“Well, you’ll find that Syron Lake’s a lot different from the pace of life in a big city like Vancouver, and it’s no tropical paradise, that’s for sure. But it’s alright.”
“It’s surprisingly civilized for a former mining town the middle of the forest.”
“That’s thanks to the retirees. They sell their homes in Toronto, move up here, and get something for a tenth of what their old house was worth. And that leaves them with a pile of cash to fix up their new place.”
I bit my lip. Hearing about retirees and their piles of home renovation cash made me suddenly embarrassed about my own plans, which now seemed rash and vague.
“I’m afraid only the first two places we’re going to look at actually have a mother-in-law suite,” Ada said. “It’s just not something people around here are into, I guess.”
Those first two houses were way beyond my budget. Still, I’d read up on creative financing and egged the agent on to call the owners to see if they’d let me take over their mortgages. That was a non-starter.
We spent the rest of the day crisscrossing Syron Lake. Ada took me to more than a dozen other places that were less expensive, but their unfinished or moldy basements made them unsuitable for my purpose.
By late afternoon, we had exhausted Ada’s list. The hope that had earlier seen me bound into the agent’s office was now replaced by a sinking feeling.
“Okay, Stella, I know you’ve said you don’t want to limit yourself.” Ada’s voice seemed to strain to maintain a cheerful friendliness. “And I know you think that, as you say, with creative financing, anything is possible. But you’ve got to give me a figure to work with, otherwise we could just be wasting a lot of time here.”
I didn’t like being pushed. But I could tell the agent had reached the end of his patience.
“Thirty. Thirty-five, max,” I said.
Ada snorted. “We haven’t seen that kind of price in years.”
My Syron Lake dreams were quickly shriveling.
The real estate agent tapped his thumbs on the steering wheel. Perhaps what he really wanted to do was kick me out of his car.
“Actually, there is this one place,” Ada said after a while. “I’m not sure it’s suitable for you. It’s kinda out of the way. But we might as well give it a look before we call it quits today.”
He drove for several minutes out of town and then turned off on a narrow road. We continued on another few minutes, during which I saw only two other houses in between the trees. Ada pulled into the driveway of a long and somewhat shabby bungalow, and parked beside an old pickup.
“Looks like the owner’s here. Built this himself. There’s no mortgage on the place. He just put it up, bit by bit whenever he could afford it.”
Despite the dented, faded siding and curling asphalt roof tiles, the place had a certain charm, mostly because it was nestled among gorgeous maples and majestic pines. If I lived here, all I had to do was look outside the great, big bay window at the front of the house for all the inspiration I needed to write.
Through that window, I saw a gaunt figure shuffle across the room. “You said he owns the place outright?”
“Uh-huh. A former miner. Lived here by himself; no wife or children. When the mines closed, he moved to an apartment down South and rented out this place. But he’s had a string of bad tenants the last few years and now he just wants to sell up. I listed the house for him fifteen months ago. Not too many takers, even though he’s asking forty for it.”
My pulse began to race.
The price was still too high, but I would negotiate. I would beg, grovel, and do whatever it took. I was even ready to use the weapon I most hated resorting to: my womanly wiles.
It was the editor at my first job at a tiny Vancouver paper called The Sentinel who had showed me how to smile and lower my head and look up with vulnerable eyes. He’d taught me the words to use to appear like a damsel in distress who admired a man’s strength and wisdom, and needed him to save the day. Then he had unleashed me on the cops. He would laugh at editors on bigger newspapers who would meet him in the bar on Friday nights and wonder aloud how The Sentinel consistently scooped them on the crime beat with a rookie reporter. I worked those womanly wiles on the cops and got the stories, but felt cheap and exploited. That’s why when I’d heard of the opening at the salmon non-profit, I had immediately jumped for it.
Now, my mind tried to retrieve all that I’d learned from my old editor.
I went full throttle. Beamed at the house seller. Played with my shoulder-length, jet-black hair, and nonchalantly stroked my collarbone. Touched the old fellow lightly on the upper arm, and leaned into him as I spoke. Asked about his life, and laughed at anything he said that was remotely funny. Told of how I was just starting out in life, myself. Of how I found the place he had created to be unique and enchanting, and of how I would treasure it, as a hopeful, young writer….
Three hours later, I walked out the door with a signed agreement.
“So you beat his price down to thirty-two grand and got him to give you a vendor take-back mortgage,” Ada said as we got into his car. “That’s some kinda negotiation skills you’ve got there, young lady.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I mumbled. I knew it was all down to pure desperation.
As we pulled off, the house seller came outside and shuffled around to the back.
“He’s in a bad way,” Ada said pensively. “Thinner and frailer than when I last saw him.”
“You’re not trying to imply that I took advantage of an old man, are you?”
“No, no. I’ve seen him become cantankerous with buyers who tried to lowball him. He seemed to have taken quite a shine to you.”
