Chapter 7

7

It isn’t the mountains ahead that wear you down. It’s the pebble in your shoe.

—Muhammad Ali

London

Now

Astrid fiddles with her phone by the front door of the basement flat as I keep an eye on the street. There aren’t a lot of people walking by, and the ones who are don’t pay us much attention.

“It was like a year ago, I think,” she says, muttering under her breath, more to herself than to me. “I’m sure I still have the email in here somewhere…”

London makes me nervous. Same problem as any major city—the surveillance network. The more time passes, the more time the Agency has to upload my image to law enforcement databases around the world. Sooner or later just stepping outside is going to be dangerous.

Which is why, if this works, it’ll be a pretty big win. The short-term rental site listing shows the flat isn’t available, but the lights are out and there’s a pile of moldering leaves on the mat that hasn’t been cleared. So far we’ve struck out on finding a cash-only motel that wasn’t out in the sticks, and we need to get off the street.

And we could both use a shower. Billy’s man came through and got us on a fishing boat. Seven hours later we were in Jakarta, and he even handled the entry passport stamps so we wouldn’t get hassled on the way out. Couldn’t find a direct flight to New York, but Astrid said she might have a connection in London that could be useful.

“Got it,” she says. She keys a code into the lock on the door, and we get lucky. It opens onto a very small, very European apartment. White walls, tight space, IKEA furniture, faux-wood flooring, weird plugs everywhere.

“This thing sucks, by the way,” Astrid says, pocketing her new burner phone. “You really think this guy is tracking me?”

“He’s tracking something.”

Which dawned on me halfway through the ride to Jakarta, which is why both of our phones are now at the bottom of the Java Sea. I miss mine already, feeling naked with a regular old smartphone, but I can still access my secure email and I was able to get D@nt3 working for the Via Maris. I don’t redownload the messaging app that I used with Ravi—no sense in letting him drip poison in my ear.

Before we enter I pull out my phone and check the Wi-Fi networks. One of the network names looks a little funny—a long, unintelligible string of numbers and letters. I check the locking mechanism on the door one more time. It’s not sophisticated enough to transmit a signal. I put P. Kitty down and tell Astrid: “Wait here.”

Given it’s a basement flat, it’s pretty dark already, so I don’t turn on any lights. I use the flashlight on my phone to sweep the place, moving extra slow around the bed, the light fixtures, the electrical outlets. There’s a good bit of dust, so that’s encouraging, that we won’t be disturbed. In the bathroom I catch a glint coming from the vent. I yank it off and find a little black box that fits neatly in my palm. There’s even an electrical outlet installed inside the vent, so the wires aren’t visible. I bring it to Astrid.

“Camera,” I tell her. “Wi-Fi enabled. Doesn’t look motion-activated. The owner probably isn’t monitoring it if no one’s been here.”

“That creep…” Astrid says.

“I suddenly don’t feel so bad about breaking in.”

Now that we’re settled, I set up P. Kitty’s stuff—a can of cat food, a bowl from the cabinet I fill with some water, and a litter box, which, helpfully, this apartment already has, because it’s pet-friendly. I take P. Kitty out of his carrier and he lolls around for a minute, taking in the new space, before heading for the food. Little guy must be ravenous.

I grab my bag and head into the bedroom, figuring I can jump in the shower after Astrid, but I find her naked from the waist up, her back to me. There’s a nasty scar down her back, like someone inserted a meat hook and dragged it down diagonally from her left shoulder.

We clock each other at the same time. She puts her arms up to cover her breasts but doesn’t know which way to turn—whether her chest or the scar is more intimate. I jump out of the room to give her privacy.

“Sorry, sorry,” I call around the corner.

“We’re both adults, I guess,” she replies. “I’ve seen you with your shirt off.”

“That’s a hell of a scratch. Can I ask?”

She comes out of the bedroom barefoot, in jeans and a white T-shirt. She looks me up and down, deciding how she wants to answer. She settles on: “Not everyone I’ve worked with over the years is as nice as you.”

The old me would have offered to pay whoever did that a visit. Part of me still wants to, but I feel like Astrid wouldn’t take it as chivalrous. Not that it would have been; it just would have been an excuse to hurt someone.

“Seriously,” I ask. “What’s your story? You handled yourself pretty well in that hotel room.”

By way of answering, she makes her way to the kitchen and pulls out the coffee maker, filling it with water and then picking a pod out of the tray underneath. She looks toward me expectantly and I nod. She starts the first one brewing and pulls a stool underneath her, then takes the first steaming mug of coffee and passes it to me. I set it on the counter to cool while she sets up hers.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” I ask.

“The plan,” she says, “is I go out and talk to my friend. And hopefully that friend tells us where to find the guy we’re looking for.”

“And how do you know this guy is even here?”

“Because I do,” she says. “Again, you boys love to brag. I’m good at listening.”

“Are you sure it’s safe?”

“I’m not a damsel.”

She takes her mug and turns to the sink, where she splashes in a little water to make it cool enough to drink. As she touches it to her lips and peeks at me from over the rim of the mug, I am struck by how incredibly attractive she is.

Not that I didn’t notice before. You always notice a woman like Astrid.

But there’s something about this moment, where we can breathe, where we can enjoy a drink together, where she’s putting me in my place, that I feel safe with her. I want to tell her the truth about me. I want to lie down with my head in her lap. I want to kiss her and feel something other than this mix of broken glass and battery acid in my stomach.

Which means what I really need is a meeting.

Twice now I went to speak and the Pale Horse’s voice came out. I’m slipping back into old patterns and routines. It doesn’t feel good.

That’s the thing I keep trying to convince myself.

And I’m doing a bad job at it, so I need a meeting.

“You do your thing, and I have some errands to run myself,” I tell her.

