I saw none of it. Of course I looked out as I was carried over the East River but I couldn’t believe I was really there. It was as if I was sitting in some sort of prison and the tinted glass of the car window was a silent television screen that I was glimpsing out of the corner of my eye. If you had told me, a year ago, that I would one day arrive here in a chauffeur-driven car, I would have laughed in your face. But the view meant nothing. I had torn open the envelope. I had taken out a few sheets of paper and two photographs. I was looking at the face of the person I had come to kill. My first thoughts had been wrong. My target was not a man.
Her name was Kathryn Davis and she was a lawyer, a senior partner in a firm called Clarke Davenport based on Fifth Avenue. I suspected that the address was an expensive one. The first photograph was in black and white and had been taken as she stood beside a traffic light. She was a serious-looking woman with a square face and light brown hair cut in a fringe. I would have guessed she was in her mid-thirties. She was wearing glasses that only made her look more severe. There was something quite bullish about her. I could easily imagine her tearing someone apart in court. In the second photograph she was smiling. This one was in colour and generally she was more relaxed, waving at someone who was not in the shot. I wondered which Kathryn Davis I would meet. Which one would be easier to kill?
There was a newspaper article attached:
NY LAWYER THREATENED
In Red Knot Valley, Nevada, she’s a heroine – but New York lawyer Kathryn Davis claims she has received death threats in Manhattan, where she lives and works.
Ms Davis represents two hundred and twelve residents of the Red Knot community, who have come together in a class action against the multinational Pacific Ridge Mining Company. They claim that millions of tonnes of mining waste have seeped into their ecosystem, killing their fish, poisoning their crops and causing widespread flooding. Pacific Ridge, which has denied the claim, owns several “open pit” gold mines in the area and when traces of arsenic were found in the food chain, local people were quick to cry foul. It has taken 37-year-old Kathryn Davis two years to gather her evidence but she believes that her clients will be awarded damages in excess of one billion dollars when the case comes to court next month.
“It’s not been an easy journey,” says mother-of-two Ms Davis. “My telephone has been bugged. I have been followed in the street. I have received hate mail that makes threats against me and which I have passed to the police. But I am not going to let myself be intimidated. What happened in Red Knot is a national scandal and I am determined to get to the truth.”
I had also been supplied with the woman’s home address – which was in West 85th Street – and a photograph of her house, a handsome building that looked out over a tree-lined street. According to her biography, she was married to a doctor. She had two children and a dog, a spaniel. She was a member of several clubs and a gym. There was a blank card at the bottom of the envelope. It contained just four words:
MUGGING. BEFORE THE WEEKEND.
It is embarrassing to remember this but I did not understand the word ‘mugging’ – I had simply never come across it – and I spent the rest of the journey worrying that the driver or Marcus would discover that I had no idea what I was meant to do. I looked up the word the next day in a bookshop and realized that Scorpia wanted this to look like a street crime. As well as killing her, I would steal money from her. That way there would be no connection with Scorpia or the gold mines at Pacific Ridge.
The driver barely spoke to me again. He pulled up in front of an old-fashioned hotel, where there were porters waiting to lift out my case and help carry it into reception. I showed my passport and handed over the credit card I had been given.
“You have a room for four nights, Mr Gregorovich,” the receptionist confirmed. That would take me to Saturday. My plane back to Italy left John F. Kennedy Airport at eleven o’clock in the morning that day.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re in room 605 on the sixth floor. Have a nice day.”
During my training, Oliver d’Arc had told me the story of an Israeli agent working under cover in Dubai. He had got into a lift with seven people. One of them had been his best friend. The others were an elderly French woman who was staying at the hotel, a blind man, a young honeymooning couple, a woman in a burka and a chambermaid. The lift doors had closed and that was the moment when he discovered that all of them – including his friend – were working for al-Qaeda. When the lift doors opened again, he was dead. I took the stairs to my floor and waited for my case to be brought up.
The room was small, clean, functional. I sat on the bed until the case came, tipped the porter and unpacked. Before I left Malagosto, Gordon Ross had supplied me with a couple of the items which he had shown us during our lessons and which he hoped would help me with my work. The first of these was a travelling alarm clock. I took it out of my suitcase and flicked a switch concealed in the back. It scanned the entire room, searching for electromagnetic signals… in other words, bugs. There weren’t any. The room was clean. Next, I took out a small tape recorder, which I stuck to the back of the fridge. When I left the room, it would record anyone who came in.
At ten o’clock exactly, there were three knocks on the door. I went over and opened it to find an elderly, grey-haired man, smartly dressed in a suit with a coat hanging open. He had a neat beard, also grey. If you had met him in the street you might have thought he was a professor or perhaps an official in a foreign embassy.
“Mr Gregorovich?” he asked.
It was all so strange. I was still getting used to being called “Mr”. I nodded. “You’re Marcus?”
He didn’t answer that. “This is for you,” he said, handing me a parcel, wrapped in brown paper. “I’ll call back tomorrow night at the same time. By then, I hope, you’ll have everything planned out. OK?”
“Right,” I said.
“Nice meeting you.”
He left. I took the parcel over to the bed and opened it. The size and weight had already told me what I was going to find inside and, sure enough, there it was – a Smith & Wesson 4546, an ugly but efficient semi-automatic pistol that looked old and well used. The serial number had been filed off, making it impossible to trace. I checked the clip. It had been delivered with six bullets. So there it was. I had the target. I had the weapon. And I had just four days to make the kill.
The following morning, I stood outside the offices of Clarke Davenport, which were located on the nineteenth floor of a skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan, quite close to the huge, white marble structure of St Patrick’s Cathedral. This was quite useful to me. A church is one of the few places in a city where it is possible to linger without looking out of place. From the steps, I was able to examine the building opposite at leisure, watching the people streaming in and out of the three revolving doors, wondering if I might catch sight of Kathryn Davis among them. I was glad she did not appear. I was not sure if I was ready for this yet. Part of me was worried that I never would be.
The secret of a successful kill is to know your target. That was what I had been taught. You have to learn their movements, their daily routine, the restaurants where they eat, the friends they meet, their tastes, their weaknesses, their secrets. The more you know, the easier it will be to find a time and an opportunity and the less chance there will be of making a mistake. You might not think I would learn a great deal from staring at a building for five hours, but at the end of that time I felt myself connected to it. I had taken note of the CCTV cameras. I had counted how many policemen had walked past on patrol. I had seen the maintenance men go in and had noted which company they worked for.