by Tim Stevens
But the whole episode was an enormous setback.
After she left the hospital she spent the morning being questioned. Her account of events was written down by three separate interviewers.
She knew she had to go through the process, but she was itching to get after the Colby woman. Every second of delay was a second more that Colby and the big guy helping her would get further away.
The story Shelly recited went like this. She and Mike Gomez had identified Dr McNeill as a possible link between Colby and Professor Lomax. Perfectly true, this. They had paid McNeill and her husband an early morning visit to warn her that she might be in danger, and while there had been ambushed by the big man who’d abducted Colby earlier. The man had both a Beretta and a Glock. Dr McNeill’s husband had tried to get heroic with a shotgun and had missed. The big guy killed him and his wife and Gomez, and winged Shelly. Then he’d made his escape, the Colby woman with him. It wasn’t yet clear if she was cooperating with him in some bizarre Stockholm Syndrome way, or if she was too terrified of him to put up any resistance.
A messy but plausible story, and like all the best lies, it was mostly true.
All through the early morning, as she was questioned and given endless forms to complete, papers to sign, Shelly suffered a stream of well-wishers. Fellow cops, sympathizing with her for what she’d been through, commiserating over the loss of Gomez. Swearing vengeance against whoever it was that had killed one of their own.
Shelly gave as accurate a description of the big man as she could. Over six feet, two hundred pounds, maybe a little more. Dark hair, cut short. A tidy goatee. Almost certainly ex-military considering his speed and proficiency with weapons.
And the crime scene techs were, of course, scouring the Brooklyn brownstone for DNA, or any other clues to the man’s identity.
Shelly was sent home for the day around mid-morning, when they’d finally finished with her. She had to turn in her gun, as was usual procedure after a cop used their firearm. She put up a half-assed protest, saying she wanted to get out there and join the hunt for Mike Gomez’s killer. But she knew her superior would forbid it, saying she wasn’t in a fit state, and he did.
That suited Shelly just fine. It gave her time to get on with what she needed to do.
With what Rosetti had hired her to do.
As she stepped out into the early afternoon sunlight and began the walk to the subway and home, crunching a handful of ibuprofen tablets, Shelly thought back over the last 24 hours.
Rosetti had called her personally yesterday morning, asking if she could do a hit on a woman in hospital. As it happened, Shelly wasn’t on duty till five PM. She said she’d do the hit that very afternoon.
It had been a simple matter to locate the cancer ward on which the woman, Luisa Perez, was being treated, and gain access. An NYPD badge got you respect, and opened all kinds of doors. Especially if you were as innocent-looking and cute as Shelly Anderson.
Once on the ward, Shelly pilfered a syringe and a needle from a storage drawer, waited for the right moment, then administered a syringeful of air into the IV set of the dozing young woman.
She was already walking away when the cardiac arrest call went out.
An odd choice of victim, Shelly thought. Why was a mob boss like Rosetti taking out a contract on a twenty-something woman with cancer? But it didn’t matter. So long as Rosetti paid up, Shelly was happy to take the work. Especially jobs as easy as this one.
The Colby killing was proving much harder, though.
This time Rosetti had called late last night, while Shelly and Gomez had been interviewing Dr Colby across town in the station house. Shelly couldn’t believe her good luck. The very woman Rosetti wanted her to kill was sitting there in the interview room Shelly had just stepped out of.
The problem, though, was Gomez. He knew nothing of Shelly’s other life, nothing of her fantastically lucrative sideline as a hitwoman, alongside which her meager NYPD detective’s salary was chickenfeed.
She had to get Gomez out of the way and be alone with Dr Colby. And that proved hard to do.
In the end, she didn’t manage it, and then the big guy had arrived and snatched Colby away. And then that other man had turned up in the car, apparently also trying to kill Colby. The same man, probably, who’d tried to shoot her in her apartment only a few hours earlier.
Another assassin? Was Rosetti hedging her bets, sending several killers into the field, letting them duke it out until one of them did the job?
Shelly figured it meant this Colby woman really was special.
That was interesting. It suggested Shelly might be able to negotiate a higher fee from Rosetti. Once she’d completed the job.
Shelly’s home was a basement apartment in NoHo. She could have afforded better – way, way better – but people would have gotten suspicious about how she could stretch her cop salary that far.
She’d spent a lot of money converting the inside, however. Creating all kinds of secret panels and hideyholes.
A hidden trapdoor led to a cellar. Taking care because of her injured shoulder, Shelly descended.
Flicking on the light, she surveyed her arsenal.
One wall held handguns. Glocks, Sig Sauers, Berettas, Heckler & Kochs. Plus some more exotic pieces like Jerichos from Israel and South African Vektors.
On another wall were her racks of rifles. Several Russian weapons, including the famous AK-47. A couple of British items, classy toys. An Armalite AR-10.
And then there were the big boys. A Ruger, an Uzi, and a Czech Skorpion. And a Panzerfaust grenade launcher.
Shelly stood for a few minutes, basking in the gleam off the metal, the beautiful heady smell of gun oil.
Her babies. Her pride and joy.
