At the sound of Engelmann’s footfalls, the man in the chair raised one finger-his hands until then both curled around the edges of the armrests-and the barber, a slight man with gray hair, gray eyes, and a lined, gray face, disappeared without a word.
“I kinda figured you’d be taller,” said the man, his gruff, coarse tone confirming him as the one who’d called Engelmann two nights ago.
The man’s statement was a joke-with a hot towel draped over his eyes, he could no more see Engelmann than could Engelmann see him. But Engelmann did not laugh.
“Someday,” said Engelmann, “you’ll have to tell me how you obtained the number of a burner phone I’d not used until that very night.”
“No, I don’t think I will. Sit down.”
Engelmann did not sit down.
The man shrugged. It was a token act of defiance, nothing more. Engelmann had come when called. He may be one of the most gifted contract killers in the world, but in this room, at this moment, Engelmann was more house cat than lion.
“We have a job for you,” the man said from within his wet folds. “A pest in need of exterminating.”
“And what, pray tell, is this pest’s name?”
“I wish to hell I knew,” said the man, “but if I did, I wouldn’t have had to call you.”
“Ah. I see. I trust, then, that you’ve no idea where I might find him, or even what he looks like.”
The man bristled. “Not specifically, no.”
“Then perhaps we should begin with what he’s done to so offend.”
The man gestured vaguely toward the oak vanity behind him. “Check the left-hand drawer.”
Engelmann did. Inside was a manila envelope with a string-and-button enclosure, fat with documents. Engelmann unwound the string and lifted the flap. Not documents, he discovered-or at least not mostly.
Mostly, they were pictures.
Some were glossy black-and-white eight-by-tens. Some were color copies of police reports, blown up so large the images had pixelated, and the typeset words around them were five times their normal size. On the back of each was a location and a date, scrawled in a tight, controlled script. The dates stretched back as far as three years. The most recent was just two days ago-the day Engelmann received the phone call summoning him here.
Each photo was of a murder scene.
No. Not just a murder scene. A hit. Cold. Calculating. Professional.
Engelmann thumbed through them, transfixed. Some of them, like San Francisco in October of 2010, or Wichita this January past, were precision long-range kills- needle-threading sniper shots from what had to be twelve hundred meters away. Some of them, like Green Bay or Montreal, were close and messy-the former a stabbing that took place past security in an airport, and the latter a garrote at the opera during a Place des Arts performance of Gounod’s Faust. Of the close kills, it was the former that impressed Engelmann the most. Smuggling a weapon past security, while not impossible, poses some degree of difficulty-but to then commit murder and vanish undetected is quite a feat indeed. Which clearly this man had done, for if his visage had been captured by security cameras, the Council would have doubtless obtained the footage. They had, after all, tracked Engelmann without difficulty.
“You believe this all to be the work of one man?” Engelmann asked.
“I do.”
“Magnificent,” he muttered.
“You sound surprised.”
“Most in my profession have a preferred method, something tried and true from which they never deviate. Whoever did these is proficient in a variety of techniques. Few in the world can claim such skill. Even fewer can make good on such claims.”
“You can,” said the man, steel creeping into his voice. Despite himself, Engelmann drew a worried breath, wondering for a moment if this had all been some elaborate setup to lure him here. But then, from beneath his towels, the man laughed. “Relax, Al-I didn’t ask you here so I could whack you. We’ve had an eye on you since this guy’s Reno job a few months back; we know you weren’t anywhere near Miami two nights ago when he last hit. He popped a guy from ground level across four blocks of busy city street, if you can believe it. Turned the poor bastard into a fucking smear.”
“These targets,” Engelmann asked. “They were La Cosa Nostra?”
“Some,” allowed the man in the chair. “Some were Salvadorans. Some Russian. One was Southie Irish. Truth is, there’s not an Outfit in the country ain’t been touched. Which is a good fucking thing as far as I’m concerned, ’cause if any of the families had been spared, everybody who got hit would be gunning hard for them, figuring it for some kind of power play. Shit, it’s just a matter of time before one family points the finger at another anyway, just ’cause they don’t like the look of ’em. This situation is a- whaddaya call it-a powder keg.”
“Hence the involvement of the Council.”
“Yeah,” the man said drolly. “Hence. Tensions among the families are running high. This don’t get resolved soon, there’s gonna be a war. Which is why we’re willing to offer you a million flat to find this guy and seal the deal. That, and whatever resources are at the Council’s disposal.”
One million dollars.
One million dollars, plus the combined resources of every crime family in America.
Engelmann could scarcely contain his excitement. But he managed. One does not attain a reputation such as his without mastering one’s emotions.
Engelmann smiled, showing teeth. “Euros,” he said.
“ ’Scuse me?”
“One million euros.”
The man in the chair was silent for a moment, and then he nodded his assent, his towels bobbing.
“Excellent,” said Engelmann. “Consider me in your employ. I’ll send you the number of my Cayman account, and you can wire the money at your convenience.”
“No need,” said the man. “We’ve got the number.”
Engelmann, unnerved, swallowed hard, and then changed the subject. “His victims,” Engelmann asked, “have they any commonality? Apart from their employers’ extra-legal status, that is.”
“Yeah. They’re all hitmen. And every one of ’em was on a job when they got whacked.”
For a moment, Engelmann thought he’d misheard, then realized he hadn’t. That one man had perpetrated such a variety of kills was impressive. That his victims were themselves all hired killers made the accomplishment all the greater.
“You are telling me you’ve a hitman killing hitmen, and now you’re hiring a hitman to hit him back?”
“I’m telling you I’ve got a problem, and you’ve got one million reasons to fix it.”
Engelmann smiled again, for he in fact had more than that. For the first time in a decade, he had a job that posed a significant challenge and a quarry worthy of pursuit. For the first time in a decade, he had reason to fear for his own safety-reason to question whether he was equal to the task. Of course, this man would not have the combined resources of every crime family in America at his beck and call-but then, it seemed his wits had served him well thus far in the face of such resources.
This man, thought Engelmann, was not to be trifled with.
This man, whoever he was, would be an honor to square off against.
This man, he would have killed for free.
5
Special Agent Charlotte Thompson flinched as her cell phone chimed. She knew before she glanced at it the text was from her sister; she’d texted fifteen times today already. Jess was Charlie’s baby sister-just three years out of college. A waitress who fancied herself an artist and insisted her meds quieted her muse.
Usually, when Jess was in a manic phase, it fell to Charlie to talk her off the ceiling. But today, she had neither the patience nor the time. She’d spent the past seven hours crammed into the back of a surveillance van with three other FBI agents and a tangled heap of audiovisual equipment. Seven hours of listening to the tinny patter of Albanian played through headphones, and the Bureau’s translator-a slight, olive-skinned man by the name of Bashkim-converting it into flat, dispassionate English beside her. Seven hours with no AC and no fan, the van amplifying the August heat until the cabin reeked of sweat and the agents’ clothes were plastered to their skin. Between the dehydration and the constant discordant input of two languages at once-not to mention her new partner Garfield’s inane chatter before she finally told him to shut up-Thompson’s head was pounding. The last thing she needed was a dose of Jess at her most tightly wound.