“I’ll text you when I’ve got something.”

“Ten-four,” I say, and go to the bedroom, where I pull out my phone. Still nothing from Kenji, which is making me nervous. I texted him the new number and figured he would have gotten back to me by now. Something is up. If the Russian was in Singapore, then he couldn’t be causing trouble back home. Anyway, Kenji can handle himself.

Still, I pop into the secure email account and leave a note in the drafts folder:

K, could use a check-in. M.

I include my new number, in case the other message didn’t come through. Then I hop onto the Via Maris and navigate to the discussion boards. This is where you go to get into long discussions about the pros and cons of bump stocks, or the best way to dissolve a body, or reviews on survival gear. Nearly all the forums are public, except a few, including Paper Cranes. I input the password and scroll through the list of cities until I land on London.

A thread pops up with just a username: 1DayUK. It’s otherwise closed to comments. I send a private message:

In town and HALTing.

HALT is the AA acronym for hungry, angry, lonely, and tired—because when those needs aren’t being met, we’re particularly susceptible to relapse. I hope they use the same acronyms over here, because I am currently all four of those things.

I jump in the shower and let the hot water sear my skin, then soap up and rinse the wound on my stomach; Astrid repatched it on the boat, and it doesn’t seem too bad. It hurts, but so does the rest of my body. I haven’t been this tired since Hell Week. Five days, twenty hours a day of PT, two hundred miles of running, four hours of sleep a night. Cold, sandy, hungry, and someone screaming in your face the whole time.

I’d trade that for this in a heartbeat.

Which is why I spent most of the trip here alternating between rest and trying to figure out the value of the notebook. The whole thing is written in code, but anyone with a bit of time and half a brain should be able to crack it. I remember most of it and it’s easy enough to eliminate the small-time jobs. Whoever’s doing this is a major player. Which leaves any number of government officials, oligarchs, oil-rich terrorists, and other sundry wealthy psychopaths.

A day later and I’ve got nothing that feels like a solid lead, which is so frustrating I want to scream, so it brings me a modicum of comfort that, when I get out of the shower and check my phone, there’s a meeting and an address waiting for me.

—

It’s a different church and a different basement, but cool water fills my veins as soon as my shoes squeak on the linoleum floor.

Some people think of recovery as a destination. Really, it’s a path you travel for the rest of your life, and the finish line is perpetually over the horizon. You have to learn to be happy with the journey. To be the journey.

As I enter the room, a bear of a man turns to me from a folding table that I expect to be holding coffee and donuts but is in fact holding scones and tea, which is kind of neat. He has sandy hair, a thick beard, and a face that’s taken a lot of punches.

“You the chap who messaged?” he asks, his working-class British accent so heavy it could sink in water. I wonder what brought him to this room; he doesn’t strike me as the MI6 type, more local leg-breaker.

“That’s me,” I tell him.

He opens his arms like he expects a hug, but I don’t know that he really wants one. “Welcome home, brother. American, yeah?”

“What gave it away?”

He waves me over to the table. “New Yorker, too. You got that dry sort of attitude down tight. Kenji still running that meeting?”

“That he is.”

“He’s a good egg, isn’t he?” The man offers me his hand. “I popped in, I dunno, three or four years ago, when I was in the States visiting my daughter. I’m Ray.”

We shake. His hand is huge and feels cast out of concrete. I wonder what kinds of things he did with this hand. “Mark.”

“Mark. We don’t often get visitors, but they’re always welcome. I’d ask what brings you to town, but the thing I’ve learned doing this is, the less questions the better, am I right?”

“You are right. But I’m struggling today and I’m glad the timing worked out.”

“How long you got?”

“A few days out from a year.”

“Little over eight myself,” he says. “Good on ya, that first year is a big one. Now let’s go get you a day closer.”

He gestures me toward a circle of chairs, in the center of which is a small table holding the same kind of sound-dampening device Kenji uses to keep our meetings private. As I take a seat, another man enters. He looks like a boxer—cauliflower ears, bald head, thick in the shoulders but still light on his feet. He gives me a hard stare and then glances over at Ray, who nods.

“All right,” the man says in a soft and lyrical Irish accent that belies his demeanor, “new faces today then that we’ve got?”

A woman enters next. She’s tall, lithe, her black hair in a short pixie cut. Japanese, I think? If so, probably not Yakuza because that’s a boys’ club, so maybe she’s a freelancer. She gives me a brief nod as she whisks herself into a seat and folds her hands in her lap.

There are eight chairs set up but when the third man enters, Ray says, “That’s everyone. We’ll get started in a moment, so grab yourself a cuppa.”

The temperature of my skin rises, like a spotlight has swung onto me.

The man who entered, his black hair is going gray, his nose is sharp, his eyes hard as coal. There’s a scar on his chin, peeking out through a few days of stubble. He has the lean body of an Olympic swimmer. His name is Jean Lavigne. He’s a French assassin, code name Noire, which may lack the panache of Pale Horse, but it is very French, so there’s that.

Our paths have crossed.

Six years ago, a group of Algerian Islamic militants set off a bomb filled with nails and gunpowder in a train station in Lyon. Four killed, dozens wounded. Lavigne was sent to kill Zain Hassan, the group’s leader. Problem was, Hassan had information vital to America’s national security, so I was sent to stop Lavigne.

It wasn’t a job I felt good about. The math was sloppy. Lavigne was a professional and he was doing his job. Hassan was a piece of shit; two kids were disfigured in the bombing. But according to my calculation, taking him alive would save more lives down the road, so it had to be done.

Which is why I didn’t kill Lavigne, I just slowed him down. He was closing in on Hassan in Qatar, so while he was en route to Hassan’s last-known location, I took off his ear from five hundred feet with a scope. That gave the Agency team enough time to go in and scoop up their target.

