Called to Kill

by A. M Surtees

  I leaned into him until my mouth was right next to his ear. My voice was like a low growl, vicious and scary. “If you ever touch me without my permission again, I will tear your throat out. Now get out of my office!” I shoved him off me with such force that he almost fell backwards and watched as he tucked himself back into his pants and scuttled out the door like a wounded animal.

  Now, it’s my turn to play and after that, his effect on me was quickly overshadowed by my own pride and anger. Now that I have sensibility back I can put my plan in motion. I would need to kiss up to him later and blame it on frustration to do with the case but once I am back in control, I will find the proof I need. Once I have it, he’s a dead man. But this one I’m not wasting a bullet on. This one won’t be quick and clean. This one will be painful, it will be messy. It will be the kind of assassination that would make James shed a tear with pride.

  Game on. I’m going to teach him some manners. Then I’m going to tear him apart.

  Chapter fourteen

  Later that night, I walked up to his apartment. He opened the door, a look of shock instantly coming over his face, mixed with a little fear at seeing me standing there. Maybe he was thinking I had come to finish him off after my outburst earlier but I wasn’t there to hurt him, not yet. First, I needed answers and I was going to do whatever I had to in order to get them.

  I composed myself, turning on the innocent act like he pulled when I caught him in my office. “I wanted to apologise about my behaviour earlier. Can I come in?” He stared at me for a moment before stepping back, opening the door wide enough for me to enter.

  Sitting down on the same couch that had been the base for the opening of doors I wasn’t prepared for, while he opted for the chair furthest away from me. He wasn’t taking any chances and it was painstakingly obvious. Can’t really blame him for being on edge around me after my stunt earlier, if I’d squeezed any harder, he would have suffocated on his own breath in my office and we wouldn’t be here right now.

  I pulled every miniscule ounce of emotion I had, to try and force sincerity and the beginning of tears as I poured my ‘soul’ out to him. He bought it, moving from the chair to sit beside me on the couch, putting his arms around me and drawing me in to his warm embrace.

  God did I still want him, I wanted with everything for Penelope to have it all wrong, I couldn’t have had that kind of a connection, not just on the couch but the one in the shower and have it all be part of his game. I couldn’t be that stupid. It wasn’t who I was. As much as there was in the back of my mind, emotion wasn’t the driving force right now. My driving force was desperation. Not only for myself, but for Penny. I had to find out who hurt her and right now he was our main suspect.

  But hey, no reason why I can’t still have a little fun while I’m at it. He may quite possibly be a two faced, back stabbing liar hell bent on ripping the organisation I so adore to pieces but he was so thrilling to be with and if this was goodbye, I was going to make the most of it.

  He lifted my chin, wiping the beginnings of tears more genuine than I’ll ever admit, away from my eyes, gently pressing his soft lips against mine. I pulled him in close, fighting a war within myself to get lost in him completely.

  The rational voice knew what I had to do, and reminded me of that. I needed to get it out of him, his admission of guilt. Getting it was going to be the second most difficult thing I’ve done or have yet to do, all year. The most difficult thing was going to be killing him because I really did care for him more than I have cared for anyone in my entire life. If he wasn’t an information thief who tried to kill someone I would freely admit, meant the world to me, he may have been the man they told me about after all.

  However, my feelings for him were nothing, when you compared them to my feelings for the company that took me from nothing and gave me the world, literally. I mean, before Jackson and Penelope took me in, even getting on a plane was only a dream, now I can just pack and anywhere I please, whenever I like.

  I began to unzip his pants, when everything in me screamed for me to stop. Like it or not, his stunt in the office earlier, had me shaken to the core.

  He looked at me, concern consuming his face, “Everything ok, Tamikah?”

  As much as I resisted, it all came flooding out, the whole backstory about my step-father and how much his performance in the office reminded me of that time in my life. I couldn’t stop the emotions of a broken child from pouring out.

  He grabbed me in his arms and I started to cry like a two year old with a stubbed toe. It was both humiliating and oddly refreshing. So much for my plan to infiltrate his mind and probe it for proof of either his innocence or his guilt. Safe to say, this night was not going as planned.

  Chapter fifteen

  After fleeing Daniel’s having achieved nothing at all, I woke early the following morning. Allowing myself to be exposed like that, to someone whose loyalty I had been severely questioning, was very unlike me and I wasn’t too fond of it to be honest.

  I left his place pretty quickly after the reality of my openness had sunk in. No way in hell did I want to be opening up to, not only someone I have only known a few weeks, but someone who could possibly be behind Penelope’s attack and the infiltration that risked the potential downfall of the organisation that gave me a reason to get up in the morning.

  I hated feeling so conflicted. So much of me wanted to shoot him, but not because of his presumed guilt, I wanted to shoot him for having this horrid effect on me.

  Deciding to put last night’s events into the back of my mind for now, instead opting to head down to the office to check on Marcy and her progress. Hopefully she was getting closer to pinpointing the ID number for the person responsible for all this mess and hopefully that person was not Daniel.

