"It's simple enough, you worked with her, you fancied her and you slept with her!"
His wife stood up, pulling her hand free of his, and taking a deep, deep breath. "You bastard!"
"Wait!" he urged, standing up. "When I say it wasn't that simple, I mean it! It turns out that she was Tommy McNunn’s girlfriend. The whole time we were working on the case together to bring him down, to put him in prison with enough evidence to throw away the key... that whole time, she was with him. She was his lover!"
Tears had begun to roll down her cheeks now, but for a moment, the confusion registered.
"What do you mean? I don't understand... How many people was she sleeping with?"
Campbell shrugged his shoulders, a stupid thing to do. "I don't know. Turns out it seems I didn't really know who she was after all. I had no idea she was sleeping with Tommy McNunn. She would have been fired on the spot if anyone had known."
"So how's it relevant to you? Are you trying to say that you think she seduced you? Deliberately, to try and compromise or blackmail you?"
Campbell shrugged his shoulders again. "I don't know. Possibly. Maybe very probably. But I'm not using that as an excuse. The fact is that the night before she was murdered, she took me to a hotel room and ..."
"Did you 'fuck' her, or did you make 'love' to her?"
Campbell hesitated in his reply. A momentary pause which his wife instantly picked up on.
"What? You made 'love' to her? It was serious?"
"Fiona, I need to explain this to you. It's really important... please..."
"I can't believe I'm hearing this. You made love to this woman, Tommy McNunn's girlfriend, ... and then the next day he murdered her? What, out of jealousy?"
"Possibly, but I don't think so. I think he planned it all along. She was his pawn."
"What do you mean? How?"
"I think it was possibly part of an elaborate plan to get rid of me. When her body was found, he had somehow taken a condom full of my sperm, which he had taken from the hotel room the night before just after I had been with Danielle, his girlfriend... and he had inserted that sperm inside her. He wanted to make it look like I had just made love to her, and then I'd killed her..."
"Your sperm was found inside her dead body?" she stared at him incredulously. "After you had made love to her?"
"No! Not at all ... he'd put it there!"
"Campbell, I'm really struggling here. Now you've got me really worried... Should I be concerned that you might have killed this woman? How on earth would he get hold of 'your' sperm?"
Campbell reached out with both hands to hold his wife's shoulders and try to reassure her. He could see the sudden flash of fear in her eyes.
"You know me, Fiona. I'm no murderer. Please, put away that thought immediately. And you needn't worry. For reasons I can't share with you, the police have evidence that it wasn't me, and even though the circumstances are very unusual, no one has ever cast any suspicion in my direction. We have a watertight case against McNunn. I'm not under suspicion at all. Her murder had nothing to do with me, but he wanted to make it look like it was. He tried to frame me."
Campbell could see the colour draining from her face, and for a moment, he was scared she was going to faint.
He tried to gently steer her back to the chair, to sit down, but she pushed his hands away, a sudden strength and resolve returning to her face.
"So, why are you telling me all this now, after all these months of lying and sleeping with me, after you'd been with her? Why now? Why now, Campbell?"
Campbell's heart ached for her. He knew that the next sentence was going to be the last straw, but he had to tell her, because she needed to know.
"Because I've been told that over the weekend some details are going to be published in the newspaper."
"The whole world is going to know?"
Campbell nodded.
Fiona's hand went to her mouth, and she took a sharp intake of breath.
For a moment, their eyes connected again, and he could see all the confusion, the pain, and the hurt in her eyes. In that moment of connection, he sensed that there was also something more, a shadow of something else, but then it was gone.
As was Fiona.
She turned her back on Campbell and walked out the door.
He heard the front door close, and the car engine start and rev.
And then peace.
His house was silent.
It was then that DCI Campbell McKenzie realised for the first time that Tommy McNunn, his arch-enemy for many years, had succeeded after all: he'd just destroyed Campbell's life.
--------------------
Saturday
Fort Augustus, Loch Ness
1.30 p.m.
Alessandra felt good. Excited. Nervous.
For the first time in a long time, she was living on the edge. Doing something spontaneously. Something unplanned. Something exciting!
Inserting the key into the door, she pushed it open and stepped into the caravan she had just rented at the edge of Loch Ness.
Gavin had offered her a choice of two caravans, one of which had recently become free after its previous occupant had died, although apparently not unexpectedly, and the other which was now free because its previous occupant was in a relationship with another one of the caravan park's tenants, and they had moved in together. Life, death, relationships, and monsters. "It all goes on here", Gavin had joked.
Alessandra chose the first of the two, simply because Gavin insisted it had the best Wi-Fi connection. Although what she was doing was 'mad', she still needed to keep abreast of reality, and high on the list of things she needed to do next, was to give a status update to those who had hired her to kill Kuznetsov.
First things first though.
