by Tom Wood
He walked through the airport terminal. People saw him, but they didn’t see him. They went about their business, not paying attention to the man in the charcoal suit who walked among them. His height would have made him stand out a little, but the lowered chin and lax posture shrank him enough not to be noticeable. The bland clothes, pale skin, cheap haircut and non-prescription glasses meant features that might otherwise be considered appealing seemed ordinary. He neither walked fast enough to catch the eye nor slow enough to generate annoyance. His expression was neutral. No one would wonder what he was thinking. No one would smile at him.
The only thing that could be considered notable were his eyes, which never stopped moving.
Outside, while waiting for a cab, he stood near a professional couple in sharp suits and lots of hair product as they argued with obvious passion about nothing Victor could understand. In his experience, relationships made people miserable. He didn’t understand what kept people together when they were unhappy. He was used to being alone. He reminded himself that wasn’t the same as being used to loneliness.
The cab driver wanted to talk about baseball. Victor was no sports fan. They settled on politics as a middle ground. To make the ride as smooth as possible Victor agreed with everything the driver said.
By the time they had passed through the Lincoln Tunnel the weariness of two days spent travelling was catching up with Victor. He had the driver drop him off outside a hotel, waited until the cab had turned off the street, and walked for three blocks until he found a hotel that felt right. They had plenty of rooms available. Victor asked for one on the second floor.
He placed his attaché case on the bed and performed a sweep of the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary and memorising the layout, position of furniture and objects that might be useful as improvised weapons, should they be needed. The window opened a fraction and he let in cold, polluted air. Sirens sounded somewhere in the distance in a muted, half-strangled whine. A thousand lit windows stared back at him.
He would have lingered to enjoy the view, but a sniper could be at any one of those windows.
The wardrobe was set into the wall and could not be positioned in front of the door. Instead, Victor used the heavy desk as a barricade. It wouldn’t stop a determined assault, but it would buy him time to slip out of the window. Two storeys up wasn’t a long way down; high enough so someone could not heave themselves up with any degree of ease, but not so high that Victor would have to spend a significant amount of time scaling down when his life depended on it.
He lay on top of the cover, still wearing his suit and shoes, and slept.
When he awoke, it would be time to go to work.
TWENTY-FOUR
The address Halleck had given Victor for ‘Angelica Margolis’ corresponded to a rundown tenement in a bad neighbourhood in the Bronx. It took Victor two hours to make the forty-minute journey because he spent extra time on counter surveillance to reduce the chances he was being shadowed.
He knew enough about Raven to increase his odds of spotting her, but she knew more about him. She had tracked him down before he even knew she existed.
The neighbourhood was a mix of dilapidated social housing and the commercial enterprises that served the residents – thrift stores, pawnbrokers, fast loans, 99c stores and ambulance chasers. Every one had security gates ready to be rolled down. No ground-floor window was free of bars. Drug dealers hung around on the corners of alleyways and in the shelter of doorways. An abandoned church was boarded up and falling down. Graffiti marked any area of defenceless brickwork. Razor wire protected every low wall.
Victor walked by a disused basketball court. The backboards were cracked and the hoops were missing. A homeless guy slept in one corner under a blanket of nothing but damp cardboard boxes. Victor could see a hand-scribbled sign near to where the man lay and just about made out the word veteran.
To the south, multibillion-dollar skyscrapers were backlit by a pale afternoon sun.
He circled the block on which the tenement stood, taking the pavements opposite, checking out the locale for signs of anything out of the ordinary. No one waited longer than they needed at any bus stop. No construction workers or repairmen were busy doing nothing. Watchers disguised as dealers and degenerates would be hard to identify, but he trusted the genuine loiterers would do that for him. They would scatter if they noticed someone who didn’t belong amongst them, suspecting cops.
There were a few anonymous vehicles parked in the area – a dirty red Impala, a midnight-blue panel van with a delivery-company logo on the side, a modified Dodge pick-up, and a rust-spotted grey cargo van – but he saw no people waiting inside any.
Watchers could be hidden in the back of either van, but the cargo van had no rear windows and the panel van was parked side-on to the tenement, so anyone in the back wouldn’t be able to watch it.
Victor saw why Raven had picked the area for a safe house. It wasn’t because she was short of money. Professional killing paid well, and for the best the rewards were huge. Raven was good enough to get high-profile contracts. If she wanted to she could afford to live in five-star hotels, as Victor did more often than not. The area offered other advantages beyond money.
For all the dereliction and obvious criminal activity, he had not seen a single cop. With more crime than there were cops to combat it, there weren’t enough resources available to serve those who hung on to the edges of society. Residents here would keep to themselves and even if they did become suspicious of the comings and goings of a certain individual, they were not going to rush to inform the police any more than the police would rush to investigate.
