Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (4 page)

A quick glance at Harris’s and Skolomowski’s bodies assured him they were dead. Corvino cautiously picked his way up the steps, halting beside the doorway. He listened. The only sound was still the classical music coming from upstairs. His pulse pounding, Corvino entered the hall.

Spent machine-gun casings littered the tilted floor, and he saw another body at the end of the hall. The
pistolero
’s chest was riddled with hits obviously from Skolomowski’s MAC, the head shattered like a broken egg.

Three bodies in the lounge. The man he’d killed in the garden. And this one made five. Where was the other one?

When he discovered the body in the kitchen, Corvino nearly threw up.

The man’s stomach was ripped open, a coil of pink intestine squirming serpentlike out of the gasp.

Corvino’s mind reeled. He backed out of the kitchen, gagging.

The building was a slaughterhouse.

He fumbled the radio from his jacket.

“
Alpha to beta, copy?
Copy?!
”

Static.

Why didn’t Lang answer?!

He headed to the lounge to confirm what he’d seen through the window, shoving the radio back into his pocket.

Corvino recognized the DEA agents from their files—what remained of them.

The room looked like someone had decided to decorate every item of furniture with viscera.

He backed out rapidly, repelled by the smell of shit and blood.

This is insane!

Someone had got to their targets and ripped them apart like an animal.

Corvino had seen enough.

He ran for the doorway.

PANAMA CITY.

10:09 P.M.

Corvino parked the blue Ford Grenada opposite Mitra Alonso’s apartment building on Avenida 4, his thoughts a whirlwind of shock, revulsion and confusion.

He’d made it two blocks from the drug house when he heard police sirens. Fortunately, the Ford—their escape vehicle—had been parked where it was supposed to be, the key concealed in the left rear wheel arch. When he was two miles from the house, he’d stopped to call Mitra from a pay phone.

No answer.

The four-story building was draped in darkness. From the street he could see the curtains were drawn. Had someone gotten to Mitra? Only if her cover was blown.

Nothing made sense.

Where was Lang?

Skolomowski and Harris were dead.

Who had reached the target before them? And why the mutilation? To set an example? As for the man he’d killed, he must have hallucinated the throat wound. The sudden blow to the head must have scrambled his brains.

Someone in the Directorate had screwed up on this one. Spiral had access to the most detailed intelligence information available and was allowed to operate autonomously, the nature of its work outside the influence of the Deputy Director of Operations. Section Chief Ryan Del Valle answered to no one other than the Director, the chief of the National Security Agency, and Stansfield Hershman, the commander of E.C.O. —Executive Covert Operations, the umbrella under which Spiral functioned.

But a leak didn’t make sense either. Spiral didn’t officially exist.

He didn’t give a shit about Skolomowski. The Pole had been showing increasing signs of instability in the field for some time, but any direct criticism of his methods was dismissed by Hershman:
he gets results
. Corvino had never respected him. The Pole’s passion for killing went beyond duty; he enjoyed it. An efficient assassin felt nothing, neither guilt nor pleasure.

The street was deserted, but he crossed outside the spill of the sidewalk lamps, keeping as much to the shadows as possible in case Mitra was under observation. Her apartment house, a nondescript brick building in a mid-rent, safe neighborhood, required neither a security lock nor a doorman. He entered, and headed for the elevator.

Whether Mitra’s cover was blown or not, he should get her out of the country. Until they knew what had happened there was no point in taking unnecessary risks. A flight was scheduled to leave Southcom, the main U.S. military base in Panama, at 11:30 P.M. The flight the Spiral field operatives were expected to depart on. Knowing Mitra, she’d probably refuse to go with him, but Corvino wasn’t going to take no for an answer even if his reasons were more personal than professional. Del Valle, however, would see the logic in his decision. Hopefully, his boss wouldn’t guess Corvino’s true motive. Sexual relations between field operatives was forbidden. If Hershman found out, he’d probably pull him from active service and ship him off to Fort Bragg to train Special Forces in counterterrorist strategy, the prospect of which appealed to Corvino as much as walking barefoot through dog shit.

