A Time to Die

by Tom Wood

  The dial tone sounded for seven rings before a click announced the receiver answering.

  ‘Who is this?’

  Victor recognised the female voice that answered the phone. He had spent enough time with her to know she was in her mid-fifties, but a lifetime of smoking had given her an ancient-sounding growl.

  ‘A man you owe,’ he said.

  The woman replied with a snort. ‘You must be mistaken. I am in no one’s debt, though there are many people out there who are in mine.’

  ‘Then you might want to see a neurologist because your memory is failing.’

  ‘I don’t have time for this,’ she said. ‘I’m going to hang up now so you can harass someone else.’

  ‘No, you’re not going to hang up. You’re going to stay on this line and listen to what I have to say.’

  The line stayed connected. She said, ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Because I can tell from the tone of your voice that there is a seed of recollection germinating in your mind as we talk and it is growing roots of memory of the dark and suffering and sound and fear.’

  She didn’t respond.

  He continued: ‘There is a man you owe everything to. You owe him for the breaths you are now taking. You owe him because he once handed you a phone while you lay dying.’

  He pictured blood glistening on plastic sheeting.

  There was a moment of silence and all he could hear was rapid breathing before she said a single word: ‘You.’

  ‘Hello, Georg.’

  She said, ‘I don’t use that name any more.’

  Victor said, ‘You’re still Georg to me, and you always will be.’

  ‘It’s been a long time. I didn’t expect to hear from you again. I hoped I wouldn’t hear from you again.’

  ‘That’s a very peculiar way of thanking me for saving your life.’

  She grunted. ‘You did save my life, that’s true. But why do I now think you only did so to create a debt that you could collect at a later point?’

  ‘You must not believe in the innate goodness of your fellow human beings.’

  She grunted again, louder. ‘What do you want? Why are you contacting me after all this time?’

  ‘I’m just calling to see how you’re doing.’

  ‘I’d forgotten about your strange sense of humour,’ Georg said. ‘But if you have even the slightest interest in my well-being then you should know I can almost walk unassisted again. I’m not dead, thanks to you, but I still need physiotherapy.’

  Victor said, ‘I would like a delivery to Belgrade and I would like it fast.’

  ‘You can order pizza online these days. You don’t need to call.’

  ‘I’m lactose intolerant.’

  Georg said, ‘How do you know I’m still in that business?’

  ‘Because physiotherapy isn’t cheap and cigarettes cost almost as much.’

  ‘Maybe you should send me a shopping list.’

  ‘I was thinking the same. Email address?’

  She gave him one, which he committed to memory. ‘How are you going to pay? I’m sure you’re in no rush to visit me in Hamburg after last time. And I do not travel well these days.’

  ‘I would like to think that I’ve already covered the bill.’

  ‘Would you indeed?’

  Victor remained silent.

  The sound of breathing returned. ‘Okay, let’s say for argument’s sake that I agree I have something of a debt to you and you’re entitled to cash in.’

  ‘For argument’s sake,’ he agreed.

  Georg said, ‘But I don’t yet know what you want. I’m not a charity.’

  ‘I understand,’ Victor said. ‘You’re not a charity and I’m not someone who likes to feel cheated in an exchange.’

  ‘Yeah, I get what you’re saying. Very subtle, as always. But if you’re reasonable in your request then I’ll be reasonable in honouring it. Is that acceptable to you?’

  ‘It is,’ Victor said. ‘Please do your best to expedite the dispatch.’

  ‘I offer a special courier service for valued clients.’

  He ignored the sarcasm and said, ‘I appreciate your kindness.’

  ‘And if my kindness is sufficient, will you consider us even?’

  Victor hung up.

  ELEVEN

  Victor travelled light. The fewer items he carried the fewer things could be discerned about him from his possessions. A small suitcase, attaché case or overnight bag was his luggage of choice. A change of clothes and basic toiletries were all he required beyond his silicone hand gel. He preferred to swap clothes as soon as it was possible. Items bought in the area he was operating within helped him blend in with the locals. Foreign labels in his clothes gave away his movements. Removing them made him look like he had something to hide. When time was limited or he knew he was heading somewhere he would have a hard time finding the right attire, he travelled with clothes bought from global brands available across the world.

  He napped on the flight because no one was going to assassinate him while on a commercial airliner. Perhaps they would bring the whole plane down to fulfil the contract, but no professional good enough to pose a threat would be so reckless as to try on board, and if the plane was going to crash he’d prefer to sleep through it anyway.

  He awoke a moment before the shadow fell across his face. His eyes focused on a woman in a business suit and for a second he found himself looking at the assassin who had called herself Abigail. He blinked and the face changed, softening to that of a younger woman.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, cautious and nervous. ‘I don’t suppose I can take that seat next to you? I saw no one is sitting in it and the douche in the seat behind me keeps kicking me in the back. Sorry to wake you, by the way.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ Victor said in return. ‘I was only dozing.’ He shifted, sitting more upright. ‘Sure, be my guest.’