A landlord here would be happy to take cash payments for rent and a few extra bills in return for ignoring a lack of references or credit history. She might not even need to show any ID at all. She could keep her safe house operational with a minimum of funds and maximum of anonymity.
Victor found himself nodding as he made his way down the alleyway at the back of the building. There were trash cans and dumpsters and piles of garbage bags. A teenage girl was sitting on the ground examining her nails. When she heard him approach and looked up he saw she had a black eye. She scrambled to her feet and ran.
When she had gone, he examined the fire exits and windows and plotted escape routes should he need to make a fast exit. He was here on reconnaissance, but the only thing he had to lose by planning for the worst was time, and that was one thing he had in abundance.
A woman was leaving her ground-floor apartment as he headed for the stairs. Her greasy hair was tied back with a rubber band and ash fell from the cigarette between her lips as she dragged a pushchair through her doorway. The baby it contained was crying. She didn’t look at Victor once.
There was no sign to say the elevator was out of service, but Victor always took the stairs if the option was there. Maybe not if the alternative was forty flights of stairs, but stepping into an elevator was as close to volunteering to trap himself in a steel coffin as he was ever going to get. There was no telling who or what was going to be there when the doors opened again. The last time he had been inside an elevator, the doors had opened to reveal an assassin who had come closer to killing him than anyone had before or since.
Victor flexed his left hand as he reached the top floor. He wasn’t surprised Raven had chosen to rent an apartment on this floor and not one below. Having people above as well as below was no fun for anyone, least of all assassins looking for security and privacy. As such, he expected to find her safe house would be a corner apartment, so she would only have neighbours to one side. Windows on two walls gave snipers more options, but armoured glass or even blackout blinds could negate that threat, and more windows meant more means of escape.
He made his way down a narrow corridor to the front door of Raven’s safe house, which occupied the building’s southwest corner. Had their roles been reversed he would have chosen the same one. South-facing windows would reflect the most available
sunlight, making it harder for watchers and snipers to see through.
Her front door was coated in resilient green paint like the rest of the front doors. And like them it had been used enough to have gained scratch marks around the keyhole and scuff marks where it had been toed open, though less than the other doors. Which made sense. Raven was using it as a safe house, not a residence. She wouldn’t be here anywhere near as often as those who lived within the building. If he conducted a building-wide comparison study of scratches and marks he knew he could form a rough estimate of how much time Raven spent here, but he didn’t need to know her life in that much detail when all he planned to do was end it.
He was surprised to find only two standard locks securing the door, but he reasoned her primary layer of defence was the anonymity the apartment provided. The kind of enemies that would find her safe house would not be defeated in their intentions by any lock, no matter how sophisticated.
Victor had been picking locks long before he took his first contract as a professional killer. He had learned to shimmy open car doors before he had learned to drive. He had mastered the intricacies of raking tumblers long before he owned a property key of his own. If he had to, he could crack a safe with nothing more than graph paper and a pencil. The two standard locks fitted to low-cost urban housing were nothing he hadn’t beaten countless times as an adolescent delinquent. He had Raven’s front door unlocked in less than ten seconds.
He turned the handle and stepped across the threshold.
TWENTY-FIVE
Two men sat in the back of the midnight-blue panel van. They used upturned beer-bottle crates as seats. Not comfortable, but practical. If a cop insisted on taking a look in the back he would see nothing to catch his attention. The windows of the van’s rear doors had been treated with one-way film. They could see out. No one could see in. The film was similar to that used in sunglasses and the outside world was darkened as a result. On a grey winter day that darkness was pronounced, but they could see enough to do their job. That job was to watch.
But they were not using the rear windows to watch. They had parked across the street from the tenement building. Parking with the one-way windows facing the building would be too suspicious to such a careful professional.
Instead, they used a camera. The lens of the camera looked through a hole in the van’s side panelling. That hole was covered in glass and treated in the same way as the windows in the rear doors and disguised within the delivery-company logo. It was almost impossible to see unless someone knew where to look for it and was standing no more than two feet away.
One of the men watched a screen and operated the camera’s zoom and focus. He whispered observations to the second man, who noted everything because neither man knew exactly what was required of them but they knew enough to know that they were not to cut corners. This was a serious business. The price for failure was absolute.
‘Subject has entered the tenement,’ the first man said.
‘Manner?’ the second asked.
‘The same as when he arrived: relaxed.’
‘Is he carrying anything?’
‘If he is, it’s in his pockets. His hands are empty.’
The second man nodded and scribbled on his notepad with a 2B pencil. His shirt pocket had another two for when the first grew blunt. There might not be time to sharpen it. The graphite might snap. Pens were not much better. They could stop working for no good reason. Pencils could write when wet or on wet paper and pretty much any surface. He preferred pencils. No contest.
A phone rang. The first man answered it. He didn’t need to say hello or state his name or ask the caller how he could help. Only one person knew this number.
The caller said, ‘Is it him?’
‘I think so.’
