Rainy Night to Die
The Quiet Assassin
A
Noir Thriller
Caleb Pirtle III
Venture Galleries LLC
Copyright 2019: Caleb Pirtle III
Produced by Venture Galleries LLC
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the author or publisher.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, event, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Rainy Night to Die/Caleb Pirtle III
The Quiet Assassin
A Noir Thriller
First Printing
Formatted by Enterprise Book Services, LLC
Venture Galleries.com
calebandlindapirtle.com
Dedicated
To members of the East Texas Writers Guild
who follow their words to find out where they are going
and never know where or how far their words will take them.
And to my wife.
There would be no reason to write
without her.
Rainy Night 1
ROLAND SAND WALKED with slow, measured steps as if he were a condemned prisoner on his way to the death chamber.
Maybe he was.
Only the warden was missing.
The warden and a priest.
One to kill him.
One to save him.
A crooked grin sliced its way across his face.
It was too late to save him.
He was in a dimly lit corridor he had never walked before, on the fourteenth floor of a hotel that did not exist in any of the airport travel brochures, on the dark side of a city that celebrated its dead and buried its saviors.
Roland Sand had not come alone.
Dr. Raymond Spencer – almost six feet tall, thin as a sniper’s rifle, nearing his retirement years, and dressed in a white smock – held Sand’s arm to make sure he was able to stand straight as he shuffled his way past bare walls, the color of paste, that smelled like alcohol and hydrogen peroxide.
The carpet had patches of green and yellow flowers, worn bare by the tracks of too many lost souls, not unlike Roland Sand, whose walk down the hallway might be the last walk they ever took.
None of them walked for pleasure.
Not even the good doctor.
Sand’s shaved head glistened with sweat in the dim overhead light, and the thin line of whiskers on his jawline had not recovered from being scorched.
His face had been burned by an IED explosion on the sands of a barren desert in the heat and desolation of Iraq.
His friends looked past the scars.
Sand didn’t.
He knew the number of stitches some medic had sewn on his face.
Once he had as many friends as stitches.
Now he had only stitches.
Friends were gone.
Friends would not be coming back.
War was the great separator.
Sand wore a white undershirt and khaki trousers.
His eyes were blurred, and his feet were bare.
The carpet felt wet.
Maybe water.
Maybe urine.
Maybe blood.
He no longer cared.
He had felt the texture before.
But the last time, it was mud.
Sand blinked, trying to spin the slender thread of a distorted hallway into focus, failed miserably, and after a while, quit blinking.
He and the good doctor walked slowly and silently toward a slender ray of light spilling through the open doorway.
The burnished glow looked as if it had been smudged by someone’s greasy thumbprint.
Sand’s knees were weak.
He stood only because he refused to fall.
He felt as though a sledgehammer was pounding the top of his head.
A bullet could do that to a man.
He remembered the whiskey bar on the back side of Budapest.
Small.
Cramped.
Crowded.
Music but no band.
A sour whiskey that was mostly water.
It was night.
Always it happened at night.
His target sat across from him, a tall man, ruddy complexion, hard eyes, a wedding ring on the wrong finger.
A separate table.
He didn’t deserve to die.
But he knew too much.
He would never keep his secrets a secret.
Secrets carried a price.
Bought.
Stolen.
Or sold.
They died only when the last breath was snatched from their throats, man and secrets alike.
Dying was no different from living.
All the dead lost was tomorrow.
Tomorrow would be a wasted day anyway.
The lights dimmed.
The bar went dark.
Sand remembered one shot.
He took it.
He didn’t hear the second blast.
But he felt the bullet grind its way into the back of his skull.
He looked instinctively for the shooter.
He saw no one.
All he heard were footsteps.
Somewhere, he knew, his bosses back at the CIA operations room would be saying:
We got one of theirs.
They got one of ours.
Theirs was more important than ours.
Sand’s grin turned wicked.
He didn’t die easily.
Or quickly.
With any luck, he wouldn’t die at all.
Wouldn’t that piss everybody off?
Sand tasted blood.
His.
He had tasted it before.
Plenty of times.
Most of them had to do with guns.
Big.
And small.
Sometimes with knives.
Always with reckless abandon.
There had been a sledgehammer involved a time or two.
Maybe last night.
Maybe not.
It was difficult to remember.
He swallowed the blood.
Sand and the doctor walked together into a conference room.
