He was still staring at it, fiddling with the coupler, growing more and more certain that he was going to be double-crossed when Arching came in. He too wore a magnificent suit that had to have cost thousands. Prison had aged him. He was pale and his thin hair was even thinner. Despite his pallor and the cuffs on his wrists, a small smile played on his lips as he stared hard at Roan as if in challenge. It was a challenge Roan could not accept.
“All rise!” a bailiff bellowed as the judge swept in. Things became routine and lawyerly for a few minutes until Roan was called and the room became quiet. They were all there just to hear him rehash everything he had already said at the first trial. They were all there to hear his damning evidence.
“Before we begin the questioning, can I give a brief statement?” Roan asked. No one had an issue and the judge nodded. Still with the coupler spinning in his sweaty hands, Roan said, “I would like to amend my testimony of last year in the case of the State of New York versus Atticus Arching.” This was the plan Tarranon had hatched. It was a beauty.
“Which part?” the district attorney asked in sudden alarm.
Roan swallowed hard. “All of it. It was all a lie.”
Chapter 41
Manhattan, New York City
Roan was on the stand for an hour and for every second of that hour, he lied. It went on for so long that he began to feel sick. His stomach was filled with sour acid, his tongue was dry and coated in paste, and his head was swimmy. When he was finally dismissed he stood, swaying.
The bailiff began to walk toward him, pulling out his handcuffs as he did. Roan knew they were going to arrest him; perjury was a felony after all. Before the bailiff could get to him, he walked to Arching’s table where the ultimate game developer was wearing a beaming smile. As Roan’s “false” testimony had made up the bulk of the evidence against him, he had been freed.
“Since you can’t scalp me,” Roan said, tossing him the coupler. “You can have this as your trophy.”
Arching bowed his head slightly and took the coupler. “From what I hear, you’ve been a worthy adversary. I shall hang it on my wall with the heads of my enemies.”
Roan was about to say something when he had his hands yanked behind his back by the bailiff. “You have the right to remain silent…”
“A little late for that,” Arching said over the officer’s words. The six lawyers laughed uproariously at this. The laughter burned like fire in Roan, but he refused to let it show. They laughed their way out of the room and down the hall.
Once they were gone, Agent Covington threw her cellphone at Roan, hitting him in the shoulder. “They have her, don’t they? What the hell, Roan? We don’t do things like this in the FBI! Your Honor! He was clearly coerced to change his testimony. Tell him, Roan.”
“I have said what I said.”
Covington looked like she was about to punch him. She even raised a fist, but thought better of it. Her face still twisted in anger, she turned back to the judge. “One of our agents, a woman who was very, shall we say, ‘friendly’ with Agent Roan, was kidnapped a few days ago. Obviously they made some sort of deal for her release.”
The judge, a man with deep ruts in his cheeks where laugh lines should have been, gazed down at Roan. “Is this true?”
With Amanda still in captivity, Roan couldn’t answer that honestly, though he tried. “We have never received a ransom note.”
“So, she may not be kidnapped?” the judge asked. “I’m confused. Are you lying now or were you lying a few minutes ago, or were you lying last year?”
Roan wanted to yell into the man’s face: I’m no liar! only that wasn’t true. Arching had turned him into a liar and a thief….but not an assassin. He still wasn’t a murderer. Roan bit back his anger and turned to Covington. “Take my cell phone. Let me know if I have any messages.” She caught his look and agreed that she would. “And get me a lawyer, will you?” There had been nothing in his agreement with Tarranon that said he had to rot in prison.
His badge and gun were taken and he was led away to be charged with what would end up being thirty-eight charges of perjury, one charge of false evidence and one charge of obstruction of justice. The arrest process was long and draining for most people, but it was doubly so for Roan, who waited and waited for word from Amanda.
When Covington finally came, Roan was nearly out of his mind. “She called?” he said, into the inmate telephone, grabbing it off the wall before he even sat down. Her look was one of disappointment. She held up his phone so he could read the message through the glass.
Roan, Lying? Perjury? You’re not the man I thought you were. Don’t ever call me again.
He stared at the note for nearly half a minute, his mouth hanging open, his eyes going back and forth over the words, looking for the hidden meaning, looking for the clue that she had written sub-textually—and not finding it.
“She also sent a letter of resignation to her local field office.” The phone had slipped from Roan’s ear and her voice was tinny and faraway. “I’m having them match her signature against what they have on file. Was your testimony coerced or not?”
“Of course it was!” Roan seethed, slamming his fist into the heavy glass separating them. “They found her first and sent me a picture of her. They said they would kill her if I didn’t lie for them. I didn’t have a choice.”
“Yes, you did,” she shot back. “If you had included your team in what was going on, we could have…”
He slammed the glass again. “I didn’t have a team, remember? It was just me…and now Arching is free, isn’t he? We can’t try him again, not for this.” Covington shook her head. The waters would be too muddied to ever convict Arching a second time and as he had been in prison when Amanda was kidnapped, they wouldn’t be able to get him for that crime either. Or for her murder.
“Stop it!” he hissed to himself. Louder, he stated, “Get me my lawyer, now. I can’t spend another minute in here.”
