The Darkest Day (12 page)

Two men sat in the back of the midnight-blue panel van. They used upturned beer-bottle crates as seats. Not comfortable, but practical. If a cop insisted on taking a look in the back he would see nothing to catch his attention. The windows of the van’s rear doors had been treated with one-way film. They could see out. No one could see in. The film was similar to that used in sunglasses and the outside world was darkened as a result. On a grey winter day that darkness was pronounced, but they could see enough to do their job. That job was to watch.

But they were not using the rear windows to watch. They had parked across the street from the tenement building. Parking with the one-way windows facing the building would be too suspicious to such a careful professional.

Instead, they used a camera. The lens of the camera looked through a hole in the van’s side panelling. That hole was covered in glass and treated in the same way as the windows in the rear doors and disguised within the delivery-company logo. It was almost impossible to see unless someone knew where to look for it and was standing no more than two feet away.

One of the men watched a screen and operated the camera’s zoom and focus. He whispered observations to the second man, who noted everything because neither man knew exactly what was required of them but they knew enough to know that they were not to cut corners. This was a serious business. The price for failure was absolute.

‘Subject has entered the tenement,’ the first man said.

‘Manner?’ the second asked.

‘The same as when he arrived: relaxed.’

‘Is he carrying anything?’

‘If he is, it’s in his pockets. His hands are empty.’

The second man nodded and scribbled on his notepad with a 2B pencil. His shirt pocket had another two for when the first grew blunt. There might not be time to sharpen it. The graphite might snap. Pens were not much better. They could stop working for no good reason. Pencils could write when wet or on wet paper and pretty much any surface. He preferred pencils. No contest.

A phone rang. The first man answered it. He didn’t need to say hello or state his name or ask the caller how he could help. Only one person knew this number.

The caller said, ‘Is it him?’

‘I think so.’

‘Can you track him when he exits?’

‘I would advise against that course of action. Subject is observant and paranoid. If we follow, he will make us. Repeat: he will make us. I suggest bringing in Bravo Team to establish surveillance at Point Niner and wait for him to show.’

The caller said, ‘Your advice is noted. Proceed as planned. Follow the subject as soon as he leaves the building. Do not let him out of your sight.’

‘Understood.’

The call disconnected.

‘Better get ready,’ the first man said.

The second climbed behind the wheel.

No intruder alarm had been fitted. Victor saw no cameras or microphones or motion sensors in the hallway he stepped into, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. He knew how to hide them so that only a search that would take hours to complete and leave the apartment in ruins would uncover them. If he knew that, so could she. He had neither the time nor the necessity to do so. Once he killed her, any recordings of him in her safe house could be found at his leisure. Or even ignored, because they were no threat in the hands of a corpse.

The lights were off throughout the apartment, and the drawn blinds made it dark. The air was cold too. Even colder than on the streets. No heating had been on today to take the chill from the air, and no sunlight had been able to spill through windows to raise the temperature in line with that outside.

Victor let the door fall shut behind him, stood still and breathed in slow, shallow breaths to let every sound reach his ears unobstructed. Even without the darkness of the apartment limiting his vision, hearing was more important. Light could not penetrate walls.

He heard traffic outside, the ticking sound of pipes at work, and a television or radio emanating from the apartment beneath or next door – he couldn’t be sure which. He stood statue-still in the darkness for several minutes until he was certain he was alone.

He hadn’t expected to find Raven inside, but it would have made things easier if she was hiding, or better yet asleep and vulnerable.

He explored the safe house, moving from room to room in a slow, methodical manner. There were few furnishings and only those that fulfilled the most basic requirements of someone who needed to sleep and eat and lie low and nothing else. The lounge was almost cavernous, furnished only with a single foldout camping chair and table. A second foldout chair was still in its packaging. The three pieces had come as a set, but she had set up only what she needed. There was no television or sound system or any other electronic device. Aside from the folding chair and table the only other item was a paperback novel. It looked new and unread. The spine was still intact and the pages not unfurled.

He had never heard of the author or the title, but it had been published within the last two years and what fiction he read was picked at random from second-hand book stores, often by the box, so if anyone studied his reading material they would find no indication of personality or taste. Raven might pick new books in the same way. He could learn nothing about her from a single novel she had not yet read.

The kitchen had no toaster or kettle or microwave or other labour-saving device. In a cupboard he found a set of three rugged iron camping pans – small, medium and large. In another he found a twelve-piece crockery set. The only food he found was an unopened box of cereal. There were enough carbohydrates contained within to keep a person alive for a long time.

