American, and Grigory the Snake.
'Yes?'
'There is another job,' Plekhanov said.
Ruzhyo nodded at the speaker, even though there was no visual link. 'I understand,' he said.
'I shall contact you later to supply the details.'
'I am ready.'
Plekhanov disconnected the link. Ruzhyo clipped the com unit back to his belt, adjusting it slightly. He was used to the weight of a gun on that hip, and even a small gun was much heavier than the little communications device, but he carried no gun now. This was not Chechnya nor Russia, where he had official standing. Here, you normally did not carry weapons, unless you were police or some sort of governmental agent, especially in this city. Guns were banned here. They had a statue in a park somewhere, made of metal from melted guns. Besides, he was not a man who felt naked without a pistol on his belt. He knew a dozen ways to kill somebody using his hands, or a stick, or other available materials. He was well trained in such things. Yes, he would obtain a gun when it was needed, but unless he was working, no.
In a land of sheep, even a toothless wolf is king.
Another job. Fine. He was ready. He was always ready.
The secure line bleeped, and Mora Sullivan smiled as she waved her hand over the phone to activate it. The unit was wireless, shielded, and its transmissions and receptions encoded. The signal was routed and rerouted a dozen times. Each new call took different pathways in a random pattern through the net and comsats and back, so that tracing the unit to her location would be impossible. And her outgoing vox signal was scrambled — without a coded receiver, the binary code could not be translated. The speed, pitch, tone and cadence of her speech were electronically altered by her computer, so that on the other end of the connection, she sounded male, with a deep Midwestern American TV announcer's voice. The effect on a listener was that of a powerful middle-age man who had perhaps smoked or drunk too much at one time. The vox-scrambler was good enough so there was no hint of electronic trickery in the sound it produced, and it would fool the most sophisticated voxprint reader attempting to match it to her own. Not that it would ever come to that.
'Yes?'
'You know who this is?'
It was Luigi Sampson, Genaloni's enforcer. 'I know who this is,' she said.
'Would you be available to perform a service for us in the near future?'
'I can make myself available.'
'Good. If you would stand by for the next week or so, we will pay your customary advance against the service fee.'
The Selkie smiled. Her standby advance was twenty-five thousand dollars per day, whether she did a job or not. A hundred and seventy-five thousand just to be available for a week in case somebody decided upon a target was not a bad bit of change. Her fee for a job itself varied according to the complexity and danger involved; a quarter of a million was her starting price. If the client came up with a target, she would deduct the standby from the total payment. She wasn't greedy. And Genaloni was one of her best customers, worth two million to her last year. Another six or eight months and she would be able to retire, to leave the game. She had almost enough put away to do so now, pushing ten million, which had always been her goal. With that much, she could spend a million a year in earned interest and never have to touch the principal. And there she would be, not yet thirty, wealthy, able to go anywhere she pleased, to do anything she wanted. Nobody would have a clue who she had been in her previous life; nobody would ever suspect the petite red-haired Irishwoman, daughter of an IRA man who didn't have two nickels to rub together when he died, of being the Selkie, the highest-paid freelance assassin on the planet. Besides her current identity, she had paper and electronic trails already laid for her new life, so that should her background and wealth ever be questioned, they would easily pass inspection.
Her father's early lessons with a gun or knife or bomb had certainly paid off. Of course, he probably wouldn't be pleased at some of the people she'd worked for since he'd died, but his cause was not hers. Once the British decided to leave Ireland to its own sorrows, that whole long-running mess had ceased to have any meaning, even though the players refused to just quit and leave it at that. Something that established just didn't go away, even if its reason for being did.
Her mother, bless her, had been a hardheaded Scot, and had taught her children, all seven of them, to value a shilling.
Sullivan smiled again. That was where she had come up with her
Nobody knew who she was. She had never met a client face-to-face, save once, and that client was no longer among the living. She was a faceless assassin, one that most people thought a man, and the best there was at it, too.
Of that her father would have been proud, she was sure.
And, it seemed, she was about to go out on the hunt again.
7
One of the reasons Alex Michaels liked the condo in which he lived was the size of the attached garage. It was a two-car unit, and there was plenty of room for his hobby, which had been, for the last month, a thirteen- year-old Plymouth Prowler. It had replaced a ‘77 MG Midget that he'd spent a year and half rebuilding. He'd enjoyed that, gotten a nice profit for it, but the little English car couldn't hold a candle to the Prowler for looks.
Designed by the legendary Tom Gale for Chrysler as a concept car in the early nineties, the Prowler finally saw production four years later. It was essentially a slicked-up hot rod, a rear-wheel-drive, two-seat convertible roadster, painted a brilliant deep rich color known as Prowler purple. Since it wasn't old enough to be a classic, it had all the bells and whistles of a street car — air bags, power disc brakes, power steering and even a power rear window — but what it really was was a big kid's toy. It also had a manual transmission, smaller tires on the front than on the rear, exposed front wheels with just hints of fenders and a tachometer mounted on the steering column.
He'd been too young for the glory days of hot-rodding in the late forties and early fifties, days portrayed in rebel movies old before he was born in 1970. But his grandfather had told him stories. Told him tales about the Eisenhower years when he'd owned a primer-gray ‘32 Ford he'd souped up and taken to drag-race a quarter mile Sunday mornings in the summers on the cracked concrete runways of a shutdown airport. He'd filled Michael's mind's eye with chopped and channeled Chevys and Mercurys and Dodges that sometimes wore twenty hand- rubbed coats of candy-apple-red metalflake paint, with hubcaps called spinners or moons or fake wires. Showed him the stacks of old hot-rod magazines that had gone dry and yellow with time, but whose fading pictures still revealed the cars. He had smiled happily as he'd told a young Alex Michaels about impromptu races in the middle of town at every stoplight on any given Friday night, and of drive-in malt shops and rock and roll music blasting from AM radios, when gasoline had cost twenty cents a gallon for ethyl and nobody who was anybody walked anywhere when they could drive.
Some kids grew up wanting to be cowboys in the Old West of the 1870's. Michaels had wanted to be James Dean in the post-World War II 1950's…
He smiled as he rubbed creamy-gray degreaser into his palms, then over the rest of his hands. The stuff had that sharp, perfumed stink that reminded him of Grandaddy Michaels, who had started to teach him how to work on cars when he'd been fourteen.
You could have eaten off the floor in the old man's shop, so clean had it been, with its big red rolling-chest of Craftsman and Snap-On tools always at the ready. The old man could strip an engine, drop a transmission, break
