Beads of sweat trickled down the back of his neck as he inched closer to the living room door. It was shut, just as he’d left it before departing for Austria. He imagined where he would be in the room if he’d come here to kill the apartment’s occupant. Probably waiting flush against the wall, to one side of the door, with a handgun pointing at the height of a man’s upper body. One shot into the side of the rib cage, followed a split second later by another into the temple. Or perhaps he’d be on one knee at the far end of the room, positioned behind a sturdy piece of furniture, his gun pointing at the door, ready to put rapid two-round bursts into whoever came into view.
Or maybe he was dealing with a tough amateur. He hoped not, because their lack of training made them unpredictable.
He placed a hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed the door open while keeping his body away from the doorframe and his knife low.
The room was silent.
Though that meant nothing.
More sweat ran down his back. He had to go in the room, had to decide where the man was waiting for him. If there was only one of them.
Placing his free hand against the frame, he readied himself, sucked in a lungful of air, held his breath, rocked back on his heels, and lunged through the entrance while simultaneously spinning and thrusting the knife toward the wall opposite his hand. It sliced into wood paneling. No one was there.
Yanking the knife out, he turned to face the rest of the room, expecting a bullet to strike his head as he did so.
But the room was empty.
He spent the next ten minutes making a more thorough search of his home-in wardrobes, under beds, in cupboards, as well as kicking all of the packing cases to see if any of them had increased in weight. Satisfied that there was no intruder in his home, he moved back to the living room and stared at the two windows. Outside, there were at least nine places where a man could comfortably position himself with a rifle and remove a large chunk of Will’s head-many more places farther afield, if the weapon was a military-spec sniper rifle and its owner was highly trained.
Lowering himself to the ground, he leopard-crawled along the floor, pulled both windows’ curtains shut from his prone position, crawled back along the floor, and stood. Grabbing one of the dining chairs, he positioned it in the hallway so that it was facing the front door at the other end, placed one hand on the living room light switch, the other on the room’s door handle, switched the light on, and immediately slammed the door shut.
If a man was observing the living room through binoculars or a telescopic sight, he’d know Will was home.
But Will was now in the windowless corridor, out of anyone’s sight.
He sat on the chair, stabbed the tip of the knife into its wooden arm, and stared at the front door. In the absence of complete privacy and professional assault gear, no one would be able to enter the property through the barred windows. They’d come for him through the main entrance.
He stayed like this for two hours before checking his watch. It was 9:30 P.M. He felt hungry and tired but dared not move.
He tried to keep his mind active by recalling memories-any that came to him, it didn’t matter.
He remembered a teacher announcing Will’s high school grades to the rest of his class and saying that they were good enough to take Will to England and Cambridge University; going home later that day to find four criminals holding his mother and sister hostage while they looked for cash; feeling utter fear and confusion after he’d killed the men with a knife similar to the one by his side; his older sister telling him that he had to run away; and flying to France the next morning to enlist in the Foreign Legion.
He recalled the brutal training, the feeling that his transition from boy to man was not supposed to be like this. But over time he became numb to most emotions.
Other images raced through his mind: the day he received his kepi blanc, placed it on his head, and was officially a legionnaire; earning his wings and being deployed to the Second REP; the mental and physical agony he’d felt as he underwent selection for the GCP; being given instructions by a DGSE officer and two days later placing a bomb underneath a car in Tripoli; and calling his sister from a pay phone in Marseille on the day his tour with the Legion had come to an end and her saying that she’d been wrong to tell him to run away after he killed his mother’s murderers.
Years later, he’d found out that Alistair and Patrick had covered up what he’d done.
He briefly took his eyes off the door to check the time. Nearly midnight. Outside, London was almost silent.
He remembered his four years at university and the sensation that the GCP legionnaire and DGSE hit man was gradually being turned back into someone more decent, more human. He saw himself, in his final year of studies, walking through the university’s Darwin College, clutching politics and philosophy books, and remembered the euphoric moment of feeling truly normal again.
It was the greatest feeling, and it lasted twenty-three minutes.
Up to the moment he was walking through Cambridge’s shopping district, saw a man try to grab a young woman’s handbag, watched the woman resist, saw a knife, and heard the victim yelp as she fell to the ground clutching her blood-covered tummy. He’d dropped his books, chased the man, grabbed him, and slammed him into a wall with sufficient force to not only make him unconscious but also fracture his skull.
At the moment the man’s head caved in, the euphoria had vanished.
Now, as he sat waiting for a killer to enter his home, he doubted it would ever return.
No other memories came to him. He tried to think about the operation, about what could possibly be happening, but he couldn’t concentrate. Time dragged.
Two A.M. He couldn’t hear anything now. No passing cars, nothing.
Three A.M. His body craved sleep, but he kept staring at the door, knowing that it would be in the early hours that the man would most likely come for him.
Four A.M. He heard a scream, flinched, grabbed the hilt of his knife, then released it as he realized the cry had come from an urban fox.
Five A.M. His back and shoulder muscles throbbed from lack of activity.
Six A.M. A door opened somewhere in the building, followed by rapid footsteps. Then the downstairs front door opened and closed. Will knew that it was one of his neighbors going to work-David, a recently divorced mortician who usually left at this hour and always did so in a manner that suggested he was late. Three weeks ago the chubby man, who had taken to rolling his own cigarettes and cooking his way through a famous French chef’s book, had met Will in the lobby, introduced himself, and given Will his business card “in case of need.”
Six forty. Another door opening and closing. A woman in heels. That would be Phoebe, a thirty-something art dealer who loved champagne, middleweight boxing matches, and Chinese food, and who rarely went to work without a hangover. She’d met Will in the rather embarrassing circumstances of kneeling by the letter slot in his front door one evening and screaming in a drunken voice, “I know you’re in there, you bastard! You can’t fuck me and leave me!” It was only when Will had opened the door that Phoebe had realized that Will wasn’t the previous occupant, a cad called Jim who’d sold Will the apartment in a hurry.
Six fifty. Retired major Dickie Mountjoy, former Coldstream Guards officer and now retiree, was leaving his home at exactly the same time as he did each morning. Dressed in a suit and moleskin overcoat, and always carrying an immaculately rolled umbrella regardless of conditions, he would be taking a ten-minute walk to his local newsagents, which opened at seven A.M., would purchase a copy of The Daily Telegraph, and would then march on to the Imperial War Museum, formerly Bedlam Asylum. There, he would sit on one of the grounds’ benches and read the paper cover to cover, before walking four miles to West Norwood cemetery, standing in front of his wife’s grave, and giving her headstone a briefing on the latest news from around the world.