The Steel Shark

Chapter 12

Avi put on his white dress gloves and picked up two cardboard boxes. One box contained a drone, the other a camera, batteries, and a tiny tripod. Perfectly normal devices for a photographer to possess. And that’s what he was posing as — a photographer. Not just any photographer either, but one who had been hired to use a drone to film tonight’s gala at the Natural History Museum hosted by Blue Dreams.

To get the job, he’d had to locate the original photographer hired by Blue Dreams and kill him. Now he would take the man’s place. Simple.

Avi had trained in up close and personal combat, but had lost his taste for it. Now, he preferred to work remotely, to avoid the touch and the smells and the cleanup. He’d made an exception for the photographer, because Avi had no time to set the job up properly. It must be done quickly.

The contract had come via standard online channels. He’d not been surprised by the job. He’d been expecting someone to be contacted from the moment he’d heard of the attempt on the prince’s life. Perhaps Tesla had been trying to kill the prince and had accidentally killed his bodyguard, and this contract was in revenge for that act. Perhaps someone had been trying to kill Tesla and had failed. Either way, Avi would complete his task.

Still holding on to the boxes, he rotated his left shoulder. A bullet had damaged his rotator cuff. Surgery and physical therapy had never put it right. He’d spent the previous day in Calvert Vaux Park hunched over a remote control, becoming familiar with this type of drone and its limitations, then thrown that drone into a dumpster so it couldn’t be traced to him. He would use the original photographer’s drone — covered with the man’s fingerprints and DNA.

His shoulder ached from the unaccustomed position and tension. Weight training kept his wounded shoulder strong, but nothing stopped the pain. Painkillers would have helped, but he’d forbidden himself from ever taking them. Drugs were a weakness, and he abhorred weakness in himself, even as he expected it in others.

He stepped out of his room at the Grand Central Hyatt and let the door fall closed behind him. This room was close to his quarry, expensive enough it would seem an unlikely place for a man like him to stay and not so expensive he needed a complicated cover identity. His driver’s license had an address in Lincoln, Nebraska, and his credit card bills went there, too. No one ever asked him about Nebraska. In fact, most people’s eyes glazed over when he mentioned it, making Lincoln the perfect cover city.

He wore a nondescript gray trench coat over a black suit. His shiny shoes were forgettable, as was his face. He’d made himself even more nonthreatening with a blond wig, a straw fedora, and round hipster glasses. People looked right through him, and they always had. As a young man, he’d hated it, but now it was his greatest gift.

Footfalls silent against the thick carpet, he walked to the elevator. With one white-gloved fingertip, he pressed the down button. A woman in a red cocktail dress breathed out alcohol fumes next to him, and he held his breath as he waited for the car. She looked like she wanted to talk, then took in his glasses and his bland expression and changed her mind. That boded well for his disguise.

A few minutes later, he was walking briskly uptown toward the Natural History Museum. A yellow cab honked, and car exhaust fouled the air. Other pedestrians jostled by with their own odors. He walked past Grand Central Terminal without sparing it a glance, his straw fedora tilted down to shadow his face from its surveillance cameras.

Based on the instructions emailed to the photographer he’d murdered, he needed to be at the event a half hour early to set up his camera and drone. He had plenty of extra batteries and an external charger, plus a special item he’d secreted in a flat gray box next to the emergency exit the day before, when he’d mapped his methods of egress from the building.

He tripped up the stairs where, with a smile, he presented the dead man’s credentials, submitted to wanding with a metal detector, and allowed his boxes to be opened and searched. He was just a simple geek come to film the event, and he had nothing to hide. The bored security guard bought into that theory, too, and barely looked at him.

No one even looked at him twice as he walked up to the second floor, behind the tail of the giant blue whale. He was here to film the event, to watch Tesla, and to search for his moment. No one needed to worry about him.

Until he wanted them to.