Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (7 page)

As she cut her left wrist she bit her lip at the pain. Oh, how it hurt.
Ow, ow, ow.
And as she slashed her right wrist, she wished she owned a handgun. That would have made it so much quicker, she thought, as she watched the bath water turn red.

Thirteen hours later she discovered what a mistake the razor had been, and how Death had a far sicker sense of humor than the neighborhood kids.

Eleven-year-old Tommy Hamlyn was waiting for the stoplight, worried about being late for dinner and how his mom would be mad at him for not coming home in time, when the white Mercedes hit him.

Tommy went flying off the side of the street a mile from his house on the outskirts of Santa Fe, New Mexico, his right leg shattered by the impact, his ribs crushed like a Coke can. Two of them punctured a lung, and Tommy ended his short life in a ditch beside the road.

The driver of the car already had a rap sheet a mile long and didn’t stop.

Tommy’s last thought was of his mom and the roast chicken dinner he was late for.

When he awoke several hours later, he dragged himself from the ditch, cold, confused, and very hungry. Seeing it was dark, he set off for home as quickly as his right leg would allow him.

Mom was going to be very, very angry.

ALEXANDRIA.

6:01 P.M.

“
Summer arrived in New York with a vengeance today, and with it a wave of violence,” anchor Peter Jennings was saying, but Nick wasn’t really listening.

He was slumped across the black leather couch, a cold Rolling Rock in hand, thinking about Sandy, still angry at their breakfast conversation.

The TV screen flashed footage of New York City cops closing off a midtown street as paramedics dragged away bodies on gurneys. The clip cut to a scene in the Bronx. More cops, more paramedics. More bodies.

Urban violence. The cornerstone of American society. He’d be seeing that up close on the streets of D.C. soon enough. Right now though, he didn’t care. The apprehension he’d carried since graduation took second place to Sandy.

Although he and Sandy had parted tenderly at Union Station, the interval between the abortive breakfast and her departure on the noon train had been tense. He’d wanted their morning together to be sweet, to savor the brief time from waking until departure. When she returned, there would be plenty of grief and pain.

He took a pull from the bottle. The beer was cold, refreshing, but he put it down.
You’ve got a problem. Right.

He absently flipped channels, picking up a local news broadcast.

“
Police are withholding further details of the murder until the body has been identified,” said the newscaster against the background of the National Arboretum. “Which may take some time, according to Detective David Quinn. The body was so badly mutilated, identification may only be possible through dental records.” Nick flipped again. So much for a quiet Sunday. Why did people do that shit to each other? He’d find out soon enough. Every rookie knew that once he stepped out onto the streets he’d be looking straight into humanity’s heart of darkness. That was part of the reason he felt anxious—a fear of unknown horrors. The main reason though, was fear of failure. He was scared he wouldn’t measure up, wouldn’t be a better man than his father.

He stopped at ABC again, Peter Jennings still droning on about more death in New York. Fifteen people dead in Harlem. Cut to footage of grieving mothers.
Enough.
He turned off the TV in disgust and headed for the backyard, leaving the half-drunk beer—his fifth since lunch—on the coffee table.

WASHINGTON HARBOR COMPLEX, GEORGETOWN.

08:12 P.M.

The framed photograph of Billie Holiday dominated the wall to the left of the large window overlooking the Potomac. The singer in her tight evening dress, slender and shadowy in the black-and-white portrait, contrasted sharply with the Akira on the long right wall that stretched from the entrance hall to the kitchen. A simple white block of canvas, Akira’s rectangle was bisected by a violent red arc of paint resembling the spill of blood on a
seppuku
mat. The image was tranquil despite the force of the color, the echo of death.

Corvino, dressed in gray sweatpants and a white silk karate
gi
, was by the window, reclining on a black leather easy chair, his face serene as he tried to meditate on Billie. The day before an assignment, he would focus on the Akira. The ritual formality of the painting made it perfect to reflect on, to still the mind and help focus on what was to come—the explosion of violence required by any mission. After an assignment, however, it was the photograph of the blues singer that helped to calm him, to resolve the tensions which assignment unleashed.

