Hostage Zero

“The man is waiting for you inside,” the boy said. He sealed the deal with that magnificent smile.

For crying out loud, what was she so nervous about? She was meeting an envoy of the secretary of defense. It was as if she were walking into a meeting with Secretary Leger himself. There could be no safer place in the world for her. This was what tradecraft was all about.

There’d be no doing it slowly, though. She needed to proceed with the commitment of pulling off a Band-Aid. She climbed the stoop, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

In the transition between the bright sunlight and the darkened interior, she felt completely blinded.

She called, “Hello-oh!”

What the hell was that? The second syllable of hello escaped without her thinking, driven by a piercing pain above her right breast. For half a second, it registered as a thick pin-prick, but then in the next half second, she realized that it was growing in intensity. She brought her left hand up to touch the pain, and then another jolt struck her again in the chest. This one hurt ten times worse than the first, and though she wanted to yell, she could produce no sound.

The agony was exquisite-completely off the scale. It caved her in in the middle, and as she doubled over, she got the first glimpse of blood on the floor. How about that? There was blood on her hand, too. And on her blouse. She felt the world spin, and as she struggled to steady herself against the wall, she lost her grip on the envelope. She saw it slipping through her fingers in slow motion, and while she tried to reach for it, nothing about her body was working right anymore. She had no choice but to watch it sail across the filthy linoleum.

As she slid down the wall to join the envelope on the floor, she saw a form step out of the shadow on the side of the center staircase. He carried something at his side. Something in his hand. As he closed to within a few feet, he raised the object at arm’s length and pointed it at her head.

Brandy gasped. “Please don’t-”

Three bullets for a single kill was embarrassing, but there was no other way. True silence was a necessity in the middle of the day, and that meant using subsonic loads to launch a bullet through a suppressor at a slow enough speed that the round would not create its own sonic boom in flight. For light loads like that, Mitch Ponder used a. 22 with a full copper casing. If he could have gotten close enough to guarantee a one-shot kill, he might have used a fully suppressed. 45, but by the time the combustion gases made it through the baffles of a. 45 suppressor, there was never enough left to eject the round. If he’d wanted to live in a world where you only get one shot at a target, he’d have been born in the nineteenth century.

Silhouetted as she was against the sunlight, a head shot was out of the question, so he’d gone for center of mass. Even then, the distortion of the light caused him to miss the heart twice. Just as well, he supposed. If he’d hit the sternum, the slow, light bullet might not have penetrated the chest cavity at all.

“Please don’t,” she said.

Mitch hated it when they begged. No matter how small and underpowered the weapon, a bullet through the eye at close range always made it to the brain. Finally, she lay still.

Mitch stooped to pick up the envelope his target had dropped and gave it a quick glance to make that no blood had splashed that far. He wasn’t sentimental about these things, but in his line of work, you didn’t want objects in your possession to be spattered. He smiled. Another advantage to using small rounds.

He saw a shadow on the floor and recognized the silhouette as Jaime, the boy who’d been his legs for this job.

“Did I do good?” the boy asked. His tone brimmed with pride.

Mitch stayed on his haunches and pivoted his head. “You did very good,” he said.

“Then pay me now?” Jaime held out his hand, palm up.

Mitch smiled. “Absolutely.”

He proved yet again that a bullet through the eye always made it to the brain. The boy was dead before his knees buckled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

According to the meticulous research package that Venice had assembled, at the height of his career, Bruce Navarro had lived the life of the privileged. Big house, expensive cars and mistresses on both coasts, with a couple more rumored to be ensconced in Europe and Asia. On his tax returns, he reported an annual income north of two million dollars. The bulk of it came from perfectly legitimate clients as the result of legitimate and capable legal work. Nothing in the record proved that Sammy Bell or the old Slater crime syndicate had any direct connection to The Navarro Firm, but Venice had been quick to point out that in her haste she might easily have overlooked a “legitimate” client that was in fact a cutout for a criminal enterprise.