Fleischer had become adept at surveying his surroundings without appearing to do so. He had mastered the art of being fully present as he approached the location of a job, of silencing the crippling mental noise that would otherwise shout above the whispered details offered by the world around him. It was this finely honed skill that told him his predawn approach to the apartment building had been unobserved.
He advanced toward the building’s utility entrance from the southeast. At two a.m., he didn’t expect much activity. Nothing stirred as he walked down the steps leading to the belowground entrance.
He snuggled up close to the cold, damp brick wall of the building as he neared the surveillance camera, its unblinking eye trained tirelessly on the doorway. Fleischer’s fishing hat would nicely obscure his facial features, and the intentional and affected stoop of his shoulders and slowing of his gait would communicate many more decades of age than his athletic frame had actually accumulated.
He didn’t spend long in the doorway, because he had a key. Preparation beat improvisation every time. He moved inside the dark basement hallway, flanked by laundry, utility, and janitorial rooms on either side. He did not turn the lights on.
He found the stairwell and climbed to the seventh floor, feeling the thump of his heart in response to the exertion. It felt good, and Gunther felt alive. He was in his element, a jungle cat on a nocturnal hunt, and he was thankful for the opportunity to ply his craft.
He paused at the seventh floor landing and listened for sounds in the hallway beyond. He pressed his ear to the door. The building spoke to him in its quiet language of creaks, groans, and crackles. But he heard no human noises, no rhythmic drumming of feet against the concrete floor in the hallway beyond, and no sharp noises of residents awake and rattling about their kitchens or bathrooms.
Fleischer let his breathing settle a moment longer, then quietly opened the unlocked door, letting himself into the residential hallway. It was well lit, as the housing regulations required, and Fleischer instantly saw the police tape sealing the door to an apartment situated roughly a third of the distance to the far wall.
He moved quickly but silently, not eager for attention, but also not afraid of it. His cover story was well-rehearsed, and he could deliver it confidently and convincingly to anyone at all, Polizei included.
Most of the crime scene tape could be pulled off without tearing or cutting, but there was a strip that sealed the door to the jamb. This he sliced with a razor blade. He didn’t have the key to this particular apartment, so he used a thin but sturdy nail file and a paper clip to work the lock. It took him just a few seconds.
He stepped into the dark apartment. He instantly recognized the metallic smell lingering in the still air. Human blood. It smelled differently than animal blood. Fleischer wasn’t sure why, and he’d never studied the chemistry enough to find out, but he made a mental note to satisfy that curiosity someday.
He pulled the backpack from his shoulders and fished for a few particulars. He donned paper slippers, a paper suit, a surgeon’s mask, and a hairnet. He kept a knife tucked in his sock and a silenced Ruger in his belt, but he expected not to use either of those tools. His objective on this particular night was information.
Fleischer reached for a flashlight. He didn’t dare examine the crime scene under the glare of the apartment’s lights, as it would be an unwarranted risk. But his flashlight beam was powerful, and he carefully collected a number of fiber samples, to be handled later by a very discreet investigative service staffed by former police investigators with an interest in far more lucrative employment than the public sector offered.
Mein Gott, die Blut. The job had been messy. They didn’t just want to kill the young man. They’d wanted to prove a point, to make an example. This was a murder, but more than that, it was a message. Fleischer gathered blood samples, taking care not to leave traces of his presence in the process. He used pre-marked, sterilized vials to contain flakes obtained from the floor and from the bed itself, where the body had been discovered.
Fleischer then moved on to the real reason he was there: the surveillance camera footage. His client was careful and exceedingly suspicious. The paranoia hadn’t prevented the crime, unfortunately, but it would certainly go a long way toward fingering the perpetrator.
Fleischer found the circuit breaker closet, located on the wall adjacent to the bathroom doorway. Each apartment had its own breaker box, in order to prevent costly service calls to reset centralized breakers in the basement after residents plugged in one too many appliances. Fleischer pulled a screwdriver from his backpack and carefully removed the face plate covering the switches.
It took him just an instant to find what he was looking for, hidden beneath the jumble of power cables leading to the various switches mounted in the circuit breaker box. Fleischer removed the portable computer drive, carefully disconnecting its cable from the receptacle hidden cleverly on the back of one of the electrical switches. The system routed all of the feeds from the apartment’s half-dozen hidden cameras to the hard drive for storage. It contained a terabyte of data. If the video were compressed, it would store several months of footage. At full resolution, maybe only three or four weeks. Regardless of the resolution setting, Fleischer was confident the system would have captured the final, painful moments of a very unfortunate young man.
He placed the data drive carefully in his backpack, made a final sweep of the apartment to ensure he’d left no traces of his visit, doffed the paper suit which prevented his own DNA from contaminating the crime scene, stuffed the suit back into his backpack, and carefully listened against the closed door for the sound of anyone out in the hallway.
Hearing no one, he carefully exited the apartment, closed the door quietly, patiently removed the sliced tape that had once sealed the door closed, and replaced it with a fresh strip from the roll of crime scene tape he’d brought with him. He took a step back to examine his work.
