The Killing Kind (2 page)

“Mark.”

At once, the lights for blocks around changed so that the intersections were red leading to this stretch of road, and green leading away. As traffic cleared in front of the Morales building, the light at the crosswalk changed as well, and the crowd around Morales stepped out into the street.

“Three,” said the voice in his ear.

Hendricks drew a measured breath and held it. His body processed the complex math behind the shot by instinct, making fine adjustments to account for the heat, air pressure, and distance from sea level. His heart beat slow and steady in his chest.

“Two.”

His body motionless, Hendricks squeezed the trigger— three pounds’ pressure, no more, no less.

“One.”

A crack like thunder echoed down the street.

When Morales heard the shot, he hit the deck. Hendricks had to hand it to the guy, he had good instincts—he reacted a full second before anyone else in sight. But ultimately, his gesture of self-preservation was futile; by the time you hear the gunshot, the bullet’s come and gone.

Lucky for Morales, he wasn’t Hendricks’s target.

Hendricks’s target was Javier Cruz—the hitman the Corporation had sent to kill Morales. A button man for the Corporation since their early days running
bolita
rackets out of Little Havana, Cruz’d killed more men than he could count.

Not that anyone would know to look at him. Those he passed on his stroll down Brickell toward Morales Incorporated were like as not to smile at the kindly old Cuban man in his crisp white guayabera shirt, raw linen pants, and straw fedora. They had no idea his steel gray mustache hid beneath it the grisly scar of a lip split by a policeman’s baton, or that the policeman in question hadn’t lived to see the sun rise the following morning. They didn’t realize the limp in his gait wasn’t age or sciatica, but the result of two lead slugs fired off by the wife of a local politician who’d made it his business to disrupt the Corporation’s. She woke to find him in her bedroom while her husband was out of town, and if she hadn’t been so beautiful—or so very, very naked—perhaps Cruz wouldn’t have allowed her time to reach the gun in the nightstand. She buried two bullets in his leg, and he buried her in half a dozen spots the state over, leaving only a bedroom full of blood and a ring finger for her husband to find on his return, resting atop a photo of their four daughters. That man never spoke a word about the Corporation again.

Those Cruz passed didn’t know they were in the presence of a monster. But unfortunately for Cruz, Hendricks knew.

And unfortunately for Cruz, Hendricks never missed.

When Hendricks pulled the trigger, Cruz’s head exploded. For a moment, what was left of him stood there, inches from Morales, a steel blade gleaming in his hand— his bloodied fedora fluttering to the ground behind him. Then his body slumped to the sidewalk like a dropped marionette.

As the gunshot’s echoes died, the night was filled with the sounds of panic. The shriek of voices and tires both. The bleat of car horns. The wail of a distant siren fast approaching. Everyone within earshot had been trained by one awful news report after another to await that second shot, or third, or fifth. Trained to wonder if they’d prove another victim in the killer’s tally.

Hendricks, on the other hand, calmly withdrew the rifle and raised the blackened window. He knew it would take them several minutes to determine where the shot had come from—more than enough time for him to make his escape.

“You get out of the system clean?” he quietly asked.

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” the voice in his ear replied. “They’ll never even know I was there.”

“Good,” said Hendricks. “Signing off.”

“Safe travels.”

At the curb outside his office building, Edgar Morales scrabbled to his feet, ashen and trembling. Though he tried, he couldn’t tear his gaze from his would-be killer’s corpse. If he’d had any inkling it would come to this when he’d begun buying up cheap tenements in Miami’s dodgy Goulds neighborhood with an eye toward gentrifying the area—and cleaning up a stronghold of the Corporation’s narcotics sales in the process—his altruistic streak would have taken a backseat to his healthy sense of self-preservation. But he hadn’t known, any more than he’d known until this very moment that he had no stomach for killing, even in self-defense.

His phone rang in his pocket. Morales flinched as if slapped, and then answered.

“H-hello?” he said.

“Are you all right?” Hendricks asked.

Morales hesitated. As a point in fact, he was pretty fucking far from all right. But instead, he told Hendricks, “Yes. I trust my payment was received?”

“If it wasn’t,” Hendricks said, “you wouldn’t be around to ask me that.”

Morales laughed—brittle, barking. “That’s not exactly a comforting thought.”

“Well, just think: now you’ve got your whole life to come to grips with it. Pleasure doing business with you.”

And then the line went dead.

2

It was a cool August night on the southern shore of Lake Geneva, and Jean-Luc Vian’s château was alive with candlelight—a glimmering jewel nestled in the crushed velvet of the French countryside, its rich greens fading to black as the soft light gave way to darkness. The grounds were bedecked for a grand party, and the flagstone drive— which led from the rural one-lane road, past the massive iron gates and guest quarters, and up to the main house— was lined with luxury automobiles. BMWs and Mercedes, mostly, interspersed with a few Jaguars, a Bentley, and even one god-awful yellow Lamborghini, the last driven by that boorish football player Caravagas that Vian’s wife had insisted he invite.

No doubt that deceitful cow had by now lured the man to one of their many bedrooms, Vian thought, where their exploits would join those of her prior dalliances as the talk of every dinner party from Paris to Haute-Savoie.

