Hit For Hire

by David Archer

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said, this time with a Western American accent. “Are you keeping dinner for me?”

  The woman on the other end of the line was silent for just a moment, and then she took a deep breath. “Henry? Is it really you?”

  “Sure is. I got a little tangled up over here for a while, hope you weren’t too worried.”

  “I’ve been a wreck,” she said. “I kept checking all the news websites, looking for anything that might explain why you disappeared. I haven’t been sleeping, that’s why I was sitting here awake when you called. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Rachel,” he said. “Had to put in a little extra work to get out of a mess, but it’s all over now. I just wanted to check in and make sure you’re okay.”

  “I will be,” Rachel said. “You’ll be coming home soon, right?”

  He frowned. This was the part of the call he was dreading. “Not quite yet,” he said softly. “That last contract may have gone bad on me, so I need to go ahead and make some money pretty quick. There was another company looking to hire me just before everything got screwed up, and I need to make contact with them.”

  “Oh, God, Henry,” the woman said softly. “I get so worried.” He heard her sniffle, but then she pulled herself together. “All right, then, what can I do to help?”

  “That’s my girl,” he said. “Remember I emailed you an ad I ran across? It listed a few different cities, can you take a look and see if London was one of them. I’m pretty sure it was.”

  “All right,” Rachel said. “Give me a couple of moments.” She was quiet for nearly half a minute, and then she said, “I found it. Yes, London is in the list. You are supposed to place an ad in the newspapers saying that you want to discuss business, and use the code AD229.”

  Henry smiled. “That’s great,” he said. “Okay, sweetheart, just give me a few days to look into what they want, and I’ll call you again. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. If this is too big a job, I might be home by the end of the week.”

  He heard a sob escape her. “I hope so, Henry,” she said. “I really hope so.”

  He ended the call and looked at the time display on the phone. It was well after three AM, and there was no possibility that he could place the ad before eight. He wandered off to his bed and set the alarm on his phone to rouse him at seven.

  He woke on schedule, went to his little kitchen and made himself some breakfast. At just after eight, he took out his phone and dialed another number.

  “London telegraph,” the receptionist answered. “How might I direct your call?”

  “I’d like to place a classified ad, please,” Henry said. The receptionist put him on hold for a moment and then another young woman came on the line. Henry explained to her that he wanted to place an ad, dictated it to her perfectly and then gave her a credit card number from memory.

  “Thank you,” the girl said. “Your advertisement will appear in this evening’s paper, as well as appearing on our website right away.”

  “Well, thank you,” Henry said. “You were a great help.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Noah woke five minutes before the alarm he had set for six AM, and roused Sarah so that they could get their showers out of the way. He wanted to be ready for anything by the time Neil and Moose were up, but they surprised him by knocking on his door while he and Sarah were drying off. He left her in the bathroom and went to the door with just a towel around his waist.

  “About time,” Neil said as he pushed past Noah into the room. “We’ve been up for an hour already, working our butts off while you two were probably playing kissy-face.”

  “Ignore him,” Moose said. “He’s just jealous.”

  “I am not jealous, I am just impatient. The boss man said he wanted me working on some things first thing this morning, so I got up and worked on them. You want to hear what I found, Boss?”

  Noah had closed the door and dropped his towel, and slid into his slacks as he nodded. “Of course,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  Neil had already set his computer on the table and opened it. “First item you asked for was a house, right? I found one in East Kensington that ought to be ideal. Fully furnished, fully stocked pantry, five bedrooms, a two-car garage attached to the house and almost two full acres of yard that’s surrounded by a 10-foot-high brick wall. It’s available for only 900 pounds per week. The estate agent will be open at seven thirty, if you want to grab it, but I didn’t see anything else that was half as likely to work.”

  Noah nodded. “Go ahead and get it when they open,” he said. “We can move over there later today.”

  “Okay, now the second thing.” He pulled up a photo on the monitor and pointed at it. “Patrick Iverson,” Neil said. “Forty-eight years old. Known member of the offshoot organization known as the Real Irish Republican Army. SIS has been keeping tabs on him for almost a year, now, and he’s been hauled in for questioning about IRA activities in the country on four different occasions. So far, there’s been no evidence linking him to any actual events, but circumstantial evidence against him is mounting. He’s had direct contact with bad actors in at least two of those attacks, and he’s suspected of helping to set them up. He lives in the London Borough of Hackney, in northeast London. It’s not quite a slum, but the area has seen a lot of poverty and some increase in crime over the last few years. Single with no known family anywhere in the area, and he seems to be a loner. Works in a factory, and doesn’t seem to have any friends.”

  “What about skills? Has he had any kind of military training?”

  Neil nodded. “Yep, served four years in the Royal Navy. Never saw combat, but his specialty was underwater demolitions. Sounds like a guy who would know how to rig up a bomb, don’t you think?”

  “Any general criminal history?” Noah asked.

