Joe Ledger (31 page)

He took care. He planned every step.

If his information was correct, he was near the target.

The killer slowed to a walk and then stopped at the entrance to a chamber that was part of the channeling system that took water from dozens of culverts and combined it in a larger chute that flowed to the Seine. He crouched in the shadows, silent and unmoving, allowing his senses to fill him with every bit of detail about where he was and what was here. He was not a man to make assumptions, even about an empty tunnel.

There was a rusted service door in the far wall. A weak bulb in a grilled cage mounted above the door threw dirty yellow light over the churning water. A child’s ragdoll bobbed in the current, and the killer paused for a moment to look at it. The doll was dressed in the checkerboard clothes of a harlequin jester, with bells on its hat and a broad smile of stitched red silk.

It was an expensive doll and it looked well-worn, and not just from the passage through the drain. This was a doll a child had held close for many nights. Something loved, something treasured. And now it was lost here in the darkness, on its way to oblivion in the ocean. Perhaps if the child knew where it was then he, or more likely
she
, might imagine her tattered friend to be off on some grand adventure. Otherwise…it was a friend who was lost and would never be found.

That thought came close to breaking the killer’s heart.

So many of his friends were lost to him.

So many.

He almost reached for the doll, almost pulled it from the water as the thing bobbed past, but he did not. He remained as still as the shadows and the grime-slick walls and the bones of dead rats. Instead, he watched the harlequin doll drown in the froth of converging sewer water and rush away into the great nothingness.

After a moment, he turned his attention to that rusted door. According to the records Pangaea had filched for him, that door led to a disused valve station whose purpose had been superseded by a more modern system controlled in an office on street level.

At a glance the door appeared to be forgotten, with years of rust crusted to the hinges and knob. The low-wattage service light was there to aid with routine inspection of this rechanneling chamber.

That was how things looked according to all official records and even on the service logs of the men who worked these tunnels. They knew the door was there, but they ignored it as they ignored hundreds of similarly disused doors, tunnels, chambers, holding tanks, ladders, and other detritus of an older age of public sewage. Like the subway systems in New York and London, here there were layers of new built on forgotten bones of the old.

However the killer had a separate source of intelligence that insisted that this door was not at all what it seemed. And that there were more than rust-frozen valves on the other side.

The killer was about to rise from his crouch when he heard something.

Very faint, very soft.

A footfall. A scuff.

Not an animal sound.

Human, though he could not tell more than that.

He did not move, aware that he was so deep inside a bank of shadows that he was invisible. His clothes were as black as his balaclava, and he had black greasepaint around his eyes. Only the whites of his eyes were visible in the light, and no light touched him where he crouched. The gear he carried—grenades, knives, and more—was arranged on his belt with cushions so they didn’t clink or rattle.

The sound came from a side tunnel to his left. From the memory of the tunnel schematics in his mind, he knew that the closest street access to that tunnel was at least a mile away. A long way to go in the dark. He raised the black cover of his watch and touched the face, reading the position of the arms. Three minutes past four in the morning. Far too late for the evening maintenance crew, two hours early for the day shift.

He waited.

There wasn’t another scuff. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly. The scuff had probably been a rare accident. An unseen patch of slime.

The killer drew his pistol. A .22 with a sound suppressor. It was poor at long range, but this man never killed from a great distance. He was selective and careful. It was not because killing up close provided some men with a physical thrill. That was not a factor in the function of either his heart or mind. It was a matter of not liking to make errors. Distance, especially in the dark, increased the risk of errors.

Errors were the result of sloppiness, nerves, or poor process.

He crouched, the pistol held in both hands, barrel pointed down, his forearms resting against his bent knees to keep the muscles from fatiguing.

Forty feet down the tunnel the shadows changed. A slender fragment of the darkness detached itself and crept forward with catlike grace.

In the bad light it was difficult to tell much about the figure.