She cleaned the caravan from top to bottom, disinfecting everything in sight, putting new bed sheets and linen on the mattress which she had bought in Inverness, the city at the other end of the Loch, that morning, and placed some pictures and other bits and bobs around the caravan that hinted at her made up life in America, and that of a normal everyday woman and tourist: pictures of her outside a house in the suburbs of Chicago - not her house, just a random one she was passing one day that looked the part and she knew would fit the job - pictures of a dog, and a cat, - taken from a magazine, and one of a young woman graduating from high school, - again, taken from a magazine, but now masquerading as a fictitious niece.
Sometimes, at night, wherever she was, she would stare at these elements which alluded to another life, and they made her sad. They helped her imagine another life that she could be living, and although she knew that after a while it would probably bore her to tears, there were aspects of it that she occasionally yearned for. A family whom she could talk to. A partner. And someone, or something to love.
After cleaning the caravan, she took a walk along the foreshore and sat down on the cobbled beach, looking out across the loch. In a moment of surprisingly honest introspection, she admitted to herself that there was a hole in her life that she had not yet managed to fill, which was perhaps the reason she was here now. Living in a caravan park, in the middle of nowhere, searching for something. Perhaps all this was nothing to do with searching for the monster. As Gavin had suggested, perhaps this was more about searching for herself.
Later that evening, after having devoured a plate of traditional Haggis and Neeps and Tatties - mashed potato, and turnips - at the pub, she had returned to her caravan, closed her curtains, and logged onto the Tor network, via the Wi-Fi. From there she logged onto another Deep Web obfuscation service, - a further precaution to yet further bury all her communications. Then and only then, - when she knew that there was no way anyone or any secret service on the planet could ever track her action back to her laptop or her location in Scotland - did she log into the temporary email account which had been established to communicate with her sponsors for terminating Kuznetsov, allowing her to then send a report of what she had achieved.
She kn
ew the account was monitored, and that they would be expecting the report.
True enough, within ten minutes, a reply appeared, confirming the transfer of the remaining bitcoins to her account.
Alessandra quickly got to work, logging into several bank accounts and other Dark Web services. First of all, she converted the bitcoins to US dollars, and then routed them through several different banks and bank accounts from one country to another, until the funds finally ended up in her own private Swiss account.
Confirming that they were finally there, she took the first sip of the wine that she had opened and was letting breath in preparation. A beautiful red. The most expensive she had been able to find in the supermarket: although she knew cost did not necessarily equate to quality, tonight she just wanted to splash out.
In general she did not normally feel the need to celebrate the completion of a mission, but tonight why the hell not?
Perhaps things were changing.
Kicking back, and drawing her feet up beside herself on the chair, she started to browse the Dark Web, the set of mostly illegal and hidden websites that only those armed with a Tor browser could access and view.
Most of the websites she visited were in relation to the supply of weapons, chemicals, or tools of her trade.
She kept up to date with the latest Dark Web intelligence, having subscribed to several sites that provided up-to-date information on the latest techniques that law enforcement agencies and intelligence services were using to track down criminals on the Dark Web and intercept their communications. Most importantly, this supply of threat intelligence, or rather counter-intelligence, also informed their paying customers how to get round these latest developments, to avoid detection, and remain invisible, regardless.
Where the information came from, Alessandra didn't need to know, although she knew that corruption was everywhere, and that these counter-intelligence services were most likely provided, for a price, by corrupt members - 'insiders' - of the secret services who were more worried about their pockets than their countries.
In her experience, everything, and everyone was for sale. For the correct price. And the Dark Web was the place to buy or trade it.
Idly browsing to the assassins’ website, 'Hitsforbits', she casually scrolled down through the current selection of international targets that were on offer. Over the years she had found quite a few decent contracts for offer on the site, and in the past she had accepted a number of them and carried them out. Enough for the system to recognise her as a highly trusted assassin who completed all the work she took on. Even though the site was a recognised and trusted site amongst her peers, in recent years she had become more cautious of all the offers and targets advertised there: she had a growing concern that intelligence agencies had infiltrated the site and were now routinely offering fictitious targets, in the hope they could entice some top international assassin to go for the bait, reel them in, and then catch them. She had no proof, but it only took a little imagination to see how it could be done, and surely, if she'd thought about the idea, the agencies would be way ahead of her and have thought of it too!
The magic word was 'caution'.
Still, she often visited the site, and browsed what contracts were on offer or up for grabs.
A few pages in, one immediately grabbed her attention.
Name of Target: DCI Campbell McKenzie
Contract Price Offered: £600,000.
Location: Scotland
Target Death Time: Within one month.
Curious.
She hit the link and started to read the details.
The target was a DCI in the Scottish police force, based out of Edinburgh. The contract sponsor made no bones about that. The price was good. The location was perfect.
Leaving the webpage open, she put her iPad down and went to get some more wine from the bottle which she had left in her small kitchen.
There was a knock on the door of her caravan.
A little alarm bell sounded in the back of her mind.
Who could it be? Who knew she was here? She looked quickly at her watch.
9.35 p.m.
The only person who knew she was there was Gavin.
She smiled to herself, checked that she looked okay in the mirror, and then opened the door.
