Locked Room - A Katla KillFile (Amsterdam Assassin Series)

by Martyn V. Halm

  “What? What do you want?” He coughed again. “A confession?”

  “No, doctor.” She lifted his feet again and his head slipped under water. “It’s way too late for confessions or apologies.”

  The doctor lost consciousness pretty much immediately. Katla counted to ten and pulled him back out of the water. His head lolled backward, but he still had a pulse, so she held his head above water, put the one-way filter pocket CPR face mask over his nose and mouth and gave him rescue breathing until he coughed and spluttered in the mask. She cradled his shoulders and he leant against her, foam on his lips.

  “I thought...” He coughed and foam drooled from the corner of his mouth. “Drowning.”

  “You thought I was drowning you?”

  He nodded weakly.

  “I am,” Katla said. “You had pathology when you went to medical school, no?”

  “Pathology?”

  “There’s this famous case about a husband drowning three of his brides…”

  He blinked, then looked at her fearfully. “The brides...”

  “That’s right, the Brides in the Bath case,” she said. “A landmark case in forensic science.”

  He shook with impotent anger. “You won’t... You won’t get away with this.”

  “Because George Joseph Smith failed?” Katla shook her head. “He made mistakes.”

  She let his head slip down her arm back in the water. He tried to push himself out of the water, but she held his shoulders to make sure his nose and mouth went under water. Panic widened his eyes as water gulped into his mouth and he fought weakly to raise his head from the water, but his resistance was futile. As his eyes rolled back in his head, Katla pulled him back up and let him draw a breath. His eyes were red and he seemed to be crying, but that was difficult to determine with the bathwater on his face.

  “Smith had the right idea when he pulled his brides under water by their ankles,” Katla said. “No struggle, just straight loss of consciousness as the water hits the vagus nerve in the nasal cavity. Leaving them submerged and unconscious while they suffocated was a mistake, though. That’s how Spilsbury could determine that they died uncommonly quick. You see, in normal drownings, the victim will struggle for life and so ingest much more water. In a real drowning, the water will be in the stomach and the duodenum intestine. Even the heart valve will contain diluted blood.”

  As she pushed his head under water again, the doctor tried to straighten and whipped his head from side to side. Katla shook her head as if chiding a child and grabbed his head by the wrestling headgear, guiding his nose and mouth back under water again. The doctor’s body spasmed, but the foil restricted his movements and prevented him from hurting himself. When he appeared to lose consciousness again, she pulled him up and waited until his bleary eyes started to focus on her again.

  “There’s only one drawback to my method,” Katla said. “I don’t mind having to take more time to drown you in stages, but this method comes close to torture methods like waterboarding.”

  She gently pushed his head under water and he struggled feebly, his eyes quickly losing focus again. Her fingers felt for a pulse in his neck, but it was almost non-existent. She pulled him up to the surface one last time, but she could see that his eyes couldn’t focus anymore. His oxygen-deprived brain was permanently damaged.

  She put the CPR mask back on his face and breathed through the one-way valve. Even though his brain wasn’t all there anymore, his body still fought for air autonomously. She cradled him like an idiot child while he gasped for breath. His face remained blank, but his body spasmed as she submerged him again. Katla made sure he didn’t bruise himself against the rim of the tub.

  When his body turned limp, Katla unfolded her karambit knife. Careful not to cut his skin she slipped the tip of the curved blade wrapping and sliced away the foil. She rubbed the pale skin underneath with bath oil while the foil fell away into the lukewarm water. When all the foil was stripped away from his limp body, Katla felt his erratic pulse and slowly let him slip back under water. His unfocused eyes stared blankly through the foam-speckled water as the last oxygen escaped from his nostrils in a thin stream of bubbles.

  She kept rubbing his skin with the oil to remove any trace of a restraint while she felt his neck for his pulse growing weaker until it stopped. She checked her watch while she observed his still body floating in the water, foam on his lips and nostrils flecking the greyish bath water. He probably wasn’t faking it, but she took no risks. While she waited, Katla wadded up the foil and put it in the plastic supermarket bag, together with the CPR mask and the protective headgear. She rolled the tarp into a small package to join the rest of her equipment.

  The submerged body still hadn’t moved. Even if someone broke down the door now and managed to resuscitate the body, the damage to his brain would make the doctor a wheelchair bound vegetable for the rest of his miserable life.

  Now came the most important part of the whole venture. Getting away clean…

  Before she left, Katla made a last circuit of the apartment and halted by the bed, then went down on hands and knees. The bright beam of her flashlight threw everything under the bed in sharp relief. The doctor had a great housekeeper, the space under the bed was virtually free of dust bunnies.

