“Madonna with a snake in your teeth. I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the magazine than you realize.”
“Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”
“Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”
Marty looked skeptical.
Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this. Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said, holding her close.
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing. ”
After midnight.
The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn-stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information about potential threats to the well-being of those who sleep beyond the brick and stone walls.
The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.
Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and directly is viewed as honest and harmless, is not remarked upon, and is later forgotten altogether.
A cold northwest breeze.
A moonless sky.
A suspicious owl monotonously repeats his single question.
The house is Georgian, brick with white columns. The property is encircled by a spear-point iron fence.
The driveway gate stands open and appears to have been left in that position for many years. The pace and peaceful quality of life in Kansas City cannot long sustain paranoia.
As if he owns the place, he follows the circular driveway to the portico at the main entrance, climbs the steps, and pauses at the front door to unzip a small breast pocket in his leather jacket. From the pocket he extracts a key.
Until this moment, he was not aware that he was carrying it. He doesn’t know who gave it to him, but at once he knows its purpose. This has happened to him before.
The key fits the dead-bolt lock.
He opens the door on a dark foyer, steps across the threshold into the warm house, and withdraws the key from the lock. He closes the door softly behind him.
After putting the key away, he turns to a lighted alarm-system programming board next to the door. He has sixty seconds from the moment he opened the door to punch in the correct code to disarm the system; otherwise, police will be summoned. He remembers the six-digit disarming sequence just when it’s required, punches it in.
He withdraws another item from his jacket, this time from a deep inside pocket: a pair of extremely compact night-vision goggles of a type manufactured for the military and unavailable for purchase by private citizens. They amplify even the meager available light so efficiently, by a factor of ten thousand, that he is able to move through dark rooms as confidently as if all of the lamps were lit.
Ascending the stairs, he removes the Heckler & Koch P7 from the oversize shoulder holster under his jacket. The extended magazine contains eighteen cartridges.
A silencer is tucked into a smaller sleeve of the holster. He frees it, and then quietly screws it onto the muzzle of the pistol. It will guarantee eight to twelve relatively quiet shots, but it will deteriorate too fast to allow him to expend the entire magazine without waking others in the house and neighborhood.
Eight shots should be more than he needs.
The house is large, and ten rooms open off the T-shaped second-floor hall, but he does not have to search for his targets. He is as familiar with this floor plan as with the street layout of the city.
Through the goggles, everything has a greenish cast, and white objects seem to glow with a ghostly inner light. He feels as if he is in a science-fiction movie, an intrepid hero exploring another dimension or an alternate earth that is identical to ours in all but a few crucial respects.
He eases open the master-bedroom door, enters. He approaches the king-size bed with its elaborate Georgian headboard.
Two people are asleep under the glowing greenish blankets, a man and woman in their forties. The husband lies on his back, snoring. His face is easily identifiable as that of the primary target. The wife is on her side, face half buried in her pillow, but the killer can see enough to ascertain that she is the secondary target.
He puts the muzzle of the P7 against the husband’s throat.
The cold steel wakes the man, and his eyes pop open as if they have the counterbalanced lids of a doll’s eyes.
The killer pulls the trigger, blowing out the man’s throat, raises the muzzle, and fires two rounds point-blank in his face. The gunfire sounds like the soft spitting of a cobra.
He walks around the bed, making no sound on the plush carpet.
Two bullets in the wife’s exposed left temple complete his assignment, and she never wakes at all.
For a while he stands by the bed, enjoying the incomparable tenderness of the moment. Being present at a death is to share one of the most intimate experiences anyone will ever know in this world. After all, no one except treasured family members and beloved friends are welcome at a deathbed, to witness a dying person’s final breath. Therefore, the killer is able to rise above his gray and miserable existence only in the act of execution, for then he has the honor of sharing that most profound of all experiences, more solemn and significant than birth. In those precious magic moments when his targets perish, he establishes relationships, meaningful bonds with other human beings,
Although these victims are always strangers to him—and in this case, he does not even know their names— the experience can be so poignant that tears fill his eyes. Tonight he manages to remain in complete control of himself.
Reluctant to let the brief connection end, he places one hand tenderly against the woman’s left cheek, which is unsoiled by blood and still pleasantly warm. He walks around the bed again and gives the dead man’s shoulder a gentle squeeze, as if to say,
He wonders who they were. And why they had to die.
Down he goes through the ghostly green house full of green shadows and radiant green forms. In the foyer he pauses to unscrew the silencer from the weapon and to holster both pieces.
He removes the goggles with dismay. Without the lenses, he is transported from that magical alternate earth, where for a brief while he felt a kinship with other human beings, to this world in which he strives so hard to belong but remains forever a man apart.
Exiting the house, he closes the door but doesn’t bother locking it. He doesn’t wipe off the brass knob, for he isn’t concerned about leaving fingerprints.
The cold breeze soughs and whistles through the portico.
With ratlike scraping and rustling, crisp dead leaves scurry in packs along the driveway.
The sentinel trees now seem to be asleep at their posts. The killer senses that no one watches him from any of the blank black windows along the street. And even the interrogatory voice of the owl is silenced.
Still moved by what he has shared, he does not hum his little nonsense tune on the return trip to the car.
By the time he drives to the motor hotel where he is staying, he feels once more the weight of the oppressive
