Matt Hilton - Cut and run

He looked down at his jacket. It was liberally splashed by the dead man's blood. So much for not getting messy. Rickard shrugged out of the jacket, took it over to a sanitary wear disposal bin and shoved it through the flip lid. He wiped his blade and his hands on a perfumed tissue which he flushed down a toilet. He walked out of the room nonchalantly, making his way towards the exit. Behind him a woman got up and headed for the restroom. In seconds the screaming would start.

He tossed dollars on the table as he passed, didn't want a cashier chasing him into the street. Then he was out the door and walking quickly away from the diner.

He heard a wail, not from someone discovering the dead guy, but the distant sound of emergency sirens. Across town something major was happening. Good, he thought, a diversion while he got away from here and took up the chase for Alisha.

He found his car and clambered inside, started the engine. About to pull into the street, he had to wait while a squad car rocketed by with its lights flashing, the cop lying heavily on the siren to clear a way through the traffic.

It looked like all available response vehicles were heading downtown.

On a whim, he followed.

His apartment was in the same vicinity that all the police cars were converging on. Alisha could wait for now; he wanted to know what was happening.

He wasn't fully sure how he felt when he arrived at the scene.

It was still a couple blocks short of where his apartment was, but if his instincts had been correct this latest emergency was tied to him, only in a way that he couldn't quite fathom at first.

Parking outside the cordon of police cars he watched in fascination as the officers jostled for covering positions behind their cars, circling the front of a diner similar to the one he'd just left. It was obvious that a gunfight had recently taken place, judging by the pockmarks in the front window of the diner, and the people scrambling outside and collapsing on the street in shock and dismay.

The glare of the morning sun made seeing through the diner's windows impossible. The sounds of the gun battle had stopped and now only the faint cries of the injured could be heard. Distantly he caught the strident calls of other responding police cruisers. Or maybe they were ambulances for the injured. Should get out of here, he thought. But curiosity held him in place.

His decision to wait and see what transpired rewarded him within seconds. Three men walked outside, showing empty hands. Between them they dragged a fourth man who was unconscious or dead, whom they threw down at the feet of the police.

They were an unusual-looking trio: a giant Asian-American, a tall African-American and – in Rickard's opinion – a walking dead man.

There was no avoiding a trip to the local police precinct house this time. We'd been involved in a shoot-out where three hitmen and three members of the public had died. There were four others seriously wounded and a couple with minor injuries from flying glass. And there was one unconscious killer.

We chose to take our Fifth Amendment right until Walter arrived. The cops weren't happy, but Walter had us kicked loose under rules governing the arrest and incarceration of active CIA agents. We made nobody any the wiser. As soon as we were off the record, I told the homicide detectives what I knew about our attackers. It wasn't much. I didn't mention a possible connection to Wetherby because I wasn't sure that there was one. Then we went and collected our weapons from where they'd been stored after they were seized as evidence. That raised the anger level tenfold, but there was nothing the cops could say or do at the time.

I seriously pissed off the lead investigator, Lieutenant Jonah Hawke, a big, red-faced detective with twenty years under his belt, when I asked to look at the file concerning the murders at Luke Rickard's apartment. I actually thought that he was going to swing for me and we had an awkward moment before Walter stepped in and made the request official.

'I only want a look at the suspect's face,' I told the cop.

'Can't help you. He's not on record. He wasn't the type to keep snapshots either; there were no photographs of him lifted from his apartment.' Hawke was more than a little smug in the way he announced this. 'We've checked his prints. They've come up in connection with a few unsolved crimes, but that's it. The name Luke Rickard's bogus. As of now he's designated as an Unknown Subject. The guy's a goddamn ghost.'

He will be if I get my way, I thought.

'What about his physical description? You must have canvassed the other tenants in the building by now.'

Hawke held my gaze steadily. 'Physical description, huh? I'm looking at it.'

The cop's words struck me deeply. I was already aware that Rickard had disguised himself in order to set me up, but now I wondered just how far he'd gone in stealing my face. It wasn't a nice thought considering that there was someone out there who was the total antithesis of me, but who was my identical double. I walked away from Hawke before he noted the shaking of my hands.

Our Chrysler had been abandoned back at the diner when we'd been taken in. We had to grab a taxi to go and collect it, and none of us spoke about what happened on the journey over. Then we went to a hotel room to hook back up with Walter and Bryce. Neither of the CIA men – active or retired – was there yet so we made ourselves busy gathering our own information. Harvey was as good at digging up data as any other person involved.

Up in Maine, the police there were a little ahead of the game. Probably it was because SAC Hubbard was pushing them for answers. Harvey brought up a couple of digital photo-fits formed from descriptions given by Imogen and by the boathouse owner who'd disturbed Rickard. There were subtle differences between both images, but they were enough alike to be the same man. Lieutenant Jonah Hawke was right: Rickard did have a resemblance to me. Slightly darker in the hair and definitely darker in the eye, but there were more similarities than there were disparities. For the purpose of incriminating me, Rickard had gone to a lot of trouble, maybe as far as having cosmetic surgery. It was an uncanny feeling looking at my evil twin.

Rickard was a fucking abomination.

I had been hoping to recognise the man's face, but not in this way. Part of me had even wondered if Jesus Henao Abadia had risen from the grave and was tormenting me like a vengeful spectre from my past. I'd even wondered about Jack Schilling; I heard he'd killed himself, but I never saw the body. It sounds like a stretch, but Martin Maxwell had faked his own death before going on a rampage as the serial killer Tubal Cain, so I was ready to investigate any angle. But this man was neither Abadia nor Schilling. I'd never seen him before in my life – except for in a mirror.

Harvey pressed buttons on his laptop. He brought up more pictures and then tapped the screen. 'These two are Jean Shrier and Ben Le Duke. It looks like Wetherby was telling the truth about them. They're deployed to Hong Kong and Nigeria respectively.'

A simple glance at the men's mugshots told me that neither of them was the killer calling himself Luke Rickard. To all intents and purposes we were back to square one. Except for one thing.

'What about his wife?'

I'd no sooner asked the question than Walter and Bryce came in the room. Walter's bodyguards waited outside in the hall. Maybe they should have followed him in because Walter looked like he'd need their help to aid him in standing, he was so washed out.

He sat down on the edge of one of the twin beds and let out a ragged breath. He glanced over at Bryce, who didn't look that much better. 'You don't know how well off you are. I wish I could spend my days sitting beside a river watching the salmon avoiding my hook.'