Assassin

by Tara Moss

  He hesitated. ‘I thought you were coming on Sunday?’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps it was meant as a surprise? They just told me to say that Beverley sent me. I can certainly come back at a later time.’

  He frowned. ‘Are you new there? What accent is that exactly?’

  Mak looked up and smiled, and despite her changed appearance, despite Bogey’s spectacles, the uniform, the hair, the recognition hit him with a jolt. His face contorted.

  Okay, it’s going to be like that.

  ‘Good. You recognise me,’ Mak said immediately. ‘That makes this simpler.’

  He gave a worried glance behind him, but the guard was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Don’t call him back. Let’s just have a chat first, okay?’ She held both palms in the air. ‘I’m here to tell you to call them off. I no longer care what you’ve done. I’m not after you or your family. Just call off your people and I promise I will leave you alone.’

  Jack Cavanagh didn’t speak or move. Now that she was really looking at him, she noticed he looked a little unwell beneath his tan. There were bags under his pale blue eyes. He looked much older than the photographs she’d seen.

  Seconds ticked by. ‘You’re mad to come here,’ he finally said.

  Yes, I am. ‘Mad is a good word,’ she agreed. ‘Mad, yes, but willing to let things go.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She knew she would not have long. The guard would be back to check on things, and then she’d have to deal with all that bulk and that semi-automatic of his. ‘Please leave me be now, Mr Cavanagh. Promise me you will leave me alone and I will leave here, no harm done.’ Mak felt a strange flutter in her stomach, and for a moment her composure wavered. There it was, her reason for taking this drastic step. The reason she could wait no longer. She felt an unexpected sting in her eyes as they threatened to well up. With significant effort she suppressed the ill-timed swell of emotion. This was not the time or place to wonder if the flicker of life in her belly would survive her troubles to one day be safely born, or if that child would be born in a prison, or to a life on the run.

  Jack watched her carefully.

  ‘Please,’ Mak continued, managing a steady voice. ‘Leave me alone and I will leave you alone. I am pregnant. I want to live. On my mother’s grave I promise I will leave you alone forever.’ She raised her palms again, as if to show she wasn’t armed. For a moment the gun in the small of her back no longer itched. She felt ill, imagining she might have used it. She wanted so badly to be human again, to have this all go away. She wanted to see his humanity. She wanted to see that he wasn’t to blame. That it was all a mistake. A misunderstanding.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Jack Cavanagh said and rubbed his nose. He shifted on his feet. He looked to her stomach and back to her face.

  Liar.

  A line of rage bubbled up and her hopeful emotions left her as quickly as they had arrived. She took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘Yes, you do, Mr Cavanagh. I can see that you do. But I wonder if you do know that I was already gone? That I wasn’t ever going to return to this country? If you, or your advisors, had not sent men to kill me, I would not be in your living room right now. I don’t want to be here, believe me. And I’ll be happy to leave here and never, ever return if you can ensure my safety.’

  ‘So you come here under false pretences, posing as a masseuse? You know I could have you shot. I’d be well within my rights.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ she countered. ‘But I do know that this is the only way I could speak to you face to face. Maybe you really aren’t so callous about human life, Jack? Maybe you didn’t mean to unleash all this violence? If you are telling the truth, and you really don’t know about the contract on my head — which I seriously doubt — I fear your advisors are doing things you are not aware of.’

  Cavanagh folded his arms. His eyes narrowed. ‘Have you got a wire on or something? Is that what this is?’

  She shook her head, pulled the unzipped fleece back and lifted the white polo shirt a touch to reveal a stretch of her stomach. As it happened, she wasn’t wearing a wire, but the bag she’d brought with her was recording everything in that living room, all for naught if he did not admit anything. After everything, a clear, indisputably authentic video of the Cavanagh patriarch admitting his own guilt might finally be enough to push the case against him over the line, to erode his corrupt power and see him properly investigated. Especially if it was posted online.

  ‘I guess it doesn’t matter if you are. They’ll take it off you,’ he said.

  They. The people who protected Jack. The people who killed Jimmy for nothing. The people responsible for killing Bogey.