“I’ll do what I can.” She gave over every case she was working on and devoted hours to badgering the D.A., the judge, and even their secretaries to get Roan out. Still, it was after eight that night before he walked out of the city jail in a towering rage. He didn’t want to believe Amanda was dead and the anger helped to cover the fear eating away at his insides.
Covington was there waiting for him, sitting on the hood of a black four-door sedan. Next to her were two cups of coffee and an open bottle of whiskey.
“What have you heard about…”
She pointed to the bottle. “Take a shot first.” He didn’t like the sound of that, but took the bottle nonetheless. The amber liquid burned in a good way. When he took a second shot, she nodded and said, “We still haven’t heard anything more from Amanda, though we did track her phone to a motel in Iowa. From the receipts we found, it seems she had been moving steadily east, day by day. A little at a time. I think she wanted to get here for you.”
“And she stopped the day you received her picture.”
“Yes, she checked in three days ago and supposedly left this morning. When we tracked her phone, we had a state trooper banging on doors in twenty minutes. He found a witness who saw a ‘pretty blonde girl’ crawling in and out of a white Volkswagen Beetle. The same kind of car she drives.”
Roan shook his head. “I’m missing something. If she left, how did you track her cell…oh, they left it for us to find.” Roan’s stomach dropped. The assassins had covered their tracks perfectly. They had someone “play” Amanda so she could be seen alive to further discredit Roan. They then leave the phone in plain sight and poof Amanda disappears for all time.
“We’re not going to find her body, are we?” he whispered, blinking back tears.
“We don’t know that,” Covington said, before taking a sip from the whiskey. A grimace twisted her features. “Ugh. What I know is that the signature was muddled just enough to come back as inconclusive. They fingerprinted the page and there were only three prints on it, all very
suspiciously placed. On a hunch, they ran it through mass spec and they found urine on the page.”
Roan nodded. “She had been under for days by then and had to have wet herself. They’ll find more if they check the mattress. Flip it if they haven’t.”
“They did but found nothing…nothing fresh that is. Those poor guys have all sorts of weirdness to deal with. It still is strange not to find urine if she had been under for so long.”
“If? Of course she was under. Have them try the closest vacant rooms. What have you dug up on Chandler and Corvo?”
Covington gave him an odd look followed by an even stranger shrug. “I’m sorry, that’s not something I can discuss. Even though you have been suspended with pay, you’re still suspended. And before you ask, the same goes for Arching, though with him there’s not much to tell. I had an agent tailing him after he left court. He took a few turns and just vanished. He has two properties in the New York area and he hasn’t been to either.”
Roan grabbed the bottle of whiskey and chugged as he did he saw how perfectly he had been played. Amanda had been killed, that was for certain and Roan was probably even then being set up to take the fall. He was now pretty sure they would find her body after all and he would be linked in some fashion.
Arching would find a way. He would want Roan to suffer in prison just like he had suffered, and, after twenty or thirty years, just when Roan was about to get out, Arching would have him killed. That was the way the king of assassins would do things.
A part of Roan’s soul ached for Amanda, but the rest burned with white hot rage. The rage was unquenchable. “I’m going to need a piece.”
“A gun? I don’t know. Don’t you have a backup?”
He did—in his apartment. What were the chances it was still there? One in a million. What were the chances it had already been used to kill Amanda? He ground his teeth and didn’t answer the mental question. “I do. If it’s still there, it’s in the third kitchen drawer next to the stove. I get the feeling it won’t be.”
Covington was about to ask why then closed her mouth. She shook her head. “These guys are pros. So far, they have done everything exactly like, I don’t know, like the CIA, I guess. They just don’t make a mistake, do they?”
“They’ve made one,” Roan said. “They messed with me.”
2—
Covington put out a search for Arching. Agents had been staking out his estates already and now more checked the homes of his lawyers and those of his very few friends. When that didn’t turn up anything, they started demanding access to the fanciest penthouses in the city on the flimsiest of excuses.
With the power of the FBI, these excuses were almost always accepted. As Roan knew they would, each search came up empty.
Arching wouldn’t be so predictable and yet, he was used to a certain lifestyle. He would want rich surroundings and at the same time he would want to be close to the action that New York City represented. And after prison, he would want something open. No penthouses for him. He would want a real house, or more likely, a mansion.
There were only twenty thousand mansions in and around New York City. A daunting number, but Roan knew Arching would also be in need of one other necessity: female companionship. If Roan was doing an actual search, this would have narrowed things down considerably. But he wasn’t doing a search. He had already found his man and was two hundred yards away, sitting behind a hedge with field glasses trained on the wide glass doors of a spacious living room.
He was sideways on and didn’t have the best view, still he could see Arching and a curvaceous black woman. Roan would bet everything he owned that the woman played a drow witch on the other side. In fact, he would bet her life on it as well. He planned on killing her just as he planned on killing the four guards stalking the grounds.
