked, “Can this pistol be tracked to you?”
“No.”
“Where do you keep your knives?”
“Left of the sink.”
Judith slid open the drawer. She chose an eight-inch blade and pressed her thumb to the sharp point. Lifting her boot to the countertop, she slid the knife into the empty sheath.
* * * *
CHAPTER TWO
January 2
Tomdoun
Highland, Scotland
LAMMECK POINTED INTO THE dusk.
“There, there!”
The driver slammed on brakes. Bodies and curses jumbled in the truck bed.
“You missed the turn,” Lammeck chided.
The driver, a soldier half Lammeck’s age and a fraction his size, said “Sorry” and shifted to reverse.
Lammeck shouted behind him to the men riding under the tarp. “You alright back there? It’s dark; he missed the turn.”
“You think so?” answered a droll French voice. “Christ, mate,” returned a Cockney.
The truck backed to the sign, almost lost in the thick shadows of wild forest growth. The last of the highland afternoon retained only frosty strands of light, snared by the hills and branches of the Lochaber foothills. The air bore a wet chill that only a snug pub and lukewarm ale could disperse.
Down a pebbled track a hundred yards off the narrow road stood The Cow & Candle. An inviting yellow glow stemmed from ancient windows; wood smoke screwed from a chimney.
Lammeck lowered the tailgate. Eight of his trainees jumped out.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Don’t forget Hunk.”
The last soldier, a kilted Scot, smacked a palm to his head and jumped back into the bed to retrieve the sandbag dummy.
All of them filed into the tavern, ducking to enter except the tiny driver, an Irish kid. They swarmed to a poorly lit corner, borrowing tables and chairs to make themselves a camp. Hunk, carried in on the Scot’s shoulder, was plopped upright in his own seat. The dummy had been dressed in the fatigues of a Royal Marine, swiped from the trunk of a teetotaler who wouldn’t come out tonight. Lammeck ordered Hunk a stout.
With cigarettes lit and beers delivered, Lammeck held court. Around him sat three Englishmen, one Irishman, two Canadians, one Frenchman, one Scotsman, and one dummy.
Lammeck raised his mug. These boys were Jedburghs, the name for the multinational clandestine teams recruited and trained by the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, to operate behind enemy lines.
“To you, my lads, and to all the Jedburghs who’ve come before you.” The young men lifted their glasses and clinked all around. The Scot hoisted Hunk’s arm and stout for him.
“Alright, alright,” Lammeck said, wiping foam from his be
ard, “what do we have here? I know most of you specialize in Weapons. What else do we have?”
“Wireless and ciphers,” said one of the Brits.
“Ooo, ciphers. Riddles.” The crew laughed.
“Tell us a cipher,” Lammeck ordered.
The Assassins Gallery - [Dr Mikhal Lammeck 01] Page 2