The Hunter

CHAPTER 6

08:45 CET

Victor left the apartment building through the front door. In the street outside the crowd had grown considerably. He counted half a dozen police officers, but none of them were paying him the least bit of attention. Farther up the street Victor could see the red splash on the back of the van, but the body was hidden between the parked vehicles. Everyone was too preoccupied to notice it.

Knowing he didn’t have much time, Victor hurried along the sidewalk, weaving around pedestrians who stood gawking at the commotion. The morbidity of the general public always amazed him. He closed the distance to the van, glancing down to see the corpse lain down in a heap between the van and the sedan parked behind it. No one was looking, but it wasn’t worth the risk to check the body’s pockets.

He opened the door against the kerb and climbed into the driver’s seat. It smelled musty inside — the smell of too many men in an enclosed space for an extended period. Resting on the dash was a cardboard tray with six empty coffee cups. There was nothing else in the cab, so he opened the glove compartment. Inside was a manila envelope that contained his dossier, thankfully brief. It was a single piece of paper listing his details — race: Caucasian, height: six-one/two, weight: one hundred eighty pounds, hair: black, eyes: brown — and included a short paragraph stating he was a contract killer and a dangerous target. Scrawled by hand at the top of the sheet was the name of his hotel, his room number, and his current alias, Richard Bishop.

Victor placed a hand to his stomach. More like one seventyeight.

Beneath the dossier was his face, or at least a face that could have been his. It was a digital composite, close enough to the real thing to have been composed from reasonably reliable and recent information. A verbal description here, a grainy closed-circuit camera image there — add a dash of rumour and serve.

The photo-fit was a worry, but he was relieved to find that their knowledge of him was so limited. If they knew anything else it would be here as well. Even the most amateur of assassins knows the value of a detailed dossier, and even the most cautious of clients wants his hirelings to have every advantage available. He folded the sheet up and placed it into his inside pocket. There were no postmarks on the envelope so he left it.

In the back of the van were the greasy remains of takeout breakfasts but nothing else. He wasn’t surprised by this. The only thing of use he’d found had been the single laundry receipt. The other members of the team had been careful not to bring anything unnecessary with them.

Victor looked in both side mirrors to make sure no one was watching and climbed out onto the sidewalk. A perimeter around the hotel was being set up by the police and he joined the crowds, allowing himself to be funnelled out of the street and away by a harried police officer.

At the end of the road Victor hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Musee d’Orsay. The taxi driver asked him what had happened, gesturing to the adjoining street and its huge crowd.

Victor shrugged. ‘ Ca a I’air serieux.’ Something bad.

It was then that someone noticed the brainless corpse lying in the gutter and more screaming started.

The man watching the taxi pull away was tall with gelled dark hair. He stood among the crowd outside the hotel, pretending to be as bewildered as the throng of Parisians around him. He shared their anxiety, but not their ignorance. His eyes tracked the taxi until it had left the street and he pulled a slim notebook from his inside jacket pocket. He flipped over a few pages and wrote down in clear handwriting the licence plate of the taxi and a brief description of the passenger.

The face on the photo-fit hadn’t had a beard and the hair was different, but there could be no mistaking who it was. The tall man sighed heavily. This was bad.

He negotiated his way through the ever-expanding horde of onlookers and finally came out of the crowd feeling hot despite the chill November air. The man was dressed in a suit and raincoat and looked like any other soldier of commerce. Unless absolutely necessary he wouldn’t speak with anyone around him. His French was good but not fluent.

He walked away at a controlled pace, hurrying like the terrified crowd, though he wasn’t scared. He would have liked to have stayed longer but there were police everywhere, and more had to be on the way. Cops were already examining the crowds, narrowing in on potential witnesses and suspects. It would not be good for him to have to answer any difficult questions.

He knew there was a payphone farther down the road, on a side street, which he headed towards. It was sufficiently out of the way to be used discreetly but close enough to the hotel so that he could report in promptly. The report he was about to give was far from what had been expected.

He didn’t know exactly what happened inside the hotel, but he could make a reasonable enough analysis. The target had escaped in such a manner as to attract a huge police presence, and there was no sign of the team that was supposed to do the job. He’d overheard people in the crowd talking about bodies. None of the team members had left the hotel. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

He passed a group of young women heading towards the commotion and took a left into the narrow side street, where a cafe released a myriad of exotic smells into the air. The phone booth was unoccupied and he stepped inside, closing the door behind him, thankful for the muffling of the exterior noise that allowed him to think more clearly.

He dialled a number, and while he waited for the line to connect he thought about how best to phrase that the job had been a spectacular failure.

His employer was not going to be pleased.