Chameleon Assassin (Chameleon Assassin Series Book 1)

by BR Kingsolver

  I was extra careful for a couple of weeks, but when nothing unusual happened, I relaxed into my normal state of rabid paranoia and sort of forgot about Adnan and his friends.

  Then one day, Dad called and asked me to drop by. I briefly wondered if he might have fenced some of Carpenter’s jewelry but didn’t ask. We never discussed business except in person.

  “I received an inquiry for a job,” Dad said after we sat down and shared some cookies and lemonade. The little crook at the corner of his mouth and the sparkle in his eyes gave me warning of a surprise coming. “It’s a hit on Nikolai Sholokhov, Elektronika Upravlyaet’s North American sales director. Adnan Erdowan’s boss.”

  I barked out a startled laugh.

  “The best part, though, is the client,” he continued.

  I held my breath because he almost never told me who contracted my services. He trained me not to be curious about that.

  “The client is Andrei Saakashvili, who is Sholokhov’s boss.”

  He watched me closely, waiting for me to put it all together. I had to be careful. If I came to the wrong conclusion, he’d shred me. If I took too long reaching the correct conclusion, he’d shred me. He didn’t give jobs to stupid assassins, and I wasn’t the only tool in his box.

  “One explanation might be that Saakashvili found out Sholokhov put a hit on him,” I said. “Sholokhov couldn’t use Electronika’s own men on an internecine hit, so he went looking elsewhere. No idea how he got my name. Their approach certainly wasn’t very businesslike.”

  I tried to be cool while I waited for Dad’s decision. Have another cookie, Libby. Take a drink of lemonade. Try to control your urge to scream at your father.

  “That’s the same line of reasoning I followed,” he said, “but it still doesn’t feel right.”

  That was as close to a “well done” as I ever got from him.

  “Standard fee?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five percent bonus if it looks like an accident. They’re brothers-in-law.”

  Chapter 4

  The definition of an accident is rather broad. Falling off a cliff is an accident, being pushed isn’t. A car wreck is an accident, a car wreck because the brake lines were cut isn’t. A heart attack is an accident, poison that stops the heart isn’t. Insurance companies tend to define an accident very narrowly. They have no sense of humor when it comes to paying claims.

  Dad gave me a dossier on the target, which was only a starting point. I committed it all to memory and reviewed everything available online. Since I’d cracked Elektronika’s network already, I was ahead of my normal timeframe. Three days later, I packed my kit and headed for the airport.

  Elektronika’s regional headquarters was in Dallas, a center of the North American petroleum business even before the oceans rose and the missiles fell. I had been in Dallas before, but not in the summer. I stepped off the plane, and the heat and humidity hit me like a club. I knew I was on the edge of the Great Southwestern Desert, but knowing and experiencing are often very different things.

  Luckily, the majority of the metropolis was either inside or underground, and air-conditioned. The old aboveground city with its skyscrapers was visible in the distance, now inhabited by rats, muties, and the desperately poor.

  One thing I did like about Dallas, since so much of it was covered, was that I didn’t need to wear my filter mask all the time. The outside air was foul, but I was rarely out in it.

  The monorail took me to my hotel, where I tapped into Elektronika’s network, and then into Sholokhov’s calendar and private files. Building a catalogue of the target’s movements and habits would be the truly boring part of the job.

  After a week, I started wondering if the accident premium was worth the effort. Sholokhov never went anywhere alone, except to visit Maria, his mistress. Even then, two bodyguards accompanied him and waited for him. Arranging an accident was going to be difficult. One thing Dad had drummed into me—collateral damage was unprofessional.

  Normally, the two ways to take out an unapproachable target were poison or a long-range rifle. Since I had no way of observing the inside of Sholokhov’s home or business, I would have to poison the food going in. Someone else would also eat the food, so collateral damage was inevitable. Saakashvili certainly wouldn’t pay a premium if I killed his sister. Hurting the mistress was something I didn’t even consider. How would I feel if someone killed Nellie in an attempt on O’Malley? A rifle bullet was difficult to pass off as an accident, so I pushed that off as a last resort.