The lights had been turned off.
Only one candle was burning in front of him, sitting atop a long mahogany table.
The smoke was too sweet.
It was suffocating.
He wanted to cough.
He didn’t.
It would be, he decided, a sign of weakness.
Sand’s eyes caught the glimpse of a shadow at the far end of the table.
The shadow was smoking a cigarette.
The glimmer of burning ash cut through the darkness.
“Who’s the man?” Sand asked.
His voice sounded weak.
“He’s a government man.” Doctor Spencer’s words were clipped and devoid of any emotion.
“What does he want?”
“He’ll have to tell you.”
“Does he want to kill me?”
The doctor laughed softly, “He’ll try.”
Sand laughed with him. “It’s a lonely night,” he said.
“For what?”
“For someone to die.”
The walls inside the room were painted a mint green and smelled as if they had been awash with cigarette smoke and gunpowder.
He guessed it was a conference room.
It was too large to be an office.
His eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Sand existed in darkness.
It was his refuge.
He allowed no one else inside.
And where were the windows?
The night was kept outside by bare stucco walls.
No plaques.
No honors.
No autographed photographs or diplomas.
The flickering light cast off by the candle fought the shadows, and it was a losing battle.
Sand knew the man had been waiting for him.
But why?
“You must be Roland Sand,” the voice said.
The shadow had a strange accent.
Maybe Russian.
Maybe Polish.
Maybe a lie.
“If you say so,” Sand replied dryly.
“Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand.”
“Do you know who I am?” the voice asked.
“No.”
“Do you know why I’m here?”
“No.”
“I have a job for you.”
“Where?”
“You’ll find out when the time is right.”
Sand leaned against the wall and folded his arms across his chest.
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’ll find out when the time is right,” the voice repeated.
Sand glanced down at the long mahogany table.
A Walther PPK lay within reach.
He had no idea why anyone had put it there.
“I may not take the job.”
“You will.” The voice was harsh, the accent a little thicker and more Slavic.
“What makes you so certain?”
“It’s important for you to finish the crossword puzzle.”
“What do I need in order to finish it?”
“A six-letter word meaning secrets.”
Sand closed his eyes and thought for a moment.
“Puzzle,” he said.
“They told me you were the smart one,” he said.
Sand shrugged.
He could hear the sneer in the accent.
“They were wrong,” the voice said.
“They make mistakes,” Sand said.
“It’s enigma.”
Where did that voice come from?
It was a voice he recognized.
“I can’t afford mistakes,” Sand said.
Between one breath and the next, he stepped forward, reached down, and picked up the Walther PPK.
He shot the shadow once – two inches above his left eye.
He had no idea why he fired the shot.
Maybe somebody else fired it.
Sand could not remember pulling the trigger.
He stood, his shoulders rigid, his jaws clenched, and all thoughts faded away into a dark and empty recess of his mind.
He wasn’t here.
He wasn’t there.
He saw the room go dark.
Sand felt at peace with himself.
He was in a familiar place.
Rainy Night 2
ROLAND SAND SAW General Malcolm McDowell open the door to an anteroom and walk toward him.
He was tall.
He was gray.
His face.
His eyes.
His hair.
All gray.
He was smiling.
Sand looked for the humor.
He found none.
The General had a scarred, gaunt face that had seen too many wars, and he wore three stars on the shoulder of his uniform.
Doctor Raymond Spencer sat slumped in a straight-back, wooden chair, laboring heavily for each breath.
All color had left his face.
His eyes never left the corpse still seated in a metal chair, his head thrown back, his hat lying on the floor behind him.
Blood matted his hair.
“Perfect,” the General said. “It’s always gratifying when a complex plan comes to the right conclusion.”
Silence.
Broken only by the ticking of a clock on the wall beside him.
It was a clock with no hands.
The numbers had been removed from its face.
It was a clock without time.
“Did Hancock know Sand was going to shoot him?” Spencer’s voice was barely audible.
“It surprised him as much as it surprised you. He just had less time to think about it.” The General pulled a pipe from the inside pocket of his jacket.
He held it.
He didn’t light it.
“I didn’t bargain for this.” Spencer’s chin was quivering.
“I’ll have somebody clean up the mess,” the General said. He reached over and took the Walther PPK out of Sand’s hand. “We wanted to be sure the code word you implanted in his brain worked.” The General laughed harder. “It worked even better and quicker than I anticipated.”