In a drawer, a cutlery set had been aligned with neatness and order. It was the only true sign of personality so far, but he had expected to find some indication of a need to have everything in its place, accounted for and ordered. Like himself, she was fastidious in her need for order. His had grown out of a need to survive and a knowledge that the smallest detail, the smallest mistake, might make the difference between life and death. In the neat, ordered layout of the cutlery he saw that she was the same as him in that way as she was in others and he wondered how else they would prove to be alike.

He did not enjoy discovering the similarities between them because it would make her harder to kill. But better he find out in advance than when his life might depend on it.

He found soap in the bathroom, but no toothbrush. He imagined she bought a new one with her every time she stayed, disposing of the old one and its traces of DNA.

The apartment had a single bedroom, which contained nothing but a sleeping bag. It was a quality item. He assumed it had been brought from the same store as the chair and table set and the items in the kitchen. He wondered what lie she had told the person who served her. He squatted down to smell it. There was a trace of female scent within the synthetic material. He had read that smell produced the most powerful memories.

He was a little surprised to find no gun. But, like the toothbrush, she must bring a weapon with her and take it away again. With the limited security offered by the front door, she did not feel it prudent to leave a weapon, no doubt illegal, behind.

An idea came to him. He returned to the lounge and picked up the paperback novel. A sticker on the front jacket showed it had been in a promotion. He had to fight the compulsion to peel the sticker away. Had it been his own he would have done so before he had walked out of the store. Raven hadn’t felt the same need, but it seemed as though she hadn’t read the book either.

He balanced it by the spine in the centre of his palm and let the pages fall open. They did not do so in an even manner, parting to about a third of the way through instead of the middle. The book was in far too good condition for Raven to have read up to page 100 of a 311-page paperback novel.

There were no pencil or pen marks on the page, no words circled or underlined. He read both pages. It was almost all dialogue between two characters, discussing another character. Victor had no idea what the story was about. He took the book into the kitchen, flicked a wall switch to send power to the oven, and turned dials to operate it. A fan whirred and a light came on. He switched off the ceiling light so the only illumination came from the oven, leaving the room dark and glowing in soft orange.

Sitting down next to the oven, he positioned himself and angled the book so the light shone across the pages in a horizontal manner. With no other light reaching the pages, the texture of the paper was obvious – rough and fibrous. It had a moonscape quality of tiny hills and shadowed craters.

Except in three places.

On page 100 the first word on the first line had a faint horizontal groove beneath it, where pressure had been applied. Victor placed the nail of his little finger into the groove. It was a good fit for his, or the index finger of a medium-sized woman. Towards the bottom of the page, the first word of the twenty-eighth line had a similar groove. On the same line was another, deeper, groove, under the word
met
. It was the fourth word on the line.

He pictured Raven opening the book to page 100, placing her fingernail under the first word and counting down to the twenty-eighth line, then across to the fourth word. She had been given the name of the book and a six-digit numerical code – 100, 28, 4 – resulting in a single word, or maybe another code comprised of three letters – m, e and t.

He retried balancing the book by its spine in his palm in case it fell open to another page, but without success. At first it seemed odd that she had left the book behind, given its significance, but he reasoned she would need to use it again for further communications with whoever had given her the first code. Bookstores were a lot rarer than they used to be and there was no guarantee she could buy another copy when she needed to.

In his earlier days in the business he had sometimes used newspapers and similar codes to communicate with those it was too risky to meet face-to-face, but he had never done so with novels.

He thought about the word
met
, and what it could mean, and what
m-e-t
could stand for. He was no sports fan but he knew of the New York Mets. Met was also a common name for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Or met might signify a pre-determined course of action like a meeting or could be a code word for something or someone.

But on its own it couldn’t reveal much information. Unless the numbers that led to it were also significant. He flicked back to page 100 and then turned back pages until he came to the start of the chapter: 15. Today’s date was the fifteenth.

100, 28, and 4. He didn’t understand what the numbers could represent. A grid reference, maybe. Or the 4 might denote the time of the meeting or handover or whatever else. 100 could be for the street, but there was no way of knowing whether it meant E 100th Street or W 100th Street.

He had no more time to ponder it because two federal agents kicked open the front door.

There were no preceding footsteps, so they had to have approached with stealth or caution, but he heard them shuffle outside the apartment door an instant before it was kicked open.

‘
Federal agents
,’ shouted one. A woman.

The voice carried weight and resonance and confidence. It was the well-practised shout of someone who believed in the absolute authority and righteousness of the words. She sounded to Victor like the real thing.

Which was a serious problem. He would have preferred it to be a bluff, and the woman a killer trying to catch him off-guard. Killers were easier to deal with. There wasn’t any grey area. It was always a simple case of killing them before they killed him. He could lie in weight and ambush the first one, disarming him or her of their gun and perhaps using them as a human shield while he shot their partner before torturing anything useful out of the one alive before finishing them off.