Lavigne looks me up and down before sitting across from me. He knew it was the Pale Horse who did it, and I know he was looking for revenge. He put feelers out, trying to find me. He got close once, too, in Morocco. But he never saw my face. I try not to stare at the knob of pink, mottled skin where his left ear should be.

“All right, everyone,” Ray says, taking his seat with a steaming paper cup of tea. “As you can all see, we got ourselves a new one today. All the way from the U.S. of A. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the group, friend?”

“Hi, I’m Mark,” I say, trying not to pay too much attention to Lavigne so as not to tip him off, “and I’m a killer.”

The group claps for me.

“Hello, Mark,” Ray says.

The meeting starts. The Irish boxer, Liam, reads the literature. Once we get through everything, Ray asks if anyone wants to share, and he seems to gesture to me, out of deference to me being a guest, but Lavigne raises his hand.

“I’m Jean, and I am a killer,” he says in a sloping, breathy French accent. “I haven’t killed anyone in three years. I am having a very difficult day today.” He pauses and stares down at his hands folded in his lap.

This is the exact opposite of what I came here for.

He continues: “I was in the supermarket yesterday. There was a little boy…” He takes a deep breath. “I heard him say to his mother, ‘Mommy, what happened to that man? Is he a monster?’?” He tilts his head down like he can hide his ear. “I don’t blame the child. There are still days I want to find the man who did this and show it to him. I have worked very hard to leave that life behind. We carry things in here.” He touches his chest. “But it is the outward reminder, the thing I see in the mirror every day, that I struggle with. It says to me: ‘You can never change. You will never be whole.’?”

He bends forward, the processing of this emotion making him smaller.

I realize he should be on my amends list, and he isn’t.

Which makes me wonder how many people I left off.

How many more people I hurt.

Will the process ever end? Or will I spend every waking moment until the day I die trying to make good on things I can never truly make good for?

“I apologize,” Lavigne says to me. “As a guest, I should have let you go first, but I just needed to get that out. You understand?”

I nod slowly, not really sure how to tackle this one. Part of me wants to say: It was me. I’m the one who took your ear. If he tries to attack me, presumably the other people in the room will stop him. Maybe this is the safest place to do it, where we can talk it out with witnesses.

I want to do that. Except for the burning feeling in my chest. The reminder of the ways that I’ve left hurt in this world. This man just wants to be better and I make it harder for him every day.

“All good, buddy,” I tell him, as I take the six-month chip out of my pocket and turn it over in my hand. “Not sure how you do it over here, but my home group does a chip for one month, six months, and one year.” I hold up the six-month chip. “I’m having a hard day, too. I’m a few days out from replacing this one, and it felt like such a big milestone. Now some things from my past have come back to haunt me. And I just feel it all coming back. The way I used to be. The worst part is, I kind of like it. I miss that feeling. Killing people makes life a lot easier, you know? Then the problem goes away. And maybe that’s why recovery is so hard. We never learned how to sit with the things we did. We just put them in the ground and moved on. We never had to have the hard conversations…”

The rest of them are nodding along. I don’t know if there’s a time limit here—Ray didn’t say anything, but again, there usually isn’t—so I keep going.

“I made my first amends…a day ago?” I gesture to my face, and the cuts and bruises left by Billy. “It was weird. He beat the shit out of me, but he also seemed to forgive me. It was a little complicated. Point is, I thought it was going to make me better. Encourage me to stay the course and keep going with this. Instead there’s a part of me that just wishes I had killed him on the spot, so he can’t come back and cause trouble for me.”

More nods.

“It’s hard to let people live,” I say. “It’s hard to live.”

I glance up at Lavigne, who holds my gaze.

I did it.

It was me.

I’m sorry.

Just say it.

“I understand the feeling, my friend,” he says.

That word, the way it comes out of his mouth, it scorches my exposed skin.

Friend.

I tumble into a dark hole of self-hatred, interrupted by the Japanese woman, who raises her hand.

“Hina,” Ray says, gesturing to her.

“The Pale Horse, no?” she asks.

My heart slams to a stop in my chest and I look up at her, but she’s looking at Lavigne.

“Yes,” Lavigne says. “He was the one who did this.”

“I’m afraid to say this, but I think I have to, in the interest of being honest with myself.” She looks down and closes her eyes. “He’s the one person I would throw this all away for. I would kill him if I had the chance. Without a second thought.”

“That’s a tough thing to confront,” Ray says. “Thank you for sharing that.”

What? I don’t even recognize her.

Ray clasps his hands in front of him. “Harboring hatred for the Pale Horse is like drinking poison and hoping it kills him. It doesn’t do any of us any good. We have to remember he’s sick and suffering. What you have to focus on is what you’re doing today.”

As he says this, he glances at me, thinking maybe this is helping.

It is not.

The rest of the meeting passes in a thick mist and ends with the serenity prayer, even though I’m not feeling very serene. When it’s over I head for the food table to grab a scone on the way out. I don’t want to bolt—that would look suspicious—but I don’t want to linger, either. Anyway, I need to find Astrid. I need to check for word from Kenji, and…

“Mark.”

I turn to find Lavigne with his hand proffered to me. I can’t tell anything about the look on his face, his demeanor, because all I can see is that nub on the side of his skull. I reach for his hand and we shake. “It is good that you came,” he says. “We need each other on days like this, no?”

“We do,” I say, holding my scone, wanting to run, wanting to tell him who I am, and why I did what I did. I was following orders, which is all any of us are doing, but the truth is, that wasn’t an excuse. I made my decision. And after I sighted him in my scope and pulled the trigger, when I saw his head jerk, as he looked around frantically before diving for cover, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t put the bullet into his cerebellum.