  The young woman was overweight and awkward in her movements. She squeezed past his skewed knees and he watched her hands the whole time. The woman had a plastic bottle of mineral water in one and the other was a closed fist. She opened it to help her balance and the need to watch her disappeared. She didn’t so much sit as fall into her seat.

  He was suspicious at first that she had chosen to sit next to him when other free seats were available. His usual posture and expression sent out subtle messages that put off most people from engaging with him, but he had no control over himself when asleep. It seemed he was approachable like that.

  The young woman continued their small talk and though she was pleasant enough the experience at the Covent Garden hotel was a solid reminder that he could trust no encounter, no matter how innocent it appeared. Even if this woman wasn’t a professional killer she might be some other kind of threat – law enforcement, spy or watcher.

  ‘What about your bag?’ Victor asked, because he had never seen a woman on a flight without a purse or handbag or other carry-on luggage.

  ‘Overhead locker above my seat. I’ll get it when we land. If I hadn’t got away from Mr Footsie back there then I might have done something I’d no doubt pretend to regret.’

  Victor nodded. She seemed genuine and after half an hour of chatting about her Tibetan mastiff he was content to file her away as nothing more than a talkative civilian. Even if she prevented him sleeping, she helped pass the time.

  They said their goodbyes as they disembarked the plane and Victor began scanning the faces waiting at arrivals.

  The terminal was hot and the air stifling. Outside it was winter but the heating system was set to tropical. Rich women were carrying their fur coats and their husbands were sweating. Victor changed his watch for the new time zone. He planned to trade it for cash – it was a $10,000 Rolex – but he didn’t want to give the jeweller or pawnbroker a clue as to where he had travelled from.

  Victor ignored the car-hire services. Belgrade was small and its public transport adequate for his needs. Renting a car left a paper trail he preferred
to avoid. He took a cab to the city and had the driver drop him off near Trg Republike, Belgrade’s most prominent square, where he could disappear among the tourists.

  It was cold and windy in Belgrade. He was happy being uncomfortable to gain some other advantage, but the temperature let Victor’s hands keep their feeling even without gloves. Most other people wore them or mittens, which had the added benefit of helping him identify threats. No competent assassin would wear thick gloves or mittens if they had a gun to use.

  With no known location for Rados, little could be done until Victor had found him. That would take an indeterminate amount of time – days, or even weeks, depending on how off the grid the Serb was living. Victor needed somewhere to lay his head when he was not hunting down his target.

  Hotels were his primary choice of residence. They offered security and a reasonable degree of privacy as well as convenience. For this job, he wanted somewhere else. The two recent attempts on his life had to be a consideration. He could not rely on his anonymity as his first line of defence this time. With every job he took he increased his exposure, but it seemed Fletcher’s treachery had done immeasurable damage. He had numerous identities and aliases and legends to draw upon, but none were ironclad, as the two assassins had demonstrated.

  Victor didn’t want to leave any record of his whereabouts, which was impossible with a hotel. Finding a private landlord who was happy to accept cash and not ask questions was easy when he was paying three months’ rent upfront. It was more than he would have liked to pay because marking himself as wealthy also made him memorable, but it was balanced out by not having to provide any documentation.

  The apartment occupied the top floor of a townhouse within the walled old town. It was more space than he needed – enough for a whole family – but he liked the fact his footsteps echoed loud and clear on the hardwood floors of the building’s corridors and staircase. The other benefit was the basement the landlord lamented could not be rented because of damp. Victor agreed it was a shame as he noticed the padlock securing it was one he could pick in under fifteen seconds.

  The building was ten storeys of late eighteenth-century architecture in a neighbourhood built to house rich merchants and minor aristocracy. Two hundred years later and it was a fine place for an assassin to make a temporary home. The landlord owned several of the apartments and rented them out to tourists and business travellers, whom he could charge premium fees for short stays. Victor liked that. It meant he would have fewer neighbours than he might otherwise. With a dusting of snow on the ground and the temperature hovering around zero the temporary residents were even fewer. The landlord didn’t like the winter for this reason, but with undisguised glee explained how he made up for it during the summer when he raised the prices in line with the increasing temperature.

  It had been listed as part-furnished, which equated to a sofa, coffee table and bed. There was a mouldy cardboard box containing crockery left by the previous tenant in the kitchen and little else but dust. The landlord assured him the entire apartment had been cleaned by professionals. Victor nodded.

  He paid the landlord with an envelope of cash, which made the man lick his lips with delight. He was too busy calculating how much more profit he would collect by failing to inform the taxman to consider that his new tenant might also want to avoid a paper trail. Cash was always the preference for transactions, but there was only so much Victor could travel with without causing problems in airports. He supplemented this with expensive watches and jewellery that could be worn across borders without raising suspicion and then sold for cash at his destination. Not all transactions could be completed with cash, and so he had prepay credit cards as backup. The handful of solid identities that he used to hold bank accounts and be a registered director of offshore shell corporations were never used while working. They were harder and harder to establish all the time and the number he kept active had diminished in recent years.

