The Hunter

CHAPTER 65

01:49 CET

The main light was off when Victor returned to the room. Good. He’d told her not to put it on. Secondary lights only. They were off too. He heard the shower running. He hadn’t told her never to use one. If someone came for her he doubted it would make a difference either way.

‘It’s me,’ he said.

No answer. She couldn’t hear him over the noise of the shower. There was a crack in the curtains. A trace of moonlight shined through into the room. Light from the bathroom slipped under the door. There was just enough illumination for him to see that nothing was out of place. He was cautious, though — he always was. In the darkness he walked over to his bed, the one farthest from the door. He flicked on the lamp. The room stayed dark.

Sighing, he walked around the bed to the second lamp next to the broker’s bed. They always used double rooms with two beds. It was hard enough to sleep knowing she was in the same room without her being in the same bed too. After all the years of sleeping alone Victor didn’t know if he could with someone next to him. He didn’t want to try and fail, to know just how far removed from normality he really was.

He flicked the switch but it stayed off too. Victor turned around. The light in the bathroom was on, so the electricity was working, but both lamps were out. It seemed like too much of a coincidence.

The knife appeared in his hand.

He moved over to the main light switch. It was against protocol to turn it on if a smaller light source was available, but there wasn’t one. His hand reached out, his finger touching the switch. But he didn’t flick it down. Something was very wrong.

It felt as if he had been guided toward it. He could be mistaken, but he wasn’t about to take the chance. He moved his hand away from the switch and took the slim flashlight from his pocket. He shined the light at the switch. It was just an ordinary light switch, no different from how it had been when they had first entered, except the screw heads looked scratched. He shone the light at the floor underneath the switch. It took him a few seconds before he noticed the minuscule white speck on the carpet. He squatted down and touched it with his finger. Plaster.

The room had been immaculate when they had arrived.

His pulse started to rise. There were no sizeable wardrobes, no room underneath the beds. That left the bathroom.

Victor turned on the TV, cranked up the volume. He moved back to the bed. He had the flashlight in his left hand, the knife in his right. He moved silently over to the bathroom door, standing facing it. He had a horrible feeling about what he was going to see inside. His stomach was tighter than it had ever been.

He kicked the door open.

The bathroom was small. There was no one hiding in there, no one waiting.

No one alive anyway.

She still looked good, even with wet hair draped across her face. Her head was resting on the lip of the bath as if she were resting, but at an impossible angle from the rest of her body. The water from the shower splashed on her face and the wide, open eyes. Victor approached slowly and turned off the shower.

No amount of controlled breathing could slow down his heart rate. Victor squatted down next to the bath, the knife slipping from his fingers. He knew it was pointless, but he checked her pulse anyway. Her skin was still warm. He reached out a hand and brushed the blonde hair from her face. She’d complained when he’d ordered her to bleach it. He gently closed her eyelids. She looked asleep, peaceful. He stayed looking at her far longer than he knew was prudent.

He retrieved the knife from the floor and stood back up, his knuckles white. He felt sick. Victor left the bathroom, cold anger in his eyes.

There were no defensive wounds, no evidence of a fight of any kind, no traces of blood, no skin under her nails, nothing to suggest she had even fought back. Victor knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have died without a fight. But against whoever killed her that fight had been over the second it had begun. The killer was good. And he was still near. The broker wasn’t the only target. He had come for them both. Victor turned around, looking back at the light switch.

There would be a trip switch behind it, rigged up to a detonator that would explode when electricity was passed through it. In turn the explosion would detonate the plastic explosive packed behind the wall, enough to ensure no one inside the room survived the blast. It would have killed them both, had she had gone to Olympus with him. But she hadn’t. He’d told her to stay. It was safer.

The killer was outside. He wouldn’t have just set the bomb and left, hoping it would be successful. He would need to make sure. He was nearby, watching, waiting. He would only leave when the fireball burst through the window.

Victor wasn’t going to keep him waiting.

He used the knife to unscrew the light switch, and carefully he removed the front plate. Inside it was exactly how he imagined it would be. A detonator was attached to the main wiring and implanted into a large quantity of what looked like American C-4. It wasn’t in a block; it had been carefully kneaded and pushed into the cavity behind the wall. There looked to be several pounds’ worth. With it were plastic soda bottles filled with diesel to ensure the explosion caused a relentless fire, presumably to incinerate their corpses and leave no trail back to whomever started this. He expected other bottles were hidden around the room and in the bathroom too.