The Agency had said to stop him, so killing him was on the table. In a moment of professional solidarity, I figured it best to wing him, but later I felt like it was a sign I’d gone soft.

“I do not know how long you’re in town for, but would you be interested in grabbing a drink?” His eyes duck away from mine a little before meeting them again. “No shop talk, if you don’t want. We don’t have to talk recovery, either.”

Jesus.

He’s hitting on me.

This just keeps getting worse.

He’s a handsome man. And that accent. My taste for men is a little narrower than it is for women, but he’s definitely in my wheelhouse. As I’m playing it out in my head, he senses my hesitation. “Sorry, what is it they call this? Thirteenth stepping?”

Old-timers hooking up with people who have less time in recovery. It’s generally frowned upon, but it happens. If not for the insanely complicated psychosexual component of this, I might have considered it. It would certainly take my mind off everything that’s going on.

But then I can never make amends to him.

After he bared his soul, and I just sat and listened and didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I would. But I’m meeting a friend and things are a little complicated for me right now.”

He puts his hands up and takes a step back, showing me some deference. “Of course. Perhaps if you stay in town a little longer and things settle down…”

“I’m sorry about your ear.”

Lavigne draws himself to full height, puffing his chest out a little. “Thank you. But you do not owe me an apology.”

“Yeah, well…” I start, and then I see the hundred ways this can go wrong. “Just, sorry, is all.”

He shrugs. “It woke me up. It helped get me to this room, and…”

“Holy shit.”

We both look across the room to Hina, standing with her phone in her hand, staring at the two of us. If not for the intervention of a few tendons and some muscle, her jaw would be on the floor. “I just got a text…there was a video posted on the Via Maris…”

No.

She raises a finger at me. “It’s him. The Pale Horse.”

Lavigne turns to me, his eyes raging, and he says, “You…”

The second his shoulder twitches I have my arm up to block the swing. My lizard brain is calculating the angles—slip right, hook to the ribs, uppercut to the jaw—but I push down the instinct and shell up, going straight to defense. I don’t want to hit back. Part of me wonders if I should drop my hands and let him take his shots. So I let him hit me, absorbing the blows and hoping it brings him some modicum of peace.

He lands a few but suddenly they stop, and Ray is holding him in a bear hug. Lavigne is half of Ray’s size, and Ray is still struggling to hold him in place. Liam, meanwhile, is standing in front of Hina, his hands up, saying, “Not for him. He’s not worth it.” She’s trying to duck around him and he’s moving to block her path and I don’t know how long that’s going to last.

“You bastard,” Lavigne says, trying to break free from Ray’s grasp. “You just sat there with a straight face?” He spits in my direction.

“You better go,” Ray says to me. “Now.”

I don’t wait to argue or make my case. As I reach the door I hear Ray call out, “And don’t come back, ay? This particular group maybe isn’t for you.”

—

Turns out, Billy’s office had a camera in it, and I guess he saw an opportunity to build some cred. So he posted a clip of him whaling on me, with the message: Getting revenge on the PALE HORSE for killing my dad. I let him live—and I doubt he’ll be coming back.

Which raises a few issues. First, the video very clearly shows my face, which will mobilize a whole lot of people who want to kill me. Worse is the chatter on the discussion boards. Some people assume it’s not true; no way would the Pale Horse take a beating from some kid and let him live.

But if he did, they say, he must not be as tough as the stories said.

I knew there’d be a price for that boat ride. Didn’t know it’d be this.

Astrid asks: “ Grosse Pointe Blank ?”

“Huh?”

“What about Grosse Pointe Blank ?”

“Oh.” Snapped out of my funk, I toss my second emptied Americano into a bin. “Never saw that one.”

“Really? It’s a classic.”

She knows about the video. I made it clear it wasn’t a topic for discussion. If this is her way of taking my mind off it, fine. “I don’t buy John Cusack as a hitman,” I tell her.

She nods slowly, thinking. “Okay… Collateral .”

“That the one with Tom Cruise?”

Astrid nods.

“I buy Tom Cruise as a killer, definitely. But kidnapping a cabdriver and icing him at the end of the night? Needlessly cruel. Cabdriver’s not in the game.”

“How about The Professional ?”

“That’s a good one. Jean Reno is great. But it has to be the international cut, not the American one. American one lost twenty-four minutes of footage.”

“Because of all the creepy Natalie Portman stuff?”

“Yep, but it’s the best depiction I’ve seen of the assassin’s life.” The thing I don’t want to say is that what resonated most with me was Reno’s quiet sadness and loneliness.

“ In Bruges ?” she asks.

“Really funny. Brendan Gleeson, man. I’ll watch him in anything.”

“ Mr. and Mrs. Smith ?”

“Saw it. Don’t remember anything about it.”

“And we’ve established you don’t like the John Wick movies?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I said they were fantasy. Keanu Reeves is a national treasure. But people stabbing each other in Grand Central during rush hour and no one notices? C’mon.”

“Do you have a favorite?”

“I like Joubert. The assassin in Three Days of the Condor . He was a pro.”

“Okay, but that’s a thriller. I mean a favorite hitman movie.”

“ Le Samoura? .”

She nods, takes a long sip of her tea. “Never seen it.”

“French film from the sixties. Very cool. I wouldn’t say no to Alain Delon, either.”

“Thought you didn’t like action movies.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like them. I just said I don’t prefer them.”

“Okay,” Astrid says, as a smile stretches across her face. “Favorite movie of all time.”

I know the answer, but it’s not an answer I want to give, so I offer a worthy runner-up. “ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory .” Then, tired of this line of questioning, I nod up at the building in front of us, reaching into the overcast sky like an obelisk. “You sure about this?”

“He works here, and he’s inside,” she says. “He’s not, like, the top guy. But he’s near enough to the top.”