  ‘What are you planning to do during your time in Belgrade?’ the landlord asked once they had concluded their business.

  ‘I’m writing a book. This will be my home-slash-office. I need to lock myself away from the world to get it finished.’

  ‘Oh,’ the landlord said, surprised and disappointed not to have a more exciting tenant. ‘What kind of a book are you writing?’

  ‘It’s a fictionalised account of the death of Archduke Ferdinand.’

  ‘A historical novel then. How interesting. You understand a lot about the assassination?’

  ‘Well,’ Victor said. ‘They do say to write what you know.’

  TWELVE

  The first night in the apartment Victor didn’t sleep. He stayed awake until dawn, passing the time by reading a Serbian translation of a novel he had read before. It helped with his language skills. He spent the night sitting on the sofa, pausing reading for every sound that echoed and seeped through the old building. The near-empty apartment amplified the ticking of pipes and clatter of shoes. He kept all the doors open flush to neighbouring walls to aid his ears and so no enemy could hide behind them.

  It had been years since Victor had slept like a regular person. The night was the most dangerous time. Killers operated then as preference, both to remain unseen and to catch their target unawares. As equal parts killer and target, Victor took his rest in the morning whenever he had the choice, in the afternoon if that choice was compromised and in the evening as a last resort. The time between midnight and dawn were the prime hours to both hunt and be hunted.

  When enough sunlight had seeped into the apartment for him to see the fine hair on the back of his hands, he set the novel down on the floor next to the sofa, made himself comfortable, and slept.

  If he dreamed, he had no memory of it when he awoke a few minutes after midday. He lay still for a moment and listened, identifying no sounds to suggest an enemy was present and registering no physiological reactions to advise his subconscious had become aware of danger while his consciousness was compromised.

  Satisfied, he sat up on the sofa and breathed in the cold air. He shivered and rubbed some warmth into his arms. He slept without the comfort and constriction of bedding and his suit was no protection against the ambient chill.

  He woke alert and refreshed because he knew his own body and the rest it required as well as his body had grown used to his sleeping habits. He made himself coffee regardless, because it had become habit long ago and, needed or not, he liked it and little vices made life worth living. Coffee drinkers lived longer, he’d once read whilst recovering from multiple lacerations caused by a custom-crafted combat knife.

  He nudged open a blind enough to peek outside. Looking north, he could see the Danube and the far bank. Somewhere in the grey haze of winter clouds a plane was passing overhead. Cargo containers, sun-stained and rusted, were piled on a barge that made its slow passage along the river to the port. Gulls rested on top of the containers and cleaned their wings. Relying on his eye alone it was hard to be sure, but it looked to be seven hundred metres to the nearest conceivable sniping nest. If he was fortunate enough to spot the flash he would have two-thirds of a second to move before the high-velocity round smashed through the window and killed him. If he didn’t see the flash then he would be dead before the broken glass reached the floorboards.

  Victor rubbed his hands and exhaled, watching the vapour condense on the cold window glass. He didn’t open the window. Precautions, no matter how small and insignificant alone, worked in conjunction with others, building and combining to form a pattern of behaviour that had saved his life before and could do again.

  He stepped away from the window after a short moment in case there was a marksman on the other side of the river preparing a shot.

  He washed, then applied a new dressing to his thigh, burning the old one in the kitchen sink. The wound was healing well. It was still painful, but not debilitating.

  The front door had two quality locks, but the landlord no doubt had his own set of keys despite assurin
g Victor this was not the case. He had slept with the sofa barricading the door, and once dressed he found a locksmith and had the locks changed for the most secure ones available. The landlord wasn’t going to be happy when he came to inspect the property in a month’s time, but Victor would either be gone without a trace by then, else he would reinstall the original locks the morning of the landlord’s inspection.

  Once the new lock was fitted he set about securing the rest of the apartment. Retrofitting the windows with armoured glass was not a realistic option, but the height from the ground would make entry through the windows impractical. Not impossible, because Victor knew he could scale the exterior, and even if his strength and climbing skills were exceptional, there were others like him out there. The many scars hidden beneath his clothes were proof of that.

  The apartment was on the building’s north side. Not ideal, because he would have preferred direct sunlight to shine on the windows for most of the day, creating glare and making the job of watchers or snipers more difficult. He had taken it anyway, because compromises always had to be made, and the apartment’s other benefits balanced out this imperfection.

  The landlord had suggested Victor acquire some thick rugs because the bare floorboards would get cold underfoot, and though he agreed it was a good idea, he had no intention of adding muffling agents to what was a great line of defence. Years before when he had lived in one location he had emulated medieval Japanese lords and used ‘nightingale’ floorboards that sang underfoot to protect him from assassins as the daimyos had been protected from ninja. Polished hard flooring was an acceptable middle ground. Footsteps would be loud unless an intruder removed shoes or boots, but then would lose traction in socks or barefoot.