The Killer

FIFTY-ONE

23:03 CET

He called the broker. She gave him the name of a bar and its location on the outskirts of the city. He hailed a cab, told the driver the destination, but had him stop a couple of blocks away. It could have been any low-income Parisian neighborhood. Winding streets seemed to blend into one another. Quiet.

He circled the block where the bar was located a couple of times, checking for anyone waiting who looked out of place. If the broker had been successfully shadowed before, she could be so again. It was not the kind of area where people would choose to just sit parked along the curb. He saw no one.

The bar was a run-of-the-mill drinking house. Linoleum-covered floors, faded wallpaper, and a long polished bar, marked and scuffed from thousands of glasses and bottles. The broker was sitting in the corner, facing the door. He expected she did so in order to see him enter instead of to look out for any threats like she should be doing.

Victor sat down on a stool next to her, adjusting it so he could watch the entrance and see the broker without moving his head. She had smartened herself up, cleaned her face, and reapplied her makeup. She was dressed differently too. There was a shopping bag next to her feet.

“I got us both a vodka tonic,” she explained, before adding with her eyes lowered, “I drank both though. Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

Two glasses stood in front of her on the table, half-melted ice cubes lay in the ashtray. She saw him looking.

“Unless I have a straw, I can’t drink out of a glass with ice in it. They don’t have any straws here.”

Victor nodded as though it mattered. The broker was badly shaken up, that much was obvious. The adrenaline was all gone, and she was getting her head around what had just happened.

“First time you’ve been in a situation like that?” he asked

“Yeah.” She took a deep breath. “Do you ever get used to it, people trying to kill you?”

“They weren’t trying to kill us.”

“It was still terrifying. And you know what I meant. So,” she said, “do you? Get used to it?”

“Yes,” he answered, even though he’d wanted to lie and say no. “You deal with it better each time.”

“So I won’t feel this bad if it happens again?”

“Some people deal with it more easily than others.”

“Will I?”

Victor saw the fear in her eyes at what his answer might be. He wasn’t sure why, but he decided to spare her. “I’m sure it will get easier for you.”

The broker told him how she’d driven away without a problem and wasn’t followed. “I found a store that was still open and bought some new clothes. I-”

“Let’s just continue where we left off.”

“We need to go somewhere else to talk.”

Victor stood. “Okay, but we go where I choose.”

The neon sign above the door announced the hourly cost of the rooms. Inside, the lobby was dark and small, deliberately poorly lit. The short man behind what served as a reception desk stared leeringly at the broker while Victor counted out the money. A condom machine was attached to the wall in the corridor outside.

The room was small and featureless except for the double bed that took up nearly all the available space. There was a metal box next to the headboard that took coins to make the bed vibrate. Victor couldn’t believe people really used those things anymore. Had they ever? The last time he’d witnessed one in action it had made him feel sick.

The broker was standing in front of the window, looking out of the half-opened drapes. Victor was about to tell her she shouldn’t be doing that, but if there was a sniper out there, she would have been shot already.

She was nervously toying with the fabric. It didn’t look thick enough to actually prevent anyone from peering through. Victor supposed that was the point, an extra thrill for those who used the room. He guessed the fact that the only eyes likely to be looking in belonged to pigeons would hardly matter.

“It makes my spine crawl just being here,” the broker said, not turning around.

Victor closed the door behind him, locked it. That made her face him. “I don’t care if you don’t like being here,” he stated without emotion. “No one will find us. These kind of places don’t like to advertise who stays.”

She didn’t argue. He was right, and he knew she understood that. She folded her arms in front of her chest. He left the main light off and turned on a lamp by the bed. It had a thin red shade and cast a dim crimson glow over the room.

Neither talked for a moment.

The broker spoke first. “Back at my apartment, if they weren’t trying to kill us, why did you kill them?”

He’d been expecting such a question. “Flashbangs work for a few seconds only.”

She responded quickly, already knowing that fact. “But they had night vision. Surely they would have been blinded longer.”

When he finally answered he didn’t try to hide his displeasure at being questioned. “NVGs have a cutoff mechanism for bright light.”

“Okay,” she said eventually.

“If I hadn’t killed them, we couldn’t have escaped.”

“But they were just cops, right? Good guys.”

“It was either them or us,” Victor said. “And they knew the risks when they signed up.” He gave her a minute before speaking again. “What do we do now?”

She snapped out of whatever temporary anxiety or guilt had gripped her and straightened up. “Elliot Seif,” the broker stated with surprising venom. “He’s the first port of call.”

The broker withdrew a computer printout from her shoulder bag. It was low res, black and white, a head-and-shoulders shot of a thin, suited man in his fifties or older. His forehead was a mass of deep lines, lips thin, eyes dark under bushy eyebrows. He looked like an accountant.

“Who is he?” Victor asked.

“An accountant.”

Victor raised an eyebrow.