Small, slight of build, moving with the ease of a dancer or a martial artist. Someone who knew how to move. No visible weapons in the hands; however, the black handles of knives stood up from sheathes on each thigh.

The killer pursed his lips in appreciation.

He watched as the figure approached the downspill of yellow light and paused, becoming as motionless as the killer himself.

Suddenly a sound broke into the moment as the rusted metal door opened. Despite its decrepit appearance, the door opened with a soft
click
and swung outward on nearly silent hinges. Three men stepped out. Two of them wore boots, jeans, and t-shirts; both wore identical shoulder holsters with .45 pistols snugged into them. The third man wore a hazmat suit with the hood off. The men in jeans drew their pistols and walked to the edges of the runoff trough, looking up and down into the shadows. The killer knew that they saw nothing, that they
could
see nothing; neither had allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness before trying to look through it. They didn’t see the killer, and they didn’t see the other figure crouched barely six feet from them.

The two thugs nodded to the man in the hazmat suit who reached through the doorway and lifted out a Styrofoam cooler of the type used to transport medical or biological materials. A red biohazard symbol was stamped onto the white plastic side. He walked to the edge of the trough and stood for a moment looking down into the eddying water. Then he set the cooler down.

The killer raised his pistol.

His intel had brought him here to this place, this time. His mission projections had him back at street level within eight minutes from first trigger pull.

Then everything changed.

The figure crouched in the dark moved.

There was a rasping sound, steel clearing leather, but no flash of metal. Like British commando knives, the blade was blackened. The figure rose from a crouch and swarmed among the men. The blade swept right and then left, and suddenly arterial blood geysered, spraying all the way to the curved top of the brick tunnel. One of the thugs reeled back, fingers scrabbling to stem a flow that could never be stopped. The second man staggered away and turned in an almost graceful pirouette, hands reaching out to break a fall that turned clumsy and artless. They collapsed like discarded puppets onto the stone walkway so quickly that the man in the hazmat suit was unaware of their deaths until bone and slack flesh struck the stones behind him.

He twitched and spun and was on the verge of crying out in shock and alarm, but the figure moved past him, sweeping an arm across his throat with such speed that arm and blade vanished into a dark blur. The man in the hazmat suit dropped to his knees and then fell forward, his slumping corpse humped over the Styrofoam chest.

It was the fastest thing the killer had ever seen.

How quick? Three seconds? Two?

The thugs and the other man lay dead. Blood ran in slow lines down the walls.

The shadowy figure stood facing the open doorway, knife gripped in one hand. The cuts had been so fast, the edge so sharp, that no blood clung to the weapon except a single pendulous drop that hung for a moment from the tip and then fell with the softest
splash.

The killer watched all of this down the barrel of the .22 he held in hands that neither trembled nor swayed. He was thirty feet away, and if he’d to paint a fourth corpse onto this tableau he could have done it with impunity. Fast or not, the kill shot was his to take.

But the figure turned.

Slowly, with grace and without haste.

Toward him.

A gloved hand reached up and hooked fingers under the edge of a mask. Lifted, pulled it away.

In the weak lamplight the hair which spilled out from under the mask looked yellow, but the killer knew that it was not. He knew that it was as white as snow. Thick and lustrous, but paler than death. The face it framed was nearly as pale, except for a red mouth and eyes so dark they looked black. It was a beautiful face. Regal and cold and cruel. A face unused to smiles. A face like a death mask of some ancient queen, or a temple carving of a goddess of war.

The killer knew that face.

He held his pistol on her for five long seconds.

As always there was a fierce internal debate. His finger lay along the outside of the trigger guard. It would be so easy to slip it inside and take the shot.

The air between them seemed flammable, as if a word or even a thought could ignite it.

She lifted that proud head and looked down her patrician nose at him.

“Saint Germaine,” she said quietly. There was equal parts contempt and admiration in her voice. “Or do you prefer ‘Deacon’? I’ve heard that people are calling you that now.”

