Blood of the Assassin

CHAPTER 4





Jean-Claude Bouchard peered at his watch with annoyance and lit another cigarette with a thin gold lighter that had been in his family for generations. His refined features spoke to an aristocratic heritage, as did the insouciant way he sucked greedily on the Gitanes and then blew smoke at the ceiling, as if disgusted with it even as the tendrils left his lips.

He should have been asleep at this late hour, or at the very least, been rolling around with one of the young German lasses that he favored with his attentions. Instead, he was waiting for the idiot clerk from the police department that he kept on the payroll – mainly so he could justify to his superiors in French intelligence that he was doing something besides spending their money and enjoying the Berlin nightlife.

At thirty-seven years old, Jean-Claude was in the prime of his career, such as it was – the truth being that even though the French maintained a spy network, there wasn’t a lot to challenge him in Berlin. He waxed nostalgic about the good old days, when in his imagination he could have been darting furtively down darkened alleys, meeting Soviet moles, danger behind every door. Unfortunately, he’d been born too late for that, and had to content himself with doing grunt work that was beneath him, running a network of informants who did little more than offer tidbits of gossip and data he had no interest in. Still, as long as the French government was willing to pay to collect it, he would, biding his time until he could return to a nice comfortable desk in Paris once he’d done his obligatory stint in the field, and wait for his father to die, leaving him a nice endowment and a lavish flat in the sixteenth arrondissement.

He ran nimble fingers through his thick black hair and then pursed his lips, wondering what the hell the German could have for him that required this ungodly hour for a rendezvous. He stared at his hand, holding the cigarette in the affected way he had seen in the movies, and decided that he would give the clerk twenty more minutes and then leave the little studio apartment he kept for meetings; the ingrate could damned well wait until morning if he wasn’t going to be considerate enough to be prompt.

The intercom buzzed at him like an annoyed insect, startling him as he fumed over Heinrich’s rudeness – very typically German, he thought bitterly. Not pausing to endure the ritual of asking who was there at four-twenty in the morning, he pressed the black button that unlocked the front door and then paused at the hall mirror to consider his appearance. Thin, handsome, he had been told that he looked like a Hollywood star – Leonardo DiCaprio, although Jean-Claude thought he was better looking than that. DiCaprio looked soft, whereas Jean-Claude in his mind radiated brooding danger, as befitted a master of the clandestine world. He stubbed out his smoke in a crystal ashtray on the side table and sucked in his cheeks, turning his face to inspect the effect on his profile.

A thud at his apartment door pulled him from his ruminations, annoying him even further. Was the man raised in a barn? Couldn’t he at least attempt to be quiet? Jean-Claude moved to the peephole and looked out, but saw nothing except for the empty hallway lit by a couple of cheap lamps left over from the industrial revolution. Puzzled, he listened at the door, and then pushed his ear against the wood to better make out any sound in the hall.

He was about to go back and push the intercom button again when he heard it. A scratching sound.

“Heinrich?” he called out softly, his voice betraying his puzzlement.

Nothing.

Another faint scratch. Nails on the door. And then a groan. Almost inaudible.

Jean-Claude swung the door open and practically fell over the German’s inert form collapsed across the threshold, blood trickling from his nose and mouth. Jean-Claude’s eyes widened in alarm, and he instantly regretted not having brought his pistol – not that there was any obvious threat. He stepped back and kneeled, taking care to avoid the blood.

“Heinrich! What happened? Are you all right?” he whispered, registering even as he asked that Heinrich was far from all right.

The German murmured at him unintelligibly. Jean-Claude stood and then bent down to haul him into the apartment, anxious to avoid any unwanted scrutiny from a light-sleeping neighbor. He got his hands under Heinrich’s arms and dragged him in, and then held out his hands, covered in blood, as he moved to the door and kicked it closed behind him. Pausing for a moment, uncertain what to do, he stepped over the wounded man and moved into the small kitchen to rinse his hands.

“Good Christ, Heinrich. You’re bleeding like a...” Jean-Claude bit his tongue. Heinrich undoubtedly knew he was losing blood.

He moved back to the German and pulled his overcoat open, and saw a bullet wound high in the chest, and another in his upper shoulder. His arm was twisted at an unnatural angle, broken, and his skin was the color of a shark’s belly.

Heinrich tried to speak, but all that came out of his mouth was another gurgle. Jean-Claude knelt and leaned over him, turning his head to better make out whatever he was trying to say.

“What? What is it, Heinrich? Who did this to you?” he demanded.

Heinrich tried to raise his good arm, but then it fell back to his side as he coughed blood all over the side of Jean-Claude’s face.

The Frenchman pulled back in horror, momentary thoughts of blood-borne diseases racing through his brain – hepatitis, AIDS, Ebola...

Heinrich coughed again, laboring for breath, and then with a groan, lay still, his chest ceasing its straining, his eyes open, staring into eternity with a puzzled frown. Jean-Claude watched life quit the German’s body, and then his arm froze on its way to his face to wipe away the blood.

There was something in Heinrich’s hand. Clutched between his dead fingers.

Jean-Claude reached out, trembling slightly from shock, and gently eased the object from his death grip.

