He wondered what she looked like, he thought as he fielded her questions.
Was she tall and leggy, unnaturally
thin and nervous like so many career women?
Was she slightly plump, with glasses and sensible shoes?
He liked that idea.
He was tired of wafer-thin models.
He found he was getting turned on, which was odd.
Not his style.
He liked the idea of fucking her.
Of going out and finding her after this
was done, seducing her, seeing how far he could push her.
He could seduce just about anyone, and
this woman, whose name was most definitely NOT Elizabeth Shannon, would be
child’s play.
Blonde or brunette?
Tall
or short?
He fantasized as he spun
her stories, some blatant lies, some horrifyingly true, and she was naked with
her sweet, questioning mouth on his cock.
He didn’t usually like women to be frightened of him, not in bed.
He liked an even match, a woman who
gave as good as she got, one who had the illusion that she was in control.
They never were.
He made it a rule never to walk into a
situation where he didn’t command complete control.
It would be easy enough with this one.
She was young, thinking she was experienced.
Those were the easiest to get to.
He shook his head, amused at himself.
He wasn’t taking care of that little problem this
afternoon.
This was business, this
was for Taggart.
“Tell me,”
he said,
pitching his voice low.
Even with
the distortion and the German accent he knew it would come through the other
side of the wall as pure seduction.
“Do you have a lover?”
He felt her instinctive withdrawal as she considered her answer.
“In fact, I have.
A very kind, sweet man.
Not that it’s any of your
business.
Why do you ask?”
“Do you like kind, sweet men?
Do you fuck in the darkness, missionary-style?
Do you even suck his cock?”
“You’re disgusting.”
He laughed softly.
“That
answers my question.
You should
try it sometime.
You might even
like it.”
“I’ll have you know that I’ve …”
her voice trailed off as she realized what he was doing.
Her laugh was rueful, and he was hard.
He should have had Taggart put a filter
on her voice too.
It was low,
melodic, slightly nervous and most definitely self-aware.
“You’re the one who’s supposed to
answer the questions,”
she said.
“Not me.”
“You don’t want to tell me about your sex life?”
“Not particularly.
Any
more than you want to tell me about yours.”
The moment she said the words she knew her mistake.
“Cancel that.
You’d probably like nothing more than to try to embarrass me
with salacious stories.
I’m here
to find out about your work as an assassin, nothing more.”
He smiled to himself.
“I don’t
like that word, ‘assassin.’
It’s
too melodramatic.”
“God, you’re not going to use one of those tough-guy movie terms, are
you?
Like Cleaner?”
She’d relaxed now, ready to lob some of
his
snark
back at him.
She had no idea how mismatched they were, but he could be
gentle with her.
For now.
He laughed softly.
“No,
sweetheart.
I avoid
terminology.
I am what I am, do
what I do.
Aren’t you tired of
this by now?
Do you want to go
somewhere and fuck?”
Her heard her swift intake of breath, but her reply was calm
enough.
“If you think sexual
innuendoes are going to scare me off after some of the stories you’ve told me
then you have a strange opinion of women.”
“You’re American.
Most
Americans are far more comfortable with violence than sex.
Just look at your television shows.”
“I’d rather not,”
she
said dryly.
“And no, I don’t want
to go somewhere and fuck, though you’re very kind to offer.
I’m meeting my boyfriend for dinner.”
“Too bad.
If there were
more time I’d unzip myself and …”
“I gather you’re getting bored with all this.”
Her voice was brisk, interrupting his
crude comment.
“So am I.
Just one more question.”
Just as well, he thought.
He was getting distracted.
“Would you tell me your name?”
He laughed, a short, sharp sound.
“You know the answer to that.
If I did I would have to kill you,”
he said.
“And don’t decide to be Nancy Drew and try to find out who I
am.
If you do I
will
kill
you.
And you won’t be some Daniel
Pearl type martyr.
I’ll make it
look like an accident, and no one will ever know you died for your fucking
story.”
Her heard her intake of breath, and he knew she believed him.
“I won’t,”
she said.
“I didn’t think you would,”
he said peaceably.
“Anything else?
I need to
get to my gym.”
Another lie.
He worked out in whatever room he was
inhabiting, exercises to keep him agile and alert.
He didn’t need fancy machines.
“Just one.
Why do you do
it?”
He laughed.
He could
imagine how it sounded on the other side of the pitch dark window, like the
sound of the devil, laughing from the fires of hell.
“Because I’m good at it.
Everyone has certain talents.
You’re a journalist.
I
kill.”
Dead silence from the darkness.
“Are you a sociopath?
Or a
psychopath?”
Good for her, he thought silently.
“A psychopath loves his work, sweetheart.
I’m a sociopath.
I just don’t care.”
And he flicked off the microphone.
Enough.
CHAPTER TWO
Madison Mary Banks felt the micro-recorder slip out of her sweat-damp
hands and land on the floor.
