Dark Winter

4

Washington DC

Friday 2 May, 07:04 hrs

It was a miserable day. The weather just couldn’t make up its mind – never quite raining but looking like it wanted to at any moment.

I walked along D Street just a couple of blocks south of the Library of Congress, on my way to meet George, moving as fast as I could while trying to sip from a lip-burning Starbucks. I’d got the metro from Crystal City, where I now lived in a large grey concrete apartment block that made me feel like a UN delegate. There was a Bosnian concierge in the daytime and a Croatian one at night. All the cleaning women seemed to be Russian and the superintendent was from Pakistan. They all understood English really well, until something needed repairing or cleaning. Especially the superintendent – every time I hassled him about the problem with my washer-dryer he went deaf.

I tested my Starbucks again. It had cooled down a little so I took a longer sip through the top cover. I’d been thinking that only George would call me into the office for seven in the morning, but apparently he wasn’t alone. The whole of DC seemed to be on an early start; the traffic was heavy already and plenty of people were walking purposefully past me in both directions, almost power walking, cell phones stuck to the sides of their heads so everyone knew they were doing really important stuff. Not that they needed the cells; their voices were loud enough to carry the message right across town.

I took another swig and checked my traser watch again as I kept moving. I should be on time. The mission in Penang had been simple enough – to kill the target once he’d handed over a box to the source, after prayer that same evening. But just as important, George had stressed, was that Suzy and I both had to see the source physically in control of the box – which must have been why he’d brought it round to the passenger door.

It was a shame about the target’s pickup. He was one of life’s unfortunates: wrong place, wrong time. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that whatever was in those bottles, it sure wasn’t wine, or even Ribena; I just hoped it had been worth him dying for.

The big problem facing Suzy and me afterwards was that we still had four days left of our package holiday. We couldn’t just pack up and take a scheduled flight home: everything had to look normal; we had to brass it out. We did a lot of the tourist sights rather than lying by the pool – I needed to keep my gravel-graze out of view and keep as low a profile as possible. It felt like we spent entire days in trishaws going from temple to temple.

I took the bike back; it cost me $150 for the damage, but I was just dismissed as another incompetent tourist. The killing, even the disappearance of the two waiters, hadn’t made it to the New Straits Times in the remaining four days, which probably meant that no one had come across the Lite Ace or a fly-infested body by the time we left the country. In fact, the main event in the papers was some politician’s wife being accused of khalwat , an offence that involved being in close proximity to a member of the opposite sex who wasn’t a relation. She had been watching television with three students from the International Islamic University when a team from the Federal Territory religious department raided the apartment following a complaint from neighbours. If found guilty, they could be fined three thousand dollars and jailed for up to two years. As Suzy said, she should count herself lucky she hadn’t been sitting with three drug-dealers watching satellite channels with an iffy Sky card.

Suzy’s revolver had been dropped off by a courier in the Firm into a dead-letter box in the women’s toilet at Starbucks. I took another sip of their coffee; globalization was a reality, these guys were getting everywhere. That one had been in the shopping mall in a good part of Georgetown, the island’s capital. The weapon and six rounds were all we’d been given, so Suzy had to make sure she did a good job. No wonder she’d acted like a lunatic, diving in through the Lite Ace’s window. She knew she couldn’t afford to waste a single shot.

It would have been better for us if the handover of the wine box had been done on the last night, so we could have carried out the task and left Penang the following day. But I was just pleased that it hadn’t happened on the first night, which wouldn’t have given us enough time to do the recces and would have exposed us on the island for a whole fortnight. We’d spent a lot of time establishing his routine: the route from his house to the restaurant, what time he started work, what time he finished, whether there was anyone else living in his house. We knew where he kept his vehicle, and we knew the best time to go and tamper with the brake light. We knew almost everything about him, except his name – but then again, it wasn’t as if I’d wanted to have coffee with him.

By the time I reached the mansion block there was still about half a paper cup of latte left. I walked up the six or seven steps of the large Victorian brick building, long ago converted into office space and flanked by modern concrete blocks at either side. Large glass double doors took me into the hallway and down towards a huge black guy in a white shirt and blue uniform at the front desk. I showed him my Virginia driver’s licence, as required everywhere since 9/11. I hadn’t got round to buying a car yet because I had my bike – if I could get hold of it – at Carrie’s house in Marblehead.

I glanced at the security guy’s name badge. ‘Hi, Calvin. My name’s Stone – I’m going to the third floor, Hot Black Inc.’

‘Can you sign the book, sir, please?’

I signed in while he checked the visitors’ list and gave me the once-over. DC was still quite a formal town when it came to dress codes and I was in my jeans, Caterpillar boots and brown leather bomber jacket. I placed the pen back on the desk and gave Calvin a smile. ‘It’s dress-down Friday.’

Calvin didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Thank you, Mr Stone. The elevator is just round the corner there to the right, and you have a good day, sir.’

As I walked away I gave him the standard, ‘And you.’ I had a smile on my face: the name Hot Black Inc still made me laugh. I’d always thought it was only in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that they invented weirdly named companies as fronts.

I’d been on Hot Black’s payroll for just under a year now. It was a marketing company that didn’t really have anything to market, which was just as well because I didn’t know the first thing about that. Life was good. I got paid a salary of $82,000 a year, my apartment was taken care of, and on top of that I got cash in hand after every job. It was a much better deal than working as a K for the Firm on £290 a day, all in. As a Hot Black employee I’d been given a US social-security number, and I even had to file tax returns. It gave me the chance to have a kind of real life. After George’s daughter, Carrie, had binned me, I’d even managed to have a new girlfriend for about six weeks. She was the area manager for Victoria’s Secret for DC and Virginia, and we lived in the same apartment block. It worked out quite well until her husband decided he wanted to try to make a go of their marriage. I guessed he’d been missing the free samples she brought home.

I even had a pension plan. It was one of the ways George could slip me extra cash without it being noticed in the real world: walking into a bank with $20,000 in cash, these days, would do more than just raise eyebrows. For the first time in my life I was starting to feel a bit secure.

The elevator arrived, pinged open, and I stepped in and pressed the button for the third floor.