I remained quiet.
“My commission may be lower because of that deal, but, actually, I think it’s a lucky thing that you showed up today to take this place off his hands,” Ada said. “At his age, he needs to let go of that house, stay down South, and just take care of his health.”
Lucky for him and lucky for me. It turned out that I wouldn’t even need tenants as I could more than manage the monthly payments we’d agreed to. I now had a whole, big house in the woods to myself, where I could comfortably and happily write up a storm.
Moving to Syron Lake felt like the best decision I’d ever made.
Little did I know how quickly all my expectations would be turned upside down.
Chapter 4
At half an hour before midnight on Saturday, Monaco was alive and buzzing. Throngs looking for a grand time on the Riviera filled the Casino Square, and flooded the waterfront bars and lounges. Euro techno and American hip-hop blasted out of jam-packed clubs and mingled with the sound of the Mediterranean rolling in and crashing on the rocky shoreline.
The Russian parked his motorcycle high on the hill in Beausoleil. Dressed in all black fatigues and tabi boots, and carrying a bulging, black backpack, he made it on foot down to Villa St Eustace. He encountered not a soul.
There were no glamorous nightspots here, only villas, apartment buildings, two office towers, a dental office, a jewelry repair shop, and a stationery store. No one would be in this street at this time unless they had a good reason to be there.
The assassin slipped into a narrow passageway and stood before the service entrance of Villa St Eustace. Behind the door was a staircase that went straight to the top, to the mansard where the servants’ quarters were. That was where he needed to be.
Picking the lock would have been easy; for him it was a minor, low-level skill. But there were cameras inside, one on the ceiling of every floor.
The only safe way to enter was from the roof.
He knew
every inch and all the innards of the building. The client had supplied the blueprints.
It was a century-old villa built by a Russian merchant who’d been ordered by doctors to “take the waters” on the Mediterranean in his dying days. Knowing that his offspring rarely got along with each other, the old man had designed the villa to contain five separate apartments, each one occupying an entire floor. The property had remained in the hands of the merchant’s descendants until sold to Magrelma Mines almost two decades prior.
Originally, each of the four founders had had an apartment, and the company’s office had occupied the ground floor. Upon the death of the oldest among them, Bernard Ellis, whose wife returned to New York, the office expanded to two floors.
The third floor belonged to Henry Maitland, who was divorced and kept no domestic staff. Carmela Greene owned the floor above that. Mahler had the top-most apartment, with the best view.
And just above him was the mansard. Divided into eight hutches for the servants, each room was so small there was little space for anything other than a twin bed.
The assassin aimed a REBS compact grapnel launcher at the roof and fired. The rubber-coated hook shot into air and landed with only the slightest thud on the terracotta tiles. He tugged on the rope until it snapped taut.
He checked the street again. All clear.
The split of his tabi boots allowed him to grasp the rope with his toes as well as his hands. In less than a minute he had climbed up onto the roof.
Intermittent reminders of the nearby revelry in the Casino Square floated up to his ears: loud laughter, a screech of tires, someone calling out to someone else. But he snaked his way across the roof with the assurance that he was shielded from view by the giant jacaranda and the taller commercial buildings around him.
He stopped at the skylight of the room belonging to Mrs Greene’s maid. He took a radiator hose pick out of his backpack, and with deft flicks of his wrist, he worked past the skylight’s weatherstripping until he caught hold of the latch and popped it open.
The room was the closest one to the stairwell. It was empty. According to the client, there would be no one in the mansard that night. Mrs Greene had left the week before with her maid for her cruise. Fran Mahler had given her servants the weekend off as she would spend Sunday at the Monte Carlo Bay after the gala finished in the wee hours of the morning. Three of the rooms were used to store extra files and equipment from the Magrelma office; but it was highly unlikely that anyone would be working that late on a Saturday to have any cause to come up to the mansard.
The killer had the floor to himself.
The first order of business was the security camera.
It was a stationary unit, which pointed down the stairwell, and was trained on the back door to Mahler’s apartment. There was no device surveying the other direction — the corridors of the servants’ floor. The inherent snobbery of this arrangement was to the Russian’s advantage.
He placed a chair from the room as close as possible to the security camera. He climbed up on it, pointed a Fujifilm Instax 210 Instant Camera in the same direction as the security camera, and clicked. In seconds, he had a printed replica of the scene.
Working quickly, he passed a black card before the lens to mask the act of mounting the picture directly in front of the security camera. If anyone was actually monitoring the camera feed in the security post in the basement, it would have looked as if the equipment experienced a momentary lapse. It would easily have been taken as an unremarkable blip, after which the normal view was restored.
He returned the chair to the room, packed away the instant camera, and took out a smaller sack with gear for the next stage. Footsteps coming up the stairs made him dart to the door. He closed it and breathed silently as he listened.
The client had stipulated no guns. But the Russian was wearing a piece. He had to be prepared for all eventualities.
