Twelve minutes later the cab spit me out on Roosevelt. I paid with a fifty, got my change, and walked the last three blocks. There was a cool autumn breeze, but my hair was almost dry, my damp clothes warming up from the cab ride and my physical activity. I smelled car exhaust, sewage from a nearby drain, and cinnamon from a bakery up the street. The sky was overcast, but I sensed the barometric pressure, and it didn’t feel like rain. My hearing had almost returned to normal, with only a faint ringing. I kept my bad arm against my side as I walked. The pain was gone, but I had no idea of the damage, didn’t want to make it worse.
The apartment building was typical of the area, five stories, red brick, built with the design acumen of a three year old playing with blocks. From the outside I judged there were forty units, eight per floor.
I circled the building, didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Then I slipped into a neighboring building’s doorway and waited three minutes just to make sure no one was following, doing the isometric calf exercises I’d been taught to keep my muscles loose.
I was clear.
The front security door was cake, six seconds with my pick and tension wrench. No lobby, just a hall leading to the apartments on that floor, the elevator, and the stairwell. I smelled traces of mildew, roach poison, and fresh paint. Someone had cooked pancakes for breakfast. Voices and a jangle of music came from a TV on one of the upper floors. I took the stairs to apartment 304, listened at the door, then knocked. No one should have been home, so when I heard movement coming from inside I stepped to the left of the doorway and tugged the .22 from my waistband.
Victor opened the door, looked around, and then saw me. He smiled in recognition, then confusion took over. “Carmen?”
I brought the gun up in a smooth arc. It caught him under the jaw even as he was flinching away. He backpedaled, and I followed him into the apartment. I cocked back my right leg and fired it into his gut.
Victor crumpled to the floor on all fours. I closed the door behind me and jammed the gun into his ear.
“On your face, arms out, palms up.”
“Carmen?” His voice had a quaver in it. “What the hell—”
“If you make me ask again I’ll shoot you.”
He eased himself down and splayed out his arms. He was wearing jeans, a blue polo shirt. I noted he’d shaved since I’d seen him on my computer monitor, and I could smell cologne. Claiborne For Men. I put my knee on the back of his neck, pinning his face to the carpeting, and frisked him. Wallet in his back pocket. Cell phone in his front. I took both.
“I have some cash,” he said, the fear still in his timbre. “In a box in my closet. A few hundred dollars.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“What?”
“Work. You said you were on call.”
“Last minute thing. A buddy phoned, wanted to trade shifts.” He gave a strangled laugh. “Is this what you do, meet guys online then break into their homes when you think they’re at work?”
He seemed genuine. But all operatives took acting lessons. I could go from laughter to tears in an eyeblink, just like Meryl Streep. But I doubted Meryl could kill a man eighteen ways using just her thumb.
“Hands behind your back. Cross them at the wrists.”
I increased the pressure on his neck, digging a zip tie out of my pocket. It was a white plastic strip, eighteen inches long, made for bundling cable. In a quick motion I stuck the .22 under my armpit and encircled his hands with the tie, snugging it tight.
“I didn’t think I even gave you my address,” he said.
“You didn’t.”
He made a sucking sound. “I think you knocked one of my teeth loose. This is a pretty awful first date, if I may say.”
I took note of his attempt at humor but didn’t acknowledge it. Nerves talking? Or cool under pressure? At this stage I couldn’t tell. “Ankles together, then bend your knees so I can reach your feet.”
He obeyed, and I cinched another zip tie around his feet, noting he had on socks with a White Sox logo.
“Now what? You kill me?”
“That depends on you, Victor. I’d like to trust you, but some things are happening in my life that make me incapable of that.”
“If you’d like to talk about some of those things, I’m a captive audience.”
The normal me might have smirked. The normal me liked this guy. But I couldn’t afford to let the normal me do the thinking now. I unslung my duffle and fished out the med kit. It took a few seconds to find the vial of amobarbital. I judged his weight to be a hundred ninety, filled the syringe with an appropriate dose, and shoved it into his biceps as I pressed the plunger.