The broker looked at him closely. “Did I miss something?”

He shook his head. “Continue.”

“Seif is a senior partner at a large financial firm in London, Hartman and Royce Equity Investments. He handled the account that paid me the money, which I in turn used to pay you.”

“You’re certain?”

“You’re good at what you do. So am I.”

She was good-Victor knew enough about her to know that. He trusted she knew exactly what she was talking about. Victor reached into his coat for his cigarettes and matches.

“Could you not do that?” the broker asked.

He looked up. “Sorry?”

“Can you not smoke, please?”

He hesitated for a moment, then put the packet back. “I’m trying to quit, anyway.”

“You’ll feel better for it.”

“I don’t so far.”

She smiled briefly before getting back to business. “But Seif is just a stepping stone,” she said. “He’s a middleman, nothing more. A conduit for the money to provide an extra layer of protection for whoever’s behind this. We have to know who owns the account that paid me, or we’ve failed before we’ve really begun.” She paused to get her breath back, continuing after a moment. “And to do that I need access to his files.”

“Can you outside line it?”

“An agency cryptography team and a supercomputer would help.”

“Point taken.”

“The transfer was done electronically. I’m guessing from a front company or dummy corporation somewhere. Seif will have it on record. On a hard drive there’ll be a name. That’s all I need.”

“Why not just speak to Seif?”

“I would be amazed if he knew where the money really came from and even more amazed if he knew where it went after it left his hands. And if he did, he wouldn’t tell us.”

“I can be very persuasive.”

She stared into his dark eyes. “We don’t need to go there.”

“You mean you don’t want to go there.”

“That’s right, I don’t. It would be too difficult anyway. We’d have to snatch him, which can’t be easy. And he could lie, send us in the wrong direction. We don’t have time for that. Getting his files would be easier surely.”

Victor nodded after a few seconds thought. “Then we’ll break into his firm.”

“If it’s viable, but we’re against the clock, so hopefully we won’t need to. He’s bound to have a laptop or PDA with client information. I don’t need much to get us a lead.”

“How long have we got to get this done?”

“They could be targeting Seif as part of the cleanup, so we have to get to him before they do. My control was dead within days of this op going wrong. I don’t know how many other people are involved, but we’ve got to assume not many. So if we can’t get Seif’s files by tomorrow, then it has to be the next day at the latest.”

“That isn’t long.”

“I can’t do anything about that.”

Victor’s jaw flexed. It had been a statement, not a critique. It wasn’t in his nature to complain. “With this short a time frame, there is no way I can take the computer from him without his knowledge.”

The broker nodded, grudgingly accepting the implication.

“We’ll need an appointment at Seif’s firm for tomorrow,” Victor said. “Plus his home address and every piece of pertinent information we can find on him.”

“I’m seeing one of his associates at two thirty tomorrow afternoon.”

“That was fast.”

He caught the trace of a proud smile before she said, “Can’t say I’m looking forward to it, though. I’ve got a thing about bad teeth.”

“That’s just a stereotype Americans like to perpetuate. Teeth are no worse in Britain than anywhere else.”

She shook her head. “Dammit.”

“Excuse me?”

“I thought you might have said ‘we’ at some point in there.”

“Why would I say that?”

“You wouldn’t necessarily, but if you had it would have told me where you’re from.”

“You think I’m British?”

She shook her head. “Or you could have said it instead of ‘Americans.’”

“So I’m American?”

“You speak like you’re from the United States sometimes, like a Brit at other times, transatlantic sometimes, too. Your accent switches all the time, though, so I really don’t have a clue.”

“I move around a lot.”

“I figured. But when we spoke on the phone, I’m sure I detected an Eastern European accent in your English. But when we met, I thought I could hear a trace of French. I’m guessing your accent reflects whichever country you’re in at the time.”

“Very observant.”

She smiled, shyly but proudly at the same time. “So I thought I’d test you, see if you’d slip and give it away.”

He liked her guile. “Better luck next time.”

“Thanks, I’ll make sure I’m more subtle.”

“You’ll have to be.”

She was still smiling, as though they were just normal people talking, a man and a woman getting to know each other, chatting easily. He reminded himself that was a dangerous course of action. There were good reasons he had no one in his life. Now was not the time to start letting his guard down.

He noticed her expression was different. She stared at him.

“What?” he asked eventually.

“I didn’t thank you for earlier. At my apartment.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“You saved me. If not my life, my-”

His voice was hard. “We don’t need to discuss it.”

The broker’s face changed. It looked like he’d hurt her feelings. Victor told himself he didn’t care why.

No one spoke for a minute. The broker reached into the shoulder bag again and took out a file. She handed it to Victor without looking at him.

“Seif’s dossier,” she explained. “I’m sorry; it’s all I could get in the time frame.”

The file was a quarter inch thick. She had done a lot in just two days. He flicked through, surprised. Impressed.

“It’ll do.”