  Walking into the office later that morning, there was a strange vibe suffocating the entire place. Everyone was tense, on edge and for the life of me, I had no idea why. I went into the tech room to find the small girl - whose name I later discovered was Maxine – wiping her eyes with the cuff of her sweater. She had clearly been crying, only just managing to maintain any form of composure. What the hell was going on?

  “Hey? Is everything ok?” I asked, approaching her cautiously. She looked up at me and as if my very face was the reflection of her pain, she broke out in heaving sobs, making any form of communication she attempted, practically inaudible.

  I left the room, on a mission to find someone, anyone, who could tell me why everyone around here was so highly strung today.

  Not looking where I was going I bumped straight into a tall, dark skinned man of around six foot three. Skipping politeness, I instantly probed him for answers, not in the slightest however, was I expecting the answer he gave.

  Marcy was attacked last night and she was in the hospital. Only problem being the biggest one of all. She wasn’t a patient. She was in the morgue. The people who attacked her, didn’t leave room for error, they finished the job the first time. Funny thing about a bullet to the temple, they usually don’t have much of a survival rate.

  I didn’t really know Marcy very well, I didn’t really like her very much, but she was a colleague and she was our best chance at getting into the tech system and catching the person responsible for all this with the intention to potentially cause much more damage before they were done. But, even though I didn’t know her, she was sent up here with me, I was in charge of the five of us. Why the hell had I not been told that one of my team was dead? You can bet your bottom dollar, that I was furious. Someone was going to give me answers, now!

  Jackson didn’t even have enough time to say the standard ‘hello’ before I started swearing blue murder at him, demanding to know why I wasn’t told about Marcy and what was going to be done about one of our own being murdered. She wasn’t a very nice girl, but she was an excellent hacker, and, a mother to a little boy named Seth who was only three. I didn’t care for human emotion, but Daniel had opened a door that I struggled to close, tea
rs billowing from my eyes as I thought about her son. No child should have to endure that, it’s just not right and its one reason why I never plan to have children, especially not working in this kind of job. His dad walked when Marcy told him she was pregnant so now that little boy had no one and he wasn’t even old enough to understand why.

  One incredibly important thing Jackson did tell me, that didn’t hit until after I had ‘ended’ the phone call and by ‘ended’ I mean that I threw my phone across the room in a fit of blind rage, watching as it shattered against the solid wall.

  Marcy’s time of death was recorded as being at approximately 8:45pm last night, taking place in the alley behind the hotel we were all staying at. It was 9:30 when I left Daniel’s house and the taxi back to the hotel took around twenty minutes. There was no way he could have killed Marcy. He was in the clear. Part of me was happy, most of me was pissed. Back to square one, this time without our hacker to bring us closer to a resolution.

  It was three extremely long days before someone was able to come from Melbourne and approve Marcy’s body for shipping. ‘Approve for shipping’ was the term they used. Like she wasn’t a person. Just a package that needed to be stamped and sent off in a box to her loved ones.

  Along with that someone, came Mack to take Marcy’s place on the mission. She looked less than excited as she walked through the arrivals gate at Sydney airport. That was, until she saw me, throwing her bags down and darting across the floor and throwing her arms around me and sobbing at the loss of her friend.

  When she gathered herself, we walked out to get in the rental and it was obvious that there was no place she’d rather be than anywhere but here. I couldn’t really blame her though, I felt exactly the same. It couldn’t have been easy for her to find out she was being shipped up to Sydney to take over the role of her dead co-worker and friend. Mack was the type who liked everyone she worked with so she was feeling the grief a lot more than I was and even I was feeling it.

  As we entered the tech room, Mack’s expression was a lot less enthusiastic than Marcy’s had been and I could understand why. A hard look came over her face as blind determination set it. She had a job to do and that job was to track down the son of a bitch who killed Marcy and almost killed Penelope.

  Sitting down to familiarize herself with the computer system, Mack told me something that made my day; Marcy had been keeping Mack completely up to date with the system and even though they were working in different states, they had been tackling the system together. We wouldn’t have to start back at square one after all. Finally some good news.

  Chapter sixteen

  It had been almost a week before I mustered up enough courage to approach Daniel again on more than a professional manner in the office, after my epic heart pouring episode followed by my running out the door so fast I didn’t even say goodbye. I also couldn’t face him alone, knowing how much I had wanted to kill him, only to find out later that he wasn’t the one who hurt Penelope, that he was innocent. I may not be good at feeling love and other mushy emotions, but remorse for condemning an innocent person, now that was a feeling I was infinitely familiar with.

  Walking into the small café that he agreed to meet me at, I found him sitting in the back corner, looking quite down which was understandable considering all that has happened the last two months but his expression changed almost instantly when he saw me approaching the table. I had never seen anyone look at me the way he did, it was bizarre to say the least.

