Diary of an Assassin (15 page)

CHAPTER 39

Henri parked his car in front of the police precinct and stepped outside to sit on the hood. He took out a package of cigarettes, Belgian with no filters, and smoked. The sky, which had been dark and gray, began to clear to a soft hue of orange as the sun began to shine through the clouds. He took out his cell phone and called his home. His son answered, informing him his mother had left for the market.

“Tell her that I love you both and I miss you.”

“Okay, Papa. I love you too.”

When he finished
smoking, he went inside and asked the front-desk receptionist for the detective working the shooting at the Garden Line.

“He
’ll be out in a minute.”

“Thank you.”

He sat on an old couch and flipped through some magazines on a coffee table. They were mostly gun magazines, a few
Sports Illustrated
s, and he put them back and leaned into the couch, staring at the floor of the police precinct.

Cops were busy swapping war stories, giving each other a hard time, joking about cases
, and complaining about superior officers. It made him grin: no matter where you went, cops were always the same.

Before long
, a pudgy detective in a wrinkled suit came out. “I’m Detective Karl Loosle. What can I do for you?”

“You are the detective working the Garden Line shooting?”

“Yeah.”

“I believe I can help you
.” Henri stood and took out his Interpol badge. “The man that did this, that I think did this, was in one of our prisons in Paris until about five days ago.”

“You sure it’s him?”

“It’s my understanding you have a video of the incident?”

“Yeah,” he said, eyeing him.

“I can identify him. Detective, I have no interest in your investigation. If you arrest this man, it is your arrest. I just want to help you.”

He was silent a moment. “Come in the back.”

Henri followed him around the bullpen
, past the officers who were lounging around and drinking coffee out of Styrofoam cups, and through a gray door that led into a long hallway. Two doors down on the right was a room set up with a DVD/TV combo, a desk, and some chairs. Henri sat in one of the chairs as the detective took a DVD, which had been on top of the TV, out of a slip and put it into the machine. A grainy black-and-white video came on.

Henri watched as it caught a glimpse of a man walking out of the Garden Line Motel, firing two rounds into the clerk. The man didn’t even have to glance
the clerk’s way and yet both rounds hit the heart. He went outside, disappeared off camera a few moments, and then got into a red car and drove away.

“That him?”

“Oui. That is him.”

“Here’s what I don’t get,” the detective
said, “three blocks up the road some poor bastard was walking his bicycle across the street and witnesses said a red Cadillac sped up and ran him over. No reason at all. He’d already gotten far enough away from the motel and it actually drew more attention to him to do that. I don’t get it.”

“It amused him.”

“What did?”

“To see that man die.” They exchanged glances. “Do you know who the car belongs to?”

“Yeah, we traced it down based on the plates. The owner’s been dead almost ten years.”

Henri nodded and rose. “Thank you for showing me the video.”

“Well, is it for certain?”

“
What?”

“T
hat that’s the man you’re looking for.”

“Yes,
I’m certain that’s him.”

“Well I’d like to spend some time with you then and get his information.”

“You won’t find him in any databases, Detective, and he has many names.”

“You have any idea where he is?”

Henri brushed past him and into the hall. “No. But I think I know where he’s going.”

CHAPTER
40

It was nearly midnight when Vanessa Hailstorm looked up at the clock and realized she’d been at her computer for four hours straight. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned before looking out the windows to the streets of Washington, DC, below.

She remembered this town from a long time ago. She counted the years it had been since she was an intern
in Congress from George Washington University: twenty-one years. Twenty-one. Looking back, it seemed like a tick of the clock but the time was obvious in the city’s nature. It had changed.

She remembered
, as an intern, going to dinners and out for drinks, Democrats and Republicans, interns and senators, and joking around and trading barbs. She remembered reporters were there too, but there was an understanding that these were intimate moments between friends and they never betrayed that trust.

Now, your own staff sold you out
to the papers for a few bucks and the hatred between the parties was so deep, they could barely speak to each other in private much less be seen in public together. Each politician was after reelection and getting rich. That was why almost every politician went into politics, Vanessa thought: wealth.

It was amazing to her that the public didn’t as
k how a congressman going into the house or senate making $90,000 per year came out a millionaire. It was a simple loophole: members of Congress were allowed to insider trade. When they found out that a piece of land was about to be developed or a major bank was going to be under investigation by the SEC, they simply bought the land or shorted that bank’s stocks. In Congress, a monkey with a few bucks could become a millionaire.