  ‘I don’t want to die. You don’t have to have me killed. I will leave you alone,’ she reiterated. ‘Please call your security man, The American, and tell him to leave me alone.’

  Inside, she was growing impatient. But she had to do this right, had to say the words.

  His eyebrows shot up. He was perhaps surprised she knew of the man.

  ‘The American? Tell him yourself. He’ll be here soon,’ Jack responded.

  Mak swallowed. Is he bluffing? she wondered and nodded to herself, trying to take the news calmly. She’d already known the clock was ticking. ‘And you didn’t call the cops?’

  He didn’t respond.

  No, he wouldn’t want them coming too soon. Not until things are finished and I’m dead.

  ‘I need you to think about the fact that people are being murdered on your behalf. People like that girl who overdosed with your son and the friend of your son’s who witnessed her death and was murdered because of it. People like Bogey Mortimer.’ Jack simply continued looking at her, silently. ‘You need to put an end to this or more people will die. People like me and my unborn child.’

  His pale eyes flickered to her stomach again.

  ‘My offer is sincere,’ she said. ‘I will leave you alone if you stop pursuing me. Maybe justice will finally catch you, but it’s not my fight any more. I want nothing to do with it. Let me go. Please. Let me live.’

  As she spoke the words she’d rehearsed again and again in her mind, she realised that some tiny, naïve part of her had actually hoped her words would have an impact, could make a difference to the hard reality of things. She found that same naïve part of her had actually longed to look into Jack Cavanagh’s eyes and find innocence — not a man used to sitting in his mighty high-rise office ordering death and corruption, but a man unaware of what was being done in his name.

  But this was not a fairy tale. She knew what she had to do, what she’d come here to do.

  Jack Cavanagh stood before her, and the corners of his mouth turned down into a sneer. ‘Honestly, woman, did you think this would work?’ he said and took an unwelcome step towards her, his blue eyes glittering darkly, hard as diamonds. ‘Did you think you could win my sympathy by getting yourself knocked up? If you even are? By coming here to show yourself? This is larger than you. You should be fucking dead.’

  Ah. There you are. This was the other side of Jack Cavanagh. The ruthless side his spin machine worked so hard to hide. The side she’d known was there.

  Mak shook her head. ‘You make me sad, Jack. You’re doing all this so you can keep your son’s precious secrets while he parties it up in Monaco — with, I’m guessing, your money — and leaves you here to clean up the mess? Tell me, has it been worth it? Worth your marriage?’

  His mouth tightened like he’d sucked a lemon.

  ‘Oh yes. Your wife wouldn’t send you a surprise massage because you aren’t on speaking terms at the moment, are you? And your son? Have you spoken to him lately?’

  Jack’s face reddened. ‘Jayden, get this woman out of my sight!’ he shouted and stepped back. ‘You’ve signed your own death warrant,’ he spat and folded his arms, as if he was done with their exchange and she would simply disappear now that he’d ordered it.

  ‘Fucking bitch.’

  It was not Jac
k who spoke.

  The voice came from behind him.

  From the base of the stairwell.

  Not the bodyguard she’d been expecting, but someone else. Someone familiar.

  Damien Cavanagh?

  Jack’s son was sullen and dark-eyed, his hair askew. He wore a black silk robe draped loosely over the angles of his long, lean, deeply tanned body. Despite the time, Damien appeared to have been woken from slumber. My God, it’s really him. Mak had not seen him during her reconnaissance of the house. Andy had not mentioned his return. How could I have missed that Damien was in the country? Makedde wondered in the stunned instant it took to realise that he was there and to see that he was raising his right arm.

  Something was in his hand. Something that flashed silver, reflecting the sunlight.

  A gun.

  He has a gun.

  He held it out towards her, his mouth turned down into a scowl. ‘Bitch,’ she heard him say again.

  ‘Damien! Get back!’ his father yelled, but Mak was no longer focused on him.

  She pulled up the back of her shirt, took the loaded nine-millimetre Glock out from her waistband and aimed it at the Cavanagh heir, one hand cupped around the other, thumbs locked down. Her heart quickened. Her vision constricted. All she could see was Damien Cavanagh, holding a gun on her — his face, his hands on the gun — and everything else had somehow disappeared. She had tunnel vision. The adrenaline was causing it. The fear. In her ears was a kind of buzzing. It was her blood.

