by Greg Rucka
"Son of a bitch," Bowles murmured.
I blinked several times, trying to convince at least one of my eyes to focus on him. I wondered if, this time, I had lost a contact.
"Okay," I said. "You win. I'll tell you where she is."
Bowles threw down his mug, reaching into his overcoat with his other hand, spinning in place all at once even as he brought out his pistol. He did not look at me.
"It's Drama, it's fucking her, that fucking cunt is here, she's come to get him," he said quickly to the others. "She's fucking out there and she's taken the overwatch and you are going to find her and you are going to kill her."
They started moving all at once, Sean directing them. Two ran back to the house, the third staying close by. Bowles pivoted back towards me, kicking up snow as he did so. He grabbed hold of me by the Flexi-Cuffs around my wrists, shoved the gun against my temple.
"Get up," he told me. "Get on your knees!"
I struggled with it, and not only to buy time, but because most everything hurt, and those parts that didn't were silent only because they'd gone numb with the cold. I'd be dealing with frostbite in another few minutes, if I wasn't having to deal with it already. While Bowles muscled me to my knees, the two who had gone for the house reemerged, carrying three long guns and three sets of NVG between them. Everyone but Sean and Bowles got a long gun and the goggles.
Bowles rammed the pistol into the side of my neck.
"You don't want to do that," I told him.
"Shut up," Bowles snapped. "Shut the fuck up, call her, call-"
A third scream, more broken than the two that had come before, the voice issuing it already threading with strain. It sounded awful and piteous. It sounded like someone not only in agony, but in terror, and all of them heard it, and none of them liked it.
"Jesus Christ," one of them whispered. "That's Ryan. What the fuck is she doing to Ryan?"
Sean ran his free hand in a cutting motion across his throat, angry, indicating to all that he wanted them to shut the fuck up. They gave him his silence, and in it he flashed out a sequence of hand signals, deploying the three men. They began making towards the line of trees surrounding the cabin, and I'd been right about their pedigree. They moved well, spreading out to keep from bunching up while still keeping each other in sight enough to provide backup. Hand signals flashed between them, and maybe they had a line on the screams, where their friend Ryan was, because they seemed to know where they should go.
"Drop the gun," I told Bowles. "Listen to me."
He glanced down at me, then dug the barrel harder into the side of my neck. I was so cold it didn't feel like much other than pressure against my skin. "Call to her. Tell her to come out."
If I'd been able to, I would have laughed. As it was, I coughed and snorted all at once, ejecting more blood and mucus.
To my right, just at the edge of the cabin, one of Sean's men staggered at the same moment that the wooden wall behind him splintered, sprayed with a coat of gore and blood. The sound of the shot came at almost the exact same moment, the concussion of a Magnum round rattling the trees. The man fell to his knees, then dropped face-first into the snow.
"Seven o'clock!" one of the others shouted. "Muzzle flash, seven-"
The top of his head shredded before he could finish the sentence. The report chased after the echoes of the first.
Both Sean and the last of his men dove to the ground. Sean was smarter about it, staying clear of the cabin, using the deep snow. It was a good move; unless Alena had taken a position with elevation, and I knew that she hadn't, the snow would keep him out of her line of sight.
The last one wasn't as lucky, and when he went for cover, he tried to use the cabin, to get around the corner. He almost made it; if he'd been a little faster, or Alena had been a little slower, he would have.
But he didn't.
Bowles balked, then dug his pistol deeper against my neck. The thought of taking it from him, freeing myself, flicked through my mind, but I ignored it. The condition I was in, the posture I was holding, I'd never be able to manage it.
"I'll kill you, she doesn't come out." Bowles still wasn't looking at me. "I'll kill you."
"Then she's gone," I said. "If you get the shot off, she's gone. And you want us both, remember?"
He swore softly.
"Drop the gun," I said again. "Please, Matthew."
"Shut up! Sean! Sean, do you see her?"
"I need answers," I told him. "You can give them to me. Drop the gun, don't do this."
The pistol left the side of my neck, and for an instant I thought he'd seen reason, that he'd let it go. He backed away from me a step.
"I know you're there!" he shouted into the trees. "I know you're there, I'll kill him if you don't come out! Give yourself up!"
"Don't!" I shouted, as much to Alena as to Bowles, and I tried to get to my feet, tried to rise up and block the shot that I knew would come, because I knew what Bowles would do next.
He raised the pistol on me, leveling it with both hands at my head.
"You've got five!" Bowles shouted.
"Just put it down!"
"Four!"
"Dammit, Bowles-"
"Three!"
Then the hole opened in his chest, high on the sternum, and Matthew Bowles dropped like a marionette whose lines had been cut. Foamy blood blew out from his mouth, dripped over his lips, into the snow.
He rattled out the last of his air, and died.
"You stupid son of a bitch," I told him. "All we wanted was an answer."
