The Soul Collector

by Paul Johnston

  Suddenly I was filled with anger. Some bastard had got into my home and was strolling around, poking his nose in my things. To hell with that. I moved forward at a trot that was soon close to a full-on sprint. I slowed as I approached the building because the perimeter camera would pick me up—as it would have my visitor—and the security firm would send a man over if it looked like the place was under assault. I punched my code into the main door and headed for the stairs. I’d only been in the lift once, and that was when I moved in—I wouldn’t let the removals guys carry my precious stereo system. I glanced at my watch. My record for the four flights was 19.4 seconds. I did them in 20.2 and jogged lightly down the wide hallway.

  At my door, I felt my anger weaken, but not enough to stop me sliding my key silently into the lock. I got my breathing under control, then took out my cell phone and found Dave’s number in the memory. If anything adverse happened, I only had to press the button and he’d be connected. He would see my number on his phone’s screen and get going. The five of us had set that system up after the White Devil’s death and we’d tested it several times.

  I was ready. I only wished I had taken some kind of weapon with me. From now on I’d be making sure I was always armed. Three—two—one…I turned the key and pushed the door open, then ran into the living area, shouting, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “Daddy?” My daughter’s voice was fearful.

  When I caught a glimpse of myself in the star-shaped mirror that my editor had given me when The Death List reached number one, I understood why. My eyes were wide, my hair was all over the place and I looked like a chest-heaving Viking in full berserk mode.

  “Em, hello, Lucy,” I said, exhaling and looking around.

  “What happened?” she asked. “You frightened me.”

  I squatted down and opened my arms, as I’d done since she’d started walking.

  After a pause, she ran into my embrace. Eleven wasn’t so old after all. I breathed in the scent of her hair and felt the warmth of her against my chest.

  “What are you doing here?” I felt like a complete jackass. The only person apart from Karen who had a key, and knew the entry and alarm codes, was my ex-wife, Caroline. I heard the toilet next to the kitchen flush. Any second now, she would be loose.

  “I…I was lonely,” Lucy said, clutching me. “I wanted to see you, Daddy.”

  “But I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,” I said.

  The door opened and Caroline walked out, shaking her hands. “Oh, there you are,” she said to me, as if I didn’t belong in my own home. “The towel in there needs changing.”

  I stood up and bit back on the sarcastic response. No fighting in front of Lucy was the rule, though it had been broken far too often. “Nice to see you, Caroline,” I said. “Just out of interest, what are you doing here?”

  “Didn’t Lucy tell you?” she said, walking past us. “She wanted to see you. For once, I gave in to her demands. It is a Friday evening, after all, and we were at a concert at the Festival Hall.” She moved her head around in a theatrical way. “What on earth do you do with all this space?”

  “Play cricket in it,” I said, provoking a snigger from my daughter, who had a wicked sense of humor. Unlike her mother. “Did you forget the arrangement?”

  Caroline was a hotshot economist with a Japanese bank in the City. She didn’t forget anything, apart from the fact that she once loved me. “I called you, Matt. Several times. You didn’t answer.”

  “I was on the Tube,” I said. “It didn’t occur to you to leave a message?”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, what difference does it make?” she demanded, tossing her black hair. She was still quite a looker but, according to Lucy, she didn’t have a “boyfriend,” at least not one she brought home. Maybe she took them to a hotel during her lunch break and ate them.

  “Absolutely none at all,” I said, aware that any mention of Sara or the White Devil, in any language, would cause a meltdown. I smiled at my daughter. “Well, now you’re here, do you fancy a fizzy drink?”

  Lucy nodded and ran to the fridge.

  “Bloody hell, Caro,” I said under my breath. “Make sure you do leave a message the next time. What would you have done if Karen had walked in? She quite often gets here before me.”

  “That’s hardly my problem,” she said, looking away.

  It was then that I realized I’d called her by the diminutive I’d used when we were in love. It must have been six or seven years since I’d last come out with it. I felt about as uncomfortable as a man can with his ex-wife. God knows how Karen would have reacted to this accidental intimacy. I wasn’t going to tell her, but Caroline might find a way.

  When Lucy came back with her glass, I took her over to the small desk where she kept her things. For weeks we’d been playing an interminable board game involving Sherlock Holmes and a group of anarchists kitted out with round bombs and lit fuses. Unfortunately, they’d never managed to reduce the game to small pieces.

  After half an hour, Lucy started to yawn. I grabbed the opportunity.

  “Come on, Luce. How about the zoo tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes, Daddy,” she said, clapping her hands. Fortunately she didn’t demand more time with the anarchy game.

  Caroline was curled up on one of the long leather sofas. I looked down at her and saw the face I’d awoken next to countless times. When she was at rest, her skin was as smooth and her forehead as unfurrowed as they’d ever been. Obviously working in international finance was good for you. I wished I’d aged as well. I’d just turned forty-one and the gray hairs had established themselves for good, and not just on my head.

  Then Caroline woke up and immediately frowned at me, as if I’d been molesting her with Lucy in the room.