  I thought about how I might be able to use my mutations at the mistress’s apartment. The place was full of cameras and I watched Maria and Sholokhov when he went to visit.

  Early on, I considered kidnapping the mistress and taking her place. That wouldn’t gain me very much. I still had to figure out what kind of accident Sholokhov could have.

  I decided to spend a day following the mistress around, thinking a change in her routine might produce a brilliant idea. At the very least, I would need to know what she sounded like and what her mannerisms were if I did decide to take her place.

  Maria Lopez, Sholokhov’s mistress, approached shopping the way a general approached a battle. In a little more than two hours before she stopped for lunch, she tallied up at least twenty grand. If Sholokhov let her do that on a regular basis, I had to wonder if the true source of the contract to kill him might be his wife.

  Speaking of the wife, Maria resembled a younger version. Medium height, busty, with long dark-brown hair, brown eyes, and an olive complexion. Actually, when I got the chance to see Maria close up, she was a dead ringer for Sholokhov’s oldest daughter. I shied away from that thought.

  Lunch was excellent. For those prices, anything less than outstanding would have been a cause for complaint. I wandered into the restaurant about five minutes after Maria did and took a table fifteen feet away from her. Close enough that I could read the label on the wine she ordered and match it to a two-hundred-credit price on the menu. I contented myself with a twenty-credit bottle of mineral water.

  A friend of hers joined her, so I got to see more of how she interacted with people, how she laughed, how snide she was about the waitress. I didn’t like her or her friend much after that.

  They spent two hours eating lunch, and getting fairly drunk. Then the two of them evidently decided they needed new shoes and purses. A truckload of shoes and purses. Then they spent a couple of hours shopping for lingerie. Afterward, they went to dinner at a place a decimal point more upscale than the bistro where they had lunch. I wasn’t dressed for that, but I had a few patterns stored away in my mind.

  I morphed into a fifty-year-old woman with more money than God. The pearls alone could have bought the restaurant if they were real.

  “No, I don’t have a reservation, young man. Don’t you know who I am?” They gave me a great table next to a window where I could watch the sunset.

  I perused the menu and decided I should have grabbed a burger and waited for them outside. This type of contract didn’t come with expenses covered. But as long as I was emptying the bank account, I decided to go all out and ordered a lobster. I had never eaten one, or even seen one, but I’d heard of them and knew they were supposed to be a delicacy. I figured for that kind of money, it should be relatively free of toxins and radiation.

  It was a bit of a shock when the waiter delivered a huge platter of bug. He was nice and explained that it only looked like a bug. He showed me how to eat it, and it tasted wonderful. Someday I might try it again.

  Maria and her friend dropped a month’s income for a corporate mid-level manager. I’d been around some pretty obnoxious rich corporate types, but I’d never seen anyone spend money the way they did. The fanciest wine and champagne, caviar and a custom-made dessert. I consoled myself with the thought that the caviar would probably glow if the lights went out.

  I almost lost them after dinner when they called a taxi. I’d seen some old movies from before the wars where someone jum
ps in a taxi and says, “Follow that car!” Try that with a robotaxi. It just kept asking for my destination before it would move. I was tempted to short the damned thing out, but then it would never move again.

  Instead, I got out and asked the doorman if he knew where the two young ladies ahead of me had gone. Twenty cred got me an answer. They were going to a club.

  I changed forms in the taxi. I thought I’d looked pretty hot the night at The Pinnacle when that guy Ron hit on me, so I used the same clothing.

  The club was definitely upscale. I had to flash corporate identification to get in, forged, of course. Keep the riff-raff out. I thought about Nellie’s friend Galina and wondered how Maria would take it when Sholokhov found someone younger. Without his patronage, that corporate ID card would disappear along with the expense account.