But even so, she remembered a different generation of politicians that
, at least on some level, had the public interest at heart.

She clicked off her computer and grabbed her purse before heading out of the office. The building was empty now except for security and she nodded to one of the guards that let her out through the back exit to employee parking.

Her car, a Mercedes, was parked on the second level. As she walked down the metal stairs, she heard footsteps behind her. She kept walking, pretending not to notice, and casually slipped her hand inside her purse.

She swung around with the .25 caliber Smith & We
sson and pointed it at Santos Aras’ face. He held up his hands in mock surrender, an unlit cigarette in his mouth and a lighter in his hand.

“You got me.”

She put the gun away. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Could ask you the same thing,” he said, lighting the cigarette.

“This is my job.”

“Is it?” He blew out a puff of smoke and looked out over the parking lot. “Have you been keeping tabs on your gentleman?”

“And what gentleman would that be?”

“Gustav Fabrice.”

“Yes.”

“Really? When was the last time he checked in?”

“Two days ago.”

“Well in that time, he’s killed three people. Including some poor
bastard out riding his bicycle.”

Vanessa didn’t say anything.

“No witty retort, Vanessa?” He blew out a puff of smoke. “Just who the hell did you hire?”

“He came highly recommended.”

“Do you know his name’s not Gustav Fabrice?” He exhaled smoke.

“I had some idea. He worked for the CIA before freelancing.”

“And for the KGB before the Berlin Wall. I’m guessing you didn’t get that far into his background.”

“I was thorough.”

“The guy’s a psychopath.”

“Gi
mme a break, Santos. They’re all psychopaths. We train psychopaths and then expect them to come back to society and be normal. Well it doesn’t work that way. You can’t unlearn what we teach them.”

“Pul
l him out of the field and get this fucker out of my country. Now. He’s putting us all at risk.”

“And what about the marks?”

“They’re already taken care of.” Santos took one last pull and stubbed the cigarette out on the railing in front of him. He threw the butt off the side of the building. “The Messenger says we may need to reevaluate your contract at the end of this term. You better show them you have something to offer.”

As Santos turned and walked away, Vanessa said, “Who is he, Santos?”

“Who said he was a ‘he’? Besides, you’ll meet the Messenger soon enough.”

February 12
th

We were married almost as soon as we had left the academy and gone into the field. I was twenty now and she was twenty-one. Since she spoke fluent Chinese, she was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency to analyze intel out of Shantou. I thought I would be taking a job as an OO with them but that wasn’t offered. They had brought me out here specifically for that, and I thought that maybe I hadn’t done well on my exams. We had brutal, five-day, twelve-hour-long written exams and then a grueling week of pain, exertion, and starvation before we officially graduated. Two years of our lives went into this training, and by the time we were through, we weren’t sure we could ever do anything else. Only three of us had made it and I thought that maybe they had recruited the other young man, the Texan, for the job, that maybe I just wasn’t good enough to make it.

Heather
chose to complete her residency before moving to Shantou. She did one year and was so bored by the end that she called the CIA and begged for her job back. At this point I was just following her around and I still don’t know why. The year of her residency I just sat around, somewhat depressed, and would go for long walks or to the local library or the gym, which is where I spent most of my time.

But the CIA accepted her back and we were
stationed in DC so we moved there. We got a small apartment overlooking the river and she would work from sunup to sundown. At night we would go out to bars and clubs and restaurants. Some days she had off, not many, but some, and we would go to museums or sessions of Congress or the Supreme Court. At the time, we thought government was interesting.

One day
, I think it was in May, I was walking back to my car from a building downtown. I had applied for a job as an office clerk and I thought that I would be going to college part-time as well. I got to my car and heard a voice behind me. It belonged to a beautiful blond woman with glasses.

“We have an offer for you,”
she said.

“Offer with who?”

“I think you can guess.”

“With the CIA?”

“No, not with the CIA. Not officially.”

“Who then?”

“You’re going to be defending this country in a way no one else will. It will be direct, no bureaucrats or paperwork. But it comes at a price. You will never live the same way again. You will never see this country the same way again. You will be revolted at first, but that will fade. If you are a spiritual man, what you will see will push that out of your life. You will be giving up what and who you are for this. But the money is unlike anything you could make elsewhere. And with secrets comes power: anything that is in secret has a lot of power, and you will be filled with them. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then come with me now.”

“
What about my car?”

“You
won’t need it anymore.”