  “Come on, darling,” she said, sitting up. “It’s time we went back to our hovel.”

  Lucy mouthed the last word at me after her mother walked past her.

  I raised my shoulders. Caroline had bought a four-bedroom house that had been refurbished to almost regal standards by its previous owner, an award-winning architect, so I had no idea what she was complaining about. Well, I did. She thought money earned from frivolous activities like writing had less value than that gained from real work like banking. There was a time, when my early novels were flying and she was struggling to get back into her career after Lucy was born, that she’d been glad enough for literary money. That was another thing that had been erased from her memory.

  I kissed Lucy, and called good-night to Caroline down the hall. Then, after waiting in vain for an answer, I closed the door and went for my computer.

  Maybe I had mail.

  I was also spoiling for a fight.

  Four

  The woman moved with catlike poise across the carpet of the room, the cold steel of the silver pistol against her cheek. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at her face. For a few moments, it was a stranger who stared back at her. Then she remembered what she’d become and smiled. She was no longer Sara Robbins. She had changed her name, her appearance, her very nature.

  The hotel near Victoria Station was cheap, most of its residents being tourists from the U.S. and Australia on budget holidays. They only stayed a few days before moving on to other cities on the modern Grand Tour—Edinburgh, Paris, Berlin—spectral cities filled with memories of slaughter, medieval and modern. But she was here for the duration, had already been in residence for two weeks, preparing, checking and carrying out the most subtle of surveillance. She’d learned the trade from masters, men who slipped unseen through streets and across squares, their weapons never more than a finger’s length away.

  Soon she would strike the first blow in the city so large that she could disappear at will into its backstreets and lanes, its underground tunnels and its spacious, forested parks. They would not find her, unless she made the most egregious of errors. That would not happen. Her brother had trained her well. He’d also left a directory of former CIA and Special Forces ope
ratives, and they had completed her education in the arts of deception and death. The White Devil, her brother and lover, would have been so proud.

  And yet, she didn’t miss him, at least not in the sense that he was absent. Rather, she felt his presence in everything that she did. He was with her, though not as some spook at her shoulder. He was inside her—he had penetrated every cell and organ of her body, his mind was in hers.

  She had felt that from the beginning, when he’d made himself known to her before his great scheme was put into action. And after his passing, she had felt it even more, the possession—not that his soul possessed her, but rather that their twin souls possessed each other. There was never any inequality. The White Devil had treated her as his partner from the start, his partner and his shared destiny. That destiny still awaited them, but her brother could now only experience it through her eyes and ears, her mouth and nose, her touch, while the man responsible for his death was still alive. That fact filled her veins with burning fire and drove her every action. She would destroy Matt Wells, but first she would turn him into a quivering wreck.

  Standing at the window and looking through the gap between the dirty gray curtains, the woman took in the people on the street below. It was raining and they were walking quickly, even those with umbrellas. The early morning cloud cover and muted lights blurred everything, making the lines between cars and people indistinct. It was a semiliquid landscape, one poisoned by exhaust gases and the fumes from boilers and pumps. A man-made hell…

  …and suddenly she was back in the jungle of Colombia, a hell of nature’s creation, her throat burning and the rotting vegetation making her stomach heave. She made sure her guide didn’t notice that. They were under a kilometer from the target and soon all her concentration would have to be on the job. This would be her first major kill and she felt her brother inside her, urging her forward. He had made a file on the target, checked all the data personally. It was six months since he’d been executed in London. She had spent four of them being trained by different experts—unarmed combat, the use of weapons, covert procedures, advanced computing skills and the mechanics of international finance. Let loose on the world, she had already killed a pusher in Atlanta, a pair of crackheads in Jacksonville and a scumbag who had tried to rape her in the washroom of a bar in Miami. Those murders had been of her own choosing, as the White Devil had suggested in order to build her confidence. But only by hitting major players would she prove her real worth.

  Pedro “El Loco” Camargo called himself a guerrilla leader, but the reality was that he ran the area’s cocaine production, treated the workers as slaves and took any girl he wanted to his bed. His private army, the so-called Golden Liberation Fighters, lorded over the villages and shot anyone who showed disobedience or disrespect. The organization was rotten from head to toe. And she was here to remove that head.

  El Loco, led astray by the typical dictator’s delusion that his people loved him, allowed them to pay court every Saturday. The men and women who had aired their grievances at the first such reception were found soon afterward with their throats cut and their faces unrecognizable. Since then, the GLF had been forcing workers to present themselves and laud their leader.

  “Remember, there will be fighters all around,” said her guide, Esteban, when they reached the tree line. He was a former sidekick of El Loco, but had been bought off by Sara’s brother before his death. “But they will be drunk and drugged up. My people are ready. As soon as you strike, they will deal with the whores’ sons.”

  The woman wondered, not for the first time, why Esteban’s supporters had not taken the apparently simple step themselves. But she dismissed the thought, content to do her brother’s will, even if the Colombian was temporarily taking advantage of her. She unslung her pack and took out tattered peasant woman’s clothes. She caught Esteban’s eye as she was undoing her trousers. He turned away quickly when he saw the look on her face.

