Paul Johnston - The Soul Collector

“What are you doing here?” I felt like a complete jackass. The only person apart from Karen who had a key, and knew the entry and alarm codes, was my ex-wife, Caroline. I heard the toilet next to the kitchen flush. Any second now, she would be loose.

“I…I was lonely,” Lucy said, clutching me. “I wanted to see you, Daddy.”

“But I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” I said.

The door opened and Caroline walked out, shaking her hands. “Oh, there you are,” she said to me, as if I didn’t belong in my own home. “The towel in there needs changing.”

I stood up and bit back on the sarcastic response. No fighting in front of Lucy was the rule, though it had been broken far too often. “Nice to see you, Caroline,” I said. “Just out of interest, what are you doing here?”

“Didn’t Lucy tell you?” she said, walking past us. “She wanted to see you. For once, I gave in to her demands. It is a Friday evening, after all, and we were at a concert at the Festival Hall.” She moved her head around in a theatrical way. “What on earth do you do with all this space?”

“Play cricket in it,” I said, provoking a snigger from my daughter, who had a wicked sense of humor. Unlike her mother. “Did you forget the arrangement?”

Caroline was a hotshot economist with a Japanese bank in the City. She didn’t forget anything, apart from the fact that she once loved me. “I called you, Matt. Several times. You didn’t answer.”

“I was on the Tube,” I said. “It didn’t occur to you to leave a message?”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, what difference does it make?” she demanded, tossing her black hair. She was still quite a looker but, according to Lucy, she didn’t have a “boyfriend,” at least not one she brought home. Maybe she took them to a hotel during her lunch break and ate them.

“Absolutely none at all,” I said, aware that any mention of Sara or the White Devil, in any language, would cause a meltdown. I smiled at my daughter. “Well, now you’re here, do you fancy a fizzy drink?”

Lucy nodded and ran to the fridge.

“Bloody hell, Caro,” I said under my breath. “Make sure you do leave a message the next time. What would you have done if Karen had walked in? She quite often gets here before me.”

“That’s hardly my problem,” she said, looking away.

It was then that I realized I’d called her by the diminutive I’d used when we were in love. It must have been six or seven years since I’d last come out with it. I felt about as uncomfortable as a man can with his ex-wife. God knows how Karen would have reacted to this accidental intimacy. I wasn’t going to tell her, but Caroline might find a way.

When Lucy came back with her glass, I took her over to the small desk where she kept her things. For weeks we’d been playing an interminable board game involving Sherlock Holmes and a group of anarchists kitted out with round bombs and lit fuses. Unfortunately, they’d never managed to reduce the game to small pieces.

After half an hour, Lucy started to yawn. I grabbed the opportunity.

“Come on, Luce. How about the zoo tomorrow?”

“Oh, yes, Daddy,” she said, clapping her hands. Fortunately she didn’t demand more time with the anarchy game.

Caroline was curled up on one of the long leather sofas. I looked down at her and saw the face I’d awoken next to countless times. When she was at rest, her skin was as smooth and her forehead as unfurrowed as they’d ever been. Obviously working in international finance was good for you. I wished I’d aged as well. I’d just turned forty-one and the gray hairs had established themselves for good, and not just on my head.

Then Caroline woke up and immediately frowned at me, as if I’d been molesting her with Lucy in the room.

“Come on, darling,” she said, sitting up. “It’s time we went back to our hovel.”

Lucy mouthed the last word at me after her mother walked past her.

I raised my shoulders. Caroline had bought a four-bedroom house that had been refurbished to almost regal standards by its previous owner, an award-winning architect, so I had no idea what she was complaining about. Well, I did. She thought money earned from frivolous activities like writing had less value than that gained from real work like banking. There was a time, when my early novels were flying and she was struggling to get back into her career after Lucy was born, that she’d been glad enough for literary money. That was another thing that had been erased from her memory.

I kissed Lucy, and called good-night to Caroline down the hall. Then, after waiting in vain for an answer, I closed the door and went for my computer.

Maybe I had mail.

I was also spoiling for a fight.

The woman moved with catlike poise across the carpet of the room, the cold steel of the silver pistol against her cheek. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face. For a few moments, it was a stranger who stared back at her. Then she remembered what she’d become and smiled. She was no longer Sara Robbins. She had changed her name, her appearance, her very nature.

The hotel near Victoria Station was cheap, most of its residents being tourists from the U.S. and Australia on budget holidays. They only stayed a few days before moving on to other cities on the modern Grand Tour-Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin-spectral cities filled with memories of slaughter, medieval and modern. But she was here for the duration, had already been in residence for two weeks, preparing, checking and carrying out the most subtle of surveillance. She’d learned the trade from masters, men who slipped unseen through streets and across squares, their weapons never more than a finger’s length away.

Soon she would strike the first blow in the city so large that she could disappear at will into its backstreets and lanes, its underground tunnels and its spacious, forested parks. They would not find her, unless she made the most egregious of errors. That would not happen. Her brother had trained her well. He’d also left a directory of former CIA and Special Forces operatives, and they had completed her education in the arts of deception and death. The White Devil, her brother and lover, would have been so proud.

And yet, she didn’t miss him, at least not in the sense that he was absent. Rather, she felt his presence in everything that she did. He was with her, though not as some spook at her shoulder. He was inside her-he had penetrated every cell and organ of her body, his mind was in hers.

She had felt that from the beginning, when he’d made himself known to her before his great scheme was put into action. And after his passing, she had felt it even more, the possession-not that his soul possessed her, but rather that their twin souls possessed each other. There was never any inequality. The White Devil had treated her as his partner from the start, his partner and his shared destiny. That destiny still awaited them, but her brother could now only experience it through her eyes and ears, her mouth and nose, her touch, while the man responsible for his death was still alive. That fact filled her veins with burning fire and drove her every action. She would destroy Matt Wells, but first she would turn him into a quivering wreck.

Standing at the window and looking through the gap between the dirty gray curtains, the woman took in the people on the street below. It was raining and they were walking quickly, even those with umbrellas. The early morning cloud cover and muted lights blurred everything, making the lines between cars and people indistinct. It was a semiliquid landscape, one poisoned by exhaust gases and the fumes from boilers and pumps. A man-made hell…

…and suddenly she was back in the jungle of Colombia, a hell of nature’s creation, her throat burning and the rotting vegetation making her stomach heave. She made sure her guide didn’t notice that. They were under a kilometer from the target and soon all her concentration would have to be on the job. This would be her first major kill and she felt her brother inside her, urging her forward. He had made a file on the target, checked all the data personally. It was six months since he’d been executed in London. She had spent four of them being trained by different experts-unarmed combat, the use of weapons, covert procedures, advanced computing skills and the mechanics of international finance. Let loose on the world, she had already killed a pusher in Atlanta, a pair of crackheads in Jacksonville and a scumbag who had tried to rape her in the washroom of a bar in Miami. Those murders had been of her own choosing, as the White Devil had suggested in order to build her confidence. But only by hitting major players would she prove her real worth.