Victor bucked, throwing me onto my ass, but I’d managed to give him the full dose. He twisted to face me, the needle still sticking out of his arm.
“What did you do?”
“It’s a sedative. You’ll sleep for a few hours.”
He blinked, his eyelids already getting heavy. “W…why?”
“I need your apartment for a little while. If you’ve been telling me the truth, when you wake up I’ll be gone. If I discover you’ve been lying to me, about anything at all, you won’t wake up.”
“L… lousy first date.”
Then his eyes fluttered shut and his head hit the carpet.
My to-do list was growing exponentially. I needed to toss Victor’s place to see if he was just an unlucky civilian or somehow part of this whole mess. I also had to tend to my injuries, find a shoulder bag like Cory had specified, figure out who that hit woman was, access the DoD database, try to contact Jacob, learn the extent of my frame-up, and form a plan to handle Cory and get Kaufmann back unharmed—a plan that was already way behind because my duffle bag only contained 10k and not the 30k Cory had demanded.
I prioritized, doing a quick tour of the apartment to make sure it was empty. It was, except for an incredibly obese calico who meowed when she saw me.
“Hello, Mozart.” I tickled her chin and she purred.
I found the bathroom, shedding my clothes and checking out the medicine cabinet. It was stocked full of bandages, first-aid supplies, and various professional equipment. Exactly what would be expected from a paramedic, which is what Victor supposedly was. I stripped off my bra, brushing away the remnants of the damp pills I’d stuffed inside earlier, and checked my injuries in the mirror over the sink.
I was a mess, cut up and bruised and swollen over much of my body. The worst was my shoulder, bright pink and puffy. I didn’t have time to properly clean or tape any of my wounds, so I slathered on a whole tube of antibiotic ointment, gave myself a booster shot of Demerol, and swallowed four aspirin and some amphetamine salts from my kit. Then I shoved my clothing and gym shoes into the dryer in the closet near the kitchen.
My encrypted cell had a touch screen, but it didn’t dial out like a regular phone. There was a nine key sequence that changed according to the date, and entering a wrong number made it shut off for ten minutes. I pressed the buttons carefully, not hitting send, and waited for Jacob to answer.
Jacob’s phone didn’t ring. Instead, it played a recording that the number had been disconnected. I silently counted five seconds after the message ended and said, “This is Yolanda. I’m in Ontario.”
I waited. Jacob didn’t pick up.
I disconnected by pressing zero and tucked the phone away, walking to the bedroom closet. Among the men’s shirts, sweaters, and suits, there was a small selection of female clothes. Jeans, culottes, some shirts and blouses, a sweater, a pants suit and a jacket. All size six. I took the jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. They smelled like L’Air du Temps and fit me perfectly.
Then I headed for the second bedroom. Sure enough, Victor had transformed it into an office of sorts. I recognized the beige sofa I’d seen on the webcam. Some free weights cluttered the floor under a small window. I sat at his desk in front of his computer. Windows 7 and IE were already running. While I downloaded Google Earth, I accessed the backdo
or for the Department of Defense, which almost certainly wasn’t aware it had a backdoor. Jacob changed the passwords several times a day, to make sure no one else could use his entry route. He’d told me Diciassettesimo papa. I knew Italian, but hadn’t brushed up on my Catholic history in a while. Wikipedia informed me the seventeenth Pope was St. Urban I. That password got me in.
For one of the most encrypted, expensive websites on the planet, the DoD database was a bitch to navigate. It took me a minute to access their facial recognition software, and six more to create an adequate likeness for the scarred hitman who knocked on my door.
I had to give our government some credit, though, because it only took seven thousandths of a second to get me a match.
Alex Sokolov. Ex-KGB. Records reported he died seven years ago, but most Russian records said that. I didn’t have time to go through the whole dossier, so I saved it as a text file, named it Alex, and buried it on the C: drive.