Satisfied, he slipped silently back into the stairwell. Moments later, Fleischer stepped out of the utility entrance and into the cold February morning. Sunrise was only a couple of hours away, but the night was still black as ink. Fleischer hoped to be fast asleep long before the sun peeked over the horizon.
23
Jim Firth boarded the Gulfstream V private jet at Charles de Gaulle International in Paris. He was manifested as James Firthson, and carried all of the associated paperwork to backstop the alias in case anyone were to ask serious questions about the small flip-top Coleman cooler he toted.
But his travel arrangements were designed to minimize the chances of any such questions, because there were no good answers that would stand up over time. It wouldn’t take a reasonably smart Fed with a microscope longer than about half an hour to figure the whole thing out. It was a risky op, but Viktor had been adamant, which meant that Viktor hadn’t bitched too much about opening up his wallet to bankroll the trip.
No trace of the op could ever be found on the Synergique books, of course. Even if the science turned out to be as groundbreaking as everyone at Synergique thought it might, a turd on the financials could torpedo everything just as quickly as a poor test result. Quicker even, because you could always buy new drug trials, but it was much tougher to buy your way out of jail.
Kohlhaas’ handling instructions to Firth had been painstaking and explicit. The active compound was not yet bound to a powdered substrate, as it would be in its final pill form, and it was unstable at temperatures above fifteen Celsius. If allowed to warm up, the drug would begin to decompose, and it would lose its efficacy after as little as an hour.
How could a drug that falls apart above sixty Fahrenheit possibly do any good inside a ninety-nine-degree human body, Firth wanted to know, and it wasn’t a bad question. Kohlhaas had taken the time to explain that the first two chemical steps in the decomposition reaction occurred only in the presence of diatomic oxygen, which would not exist in the bloodstream because it would be bound to hemoglobin. But freefo
rm diatomic oxygen did exist inside the transport vial, try as they might to evacuate all the air. Hence the temperature restriction during transport. But once the fluid had found its way inside the patient’s veins, the temperature would no longer be a problem.
Keep it cold. Got it. No issue.
The real difficulty would be sociological rather than biological, Firth figured. The job might call upon his considerable persuasion skills, the kind that had gotten him admitted to the most sensitive and secure portion of the infectious disease ward at NIH.
To that end, Firth studied the laboratory results, prepared by an A. LeBeque, a man whose name Firth didn’t recognize, but whose scientific acumen had apparently earned Kohlhaas’ trust. Persuasion was best accomplished with supportive facts. When facts didn’t support, more art came into play. But, judging from the scanning electron micrographs of the bacteria’s inhibited reproduction proteins, Firth wouldn’t have to get too creative.
He’d even thought of the catch phrase he would use. Humans always needed an analogy, something pithy and relatable, some small fact to justify an emotional decision. This drug sterilizes the bacteria, he would say. It can’t reproduce. The drug is like chemical castration.
He hoped it proved as compelling as he thought it might. For one thing, if Kohlhaas and his band of bio-nerds were correct, the compound just might save a few lives. For another, Kohlhaas would pay a hell of a lot more money if Firth got them to try the drug.
Win-win. Firth loved those kinds of deals.
The door closed, Firth’s ears adjusted to the pressure change, and he soon reclined in his chair to sleep away as many of the miles as he could. He had a feeling that once his feet hit terra firma in New York, there wasn’t going to be much opportunity to catch his breath.
All the better, he figured. If everything went well, he’d take a couple of months off. Maybe even longer.
24
Peter Kittredge awoke. It was light in the room. How long had it been since he’d slept past sunrise? He couldn’t remember. The wine was a softer letdown than the hard stuff, and his shakes were manageable. Not pleasant, but manageable. For the moment.
He inhaled, and the sweet smell of Nora’s hair, and of Nora’s girl-ness, put a smile on his face. She really was something else. She’d worn him out.
Nora wasn’t in Nora’s bed. In her place, Kittredge found a note. It thanked him for the pleasurable evening, and for staying over with her. She was a little freaked out about everything going on, and she felt safer with him in bed with her. The fridge had bacon and eggs, and coffee was all set up and ready to brew, the note said. She had to be at work by eight, but would be home just a little after five. She hoped to enjoy him again then.
He smiled. She was a keeper. To the extent that Peter Kittredge kept anyone in his life, anyway, which wasn’t a terrific extent. He had enough trust issues to carry the average shrink through to retirement. Fortunately, Kittredge wasn’t big on self-reflection.
Kittredge walked to the kitchen and searched for anything resembling a liquor cabinet. Nora apparently wasn’t into the hard stuff, but she did have two boxes of a clichéd and therefore overpriced French Beaujolais. Any port in a storm, Kittredge decided, plundering the drawers for an opener.
A rectangular white object on the countertop caught his eye. Jürgen Strauss, Polizeikommissar, the business card announced, causing a cascade of pre-coital memories of the previous evening to descend upon his mind.