"Good evening, Miss," the police officer standing on the grass outside announced. "I apologise for it being so late, but we were wondering if we may ask you a few questions?" He nodded at his colleague, a young woman constable by his side.
"May we come in?" he asked.
Alessandra stood in the doorway, a little numbed from the shock of seeing two uniformed, and armed, police officers on her door step. Her mind immediately went into overdrive, and the fight-or-flight response kicked in. She quickly calculated in her mind, all the options available to her.
They were limited.
Although Alessandra had no guns with her, there were only two police officers, and their weapons were not drawn, so if needs be, she knew she could easily overpower them quickly.
But, she did not know how many more were out there.
If she did have to run, Gavin knew her car number plate - she'd had to sign several forms before getting the keys to the caravan. Granted, all the details she had filled in were false, and the credit cards she'd used were faked, professionally, so they couldn’t get anything on her from them, but at this time of night she could not rent another car.
If she had to run, it would be by foot: by car she would not get far... there were not many roads in the highlands, and a helicopter and a few road blocks would catch her easily.
Crossing the mountains on foot would be possible, although tricky by night, but she'd left her emergency case, containing another passport, identity and cash, at the airport in Edinburgh, and she'd have to make it all the way there, somehow, without much money, evading the police all the time, before she got to it. And without it she couldn't leave the country.
It was doable, but it would be tricky.
These, and a thousand other thoughts and permutations, went through her mind in the seconds she stood there in the doorway.
In the end, she weighed them all up and came to the best conclusion. The obvious and less risky course of action to take next.
"Come in, please?" she said with a smile, opening the door, and stepping aside, waving them towards the table.
The police officers smiled, removed their hats, and wiped their feet on the mat at the doorway. Stepping inside the caravan they walked towards the table and sat down on the seats edging the windows.
As he sat, the young officer, reached out and picked up the iPad.
Alessandra froze. Still visible on the main screen was the 'Hitsforbits' website.
"Sorry, I almost sat on it," the officer said, holding it out and offering it to her. Smiling.
Alessandra quickly took it from him.
"Thank you," she replied. "I was just about to catch up with the real world on Facebook.
The officer smiled.
"I don't want to take up too much time from your evening, but we are just going round the caravans gathering some information and making some local enquiries. Is that okay?"
Offering no hesitation that could visibly attract any attention, she immediately agreed, smiling.
"Certainly. Can I offer you some tea? I've just opened some wine, but I'm guessing that since you are on duty..."
"Very kind, but no thank you. Hopefully we'll be gone in a few moments. May we start by asking your name?"
"Alice. Alice Brandon. Miss Alice Brandon."
"Have you been living here long?"
"Only about an hour. I just moved in."
"Oh, well," the two officers looked at each other. "I suppose you have heard that a body was found not too far from here a few days ago? On a boat, out on the loch? Well, we were going to ask if you had perhaps seen anything at all, since you have such a good view of the Loch. But if you weren't here...?"
"Sorry
, officers, I've just arrived. I only arrived here in the area yesterday evening and was offered the caravan last night by the manager of the visitor centre. I was looking for somewhere to stay."
"So where did you stay last night?"
"In a village near Skye, on the west coast. I'm a tourist, from Chicago. Have I done the wrong thing? Is this place not safe? Do you suggest I leave?"
The officers stood up.
"I'm sorry to alarm you. But there is nothing to worry about Miss Brandon. This is the first time we've found a body like this in years. And I'm quite happy to assure you that this is one of the safest places in the world. We'll leave you in peace now and let you start your holiday. I repeat, don't be alarmed. Fort Augustus is a haven of peace and tranquillity. But, if you are going to be staying here long, may I recommend that you visit the monastery and try their tea and scones. They're to die for..."
The young policewoman scowled at him, and the officer blushed.
"Sorry, a better choice of words may have been more appropriate. But suffice it to say that they're delicious. Enjoy your stay."
The officers ducked through the caravan door on their way out and disappeared towards the next caravan.
Alessandra laughed.
She returned to the table, poured herself another glass of wine, and opened up 'Hitsforbits'.
She was beginning to enjoy Scotland. Staying a while longer was beginning to seem like a good idea.
And who was to say she couldn't mix some business with pleasure?
She spent the next two hours considering killing DCI Campbell McKenzie, and in the end came to an informed decision.
Why not?
Chapter 9
Scotland
Edinburgh
Saturday
3.00 p.m.
One of the great advantages of her job was that Alessandra got to see the world. She couldn't claim that she had been everywhere, but she had certainly visited most of the continents, and killed people in almost all the major capital cities of the world.
She'd been to Scotland once before, to Glasgow, but to this day she had never yet managed to spend more than an hour or two in Edinburgh, the capital. She’d read about it, and seen many, many pictures of how beautiful it was: the castle, the old tenement buildings of the Old Town - which were apparently the first skyscrapers in the world, - the New Town, and the beautiful scenery and countryside which surrounded it. One half of the city was even bounded by the sea, which could obviously create sailing opportunities if she ever had the time and she found a boat to rent!
The Assassin's Gift Page 9