  His blue eyes lit up and a brilliant smile consumed his face, looking at me as if I was the most amazing flower he’d ever seen. It was both flattering and scary to have someone look at me like that. I still wasn’t sure if I liked it or not, and I still hadn’t forgiven him completely for the incident in my office a few weeks ago, an incident he has apologised for more times than I can keep count of ever since I told him about Dwayne and what he did when I was a child, but the fact remained, he was totally smitten with me and like it or not, the feeling was mutual.

  Sitting across the table from him, I couldn’t help but sneak a stare or two at his beautiful baby blues, there was something about them that lit a fire in a deep part of me that had been cold for so long, I couldn’t remember days when it had ever been any other way. My heart.

  He hadn’t called me to meet him here just so that we could make goo goo eyes at each other the whole time. I needed to focus. He’d told me that he had been to visit Penelope in the hospital. It instantly triggered the memory of her story about them getting close and intimate and my blood pressure felt like it was rising fast. A horrible feeling washed over me as a wide variety of possible scenarios ripped their way through my brain.

  As if picking up on my uneasiness, he assured me the reason for his visit to Penelope hadn’t been a social one; he went there on a mission for information about the attacker, an admission that took me by surprise and to confront her about the fact that he had been fingered as a suspect.

  Expressing about how he was going crazy constantly having to watch me lose my patience, time and time again. About how he shared my frustration at the amount of times we would get inches away from having a decent lead, only to have it fall through.

  We’d been in Sydney for over two months and still nothing was bringing us closer to finding the person responsible. I was losing faith in the ability to catch this guy and it appeared that Daniel had noticed and taken it upon himself to try and help.

  I was grateful that he had tried, but disappointed that it was once again, for nothing. After apologizing profusely for accusing Daniel, her memory was fuzzy and she remembered that he had brought her case files to the apartment which was why she thought it was him.

  Since then, Penelope had been able to remember a slim figure leaving her apartment before falling completely unconscious but it was a sea of blacks and greys, a shadow if you will. The figure she could see in her mind was an inconclusive form, with no key factors to determine gender. We might as well be hunting the ghost of Jack the Ripper; we’d probably have a better chance. She also couldn’t remember anything from just before she was knocked to the ground, such as who they were, why they were in her apartment and if there was any argument or struggle before she got hurt. As I said, he achieved nothing other than clearing the air with his former accuser.

  Dropping my head in my hands, I let out a sigh as my fingers rang through my hair when the vibration against the table as my phone started to ring, pulled me from my trance. The call was from was Jackson, informing me that the coroner in Melbourne had discovered a small droplet of blood on Marcy’s body, that wasn’t hers. Finally, we had a lead.

  Chapter seventeen

  “Here’s to finally finding a lead in this basket case” Dimitri shouted as we clinked our glasses together in celebration. The celebrations may very well have been considered as somewhat premature considering we hadn’t actually caught the attacker but we had a lead. We would celebrate our win because that’s exactly what it was. It was a little bit of hope that all we have done here wasn’t for nothing. That Marcy’s death, wasn’t for nothing. For the first time in over two months, we had something that had the potential to finally get us somewhere.

  Female DNA was found on Marcy’s body, officially eliminating every single male from our suspect list. That was over two hundred names. In the grand scheme of things it may not be much, but it was a whole lot more than what we had before Jackson’s call last night. It was a lot easier to filter through one hundred names, than it was to filter through three times that number.

  This new information was under lock and key, with only the five of us being privy to it. We didn’t want to take the risk of someone we couldn’t trust, finding out what we knew.

  With this new information Mack compiled a list of all the female employees from the agent files I’d put together at the beginning of our mission and brought them with her to the bar.

  “I cross checked them like you said to eliminate the long term employees and narrowe
d it down to a list with only twenty names. There’s one name on here, though, that concerns me. Call it a gut feeling, or just paranoia, but I get this really weird vibe from Maxine. She’s always asking a tonne of questions and I thought she was just curious, but after seeing that she fits the employment component, and the gender as well, I’m starting to wonder.”

  I agreed with Mack about the weird vibe, but Maxine seemed pretty harmless. I mean realistically, what could a five foot nothing computer hacker, really do? Besides, her reaction to Marcy’s death seemed quite genuine so I wasn’t convinced that she could actually kill her. She would have to be an Oscar worthy actress if she was guilty, of that I was certain.

  Taking what Mack said on board, I agreed to keep a closer eye on Maxine, just to be safe. If it was her that was behind this – which I doubted, by hypothetically if she was – then it was her that killed Marcy, also meaning that Mack too, was in danger. Unlike Marcy, I actually had a lot of time for Mack, she was like a little sister and if something were to happen to her, I would be out for blood. More than I already am.

  When I returned to the hotel afterwards, I placed the satchel of employee files that Mack had given me, on my bed while I had a shower and got changed, ready for bed before attempting to tackle this list. Someone in this satchel was responsible. We just knew it but they also didn’t trigger a file back when their blood sample was tested which meant they either knew their way around a computer, well enough to be able to erase all information that could pull them up on a scan, they knew someone who knew what to do, or the long shot, they don’t have a record. The latter was highly unlikely but still possible if they had never been caught or never had a reason to have their DNA on file.