Tom Hinshelwood: The Killer

In the back of the van were the greasy remains of takeout breakfasts but nothing else. He wasn’t surprised by this. The only thing of use he’d found had been in the dead sniper’s bag. The other members of the team had been careful not to bring anything unnecessary with them.

Victor looked in both side mirrors to make sure no one was watching and climbed out onto the sidewalk. A perimeter around the hotel was being set up by the police and he joined the crowds, allowing himself to be funneled out of the street and away by a harried police officer.

At the end of the road Victor hailed a taxi and told the driver to take him to the Musée d’Orsay. The taxi driver asked him what had happened, gesturing to the adjoining street and its huge crowd.

Victor shrugged. “Ca a l’air serieux.” Something bad.

It was then that someone noticed the brainless corpse lying in the gutter and more screaming started.

The man watching the taxi pull away was tall with gelled dark hair. He stood among the crowd outside the hotel, pretending to be as bewildered as the throng of Parisians around him. He shared their anxiety, but not their ignorance. His eyes tracked the taxi until it had left the street and he pulled a slim notebook from his inside jacket pocket. He flipped over a few pages and wrote down in clear handwriting the license plate of the taxi and a brief description of the passenger.

The face on the photo-fit hadn’t had a beard and the hair was different, but there could be no mistaking who it was. The tall man sighed heavily. This was bad.

He negotiated his way through the ever-expanding horde of onlookers and finally came out of the crowd feeling hot despite the chill November air. The man was dressed in a suit and raincoat and looked like any other soldier of commerce. Unless absolutely necessary he wouldn’t speak with anyone around him. His French was good but not fluent.

He walked away at a controlled pace, hurrying like the terrified crowd, though he wasn’t scared. He would have liked to have stayed longer but there were police everywhere, and more had to be on the way. Cops were already examining the crowds, narrowing in on potential witnesses and suspects. It would not be good for him to have to answer any difficult questions.

He knew there was a pay phone farther down the road, on a side street, which he headed toward. It was sufficiently out of the way to be used discretely but close enough to the hotel so that he could report in promptly. The report he was about to give was far from what had been expected.

He didn’t know exactly what happened inside the hotel, but he could make a reasonable enough analysis. The target had escaped in such a manner as to attract a huge police presence, and there was no sign of the team that was supposed to do the job. He’d overheard people in the crowd talking about bodies. None of the team members had left the hotel. It didn’t take a genius to connect the dots.

He passed a group of young women heading toward the commotion and took a left into the narrow side street, where a café released a myriad of exotic smells into the air. The phone booth was unoccupied and he stepped inside, closing the door behind him, thankful for the muffling of the exterior noise that allowed him to think more clearly.

He dialed a number, and while he waited for the line to connect he thought about how best to phrase that the job had been a spectacular failure.

His employer was not going to be pleased.

09:15 CET

Less than a mile away Alvarez looked down at the corpse on the steel tray before him and sighed heavily. The wrinkled skin was pale, the eyes closed, the lips tinged with blue. A small red hole marked the skin of the left temple. Entry wound. The hole in the right temple was larger, rougher. Exit wound.

“Yeah,” he breathed. “That’s the poor bastard.”

The French assistant mortician responded with a brief nod. He stood a few feet away, on the other side of the table, a young man in his twenties, and despite the cool temperature Alvarez could see there was sweat on his brow. The mortician shifted his weight, fidgeted. Alvarez pretended not to notice.

The American realized he wasn’t helping calm the kid. Alvarez knew he had a face that seemed to be perpetually scowling and made people who didn’t know him better feel uncomfortable. Even smiling didn’t help, and his size only exacerbated the problem. Alvarez had a neck wider than his skull and shoulders that filled a door frame. When it came to confrontation his appearance gave him an edge, but the rest of the time it was simply a hindrance. He had to work twice as hard as anyone else just to get people to trust him.

He had the pathologist’s report in hand. He glanced over the details to where it described the bullet wounds. There were two more to the chest. He gestured.

“Show me.”

The mortician looked around nervously before carefully gripping the white stain-proof sheet. He folded it backward from the body’s neck to reveal the torso.

Alvarez examined the two neat holes in the sternum. “They look small caliber to me. Twenty-twos?”

“No,” the mortician answered. “All three wounds. Two to the chest, one to the head. 5.7 mm rounds.”

“Interesting.” Alvarez leaned forward for a closer look. “What kind of range are we looking at?”

“No powder burns so it wasn’t point blank, other than that I can’t tell you. Listen, I’m just an assistant here. I’m not a ballistics expert. I…I don’t know very much.”

No shit, Alvarez thought. He considered for a moment. That the rounds were 5.7 mm meant an FN Five-seveN, one of the world’s slickest and most expensive handguns. He pictured the scene in his head. Double-tap to the heart, then, as the victim was prone, head to one side, the killer put one extra through the frontal lobe. Not taking any chances. Alvarez was no stranger to professional killings, and this execution was about as thorough as they came. He blinked the image away.

“Look,” the mortician began, “my boss is going to be back soon.”

Alvarez could take a hint. He opened his wallet.

Outside the hospital he buttoned up his coat against the drizzle. Where the hell was Kennard? It took a couple of minutes before the dark sedan pulled up outside.

“Sorry,” Kennard said, as Alvarez climbed into the passenger seat.

Alvarez rubbed some of the rain from his buzz cut. “It’s Ozols,” he said.

“He’s dead.”

“Jesus,” Kennard exhaled. “The package?”

Alvarez shook his head. He summarized what he’d seen.

“What do we do?” Kennard asked.

Alvarez chewed on his thumbnail for a moment. He reached into his jacket for his cell phone. “I’ve got to speak to Langley.”

09:41 CET

Le Hotel Abrial was located on the Avenue de Villiers, west of the Seine. Victor had caught a second taxi at the museum, and it was a long, slow drive through the Parisian traffic. The driver was thankfully silent, and Victor gave him a moderate tip. A generous tip or no tip at all and the driver might remember him if asked at a later date.

Victor noted that it was a nice area, glowing with all the positive things that tourists tell their friends about Paris but without the rain, the dirt, and the sour-faced Parisians. Victor made his way along the busy street, passing the hotel. He found a pharmacy a couple of blocks away where he purchased a bar of soap, disinfectant, tweezers, cotton balls, and deodorant. He then found a quiet bar where he bought a lemonade and used the bathroom to wash himself.

He then turned his attention to the wooden splinters embedded in his face. At the time adrenaline had blocked the pain, but Victor no longer enjoyed such luxury. The splinters were small but rough and snagged in his flesh. With gritted teeth he drew them from his cheek with the aid of the tweezers. He would have preferred to get it over with quickly, but he had to work slowly to avoid their breaking. When the last one was out, he held a cotton ball soaked with disinfectant against the tiny wounds for as long as he could stand it.