CHAPTER 1

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-24268629.post-1144868216901615812006-04-12T19:47:00.000+01:002006-04-12T19:56:56.930+01:00CHAPTER 1She strode purposely across the rooftop. She was not going to be waylaid. Her gloved hand stroked the jagged appendage at her side. Helena had always preferred knives to guns. Knives did not misfire. Knives did not need reloading. Knives left the errors up to the people who wielded them and Helena was not in the habit of making errors. Nor was she a romantic. She was also carrying a gun. Sometimes her job was difficult. Tonight it would be easy. She smoothly unclipped the rope from her belt and unsnaked it from round her waist. She took the small crossbow from her back and attached the end of the thin rope to the arrow. She fired across the gap to the next building. She could see the concrete into which the steel-tipped arrow had sunk. It was not how she planned to escape, but she had learned long ago that you could never have too many exit strategies. Helena tied the rope securely and moved quickly to the hatch that would allow her entry to this "impregnable fortress". Although she was prepared to force it open, the cigarette butts that surrounded it testified to the fact that the office smokers used it regularly and she was not surprised that it was unlocked. Lowering herself into the pitch-black corridor, she pictured the plans that she’d memorised. She inched forward to the far wall and turned right. Security was minimal. As she found the warm glow of a light seeping under the shut door that marked her target’s office she allowed herself half a smile. Two minutes and twenty-three seconds later Helena was on the fire escape. Inside the building she had left exactly one dead man gushing blood onto a green carpet that had already needed replacing. If Helena had understood why the man had to die, she might have anticipated the sniper who was waiting for the chance to end her life, but probably not. Helena was dressed all in black. The fire escape was the same colour. This alone would not have presented a problem. The true difficulty lay in geometry. The twisting structure obscured a clear view of either the head or the heart. When the shot did come, it crunched Helena’s shoulder against the wall and she felt her legs give way. She assessed her options. She could stay where she was and try to return fire; she could continue to ground level; she could re-enter the building through the fire exit one floor up or she could use the fire exit one floor down. She chose the final option. As she hurtled downwards two further shots rang out. She slid the door open with her knife and crawled in. She left a broken red trail between the fire exit and the bathroom that she swiftly located. She was glad that she had memorised the lay out of the entire building even though she had only intended to operate on the top three floors. How long had she got? How long before the scream that would accompany the discovery of the body? She felt the twin wounds that neatly bisected her shoulder – her left arm was definitely out of action for the immediate future. That was unfortunate, but one arm would be enough for a rooftop escape. She could head downwards and aim to escape via the parking lot, but she would do well to avoid all four of the security guards who were currently sweeping the building. Helena would have backed herself to eliminate them, even with an arm out of action, but mass murder is rarely the path of least resistance. She checked her watch. Helena knew the routes that each security guard habitually took and she still had eight minutes until the body would be discovered. She left the bathroom and headed for the stairs. Her mind flicked onto the question of what was so important about this job that meant that her employer had decided to go to all the trouble of having her eliminated so soon after she had completed it. She set the question aside. Her subconscious could puzzle over that if it wished. Meanwhile she would concentrate on staying alive long enough to do something about it. Upon reaching the roof without meeting anyone, Helena was thankful. For one, she drew a moral distinction between disposing of pre-acquired targets and killing people who get in the way. Two, mass casualties were untidy. Leaving a pile of bodies behind is the professional assassin’s equivalent of shoddy craftsmanship. It looked bad and it would make people less likely to use your services again. "Being killed in the middle of a job would have the same effect," thought Helena ruefully. She carefully fitted the instrument over the rope. Then, putting her right hand through the noose and twisting it tight, she flicked the catch and felt her right arm take the weight of her body. Seconds later she was on the adjacent roof. There were no fresh bullet holes in her. She was happy to be on the roof of this building, because this building was abandoned. This building was scheduled for destruction in a week or two – as soon as the final permits came through. Five minutes later Helena had left via the ground floor. Twenty-five minutes after that she was