It
was tough enough to withstand the punishment, having survived war zones and her
sister’s energetic toddler, but she made no effort to retrieve it.
She felt strange, disoriented, she
smell of tobacco on the air, the sound of his distorted voice in her ear.
She wrapped her arms around her waist,
hugging herself.
She had just
spent the better part of an hour in a darkened room with someone who could only
be called a monster – it was no wonder she felt ill.
His stories lingered in her brain, and she wished there was some way
to wipe it clean.
He’d answered
everything in detail, but not in specifics.
No names, but how long it took a man to bleed out, depending
on which artery was severed.
Which
poisons worked the best.
Sniper
training, but not where he’d received it.
She now had a sickeningly clear view of what it was like to be a … a
termination specialist in the modern world.
She just wished she didn’t.
The door opened, and light flooded the room, momentarily blinding
her.
She felt an instant’s panic,
but it was simply
Renard
, the friend of a friend of
Drake, her boyfriend, the man who’d facilitated this meeting.
Drake was going to laugh at her, say “I told you so” when he saw
her.
But maybe she’d have managed
to pull herself together by then.
“You okay, mademoiselle?”
Reynard’s voice was cool and obsequious.
Just the kind of man whose ancestors stormed the Bastille
and knitted while the aristocrats were beheaded.
She knew how she presented to most people, no matter what
kind of thrift store clothes she dressed in, and he was probably wishing they
still had tumbrels.
“Fine,”
she said, her
voice hollow.
“Has he gone?”
Renard
raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, mademoiselle.
He left a good ten minutes ago.
I was waiting for you to open the
door.”
“I was … was assembling my notes,”
she said weakly, reaching down and picking up the
recorder.
“It’s good to have your
thoughts in order while they’re still fresh.”
“Indeed, mademoiselle.
You will tell our friend I fulfilled my part of the bargain?”
Which friend, she wondered.
Drake, or a friend of a friend of Drake’s?
She rather hated the idea that she was sleeping with a man
too closely connected to the creature she’d just interviewed.
“I’ll tell him,”
she
said, rising, the recorder clutched in one hand.
Constantine heard the door to the apartment close behind their
departing guest, and he sank to the floor with another cup of coffee, his legs
crossed beneath him as he watched
Taggert
dismantle
his safe house.
“Did you have to do that?”
Taggert
demanded irritably.
“Do what?”
“Try to seduce her.
She’s
harmless, but she has connections.
If you wanted to fuck her that badly I could have cancelled this and you
could have picked her up at a café.
At this point if you shagged her you’d probably screw her up for
life.
You gave her quite a convincing
picture of our lives, though a bit more colorful and imaginative than the
truth.
But why the hell did you
let her tape you?”
Constantine frowned.
“I
did, didn’t I?
In fact, I didn’t
intend to be that helpful.
She was
just so damned gullible that I kept pushing.”
“You forget how long I’ve known you.
You were just so horny that you kept pushing.
You need to keep away from her, my
friend.
I don’t think the tape is
important, though I might see if I can send someone to get rid of it.”
“I know the kind of men you hire – they’re clumsy.
It would … annoy me if they ended up
accidentally killing her.”
His
voice was light, almost airy.
“It
would annoy me a great deal.”
Taggert
snorted, unimpressed.
“Get it yourself.
You’ll be seeing her again.”
Con rose in one fluid gesture, his innate grace causing more than one
man to mistake his devotedly heterosexual orientation.
“I don’t know what she looks like, I
don’t know her name, and I have no interest in finding out.
I’m enjoying the most deliciously
salacious fantasies about her, I admit.
I doubt reality would come even close.”
“It seldom does,”
Taggart
said morosely.
He finished packing
up the case and locked it.
“Today
didn’t happen.”
“It seldom does,”
Con
replied.
Maddy wasn’t sure how she made it out into the bright sunshine.
It was a hot day, and she still
shivered.
She was walking, fast, a
New York City walk, not a Parisian stroll, and she forced herself to slow down,
take deep breaths.
She looked at
the digital recorder she was still clutching.
She could throw it into the busy street, watch it get
crushed beneath the wheels of the cars.
She could slam it against the cement pavement, hard, and see the plastic
shatter.
She took another breath.
She wasn’t going to start making melodramatic gestures.
She wasn’t her mother.
This had been her choice of a story,
and she could just as easily choose not to write it.
Except that she had to get it out of her head.
Beneath the distortion of his voice he’d sounded oddly gentle.
That, perhaps, was part of the
horror.
That he could recount such
acts with the air of a guest at afternoon tea, or some kind of charity benefit,
champagne glass in one hand, plate of canapés in the other.
Flirting with her.
Coming on to her.
He had to be in his mid-sixties to have
committed some of the crimes he described.
