Silent Assassin

by Leo J. Maloney

  “Nice place,” she said. “Swanky.”

  “The best of everything that money can buy,” he said. “You fit right in here, don’t you? An expensive doll for an expensive apartment.”

  “I guess,” she said, with a nervous smile. “How about I get you that drink now?”

  “No,” he said. “I’ll get the drinks.” He turned on some smooth jazz with the stereo remote control. “You dance.”

  He poured two glasses of wine as he watched her sway to the music, eyes closed, hands running along her body. He was standing in front of her when she opened her eyes again, and she gave a little start.

  “Your glass,” he said, extending it in his left hand to her. “Take it.”

  “I can’t,” she said nervously.

  “I said take it,” he growled. She took the glass sheepishly from his hand and took a nervous sip. He grinned triumphantly. He was going to have fun slowly breaking this one. He took a mouthful of the wine. It was good and got his blood flowing.

  “So tell me,” he said, in almost a whisper. “What other rules are we going to be breaking tonight?”

  He downed the rest of his wine, then grabbed her by the wrist again. “Do I make you nervous?” he said, in a way calculated to make her nervous. Judging by her expression, it worked.

  “How about I pour you another?” she said, taking his glass in her free hand and backing away. He had to smile. He had succeeded in rattling her, at last, and she wanted a moment away. He’d give it to her.

  “Yeah. Why don’t you do that?”

  She picked up the glasses and turned her back to him. He smirked, looking at her back, then looked at his reflection on the full-length mirror of the far wall. Sharp. Something in the mirror caught his attention: her hands, hovering over the wineglass for just a second, and then a tiny, empty vial between her fingers. Anger welled up inside him as he realized its significance.

  He didn’t react and put on a blank face when she turned around with a wide smile and handed him the wineglass. He took it, and raised it.

  “To your beauty,” he said. She smiled and clinked her glass against his. He raised the glass to his lips. Then, instead of drinking, he tossed it aside violently so that it shattered in a thousand pieces on the hardwood floor. He caught her by the hair. “So, you were trying to drug me?”

  “What?” she said, trying to wrestle free. “No! I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You were!” he hissed.

  “No, I swear!” said Risa. “Look, okay, I did put something in your drink. But it’s just something to make this night more fun!”

  “I’ll give you fun,” he snarled, and backhanded her across the face.

  Morgan met Bishop’s eye, and they didn’t have to say a word. Both men were already getting up. Shepard’s voice came over the comm: “You guys getting this? You’d better get in there!” Morgan dropped two bills on the table, and they ran out of the bar and across the street to the door of the apartment building.

  “Lying bitch!” Morgan heard Stuart yell through his earpiece. “You were trying to drug me! You were going to rob me, weren’t you? Is that your deal? Huh? Is that what they tell you to do at that whorehouse?”

  “No! I swear!” She sounded more and more distressed. “I don’t want anything from you. Please, just let me go!”

  Morgan swiped the key card at the front door and they dashed inside, past the lobby. Stewart’s place was seven floors up, and the elevators were both higher than that. This couldn’t wait. They made for the stairs.

  “I thought I paid top dollar to avoid your kind of thieving gutter trash.” His voice was getting increasingly menacing. Morgan’s legs burned to keep up with Bishop as they ran up three steps at a time.

  “But I guess a whore’s a whore, right?” He heard the sound of glass shattering and a heavy piece of furniture being knocked over. “What else can you expect?”

  “Stay away from me!” came Risa’s tearful voice.

  They reached Stuart’s floor, and Bishop tried the door, but it was locked.

  “Who the hell is that? One of your buddies?”

  “Oh hell,” said Morgan. “Stand back, Bishop.”

  He took a few steps back and then kicked the door as hard as he could right next to the knob. The frame splintered around the lock, and the door slowly swung open. On the floor, on top of an expensive-looking Persian rug, was Len Stuart, inert but still breathing, looking especially small and shriveled with his scrawny build and prematurely balding head. Standing above him with a little smile as if she were welcoming them for a dinner party, was Risa Rispoli.

  “What the hell happened?” said Morgan.

  “Lenny took a nap,” she said, as she walked past them.

  “The point of your coming here was to subdue him without a fight!” Bishop hissed.

  “You got what you wanted, ” Rispoli said airily as she walked away. “Now, have at it, boys.”

  CHAPTER 17

  New York, January 7

  Len Stuart woke up groggy and confused, which was in itself strange, but he was not in any shape to notice right away. He tried to jump out of bed as per his usual routine, only to find that, not only was he in fact sitting down, but his hands were tied behind his back with something tight and sharp cutting into his numb wrists.

  “Hello, Len.” The voice was more like a growl, low and intimidating. He looked up, his head lolling on his neck, and saw through fuzzy eyes that there were two men in the room with him: one standing against the wall in front of him, watching him silently from behind a black ski mask; and another one, the one who had been talking, standing over him, wearing a mask too, a deep crimson one.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he said, slurring the words. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the angel of justice, Len,” said the man in the red mask. He was white, while the other was black, and this one was shorter than the other man, but from where he was standing, he looked frighteningly tall and powerful. “An avenging spirit here to punish you for the evil things you’ve done. And there are a lot of them, Len. You have a lot to answer for.”