  The music was canned, and I sniggered when they played one of Nellie’s songs. Only a few people were drinking beer, and that out of fancy goblets. Pretty pastel drinks with fruit and umbrellas seemed to be the norm. I ordered lemonade, and the bartender stuck an umbrella in it.

  It took me a little while, but I figured out a lot of the people were doing some kind of drug. It wasn’t as obvious as the Drop Inn, but then I spotted a woman and a man shoot themselves with little one-shot jet injectors. As the night wore on, they became increasingly amorous, like a number of other couples.

  The women I was following were dancing and flirting. I knew from Sholokhov’s calendar that he was out at the opera with his wife, and would be returning to his estate for the weekend afterward. Maria had time to herself, and from the looks of things, she planned to take advantage of it. Nellie and the other kept women I knew were as monogamous as their sugar daddies. I assumed it went with the territory.

  I turned down a guy who asked me to dance. At the sound of my voice, a man a few feet in front of me spun around and stared at me. It was Adnan.

  Two steps took me in reach of him, and I gathered him into a hug with my arms around his neck.

  “It’s so good to see you! Where have you been keeping yourself?” I gushed. No one around us could see the six-inch stainless steel hatpin I took from its sheath in my bra. “We really need to get together sometime soon and catch up!” I stuck the pin in his ear and pushed it into his brain. “Gotta go. Give me a call!”

  I whirled and headed for the washroom, leaving him standing there, swaying slightly as if he had too much to drink. It takes some time for the body to realize the brain has been mortally wounded. In addition to the physical damage to his brainstem and temporal lobe, the hatpin was coated in a neurotoxin which started spreading through his system.

  I passed the washroom and slipped out a side exit. Walking around to the back of the building, I let the clothing image go. A block away, I flagged down a robotaxi and had it take me to my hotel.

  The club had cameras, just as there were cameras almost everywhere. When I checked in, I found one in my room. Correction. There was a camera in the shower. It developed a malfunction.

  The worst part about running into Adnan was that I had to change identities. Of course, I had backups, but it was inconvenient to have to rearrange my identity. I transferred the credits in the account I’d been using to a Swiss bank, burned all of my identification, changed clothes, packed, and left. The hotel room was paid for another week. Maybe no one would check on me.

  I shorted out the camera in the elevator and morphed into a form that was six inches shorter, with brown hair. A taxi took me to a hotel a couple of blocks away, then another taxi took me to a different hotel. I checked in there, morphed into a redhead, and caught a taxi to another hotel.

  When I woke up in the morning, I had absolutely no idea where I was, though it was obviously a hotel room. It was sort of comforting. If I didn’t know, maybe no one else did. Room service brought me breakfast and I logged into Elektronika’s network. There wasn’t any evidence online that Sholokhov knew Adnan was dead. Some of the security team did, though, and someone had ordered an autopsy. That meant they weren’t sure how he died.

  The security logs on Maria’s apartment showed that she hadn’t come home the night before. I hoped she had a good time.

  I morphed into Maria and took the monorail to a stop near her apartment. Security wasn’t a problem since I had already compromised Elektronika’s main security controls. I thought it was interesting that Maria didn’t have the authorization to reset the passwords to her own home. I wondered if she knew how many cameras it contained. Knowing about the cameras would be a good reason for not bringing a man home with her.

  I also wondered if Sholokhov was the kind of man who would change the codes one day while she was out, leaving her on the street with only the clothes on her back. Some of the corporate execs were real bastards.

  Inside, the first thing I did was turn off the camera in the bathroom. That would set off an alarm to Elektronika’s security team if anyone noticed. Since I wasn’t sure how closely they watched her, I needed to work fast.

  I rerouted some of the bathroom’s wiring and added an amperage booster to the circuit, then added a new switch in the camera. With that done, I reactivated the camera and left.

  As I walked down the street to the monorail, a robotaxi drove by with Maria sitting inside. She had a bad case of bed head.