‘Can you track him when he exits?’
‘I would advise against that course of action. Subject is observant and paranoid. If we follow, he will make us. Repeat: he will make us. I suggest bringing in Bravo Team to establish surveillance at Point Niner and wait for him to show.’
The caller said, ‘Your advice is noted. Proceed as planned. Follow the subject as soon as he leaves the building. Do not let him out of your sight.’
‘Understood.’
The call disconnected.
‘Better get ready,’ the first man said.
The second climbed behind the wheel.
TWENTY-SIX
No intruder alarm had been fitted. Victor saw no cameras or microphones or motion sensors in the hallway he stepped into, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He knew how to hide them so that only a search that would take hours to complete and leave the apartment in ruins would uncover them. If he knew that, so could she. He had neither the time nor the necessity to do so. Once he killed her, any recordings of him in her safe house could be found at his leisure. Or even ignored, because they were no threat in the hands of a corpse.
The lights were off throughout the apartment, and the drawn blinds made it dark. The air was cold too. Even colder than on the streets. No heating had been on today to take the chill from the air, and no sunlight had been able to spill through windows to raise the temperature in line with that outside.
Victor let the door fall shut behind him, stood still and breathed in slow, shallow breaths to let every sound reach his ears unobstructed. Even without the darkness of the apartment limiting his vision, hearing was more important. Light could not penetrate walls.
He heard traffic outside, the ticking sound of pipes at work, and a television or radio emanating from the apartment beneath or next door – he couldn’t be sure which. He stood statue-still in the darkness for several minutes until he was certain he was alone.
He hadn’t expected to find Raven inside, but it would have made things easier if she was hiding, or better yet asleep and vulnerable.
He explored the safe house, moving from room to room in a slow, methodical manner. There were few furnishings and only those that fulfilled the most basic requirements of someone who needed to sleep and eat and lie low and nothing else. The lounge was almost cavernous, furnished only with a single foldout camping chair and table. A second foldout chair was still in its packaging. The three pieces had come as a set, but she had set up only what she needed. There was no television or sound system or any other electronic device. Aside from the folding chair and table the only other item was a paperback novel. It looked new and unread. The spine was still intact and the pages not unfurled.
He had never heard of the author or the title, but it had been published within the last two years and what fiction he read was picked at random from second-hand book stores, often by the box, so if anyone studied his reading material they would find no indication of personality or taste. Raven might pick new books in the same way. He could learn nothing about her from a single novel she had not yet read.
The kitchen had no toaster or kettle or microwave or other labour-saving device. In a cupboard he found a set of three rugged iron camping pans – small, medium and large. In another he found a twelve-piece crockery set. The only food he found was an unopened box of cereal. There were enough carbohydrates contained within to keep a person alive for a long time.
In a drawer, a cutlery set had been aligned with neatness and order. It was the only true sign of personality so far, but he had expected to find some indication of a need to have everything in its place, accounted for and ordered. Like himself, she was fastidious in her need for order. His had grown out of a need to survive and a knowledge that the smallest detail, the smallest mistake, might make the difference between life and death. In the neat, ordered layout of the cutlery he saw that she was the same as him in that way as she was in others and he wondered how else they would prove to be alike.
He did not enjoy discovering the similarities between them because it would make her harder to kill. But better he find out in advance than when his life might depend on it.
He found soap in the bathroom, but no toothbrush. He im
agined she bought a new one with her every time she stayed, disposing of the old one and its traces of DNA.
The apartment had a single bedroom, which contained nothing but a sleeping bag. It was a quality item. He assumed it had been brought from the same store as the chair and table set and the items in the kitchen. He wondered what lie she had told the person who served her. He squatted down to smell it. There was a trace of female scent within the synthetic material. He had read that smell produced the most powerful memories.
He was a little surprised to find no gun. But, like the toothbrush, she must bring a weapon with her and take it away again. With the limited security offered by the front door, she did not feel it prudent to leave a weapon, no doubt illegal, behind.
An idea came to him. He returned to the lounge and picked up the paperback novel. A sticker on the front jacket showed it had been in a promotion. He had to fight the compulsion to peel the sticker away. Had it been his own he would have done so before he had walked out of the store. Raven hadn’t felt the same need, but it seemed as though she hadn’t read the book either.
He balanced it by the spine in the centre of his palm and let the pages fall open. They did not do so in an even manner, parting to about a third of the way through instead of the middle. The book was in far too good condition for Raven to have read up to page 100 of a 311-page paperback novel.
There were no pencil or pen marks on the page, no words circled or underlined. He read both pages. It was almost all dialogue between two characters, discussing another character. Victor had no idea what the story was about. He took the book into the kitchen, flicked a wall switch to send power to the oven, and turned dials to operate it. A fan whirred and a light came on. He switched off the ceiling light so the only illumination came from the oven, leaving the room dark and glowing in soft orange.