  “Minor stuff, mostly,” Neil said. “like traffic tickets, public intoxication. In nineteen ninety-nine, he was accused of rape by a young woman who lived in the same apartment building he did at the time. Police investigated, he was arrested but then was released only a couple days later with the charges all dismissed. Apparently the girl had made the exact same accusations about a couple of other men in recent months, identical all the way down to descriptive details of the event. She ended up being sent to counseling.”

  Noah was leaning over his shoulder, studying the photos of the man that were displayed on the monitor. “Okay, he looks like our guy. Moose and I will go round him up within the next couple of days.”

  “Cool,” Neil said. “Now, as for Prince Charles; he’s only got five appearances scheduled in that time frame, and three of them all next Thursday. All three of those will be in connection with a schools and teachers charity, at three different primary schools scattered around London. He’ll be accompanied by the Prime Minister, and they’ll be surrounded by kids the majority of the time in each one, so I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to have them on the list?”

  “You guessed right,” Noah said. “We’re not going through with it in any case, but I don’t even want to plan a dummy operation that would involve killing innocent kids.”

  Neil nodded and snapped his fingers. “Way cool,” he said. “Okay, next Wednesday, the Prince will be hosting a meeting of business leaders from around the city. There will be about two hundred in a conference room set up like a theater, and he’ll be addressing them from the stage. Then, on Friday, he’s attending the opening, like a ribbon-cutting, of a hospice in Tower Hamlets. That one is open to the public, so it’s likely to be pretty packed around it.”

  “Where is the conference room for the business meeting?” Noah asked.

  “It’s in the Canary Wharf building, One Canada Square in the Canary Wharf Borough. The meeting will be on the forty-seventh floor.”

  “That would make it tough to get out of, Boss,” Moose said. “I’m assuming you’re going to want to plan this all the way out, with escape routes and everything?”

  Noah nodde
d. “You’re right,” he said. “Still, it’s probably the most likely situation where anyone would have a chance to make the hit. I think we’ll have to take it.”

  “Okay, does anybody but me think this is getting to be a little scary?” Sarah asked. “Noah, what are you going to do if you haven’t identified the Executive Director by the time you’re supposed to make this hit?”

  “I’ve thought of that, and there are couple of possibilities. First, it could simply be a failed assassination attempt. I could miss, in other words. Second, and this one might be a little trickier, we could call in our girl Catherine and let her know what’s going on. She could probably manage to make contact with the Prince and get his schedule changed at the very last possible second. That would naturally make it impossible to complete the assignment as planned, and I’d have to go into sudden-death overtime. It might even give me the reason I’m looking for to make Deanna call the top man again.”

  “I don’t see why you can’t just call them in a week or so and make up an excuse,” Sarah said. “Why go to all this trouble for an assassination you aren’t really going to do?”

  “That group of people organizes assassinations and terrorist attacks all over the world,” Noah said. “You can bet they’ll be watching closely, checking every news story and looking for signs that I’m actually setting this up. If they don’t find any, they’re going to start wondering whether they wasted their money on me. There’s got to be enough convincing clues or they won’t even take a call from me again.”

  “That’s your logic talking,” she said. “Only problem there is that I can’t argue with it.”

  * * * * *

  The cell phone on the table rang suddenly, and the man who called himself Henry snatched it up. “Hello,” he said, his American accent completely gone.

  “You want to discuss something?” a woman asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am responding to your attempts to contact me.”

  The woman was silent for a moment, and when she spoke again, Henry could hear confusion in her voice. “Is there a problem with the arrangement?”

  It was Henry’s turn to be confused. “Arrangement? We have not even begun to discuss it yet.”

  Another moment of silence passed. “You placed a code in your advertisement. How did you come by that code?”

  Henry scowled. “Dear lady,” he said, “that code was listed in advertisements placed by you and your people, advertisements that were obviously intended to get my attention and elicit a response. I regret that it has taken me some time to respond, but I have been unavoidably detained. I have now overcome that detention, and am willing to discuss whatever work you might have for me.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what to say,” the woman said. “That work is already assigned to the person we were trying to reach.”

  Henry’s eyebrows rose half an inch. “I find that to be quite startling,” he said, “since I’m quite certain I am the person you are seeking. If you have made an arrangement with someone using my name, then you have been seriously misled. Let me suggest that you notify those above you of this fact, and tell them how they can contact me at this number. I shall keep it for no more than two hours, and if I have not heard from them by that time it will be destroyed.”

  He pressed the end button on the phone and set it down on the table once again.

  So, he thought, someone is trying to impersonate me? The only possible reason for such an impersonation is an attempt to infiltrate the organization that wishes to employ me. That would mean that we are dealing with a government agent, but from which government?

  Henry lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling. This was troubling, and he needed to be certain of how he wanted to proceed. He could conceivably walk away, let IAR—he was certain that was who he was dealing with—find themselves rounded up and held accountable for their crimes, but he had been hoping that the employment they were offering would lead to more.

