Locked Room - A Katla KillFile (Amsterdam Assassin Series)

by Martyn V. Halm

  CONTENTS

  Locked Room copyright page

  Pitch

  Dedication

  Also Available

  LOCKED ROOM

  Note to the Reader

  The Amsterdam Assassin Series

  About the Author

  Contact Martyn

  Reviews

  Special Thanks to

  Disclaimer

  AMSTERDAM ASSASSIN SERIES

  Locked Room

  [A Katla KillFile]

  By

  Martyn V. Halm

  Pushdagger Publishing Limited

  Locked Room - A Katla KillFile (Amsterdam Assassin Series)

  ISBN: 978-94-91623-00-4 (ePub)

  ASIN: B008VUXNTQ (mobi)

  Copyright: Martyn V. Halm

  Published: August 10, 2012

  Publisher: Pushdagger Publishing Limited

  Cover design: Farah Evers

  The right to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by Martyn V. Halm in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher.

  Please do not circulate this book in any format without express consent.

  Assassin Katla reinvents a forensic landmark while creating a Locked Room mystery...

  The Locked Room KillFile (7,800 words) follows freelance assassin Katla Sieltjes executing a contract on a physician responsible for the death of her client’s wife. Using an updated version of a lethal puzzle that astounded forensic scientists at the end of the twentieth century, Katla recreates a diabolical killing method that became a landmark in the forensic sciences. Thwarting forensic scientists is not her only hurdle in fulfilling her contract, as her target has to be killed in his home, an opulent penthouse in a fortress-like apartment building…

  The Katla KillFile short stories chronologically precede the novels in the Amsterdam Assassin Series.

  Each KillFile features Katla Sieltjes, expert in disguising homicide, executing one of her contracts. While not mandatory reading, each KillFile provides insight both in Katla’s work methods and skill, and additional background information in her character and personal history. The KillFiles can be read out of order, as the contracts are random samples from her past.

  For Maaike, the love and light of my life.

  And to Tycho Thelonious and Nica Hilke, thankfully still too young to read my work.

  Also available from this author:

  AMSTERDAM ASSASSIN SERIES:

  Novels:

  Reprobate

  Peccadillo

  Rogue

  Ghosting

  KillFiles:

  Locked Room

  Microchip Murder

  Fundamental Error

  Aconite Attack

  Sign up for the Amsterdam Assassin Series mailing list!

  Click this link and fill out your email address to stay up-to-date.

  LOCKED ROOM

  Amsterdam, November, 17.30 hours.

  Autumn dusk descended on Amsterdam with dark clouds covering the moisture-laden sky. Katla Sieltjes parked her dented Vespa motor scooter across the street from the narrow pedestrian tunnel that led to the inner court of the apartment complex. She sat and watched the setting sun tinge the overcast sky the colour of fresh blood before she strolled to the tunnel, a one-and-a-half-meter long canister strapped to her backpack.

  At the end of the tunnel, an iron gate barred entrance to the inner court. A large metal plate around the lock intended to prevent people from reaching through the bars and twisting the knob to gain entrance. That would make the gate formidable, if they hadn’t installed a standard profile euro cylinder lock that offered little resistance to her lock-pick gun. She wasn’t too worried about scratches, as the lock had obviously been used by people too inebriated to insert their key at the first attempt.

  The hinges squeaked and she sprayed them with lubricant to silence the noise before she opened the gate and stepped inside. At the top of the frame was a retarding spring to close the gate, but Katla held the handle and twisted the knob as the gate clicked shut to keep the noise to a minimum.

  The inner court featured gardens with flagstone paths meandering through lush vegetation. The broad paths went to the main staircases, with smaller paths leading off to individual ground floor backdoor entrances. While the tunnel was illuminated, the inner court gardens were mostly dark, with motion-activated street lanterns planted at intervals along the paths, for safety and burglary-detection. Three evenly distributed staircases led up to the galerijen—sheltered walkways for each floor that ringed the gardens and provided access to the entrances of the apartments. Each door had a small square backlit panel featuring the apartment number.

  Dressed from head-to-toe in anthracite GoreTex WindStopper gear, Katla veered away from the paths and made her way to the blind wall on the other side of the gardens, her night-vision goggles guiding her through the domesticated jungle. Her large flat overshoes kept visible tracks to a minimum.

  A row of street lanterns blossomed to life, illuminating a path on the other side of the inner court gardens, and Katla crouched in the bushes. An older man with a Rollator crept along the flagstone path in the direction of the gate.

  While the old man moved with a snail’s pace across her field of vision, Katla took out a dark green camouflage stick to obscure her pale skin, checking her handiwork in the mirror of her compact. After the old man entered the tunnel and the lanterns extinguished themselves, she continued stalking through the undergrowth and halted at the bottom of the twenty-two meter high wall.

  In most Amsterdam apartment buildings, a blind featureless wall would either remain unadorned or become covered with graffiti, but upscale apartment buildings like this one often decorated such eyesores with ‘art’. In this case, the dark red bricks were festooned with an abstract tree with black metal branches that featured illuminated leaves. Even muted, the glowing leaves would throw her silhouette in sharp relief.