The walls of the fourth-floor hallway were painted a bright yellow. Mitra’s apartment was at the end of the hall on the right. He paused outside the door, listening for signs of life. A telephone rang twice in another apartment; the faint drone of a television rose from another. He pressed his ear to the door, trying to shut out the noise.

Then he pulled the 9mm Browning from his shoulder holster, attached the silencer, and pressed the door buzzer. Its ring echoed loudly in the quiet hallway.

No response.

He buzzed a second time and waited a full minute, then lowered the gun to the lock. He pulled the trigger and pushed the door inwards.

The room was cloaked in darkness, a faint strip of light from the street bleeding through a gap in the curtains. He closed the door behind him and waited. Nothing moved.

The sudden, overwhelming smell of death made him recoil.

Corvino gagged as he flipped on the light switch. The living room was neat and tidy except for a blood-stained cloth lying beside the white leather sofa.

The unmistakable stench wafted from the door next to the bathroom. He entered the bedroom, feeling for the light with his left hand as he held his breath.

The pale blue walls were bare except for a poster announcing a Picasso exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an arc of dried blood above the brass bed frame. Mitra—what was left of her—lay on a crimson mattress, mouth gagged, arms and legs spread-eagled, tied to the corners with lengths of clothes line, the skinless corpse glistening red meat and muscle. He closed his eyes as his stomach heaved, the acid taste of bile rising into his throat.

God, no!

Corvino made it to the bathroom sink as a thin runner of gastric juices leaked from the corner of his mouth. He put the gun down, wiped his mouth and ran the cold tap, splashing his face with water as he gasped. He heaved again, but his stomach was empty.

Killing was never as clean in real life as the movies depicted it, but the atrocity in the bedroom went beyond murder, either legally sanctioned or committed while drunk on the white heat of rage. This was the work of a butcher. He breathed deeply. The mutilated body at the drug house looked like it had been torn apart by an animal, but this was worse.

Picking up the gun, he went back into the bedroom.

Mitra had been systematically flayed alive, the skin from neck to vagina peeled away in strips. A deep six-inch gash incised her larynx and had sliced open the carotid artery, splashing the scythe-like blood spray on the wall. Whoever had done the work knew what he was doing; judging from the strain marks around her wrists and ankles, she had been conscious throughout the skinning.

She didn’t deserve to die this way—no one did.

Mitra opened her eyes.

Corvino dropped his gun.

Her deep blue eyes bulged in their sockets as she turned her head towards him. The stretched lips strained at the cloth gag, her body arching off the bed as her limbs pulled at the bindings.

Mother of God!

There was no trace of recognition in her eyes, just a glaze of insanity.

The pain must be incredible.

Corvino clenched his jaw as he reached down for the gun. Long-suppressed emotions clawed his chest. A sob caught in his throat. He placed the silencer against her head and looked away. The soft plop of the report was followed by a wet splat. Corvino squeezed his eyes shut and backed away from the bed.

His arms trembled as he pulled the Ford out of the parking space, his instincts screaming for him to jam the accelerator to the floor. Self-control prevailed.

Mitra.

The street was almost empty of traffic, but he kept the car under the speed limit, slowing as he reached the stoplight at the end of the block.

Mitra!

The light changed and he eased the car across the intersection.

There was something horribly familiar about the murder, the details echoing an incident in Nashville a couple of years back, and as he reached the end of Avenida 4, he floored the accelerator in rage.

Nashville.

He’d had his suspicions following the assignment, had discussed them with Del Valle, and although the murder had had no bearing on the hit, the section chief made inquiries. When the supposed killer was apprehended a month later, it appeared Corvino had been wrong. Yet doubts remained, questions raised by Skolomowski’s subsequent behavior.

It was a two-man assignment, the target Luis Valencia, a Cuban responsible for a series of deaths amongst political refugees in Florida, and was designed to look like an accident, a drunken fall from a hotel balcony. Valencia had a passion for country music and was a regular visitor to Nashville, where he indulged his taste for flashy women, flashy hotels and bad music. Nashville had been the obvious location in which to terminate him. Corvino performed the hit with Skolomowski as the backup.

