KILLING SARAI (A NOVEL)

CHAPTER THIRTY





Victor





I had hoped she would choose France, but I knew she would choose to go with me. I could still very well take her to France and set her up with everything she needs and my conscience would be clear. But I bypassed the meaning of rational where Sarai is concerned a long time ago. She may very well die in Los Angeles, but I gave her a choice. I all but spelled out the potential consequences of her decision. I didn’t exactly tell her everything, but there is a method to my madness. I can’t allow her time to contemplate what she might do because in this business sometimes a life or death decision comes when you least expect it. And that is the kind of scenario she needs to experience.

Perhaps a part of me hopes she doesn’t make it through the mission because then I will be free of my…shortcomings when it comes to her. But the other part of me, the part that I’m still struggling with that brought her with me as far as I have…

That’s an entirely different issue.

If she lives then I’ll find it necessary to confront it.

If she dies…If she dies then I will go back to my normal life and never find myself in a situation like this again.

“His name is Arthur Hamburg,” I say, laying a manila envelope on Sarai’s lap next to me on the private jet. “He owns Hamburg & Sthilz, the most successful real estate agency on the west coast. But his most lucrative business is more underground.”

Attracted by my silence, she looks up from the photo she removed from the envelope.

“What is his other business?” she asks, as I knew she would.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “The information that I choose to give you is all that you need.”

She cocks her head to one side. “But you know more,” she accuses.

“Yes, I do,” I admit. “But as your employer, you never ask questions about the personal nature of any mark unless you’re unclear as to how you’re going to eliminate him. What he does for a living, who his wife is, his children, if he has any, his crimes, if he has any of those, they don’t matter. The less you know about his personal life, the less of a risk there is for you to become emotionally involved. I give you a photo, tell you his frequent whereabouts and habits, designate a manner in which I prefer the hit to be carried out: messy and in public to send a message, or discreet and accidental to avoid an investigation, and then you take care of the rest.”

She thinks about it a moment, the photo of Arthur Hamburg clutched in her fingertips.

“Wait,” she says, “so you’re saying that you don’t only kill bad people. You also kill innocent people?”

A small smile, I admit unbecoming of me, lifts the edges of my mouth. “No one is innocent, Sarai,” I repeat something she said to me once. “Children, yes, but everyone else, they are as innocent as you or I. Think of it this way if it makes you feel any better: to have a hit placed on you, you must’ve done something or be involved in something illegal or ‘bad’ as you call it.”

“I thought you said that I was innocent,” she reminds me. “And that’s why you didn’t kill me.”

“You were,” I say. “And I wasn’t ordered to kill you by my employer. Javier’s offer was considered a private hit, it didn’t go through my employer first. Private hits are the ones that get innocent people killed. Wives wanting their husbands deaths to look accidental so they can collect their inheritance. Scorned lovers pay private parties to kill their girlfriends out of jealousy and vengeance. I don’t take jobs like those and my employer has never given me one. My Order deals only in crime, government corruption and a host of other things that make bad people bad. And sometimes we eliminate people who might be considered innocent, but who are a threat to a large number of innocent people, or an idea.”

Her eyebrows crease gently as she looks to me to elaborate further.

“Would you have killed Robert Oppenheimer if you knew he was going to head the invention of the Atomic Bomb? Or, eliminate a scientist before she completes her lifelong quest to create a deadly virus in her lab that is intended only to be used against an enemy country in a time of war?”

“Yes, I guess I would,” she says. “Though something like that is sort of like playing God with people’s lives. You’re convicting someone of a crime before it happens.”

I don’t respond to that because that’s exactly what it is.

“Then if they all deserve to die,” she goes on, “what does it matter what I know about their personal lives? What does it matter what I know about this Arthur Hamburg?” She glances at the photo.

“Because for some, the means do not justify the end.”

“You mean that I might feel bad for someone because their crimes don’t constitute a death sentence?”

“Exactly,” I say. “And it’s not for you to make that call.”

“And what makes you think I’d be that soft?” she asks, her eyes full of intent and curiosity.

“I don’t,” I say. “Not for sure. But for someone who wasn’t raised like this, who hasn’t been killing people since she was thirteen-years-old, it would be a very difficult thing to get used to.”

Sarai looks down at the photo one more time and then back up at me. “You’ve been doing it that long?” she asks sympathetically. “I can’t imagine….”

“I endured several years of training as a boy before I was sent on a mission with my mentor. At that age, it’s easy to be molded into whatever they want. My first kill was clean. And I slept soundly that night.”

She looks away, staring off at nothing, lost in thought.

Just when I think she might start second-guessing this whole mission, she surprises me.

“OK, so what am I supposed to do?”

I take the photo from her hands.

“This hit was designated clean,” I begin. “But Arthur Hamburg is rarely alone on his estate. He throws elaborate parties three to four nights a week, only for the wealthiest of people and always by invitation only. The security at his estate is top notch. Hamburg hand-picked every one of them. They are not unskilled security guards hired off the cuff. It won’t be like it is in the movies where I get onto the property unseen and take out all of his men before they get a shot off. It doesn’t work that way in this case.”

Her face has grown weary and anxious over the course of the last few seconds.

“Then how do you get in?”

“We get in by invitation,” I say. “Hamburg has a weakness, like all men, and you and I are going to use it to our advantage.”

Now she looks a little nervous.

“What’s his weakness?”

“Sex, of course,” I say as if she should already know the answer. And I know she did.

She flinches a little underneath that soft skin.

“Is this going where I think it is?”

“Probably not,” I say, “but it will still be unpleasant.”





Sarai





My stomach ties up in a knot. Victor puts the photo of the old man away inside the envelope. And I can’t seem to get these disgusting images out of my head of him lying naked on top of me, the creases and folds of his obvious weight problem smothering me like way too much jelly on a PB&J. I shudder. Surely Victor wouldn’t expect me to sleep with this man even for the sake of a mission. I’m not a hooker in any form and I’ll be damned if I become one. Not even for this. I may have slept with Javier every night for years even though I didn’t want to, but that was different. That was my way of surviving. And Javier, dare I say it, was attractive despite his unforgivable faults.

That was definitely different…

I can’t look at Victor right now, not because I’m mad at him for this even though I feel like I should be, but because…goddamn, I’m still contemplating it. There has to be something more to it, something that separates what whores do from what he expects me to do.

He won’t let it go that far, I resolve to believe. Yes, that’s it. It has to be.

A bit of turbulence shakes the plane and pulls me out of my thoughts. I’m gripping the armrests when I turn to see Victor again.

“So then what’s the plan? It’s obvious you brought me along because being the girl I fit perfectly into it.”

He nods. “Yes, being a woman has its advantages in cases like these. Just remember the things I told you before: you’re submissive to me but sometimes your tongue gets you into trouble. You’re a wealthy, stuck up little bitch and more than anything, you fear nothing.”

I laugh derisively. “Well, according to you, I’ve got that fear thing down pat already.”

“Yes,” he says retaining his serious expression, “but you might feel differently once you’re there and the threat is all around you. You need to make certain that nothing will break you of the control you have over your fear. Hamburg will be turned off by you the moment he senses it. Fear to him is weakness and he likes strong, reckless young women. And even stronger men.”

I feel my face distort with disgust and mild shock, but I don’t ask about the obvious. I just try to let it all sink in, what exactly we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it. Because everything I theorized before has just been tossed out the window.

Victor did say that what I assumed would happen probably wasn’t right, but I’m only slightly relieved by the truth in that. And ‘slightly’ will continue to be the measure because he also said it would still be unpleasant.