The Killer

SIXTY-THREE

Nicosia, Cyprus

Thursday

23:49 CET

Rebecca sat on the end of the bed, flicking through the hotel’s satellite-television channels. It was a bizarre mix of both English and Greek language channels with local Cypriot TV. Tesseract was packing his backpack. Her curiosity had made her ask what the equipment was for and, to her surprise, he’d told her. First there was a portable high-capacity hard disk to clone the contents of computer hard drives. Next a transmitter, radio receiver, and tape recorder to bug a phone should he not find what they needed. Items she didn’t need explained were screwdrivers, pliers, a wrench, hexagon keys, pencils, and paper. Lock-picking tools, a glass cutter, and a suction cup were placed together in a separate small bag, which was then added to the backpack.

“Do you think you’ll need all that?” Rebecca asked.

He shook his head. “But better I take what I might not need than find myself without what I do need.”

When everything was securely packed away, he took a set of clothes with him into the bathroom and closed the door. It wasn’t closed all the way, and through the crack she could see his reflection as he changed. She glimpsed his bare arm, lean but with ridges of hard muscle. She continued watching to sneak a peek at the rest of his body but instead flinched at what she saw.

She caught a glance of his torso and the scars that marked his flesh. A huge circular bruise the size of a fist dominated the center of his chest. She saw two scars that could have been bullet wounds and more that she guessed were caused by blades. There were others, but she didn’t look long enough to identify them. Rebecca turned her head away, shocked and horrified.

“That pretty?”

She looked up and saw he was looking at her through the mirror. Her face flushed with embarrassment, and she averted her eyes. Before she had worked up the courage to respond, he closed the door fully. She heard the bolt slide across.

He came out a few minutes later, and she watched him take the folding knife from the bedside table and slip it into his pocket. He’d bought it from town. Trying to find a gun would have attracted too much attention, he’d told her.

“I expect you hate instant coffee as much as I do,” Rebecca said. “So I made us both a tea.”

He took the mug from her and sipped. It must have been okay because he took a longer sip a second later.

“I still think I should go with you,” she said.

He didn’t look at her. “I work alone.”

“That hardly matters. I-”

“Besides,” he said, interrupting her. “It’s safer for you if you stay here.”

She sighed. It was useless trying to argue with him. He was like a child. Stubborn and narrow minded, too used to doing things his own way to accept that someone else might be able to help.

“Remember,” he said, “don’t leave the room until morning. If I’m not back by sunrise, something has happened to me, and I’ll never be coming back. Get off the island straightaway and disappear. Take a boat not a plane-”

“I know, I know. We’ve been through this once already.”

“And we’ll keep going through it until I’m convinced you understand everything.”

“It would be nice if you could give me some credit.”

He looked at her for a moment. “This is what I do.”

Rebecca could see she was breaking through the wall he surrounded himself with, even if the only way to penetrate it was to make him lose patience. She wanted to chip away more at that wall, but instead she found herself saying something else.

“And why do you do it?”

He looked at her blankly. “What?”

“I said, why do you do what you do?”

Rebecca examined his face while he struggled with her question. She’d expected some kind of quick retort or dismissal or downright refusal to answer. Not this. He looked confused, pained even, and she instantly regretted asking him.

“It’s okay,” she said, trying to lighten the mood. “You don’t have to say.”

“It’s the only thing I’ve ever been any good at.”

She could see that it hadn’t been a justification or even an admission. It had been a confession. He turned his head away and grabbed the backpack from the bed. She watched him, finding herself starting to see the man instead of the killer.

“How do you manage to sleep at night?”

“First I close my eyes,” he explained, deadpan. “The rest comes naturally.”

Her nostrils flared. “I thought you didn’t make jokes.”

“I’m learning.”

She saw the trace of smugness in his face. He was pleased with himself, but she saw his responses for the avoidance they were. “Tell me your name.”

“What?”

“I’ve known you for almost a week,” she said. “And I still don’t have an actual name to call you.”