No one sang like Lady Day. The fragility of her voice touched a nerve inside him in a way no other musician could. Certainly, the nature of his work, the index of his experiences, didn’t encourage levity or emotional expression. But although years of killing had stripped his responses down almost to a neutral level, she reminded Corvino that he was still a man, not a machine with a gun. Indeed, sometimes he’d wished he was like Schwarzenegger in
The Terminator
, an unstoppable killing machine. All his life he’d had a problem expressing his emotions. Through Billie Holiday’s voice though, that human side of him found refreshing release. She sang like an angel with broken wings, a seraph gifted with a voice of glass, for he also knew that her songs of love and life were blown from an existence forged in pain, heartbreak, addiction, and death. It all made perfect sense to him, this uncomfortable duality: beauty from suffering, joy from pain.

Shortly he’d slip her Greatest Hits album on the CD player and lie there losing himself in the alluring sways of her haunted voice. For now, however, he just wanted to stare at her, trying to rid himself of the troubling thoughts nagging him, just concentrate on her beauty, frozen and immortalized by a camera lens.

But the ritual wasn’t working. He kept seeing Mitra’s flayed body on the bed, Harris and Skolomowski on the steps, the mutilated corpses inside the drug cartel house. He couldn’t banish Panama from his mind, allow the smoky image of the blues singer to overwhelm his consciousness, until he saw nothing but the photo, nothing but her dark, sensitive, sad eyes, her thick, delicate lips. Years of Zen meditation had taught him not to waste precious energies worrying about elements outside his immediate control. But his grief and confusion were so great he couldn’t concentrate.

Mitra was dead.

And so were the others.

Not that he gave a shit about Skolomowski. His death gave Corvino a small measure of satisfaction. The bastard deserved it.

He was sorry about Harris, though. He’d been a good operative, yet his murder was inconsequential in the greater scheme of things. Death was a way of life for an assassin. It didn’t matter whether you were on assignment or not; there was always the chance someone on the other side, whatever side that was—the lines were so blurred you couldn’t define them anymore—could sanction you in retaliation for something you did years ago, or for an assignment you had no involvement with. Covert operatives remained just chess pieces in an endless game of moves and countermoves. It didn’t matter whether you were a pawn or a knight—ultimately, you were expendable.

Fuck it. Take it away, Billie.

He didn’t care that he was suspended pending an official investigation. He was burning out on the killing and he’d been thinking about retirement for some time. Of course, that was easier said than done. You didn’t just put in a request and collect a pension in this game. They’d use you until you had nothing left to offer them. And even then there was no guarantee they’d allow you to live out your last years in peace. If they deemed you a security risk, you ended up in a government-owned sanitarium, drugged to the eyeballs in a cell masquerading as a private room. At best, they provided you with a suite at an anonymous country club in Vermont, Virginia, or Texas, complete with swimming pool, tennis courts, Jacuzzis, and every convenience money could buy, living in a community of former operatives.

Or you took your own life like Nuemann, Jenkins, Jones and some of the others he’d known who, when they looked back on their careers, found nothing of worth in their lives.

Corvino had been aware he’d teetered close to complete burnout for nearly a year. It was part of the reason he’d allowed Mitra to get close to him. But he’d been crazy to think it could work, that they could have a normal relationship once he retired. He’d been a soldier, a mercenary and, for the past fifteen years, an assassin. He’d killed more people than he could remember, lived in the shadows of the world most people took for granted, seen and done things the average person couldn’t accept.

Like shooting a dead man.

For the twentieth time that day he entered Mitra’s apartment, saw the blood-stained rag, fumbled for the light switch. Her flayed torso glistened wetly as the smell of death caught in the back of his throat.

Mitra…what did they do to you?

He stared at the picture of Billie Holiday but couldn’t see her. All he could see was Mitra’s body, her eyes opening, the silenced barrel of his gun touching the side of her head.

He got up from the chair and paced the room.

Who’d killed the men in the house?

What was Skolomowski doing there?

