To Manhattan…with love
These books are part of the “Fifth Avenue” series. All are stand-alone books. They include “Fifth Avenue,” “Running of the Bulls,” “From Manhattan with Love,” “A Rush to Violence,” and “From Manhattan with Revenge.” Coming soon in the series is the thriller, “Park Avenue.”
All books have been overall Top-100 best-selling thrillers in the United States and in Europe.
Copyright and Legal Notice: This publication is protected under the US Copyright Act of 1976 and all other applicable international, federal, state and local laws, and all rights are reserved, including resale rights.
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First ebook edition © 2012.
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Disclaimer:
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to persons living or dead (unless explicitly noted) is merely coincidental. Copyright © 2012 Christopher Smith. All rights reserved worldwide.
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For their help with this book, the author is particularly grateful to Erich Kaiser, his parents Ross Smith and Ann Smith, Margaret Nagle, Brandi Doane, literary agent Matt Bialer, the team at Odyl, his friends at the Bangor Daily News and at UMaine, Sandy Phippen, Debra McCann, Diane Cormier, Lisa Smith, Jon McCann, Jennifer McCann, and his amazing accountant and financial advisor, Jaime Berube. To all of you, I appreciate it.
The author also would like to thank his readers, who are the lifeblood of his work. Thank you for your patience and your incredible support. You are the first and last reason for every early morning and late night. I’ll see you on Facebook.
The author also would like to thank the Amazon team; his friends, Ted Adams and Bari Khan, for exposing him to the darker side of Manhattan, even if they didn’t know they were doing so at the time; to those other unnamed men and women who introduced the author to the real Manhattan while he researched this book; and to friends, old and new, all of whom either helped to shape this book or who offered support as it was written.
Thank you.
CONTENTS
FROM MANHATTAN WITH LOVE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
EPILOGUE
FROM MANHATTAN WITH REVENGE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Books by Christopher Smith
on Kindle
Fifth Avenue (Book One in the Five Avenue Series)
Running of the Bulls (Book Two in the Fifth Avenue Series)
From Manhattan with Love (Novella Three in the Fifth Avenue Series)
The Fifth Avenue Series Box Set
The Bullied Series Box Set
A Rush to Violence
From Manhattan with Revenge
FROM MANHATTAN WITH LOVE
CHAPTER ONE
Carmen Gragera stabbed the heart of her steak with a knife and looked across the table at the man she was hired to assassinate.
They were having dinner at an out-of-the-way restaurant on the Upper East Side not far from the Park and as she watched him eat, she wasn’t thinking how she would kill him, but if she could kill him.
The contract she agreed upon was specific: Kill Alex Williams by nine o’clock. Make it quick but don’t make it clean. The press tended to pay little attention to a clean murder. What they wanted was something messy and salacious, particularly when they were dealing with a man as infamous to the FBI as Williams was.
When she was finished with him, she was to take a cab to LaGuardia and fly back to Paris on the red eye. If she came through with the kill, the remaining half of her payment would be wired to her account by morning.
Nine o’clock was ninety minutes away.
Carmen looked down at her steak, which was so rare, a pool of brownish-red juices had formed around it. She picked at it while weighing her options, of which there were two.
She could kill him. Five million dollars was a lot to leave on the table simply because she’d broken her own rules and made the mistake of falling for him.
Or, she could let him go and say that when she went to take him down, he escaped. They’d be furious with her, but since they knew what he was capable of, there was no reason for them to question her.
The trouble with this scenario is that she’d never work for them again, which would hurt her financially because they hired her often and they paid her well. But even worse than this is what she knew they’d do. They’d bypass her and hire someone else to kill him. It was a no-win situation. Either way, he’d die.
He reached for his glass of wine and looked up at her. “What are you thinking about?” he said. “You’ve barely touched your food. Is it alright?”
“It’s fine.”
“So, why aren’t you eating?”
“I’m not as hungry as I thought I was.”
“Come on,” he said. “It’s our last night together. You’ve got to eat something. The food they’re going to serve you on the plane will be shit compared to this.”
“I know.”
He screwed up his face at her. “What’s wrong? You look upset.”
“I don’t do upset.”
“Look, Carmen. We’ll work together again. It might be a few months or a few years, but it’ll happen.”
Could he read her mind?
“And what happened last night doesn’t have to be the last time. In fact, I’d prefer if it wasn’t.”
Christ.
Alex Williams was thirty-eight, former Marine, stood six-foot-two, had a thick head of dark wavy hair and was as masculine as they came. Like her, he was a stone killer, an international assassin she considered among the best and the brightest.
Over the years, they had joined forces on several jobs, but this last one was their best, most challenging collaboration because of the high degree of difficulty involved in pulling it off.