  Moving carefully through the bushes, Katla made her way to the south-west corner of the garden where she located a small junction box. She hunkered down and unscrewed the waterproof lid that opened with a sucking noise, that sounded way too loud in the dark garden.

  With her night-vision goggles pushed up on her forehead, she used the thin beam of her flashlight to locate the fuse. Unscrewing the fuse two full turns did the trick and the leaves went dark. After spraying the rubber seal with silicon spray, she re-attached the lid of the box with just two of the four screws, knowing she’d have remove the lid later to put the fuse back.

  Now for the tricky bit.

  Huddled down among the wet foliage, Katla unscrewed the canister and soundlessly slipped out the contents: a bicycle pump, and a launcher, pre-loaded with a folded grappling hook and thirty meters of coiled climbing rope.

  In books and movies, superheroes wielded tiny hand-held crossbows that launched grappling hooks with coiled climbing rope for fifty meters. In reality, a crossbow that could launch a grappling hook and a coiled rope capable of supporting the weight of a regular human being would be too bulky and too heavy to hang from a utility belt. The same went for compressed air projectile launchers made for covert military operations. Sure, a Plumett AL launcher could fire a grappling hook the required distance, and they looked portable, until you read the specs. Lugging a forty-seven kilogram grapnel launcher around
wasn’t as covert as Katla wanted to be.

  So she had opted to build her own pneumatic projectile launcher.

  Her launcher was based on home-made PVC spud guns, except for the material. Instead of PVC, the more expensive ABS tube Katla had used to construct her launcher could handle higher pressures. More important, if accidentally over-pressured, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene would split—not shatter like the rigid polyvinyl chloride tubing used in ordinary spud guns. Her launcher featured an air chamber with a high-pressure industrial Schrader valve that could handle up to 550 pounds per square inch—although Katla would use about half that pressure—attached to a customised pressure release piston valve that opened into the barrel. The spring-loaded grappling hook was a tight fit, but the folded hook wasn’t airtight, so Katla had pushed a vaseline-coated tennis ball into the tube before she had lowered the grappling hook inside. Using the bicycle pump, she filled the air chamber of the launcher, watching the gauge creep to the 260 PSI she required to shoot the grappling hook onto the roof.

  Katla held the launcher at the appropriate angle and took a deep breath. She’d been experimenting with different angles and pressures, but getting consistent results was difficult, so there was a certain fluke factor involved.

  With her heart thumping in her throat, Katla exhaled slowly and twisted the piston valve fully open.

  A whoomph of expelled air echoed against the walls as the grappling hook flew up to twenty-six meters and disappeared over the parapet. The unfettered climbing rope spiralled in the air before the weighted end plummeted back to earth, uncoiling the rope.

  Katla stepped aside as the weighted end of the rope tumbled back down along the wall and smacked into the damp soil two meters away, her gaze on the greased tennis ball that bounced against the top of the wall and changed trajectory. She tried to follow where it landed as the ball flew far over her head and disappeared with a rustle in the gardens. Gone. She didn’t like to leave anything behind, but a slimy tennis ball probably wouldn’t attract any attention when found, so she ignored the lost ball and listened carefully to hear if the spud gun had attracted any attention.

  Small animals moved in the underbrush, but she doubted if the sound had been noticed until somewhere high above her a door opened. The scuffle of a shoe announced someone stepping outside on the galerij. Invisible among the foliage of the garden in her anthracite gear, Katla turned soundlessly and looked up at the covered walkways. One floor up a man leaned on the railing. Still, like a statue, Katla watched him through her night-vision goggles, but he didn’t seem perturbed by the launcher’s sound.

  A soft click and a flame danced in his hand. He lit up and blew smoke down into the dark garden. Maybe his wife didn’t want him smoking in the house, but Katla couldn’t scale the wall with him watching. She sniffed the air. Cigarette smoke.

  A cigarette would take six or seven minutes to smoke. If he’d lit up a cigar she’d be delayed by ten minutes or more.

  The smell of the moist earth reminded her of hunting with her uncle Joris. Smiling softly, Katla stood motionless in the foliage and watched the smoker with the cold calculating eyes of a natural predator, as she remembered stalking wild boar in the Black Forest. So much more difficult than stalking human prey.

  -o-

  “I want...” The lawyer closed his eyes for a moment and clenched his fist. His voice was hoarse, as if he had screamed himself into exhaustion. “I want him to suffer. Suffer worse that I have suffered.”

  Katla studied his slightly disheveled appearance. The creased clothes, the stubble, the rings around his haunted eyes. His grief was still fresh. She suspected that ordinarily he would be as well-dressed, groomed, and self-possessed as her usual clients; corporate sharks who preferred to keep their hands clean, who cared only about problems getting fixed and not how Loki Enterprises got the results.

  “As corporate troubleshooters, we prefer clients who have no emotional investment in the fate of the target,” Katla spoke softly. “Loki Enterprises is not interested in righting wrongs. Or punishing anyone.”