She’d mocked him, but maybe he really had done something to
Jimmy Hoffa, assuming he’d been a child prodigy.
Prodigy of death.
She
needed a shower.
She would
probably never eat again, certainly not for the next twenty-four hours, but she
wasn’t a baby.
She’d had Drake
call in favors for this, and she couldn’t throw it away because she was afraid
to pull up her big girl panties and get on with it.
She’d write the story, and she’d write the hell out of it.
It wasn’t until she was under the pounding, hot water of the shower in
her small, crowded apartment that she realized what it was about the man that
had been so disturbing.
Despite the stories, the details, the cool detachment as he catalogued
the measured ending of countless lives, she’d been aware of something else in
the subdivided cocoon of darkness.
She’d been aware of him.
Of
a sinuous thread of charisma, drawing her, calling to her.
Like looking into the eyes of a cobra
about to strike and being too mesmerized to move.
She’d listened to his voice, his distorted, heavily-accented
voice, and she’d despised him.
And
felt the insane, irrational stirrings of sexual desire.
She sank to her knees in the old tub, wrapping her arms around her shivering
body.
Closing her eyes, she drew
in the blankness.
In a moment she
would get up, turn off the shower, brush her teeth and reapply her makeup.
She’d go out and meet Drake at the
ambassador’s party and she’d smile and laugh and shrug off her silly little
reaction.
But for now, she wasn’t going anywhere.
The one problem with Paris, Con thought several hours later as he put
his arm around the tiny waist of Tessa Parker, aspiring actress, Vogue cover
model and not so coincidentally the great-niece of the deposed king of Batavia,
was the fucking paparazzi.
They
shouted in a dozen different languages, most of which he understood, the camera
flashes were blinding, and security in Paris was lax.
He smiled genially as he ushered Tessa into the party, wondering
which tabloid his face was going to adorn tomorrow.
He’d be background for Tessa’s startling beauty and vivid
camera presence.
Hide in plain
site had always been his modus operandi, something Taggart never ceased to
wonder at, but it served him well.
As the elegantly handsome Euro-trash,
D’Angelo
,
he went to the best parties, drank and gambled with the best people, and Tessa
was the perfect foil.
In her case
heroin-chic was accurate.
She
injected it under her tongue, between her toes, anywhere on her rail-thin,
perfect body that wouldn’t show, and she moved through her round of parties and
photo-shoots in a compliant daze.
She was dazzlingly beautiful.
He had no idea if she had a brain in her head beneath the steady supply
of drugs, and he didn’t care.
She
was a means to an end.
All he had
to do was lead her around, point her in the right direction, and she was so
pretty that conversation wasn’t required of her.
She would listen and smile and nod her head and everyone
would be mesmerized, and he would move through the rarified world at her side,
seemingly just as vacuous, as he waited for his next job.
She required nothing from him but company.
She had no interest in sex, which was just as well.
He could fuck on demand, but her
bone-thin, ravaged body reminded him too much of famine victims, and he could
control his sexual appetites.
She
spent her days, when she wasn’t working, being maintained like a thoroughbred
horse.
Groomed and exercised,
every square inch of her body, every inch that could be seen, was perfect, and
it cost a great deal of time and effort to keep her that way.
She had no time to consider her high
profile boyfriend or where he had first appeared.
She probably didn’t even remember the meeting he had
arranged.
Tessa stumbled slightly as they walked into the party, blinded by the
flashing lights, and his arm tightened.
She smelled like chemicals, he thought, leaning down to nuzzle her ear
as the cameras flashed.
She’d
shot up before they left, and the
initial buzz was just beginning to wear off.
She had no idea her elegant, lazy boyfriend knew what she
was doing in the
loo
right before they left her hotel
suite, no idea that he’d gone to her supplier not long after he’d chosen her as
his mark and made it very clear that Tessa was only to have the safest, most
consistent supply of heroin available.
She was never going to be able to buy too much and make a fatal mistake,
she was never going to get a dangerously strong batch.
She would have the best, a safe,
careful source.
He hadn’t even had
to touch the hardened drug lord behind the dealer Tessa usually used.
Even
Rabard
knew a worthy opponent when he saw him.
Not that he particularly cared if she died, he told himself.
But he’d chosen her for a reason,
because she could be easily controlled and used.
A drug overdose would be unpleasant.
With her political connections her
death would be scrutinized, as would her playboy lover.
And the last thing he wanted was to
answer questions.
Besides, she was pretty, sweet and harmless.
Either her addiction would overcome her and she’d die, or
she’d eventually get clean.
There
was no way he could influence the outcome – he’d be someone else by then.
But for tonight she looked up at him like a lover, even though they’d
actually only fucked a handful of times.
He had the feeling he was about to add to that handful.
Maybe even double it.
This was his second job since he’d
become
D’Angelo
, and Tessa’s lover, but for some
reason his blood was running hot.