He kept the gun on her. “It doesn’t matter.”

It didn’t. Neither was his name, and he was sure that, as smart and as connected as this woman was, she would never know his real name. No one would.

“Deacon, then,” she said. “It’s less pretentious.”

He lowered his pistol and pulled off his balaclava. “And we wouldn’t want to be pretentious,” he said. “Would we, Lilith?”

Chap. 2

Deacon rose to his feet, his pistol still in his hand but the barrel pointed down. It made the statement he intended.

Lilith flicked her wrist the way a samurai would when shaking blood from a
katana
, and then slid the black-bladed knife back into its sheath. Without taking her eyes from Deacon, she knotted her fingers in the back of the dead man’s hazmat suit and with no apparent effort lifted his body off of the Styrofoam cooler and casually swung it up into the rushing water. It was an act that demonstrated a level of physical strength far in excess of what should have been possible for a woman of her size. A very strong man might have had difficulty lifting so limp and heavy a burden and tossing it aside so casually.

That, too, made a statement, and it was in no way lost on the Deacon.

He moved closer and stood a few feet from her and the cooler.

“Are you here for that?” he asked, then ticked his head toward the open door. “Or what’s in there?”

Lilith took some time answering that. Her expression gave little away, even to someone as practiced at reading expressions as Deacon. She nudged the cooler with the toe of her boot.

“Do you know what’s in here?” 

“I might,” Deacon said. “Do you?”

Another pause. “No.”

“Ah.”

They both looked at the open door.

“That’s going to set off an alarm,” he said.

“I know.”

“If they think they’re being raided they’ll dump their hard drives and—”

“It’s an old burglar’s trick,” she said. “Set a smoky fire and watch through a window to see what people rush to save. A good man will save his family Bible. A blackmailer will save his cache of evidence. And a scientist—”

“—Will save his research. Yes, I’ve read Sherlock Holmes.”

Lilith gave him the tiniest sliver of a cold smile. Not at all friendly, but not as hostile as the flat, reptilian glare.

“Why were you waiting over there? You could have picked the door lock.”

“I wasn’t trying to get in. I wanted this.” He squatted down and removed the cooler’s lid. Inside were three aluminum cylinders packed into carved slots. Each cylinder was pressure locked with a tight metal cap.

“What is it?” asked Lilith. “A bioweapon? Some kind of germ warfare thing?”

“A performance enhancing synthetic steroid,” said Deacon.

She actually smiled. “’Performance’? What kind of performance?”

“Not the kind you’re thinking,” he said, returning her smile. “It’s the first generation of a formula that combines the select lean-mass-building steroids with a synthetic
nootropic
compound that significantly increases and regulates the hypothalamic histamine levels. In normal pharmacology these drugs are wakefulness promoting agents often prescribed to prevent shift-work sleepiness. This version is designed to build stamina and wakefulness to a point where the treated person won’t tire and won’t lose mental sharpness.”

“To what end? Super soldiers?”

“Hardly. Indefatigable factory workers.”

Lilith blinked. “Factory…?”

“These drugs are intended for use in third-world countries to increase the efficiency and output of unregulated factory workers. Shift workers who can work twenty-four or even forty-eight hours at maximum efficient output.” He sighed. “It’s a new tweak on legal slave labor because it’s for use in countries where there is no enforceable human rights presence and where governments are easily bought. Earlier versions of these drugs are already being used in Southeast Asia and some places in Africa.”

A sneer twisted her mouth. “The new face of slave labor.”

“Yes,” he agreed.

“You’re American,” she said. “Most of the companies that would use this sort of thing are American.”

“Many are, yes.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Are you here with official sanction?”

He shrugged.

Lilith shifted to get a better look into his eyes. “Why do
you
care?”

She leaned on the word
you
.

Deacon didn’t answer. Instead he closed the cooler and replaced the lid. Then he took the container and placed it in the shadowy spot where he’d been crouching. It vanished from sight as if it ceased to exist.