  ‘Jayden!’ Jack yelled, calling for his bodyguard.

  Mak took a slow, deliberate breath, squinting with her left eye and shutting the other entirely. She looked down the barrel and the silencer, and now the world seemed to slow with her breathing. She squeezed her trigger finger just as she had practised so many times, and there came the sound of two blasts — one muffled and close, the other loud and metres away. There was an explosion of red around Damien’s head and he dropped like a stone. Behind her, a pane of glass shattered.

  Damien had fired at her. He’d missed.

  ‘Drop your weapon!’

  Mak spun and squeezed off a second shot, missing the tall security guard as he ran across the lawn with his iPod earphones dangling from his shorts, dwarfed by his enormous, muscled thighs. He’d already unholstered his CZ 75 and now he let off two quick rounds, both hitting the wall behind her as she ran full tilt towards the designer leather lounge and dove behind it.

  Damien.

  Damien is dead.

  Had Damien been a decent aim, she would be as dead as he was. And she had been too absorbed in her exchange to notice the guard’s approach. She’d not even been able to see her periphery. Now the bodyguard was there. Armed.

  Get yourself steady.

  Get yourself steady, Mak.

  She stayed crouched behind the lounge, panting, and pulled off her cap and Bogey’s glasses, then sat up and peered over the edge of the lounge to see the armed guard move past the open living-room doors in his lumbering sprint. He disappeared for a moment and reappeared in the open-plan kitchen, framed by hanging pots and pans. She clocked him in her sights, took a breath and squeezed off a shot. He ducked behind the stainless-steel counter and her bullet hit a blender, which switched on for a moment, losing its lid before shorting out.

  ‘Damien! Damien!’ Jack was yelling, weeping. He’d gone to ground, stretched out on his stomach.

  ‘Drop it or you die, Jayden!’ Mak shouted from behind the lounge.

  She peeked around the edge again and saw that the guard was still creeping around the kitchen. His aim gave her hope that he was not up on his practice. Had he discharged his weapon in a gunfight before? Perhaps not. A lot of long-serving cops never discharged their weapons. Mak was not so lucky.

  While she stayed down the guard took two further shots. They hit the cushions on the lounge she was hiding behind, the sound muffled.

  His CZ 75 was set on double shot.

  ‘He’s not paying you enough. Drop it,’ she called out.

  He didn’t respond.

  In the reflection of the stereo cabinet she saw Jack crawling towards the glass sliding doors on his hands and knees. Dammit. She didn’t want to chase him across the lawn. Makedde peeked around the leather lounge to see the guard coming towards her, gun drawn. He had a lot of bullets left.

  So did she.

  Mak lined up her shot and fired at the pots and frying pans hanging over the guard’s shoulder, causing a clangour as they rocked and leaped off their hooks, some falling to the tiles below. As they fell she surged upwards and the guard, taken by surprise, tried another two shots — which zinged into the wall just above her. Mak plugged him square in his enormous chest with a single shot. She ducked back down, unsure of her aim. When she peered over the edge again she saw him stumble backwards. He clutched himself, took two steps forwards, puzzlement etched on his young face. He made it three more steps before sinking to his knees only a few metres away from her. His weapon clattered to the floor and finally he went down like a speared bull, chin first, right in front of the lounge.

  A stainless-steel pot, having fallen from its hook, rocked one way and the other on the tiled floor, back and forth, back and forth, until it eventually, mercifully became still.

  Mak stepped out from behind the leather lounge, picked up the guard’s CZ 75 and pocketed it. She couldn’t tell whether he was breathing and she didn’t bend down to check. She turned her head and at a glance saw that Damien was still at the base of the stairs, lying in a growing pool of blood. She turned her gun on Jack, who had flipped onto his back, and was making strange motions, like a fish out of water. His expression was one of naked loss and fear and confusion — and of rage. His mouth kept opening and closing. A dark stain spread out across his jeans. Urine. She aimed the gun at Jack Cavanagh’s head, both hands on the grip and her index finger placed lightly on the trigger. The weapon was disproportionately long with the addition of the dark, cylindrical silencer. She squinted, looking down the long barrel into Jack’s widening eyes, and swallowed back any remaining fear. She found there wasn’t much fear left in her. She was simply empty.