CHAPTER 41

Pain woke him up. An intense burning in his chest and shoulder. As he gained consciousness, a dullness pulsed in his upper thigh. Opening his eyes, he saw a gray sky above him, squared and blocked off. His vision coming into focus, he could tell he was staring through a backseat window. He felt the motion of the car now and the heater, which was softly blowing warm, stale air over his forehead.

The car slowed and then turned and the sky was
replaced with thick trees.

“Are you awake, Isaac?”

Rhett said nothing. He pulled on the handcuffs, but they were so tight, they cut his skin. The road grew more uneven until the car finally stopped. A door opened and he felt hands pull him outside and the coolness of a forest after a rain. The ground was wet and his feet sank. It was only now he realized that he was blindfolded but could see out of the bottom of the cloth. A shove from behind prompted him to take careful steps forward.

The ground was more than wet and his feet were sucked into mud with each step: they were in a swamp.
He could hear a bird off to his right and then the flapping of wings.

“You look good,”
an accented voice said from behind him. “Fit.”

“How did you find me?”

“The better question is why I found you.”

“I have some idea.”

“You have more enemies than the last time I saw you.”

“
Seems like it,” Rhett said, glancing down to a patch of poison ivy.

“You
had the mark, Isaac. Why did you not take her down when you had the chance?”

“It amused me more to keep her alive.”

“Hm. Is that really it…I don’t think so. She does look like her. You’re not imagining that.”

Rhett was silent a moment. “What do you want from me?”

“You? Nothing. Turn right up this path.”

“Why did they take the contract?”

“She was fighting for a law in Congress that upset some people. Regulation of large banks, I believe. It affected their pocketbooks, I imagine, and they viewed getting rid of her as the easier path.”

A small trail led through a cover of trees
and into an opening. The water grew deep and murky and it came up to his calves. They walked for several minutes without speaking. Rhett didn’t feel his pistol on him. He couldn’t hear the traffic from the road anymore.

He couldn’t help himself as he said,
“You don’t have to do this.”

Gustav laughed. “How many marks have said the same thing to you?
And you thought to yourself that you would never say such a thing when the time came for you, no? But you did. You also think you can face it like a man. With your eyes open. But you can’t. You’ll close your eyes. And you’ll beg. Stop here.”

Rhett heard nothing but his own heartbeat. “Is she dead?”

“Oh, so it was her, the resemblance. She must be quite a woman to turn you so weak. No, she’s not dead. Or maybe she is, I can’t remember.” He chuckled softly.

“If she
’s still alive, I’ll give you my bank account information in exchange for her life. Six million, Gustav. You can have it.”

“
You know I don’t care about money. Desperation does not look well on you.”

“What
do
you care about?”

He was silent.

“Gustav—”

“Stop calling me that.”

“What should I call you?”

“Nothing. I am nothing, just like you are nothing. We’re ghosts. Half in this world and half in the next. We don’t belong here. One day I’ll be standing where you are and I’ll be as weak as you when it comes. We all are
weak. But for now, it is your misfortune. That’s what it comes down to. Fortune. Do you know the difference between the slavery of Rome and the slavery of America? The Romans did not think Greeks were a different, inferior species. They knew they were human. And felt that the Gods had simply shown them disfavor by making them slaves.

“But
in American slavery, the black was an animal. Not human. It was far more brutal in America than in Rome, though we like to pretend that our age is the more enlightened. Fortune was all the Romans believed in. It is all that matters in the end.”

Rhett
hadn’t been listening. He spun around with both arms, an attempt to knock any weapon away. He caught empty air. He pulled off the blindfold just in time to see two flashes of orange as the rounds entered him. He lurched forward. Gustav elbowed him in the chin. Rhett attempted to kick at his groin but he easily stepped aside. Rhett tried strike after strike, but couldn’t hit him. He was too fast. He was better than him.

Out of breath, Rhett stood silently as Gustav stared at him.

“Are you done?”

Rhett said
defiantly, “Give me your best.”

Gustav fired another round into the heart.
He flew off his feet into the water.

He floated for several moments, sucking in breath as blood poured out of him. Gustav stood above, a grin on his face, his head tilted to the side, as Rhett slowly sank.
Gustav bent down and reached into the water. He pulled out a little red notebook that was in Rhett’s breast pocket.

Rhett tried to reach for it but couldn’t.
The world was blurring to broken, watery images. And then, there was nothing but the sounds that only creatures living underwater could hear, before the world went dark.

The last thing he heard was another soft spit from the pistol as a round entered his brain.