Magenlune the Seer had been right. Becoming an assassin, a real-life assassin, was the only way to stop Arching. He knew that now. Just like he knew that everything happened for a reason, even on this side of the veil. It was all very plain to see in hindsight: the reason Amanda was dead was because he had failed to kill Arching when he had a chance a year ago, and the reason he was sitting outside in the cool night with a gun in one pocket and a dagger in the other was because he had picked up that micro GPS unit.
He could see his coupler sitting on a counter, forgotten. Inside it was the GPS unit. He had feared being double-crossed and he had been right to.
Roan laid the field glasses on the ground. They were no longer needed. What he needed was a high-powered rifle with a starlight scope. What he had instead was a Sig Sauer P229 that seemed oddly small in his large hands. If he’d had the rifle, he would have killed Arching ten minutes before. All it would have taken was a single shot through the head as he stood gazing out at the night. One and done. With the Sig, he would have to get close. Very close.
There must be a reason for this as well, he thought.
Perhaps he was meant to die here. The thought didn’t bother him a bit. For days on end he had been living two lives and now without Amanda, he didn’t care to live even one. If he died, he felt he would be okay with that—just as long as he took Arching with him.
That was the only thing that mattered. He was there to kill. He had a target and for an assassin there was nothing better.
Unfortunately, he didn’t have time to use the purest of his assassin skills in the way he wished. It would fill his heart with malicious joy to be able to set up a truly epic kill. To be able to see Arching’s eyes as it unfolded before him, nuanced and deadly subtle.
Roan would have to settle for killing him in the bluntest of manners. And that was okay as well. Perhaps it was why he had the Sig. It had been Agent Covington’s backup piece and as she had handed it over, she had begged him not to use it and when he ignored her, she had told him lies like: “We’ll get him eventually” and “There’s still a chance Amanda will turn up.”
If he hadn’t been choking on the ashes of the last bit of goodness left in him—just as Magenlune the Seer said he would—he would have laughed at her. “You have two hours to find her or evidence on him,” he had said. “I won’t do anything until then.” That had been two hours and one minute ago.
The lights went off throughout the first floor of the house. It almost felt like an omen to Roan, or perhaps a signal to begin.
Dropping down behind the hedge, he found a gap and squiggled through. The first hundred and fifty yards to the house was spent on his stomach, low-crawling through the tall grass and widely spaced trees that bordered the property. Quickly his forearms and knees began to ache. He hadn’t low-crawled since his army days and that had been years before. Still he persevered until he came right to the fence that surrounded the property.
Here things became tricky. There were outer lights set around the eaves of the house to give it a lively feel, but there were also floodlights that were motion activated. Every time one of the guards went out to check the perimeter, the sensors that covered every inch of the grounds would kick the brighter lights on.
There was no way he could get over the fence without them turning on—if the guards weren’t so stupid, that is. Every fifteen minutes, like clockwork, one of them would exit the front door, head to the fence and check the perimeter. This would set off the floodlights one at a time as the guard walked along.
Roan picked the approach to the front door with the most cover which just happened to be an almost a straight shot down the drive, which was lined with low hedges. He waited until the guard walked by and was some thirty yards away before climbing the fence in one quick move, grabbing the bars near the top and kicking a leg up and over.
The lights were still on when he landed and scrambled for the cover of the hedge.
Now came the very hard part. Motion detectors, especially in a ritzy neighborhood such as this one were almost always equipped with dual sensors—one for movement and another that measures ambient temperatures. It is passive and will click on when there is a s
pike in temperature such as when a 98 degree human enters the field.
Neither sensor is foolproof. The sensors are dynamic rather than static, meaning that they don’t paint a single picture of an area and any deviation from it will set off the alarm. Yes, a guard walking through it sets off the lights, but if the same guard were to sit down and not move, the sensors will eventually accept him as part of its background.
While the lights were on, Roan became part of the background. He was sure they stayed on longer than usual, but since no one came running, he guessed that the extended time went unnoticed. Now that he was part of the sensor’s background, he had to remain that way and that meant hugging the earth and moving with the speed of a sloth.
Ever so slowly he snaked one arm forward and then one knee. After a breath, he very gradually thrust himself forward by eight inches. When the light didn’t flick on, he repeated the process over and over, moving eight inches every thirty seconds. When the guard came out again, Roan had only moved twenty feet. He hunkered down next to the hedge as the man walked by.
When the light flicked off, he once again took up his painstaking crawl.
Fifteen minutes later, he was under the eaves when the guard came out. Roan slid his Sig Sauer from its holster and waited for the man to make his circuit of the grounds. This was it. This was where Roan would become an assassin. Surprisingly, he felt absolutely nothing. He felt dead inside.
The guard came right back up the walk, shielding his eyes from the flood lights blaring into them. As he passed, Roan stood up and followed him to the door, moving as silently as the man’s shadow.
Just as he reached out for the door, Roan bashed him over the head with the butt of the gun. His hand came away wet with blood as the guard toppled. There was a chance that Roan could have hit him too hard and inadvertently killed him. Roan didn’t care. He took the man’s gun and stepped over the body without bothering to check for a pulse.
Infinite Assassins: Daggerland Online Novel 2 A LITRPG Adventure Page 39