The killer, watching from nearby, would have seen Victor enter the hotel. If he did not see the explosion soon he might work out what had happened. Victor couldn’t allow that. He unplugged the TV, cut the lead from the back of the set, and stripped off the plug, leaving him with three feet of cable. He unplugged the room’s phone and moved it closer to the door. He then tore off the phone’s plastic exterior and attached the wires at the end of the TV cable leading to those inside the phone. The other end he attached to the detonator after carefully removing the original wires. When everything was secure, he plugged the phone into the socket next to the TV.

When the phone rang, the electricity passing through its wires would blow the detonating charge. The plastic explosive would follow. Victor quickly gathered his things and left. He didn’t have time to waste.

He had a call to make.

*

Even in the middle of the night the various bars and cafes that lined the street were still open and busy, Cypriots and tourists having a good time. Reed sat at a table outside one of the leastraucous establishments, quietly sipping from a tall glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. He had a book on the table before him that he hadn’t read but that helped explain his unsociable presence. He knew the waitress still wondered why he had been sitting there most of the evening, but this time tomorrow Reed would be back in England enjoying a large glass of Hennessy Ellipse Cognac.

From where he sat he could see the dark rectangle that was the window to Tesseract’s room. Reed’s pulse was three beats per minute higher than normal as he waited for the big bang. He was expecting it soon since only minutes earlier he had watched Tesseract arrive back at the hotel. That he had no other name to call his prey caused a small measure of annoyance to Reed. Rebecca Sumner had been unable to tell him despite his considerable efforts to convince her to. In the end he believed her that Tesseract had refused to reveal his real name. Which was fitting he supposed. Men like Tesseract, like himself, did not have real names.

He had asked her other things as well. How old was he? What was his history, his training, his background? Reed liked to have such information about his targets, and even more so when a target was a fellow professional killer of obvious, if in no way comparable, skill. The dossier his employers had provided on Tesseract was woefully inadequate, and Reed took no pleasure in killing people he felt he did not properly know. Alas, she had not been able to tell him anything aside from the barest of details, nothing of significance he had not already known. She had not lied. People never lied to Reed. He was most persuasive.

The shockwave ruffled his shirt and made his ears pop. Glass rained down on the street. Bricks punched through windshields of parked cars. Flames spewed from the blasted-out windows. Thick smoke billowed into the night sky.

Reed closed his eyes and pictured the delicious moment when the light switch would have been flicked and the flesh stripped from Tesseract’s obliterated bones. It would have been quite a sight, Reed was sure, even if he had never been comfortable using bombs. They went against his doctrine as an assassin. They were too obvious, too indiscriminate, with too much chance of collateral damage. They were the weapon of a terrorist, not a contract killer of unparalleled ability.

The initial stunned silence that followed the blast was quickly replaced by hysteria. Another one of the deplorable side effects of explosive devices. They had a nasty habit of upsetting bystanders. Around him everyone was on their feet, staring, pointing, some screaming. He was pleased to see that the falling debris had injured no one on the street, though if anyone was unfortunate enough to be walking past the room’s door when the bomb went off, they would have been disintegrated. At least they would have died instantaneously. No suffering. That mattered to Reed. The adjacent room would also be demolished, but there had been no guests next door. Reed had checked first. He never killed innocents unless it was unavoidable. He was a professional, not a psychopath.

It had been just enough C-4 to guarantee ripping Tesseract into countless unrecognizable chunks and sufficient accelerant to make certain both sets of remains were incinerated. That had been the unmovable stipulation from the client. He wanted absolutely no traces. With limited time and resources, and with an accomplished adversary to consider, Reed had no choice but to use explosives and fire to make the bodies unidentifiable.

Reed took a moment to finish his drink before standing. There was no way Tesseract could have survived a blast of such magnitude, so Reed’s work was complete and another worthy scalp added to his already-impressive resume. It was lamentable that it was such a good trap that his prey would never have known he had walked straight into it. The Englishman collected the book and the newspaper and left an especially generous tip.

He made his way through the shocked crowds outside the hotel, walking slowly, enjoying the warm night air in a charming city, unaware he was not the only person on the street unconcerned by the blast.