The Darkest Day

TWENTY-FOUR

The address Halleck had given Victor for ‘Angelica Margolis’ corresponded to a rundown tenement in a bad neighbourhood in the Bronx. It took Victor two hours to make the forty-minute journey because he spent extra time on counter surveillance to reduce the chances he was being shadowed.

He knew enough about Raven to increase his odds of spotting her, but she knew more about him. She had tracked him down before he even knew she existed.

The neighbourhood was a mix of dilapidated social housing and the commercial enterprises that served the residents — thrift stores, pawnbrokers, fast loans, 99c stores and ambulance chasers. Every one had security gates ready to be rolled down. No ground-floor window was free of bars. Drug dealers hung around on the corners of alleyways and in the shelter of doorways. An abandoned church was boarded up and falling down. Graffiti marked any area of defenceless brickwork. Razor wire protected every low wall.

Victor walked by a disused basketball court. The backboards were cracked and the hoops were missing. A homeless guy slept in one corner under a blanket of nothing but damp cardboard boxes. Victor could see a hand-scribbled sign near to where the man lay and just about made out the word veteran.

To the south, multibillion-dollar skyscrapers were backlit by a pale afternoon sun.

He circled the block on which the tenement stood, taking the pavements opposite, checking out the locale for signs of anything out of the ordinary. No one waited longer than they needed at any bus stop. No construction workers or repairmen were busy doing nothing. Watchers disguised as dealers and degenerates would be hard to identify, but he trusted the genuine loiterers would do that for him. They would scatter if they noticed someone who didn’t belong amongst them, suspecting cops.

There were a few anonymous vehicles parked in the area — a dirty red Impala, a midnight-blue panel van with a delivery-company logo on the side, a modified Dodge pick-up, and a rust-spotted grey cargo van — but he saw no people waiting inside any.

Watchers could be hidden in the back of either van, but the cargo van had no rear windows and the panel van was parked side-on to the tenement, so anyone in the back wouldn’t be able to watch it.

Victor saw why Raven had picked the area for a safe house. It wasn’t because she was short of money. Professional killing paid well, and for the best the rewards were huge. Raven was good enough to get high-profile contracts. If she wanted to she could afford to live in five-star hotels, as Victor did more often than not. The area offered other advantages beyond money.

For all the dereliction and obvious criminal activity, he had not seen a single cop. With more crime than there were cops to combat it, there weren’t enough resources available to serve those who hung on to the edges of society. Residents here would keep to themselves and even if they did become suspicious of the comings and goings of a certain individual, they were not going to rush to inform the police any more than the police would rush to investigate.

A landlord here would be happy to take cash payments for rent and a few extra bills in return for ignoring a lack of references or credit history. She might not even need to show any ID at all. She could keep her safe house operational with a minimum of funds and maximum of anonymity.

Victor found himself nodding as he made his way down the alleyway at the back of the building. There were trash cans and dumpsters and piles of garbage bags. A teenage girl was sitting on the ground examining her nails. When she heard him approach and looked up he saw she had a black eye. She scrambled to her feet and ran.

When she had gone, he examined the fire exits and windows and plotted escape routes should he need to make a fast exit. He was here on reconnaissance, but the only thing he had to lose by planning for the worst was time, and that was one thing he had in abundance.

A woman was leaving her ground-floor apartment as he headed for the stairs. Her greasy hair was tied back with a rubber band and ash fell from the cigarette between her lips as she dragged a pushchair through her doorway. The baby it contained was crying. She didn’t look at Victor once.

There was no sign to say the elevator was out of service, but Victor always took the stairs if the option was there. Maybe not if the alternative was forty flights of stairs, but stepping into an elevator was as close to volunteering to trap himself in a steel coffin as he was ever going to get. There was no telling who or what was going to be there when the doors opened again. The last time he had been inside an elevator, the doors had opened to reveal an assassin who had come closer to killing him than anyone had before or since.

Victor flexed his left hand as he reached the top floor. He wasn’t surprised Raven had chosen to rent an apartment on this floor and not one below. Having people above as well as below was no fun for anyone, least of all assassins looking for security and privacy. As such, he expected to find her safe house would be a corner apartment, so she would only have neighbours to one side. Windows on two walls gave snipers more options, but armoured glass or even blackout blinds could negate that threat, and more windows meant more means of escape.

He made his way down a narrow corridor to the front door of Raven’s safe house, which occupied the building’s southwest corner. Had their roles been reversed he would have chosen the same one. South-facing windows would reflect the most available sunlight, making it harder for watchers and snipers to see through.

Her front door was coated in resilient green paint like the rest of the front doors. And like them it had been used enough to have gained scratch marks around the keyhole and scuff marks where it had been toed open, though less than the other doors. Which made sense. Raven was using it as a safe house, not a residence. She wouldn’t be here anywhere near as often as those who lived within the building. If he conducted a building-wide comparison study of scratches and marks he knew he could form a rough estimate of how much time Raven spent here, but he didn’t need to know her life in that much detail when all he planned to do was end it.

He was surprised to find only two standard locks securing the door, but he reasoned her primary layer of defence was the anonymity the apartment provided. The kind of enemies that would find her safe house would not be defeated in their intentions by any lock, no matter how sophisticated.

Victor had been picking locks long before he took his first contract as a professional killer. He had learned to shimmy open car doors before he had learned to drive. He had mastered the intricacies of raking tumblers long before he owned a property key of his own. If he had to, he could crack a safe with nothing more than graph paper and a pencil. The two standard locks fitted to low-cost urban housing were nothing he hadn’t beaten countless times as an adolescent delinquent. He had Raven’s front door unlocked in less than ten seconds.

He turned the handle and stepped across the threshold.