  After that, it was easy. She had to stand in line with the sweating, broken people, her head bent and her steps as unsteady as theirs. The long, black wig she was wearing, along with the dirt she had rubbed on to her face, arms and legs, made her inconspicuous. As she got closer to El Loco, she glanced left and right. Heavily armed men were leaning against the walls of what used to be the village school, their eyes bloodshot and vacant. They saw her, but they didn’t see what she was. That meant they’d enjoyed running their hands all over her in a fruitless search for weapons.

  Now she was inside—more men with Kalashnikovs and American weapons, the smell of fear and destitution more noisome. The man in front of her launched into a lengthy tribute to his master. After five minutes, Camargo, a tall, bearded man who had run to fat, nodded and the talkative man was hustled away by two GLF men. It was her turn.

  She kept her head low as she stepped up to the metal chair that had been placed on the platform. She didn’t know much Spanish, but she understood that El Loco was asking what she wanted to say. It was then that she looked up and gave him a smile that suggested everything she might give him. El Loco beckoned to her and she stepped on to the platform, leaned close and, in the split second it took to pull the inch-long blade from the wooden cross around her neck, realized that her heart rate hadn’t increased at all. If anything, it had slowed. The training routines had become second nature.

  Camargo was grinning at her, his lips wet. Then his eyelids jerked wide apart as she buried the razor-sharp blade into his neck two centimeters above and to the left of his Adam’s apple. As she moved quickly behind the chair, she grabbed the greasy hair beneath the wide-peaked officer’s cap, pulled his head back and ripped the blade to the right. As she ducked down, she saw a fine spray of crimson fill the air above the next man in the line.

  Immediately there was an explosion of automatic weapon fire and a welter of screaming. She stayed down, her arms over her head, but she had no fear. After a time, the firing moved outside and there was less noise from the people in the building. As she looked out from beneath Camargo’s chair, she saw why. The place was full of bodies, both of GLF men and of the innocent.

  The woman heard Esteban’s voice. He was telling her that it was over. She snaked an arm around El Loco’s body and removed a silver-plated semiautomatic pistol from his belt. She racked the slide and held the weapon in a two-handed grip as she slowly stood up. Esteban lowered his own pistol when he saw the way she was looking at him.

  “Okay,” he said with a slack smile. “It is okay, devil-woman.”

  She gave him a tight smile and then fired two shots into Pedro Camargo’s groin.

  The few remaining villagers in the school cheered. As she walked out, they clapped their hands. The woman ignored them. The only approbation she needed was from the soul that had merged with her own.

  …she blinked and was back in London, the damp in the streets much colder than those of Colombia. But she had never forgotten that big killing, when she had first felt the attraction of silver-colored weapons. She owned several now. It was also then that she had turned herself into the Soul Collector, on behalf of the precious soul inside her very being.

  There were several to be gathered in England, and soon Matt Wells’s time on the earth would be over. But there was a world of pain for him to endure first.

  I woke up to the sound of the telephone. The display told me it was nine-thirty.

  “Yeah?” I mumbled.

  “Hello, dear. Late night?”

  “Hello, Fran. What’s up?” Fran was my adoptive mother and had encouraged me to call her by her first name since I went to senior school. The White Devil and his sister had also been adopted, and that was one reason that he had chosen me as his fall guy. But he had forced his mother into a sexual relationship, while I had only the standard feelings of a dutiful son for Fran.

  “Why does anything have to be up for me to call my son and heir?”

  “Um, right. Full of the joys of spring, are we?” I swung my legs out of bed and reached for my
robe. I had a flash of my ex-wife’s face and remembered her visit from the night before. That made me groan.

  “What is it, dear?”

  “Nothing,” I said quickly. I could have told her about the fright Caroline had given me, but she would just have started on a rant about how she’d never been right for me and that I’d got married far too young. I usually pointed out that she wouldn’t have had a granddaughter if I’d stayed single, which invariably tested her saintlike patience.

  “You aren’t very talkative this morning,” my mother observed.

  “No,” I said, turning on the laptop and logging on to the e-mail program. I had a burning need to see if I’d received any messages from the woman who had threatened vengeance upon me after the White Devil’s death.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Mary Malone.”

  Having seen that there were no messages from unknown senders, I was checking my family’s and friends’ confirmations.

  “Did you hear me, Matt?”

  “Mm.” Everyone was okay. “Sorry, you were saying about Mary Malone.”

  “Yes, dear,” Fran said with a long-suffering sigh. “You really can be infuriating sometimes. I suppose you’re checking that everyone’s all right.”

  “Yup,” I said, irritated that she could read me so easily.

  “I presume they are,” she continued. “So, Mary Malone.”

  “I never met her, Mother. None of us in the crime fiction world did. She was a loner. What’s your interest?”

  “You’ve forgotten that I’m a member of the Crime Writers’ Society, too.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” I asked testily.

  “Well, if there’s going to be a rash of crime novelists being killed, I’d like to know in advance.”