The footsteps were slow and shuffling. Whoever was out there passed right in front of the door, then continued to the corridor on the opposite side of the stairwell.
Keys jangled; a lock tumbled.
The assassin cracked open the door just in time to see what looked like a female figure disappear into a room at the far end of the corridor opposite. The door closed behind her.
She could be in there all night. Or she could re-emerge at any moment.
He couldn’t dwell on this unexpected complication. There was no time to. He would continue as planned. If she got in the way, he just would have to eliminate her and get rid of the body.
He sprinted past the security camera and down to the landing where the stairs changed direction, just above Mahler’s back door.
He would not attempt entry through the back door. The state-of-the-art double locks were nothing he couldn’t handle. The problem was that any attempt to pick them would set off the alarm.
Once inside the apartment, he expected to find the security code written down and kept on Mahler’s nightstand. The client had said Mahler had promised the rest of the villa’s occupants that he would keep the code handy after one too many incidents in which Mahler had stepped out to the back stairwell for a smoke only to have a piercing alarm rip through the building because he hadn’t remembered the numbers to punch in to turn off the system.
The code would quicken the Russian’s exit after he completed his mission. Now, though, his whole focus was on gaining entry.
The blueprints had exposed the building’s internal vulnerability, and now he would exploit it. The garbage chute was a solid steel tube which ran from the vent in the roof to the trash compactor in the basement. It gave an access point to every apartment.
The Russian swung the side-hinged door open and affixed two switchable magnetic welding clamps to the steel walls of the chute. He climbed through the door and slid himself, feet first, into the narrow shaft.
Strapped loosely to his ankles were two more clamps. The split-toe tabi-boots gave him flexibility and control. He positioned the dangling devices against the wall and used his toes to turn on the magnets.
Having created a foothold, he straightened himself. He grabbed onto of one of the upper clamps with one hand, and, with his free hand, pulled the door shut.
Darkness engulfed him. A lesser man would have been deterred by the pitch blackness, the claustrophobic space, the awkward, suspended position, and the sure knowledge that failure of the magnets or a misstep would send him hurtling some fifty feet into the jaws of a merciless compactor that would close in and crush the life out of him.
The Russian, though, would let no obstacle stand in the way of his million-dollar payment.
His muscles were tense. Beads of perspiration formed on his brow. But he controlled his breathing and allowed only thoughts of successfully completing his progress through the shaft to play across his mind.
Switching the magnets on and off and shifting them down, each in turn, he lowered himself. Nothing else in the world existed at that moment other than each inch of patient descent. Finally, he was at the opening to Mahler’s apartment.
He pushed in the chute door, squeezed through the opening, and rolled onto the floor of the dark utility room.
According to the client, only Mahler and the male nurse would be in.
The plan was to take out the attendant first.
The nurse was a former green beret who had been kicked out of the Army for misconduct on account of a heroin addiction that once nearly cost him his life. The man had cleaned up after some years and had retrained for a new career, eventually landing this gig in the Disney World for the wealthy. He’d been on the job for six months.
The drug abuse may have done some damage, but who could tell what an ex-green beret’s reflexes mig
ht be. The Russian knew he would have to be fast, and precise.
Hidden in the darkness at the end of a long corridor, he scanned the scene.
The drapes were closed and all lights in the cavernous living room were off, except for track lights over the home bar in the alcove to the left.
The nurse sat on a stool at the bar with his back to the Russian. A television on the wall behind the counter showed a baseball match. The volume was turned down.
The man paid no attention to the screen. He kept his head bent, focusing on something on the counter. An open decanter and a half-empty glass were to his right.
From what he knew of ruthless, corporate warriors like Mahler, the Russian figured the drink was not courtesy of Mahler’s largess. The illicit enjoyment of his employer’s grog would be the nurse’s last experience on the planet. How in character for an ex-officer who’d dishonored his green beret, the Russian thought.
The attack from behind was swift. The killer caught the nurse in a headlock and pressed a rag soaked with Desflurane over the man’s nose. The nurse barely had a chance to react. His hand reached up, but his fingers could only weakly wrap themselves around the Russian’s gloved hand. The ether knocked him out cold.
The substance was not intended to cause the final exit. However, it bought the Russian time. He let the nurse slump forward onto the counter.
He had originally planned to place the nurse on the long sofa which sat near the voluminous drapes. All would serve as good tinder.
But the bar now presented a better opportunity. It was closer to Mahler’s room. And, on the counter, stood a wine rack in the form of a twisted wire sculpture that suspended six bottles at impossible angles. All good fuel.
The killer emptied paraphernalia from his sack onto the counter: a syringe, a spoon, a lighter, a vial of water, and a packet of white power — the purest heroin. He emptied the packet into the spoon, added a few drops of water, and lit the lighter under the spoon. Then he filled the syringe.
Run, Girl, Run: A Thriller Page 3