The building contains the headquarters to a bank. Apparently our man works for said bank. Apparently he’s an introvert who doesn’t spend a ton of time socializing outside home or work, and he lives nearby, so the plan is simple: wait for him to come out, follow him home, then pop in to see what we can brace him for. Our flight to New York doesn’t leave until late tonight, so it seems like a decent enough lead to chase down.

It’s just after five, so I have to figure he’s leaving soon. Still, I’m antsy and I have to piss. Astrid is bundled up in her little bubble jacket next to me and all I want in this world is to show her the maelstrom swirling in my chest. Maybe if someone else witnessed it, it’d lessen the intensity. But I can’t. Can’t tell her what I’m feeling because the second I do that, I’m admitting to the things I used to be, and the things I no longer am.

She hasn’t asked me about my errand and I haven’t asked her how she found this guy. I don’t really need to know the origin of it, I just need it to work. I don’t even know what this guy can do for us, but it’s better than plan B, which is to go home and pour a glass of whiskey and cry into it while I pray for all the people who want me dead to get distracted and move on to something else.

Which is unlikely to happen.

We’re surrounded by people, and even though nobody knows who I am, I feel like there are eyes on me. Any one of these faces could be a person prepared to shove something sharp between my ribs.

Astrid, meanwhile, is slurping down a cup of tea and grinning. This is a blast to her. If she only knew. I think she’s falling into the thrill and romanticism, thinking this is a game. It’s not. It’s a terrible stupid thing and I hate this and I hate myself and I hate everything.

I glance into the bookstore behind me and figure if I can’t find a little serenity, at the very least I can find a bathroom. But also, me and Kenji did agree to exchange gifts. A book would fit well within the spending limit. It’s something to do. Replacing the bad memory with a good one. Maybe this can count as a little recovery.

I tell Astrid, “Bang on the window if you see him?”

She nods at me without taking her eyes off the entrance. “ Raiders of the Lost Ark .”

“What about it?” I ask.

“My favorite movie of all time,” she says. “Not that you asked.”

“My apologies. That’s a good one.” She mutters something under her breath, but it’s lost as I duck inside, the warmth of the bookstore and the smell of the paper enveloping me. The girl behind the register is drowning in a fuzzy beige sweater and maroon wool cap. She has a barbell nose ring and heavy black gauges in her ears. She smiles at me when I enter, then goes back to the book she’s reading.

After hitting the bathroom, I roam the aisles, thinking: What do you get someone who used to murder people for a living?

If we were still assassins, it’d be easy. A knife is always nice. If he had a favorite rifle, I could get him a new scope—one of those really nice ones, with a ranging reticle that allows for bullet-drop compensation. But his go-to weapon was a katana. Maybe there are katana accessories? Like a nice cloth to clean it with? Then there’s dark clothing, always a plus in this profession. And snacks. You spend so much time waiting for people to show up that a stash of protein bars or some trail mix really takes the edge off.

Except, that’s the old programming.

Who is Kenji today?

He drinks tea. When we get dinner, he tends to go with the vegetarian option. We once had a very long discussion about Akira Kurosawa’s filmography. His favorite is Yojimbo , mine is The Hidden Fortress . I think we both appreciated that neither of us said Seven Samurai or Rashomon . One time I met him in the park and he was reading an Agatha Christie novel.

I poke at the book spines as I pass them. Agatha Christie seems like too safe a bet; what if I get him one and he’s read it? I could get him something in Japanese, or by a Japanese author. I want to find someone that he’s never read. Someone new and surprising. Of course, it doesn’t help that I spent more of my life killing than reading.

Damn it. Stop thinking like that.

This feels like an exercise in futility, until I stumble across a long row of Dostoyevsky novels. A little bell rings in my head. Something familiar. I pull Crime and Punishment off the shelf. A nice modern hardcover edition.

This is a book I read, a long time ago. It’s about a man who decided that he was a superior person and that meant it was okay for him to murder his landlord? I think that was the gist. But I’m pretty sure the message was that killing is bad. That could work. I don’t want to get him something where killing is an okay thing. I did take up reading a little after I went sober, just to do something with my time, and found that too many modern thrillers wrote off murder as an acceptable means to an end, with no thought to the real-life impact.

Doesn’t matter how “bad” a person is—likely there was someone somewhere in this world who loved them, and that person has to live with a whole lot of pain in the aftermath. That’s why I moved away from action movies, too. I found myself mourning all the henchmen getting mowed down in the background.

I take the book over to the counter and go fishing for my wallet.

“Oh, that’s a good one,” the girl says. “Loved it.”

“This is a weird question, but the main character doesn’t get away with it, right?”

She squints a little. “No, he ends up in prison. Sorry if that’s a spoiler.”

“The book was written a hundred and something years ago, I think we’re past the point of it being a spoiler,” I tell her. “Just wanted to make sure the guy gets what he deserves.”

“Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?”

I rack my brain for a witty rejoinder. Nothing comes to me.

“Don’t worry, there is both crime and punishment.” She smiles as she puts the book in a plastic bag. As she’s handing it to me, there’s a pounding on the front glass. Astrid is waving her arms, beckoning for me to come outside.

The second I’m through the door she takes off, not even waiting to see if I’m behind her. We cut through the crowd, but there are so many people on the street I’m not even sure who we’re after. Two blocks later we’re hustling down the stairs of the Leicester Square Tube station, and then running through the turnstiles, down the escalator, and onto a waiting car, where the doors are just about to close.

It’s packed shoulder to shoulder. I find a place that I can grab a handrail and Astrid leans into me and whispers: “Gold jacket.”

There we go. He’s not easy to miss. A stocky Black man with close-cropped hair, a gold bubble jacket, black jeans, and gold sneakers. He has a heavy set of expensive noise-canceling headphones strapped over his head, bopping in time to music.