A USB flash drive, crimson smeared across one side of it.

Jean-Claude stood, and then his blood chilled in his veins. He heard a sound from the street – the front door. A crash.

Like someone kicking it in.

Mind racing frantically, he pocketed the flash drive and glanced at himself in the mirror, taking in the drying blood spackled on his profile with alarm. Moving to the kitchen he quickly grabbed a dish towel and wiped the splatter away as he calculated his options.

The chances were good that they didn’t know what apartment Heinrich was coming to.

Then again, it was only a matter of time until they followed the blood trail to his front door. At which point, whoever had done this to Heinrich would repeat the process with him – an eventuality Jean-Claude wanted to avoid at all costs.

Which meant that he would need to beat them to the stairs.

He threw the towel into the sink, grabbed a butcher knife, and moved to the dining room table to grab his notebook computer before creeping to the door and looking out the peephole.

Nobody.

Yet.

He took a final look at Heinrich’s bloody corpse and then eased the knob open. Grateful the hinges didn’t squeak, he pulled the door towards him and stepped into the hall.

And heard footsteps on the second floor – two below his.

He debated whether to risk closing up the apartment, then erred on the side of caution and stepped silently down the hallway, passing the central main stairs, up which the sound of the pursuers had drifted, and continued to the service stairwell at the far end. His hand shook as he reached out and gripped the handle, and then he froze when the door creaked as it opened.

The footsteps stopped; then suddenly accelerated.

Abandoning any pretension of stealth, he bolted into the landing and took the steps to the roof three at a time, figuring that it would take whoever was after him longer to climb them than to follow him if he went down – gravity being his friend in this case.

At the steel roof door he stopped again, listening intently. A rustle greeted him from below. Exactly like someone creeping up the stairs would sound, trying to avoid giving away their position.

He unlocked the deadbolt and shouldered the door open, then sprinted across the roof to the next building, which was the same height. He leapt across the five-foot chasm, praying that in the dark he had gauged the distance correctly, and stumbled as his dress shoes skidded on the slick surface. Ignoring the pain from his ankle, he willed himself forward to the rooftop exit and felt for the latch.

Locked.

Shit.

He was halfway to the next building, its roof a story lower, when he heard a scrape from his building. His only hope now was that it was so dark that his pursuers wouldn’t be able to make him out. Not a great bet to have to make, he realized, and increased his speed.

He hesitated at the roof edge, and then, hearing the sounds of running steps from his building, he backed up and then hurled himself into space, swearing silently, grateful that he spent a decent amount of time in the gym, but fearing what the landing would do to him. When his feet pounded into the roof he instinctively let his knees buckle and then he was rolling, the notebook shattering as it flew from his hands, another blinding shriek of pain shooting up his left leg as ligaments protested the abuse.

When he came to a stop he was still in one piece. He forced himself to stand; his leg almost gave out, but thankfully it held. Jean-Claude limped away from his landing spot, leaving the notebook, and gimped to the roof door, praying that it was open.

The first silenced bullet thumped into the steel frame a foot from his head. He ducked, wrenching the handle with all his strength. A second shot slammed into the stone doorjamb just as the door opened, and then he was through. He vowed to go to church every morning for the rest of his life as he twisted the lock closed, pausing to take in the heavy steel plate and the industrial hinges.

It would take them a while to get through that, he thought, and then descended the steps as fast as his brutalized leg would allow. As he reached the second floor he heard thuds from above, but they were too late. By the time they got into the building, he would be gone.

Outside on the street, he was the only pedestrian to be seen. At the corner, he glanced around and dared a look back at his building, where a car was double parked outside, partially blocking the two lane street – finding a parking spot was impossible in Berlin, even for desperate murderers. He didn’t wait for the killers to make it back to ground level, instead setting off in the direction of the subway, which he could reach in two minutes, even in his condition.

When he entered the station, he briefly considered the torn knee of his two-hundred-dollar gabardine slacks and shook his head, muttering to himself. He fished in his pocket for some change, and his fingers brushed against the flash drive as he dug out the fare.

A tiny bit of innocuous micro-circuitry that Heinrich had paid the ultimate price to protect.

He had never been so happy to see a train come down the tracks in his life, and when he boarded, one of only a few bleary-eyed pre-dawn travelers, he took a seat and exhaled with relief.

Whatever was on the flash drive had to be, in Heinrich’s words, dynamite. It had already claimed one blood sacrifice, and Jean-Claude couldn’t help but believe, as he fingered it in his pocket, that there would be more where that came from.

The train rocked from side to side as it shuttled down the tracks, and when Jean-Claude got off at the third stop, he had decided that whatever had landed in his lap would require him to be extraordinarily cautious – he would stop at the first open internet café and check to see what was on the drive. If it was as big as Heinrich had intimated, he would be on the next flight out in the morning, so he could deliver it in person to his superiors and hand off the responsibility to others, taking himself out of the line of fire and hopefully landing at least a commendation, if not a promotion, for his expeditious handling of the matter.

Whatever it was.

A creeping sense of dread tickled his stomach. He had a feeling that Heinrich had made the find of his life.

Jean-Claude only hoped that he would live to tell about it.