The Darkest Day

TWENTY-SIX

No intruder alarm had been fitted. Victor saw no cameras or microphones or motion sensors in the hallway he stepped into, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He knew how to hide them so that only a search that would take hours to complete and leave the apartment in ruins would uncover them. If he knew that, so could she. He had neither the time nor the necessity to do so. Once he killed her, any recordings of him in her safe house could be found at his leisure. Or even ignored, because they were no threat in the hands of a corpse.

The lights were off throughout the apartment, and the drawn blinds made it dark. The air was cold too. Even colder than on the streets. No heating had been on today to take the chill from the air, and no sunlight had been able to spill through windows to raise the temperature in line with that outside.

Victor let the door fall shut behind him, stood still and breathed in slow, shallow breaths to let every sound reach his ears unobstructed. Even without the darkness of the apartment limiting his vision, hearing was more important. Light could not penetrate walls.

He heard traffic outside, the ticking sound of pipes at work, and a television or radio emanating from the apartment beneath or next door — he couldn’t be sure which. He stood statue-still in the darkness for several minutes until he was certain he was alone.

He hadn’t expected to find Raven inside, but it would have made things easier if she was hiding, or better yet asleep and vulnerable.

He explored the safe house, moving from room to room in a slow, methodical manner. There were few furnishings and only those that fulfilled the most basic requirements of someone who needed to sleep and eat and lie low and nothing else. The lounge was almost cavernous, furnished only with a single foldout camping chair and table. A second foldout chair was still in its packaging. The three pieces had come as a set, but she had set up only what she needed. There was no television or sound system or any other electronic device. Aside from the folding chair and table the only other item was a paperback novel. It looked new and unread. The spine was still intact and the pages not unfurled.

He had never heard of the author or the title, but it had been published within the last two years and what fiction he read was picked at random from second-hand book stores, often by the box, so if anyone studied his reading material they would find no indication of personality or taste. Raven might pick new books in the same way. He could learn nothing about her from a single novel she had not yet read.

The kitchen had no toaster or kettle or microwave or other labour-saving device. In a cupboard he found a set of three rugged iron camping pans — small, medium and large. In another he found a twelve-piece crockery set. The only food he found was an unopened box of cereal. There were enough carbohydrates contained within to keep a person alive for a long time.

In a drawer, a cutlery set had been aligned with neatness and order. It was the only true sign of personality so far, but he had expected to find some indication of a need to have everything in its place, accounted for and ordered. Like himself, she was fastidious in her need for order. His had grown out of a need to survive and a knowledge that the smallest detail, the smallest mistake, might make the difference between life and death. In the neat, ordered layout of the cutlery he saw that she was the same as him in that way as she was in others and he wondered how else they would prove to be alike.

He did not enjoy discovering the similarities between them because it would make her harder to kill. But better he find out in advance than when his life might depend on it.

He found soap in the bathroom, but no toothbrush. He imagined she bought a new one with her every time she stayed, disposing of the old one and its traces of DNA.

The apartment had a single bedroom, which contained nothing but a sleeping bag. It was a quality item. He assumed it had been brought from the same store as the chair and table set and the items in the kitchen. He wondered what lie she had told the person who served her. He squatted down to smell it. There was a trace of female scent within the synthetic material. He had read that smell produced the most powerful memories.

He was a little surprised to find no gun. But, like the toothbrush, she must bring a weapon with her and take it away again. With the limited security offered by the front door, she did not feel it prudent to leave a weapon, no doubt illegal, behind.

An idea came to him. He returned to the lounge and picked up the paperback novel. A sticker on the front jacket showed it had been in a promotion. He had to fight the compulsion to peel the sticker away. Had it been his own he would have done so before he had walked out of the store. Raven hadn’t felt the same need, but it seemed as though she hadn’t read the book either.

He balanced it by the spine in the centre of his palm and let the pages fall open. They did not do so in an even manner, parting to about a third of the way through instead of the middle. The book was in far too good condition for Raven to have read up to page 100 of a 311-page paperback novel.

There were no pencil or pen marks on the page, no words circled or underlined. He read both pages. It was almost all dialogue between two characters, discussing another character. Victor had no idea what the story was about. He took the book into the kitchen, flicked a wall switch to send power to the oven, and turned dials to operate it. A fan whirred and a light came on. He switched off the ceiling light so the only illumination came from the oven, leaving the room dark and glowing in soft orange.

Sitting down next to the oven, he positioned himself and angled the book so the light shone across the pages in a horizontal manner. With no other light reaching the pages, the texture of the paper was obvious — rough and fibrous. It had a moonscape quality of tiny hills and shadowed craters.

Except in three places.

On page 100 the first word on the first line had a faint horizontal groove beneath it, where pressure had been applied. Victor placed the nail of his little finger into the groove. It was a good fit for his, or the index finger of a medium-sized woman. Towards the bottom of the page, the first word of the twenty-eighth line had a similar groove. On the same line was another, deeper, groove, under the word met. It was the fourth word on the line.

He pictured Raven opening the book to page 100, placing her fingernail under the first word and counting down to the twenty-eighth line, then across to the fourth word. She had been given the name of the book and a six-digit numerical code — 100, 28, 4 — resulting in a single word, or maybe another code comprised of three letters — m, e and t.

He retried balancing the book by its spine in his palm in case it fell open to another page, but without success. At first it seemed odd that she had left the book behind, given its significance, but he reasoned she would need to use it again for further communications with whoever had given her the first code. Bookstores were a lot rarer than they used to be and there was no guarantee she could buy another copy when she needed to.

In his earlier days in the business he had sometimes used newspapers and similar codes to communicate with those it was too risky to meet face-to-face, but he had never done so with novels.

He thought about the word met, and what it could mean, and what m-e-t could stand for. He was no sports fan but he knew of the New York Mets. Met was also a common name for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or met might signify a pre-determined course of action like a meeting or could be a code word for something or someone.

But on its own it couldn’t reveal much information. Unless the numbers that led to it were also significant. He flicked back to page 100 and then turned back pages until he came to the start of the chapter: 15. Today’s date was the fifteenth.

100, 28, and 4. He didn’t understand what the numbers could represent. A grid reference, maybe. Or the 4 might denote the time of the meeting or handover or whatever else. 100 could be for the street, but there was no way of knowing whether it meant E 100th Street or W 100th Street.

He had no more time to ponder it because two federal agents kicked open the front door.