Why?

The word became a mantra.

Why?

Del Valle and Hershman hadn’t believed his story. Maybe Ryan believed some of it, but in the limo, Corvino had read skepticism in his eyes, too. And Lang’s disappearance troubled Corvino.

In the meantime, though, pacing with anxiety would achieve nothing. He hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours. Rest was a priority.

Corvino returned to the chair and looked again at the photograph of Billie. It took him the best part of an hour to clear his mind. His breathing slowed. And the world outside his apartment retreated. With each deep breath, tension leaked from his tired body like grains of sand slipping through the funnel of an hourglass. And, after a while, even the apartment grew dim and slipped out of focus. The pale blue walls ceased to be solid, the white Venetian blinds folded into thin strips of ivory mist glazing over the wide, panoramic windows and their skyline view of the Capitol. The black-and-white tatama lights, standing on low tables at each corner of the room, dissolved into achromatic blocks, as did the rest of the minimalist furniture.

His last thought before sleep took him was that Hershman probably had him under surveillance. Somewhere outside the building stood a parked van, probably a Ford Econoline with Maryland plates and the logo of a cable-TV company stenciled on its sides. The company name would be bogus, the telephone number nonexistent. Inside, two men dressed in maintenance overalls would be employing state-of-the-art equipment to monitor his every move.

If that was the case, so be it.

He had nothing to hide.

—
| — | —

“…
somebody’s going to get killed.

Now that’s all I can tell you about it.

I’m not playing. This is nothing to play about.”

—
Anonymous policeman

From
Cops
, by Mark Baker

—
| — | —

BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT. MONDAY, MAY 29.

4:11 A.M.

Reviving the dead was only part of Comet Saracen’s legacy.

The radiation it had brought to earth produced a second effect, one just as deadly as the first. It attacked tissue, destroyed the body’s auto-immune responses, and accelerated disease. Be it the common cold, flu, measles, chicken pox, whatever, normally non-fatal viruses began to mutate and turned lethal.

The first person to die from Comet Saracen’s other legacy was George Stanton, a forty-three-year-old insurance salesman who’d contracted measles from a client’s six-year-old daughter on Friday, but no one would ever know this. Neither the client nor Stanton knew the child had been incubating for nine days. Stanton had escaped the virus as a kid growing up in Little Rock, Arkansas. A keen athlete from an early age, he’d taken care of himself and seldom experienced a day’s illness in his life. In fact, he prided himself on his almost-flawless medical record and used it in his sales pitch. Exercise, a sensible diet, eight hours of sleep a night—that was his personal health insurance plan. But, as he liked to remind potential clients—and to George Stanton, everyone was a potential client—because the world was full of surprises, and you needed to take precautions, and there was no better precaution than an insurance policy—it didn’t matter how you tried to minimize risks, life could easily catch you with your pants down. A good insurance policy went a long way towards securing peace of mind.

George was a good salesman. He had a gift. People liked him, trusted him—and they bought his policies.
Lucky old George
, his neighbors said.
In prime health for his age, and so successful.

But now he had the measles, the incubation period was accelerating, and within twelve hours, he’d be dead.

He started to feel ill around 4 P.M. on Sunday after he’d mowed the backyard lawn. His back and muscles ached, but he didn’t really think anything about it. Just a little stiffness, that’s all. He hadn’t followed his usual exercise regime that week due to a business conference down in Hartford, Connecticut, which had taken up a lot of time. An hour later he realized his head was unusually hot. He took his temperature, and finding it was up, swallowed two aspirin. Half an hour later, feeling even more feverish, he took two more, and drank a glass of orange juice. By 9 P.M., he felt like he was coming down with the flu. Damn his luck. He’d taken Monday off to go fishing up at the lake. He decided to go to bed early. Maybe the aspirins and a good night’s rest would take care of it. Probably just the start of a summer cold. But sleep eluded him. Within the hour, his temperature had rocketed to 105 degrees and his skin itched like crazy. He tossed and turned in bed, hallucinating. By 11:33 P.M., he slid into a coma.