His name, Astrid said, is Gaius.

No one knows who runs the Via Maris. It’s a small operation. Probably only a handful of people, which is how they do it without being caught. The site looks like it was designed and set up twenty years ago, but something like that doesn’t need flash. It just needs to work.

The person at the top is someone who goes by the handle Hannibal Khan. Whether that’s a mash-up of the serial killer and the Star Trek villain, or the conquerors, I don’t know. It’s a pretty cool name, though. Better than GJoubert.

It’s amazing Khan has evaded capture for so long. The Silk Road, the original darknet marketplace, went bust after two years. Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name Dread Pirate Roberts, got nabbed by the feds, but not before making hundreds of millions of dollars. Had he not gotten caught, he was on track to make billions.

Hannibal Khan, meanwhile, seems to be a bit more clever. The Via Maris has been around for twelve years now, and I’m sure law enforcement is all over it, but so far, it’s still up and running.

And Gaius, according to Astrid’s source, is the man who runs the tech end of things.

We nearly miss it when his stop comes up, because he nearly misses it. He’s lost in his phone and bolts off at Earl’s Court at the last second, and Astrid and I muscle through the crowd just in time. He’s still oblivious to our presence, and it’s not like we’re keeping too far back, so he’s definitely not a pro. That’ll make this whole thing a lot easier.

We follow him up the escalator and down two streets, where he stops for some Indian takeout, and then finally to his apartment complex. It’s a newer building, fancy, all sharp angles and floor-to-ceiling windows, which means it probably has decent cameras, so even though Astrid follows right after, I grab her arm and hold her back.

“C’mon,” she says. “He won’t even notice us slipping in.”

I point at the doorway, and even from across the street, the black dome-shaped camera is visible above the doorway. “Hold on,” I tell her.

We stand and wait and watch, and I hope for a little luck—which comes when a light goes on in a window at the end of the fourth floor. Now we just have to get inside without ending up on video. No sense in leaving a trail of bread crumbs for the Agency or the Russian or whoever to find.

We passed a hardware store on the walk over. I lead Astrid in that direction and duck inside to buy a can of spray paint.

Hardware stores, a hitman’s best friend.

We head back toward the building, and as I step into the vestibule, I pull the scarf up over my mouth and shoot a little blast of paint onto the lens. Because the dome is black, the paint isn’t apparent unless you look close. Then I buzz an apartment on the second floor.

An angry voice comes back, “What?”

“Delivery for 5B. Just trying to leave it in the hall.”

The door buzzes. We take the stairs to the fourth floor and head toward the end. There’s only one apartment it could be, and no cameras on the way. We get to the door and knock, and after a moment, a soft voice comes from behind it. “Yes?”

“Delivery,” I say, putting on my best faux-British accent, which I’m sure sounds terrible.

There’s a pause, and a shuffling behind the door. Probably Gaius looking through the peephole, but I’ve positioned myself so he can only see a small portion of my body, and Astrid is standing against the wall.

“Leave it, please.”

I pull the felt marker out of my pocket. “Gotta sign, mate.”

Astrid rolls her eyes at me. I shrug at her. The thing I want to tell her is: I used to be pretty good at this, so let’s leave the judgment outside.

There’s a heavy sigh from behind the door and a chain unlocks. As soon as the door opens, I push my way in. Gaius is wearing a heavy robe, flannel pants, and a look on his face somewhere in the valley between surprise and terror. I grab his shoulder and press the felt marker into his ribs. Not too hard but it works its magic, knocking him off balance as he arches his body away from it, enough that I can move him against the wall. I tell Astrid, “Make sure we’re alone.”

I’m assuming we are, but she disappears down the hall to sweep the apartment. Gaius is surprisingly calm; I think he figures if he plays along he’ll be okay. “Listen, man, I have money. Cold cash, under the mattress. Take what you want and go and we’re all square, right?”

“Just be a good listener and everyone walks away healthy.”

He nods and puts his hands up. Astrid appears at the end of the hallway and throws me a thumbs-up. I lead Gaius to the living room. It’s cramped but tidy; a massive TV on the wall, every video game system I can name plus a few I can’t, an expensive velvet couch. The glass coffee table has the takeout he just picked up, as well as his expensive headphones and a closed laptop. The TV is paused, Chewbacca frozen mid-scream.

I push Gaius toward the couch and he sits. “You ain’t cops,” he says, “but I’m not sure if that’s much of a relief.”

“We’re not going to hurt you unless you give us a reason to,” I say. I move into the kitchen—also clean and sparse, like it’s never been used, besides a massive pile of rinsed and neatly stacked takeout containers next to the sink. I grab a chair from the small table and drag it into the living room, then place it on the other side of the coffee table. Astrid is standing by the hallway, unsure of what to do with herself.

Now that we’re settled and Gaius gets a good look at me, his eyes go wide and he moves back into the couch. “Shit. You’re him.”

“You saw the video?”

“?’Course I saw the video. Everyone’s seen the video, bruv. Site’s got more traffic than it’s ever gotten.” He puts his hands up in a peaceful gesture. “Look, just, before you do it, let me call my mum, okay? I won’t tip her off, I just haven’t spoken to her in a while, and it’s weighing real heavy on me in this particular moment, that I ought to at least tell her I love her one more time—”

“Stop it,” I tell him. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

He squints, confused. “Then what are you here for?”

“Can you take the video down?”

He shrugs. “Maybe. Won’t be a point in it, though.”

“Why the hell not?”

He gives me a look like I just asked him why the sky is blue. “It’s been shared and screenshotted from here to kingdom come. Toothpaste doesn’t go back in the tube. Not even for you.”