  Near the head of the bed a quadrant of thin lines formed a square and she pressed down on it. A click and the quadrant hinged upward. She checked inside—a floor safe with a digital keypad. Reading the code she’d written on her arm, she entered the string of numbers into the keypad. The safe beeped and clicked open.

  Wary of booby traps, Katla opened the safe carefully and shone the beam of her flashlight around the rim and over the loose cash on the bottom of the safe. She couldn’t tell how much was there, but she took it all out, counted twenty-three thousand euro out from the stack and put the banknotes back in the safe, so nobody would suspect the doctor being robbed. She closed the safe carefully and lowered the section of flooring back in the quadrant.

  She stored the money with the laptop and the C1000 bag in the backpack. The chain was on the front door and she locked the door, leaving his keys in the lock. She turned on the bedside lamp and the kitchen lights, but left the living room unlit.

  Standing on the towel by the balcony door, Katla struggled back into her damp WindStopper gear and packed everything but the sectioned rod away. She hung the rod from the transom handle, wiped the floor and stepped out onto the balcony. Confident that she hadn’t left any traces, she made sure the inside key wasn’t fully inserted into the lock, closed the door and used her lock picks to lock the door from the outside.

  Standing on the balcony railing, Katla put her arms through the transom window’s small opening and used the rubber end of the rod to push the latches closed. Then she hit the bow of the key on the inside of the lock until it clicked and used the hook of the rod to turn the key slightly in the lock to make it look like the door had been locked and fastened from the inside. Unscrewing section by section, she disassembled the rod and took the sections out through the transom window, storing them in her backpack. Pushing up the transom’s latch, she closed the window. The latch kept sticking up slightly, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Katla fastened her safety harness to the rope and climbed back to the roof, skirting the lit and curtained plate glass window of the upstairs neighbours. On the roof she rested, the adrenaline ebbing away, before she hung the grappling hook from the third metal rung embedded in the elevator housing. She tied a thin cord to the grappling hook and looped the cord up, outside the fourth and fifth rung and through the sixth rung. Pulling on the cord, she dislodged the grappling hook from the lower rung until it swung loose. Good, that worked. She hung the grappling hook back on the third rung and tied her backpack to the weighted end of the climbing rope. The end of the cord went around the handle before she lowered the backpack hand over hand to the gardens below.

  Rappelling down from the roof to the lush gardens was much easier th
an climbing up, and five minutes later the grappling hook, rope, and cord were coiled and stored in her backpack. After pulling the overshoes back on, Katla retrieved the canister with the grappling hook launcher and tied the long tube securely to her backpack.

  Katla crept to the electrical box, opened the lid and plugged the fuse back in. The glow leaves of the mural tree slowly blossomed to full illumination. With a broken branch, Katla raked the damp soil around the electrical box, then backtracked to the wall, where she raked the loose earth to remove her footprints.

  When she neared the lighted tunnel leading to the street, Katla smelled cigarette smoke and halted in the dark gardens. A dark shape leaned against the wall, the red dot of a burning cigarette flaring in the darkness. Another smoker, sheltering in the passageway to enjoy a cigarette.

  Katla melted back in the foliage and hunkered down, studying the smoker with cold eyes while her mind ran through her options. She watched as the smoker ground out his cigarette and lit up a fresh one. If he stayed there, chain-smoking while waiting for the rain to stop, she could be waiting for a long time. It would probably take hours before someone would find the doctor and raise the alarm, but she had no desire to hang around in the bushes, clammy and cold, until the smoker decided to leave. The smoker was facing the street, sheltering from the drizzle. The gate wasn’t locked from the inside. She could turn the knob, open the gate and reach him in two large strides. The lubricant she had sprayed on the hinges upon entry would probably enable her to open the gate quietly, but if he turned and saw her she’d have to kill, not just incapacitate.

  No, that wasn’t an option. While it wouldn’t be strange to find someone unconscious from a beating, she couldn’t leave a corpse so close to the doctor’s, unless there was no other choice. Despite its reputation, Amsterdam was not a violent city and two deaths in close proximity would attract attention.

  She felt her blackened face. He’d probably be unable to describe his assailant. And if she didn’t use her knives, but just disabled him with her ballpoint pen...

  Not an option either. If the doctor was found and someone could tell about a mysterious black-clad person leaving the inner gardens, that would be suspicious.

