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.
CHAPTER 66
Arlington, Virginia, USA
Friday
12:30 EST
Ferguson sat, chewing quietly, at a corner table in the lounge of his gentleman’s club. He was enjoying his favourite meal, a steak tartare accompanied by a large glass of Burgundy. He had his phone switched to silent so that he could eat his food without interruption. Growing older Ferguson had discovered he preferred to do more and more things alone. Too much of his life had been spent in the company of idiots for him to waste his remaining years. He particularly liked to eat by himself without having to chat business or banalities between swallows.
His phone flashed, but Ferguson ignored it. The club was mostly empty, just a handful of retirement-age men like himself spread throughout the grand mahogany-panelled room. There was a huge real fire roaring in the marble fireplace set into one wall. The club was his personal retreat, and he had been frequenting it for nearly two decades, watching the other faces grow older, the waistlines wider, and the conversation quieter.
Ferguson felt tired. He hadn’t been sleeping that well. He maintained a persona of utter calm, and for the vast majority of the time that calm was genuine, but there were occasions when his interior was not quite as steady as his exterior led people to believe. With so much at stake and playing so close to the line it was hardly surprising.
It almost defied belief that Tesseract had managed to stay alive so long. But, Ferguson reasoned, in his own past he had received his fair share of good fortune with operations, so he supposed it was only natural to have such bad luck with this one.
Ferguson placed another piece of uncooked meat into his mouth and chewed. He hoped that it was only a matter of time before Tesseract and Sumner were dead, and, once he no longer had to worry about some assassin who refused to die, he could look forward to a very rosy retirement. Just so long as he got his hands on that flash drive.
Sitting on the bottom of the seabed was at least a hundred million dollars’ worth of technology. Ferguson was