  It wasn’t that he needed the money so much; the fact was that he needed to work. He had learned early on that the only thing that satisfied the “itch” inside him was to take a life. As a child and teenager, he had contented himself with animals, spending every possible moment hunting in the fields. By the time he was fifteen, he knew that killing deer and bulls and the occasional bear was not enough, anymore, but he didn’t find an opportunity to discover the solution until he was almost 17.

  He had been out on a hunt one day, and was moving as quietly and stealthily as he could, following fairly recent spoor of a bear. The animal had passed that way only a few hours before, and he was hoping to come across it when it settled down to rest.

  A sound caught his ear, a sound that was out of place in that part of the forest. It was the sound of laughter, the sound a woman might make when she was in the company of a man she fancied. He had turned aside in curiosity, finding the young couple only 100 yards off the trail he was following. They were lying on a blanket, and the young man was pretending to hold the girl down.

  Or was he? The laughter he had heard a few moments before was gone, and the girl was protesting and demanding to be released. The young man was not cooperating, insisting to her that she lay still and enjoy what he was planning to do.

  “You know you want it,” the man said. “You may have everyone else believing in your innocence, but we both know what you truly desire.”

  “No,” she protested again. “I do not do that, I have never...”

  The man thrust his face downward and forced a kiss upon the girl. She struggled beneath him, trying to get loose, and then suddenly he pulled back. She had bitten his lower lip, and it was bleeding. He raised a hand to his mouth for a second, then slapped her violently across the face.

  “Bitch,” he said. “I don’t care if you want to be coy, but be careful. Look what you’ve done!”

  The girl was sobbing at that point, and the man lowered his hand to caress her breast. She shook her head vigorously, again pleading with him to stop, but then the sound of tearing fabric could be heard.

  That was enough, Henry decided. Without even thinking about what he was doing, he raised his rifle to his shoulder and centered the sights on the man’s face, then squeezed the trigger. The bullet entered through the young man’s left eye and blew out the entire back of his skull.

  Henry felt a thrill run through him. He had toyed with the thought of killing a human a few times, but had never actually believed he would do it. Now, feeling justified by the circumstances, he allowed himself to enjoy the rush that came, the “itch” suddenly replaced with an excitement he had not known since the first time he had killed a neighbor’s dog. It felt like waves of pure energy washing through him, and only the screams of the young woman made him pull himself out of it.

  The body had collapsed on top of her, and she was in complete panic. She was screaming, terrified and horrified at what she had just seen, and it took her a moment to gather her wits enough to push the body off herself. She scrambled to her feet and looked down at the blood covering the bodice of her dress, then turned her eyes to stare at the dead man’s broken, destroyed face as she continued screaming.

  Henry watched her, and suddenly the itch began again. Without even giving any thought to what he was doing, he worked the bolt and chambered another round, then raised the gun to his shoulder and aimed at the center of her chest. For just a moment there was a voice inside his head insisting he not squeeze the trigger, but the itch was too strong. The first kill, the man, had only teased it; now it was awake, and knew what it wanted.

  The bullet passed through the center of her chest, entering just below the breastbone and blowing out two vertebrae as it exited through her back. She fell instantly, but the bullet had not come near her heart, so she continued screaming even louder.

  Fascinated, Henry stepped out from behind the tree he was using for cover and walked toward her. She had fallen onto her back, and though she was bleeding profusely, she was still alive and conscious. S
he looked up at him in terror, tears flooding from her eyes as she used her arms to try to drag herself backward and away from him. Amazingly, she moved her limp, useless body a good six feet in the time it took him to reach her.

  She stopped moving as he stared down at her, her eyes flicking from the gun in his hands to his face. She was trying to speak, but every time she opened her mouth only garbled sounds and bloody spittle came out. Henry stood and looked down at her, and the thrill washed over him with incredible intensity.

  He glanced at the body of the man and felt nothing. That one had deserved what happened to him, so it wasn’t as satisfying. The girl, though, had been innocent. Henry looked down at her face and saw even more blood coming out of her mouth. There was no way she could survive, her wound was definitely mortal. Surely it wouldn’t take long, he thought, so he simply stood there and watched.

  It took almost a half-dozen minutes for her to bleed out, and Henry stared at her face the whole time. When her eyes finally went dim and he knew that death had claimed her, he finally sat down and leaned against a nearby tree. He still felt the waves of excitement and pleasure rolling through him, and knew that he would never hunt animals again.

  Henrik Schultz had discovered his true passion. From that moment on, he would hunt and kill human beings. It took him only two years to graduate from choosing and stalking his own victims to accepting payment to stalk someone else’s.

  His reverie ended as the phone rang again, and he realized that only fifteen minutes had passed since he spoke to the woman who replied to his advertisement. That old memory often took him for a detour, and it had done so again. He rose hurriedly and snatched up the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “I understand there may be some confusion regarding a recent employment contract?” The voice that came to the line was now that of a man, and Henry recognized it as the voice of Pierre Broussard.