Government agents were different. It was all grey area. There were no black-and-white decisions. Killing them was to be avoided at all costs. The fallout would be huge. No expense would be spared in the attempt to bring him to justice. Killing drug lords and arms dealers and corrupt spies and fellow assassins might bring him to the attention of law enforcement, but killing government agents who were doing their job would unleash a whirlwind of retribution. Also, they were not going to be an immediate threat to his life, which meant killing them would be hard to justify to what remained of his conscience. He would if he had to – if it came down to taking their lives or spending the rest of his behind bars, but only then.

There was nowhere to hide in the apartment, so he raised his hands, said, ‘Don’t shoot,’ and stepped out into the hallway.

Both agents had him in their gunsights in an instant. The one on the right was the woman he had heard. She was young, with olive skin and jet-black hair pulled back into a ponytail so tight the hair at the top of her forehead was thinning. She wore a grey trouser suit and stared at him with the same authority and confidence he had detected in her voice.

The man next to her was tall and well built. He had a thick neck and a solid, angular jaw. His hair was clipped military-short and his skin was tanned and smooth. He looked a few years older than the woman. His gaze was locked on to Victor with a more evaluating quality.

Neither had expected to see him.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ the man demanded.

Victor kept his hands above his shoulders. He stood passive, but unafraid. ‘I’m saying nothing until I see some ID.’

‘We don’t have to show you shit.’

‘Then this conversation is going to take a very long time.’

The woman stepped forward. ‘We’re from Homeland Security. I’m agent Guerrero. This is agent Wallinger.’

Victor said, ‘I didn’t ask your names. I asked to see your ID.’

‘Don’t make us arrest you,’ the man said.

‘Arrest me if you want to. But I’ve done nothing wrong so I’ll be walking within the hour and you’ll look like an idiot in front of your boss.’

The man glared. The woman took her left hand from her right and lowered her gun. ‘I’m going to put this away and take out my ID. Okay?’

Victor nodded.

She inserted the pistol back into a black leather holster attached to her belt on the right hip. Then she reached beneath her suit jacket and withdrew a badge booklet, also black leather. She opened it up and held it out for Victor to see.

‘It’s dark,’ he said. ‘I can’t read it from here. Step closer.’

She did. The man adjusted his aim on Victor, looking as though he would like nothing more in the world than to paint the wall with the contents of Victor’s skull.

The woman stopped out of arm’s reach and he examined the badge. Occupying one half was a golden Homeland Security badge. On the second half was a photograph of the woman before him.
Agent Miriam Guerrero.
The photograph was a few years old. Guerrero’s hair was thicker at the front.
It was genuine as far as Victor could tell, not that he had ever come this near to a Homeland Security ID before. But if they were pretending, they could have shot him by now. There was no need for a continued deception.

Victor gestured to the man. ‘His turn.’

The man did nothing but stare at Victor and hold his aim.

‘Let’s make this easy, shall we?’ the woman named Guerrero said to the man.

‘Fine,’ he said in return.

He put his gun away and showed his ID to Victor with almost the exact same movements that Guerrero had. Maybe they were even trained how to identify themselves.

Guerrero looked to Victor. ‘Now it’s your turn.’

‘My name is Jimmy Marino. I’m a credit enforcement agent.’

He showed the ID. It was fake, but the best money could buy. They would need to being up the identity from the DMV’s database to see that Victor’s picture did not match Mr Marino’s. If they could tell it was fake by eye alone then they were the best anti-fraud agents in the whole country.

‘You mean you’re a debt collector,’ Guerrero said.

‘Miss Margolis is behind with her rent. The landlord hired me to get his money.’

Wallinger handed the driver’s licence back, then said, ‘Company ID.’

‘I don’t carry any. I’m a one-man band.’

Guerrero said, ‘Business card then.’

‘I work on personal recommendations only.’

Wallinger looked him over. ‘So, let me get this right, you’re a debt collector who works for himself, who doesn’t carry business cards because he only works on personal recommendations?’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Why do I think you’re in a more
organised
kind of activity?’

Victor said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Wallinger said, ‘Then let me make it more obvious: I think you’re mob. I think you’re an enforcer. Would I be close?’

‘I don’t know why you would think that, Agent Wallinger. You must be a naturally suspicious person,’ Victor said, gaze even, but with just enough arrogance in his eyes to help Wallinger along the wrong path. Any path that led away from Victor’s true profession would do, but Wallinger had already made a wrong assumption. It would be wasteful not to exploit it. ‘Or are you suggesting I’m involved in organised crime because I have an Italian surname? Because that would make you a bigot.’

Wallinger frowned but kept his lips tight.

‘I’ve committed no crime,’ Victor continued. ‘You’re the ones who kicked the door open. I used a key supplied by the landlord. If I wasn’t meant to be here you wouldn’t have had to wreck the door, would you? You could have simply walked inside.’