in her hotel room. Amongst the finest hotels on the planet there are many which pride themselves on luxury. They aim to have the largest beds, the softest sheets, the most extensively stocked mini-bars and the most fragrant masseuses. There are other hotels that pride themselves on their discretion. This is not the discretion of keeping private the names of the guests from any interested parties. Any hotel worth a bean will do that. The level of discretion that these hotels offer is of the "anything goes" variety. The clientele pay huge sums to ensure that anything and everything that takes place within the walls of the hotel and within their room in particular will remain within those walls. Helena could have saved those customers a lot of money. Her room was located in a dive in the seediest area of New York she could find. No one would say anything about a black clad blonde with a bullet wound in her shoulder because it was unremarkable. The various sexual depravities of celebrities and politicians would have equally gone unmentioned, but they paid their high prices uptown. Helena peeled off her black top unflinchingly. She had a doctor who would sort out her shoulder once she returned to London. Her gaze settled on the scar midway between her belly button and her left breast. That knife wound had punctured a lung and yet she’d still killed the man who had created it. He’d died gurgling blood with a mixture of awe and disbelief etched across his face. He had been 6’1. She was 5’4. He was dead. She lived. Her body held other scars, but not many. As she cleaned her wound and made herself look more like an international businesswoman and less like a career assassin, Helena wondered dryly what would have happened if some cleaner had found her body lying in a pool of blood on the marble floor of the executive washroom. A forensic investigation would have discovered that she had killed Brian Taylor. Her body would have been checked for evidence of who she was. It would not have been found. Her fingerprints would have been taken. There were no records of them anywhere on the planet. Her scars would have been noted and compared with records in criminal databases first in New York, then the rest of America, then possibly the rest of the world. There would be no matches. It would probably end there. Although any security guard or policeman with a modicum of intelligence would follow the trail of blood and find the bullets on the fire escape, or at least the evidence that shots had been fired, they would probably discreetly ignore them. They had caught the woman who had committed murder and she was dead. The police would know that the chances of capturing the sniper were non-existent and so they would follow the need for prioritisation of resources and just leave it. Helena would not leave it. She could not leave it. The people who had tried to kill her would not stop. She would have to kill the sniper and she would have to kill the person who ordered him to kill her. That might be enough. Frankly she doubted that it would be. Helena surveyed herself in the dirt-lined mirror. The smart suit that she wore gave no indication that it concealed a couple of gaping shoulder wounds. She held up her passport. It said she was Swedish. That was not too many miles from the truth. It said she was a businesswoman. Well, she was a trouble-shooter of sorts. Her name was not Victoria Lindstrom and she was a good three years younger than the age that this particular passport suggested. Her flight was uneventful. As the plane touched down at Heathrow, she felt glad of her seven-hour nap. Her shoulder ached. Two more Ibuprofen provided a temporary solution and a trip to her locker to retrieve her British-based arsenal increased her confidence. Airport security being what it was, Helena had long found it convenient to have a bag containing the tools of her trade in a locker at every airport to which she travelled. At this point in time, she had guns, bullets and knives in a locker at virtually every major airport in the world. London was a sensible base of operations for today’s career hitwoman. Helena had always found it to be a good bridge between Europe and the United States and, although she had apartments in a number of cities, London now felt like home. Although her mother still kept her bedroom for her, she hadn’t spent more than five nights there in the past nine years. Home, for Helena, was a place that no one else knew existed. ***** Three Weeks Earlier At 10:46 a.m. the phone rang. As always, Helena let the machine answer it. The slight crackle of static indicated it was one of her special calls. An English voice left a name and a number. That was all. Helena received two types of phone call. The first was rare. The second even more so. A select group of people had her actual phone number: her mother, her brother and Sophia. The other number that could be used to reach her was actually the number of a warehouse in Cleveland. If a caller did not know the correct extension, they would end up speaking to a manager, a cleaner or a security guard depending on the time of day that they rang. If