CHAPTER
FOUR
While you were always, in your way, alone, you were never on your own.
Always there were others, the people giving the orders or the people teaching the lessons or the people in support of the operation. At every stage, there was a network.
You may have been plucked from an orphanage in Magadan at the age of eight, or seconded from the SAS, or recruited from Detachment Delta. When it began is irrelevant. You were chosen, or you volunteered, or you fell into it by circumstance, but at some point a decision was made, and you went from soldier or guardian or child to assassin, and that was when the divorce took place. Partially, this was a psychological transformation, a necessary stage in your education as dictated by those who instructed you, a need to remove you from the herd. The wolf doesn't run with the sheep, after all, and even were it in the wolf's mind to do so, the sheep would have none of it.
It is a survival mechanism. What you do now, at the behest of your government or group or cause, is dangerous in the extreme. It must be performed in secrecy and anonymity, and the best way to be anonymous, to keep a secret, is to keep the number of people involved to one. You work alone.
Or you pretend that you do, because, in truth, you have support. Be it from your government or group or cause, there are people who stand behind you, people to secure the things that you need to do your job. They do this not because they like you or because they care about you. They do it because you are a tool, and you must be directed, and you must be properly employed. If you are their hammer, they don't simply point you at the board and say start pounding; they must provide you with the nails. That they pay you a wage-if they pay you at all-is incidental, just another means of directing the tool.
It cannot be stressed how vital this network is. They give you purpose, for without them, you would not be used. They designate your target. They provide the intelligence, the means, the wherewithal to reach it. Plane tickets and weapons, identification and money, maps and photographs, everything you require to perform your task. And should you complete the job they have given you successfully, they are there at the end, to tend your wounds, to continue honing your skills, to, in fact, maintain the tool so that it may be used again and again and again either until it is so worn as to be useless, or until it is lost to damage or circumstance.
You are alone, perhaps, but never on your own.
Until you decide, for whatever the reaso
n, that what you do for government or group or cause is best done for yourself and yourself alone. Until the day that you find that the world has changed, that your usefulness is coming to an end, and that you are soon to become a liability. Until the day you discover that the wage you are paid for the task you perform is not commensurate with the risk you undertake. Until the day that you realize the only pleasure in your life lies in taking the life of another.
It is unlikely that your decision is based on any moral argument, on a question of right or wrong, or good or evil. You are what you are, what they made you to be, and one of the first things they did upon removing you from the rest of the herd was make it clear that such concerns no longer matter to you. Tools are not concerned with how they are used; it isn't the gun that kills, it is the person who pointed it at the victim's head and then pulled the trigger who does. The gun is the mechanism. The shooter is the killer.
They have worked very, very hard indeed to convince you that you are the mechanism, nothing more.
And even if such arguments have failed to completely wash away your questions or to utterly still your conscience, you have discovered that it is better not to press the subject. Not with your masters, nor with yourself.
So, be it for survival or fear or greed or kink, you take what they have given you, you take what they have made you, and you leave. And because you are a tool that has cost tens of millions of dollars to create, and because to make you what you are you have learned things that are dangerous to others, that threaten their security and their position and their futures, they are, shall we say, loath to let you go. It would be different if you maintained your loyalty, but for whatever the reason, that time is passed, all loyalty is dead.
So you cannot simply leave.
You must run.
For the first time, now, you are truly alone. There is no one to help you, no one to turn to. There is no network; there is no support.
You stand in the world with a handful of secrets and a set of skills that are, putting it mildly, highly specialized. Marketable skills, when marketed to the right people, of course, but therein is another problem; how do you find those "right" people without revealing yourself to the government or group or cause you have-in their eyes, at least-now betrayed?
If you are smart, if you are at all wise, you have money. Perhaps you even have a lot of it, acquired during those jobs performed for your masters. If you were very smart, if you prepared for this day, some of that money might even still be safe. But regardless of how much or how little you have, it will not last, because the things you need to continue to survive are expensive. Much that you require is illegal, and that brings with it a tremendous surcharge. You are a person without an identity, because every identity you have ever been known by is known also to the people you have just betrayed. And so you must create a new shell, a new name. This is crucial, because without that foundation, you can acquire nothing you need to survive. How can you rent an apartment if you cannot prove you are who you pretend to be?
Your money will not last for long, if at all.
It is possible, now, that you may decide to turn your back on what you know, what you can do. If your departure was a decision of self-preservation, rather than, say, greed, you might now consider trying to adopt what is called a "normal life." After all, you know many things, you have many skills.
But they are skills that cannot be sold legitimately. You have no references, no recommendations. Your military service, if you have one, cannot be revealed. You have no identity, and thus, no history. Thirty years old, and on the job application in front of you, under "prior experience," you find yourself forced to write the word "none."
Certainly, there is work to be found that is not contingent on a well-rounded resume. You can find yourself waiting tables, perhaps, or working in a garage, or cleaning an office in the middle of the night, but, honestly, how long will that last before your money runs out entirely?