The week before they arrived, however, Nashville had become the focus of national attention. The bodies of several young women, some of them hookers, had been discovered in a shallow mass grave next to the Cumberland River, and it looked like Country Music, U.S.A. was the latest city to add a serial killer to the growing list of metropolitan areas with a psychopath at large. The most recent corpse, which was not in an advanced state of decomposition, had been partially skinned before being raped with a blunt instrument. At the time, Corvino had taken no real interest in the case. Not until the body of a hooker was discovered in room 416 of the Holiday Inn Crowne Plaza the morning of their departure.

The hooker he’d seen Skolomowski with two nights before the hit.

She was found strapped to the bed, skinned from sternum to crotch, her breasts hacked off and left in the bathtub.

Skolomowski was a keen hunter who regularly stalked deer in off-duty spells at his cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and a man who expressed no respect for women. Like most assassins, who by the nature of their work are denied the comforts of normal relationships, Skolomowski’s contact with women was on a purely business level, either administrative or physical. Women performed functions, were vessels for sexual release. But the Pole had a mean misogynist streak, and on the Lebanese assignment, Corvino had seen this in action when he’d stopped Skolomowski from systematically beating to death a female Libyan operative during an interrogation.

Skolomowski’s contact with the Nashville hooker and her subsequent murder were too much of a coincidence to ignore. While Del Valle had monitored the Tennessee killings, Corvino had made his own inquiries, learning the weapon that killed Dori Shannon, as the girl was identified, had been a military knife. That fact made coincidence seem even less likely—until the police arrested George Brandy, a repairman for Nashville Electric Service, apprehended when he tried to rape an undercover policewoman. Brandy, a loner with a history of nervous disorders, turned out to be a regular hunter in the Ozarks, owner of an entire arsenal of military and hunting knives and an extensive collection of hardcore S & M videos. When Brandy confessed to the murders and several others, taking the police to the burial sites, Corvino accepted he’d been wrong, questioned his own motives for suspecting the Pole. And yet…

Regardless of whether Skolomowski had been responsible for either death, Corvino hoped Hell existed and he was burning in it. The Pole deserved nothing less than eternal damnation. Death by shotgun blast wasn’t enough.

Mitra was dead.

The assignment was a disaster.

And he’d killed a man who shouldn’t have been alive.

Corvino signaled left, steering the car in the direction of Quarry heights, and beyond that, Southcom.

ALEXANDRIA.

SUNDAY, MAY 28. 1 A.M.

The steady rhythm of Nick’s peaceful breathing as he slept made Sandy feel secure yet alone. Although they were snuggled together in their usual fashion—he curved around her in the shape of a comma, her back covered protectively by his torso, his left arm supporting her neck—he was lost in dreams, a pleasure her anxieties denied her. The comet’s light drenched the bedroom with a pale glow which swept back the real shadows into the furthest corners but failed to dispel those darker shadows shrouding her thoughts.

Cicadas rattled loudly in the yard, an annoying accompaniment echoing the worries tugging at her tired mind. The lovemaking had helped, albeit temporarily, yet it hadn’t been enough to free her from the apprehension surrounding her trip. Nick had offered to come with her, returning on the night train, and she’d appreciated the gesture, but she had to face her mother’s death, and she didn’t need him to hold her hand. Not when he was about to start active service on Monday.
Death is inescapable
, she thought. Having a policeman for a husband was tough enough to deal with, and D.C. was a mean beat to patrol, a high-risk area in which the threat of death loomed a constant reality. The thought didn’t fill her with much comfort. She didn’t want to lose him, too.

Slipping from his embrace, she donned her silk robe and stepped silently from the room. Nick signed in his sleep as she pulled the door shut, pausing in case he awoke. He would worry and fuss in his own sweet way, but she didn’t need that right now. She needed to be alone with her thoughts, the way it had to be. The women in her family had always been strong. They knew men harbored fragile egos and needed careful handling, prompting moments when words, no matter how passionately felt, had to be held in check. Nick was understanding, sensitive in a manner she’d found severely lacking in most men, but there were occasions when he still treated her like a little girl.