Strauss hadn’t been nearly as priggish or prickish as he’d seemed during Kittredge’s earlier interrogations. He had corroborated Kittredge’s assault claim with the police report from earlier in the day. A hotel staff member had been nearly killed by a single blow from an assailant, but had recovered enough to tell her tale, which included the part about her seeing some sissy-looking guy getting his ass kicked in the hallway right before the assailant turned his attentions to her.
Strauss could have left the sissy part out, Kittredge thought. A detail like that could linger with a guy for a while.
The hotel had video cameras covering the lobby and entrance, Strauss said, so they were hopeful for a positive identification using facial recognition software. Strauss wondered whether Kittredge had gotten a good look at the assailant’s face. Kittredge had, and he agreed to attend a police lineup if the opportunity arose.
Strauss wasn’t sure when Kittredge would regain access to his apartment, the scene of Sergio’s murder, and the inspector was certain that Kittredge would never get his bed back. Kittredge couldn’t fathom sleeping where a lover had been bludgeoned to death, so good riddance anyway, he figured.
Strauss was tight-lipped about any further details of the case, and he dodged all of their questions. But Kittredge hadn’t gotten the feeling that Strauss liked them for the murder. He had advised Kittredge to keep a low profile, whatever that might have meant, and to avoid going to places he normally frequented. Solid advice, Kittredge thought, but nothing he hadn’t thought of already.
Kittredge downed a glass of wine like it was juice, and poured another. It was going to take a lot of this shit to get functionally drunk, Kittredge realized, which meant that he would have purple teeth and a sour stomach unless he found some vodka somewhere.
He showered, reaching out his hand occasionally to fetch a glug from the glass of wine perched on the bathroom counter. He didn’t really want to wash Nora off of him, but he comforted himself in the knowledge that he had another dose of her to look forward to after she returned from work.
Thus cleaned and with appropriate mental lubrication, Kittredge turned his attention to the question of how to occupy the day, or if not the entire day, at least the next ten minutes. He retrieved from his pocket the folded paper containing his list of Sergios, and decided to continue adding telephone numbers to the names, the idea being that he would eventually call all of these people to figure out which of them were dead.
“Almighty Google, reveal to me the Secrets of the Sergios,” Kittredge said aloud as he sat at Nora’s computer, surprised by the buzz he’d obtained from just a couple of glasses of wine.
Sergio Xavier Sebastien. Are you my guy? Kittredge typed the name into the search bar.
25
“Are you certain?” The hired muscle spoke into the burner phone in clipped tones. He had traded his blue raincoat for a reversible jacket, red on one side and black on the other. He wore it red-side-out at the moment, traipsing through the German gloom toward the location he’d been told would contain the key he needed.
“No, asshole, I just conjured this from thin air.” The reply was characteristically acerbic.
The hit man didn’t particularly care for this particular employer, but as a rule he wasn’t particularly particular about where his cash came from. As long as it came in large bundles of large denominations. “Just making sure, tough guy,” he said. “This is a location we’re both familiar with, is all.”
“I’m aware of the delicacy. So be delicate. Clean up after yourself.”
“And if she comes home?”
“She won’t.”
“You say so.” He hung up, disassembled the phone, and tossed its parts down the sewer drain.
He passed an intersection and crossed with the light. He was one block away from the right building, as luck would have it. If his good fortune held, he’d be done by lunch.
26
Kittredge had grown weary of chasing down the telephone numbers belonging to Copenhagen-born Sergios. But he’d invested too much time to quit. And the effort just might reveal something about the Sergio who had died in his bed.
The wine had caught up with him, and he had to go to the bathroom. He’d drained a full bottle by now, and felt pleasantly, productively neutral, the buzzed feeling having worn off even as his blood alcohol content rose to around what had become its customary level.
He whistled a tune while he visited Nora’s bathroom. After he had washed his hands, he looked through her medicine cabinet. He wasn’t
sure what he was looking for, but he wanted to know something about her, anything really, as long as it was something that she hadn’t told him. Was there some messed-up psychology latent in that desire? Kittredge chuckled to himself. “Damn right there is,” he said out loud, hearing the slur in his voice.
He was pleased to discover birth control pills and sleep aids. His knowledge of the former would enhance their sexual experience together, and the latter would, hopefully, help him power-sleep past the shakes. He shoved a dozen pills in his pocket for safekeeping. It had the makings of a beautiful partnership, Kittredge thought as he emerged from the bathroom.
He stopped dead in his tracks. There was a man standing over Nora’s computer, bending over to read the screen, his back to Kittredge and the rest of the room.
Kittredge took a silent step backwards.
The man whipped his body around. He smiled. “Relax. You’re going to be fine,” he said. Just like he’d said the previous morning, Kittredge realized.
“You,” Kittredge accused.
“Guilty. You’re such a slippery little sissy.”
Sissy? That goddamned word again. Could this guy possibly know what the cleaning lady’s police report had said?
Kittredge’s fear took over. It propelled him pell-mell to the kitchen, toward the block full of Wüsthof cutlery on the counter next to the stove. He was vaguely aware of a decidedly unmasculine yell escaping his own lips. His flailing arms knocked over a glass of water left over from Strauss’ visit the previous evening. He reached for the knife block.
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 96