  He opened his eyes. “If it’s a matter of expenses, I can assure you, I can meet the fee.”

  “It’s a matter of culpability. You have an axe to grind with the target, which makes you a prime suspect if something happens to him. As will anyone else who benefits from his demise.”

  The lawyer closed his eyes again and sighed. “From what I understand, Loki Enterprises are experts in disguising homicide. Why should it matter—”

  Katla held up her hand. “To thwart police investigations, we prefer targets who have either no enemies or countless enemies. In your case, this doctor isn’t well-liked and his social status indicates that he’s socially inept...”

  The lawyer snorted. “He’s an asshole and a quack.”

  “That may be, but the people he crossed aren’t liable to kill him. Except you, who threatened him in court last week that you would see him dead. So if he turns up dead...”

  “Even if he turns up dead due to an accident? Or natural causes?”

  “Depends on the accident.” Katla pointed at the doctor’s file on her desk. “We don’t see any natural flaws to exploit. His demise has to lack external influences. No force or violence, coercion or manipulation. Your request to ‘make him suffer’ would be difficult.”

  “Difficult,” the lawyer said. “So it’s not impossible?”

  “We can do the impossible,” Katla said. “But the impossible tends to be extremely expensive.”

  His red-rimmed eyes held her gaze. “How much?”

  -o-

  Katla’s reverie was broken by a woman’s voice floating down over the evening breeze into the dark inner court. “Harry, are you coming back inside?”

  “Coming.”

  The smoker pitched his cigarette at Katla, who was standing motionless like a statue as the glowing tip flew past her shoulder and hissed on the damp earth behind her. Her cold blue gaze stayed on the smoker, who turned his back and moved away from the railing. A moment later the door clicked shut behind him.

  Katla turned to the wall and pulled carefully on the climbing rope. If the spring had failed to deploy the grappling hook, a yank on the rope would send the hook back over the parapet. And she didn’t want to risk caving in her own skull. The resistance increased as the grappling hook caught on the roof side of the parapet somewhere. When resistance was firm enough, she slowly increased her weight on the rope until she could pull herself clear from the ground.

  Excellent.

  Katla put the launcher and bicycle pump back in the canister. After storing the canister under the foliage of a large bush, she took the weighted end of the climbing rope and tied it securely around the handle of her backpack, so she could climb unencumbered by her luggage. She removed her overshoes, but kept standing on top of them while she fastened her climbing harness to the rope. Planting her clean soles firmly against the rough brick, she started her ascent, moving slowly around the mural to avoid damaging the glow-leaves.

  Katla had rigorously prepped herself for this phase with additional climbing sessions at the Klimhal Centraal, but like her experiments with the launcher, the actual deed was much more strenuous and stressful than the experiments. The covert aspect and the need to be silent encouraged her to take shallow breaths, while she needed to take full breaths to send enough oxygen to her straining muscles.

  About sixteen meters up with another six meters to go, a door opened on the galerij behind her. Katla froze, her legs splayed against the wall, bracing the rope to remain absolutely still.

  Behind her two women stepped outside, talking in soft voices.

  Please don’t let them be smokers.

  From the sound of their voices, the women were saying goodbye to each other.

  Her anthracite gear and blackened face turned her close to invisible, but Katla didn’t dare move. The women standing about five meters away took their time saying their goodbyes and Katla felt the muscles in her arms protesti
ng the lack of movement. Just hanging motionless was a bigger strain than the climbing itself.

  Finally, after an eternity of assurances to call one another soon, one woman moved away along the galerij to the main stairs while the other moved back inside, closing the door behind her.

  Her arms were aching from the exertion and Katla took a few deep breaths, then continued climbing up to the roof.

  The parapet was high but not too thick, so Katla could get her arm around it easily and swing her leg over. Pebbles shifted under her body as she rolled onto the roof and looked up at the sky, stars twinkling like pinpricks in the dark-blue expanse.

  Smiling up at the star-spangled sky, Katla flexed her arms and legs to relax her muscles after the exertion, before she sat up and crossed her legs. She unclipped her climbing harness and leant over the parapet to hoist her backpack up on the roof. The smell of the vegetation from the inner gardens rose up and battled the exhaust fumes wafting up from the street side.

  Dumping the climbing rope in loose coils behind her, Katla hauled her backpack over the parapet and placed the pack on the roof. With everything secure, Katla explored the dark roof, walking like a circus acrobat over the narrow brick parapet about as wide as a balance beam. About thirty by twenty meters, the rectangular roof was covered by tarpaper and pebbles to help with draining rainwater. The pebbles also made it virtually impossible to walk around the roof without making any noise, so Katla had to stick to the brick parapet and a few flagstones around the three meter high building in the far corner that housed elevator machinery.

  Katla stepped from the narrow parapet onto the flagstones and inspected the elevator housing. A large steel door, bolted from the inside, gave access to the roof from the emergency staircase. To the side of the elevator housing, metal rungs embedded in the concrete formed a ladder to the roof, where a multitude of antennas and satellite dishes pointed at the sky. She tested the metal rungs, which felt like they could easily hold twice her weight.