  ‘Just look what you’ve made me into,’ Makedde said, more to herself than anyone. ‘Look at me.’

  She thought of Luther Hand. Of John Dayle. Of Damien. Of the nameless men who’d come after her. Jack could not possibly understand what it was like to become a killer against your own will. To be perverted like that by trauma and by horror. To be forced to kill. And she realised in that moment that she was grinning again. That maniacal grin she’d seen reflected in the handle of John Dayle’s scalpel.

  ‘I didn’t want it to be this way, but you leave me no choice. Damien left me no choice,’ she said. She touched one hand to her stomach. ‘If we’re going to die, we may as well take you with us.’

  Jack backed up across the floor. He looked from her horrible grin, down to the barrel of the gun she had pointed at him and back again. She had the gun aimed at his head, and now his eyes flickered away. She imagined that he wished he had a better bodyguard. Or that he really had called ‘The American’.

  ‘Fuck you. You should have died in Paris,’ he spat.

  ‘There. That was an admission, wasn’t it? I should have fucking died in Paris, right? Stand up,’ she ordered, and he got up shakily. ‘You’ve lost your son. You caused all that death for him, for nothing. And now it’s over.’

  ‘You fucking bitch!’ he shouted — Like father like son — and he lunged clumsily for her Glock, red-faced, his fingers spread like claws.

  Mak squeezed the trigger

  and everything

  seemed

  to stop.

  A single hollow-point bullet exited the muzzle, the sound muffled by the silencer, and penetrated the centre of Jack Cavanagh’s forehead, entering his skull and mushrooming out through the brain tissue. The impact threw Jack Cavanagh’s head back with a whiplash effect, propelling his body backwards into a designer chair that slid o
n wheels across the timber floor to hit the stereo cabinet with a crack.

  Then all was quiet save for the stereo.

  No screams.

  No choking.

  No more conversation.

  Jack Cavanagh’s pale blue eyes were open and unseeing — or perhaps seeing whatever there was to witness beyond the threshold of life. He would have looked like he was sprawled out in the seat, resting in beams of sunlight, except his brains were across the stereo cabinet up the wall. Behind him, his son lay in a pool of blood. By the lounge, his bodyguard lay dead.

  On the radio Miles Davis was still playing ‘So What’.

  The men who could not have her live were gone. And Makedde Vanderwall was a murderer. For the first time in her life she’d killed someone in cold blood. She’d killed a corrupt billionaire, a man, a human being, a husband, a son, a father. Damien had fired on her, but Jack had been unarmed. She’d murdered him.

  She caught sight of motion as a figure appeared from behind her, across the lawn.

  Fuck …

  Mak crouched behind the edge of the stereo cabinet, gun extended. Had the guard called for backup? No, this was a neatly dressed older man with a full head of white-grey hair. She knew instinctively that this must be The American Andy had told her about. Cavanagh’s security man. He was capable and highly dangerous, Mak knew. Jack had phoned him, just as he’d said. He must not have been far away, or he’d already been on his way over. What were the chances? From the look of his quick breathing the man had been moving quickly, perhaps even running, but now he stood a few metres away from Mak, stock still, his gun trained on her. The air between them seemed to thicken.

  Mak did a quick count. She’d only used seven bullets — two of them on the pots and pans. Eight left. And she had a second fifteen-round magazine ready in her thigh pocket.

  ‘Drop it,’ she said, keeping her gun steady on him.

  He didn’t. His weapon, a Beretta, remained pointed at her, but his eyes strayed to the motionless guard on the floor, then to Damien at the base of the stairs, and finally to Jack, who was slumped in the chair, arms at his sides, head thrown back at an uncomfortable angle. The man they called The American moved slowly through the open doors into the living room towards his client, not wanting to alarm Mak with any sudden movements. With his left hand he held two fingers to the side of Jack’s neck and waited a couple of beats. It was clear to Mak that Jack Cavanagh was not breathing and would never breathe again. He stepped away and looked Mak up and down. He seemed what … impressed? Surprised? She could see no fear in him.