She was right-handed, but had trained herself to use a gun almost as well with her left hand as her right. In case it ever came in useful.
Which it certainly did now.
She chose a 9 mm Sig Sauer P226, and as a smaller piece a Heckler & Koch .22. In addition she opened a glass cabinet against one wall of the cellar and took out a Ka-Bar military knife and its scabbard.
It was time to get back to work.
Chapter 39
New York City is notorious for its limited public baggage storage facilities. Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, for security reasons none of the big terminals such as Grand Central or the Port Authority have provided anywhere to leave luggage for even a few hours.
A few enterprising places have sprung up around the major stations in order to address this need. Venn didn’t know exactly where the locker was that he had the key for. But he didn’t think it would be all that difficult to find out.
An online search on his smartphone threw up a few addresses. He and Beth tried the main one, Schwartz’s, but the woman there shook her head.
‘Not one of our keys.’
Venn and Beth were in luck at the second place they tried, a small facility on Lexington and East 46th. The proprietor, a small, balding Asian man, peered at the key.
‘Number 133.’
He led them down an aisle of solid-looking lockers, then left them alone. Venn had surveilled the place before they’d gone in, but hadn’t spotted anybody watching. Now, though, he felt furtive as he pushed the key into the lock and turned it.
Inside the locker, which had room enough to fit at least two large suitcases, there was nothing but a buff envelope.
Venn reached in and pulled it out. It was sealed, and had no markings on it. By the feel of it there was a stack of paper inside.
With Beth crowding in close, Venn slit the seal with a thumbnail and pulled out a sheaf of papers.
He paged through them. They were mostly photocopies of what looked like papers from scientific journal. Five or six of them, and in a variety of languages: English mainly, but also Spanish and Italian, and one in a Cyrillic-looking typescript that he took to be Russian.
On top of the articles was a letter. Another photocopy, it wa
s a single sheet, and looked like it had been written on an old-fashioned typewriter rather than a word processor.
And by somebody who didn’t use English as a first language.
It read:
Respected Profesor Lomax,
You do not now me. I am Papakostas, Independent sientist from New England but I am first from Greece. I please enclose some several medical papers from the jurnals. I ask you read these because i find puzzling and fritening information and I think so will you. Please, call me on tele phone number above.
With warmest thanks,
Dmitri Stavros Papakostas
There was a cell phone number at the top of the page. No address or email. The letter was dated February 16th this year. A little over three months ago.
‘May I?’ said Beth. Venn handed her the papers accompanying the letter.
She leafed through them.
‘These are all from obscure journals,’ she murmured. ‘Haven’t even heard of a couple of them. And that’s just the ones in English.’
‘What are they about?’ said Venn.
‘The Russian one I can’t say. But I know Spanish, and I can read a little Italian. Those papers and the English-language ones all have a common theme. I’m assuming the Russian one does, too.’
She lapsed into silence, absorbed in her reading. Venn fought a growing impatience. He didn’t think the locker facility was being watched. But the events of the past day and night had put him on permanent edge, the hairs at the back of his neck repeatedly tingling.
‘What is this theme?’ he said, as calmly as he could.
‘C-77,’ Beth muttered, not looking up from the pages.
Venn waited.
Some of his frustration must have started to radiate off him because Beth looked up. There was wonder in her eyes.
‘Compound 77,’ she said. ‘It’s a short name for the precursor of one of the main active agents in Zylurin, the drug we’re trialing.’
‘Precursor?’
Beth bit her lip, lost in thought once more. But this time she seemed not to forget Venn was there.
‘Zylurin is a synthesis of several other compounds,’ she explained. ‘One of them is C-77. It was originally developed as a potential antidepressant around ten years ago, and subject to a small phase two trial. That’s a trial involving human volunteers, mainly to assess for side effects. The initial trial was stopped because the incidence of side effects in the participants was too high. Almost universal, in fact. Mainly nausea and vomiting.
‘So the drug didn’t go anywhere. Except a few years later, it was found that if C-77 was combined with certain other agents, the side effects were minimized. The new drug, the result of combining these different agents, is Zylurin.’
Venn was struggling to follow. ‘So what are those papers all about?’ he said, indicating the sheaf in Beth’s hand.
‘I’ll need to read them more carefully.’ She tapped the stack with a fingernail. ‘But so far, it looks as if each of these studies are demonstrating a link between the original C-77 and a more serious, long-term side effect.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘Cancer,’ Beth said.
Venn took a step toward her. The color, which had been starting to come back into her cheeks after the trauma of events back at the brownstone, was now draining away from her face again.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
Her eyes searched his.
‘I took part in those original trials,’ she said. ‘But not as a researcher. As a volunteer. I took C-77.’
Chapter 40
As a field agent with MI6 in the 1990s, Marcus Royle had specialized in assassination and sabotage.
Most of his activities were ‘unofficial’, and wholly unsanctioned either by the senior officers of the organization or the political line of command to which it was answerable. But they were a fact of life in the world of international intelligence, and Royle had no reason to believe things had changed.