  Chapter 5

  With at least two days of waiting ahead of me, I turned tourist. Atlanta and Dallas were the two largest metropolises in the south and major destinations in the winter. Unfortunately, I was there in the summer, and outside temperatures ran from one hundred five degrees late at night to one hundred forty degrees in the afternoon. On the plus side, I was practically the only tourist in town.

  I picked up some small gifts for my friends and visited the botanical gardens and the aquarium. It was both neat and depressing to see species of plants, animals and fish that were extinct except in such controlled environments. The really depressing exhibit, though, contained animals with extreme mutations.

  Toronto was far enough north and inland that the climate changes weren’t too severe, although I’d read that it used to snow there. Dallas had a whole museum devoted to the planetary holocaust. Governments had been slow to deal with pollution of the air, water, and soil. When the environment heated up, they didn’t respond until the ice at the poles melted and the oceans rose enough to inundate the coastal cities.

  At the same time, Northern Africa, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent grew too hot for people to survive or grow food. The migration of hundreds of millions of people was met by a nuclear wall as the Europeans, Russians and Chinese tried to keep from being overrun. But the people they bombed had nukes, too.

  Two hundred years later, we had barely recovered the level of technology that existed before the wars. The world population was only a third of what it had been, and it was a struggle to feed us all. It reminded me of how lucky I was that my parents were rich. The corporations took care of the majority of the population, but even then, fresh fruit, vegetables, and meat were luxuries to all but the upper classes.

  One of the museums had an outdoor exhibit. It might have been doable in the winter, but after five minutes, the heat drove me back inside.

  At night, I hit a couple of clubs. Not the corporate ones, but those for the lower classes. I found one high-end mutie bar that was a riot. Great band, nice people, draft beer to die for, like the Pinnacle without the corporate snobs. The kind of place Toronto needed.

  In one club, the open drug use was really blatant. The crowd was a little older than the Drop Inn, and a lot of people were using jet injectors to shoot up what I assumed was luvdaze. It really seemed to energize them, and the club practically turned into an orgy later in the evening. So not my scene.

  Sholokhov came back into town after the weekend, and I started following him around again. His security personnel and arrangements continued as before, so it didn’t seem that Adnan’s death set off any alarms. Corporate life might pay well, but I found it rather b
oring. It seemed as though he did the same things day after day. The only break in his routine was Maria.

  He didn’t go to see her on Monday, instead spending the evening entertaining clients. But on Tuesday, he went to her place after dinner.

  I tapped into Elektronika’s network and accessed the cameras in Maria’s apartment. Watching the two of them go at it in her bedroom, I wondered if Sholokhov knew about all of the cameras. Maybe he was an exhibitionist and liked showing off to his security people. Maria was young and pretty and put on a show, but he was fifty-two and at least fifty pounds overweight. I would much rather have watched a vid, but needed to monitor the situation.

  Along about midnight, he got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower. While he washed, I flipped the switch I had hidden in the camera.

  He finished and stepped out of the shower, reaching out to grasp the metal bar anchored to the wall. As soon as he touched it, he froze and his body started shaking.

  I switched off the current, then switched it back on for another thirty seconds, then off again. Two hundred twenty volts at four hundred milliamps sent Sholokhov’s heart into tachycardia. He sank to the floor and turned a ghastly blue-gray. With a jerk, he stopped breathing.

  Electrocution was one of the least common methods of murder. When it was used, it was almost always a crime of passion. Throwing a hair dryer into a bathtub wasn’t the sort of thing you planned. A large electrical surge would kill immediately, but would also cause visible burns. My plan had been to induce a heart attack with amperage low enough that it didn’t cause visible marks. It looked as though it worked, but I wouldn’t know until Dad hit the client for the bonus.

  As I packed and made my plane reservations, I wondered if Maria was smart enough to do the same. She should throw everything worth selling in a bag and get the hell out the minute she found him.