they did dial the correct extension then a computer would bounce them around the world a dozen times until they reached a machine which would suggest that they had exactly six seconds to leave a message before being cut off. At random time intervals throughout the day the machine would ring Helena’s apartment and leave her any messages that it had received. Her first telephone conversation with "Ben White" – she assumed it was an alias – was fairly typical: "Ben White?" "Speaking" "You left me a message." Helena’s voice was carefully modulated. She found voice distorters tacky, but she left no hint of her Icelandic origin. "Yes. How do we do this?" "First, you give me a name. I’ll call you again in twenty-four hours if I wish to proceed. If not, you’ll never hear from me again." "The man’s name is Brian Taylor. He works for a company called Neurocorp. He’s based in New York." "Fine. Goodbye." Her initial investigations were straightforward. By four o’ clock that afternoon she had Brian Taylor’s life history on a blue A5 notepad lying on the table in front of her. There was nothing there to suggest why someone would pay One Million American Dollars to have him eliminated. Brian was born to Neil and Linda Taylor in a nondescript suburb of Chicago. He was an only child. Both his parents were dead. He had excelled at school, particularly in science, but did not enrol at any university. Instead he had worked upwards of ninety hours a week for nearly three years at a wide variety of odd jobs. Then, according to his Social Security record, he had simply stopped. For seven months after that he had not worked for a single day – or, at least, he had paid no tax on any earnings. That was six years ago. In the intervening time Brian’s life had been relentlessly nondescript. He had moved to New York and begun work for Neurocorp – a small company that specialised, according to its website, in creating technology which would 'Unleash the power of the mind'. This seemed like quite an errant boast given that the vast majority of their turnover arose from fixing software glitches on PCs that were out of warranty. The next day’s conversation was equally run of the mill: "My fee is one million American dollars. Half immediately, the other half on completion." "Of course. We have only one condition. Mr Taylor must be eliminated in his office. Other than that, we’re happy to leave all other details to you." "Fine. You won’t hear from me again. I’ll proceed when I receive confirmation that five hundred thousand dollars is in my account." Helena gave the number of an account in a Zurich bank and hung up. None of this was untoward. Helena always kept all contact between her and her clients to the minimum – even telephone conversations. Specifying locations was not common, but neither was it particularly unusual. Some potential hits had family and her client might want to make sure that these would be spared the pain of actually witnessing their loved one’s untimely demise. Sometimes a client might want to send a message to a third party by having the hit take place in a seemingly secure area. The following three weeks also passed without incident. The money was deposited almost immediately and Helena undertook a more thorough background check of Brian Taylor. She found nothing that might persuade her to change her mind. She had arrived in New York on Saturday 11th February. She spent four days detailing the minutiae of Brian’s daily routine. Then, on Thursday, she had killed him. ***** Slowly, Helena made a list of what she knew, what she could reasonable assume and what her options were. Someone wanted her dead, and she felt it was reasonable to assume that it was the same people who had hired her to kill Brian Taylor. From what she knew of them, was it likely that they would pursue her, or would they believe that they had scared her off? Her instincts led her to suspect the former. These were serious people. It was not unknown to try to assassinate the assassin, but it was still relatively rare. After all, if you have people at your disposal who you can trust to eliminate a trained killer, then you must have a pretty good reason why those same people could not carry out the original hit. The inescapable conclusion was that Brian Taylor was far more important than she had originally believed. If that was the case then he was certainly not simply a CEO of an electronics company. She silently cursed herself for not making a more thorough background check. Helena paused and started a new list. It had just two entries. 1. Who was Brian Taylor? 2. Who is Ben White? ***** The phone rang. Helena burrowed down under her duvet and then reluctantly thrust out a hand to grab her ringing tormentor. She quickly pulled it back under the covers. "Hello Helena. How’s your shoulder?" She hung up. Twenty-seven seconds later she was dressed. She grabbed one of her emergency bags and sped towards the door. She opened it and found a gun in her face. The gun was held by a tall black man. He smiled. Then he shot her.Edward Mannhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02991719408226920610noreply@blogger.com