If it weren’t for the fact that she was daughter to the foreign minister, his pride would have insisted he leave her long ago. Theirs was a marriage of political and social expediency, not love—a fact that was too well known amid the corridors of power for Vian’s taste.

Then again, Vian thought, for all her faults, at least
she
was enjoying the party. He, on the other hand, apparently had work to attend to, having been summoned by text to dial in to an emergency conference call—though what could be so pressing at this late an hour, his employer didn’t say.

Vian punched his security code into the keypad on his office door, waited for the electronic whir as the lock disengaged, then stepped inside. As he shut the door behind him, the lock engaged once more, and the sounds of the string quartet and drunken laughter dropped away, deadened by his office’s soundproofing.

It wasn’t until he raised the lights that he realized he was not alone.

“Who are you?” Vian asked the man in French. “How did you—”

“—get in here?” his uninvited guest ventured, his own French excellent but accented. “Mr. Vian, there’s no need for a man of your breeding and intellect to be so trite—or so dreadfully sincere. You don’t
really
expect me to answer your first question, do you? And as to your second, I suspect if you ruminate upon it for a moment, you could save me the tedium of explaining.”

So Vian ruminated upon it. It made no sense. How could this man have breached the gate and slipped past all his guards? Vian was sure he hadn’t been invited
,
for his employer—who, in addition to supplying his personal security detail, ran background checks on all attendees of Vian’s parties—had sent along the dossiers they’d compiled for everybody on the invite list just yesterday, and this man was not among them.

Perhaps he’d bluffed his way through, then. Certainly, the stranger was dressed for the role of partygoer, in his slim black suit, crisp dove-gray shirt, and matching tie. He was seated in Vian’s own leather desk chair, his black oxfords propped atop the desk. Black kid gloves graced his slender hands.

But bluffing alone could not have gained him access to this room—only Vian had the access code. Well, Vian, and his employer, who had installed the door locks, the encrypted phone and Internet connections, and the soundproofing as well.

And then, at once, Vian understood. The late-night summons. The lack of dossier on this man. The breach of Vian’s inner sanctum.

It seemed the terms of his employment had been reevaluated.

The stranger noted with some satisfaction the change in Vian’s expression from puzzlement to despair. “Sit down,” he said, withdrawing his feet from the desk and plucking a silenced firearm off the blotter as he rose.

Vian did as the man instructed, dropping heavily into one of the high-backed chairs that faced the desk from this side.

“Good,” the man said, a smile dancing across his face. “Now: tell me why I’m here.” That face was neither young nor old—oddly wise, yet unlined, as though he’d never in his life encountered a troubling thought. His hair was sandy blond, perhaps interspersed with white, perhaps not. Vian was struck by the fact that—despite the dramatic circumstances of their meeting—if he passed this man on the street a month from now, he probably would not recognize him.

But Vian knew he would not be passing anybody on the street a month from now. Vian knew his life would end tonight.

“You are here to kill me,” Vian replied.

The stranger laughed. “Well,
yes,
but do you know why?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to the man who hired me, which means it does to me. You see, I’ve been asked to send a message. Your death is merely to be the punctuation mark at the end of said message.”

“All right then, what’s the message?”

“I’ve been instructed to tell you your work in the Sudan was unacceptable. I’m told that will mean something to you. It does, does it not?”

It did. Vian’s employer was, on paper, a security contractor, one with fingers in a great many pies at France’s Ministry of Defense, including the manufacture and distribution of weapons and ordnance, the contracting of private military personnel, and consulting for strategic planning. Off book, his firm was responsible for three quarters of all weapons sales on the continent of Africa, including those to all sides of the Darfur conflict. Vian, for a time, was in charge of such sales, but he found that even his own prized moral flexibility had its limits. He’d begun funneling communiqués to the UN in secret—communiqués which implicated his employer in breaking the UN African Union arms embargo. Though nothing was made of these revelations publicly—due to his firm’s ties to not only French defense but to many other NATO nations as well—his actions led to his company losing seven billion dollars’ worth of contracts.

He’d thought he covered his tracks such that his involvement would never be discovered.

Vian could only nod, certain it was far too late for him to deny it. At least, he thought, I will not die denying the only decent thing I’ve ever done.

“Good. I’ve been further instructed to glean from you, if possible, whatever I can about who
else
may have been involved in your unacceptable performance.”

“Why on earth should I cooperate with you?” Vian spat. “You’ve already told me you plan to kill me, and my wife is too public a figure for you to harm, which means you’ve no longer any leverage.”

“That’s not
entirely
accurate,” the stranger said, and then he shot Vian in the knee.

Vian shrieked. Every muscle in his body tensed at once. He jerked out of his chair, spilling onto the floor. The pain in his knee was white-hot, exquisite. It spread up through his groin and settled like lead in his stomach. Waves of dizziness and nausea shook his body, and unconsciousness encroached, spotty black at the edges of his vision. And all the while, beyond the soundproofed walls of his office, the party continued unabated—his guests oblivious to his suffering.

Somewhere, a thousand miles away it seemed, a mobile phone chirped. The stranger looked startled for a moment, and then reached into his suit coat, removing from his inside pocket a cheap, pre-paid burner phone.

“Yes?” the stranger snapped, impatience hiding puzzlement.