Rebecca had wanted to ask him before but had never been brave enough to do so. Now, she found she didn’t need courage. She saw the vulnerability in him, the fear she had put into him by making him talk about himself.

She watched him fidgeting with the backpack, acting as if he was checking something. “You don’t need to call me anything.”

“Just tell me.”

He stopped what he was pretending to do and looked up at her. “If you want to call me something, call me Jack.”

“That’s not your real name.”

“I go by whatever name is on the passport I’m using.”

She frowned. “So I should start calling you Jack?”

He slung the backpack over his shoulder. “At least until I change passports.”

Rebecca stood up and faced him from across the bed. “If you go by so many other names, what difference does it make if you tell me your real name?”

“I am whoever my passport says I am,” he explained. “I’m more convincing if I think of myself as that person.”

“You say that like you’re trying to convince yourself more than you are me.”

“A name in itself means nothing.” He was speaking louder now, angry but trying to hide it. “No one alive knows my real name. That’s the way it’s going to stay.”

“What does family call you?”

He didn’t respond. She could’ve guessed he wouldn’t.

“What about your friends, then, do they know your real name, or do they all call you the same false name, or do different ones know you by different names?”

She used the remote to mute the TV while she waited for the answer. He adjusted a strap on the backpack and reslung it over his shoulder. He didn’t answer her question.

“God,” she said, understanding. “How can you live like that?”

“It’s better than dying,” he answered simply. “Or having someone innocent die because of me.” He headed for the door. “It’s getting late,” he said. “I have to go.”

Even with less than state-of-the-art lock picks, getting through Olympus’s back door took seconds. Victor had seen no evidence of alarms, so there was no need to disable the building’s power. There were no street lamps in this part of town, and the streets were deserted. Victor slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He stood in the darkness by the door, listening. He remained motionless until he was sure there was no sound except his for own breathing.

He flicked on a slim flashlight and used its beam to examine the interior. He was in a warehouse space that was empty but for a few crates stacked together in one corner. He could see an armchair, TV, and table behind them-someone’s own little hideaway-but there was no one there. Making no noise, Victor moved to the far end, keeping close to a wall at all times. A narrow set of steps led up to offices above the warehouse. He took them slowly, one careful step at a time.

The office wasn’t locked. In the beam of the flashlight he could see a few desks and a couple of computers-workspace for two or three staff members. There was a tall filing cabinet against one wall and a small safe buried into the brickwork. A newspaper sat folded next to one of the monitors.

He went to the filing cabinet first, working his way through the drawers from bottom to top. There were invoices, purchase orders, delivery notes, licenses, correspondence, memorandums. He looked for specific dates-his past contracts-any sizeable sum of money that was handled just before or just after those dates. He took anything that looked remotely useful.

He copied the contents of the two desktop computers to the portable hard drive before turning his attention to the safe. If there was anything else to find, it would be in there. In his backpack he had a slim but powerful laptop, installed onto which was a special piece of software designed specifically for cracking electronic key codes. The software conducted a brute-force attack through a wireless connection, interfering with the lock at its programming port before running a continuous string of numbers until the combination was found. Victor had downloaded the software from the company’s Web site at considerable expense, but without an effective countermeasure it was worth its price. Though against the traditional dial-face combination lock that Victor faced it was completely useless.

The safe looked thirty years old. Thankfully it looked like a group 2-the most common of the two safe types, and the least secure. There would no countermeasures he would have to worry about, no antitamper acid release to destroy the contents. Still, without the proper tools, it could take him hours to crack. Trust a CIA front company to have a safe almost as old as he was. The powerful laptop in his backpack was no more use to him than a paperweight.

Which left Victor with three ways of breaking into the safe: explosives, drilling, or lock manipulation. He had neither explosives nor a drill, so he was going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Victor laid out the high-tech tools for the job: a pad of graph paper, a pencil, and a stethoscope.

Traditional combination locks all worked in the same tried and tested manner. When the dial was turned, an attached spindle turned the drive cam, which then turned the combination wheels. Into each wheel a notch was cut, which when the correct combination was dialed, would all align perfectly. Resting just above the wheels was a small metal bar, called the fence. When all the notches aligned, the fence fell into the created gap, allowing the bolt securing the safe door to slide across and the safe to be opened.