“Okay, then. What can you tell me about me ? Who’s been talking about me? Who’s been looking for information on me? Someone’s after me and that’s where he must have researched me, on the Via Maris. There’s got to be some trace of that.”

“I don’t dip into the site that much. I just run it.”

“Would Hannibal Khan know anything?”

“Maybe. No idea. You know how the site works?”

“Sort of, but I see you want to explain it, so go ahead and explain it.”

Gaius smiles a little. Even when it puts them at risk, people like to brag. Especially when they don’t often get the opportunity.

“Okay, so, it’s darknet,” he says. “Not cataloged on any search engines. Only one way in: with a direct address, through D@nt3, which is sort of like Tor, but better. With Tor you enter the internet in one place, then your signal bounces between about seven thousand relays around the world, right? Makes it impossible to trace. We use about a half million relays, randomized every time. So, impossibler.”

“I don’t understand what any of that means, starting with ‘impossibler,’?” I tell him, figuring the more I can get him to talk, the quicker we get to something useful. “But how secure can it really be? The guy who ran the Silk Road got caught.”

“Yeah, he did, and you know why? Some old message board posts with his email, and he had counterfeit documents sent to his house. Even after all that, the fuzz had to set up some elaborate sting to catch him physically logging into his computer to really prove it was him. We’ve been at this long enough I’d say we know what we’re doing.”

“Yet here I am, sitting in your living room,” I tell him.

He exhales hard. “Yeah, kinda curious about that, bruv.”

“Where is Hannibal Khan?”

“Never met the man myself. All I do is provide tech and support.”

I pick his cell phone off the table and slap it down in front of him. “Call him.”

“You think Khan is just someone you call on the phone? We message through an encrypted app. I never even met him.”

“How does he pay you?”

“Same way you pay for everything on the Via Maris. Crypto. Which also can’t be traced. You think this is some schoolyard bake sale we’re running here?”

This is proving to be unfruitful. There’s got to be more he’s not telling me. I’m wondering what angle to take next, when he gives a little laugh.

“What?” I ask.

“I mean, I don’t participate, but I know who you are. Always figured you’d be more of a Jason Statham type…”

Astrid giggles behind me.

“You have to remember something,” I tell him, scooting forward a little on the chair, and the springs in the sofa squeak as he leans away from me. “I’ve had a bad day, on top of a bad week. This conversation we’re having right here”—I gesture back and forth between us—“so far it’s been polite, correct?”

He nods.

“Don’t make it not polite,” the Pale Horse says.

His breath gets stuck in his chest. Then he leans down and opens his laptop. “Okay, look, okay. So, I’m not supposed to say this, but, it’s starting to sink in, the gravity of this, right? What I tell you now can’t leave this room…” He taps at the computer and makes a face. “Actually, first, something weird here. I monitor broadcast signals around the building. Personal security measure. You know, make sure I’m not being surveilled. And I’m catching a weird GPS signal in here right now. Like, right here, in this room. One of you is carrying something that’s broadcasting.”

I look at Astrid and she shrugs. “We got new phones.”

“Not phones,” Gaius says.

“What if that’s not how the Russian was tracking us?” I ask.

“We’d notice if he tagged us with something,” she says.

“GPS devices are getting smaller,” Gaius says. “Seen some as big as a five pence, and that’s for the civilian market. We get into military application, could be even smaller.”

I get up and check the bathroom. No electronics, it’s within view of the living room, and the window is too small to wriggle out of. I come back and tell Gaius, “Go in there, close the door. Wait for us. Leave your phone.”

Gaius puts his hands up and stands, happy to leave the room. As soon as I hear the door close and lock I run my fingers through my hair, then pull my shirt off.

“What are you doing?” Astrid asks.

“Making sure he didn’t stick something on me,” I say. “Seems far-fetched but at this point we can’t be too careful. Can’t be in my clothes. I dumped everything I was wearing that night.”

She nods and pulls her shirt off, too.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Making sure he didn’t get me,” she says. “This guy is good, right? He was able to find me. Maybe he passed me and I didn’t notice.”

The two of us face away from each other and continue to strip. I check my skin the best I can, but eventually realize there are spots I can’t be sure of.

“Think we need to be a little more thorough here,” I say. “Like you said, we’re both adults, right?”

“This is turning into a tick check, isn’t it?”

I turn and she’s already naked. I try not to notice the subtle and gentle curves of her body, the way her hip is cocked out a little. She glances down at my crotch and then looks up fast, pretending she didn’t.

“Well,” she says, “let’s get down to some very awkward work.”

The two of us comb over the intimate areas of each other’s bodies, looking for anything that might be attached to our skin. As she’s checking my groin region I practice my breathing, careful not to get too excited. I do, a little, and she pauses, but she doesn’t say anything. This is the first time I’ve been naked in front of a woman since Sara, and just by acknowledging that, my heart develops a dry crack across the surface.

When we’re done we both pick our clothes from the floor.

“Nothing,” I say.

As I’m pulling my shirt on she focuses on the bandage covering the knife wound on my stomach.

I look down and wonder if I pulled a stitch. I keep forgetting about it; the pain has subsided to the point where I barely notice it unless I move the wrong way, or I cough. But the bandage is clean, and…

“Oh shit,” she says.

It hits me, and my blood turns to ice. “You stuck your finger in there…”

“If it was small I could have missed it,” she says. “I told you it wasn’t foolproof. How is that even possible?”

He stabbed me. Stuck it in, pulled it out, didn’t even offer to buy me dinner first. How the hell could it leave a GPS device behind?

Then it hits me.

“A WASP knife,” I tell her.

“A what knife?”

