The Old Rocker and the Healer

by Mike Ward

Excerpt from The Banker With a Face Full of Evil

  Dieter Köhler sat in his rental car on Nybrogatan in the Östermalm district of Stockholm. Köhler had been in Sweden for precisely four days. Tonight he planned to kill a man. He looked up the street. Fifty meters away was the gleaming façade of the Zetterstrand Investment Bank, the largest investment bank in Scandinavia and the sixth largest in Europe. Köhler’s target was Martin Ingvarsson, the CEO of the bank.

  Dieter Köhler was tall with short dark hair, steel blue eyes and horn rimmed glasses. He was in his forties, worked out regularly and was extremely fit. He was an ex member of the East German Stasi, the security police and had done extremely well under communism. Capitalism, however, had been a totally different ball game and the once well connected Köhler had floundered under the new system. Things had gone from bad to worse until one day he had called an old Russian friend who knew another Russian, who knew a third Russian and within a short period Köhler had found himself as an assassin for hire.

  Dieter Köhler lived a modest life in the suburbs of the city of Stuttgart in southern Germany. Had the German tax authorities taken a look at his finances they would have found a man in very good financial shape. Köhler had 70,000 Euros in various bank accounts in Stuttgart and another 300,000 Euros in a retirement account. What the German tax authorities wouldn’t have found would be the 2.3 million Euros that Köhler had stashed in an account in Zurich in another name that matched the name on a Russian passport he never should have owned. The Russian passport listed him as Mikhail Kaspersky, a citizen of the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which up until 1945 had been part of Germany at which time Stalin had annexed it for Russia. On paper Köhler was the kind of fine upstanding citizen that Germany loves to have as part of their country. In reality he was a screwed up relic of the Cold War, a gun for hire, a man who brought chaos into the lives of those he touched.

  Dieter Köhler was armed with a magnum 37 for which he carried a silencer. He also carried a wicked looking knife in his jacket pocket and another smaller knife strapped to his right ankle. Köhler was expecting Martin Ingvarsson to walk right past him sometime during the next hour on his way to Östermalmstorg Tunnelbana. If Ingvarsson was on his own then Köhler would either shoot him in the back of the head or cut his throat from behind depending on which seemed the best option at the time. If the man had security guards with him then Köhler would dispatch the guards first and then send Ingvarsson on his way to the next world immediately afterwards.

  The German knew nothing about Martin Ingvarsson except what was in the file he had been given. If asked he would have had no idea of the difference between an investment banker and an ordinary run of the mill banker. Dieter Köhler was not a well read man. He was not an intelligent man nor was he particularly unintelligent. He went where he was told, he did the job he was supposed to do and then he went home and kept a low profile until the next time. He would have been surprised to know that he was very highly regarded by the organization that employed him. That is why what happened next would have been unexpected by all concerned.

  Köhler heard a beeping sound and the locks on his rental car doors popped open. He was reaching for his gun when the rear door was opened behind him. He had pulled his gun out of his jacket, flipped the safety off and was moving his arm to aim the gun over his shoulder when the first bullet went into the back of his head. The first shot paralyzed the right side of his body and his gun went off as his fingers closed in a reflex motion. The bullet from his gun went through the car roof and completely missed the person behind him. Two more bullets hit Dieter Köhler in the back of the head and then he began to fall forward towards the steering wheel. The person behind him leaned into the car and shot him twice more in the head and once in the back of the neck severing his spinal column.

  Dieter Köhler died quickly. He was in extreme pain and he was partially paralyzed but he had time to feel one last emotion. His last emotion was astonishment. He had glimpsed the person who shot him in the side mirror as he was aiming his gun. He was astonished and also dismayed to realize that he had been killed by a woman.