His operations had often involved long periods of sitting or lying still, keeping a potential target – whether a person, a vehicle or a building – under surveillance. Some of these periods stretched out to 36 hours or more. Rather than attempt to stay awake all this time, a superhuman feat beyond the reach of most people, including Royle himself, he had learned the facility of being able to catch short naps in any location and any position, but of being able to snap instantly and fully awake at will.
After he’d put enough distance between himself and the ambulance that he felt safe to slow down, Royle stopped running randomly and began to search actively for what he required.
And what he required was a store, open at four in the morning, which sold cell phones. His last phone had been destroyed in the exchange of gunfire with the police earlier.
This was New York, the city that never hit the sack. He found a store on Canal Street, and ten minutes later walked out with a pay-per-use smartphone.
Down the street he found another 24-hour store where he purchased a set of pencils and a block of paper.
Royle wandered in the direction of the Hudson, where the natural light was better. Leaning on the balustrade overlooking the water, he began to sketch.
He was blessed with a near-perfect visual memory for faces. Nonetheless, it took him four attempts before he was satisfied that the face looking back at him from the page matched precisely that of the man who’d fired on him in the car, and who’d spirited Colby away.
Using his phone, Royle took a photo of the drawing he’d done. Then he balled up the pages and tossed them down into the river, as well as the pencils.
Finding an alley that was ventilated by a cool pre-dawn breeze from the river, he went down it and dialed an international number. The same one he’d called earlier.
Sir Peter Greening answered once more, sounding a little testy this time.
Royle was advised that what he was asking was ‘rather a tall order’, and that he would probably have to wait at least several hours before receiving an answer.
That gave him a chance to catch up on sleep. Refresh himself in body and mind.
Royle curled on his side in the alleyway, among trashcans spilling over with fishheads and beer bottles and potato peelings, placed the buds from his phone into his ears – the music he chose to drift off to was Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra – and closed his eyes.
The ringing phone woke him. Bright sunlight flooded down the alley, and the traffic was thickening on the street at the end.
Royle peered at the time. 6:30 AM. Two and a half hours’ sleep.
It would do.
‘Marcus.’
Sir Peter’s jovial tone was back. Royle wondered if the man had had a little pick-me-up since they’d last spoken. A drop of the hard stuff.
‘First of all,’ said Sir Peter, ‘that phone you asked me to have traced earlier is no longer detectable.’
Royle had expected as much. The Colby woman would have destroyed it.
‘The other thing?’ he asked.
‘Ah yes. Been a bit round the houses there, I have. Ruffled a few feathers. Had to call in some favors of my own.’
Get to the bloody point, you old fool, thought Royle.
‘That picture you sent me really was appalling quality. Not the artwork, but the photo itself. Couldn’t you have found something better?’
Royle said nothing, counting slowly backwards from a hundred.
Sir Peter said, ‘Nevertheless, my contacts in the US Department of Defense have been most helpful, if grudgingly so. They’ve narrowed the field down to just over three hundred possibilities. You should receive the file any moment now.’
‘Thanks,’ said Venn. ‘I’ll have one more request later.’
A few seconds later an email arrived on his phone with a large file attachment. He opened it, and began rapidly to scroll through the mug shots.
Some of the matches to the drawing he’d done were better than others. Royle assumed the man was military, or
ex-military. He estimated his age as around thirty-five, but he’d asked Sir Peter to allow a margin of ten years either way. Similarly, he’d specified a height range of five feet ten to six feet four, and a weight of between 180 and 230 pounds.
Royle had viewed and discounted almost 100 faces when one of them snagged his attention. He thumbed back a face or two.
There. That was the man. He was certain of it.
He dialed.
‘Sir Peter,’ he said. ‘I’ve found the man I want.’
‘Have you? Splendid.’
‘Now I have one more favor to ask.’
At the other end, the man groaned.
It took longer this time. Royle used the delay to eat breakfast, then found a department store that opened early. There, he bought a new set of clothes – though he kept his favorite shoes on – and a few simple items in a drugstore.
In the restroom of the department store, he dyed his hair so that it looked grayer. Did a few things with some foundation and other makeup to make his face look thinner. Put on a new pair of eyeglasses with plain plastic lenses, which completely altered the shape of his face.
Simple measures, but they would suffice.
At 10:30 his phone finally rang. He was sitting on a bench in Gramercy Park, feeding the pigeons.
Sir Peter had pulled strings at the Pentagon and with the NSA again. This was the last time. He’d called in all his favors, and hoped Marcus appreciated it.
By the time Royle hung up, he had a name. Joseph Venn. He had the man’s history: former Marine and Chicago police detective lieutenant, now private eye.
Most important of all, he had Venn’s cell phone number, and a real-time link to his location.
Once again he watched the small, pulsing beacon on the screen of his phone.
Our third encounter, he told Venn silently. And it will be the final one, my friend.
Chapter 41
Once again, Venn and Beth found themselves in a greasy spoon. This time they didn’t order anything to eat. Just caffeine, and lots of it.
They were somewhere near the Port Authority Terminal. Venn had bought them each a hoodie from a street vendor, and they sat with the hoods pulled up, hunched over the table like a couple of junkies discussing where their next score was likely to come from.