“WASP. It’s nasty, made for hunting. It injects a bubble of carbon dioxide into the body cavity. It freezes and explodes. Maybe this was a modified version, just made to deposit something.” The thought of an electronic device inside my stomach makes me a little nauseated. “What are the options, besides exploratory surgery in this guy’s bathtub?”

Astrid shrugs. “Exploratory surgery in this guy’s bathtub.”

We throw our clothes back on and call to Gaius, who comes out of the bathroom. Astrid tells him, “I need a sharp knife, alcohol, some boiling water, as many towels as you have. Do you have any prescription painkillers?”

“Woah woah woah,” Gaius says. “What did I miss?”

I pull up my shirt to show off the bandage. “The guy stabbed me. I think the tracker might be in here. Which means this guy might be coming here. As much as I don’t want to do this, we need to get this out of me as quickly as possible.”

“All right, hold on, you absolute lunatics,” he says. “Give me a minute.”

He disappears into the bedroom and we hear drawers opening and muttering, and finally he comes back with a small black device that looks like a walkie-talkie, with a thick black antenna on the top. He plugs it into his computer.

“Signal jammer,” he says. “It’ll block the signal as long as it’s within twenty feet of you. But it’s going to interfere with your cell phone, too. You can turn it off to make calls, but I suggest you don’t. Soon as you do, this guy will have your location.”

I move to the window and peek outside, scanning the street. It’s decently crowded with pedestrians and I figure, maybe I’m overthinking this.

Then I see him.

The Russian is standing across the street. He’s wearing a green military jacket and smoking a cigarette, leaning against a lamppost like he’s waiting for a bus.

“Mark?” Astrid asks.

“How precise is this thing, Gaius?”

“Not to the spot. Probably a hundred-foot radius.”

He must know we’re in the area and we’ve stopped moving. So he’s waiting for us to show ourselves, or he’s just hanging back to keep an eye on us. I move away from the curtain before he can look up. “And how long is this going to take?”

Gaius hits a few keys. “Done.”

I peek around the curtain, careful to keep myself mostly obscured. The Russian finishes his cigarette and takes something out of his pocket that looks like a phone. He stares at it for a moment, then looks up, scanning the block, confused.

“What’s wrong?” Astrid asks.

I duck away from the window. “Seems timing was on our side. He’s across the street. But it looks like the jammer worked.”

She steps toward the window, but I grab her elbow. “Don’t look .”

“Right, sorry.”

Gaius glances up from his screen. “Even with the signal dropped, he’ll know you’re somewhere in the vicinity. You can go to the roof, climb across the buildings, exit on the other side of the street. Probably the safest way.”

I sit down on the couch next to him and put my head back on the cushion. “Yeah.”

“I’m sorry, bruv, I’m not gonna lie, this is pretty cool, though.”

“I’m happy you’re impressed. Meanwhile I’m probably going to end up with some kind of rare metal poisoning. Back to what you’re saying about the site?”

“Right, right.” He shakes his head and sighs. “So, there’s this thing called god mode, where I can access pretty much anything as long as it’s on the site itself. Can’t really look up where posts came from, but I can see if people are trading private messages.”

“How does that help?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Give me some users to look up and we’ll see.”

I whip out my phone and pull up D@nt3 and go through the forums. Astrid does the same. Gaius, presumably, does as well. We all get lost for a little bit, looking for something that might be useful.

There’s an entire forum now dedicated to talking about the Pale Horse, so I start there. Lots of people saying a lot of things. That they’re coming after me. That I must be off my game to slip like that. A lot of talk about revenge. Some folks who want to meet me. A woman who wants to sleep with me. Nothing useful. Nothing encouraging.

Nothing that makes me feel very good about myself.

The whole time we’re doing this, it feels like there’s a sword dangling over our heads. I still want to go out there and confront the Russian. Except I’ve taken a few beatings in the last couple of days and I have a gaping wound in my stomach that Astrid has already had to repatch once. I’m not on the top of my game. And I’m still in the dark about exactly what’s going on.

There’s something else. This feeling I never really felt before. So brand new it took me time to feel out the edges and find a definition for it.

I’m afraid.

Because I don’t know how to beat this guy without killing him.

“Hey, I found something,” Astrid says.

She passes over her phone. It’s a post from someone with a randomly generated username, a string of letters and numbers, that says:

The Pale Horse was not nearly as tough as I thought. I left him bleeding on the floor. Just a scared little kitten. Wait until you hear where I found him…

Kotenok. Kitten. That’s what the Russian called me. At least he’s keeping the recovery angle to himself for now. Once word gets out on that, I’m dead for sure. I have to figure he assumed I would see this.

Mind games. He’s playing mind games. Maybe he doesn’t even want the notebook. Maybe he just took it to screw with me.

“How’d you find that so quick?” I ask.

“There’s a search function,” Astrid says.

“?’Course there’s a search function,” Gaius says, a little insulted.

“Okay, guys, cool. Thanks. Gaius, who posted that?”

He looks at the phone, then turns to his computer. “That’s the user’s only post. Give me a minute…” He taps a little more, watches the screen, then says, “The account is new, created a month ago. But there is some activity. Messages traded with another user recently, too.”

“Doesn’t seem very ethical that you can track private messages,” Astrid says.

Gaius offers a long stare and a little laugh. “This is a criminal enterprise.” He pokes at the keyboard and says, “I can’t read the messages. But I can see that they were delivered, and to whom. He’s been swapping love notes with a user named Sanjuro. Want me to see what I can find on him?”

The room spins. I lean forward and put my head in my hands. The two of them, Astrid and Gaius, fall silent. I’m searching for something to say, anything to say.

“Should I…” Gaius starts.

“No,” I tell him. “I know who that is.”

Sanjuro was the name adopted by the ronin—the masterless samurai—in Yojimbo .

Kenji’s favorite Kurosawa film.

Which is why he chose it as his username.