The Chosen One

53

New York, Sunday March 26, 23.01

Late nights suited him. Best time to work: no email, no phone calls, no distractions. Not even a view out of the window; just darkness.

This way his vision could be dominated by the screen on the desk. Amazing what could be done on the computer these days. Pretty much everything.

There was a glass by the side of the keyboard, amber with whisky. But he had barely touched it. The ice had melted long ago, diluting the spirit to a paler, less enticing shade. He liked that it was there, proof that he was absorbed in his work.

Which he was. He hadn’t heard from Maggie for a while, but that only served to motivate him further: she was clearly in a bit of trouble here, and so he was duty bound to do whatever he could to help. Besides, with Maggie it was never just duty.

He moved the mouse across the screen and clicked open the fifty-one-second video that had, at last, caused the penny to drop. It was a crucial piece of footage; he could not quite believe he had not discovered it till now. As soon as Maggie was back in DC, he would show it to her and all would at last be clear. But why wait till then? He reached for his phone and punched in Maggie’s number and it rang and rang and then went to voicemail. Yet again. Sighing, he shoved the phone back into his trouser pocket.

He returned to the screen and watched the video through yet again, this time noticing something new. He sat up. Was that a noise he hadn’t heard before: a metallic clang, muffled but definitely there? He spooled back and replayed the same sequence. No sound this time. Must have been outside.

He needed to think how best to organize this material, for maximum impact. What would work best? Despite the full panoply of state-of-the-art software at his fingertips, including perhaps half a dozen first-class word-processing programs, he reached for the pad and pen and began jotting notes.

There it was again. Not the same noise, more of a creak this time and, if anything, louder.

‘Hello?’

Nothing.

‘Anyone there?’

He checked the clock at the top right of the screen. Past eleven.

He went back to the sheet of notepaper, scribbling in handwriting that no one but he could ever decipher the logical sequence as he now understood it. He imagined relaying it to Maggie, watching as a smile spread across her face, a smile of recognition as she understood the pattern he now understood. That smile could make a man fall in love with Maggie Costello.

Reaching a knot in the clear logical line he was trying to unspool on paper, he sucked on his pen, feeling the plastic flake off into his mouth. Anticipating a choke, he reached for the watery glass of whisky, glancing at the darkness of the window as he did so.

The sight of a man’s face peering in made him jump. Idiotically, he wondered how someone could be outside his window – here in a fifth-floor apartment.

It took him a half-second to understand the truth. That the face staring, dead-eyed, at him was in fact a reflection of a man standing inside – and just behind him.

By then it was too late. The man’s hands were on his shoulders, pinning him to his chair, and then on his neck. He tried to gasp but it was no good: the grip was too tight.

His own reaction surprised him. He writhed and clawed at his attacker but the strength in this man’s hands was insuperable; there was, he could tell instantly, a professionalism to this attack that guaranteed it would succeed. Suddenly, and with horrible certainty, he knew he was going to die.

All of this was measured in seconds. And throughout, the only face he could see was Maggie’s. Even in these desperate circumstances he registered this as a curious fact. He had not realized how much she meant to him. But suddenly all that mattered was knowing that if they were ready to kill him, they would be ready to kill her – and that thought gave him determination. Letting his hands fall as if in submission to his fate, he dug into his pocket and then, summoning the strength for a big push, gave a sharp lurch to his right to shake the man off. He knew it would not save his life, but it might at least delay his death by a moment or two.

As his attacker stumbled backwards, he gulped down oxygen. All his concentration was on his left hand. Adept at using the phone when he wasn’t looking at it, he jabbed at the buttons. The strangling hands were back on his neck now, attempting to get a grip as he writhed, while his own left hand remained deep in his pocket, searching for the green key that would start the call. With a superhuman effort he stopped himself from crying out straight away, knowing he needed to wait a few seconds for the machine to pick up and the message to play.

Now. He would do it now.

With his right arm he tried to lash out – backwards – at his assailant and, once again, the man had to take one hand off his victim’s neck to fend off the diversion.

‘Ennnnnn!’ he rasped, in what sounded like an exhalation of desperate pain.

His attacker had forced him off the chair now and onto his knees, so that he bore the full weight of his brutal killer on his shoulders. Somehow he had to find the strength to cry out once more.

‘Ayyyy!’ he shouted, though the sound that emerged was more like a whisper.

Out of frustration, perhaps, the attacker now took his hands off his prey’s neck and punched him instead, hard in the jaw. Even so, he did not flinch, instead seizing on the chance to cry out, ‘Seeeeeeeee!’

This continued for perhaps ten more seconds, even if it felt like the longest and most terrifying hour of his life. Somehow he found the energy to force his executioner to interrupt the job of asphyxiation – even, at one point, directing a fist into the man’s balls – and to do it often enough that eventually he had cried out five times.

It was then his strength left him. He could flail no more at the dead-eyed, grey-faced man in the cheap suit who was squeezing the life out of him. At last he surrendered, allowing him to kill him – as he had known he would.

He ended up on the floor of his own study, curled up and lifeless.

There was a noise outside in the hall. The attacker, unnerved by the sound of neighbours returning to the next-door apartment, moved swiftly – tearing off the top, scribbled sheet of the notepad on the desk and then using the device he had been given to wipe the computer’s hard drive.

The knock at the door interrupted his effort to frisk the man he had just killed.

‘Hello? Is everything all right in there?’ The knocking continued and was getting louder.

The killer held his breath, hoping whoever was there would go away. Then he heard another voice say, ‘I think we should break it down.’

Hastily, he scanned the apartment for the fire escape, eventually finding it in the kitchen where a door led out onto a tiny balcony and, from there, to the narrow, wrought-iron staircase that zig-zagged its way down the exterior of the building. He fled, taking the stairs two at a time until he had reached ground level.

Calmly, he walked from there to his car.

Five floors up, his victim’s body lay discarded, the dead man’s fingers gnarled around his cellphone as if gripping the hand of a loved one for the last moment of his life.