  The best option was to lure him into the garden and sneak out while he looked around. She’d have to open the gate and create some kind of distraction to make him curious enough to enter the poorly-lit gardens. Drawing the hood down closer over her eyes, Katla rose from the dark bushes and stepped forward towards the lighted passageway when she heard a door open softly to the right. She slunk back into the dark foliage, cursing under her breath.

  From her right side, a young woman with an umbrella appeared, making her way to the gated passageway. The smoker turned around, shot his cigarette butt into the street and opened his arms. The young woman folded the umbrella, opened the gate and he stepped through to embrace her.

  Katla watched them coldly, hoping they would consummate their passion somewhere else.

  The young woman closed the gate behind them, took the man by the hand and pulled him deeper into the damp dark gardens, where she led him past Katla to an open door to the right. Katla waited until she heard the door close behind the lovestruck couple and hurried to the passageway before the next suitor ambled by.

  Still under cover of the passageway Katla shrugged into a light-brown raincoat, wiped a few damp tissues over her blackened face to remove most of the camouflage and strolled to the dented scooter across the street. The helmet with the full-face visor hid her smudged face enough for her to relax as she tied her backpack to the pillion seat and kickstarted the Vespa.

  With a final glance at the gated passageway Katla put the Vespa in gear and rode off into the dark.

  Thank you for reading the Amsterdam Assassin Series.

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  To the Reader,

  Having readers eager for the next instalment of a series is the best motivation for a writer to create new stories. If you enjoy reading my work as much as I enjoy writing Katla’s adventures, there are ways for you to support me and help me gain more exposure for the Amsterdam Assassin Series:

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  Send me feedback. If you have a question about the Amsterdam Assassin Series, like to point out errors and typos, discuss issues raised in the book, want to know how to become one of my beta readers, or just embarrass me with totally undeserved adulation, I urge you to send me an email at katlasieltjes@yahoo.com. I love to hear from readers and try to answer every email.

  Kind regards,

  Martyn V. Halm

  THE AMSTERDAM ASSASSIN SERIES

  Novels

  Reprobate

  Assassin Katla breaks her own rules when confronted with an unusual witness...

  Blessed with an almost non-existent conscience, freelance assassin and corporate troubleshooter Katla Sieltjes, expert in disguising homicide, regards murder for profit as an intricate and rewarding occupation. Her solitary existence seems more than satisfactory until a blind musician wanders in on her crime scene.

  Katla only kills for profit or to protect her anonymity, and Bram Merleyn seems harmless and unable to identify her. By sparing his life, she breaks one of her most important rules—never leave a living witness. A decision Katla might not survive to regret...

  Reprobate is the first novel in the Amsterdam Assassin Series.

  Peccadillo

  Assassin Katla’s legitimate business becomes the target of a hostile takeover...

  Still recuperating from injuries sustained in Reprobate, freelance assassin and corporate troubleshooter Katla Sieltjes, expert in disguising homicide, finds herself at war with the Kau Hong, a gang of ruthless criminals who will stop at nothing to get their hands on Sphinx Shipping.

  The potentially lethal situation quickly becomes untenable, when victims fall on both sides, and a Hong Kong sniper arrives to team up with a mute enforcer from the competitive 14K Triad.

  Amsterdam might prove too small for Katla to play hide and seek, when her enemies match her skills in search and destroy...

  Peccadillo is the second novel in the Amsterdam Assassin Series.

  Rogue

  Assassin Katla kills the wrong target and draws attention from combined intelligence communities…

  Freelance assassin and corporate troubleshooter Katla Sieltjes runs her business of disguising homicide below the radar of law enforcement, but when her latest target is a judas goat intended to draw her out into the open, the hunter becomes the hunted.

  Fooling local law enforcement can be challenging, but hiding from intelligence communities aiming to enlist Katla for their dirty work might prove impossible.

  With Homeland Sec
urity, DEA, and the German BKA joining forces with Dutch Intelligence in an effort to track down Loki Enterprises, not only Katla’s future is threatened, but also the lives of her lover and his friends.

  Rogue is the third novel in the Amsterdam Assassin Series.

  Ghosting

  Assassin Katla's sabbatical year turns out to be her biggest challenge yet…

  After her narrow escape from the intense investigations by combined intelligence forces, freelance assassin and corporate troubleshooter Katla Sieltjes takes a sabbatical to thwart the relentless scrutiny by the authorities.

  But there's no rest for the wicked.

  An unexpected pregnancy, a brother in peril, a secretive consultant, and an assiduous infiltrator conspire to force Katla to renege on her vows and once again do what she does best: solving problems in her own unparalleled way.

  Ghosting is the fourth novel in the Amsterdam Assassin Series (to be published in 2015).