‘Whatever,’ Wallinger said.

‘Where’s your warrant?’ Victor said, even though he knew they didn’t need one to enter private property if they had reasonable suspicions of criminal activity or a threat to national security.

‘We don’t need one,’ Wallinger said, looking smug.

‘We’re going to look around,’ Guerrero said and gestured to the floor. ‘You, don’t go anywhere. We’ll be right back.’

And they were, in less than a minute. There wasn’t a whole lot to look at. Victor did as instructed and stayed in the same spot.

Wallinger said, ‘There’s a good boy,’ on his return, as if talking to an obedient dog. The taunt had no effect on Victor but he narrowed his eyes and flexed the muscles of his jaw because that’s what Marino the debt collector would do.

‘What are you guys doing here?’ Victor asked.

Neither answered.

‘The door’s going to need repairing. I’d like to be able to explain why when I’m asked about it.’

They ignored him. Wallinger adjusted his belt while Guerrero typed out a message on her phone.

‘What’s Angelica done?’

‘Who says she’s done anything?’ Wallinger asked.

‘Two Homeland Security agents kicked in her front door. You wouldn’t do that for a parking ticket.’

‘Maybe we just need to ask her some questions.’

‘So you didn’t think to knock?’

‘Maybe she’s in danger.’

Guerrero said, ‘When did you last see Miss Margolis?’

‘I’ve never met her before.’

‘Do you have any idea where she might have gone?’

‘If I did, I would be there now. I wouldn’t be wasting my time here, would I? I’ve got a job to do.’

‘Okay,’ Guerrero said. ‘You’re free to go.’

‘I didn’t realise I hadn’t been.’

Wallinger frowned at him.

‘You know,’ Victor said. ‘If you tell me what this is all about then maybe I’ll be able to help.’

Guerrero said, ‘A minute ago you said you didn’t know where we could find her. If you’re withholding information from us then that’s obstruction of justice and you’ll go to prison.’

‘Why would I withhold information from you?’

‘So you can collect the debt she owes before we get to her.’

‘Ah,’ Victor said. ‘Now I understand.’

Wallinger said, ‘What do you understand?’

‘Angelica wouldn’t be able to pay the debt once you track her down, so you’re not looking to protect her or ask her questions. She won’t be able to pay off her debt because she’ll be in custody.’

Wallinger and Guerrero didn’t respond. They didn’t need to.

‘Look,’ Victor said. ‘I’m just a guy working on commission. There’s no way I’m going to get in the way of a federal investigation for my cut of Miss Margolis’s outstanding rent. Look at this place; do you think I’m going to get rich off fifteen per cent of three months’ arrears? You honestly think I’d risk prison for a few hundred bucks?’

He smiled at the ridiculousness of it all. Guerrero smiled too. Wallinger shrugged and shook his head.

‘Exactly,’ Victor said, exaggerating the syllables. ‘And I got to say,’ he added. ‘You scared me to hell when you guys burst in here waving guns around. I’m not used to that kind of thing.’

Guerrero looked apologetic. He probably reminded her of some little kid in floods of tears because she had charged into someone’s family home. ‘We have to work on the assumption that there are armed and dangerous people inside and enter accordingly. If there are, then we’re ready for them. If not… well, someone like you might get shook up a little as an unfortunate consequence.’

Victor pursed his lips and blew air through them. ‘I don’t know how you do it.’

‘We’re well trained,’ Wallinger said.

‘You’d have to be.’

They stood in silence for a beat before Guerrero tapped Wallinger on the arm and gestured for the door. Then she handed Victor her card.

‘If you find out anything —’

‘I’ll let you know.’

They headed to the door.

‘Say,’ Victor called after them. ‘Since I’m going to strike out with this collection, I wonder if you could help me with my next one.’

‘No chance,’ Wallinger said. ‘Do your own damn job.’

Guerrero added, ‘I’m afraid we’re not able to assist in commercial matters.’

‘Fine,’ Victor said. ‘I’ll remember you said that if I hear about Margolis’s whereabouts.’

They stopped and turned his way.

‘Fine,’ Guerrero said. ‘Shoot.’

‘I’ve only got a couple of questions,’ Victor explained. ‘Are the Mets playing today?’

Wallinger said, ‘What kind of question is that?’

‘No,’ Guerrero answered. ‘They’re not playing today.’

‘Okay, thanks.’ Victor nodded. ‘What about if I told you a six-digit number? What’s the first thing that comes to mind?’

The look they gave to one another told Victor they had no idea even before she turned back to him and said, ‘Sorry, not a clue.’

‘What about a five-digit number?’

She looked at him like he was an idiot. ‘Zip code, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Victor said.