In a separate window, I accessed www.NBC5.com for local news. There was a link about the two-week manhunt after the prison break at Stateville, but that wasn’t what I clicked on. Instead, I fixated on the lead story.
3 DEAD IN NORTH SIDE KILLING SPREE
I quickly skimmed the details about the three assassins I’d retired at my apartment. It didn’t give out names, but there were the obligatory pictures of the corpses, sanitized for the public, low resolution, no gory details. In the case of the two men, just bodies, no faces. The woman in the elevator must have had a lot of her body torn up by the grenade, too gross for the website. But I was sure someone took a photo of her.
I logged onto Usenet, and after downloading an NZB reader I quickly located a pirated ftp program with a keygen. I snatched it, installed it, and accessed the ftp URL for Channel 5 News. It was a site I’d hacked before, and the passwords were still the same. Their ftp address was where the www.NBC5.com server was located and all their online data was stored, and it took me less than a minute to open the file locker with the full-sized unused png photographs of the death scene.
I found what I was looking for on the fifth photo I viewed; a close-up of the woman from the elevator. Her lower body was a mangled mess, but her face was largely untouched.
Like the hit woman at Stretchers, she had short dark hair and blue eyes. And like the woman at Stretchers, she was a dead ringer for me.
“My job is to train you,” The Instructor said. “But I don’t know what I’m training you for. I can guarantee you’ll be told to do things you do not want to do. Things that violate your principles, your humanity, even your patriotism. But a weapon doesn’t question why it was fired, or what it was fired at. You’re a weapon, a tool to be used by the government or the military. I pray your handler has enough principles, humanity, and patriotism for the both of you.”
Two hitwomen, both with my face and body. A former KGB assassin. Jacob compromised. Stretchers compromised. My ID blown. Cory on the loose. Kaufmann kidnapped.
I had no idea what it all meant, and which facts were related to each other. Nor did I have time to dwell on it. Protocol dictated I establish a perimeter, interrogate my unwilling host, then evaluate the intel.
Kaufmann threw a wrench into normal operating procedure. If I’d been on a mission, things would be different. But the only bright spot in the fact that I was operating on my own, not under any direct orders, was that I could make saving him my first priority.
Whether Uncle Sam approved or not.
The ICU—a spook acronym that wasn’t actually an acronym at all but rather a literal meaning—was a net of spy satellites that could be aimed by field operatives. Any agent with a laptop computer and the required longitude and latitude could zoom in on almost any area on the planet, within two minutes of giving the command.
Unfortunately, Jacob was cut off before I could get the latest ICU uplink data. But Google Earth wasn’t a bad substitute.
I loaded the program, which began by filling the screen with the familiar round and blue view of the earth from space, conveniently facing North America. I used the mouse scroll wheel to zoom in, each revolution bringing the world closer and closer, first over Illinois, then over Chicago, streets and buildings and eventually cars and people coming into detailed focus.
Instead of degrees I punched in the street address, and got a close up satellite picture of 875 N. Michigan, revealing a familiar Chicago landmark. Google Earth also let me superimpose street names and store locations over the picture. Then I clicked on a camera icon at street level, and got a full, 360 degree panoramic view of the whole area, dated from ten minutes ago. I quickly figured out a route, entry and exit points, and visualized how Cory would run it.
If his plan followed my assumptions, and I knew him well enough to be sure it would, neither Kaufmann nor I would live through this.
Steering my thoughts away from Kaufmann’s fate for a moment, I pinged Victor’s router, got the URL, and quickly synced my phone to his WiFi. A minute later, I was uploading my doppelganger’s fingerprint to Jacob’s database. I wasn’t at all surprised I didn’t get a hit. I saved the search offline, then spent two minutes erasing all of my tracks from Victor’s hard drive.