  “What?” he said, flabbergasted. He was trying and failing to make the words fit into some semblance of meaning. His thoughts were clouded, and it all seemed so strange. Nothing seemed to make sense. He couldn’t even bring himself to be properly afraid, even though he knew he should be. The back of his head felt raw. “Who are you? What is this?”

  “So you like to beat up on women, do you?” said the one in the red mask. “Does that make you feel like more of a man? Does it make you feel powerful?”

  “Women?” he said, confused. “The whore!” he remembered suddenly. She had tried to drug him, and then . . . he wracked his fuzzy brain but couldn’t remember what had happened next.

  “She has a name,” the man in the red mask said. “She can also take care of herself. How many others were there that couldn’t?”

  “I have cash,” he said, still slurring his words and struggling to keep his thoughts straight. “In the apartment. I can tell you where it is. I’ll give you whatever you want. My cards. I got a couple things worth some money too. I’ll tell you where to find everything. Please. Take it all. I don’t care. Just take it and go.”

  “I don’t want money, Len.”

  Clarity was eluding him. His fear at that moment still seemed distant and hazy. How did they know his name? “Are-are you going to kill me?” he stammered.

  “It’s a distinct possibility.” He said it like it was nothing, and Len heard it from a distance. They are going to kill me. He tried to wrap his mind around the significance of this, but he couldn’t.

  “In fact,” the man continued, “I’d say that it’s pretty damn certain that you’ll die today. That is, unless you tell us what we want to know.”

  “What do you want to know?” asked Stuart, dread finally beginning to catch up with him.

  “That’s the attitude I like! Now. You recently made a lot of money, L
en. I want to know how you did that.”

  He frowned, perplexed. “Financial markets. I play the financial markets. I’m a trader. It’s what I do. I get more money out than I put in. That’s all there is to it.”

  “I’m sure,” the man said. “Except this time, you made a lot more than you had ever made before. It was, oh, some time around the Paris bombing. Does that ring a bell, Len?”

  The mention of the bombing in connection to his score jogged him awake. They couldn’t know. Could they? The plan was supposed to be foolproof! “I made some good investments. That’s it.”

  “Good investments?” The man in the red mask chuckled and looked at his partner. “In that case let me hire you to take care of my money, Len. Since it seems like you’re so good at it. But no. That was a little more than good investments. It went well beyond what’s reasonably believable, even for insider trading. Because you didn’t have an insider in any company, did you, Len? You had a different kind of insider, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said in a half-panicked stammer. Normally, he knew how to lie, but all his faculties were failing him at the moment.

  “Let’s not play this game.” The man bent down so that he was inches from Stuart’s face. Stuart could see his mustache peeking through the mouth hole of the face mask, his hard brown eyes. “Someone tipped you off to the attack. They did it in a way that you were able to make money off of it with strategic investments. Are we getting warm yet?”

  “I don’t know—”

  The man grabbed Stuart’s hair and pulled his head back, raising his hand to strike Stuart’s face. “Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Tell me. I dare you.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” he said, doing a fairly good job of sounding convincing.

  The red-masked man’s hand came down to strike him, but before it hit, it was stayed by another hand: it was the man in the black mask. “Hold on,” he said. Then, looking down at Stuart: “We know that you know, Len.” His voice was deep, and not as cool as that of the man in the red mask—smoother, but just as chilling. “And make no mistake about it: we are prepared to kill you if you don’t give us what we came here for. Now, you can cooperate, or you can die painfully. The choice is yours.”

  Stuart gulped. “He’ll kill me.”

  “We’ll kill you,” said the man in the black mask.

  “Who is he?” asked the man in the red mask, moving toward Stuart as he did.

  There was no getting away from this. They had him, literally tied up, and they knew. There was no way he was going to talk himself out of this one. Cooperating was the only way, even if it meant . . . well, he wouldn’t think about it right now. “I want protection. I want to be in custody. I want you to guarantee that he won’t kill me.”

  “We’re not gonna offer you protection, Len,” said the man in the red mask. “You’ve got yourself involved with some very nasty people so you could make a quick buck on the bodies of dozens of innocent people. That’s on you. I’d plug you myself if we didn’t have use for you. To them, though, you’re just a liability, especially once they know we’re on to you. So here’s what you’re gonna do: you’re gonna give us everything you know, and do everything you can so we can catch these sons of bitches. And in return, we get rid of them and pinky-swear that any bullet that scrambles that genius brain of yours doesn’t belong to us.”

  “And remember,” said the man in the black mask, “all this is contingent on you being useful to us. So you’d best start talking now, ’cause this is the best deal you’re gonna get.”

  Len Stuart took a deep breath.

  “From the beginning, Len,” said the man in the red mask.