Victor took off his jacket and folded it to use as a makeshift cushion. He was going to be kneeling down for a long time.

The first step in cracking the safe was to determine how many wheels the safe contained. Each wheel behind the dial corresponded to a single number in the combination. Just like the wheels, the drive cam had a notch cut into it, for the fence to fall into when the correct combination was dialed. Between the fence and the door bolt was a lever, which, as the drive cam was turned, would make a small clicking sound when the nose of the lever made contact with the drive cam’s notch.

Victor used the stethoscope and listened carefully for the clicks-one when the nose of the lever fells into the notch, called the right click, and a second when the nose exited the notch, called the left click. The numbers on the dial corresponded to these clicks, and the space between them was called the contact area.

Once he had determined where the contact area was, Victor set the dial to the exact opposite position, known as parking the wheels. Then, slowly, he turned the dial clockwise. Each time the dial passed the parking position there was a small click. Victor counted how many clicks there were before they ceased. Victor counted three clicks, one for each wheel, so he knew he was dealing with a safe that had a three-number combination.

Victor reset the safe by turning the dial clockwise several times. He then parked the wheels at zero and slowly turned it counterclockwise. Each time there was a click, one for both the left and right side of the notch, he plotted the numbers on a graph until he had completed a single circumference.

He started the process again, resetting the wheels, slowly turning the dial counterclockwise, but starting at three numbers counterclockwise from zero. This way meant that the contact area where the lever and notch met would be different. He again plotted the position of the clicks on the graph.

Victor repeated the process at intervals of three until all the points on the dial had been plotted. Finally, the laborious and painstaking process was finished and he had two graphs, one showing the positions of the left clicks, the other showing the positions of the right clicks. He joined up the points until he had two zigzags.

The numbers plotted on the two graphs converged exactly at three points, one for each wheel and therefore combination number. Victor made a note of these three numbers and wrote them down in all six different combination possibilities. He tried them out one at a time. On the fourth combination the safe opened. He looked at his watch. It had taken him seventy minutes. Not bad.

Inside the safe were five taped stacks of cash, a folder, and a bottle of gin. Each stack of cash equaled five thousand euros. Victor placed them in the backpack and opened the folder. It was full of files. They followed the cash. He exited the office and began descending the stairs.

Paperwork had never been Victor’s strong point, but the broker would be able to dissect the files in no time and find out what they needed. He was glad he’d teamed up with her. Alone he would have never gotten this far. He would still be running blind, going nowhere, waiting for the CIA to find him. Several times she had proved herself to be an extremely valuable associate-partner even, though it felt strange to accept that she was.

He didn’t want to admit it, but she was more than just that. Not a friend yet, but a companion, someone he actually wanted to talk to, though he still found it difficult to communicate with her. This was partly because of the effect she had on him and partly because of Victor’s nature. When he played a role, he could be articulate and charming with the opposite sex if it was necessary, but when playing himself he was clumsy and awkward. He was badly out of practice, though he had never really been in practice.

He’d been denying the attraction, but he knew it was there. His gaze lingered on her whenever she wasn’t looking. The glimpses of her body made his pulse quicken more than any hooker ever had. But it wasn’t just the desire she stirred in him. She was the only woman in his life, ever in his life, who knew what he really was, and even knowing that she didn’t look at him with disgust. Before he’d left he even saw empathy in her face as she looked at him, even if compassion didn’t normally sit well with his loner survivalist mentality.

Victor had told himself over and over that he didn’t need anyone in his life, for anything. Maybe that had been the case once, but maybe it was wrong now. Or perhaps it had always just been easier to convince himself that he didn’t need anyone than to admit the truth.

He exited the warehouse, realizing he was looking forward to seeing her when he got back to the hotel. He frowned. It was a bad idea, Victor told himself, don’t go there.

Only he wasn’t listening to that particular voice anymore.