I checked my watch, saw I only had fifty-two minutes remaining, and went to the dryer for my shoes and socks. I locked the door behind me when I left the apartment, using the keys I’d found on Victor’s kitchen table. I took the alley exit, pausing for a moment to get my bearings. I smelled garbage and car exhaust. The wind had picked up a bit, chilling my still-damp gym shoes. The alley was quiet, vacant, and I took it south, holding the duffle bag full of ten thousand dollars in my bad arm, keeping my right thumb hitched in my rear pocket, near the weapon nestled against the small of my back.
Fourteen steps out of the alley, I spotted a tail.
She was standing at a bus stop, a stylish wool cap on her head, staring intently at a tablet PC no bigger than a paperback novel. Her large sunglasses broke up the contour of her face, making her anonymous and unidentifiable as an agent.
Except to me.
The woman was doing isometric calf exercises. First flexing the left calf, then the right, then lifting the left toes, then the right.
I knew she’d lift the left heel next, then slightly bend the knee. I knew this because it was the same exercise The Instructor had taught me during training, used to keep the leg muscles warm and limber in preparation for quick action.
This woman proved me correct, following the sequence exactly. I was too far away to tell if this was another lookalike. But I would know soon enough.
I crossed the street quickly, keeping an eye on her, then approaching from the side at an angle beyond her peripheral vision. She kept her nose in the tablet, legs still twitching, oblivious to my presence.
I wanted to interrogate her, to know how she’d found me so quickly, to learn who she was and what she wanted. But I was short on time, and leaving her here to try my luck later could lead to her interfering with the Cory meeting. Contrary to the movies, subduing and capturing someone was incredibly difficult, especially without preparation and the proper equipment. A thousand things could go wrong.
Murder, however, was pretty straight-forward.
My best bet was a quick shot right behind the ear. I did a discreet check for cops, then reached for my weapon.
The move was so fast I almost missed it. While keeping both eyes on the computer screen, she yanked a pistol from under her sweater and pointed it right at me. I jerked sideways, two shots zipping through the space I’d occupied a nanosecond ago, bringing my suppressed .22 around and catching her in the chest.
Unlike the jacketed rounds for my Glock which were for penetration, the .22 was loaded with star frags—special bullets shaped like a pointed king’s crown. When they hit a target the crown opened up like flower petals, allowing for maximum energy transfer and creating an internal wound up to three inches in diameter. For a small caliber they packed a big punch.
So big, my stalker went dow
n instantly, glasses spinning off her face, dropping both her gun and the tablet, then slumping to the sidewalk like a length of cut rope.
The whole thing was over in less than a second, all the shots fired blending together like a car backfiring. Once again I checked the street for any witnesses, then hurried to the body, keeping my weapon alongside my thigh.
When I got close enough, several things struck me at once. The first was her face. Eyes closed, lips parted, undeniably my features. While her chest didn’t seem to be moving, there also wasn’t any blood. Her blouse and bra beneath were shredded by the star frags, and there wasn’t a vest under them. Rather, her skin showing between the fabric tears was brownish and lumpy, almost as if it had been slathered with peanut butter.
Bringing up my gun again, I pressed it under her neck while I touched her sternum. The brown goop was moist and sticky, and her heart thrummed under my fingertips.
I pulled the trigger the moment I realized what the paste on her skin was. But my doppelganger had anticipated the move. She swept my gun to the side. My round hit the sidewalk. She brought up the heel of her hand and clipped me clean under the jaw.
I toppled backward, my teeth crunching together so hard it rattled my brain, the sparkly motes in my vision quadrupling in size when my coccyx hit the street. I blindly brought the gun up, reflex squeezing the trigger even as I felt a foot connect with my knuckles, knowing I hit her somewhere in the legs, knowing it didn’t matter if she had that stuff smeared all over her body. Liquid body armor. I might as well have been shooting case-hardened steel.
My gun went flying—a testament to the power of her kick. During training, I’d had to hold onto a gun for a week straight without ever putting it down, but she knew right where to hit me to make me lose my grip.
Jack Kilborn & Ann Voss Peterson & J. A. Konrath Page 4