“But Hancock was an innocent man,” Spencer argued.
The General slipped the pistol into the jacket pocket of his uniform. “What we do is a dirty business,” he said. “War is a dirty business. We all have blood on our hands, and there will be more blood. There always is. We are a lot of things, my dear Spencer, but none of us are innocent.”
McDowell turned his attention to Sand, still staring in silence at the mint green wall.
Sand felt as if he had dropped into a catatonic trance.
Mentally, he had removed himself from the room.
His breathing was slow and steady.
His eyes had not yet blinked.
But Sand could hear.
He heard them all.
He heard every word.
“How soon will the subject be ready to travel?” the General asked.
“He needs a week.”
“He has twenty-four hours.” The General looked down at Sand. “Is he good with numbers?”
“They make sense to him.”
“How about puzzles?”
The doctor’s chin began to quiver slightly.
His voice had gone dead.
“He can take them apart or put them together.”
“Even the tough ones?”
“Sand’s mind doesn’t work like yours and mine.”
“Men like you and me, we make decisions,” the General said. “He follows orders. We give him the target. But he decides when and where to pull the trigger.”
“Do you give him an escape route before he leaves?”
“He builds his own as he goes.”
“You don’t really expect him to escape, do you?”
“It’s not important.”
Doctor Spencer’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not a commodity, you know.”
“He’s not?”
“He’s a man.”
“He’s an assassin.”
“He must have feelings.”
“Not Sand.”
“So you give him an assignment, send him out, and never expect to hear from him again.” A hint of anger edged into the doctor’s voice.
“Doctor,” the General said, “Sand goes where only a few would dare to go. He has a job to do. He does it. He fights to his last breath survive but is always surprised when he does. He’s a dead man walking, and he knows time ran out on him a long time ago.” McDowell took a deep breath. “He hasn’t accepted it yet. That’s why Sand is such a valuable commodity. He survives when he shouldn’t. Death has breathed on him. It hasn’t taken his breath away. He always finds a way to get back.”
The General glanced toward the corpse.
The dead man’s face was white and, in the dim light, looked as if it had been fashioned from molten wax.
His eyes were open in disbelief.
He didn’t see the bullet, but he knew it was coming.
/> McDowell glanced at the watch on his wrist. “Twenty-four hours, doctor. Have him ready to travel by this time tomorrow night. You have the meds to keep him in a coma until he reaches the Ukraine. Use them.”
Doctor Spencer stood and took Sand by the arm. “You may be signing this man’s death warrant,” he said.
“We all have death warrants,” the General said. “Every one of them has a signature.”
Rainy Night 3
ROLAND SAND AWOKE, and the world around him lay in a gray cloak of darkness.
It was as cold as death itself.
Somewhere in the distance of a decayed memory, little more than a mirror cracked by a bullet that ricocheted between the barriers of life and death, he heard the blast of a train whistle searing the silence of the night.
He felt the passenger train jerk back and forth as it rattled down the tracks toward morning, provided there would be a morning.
A dull ache worked its way into the back of his head.
It wouldn’t kill him.
But it reminded Sand of his own mortality.
He was alive for one reason.
Death had looked him over and found him undeserving.
Death didn’t want him.
Of course, by tomorrow, death might well change its mind.
Death could not be trusted.
Sand waited without moving until his eyes adjusted to the darkness.
The compartment was virtually empty, and only the faint reflection of a new moon touched the window.
He saw a lone figure sitting across from him, a shadow, perhaps a silhouette, wearing a fedora and heavy topcoat.
The figure spoke.
“I knew you couldn’t sleep forever, old boy.”
The voice had a distinct British accent.
Sand felt the speeding train sway again as it threatened to leave the tracks.
His face went numb from the chill.
He had no idea where he was, where he was going, or the identity of the stranger staring back at him.
But he knew that the pain searing into the back of his skull left the same dull sensation as a bullet.
He had felt it before.
He could not remember when or how long ago it had been.
But it was always there just beyond his reach, hanging on the ragged edge of a bewildering dream.
Sometimes asleep.
Sometimes awake.
Same dream.
Every day.
Every night.
Distortions of pain, and the pain had flashes of color, reds and blacks, smudged like a thumb print on the plate glass window of a candy store.
Why candy?
Was death so sweet?
Rainy Night To Die Page 1
