Caitlin floated down the stairs, using a technique she had studied under the Ninjutsu master Harunaka Hoshino, who had trained her to cross a nightingale floor with a minimum of noise. There was no way to eliminate the singing of the boards, but Hoshino taught her to quieten its chirping. The stairs of the old French residence were no challenge after that.
She paused on the second last step. The house was dark, the power grid having failed long ago, but with her NVGs she could make out a weak, fluttering light emanating from under two of the four doors on this floor. She stilled herself, becoming as stonelike as a human being could, and opening all of her senses wide to let the world rush in.
She smelt old food. Meat gone cold. And coffee.
A body shifted and rolled over on the floor nearby, lifting up slightly, and settling back down with a light thump.
A sheet or blanket rustled.
A wind-up clock ticked.
In one of the lighted rooms a page turned.
Every hair on Caitlin’s body bristled, in an ancient autonomic response to danger – a hangover from her animal ancestors.
She glided down the hallway to the door behind which she knew at least one man was awake and reading. Again, she settled into stillness and allowed the life of the building – just a soft heartbeat and a murmured breath here, at this dead hour – to flow into her.
Another page turned and she heard mumbling in Arabic from the same room:
Caitlin visualised the small room on the other side of the door. A single bedroom, probably given to a child in happier days. A window overlooking the street behind. No connecting doors to either room beside it.
She examined the handle. An old-fashioned brass knob without a keyhole. There could be a latch on the other side, but of that she could not be certain.
There was only one thing for it. Caitlin sheathed her fighting knife. Powered down and raised her night-vision goggles. And waited.
The mumbling and page turning continued.
She stood, motionless, for six minutes until her opportunity arrived – another jet, roaring close overhead within a mile. As the whining howl reached its maximum intensity, she calmly reached out, opened the door, got a sight picture of one man-young and shirtless, sitting up in a small bed, leaning against a pillow, reading, and then looking up at her, all innocence and dawning bewilderment as the assassin raised a hand-tooled, frequency-shifting silenced pistol and squeezed the trigger twice.
Two muted clacks, almost like a stapler, and the subsonic.300 Whisper rounds left the muzzle of the weapon at about 980 feet per second, slowing only fractionally as they entered his brainpan and scattered the contents all over the room.
She swept the space automatically, but already knew it to be empty. A quick puff to blow out his candle, after which she pulled the door closed and turned down towards the next lighted room.
This one was silent. No muttering. No page turning. Again she waited.
Closer to the stairwell this time she could hear at least three voices down on the ground floor. Two spoke in rapid-fire Arabic; one was slower, polished, but heavily accented.
Okay, that was a bitch. She’d been hoping to find him in bed, but filtering out his voice, she did determine that Baumer’s German accent was not part of that conversation, which was the only talking in the house at the moment.
Caitlin returned to her vigil at the door. The flutter of a light leaking out told her there was a candle inside. She concentrated, leaning her ear to the wooden panelling, and waiting. After three minutes she was rewarded with a brief snore.
No jet fighters conveniently appeared to cover the sounds of murder this time. But when the voices downstairs rose and broke into laughter, she was able to repeat her actions of a few minutes earlier. Coolly opening the door, lining up a head shot, and double-tapping her victim – a slightly overweight, balding man who had fallen asleep with a pair of headphones plugged into an iPod. His body shuddered violently as the 250-grain bullets shredded his neocortex. Dousing this second candle, she plunged the floor back into darkness before refitting the NVGs.
Two other rooms remained on this level. According to the building plans, they were larger, possibly capable of taking more than one small bed. Caitlin moved to the door through which she could hear the loudest snoring.
She sniffed and caught the faintest trace of an earthy, familiar smell…
Inside she found three men, all asleep on the floor. There being no beds or other furniture, they had balled up clothes or used their bags to serve as pillows. Caitlin observed them until she was certain they were deeply asleep. She withdrew the surveillance device, and then quietly swapped out her mag, which unfortunately only ran to six rounds. It was one of the drawbacks of using the bespoke no-name handgun.
This time, however, she kept the goggles powered up as she eased through the door and closed it behind her, covering the three prone forms all the time. A damp towel lay on the floor and she carefully toed it along the gap between the bottom of the door and the floorboards.
Then she quickly and methodically executed every man in the room.
Only the last one came awake, and then only enough to prop himself up one elbow and squint into the darkness. His sudden movement put her aim off and the first bullet struck him in the throat. Caitlin took two silent steps towards him and cut off his gargling death rattle with her last shot.