This is further complicated by the fact that you are now hunted. Those you betrayed by departing are certainly keeping one eye open for you, at least for the moment. You have evaded them thus far, and a stalemate of a sort has descended; but they can be very patient, for their resources are nearly limitless; they are waiting to see where you appear next, to see what you have become.
In the end, you make your decision. You will put your marketable skills to use. You will do the thing that you have been made to do. You will sell the only thing you have to sell. You will make yourself available, because you know that somewhere there is a man or a woman who, for whatever the reason, wishes another man or woman dead, and all they lack is the means to make it happen.
You are that means. You are that mechanism.
That is the service you can provide. And now you come to the problem: You cannot, absolutely cannot, do by yourself what is required.
It is simply impossible; there are not enough hours in the day. What you sell is illegal, which means that anyone looking to buy your services must be investigated thoroughly before you even begin to consider taking the job they offer. What you sell is illegal, which means that you must insulate yourself in such a way that the law cannot find you. What you sell is illegal, which means the tools you most often use must be acquired illegally. What you sell is illegal, which means you must never be the same person for long, so identity after identity must be prepared.
Every one of these things takes time, and you have yet to even approach your first target.
You cannot do it alone. You need help. You need the services of someone who can provide the support you once enjoyed, or at least something approximating it. Someone to handle the details, while you handle the work.
Like it or not, eventually, you are going to have to trust somebody. You need a lawyer. Switzerland is too obvious. Certainly, the Swiss reputation for discretion and financial wizardry is well earned, but as a result it has begun to draw unwanted attention. What you need is a location that sees a lot of money passing through, as well as a lot of people. A place that, ideally, has more resident aliens than actual residents. Someplace where your erratic comings and goings will be entirely beneath notice.
Monaco is ideal.
The place decided, the right person must now be selected. This must be done delicately, with great care. The wrong approach to the wrong person could end your new career before it even begins. Research is required. Your ideal representation would be male, in his late fifties, and single. Someone working in their own firm, or in a firm of adequate pedigree and prestige, meaning a firm that represents clients the world never knows. You do not want the firm that represents, for instance, Paris Hilton; you want the firm that represents the rest of the Hilton family.
You comb through newspapers and online archives. You search for names that you have come across in your work, the powerful men and women who surface only once in a great while, buried deep inside the Financial Times or Le Monde. People associated with the Carlyle or Blackstone groups, perhaps.
You make a list of candidates, learning everything you can about them as quickly and discreetly as possible. This person at that firm is married with three small children. That person at this firm was arrested for possession of narcotics. This one appears time and time again in photographs at social events, parties and the like. That one has taken three privately operated trips to Thailand in the last two years.
All of these you dismiss as too risky.
If you are lucky, you may find yourself with as many as three or even four names.
Now you must make your approach. The meeting takes place in the attorney's office, by appointment. The appointment has been made with some urgency, a day or two earlier. If your research was productive, you may even have dropped the name of another client to the firm as the source of the referral. You have dressed for the part. If you're female, perhaps you've chosen something a little more flattering than normal, not because you wish to seduce the candidate, but to establish a type of personality. If you're mal
e, perhaps you arrive a minute or two late for the meeting, apologetic, blaming the delay on a business call.
You are met at the office, offered a seat, asked if you would like some refreshment. You accept, taking water. The most cursory small talk takes place, and then the door closes and you and the candidate are left alone.
The candidate addresses you by name, asking how he can be of service to you.
You tell him you wish to secure title to an object of some expense. What you choose depends on the state of your resources, of course, because you will have to outlay this cash (though you will also recoup the expense later, if all goes well). Whatever you choose, it must be something appropriately expensive, to indicate that the monies involved will be worth the candidate's time, yet it cannot be so outlandish that it will bankrupt you. If your finances were not everything they should have been before reaching Monaco, it is possible that you may have detoured in the South of France, and taken the opportunity to secure more funds by robbing a bank, or better, by taking down a narcotics sale. It may even have been necessary to do this multiple times, though, of course, each crime you commit brings greater risk.
An expensive car would work, a top-of-the-line Ferrari, perhaps, or an Aston Martin. A small yacht might be acceptable. Real estate, however, is best.
In this instance, you tell the candidate that you're interested in purchasing a small villa here in Monaco. Nothing fancy, you say, perhaps five, six million dollars. You travel quite a lot, as it happens, but you do love it here, and are interested in setting down, say, some shallow roots.
This I can help you with, the candidate says.
Wonderful, you say. I have the place picked out already.
The candidate smiles.
As for the issue of title, you say, my ex is a gold-digging piece of excrement-pardon my language-and I'd rather the purchase remain off the books, so to speak. Would it be possible to have the title placed in some sort of shell company, some way to keep my name out of it? That I could own the property without there being a paper trail that says as much? Is that possible?