  He’d have to tell them. There was no way out now, except hope. “I heard about it through a friend. A solid guy. We’d exchanged information before, and not the kind the SEC looks kindly on, so I knew he had some hookups. He said he knew a guy who was selling this tip. Some shady kind of guy, billing himself as some sort of mastermind. Called himself Moriarty. Apparently, that’s some kingpin from the Sherlock Holmes books. I looked it up. Anyway, this Moriarty guy is supposed to be a sure thing, a way to make a lot of money quick, boom-boom. Something top secret, especially illegal, super risky, extremely—”

  “Wrong?” said the man in the red mask.

  Stuart gave a hollow chuckle. “No such thing in my line of work.”

  “So he gave you this man’s number,” said the other.

  “No,” said Stuart. “No numbers. I got a location and a time. I was told that he would meet me there, and that I should bring two hundred thousand dollars, cash.”

  “Where?”

  “He told me I had to order a large coffee at Starbucks and sit on the Broadway and Cedar corner of Zuccotti Park, reading the Wall Street Journal. So I do that, with my black Samsonite rolling suitcase with two hundred grand. After a few minutes, a guy in a Yankees cap sits next to me. He slips me a piece of paper, and tells me to get up and walk away, and leave the suitcase for him.”

  “Two hundred grand for a piece of paper?”

  “Worth a lot more than that if you know how to use it.”

  “What did he look like, this Moriarty?” the man in the black mask cut in.

  “Average height. Just under six foot. A bit on the skinny side. Asian. Didn’t see much of his face. He had big aviator sunglasses on.”

  “How old?”

  “I don’t know,” Stuart said.

  “You’d better remember, or I’ll find the right incentive that will.”

  Stuart was sweating nervously. “Okay. Okay, I’ll tell you. But I couldn’t tell much when I met him. A bit younger than me, maybe.”

  “What was he wearing apart from the hat and sunglasses?” asked the man in the red mask.

  “Blue jeans and a dark grey hoodie,” said Stuart.

  “Anything written on it?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “And the piece of paper—”

  “Contained only a date—the date of the attack—and two columns, one labeled ‘up,’ and another ‘down.’ Under each was a detailed list of stocks and commodities. I made my trades based on that list—and almost everything went either up or down that day, just as predicted.”

  “Do you still have that list?”

  Stuart nodded. “That desk over there. Bottom drawer. The one with the padlock. The combination is. . . .”

  But the man in the red mask pulled hard enough to yank the screws from the lock hinge out of the wood. Stuart felt a bit foolish at how little security the lock actually provided.

  “Should be among the top papers,” he told the man.

  “Got it,” the man in red said to the other. “Is there anything else you feel like telling us, Len?” he added.

  “Please don’t kill me?” he said, as breezily as he could.

  “We’re not done with you yet, Len,” said the tall one. “You’re still going to do one more thing for us. If he contacts you again, and I’m betting he will, you’re gonna let us know. See that table over there, by the window? Once you get another tip-off about making another trade, you’re going to put a bottle of whiskey on it, and you’re going to leave it there. Once we get the signal, we’ll contact you. Can I count on you to do that, Len? Or do I have to remind you what happens if you don’t cooperate?”

  “I understand. I’ll do it.”

  The man in the red mask moved as if to hit him. Stuart cowered under his hand.

  “I’ll do it! I swear!”

  “You’d better,” said the man in the red mask. “And remember: we’re watching you.”

  Someone put a dark cloth bag over his head. He felt them undo his ties, and then he was tossed onto the ground. He felt sharp, sickening pain as someone’s foot hit his abdomen. He heard footsteps walking out of his apartment as he retched, writhing on the floor.

  CHAPTER 18

  Boston, January 9

  Morgan came into the garage with h
is car and drove down to the lowest level and then to a forgotten corner beyond the available spaces and hidden away from the view of the rest of the cars and pedestrians. He parked his car and walked out to a forgotten unmarked door with a key-card reader next to it. Inside was a dark room, which lit up when he closed the door behind him. Here was another door, and a breaker box next to it. He opened the box and revealed a biometric reader. Morgan scanned his retina and palm. The door unlocked. There was a small hallway that led to an elevator and stairwell. He knew that there was another layer of security at work here—cameras with face-recognition software checking every person who came in. The elevator door opened, and he went down.

  He emerged and walked down a short hallway to the Zeta Division war room, where Diana Bloch and Lincoln Shepard were both standing, looking at one of the smaller monitors embedded in the wall while Karen O’Neal sat against a wall, flicking through pages on a tablet computer.

  “Come in, Cobra,” said Bloch. “We were just looking over some surveillance footage. Please, sit down.”

  Morgan pulled up a chair near the monitor, next to Shepard, but it was unnecessary, because moments later Shepard switched the active monitor to the big screen. Morgan dragged his chair back a few paces in order to get a more comfortable view.

  “We’ve been going over the info we got from Stuart,” said Shepard. He sat down, slumped in his chair worse than usual—it was always obvious when he was bored—and his tone made it clear they hadn’t gotten very far. “It’s pretty thin. Painfully nondescript Asian man, average height, average complexion, dark brown hair, between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Calls himself Moriarty, after the fictional criminal mastermind from the Sherlock Holmes series. In the books, he was supposed to be some kind of godfather, ruling over every major crime in England.”