Against formidable odds, they’d taken out the head of a major
corporation, which was tricky because the man was a paranoid billionaire who had round-the-clock security. Getting through them and to their target had taken six weeks of patience and planning. But last night they got him and today their work was national news.
Trouble is, yesterday they also did something else. For the first time since they’d known each other, they made love, which Carmen now regretted. She never crossed that line with her colleagues. But when Alex came out of his bedroom with a bottle of wine to celebrate their kill, they drank it on empty stomachs and gave into the sexual tension that always had been between them.
“I think we made a mistake yesterday,” she said.
He cut off a piece of his own steak and popped it in his mouth while looking at her. “I don’t.”
“Sex screws everything up.”
“It doesn’t have to. We’re adults. We’d be lying if we said there wasn’t a mutual attraction between us. There always has been. What happened happened. I don’t regret it.”
“I never get involved with anyone I work with.”
“I guess you can’t say that anymore.”
“I prefer the occasional one-night stand.” It sounded like a lie when she said it and he caught it. The truth was that she rarely had sex. She couldn’t remember how long it had been.
“That so?”
“Come on, Alex. Our jobs take us everywhere. There’s always the chance that we might not see each other again.”
“I don’t buy that. We’re not always working. There’s no reason why we can’t take a few days off to meet up wherever we’re closest, whether it’s here or in some other corner of the world.”
Her hands were in her lap. She diverted her eyes from him and, while shaking her head at his comment, she casually glanced down at her watch. She had seventy-five minutes to make a decision. She wasn’t sure what she should do.
At the table beside them a couple was leaning into the candle light between them. They were openly arguing in spite of the conversations surrounding them, the clatter of dinner and silverware being removed from tables, the sounds of orders being taken and wine bottles being opened. They were oblivious to it all.
Carmen watched them for a moment. They were good-looking, probably somewhere in their early thirties, either successful or deep in debt given the Birkin bag that was at her feet and the large nickel-plated watch that was on his wrist. The woman was playing it cool. Her arms were folded and she wore on her face the look of the disinterested. He, on the other hand, looked weirdly demonic in the shadows being cast onto his face from the candle. Carmen listened and heard talk of money--or misuse of it--while he picked up what likely was a two-hundred dollar bottle of wine and topped off his glass.
“You still with me?”
“Sorry.” She nodded over at the table, where the woman now was yawning. “I was with the Joneses.”
“Looking for reasons to stay single?”
“I think I’ll always be single.”
“Why? We can’t stay in this game forever. There’s a phase two for each of us. What’s yours?”
“Me on a beach in Bora Bora.”
“Want company?”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Because I enjoyed last night. I think of you when we’re not working together. I think there’s something here worth exploring.” He paused for a moment and seemed to make a decision. “But it goes deeper. There’s something I was asked to do tonight that I know I can’t do.”
Her eyes flashed up to meet his.
“Part of my contract was to take you out tonight, Carmen. There’s no ticket waiting for you at LaGuardia. When we finished the main job, I was given a second one. It was to kill you.”
CHAPTER TWO
She sat unmoving in her chair, studying his face while instinct laced through her. She looked for his hands and saw them on the table, one holding the stem of his wine glass, the other holding his steak knife. She didn’t look away from the knife until he put it down.
“Let me guess,” she said. “This was to be done at nine o’clock tonight? A messy hit because the press likes a mess? Is that how it was supposed to go down?”
He let a silence pass.
“You were to take a photograph of me and send it electronically to them, proving I was dead? Is that right?”
There was no need for an answer.
“I’ve been struggling with this all evening,” she said. “It’s why I couldn’t eat. And you were right earlier. I am upset. I was asked to kill you, Alex.”
It was almost imperceptible, but she saw it. His hand nudged closer to the knife. “Were you going to go through with it?”
She pressed her back against the chair and felt her gun concealed behind her back. He had the advantage with the knife, but she was fast. She could dodge it. If he made a move, she’d throw her glass of red wine into his face, blind him with its acids and then reach for her gun.
“Obviously not or I wouldn’t have told you. And by the way, I told you first. What if I hadn’t told you?”
“Then I’d probably still be sitting here weighing my options.”
“So, you were considering it?”
“It’s what we do, Alex.”
“It’s what we do to strangers.”
“Not all the time and you know it.” She studied his face. “Look, if it makes you feel better, it’s unlikely that I would have done it.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need the money. If I told them I screwed up, they’d just send someone in else to do the job.”
“And you wouldn’t have warned me?”
“I don’t know what I would have done. But here’s what I do know. They want each of us dead. They were betting that in spite of our history together, one of us would go through with it for the five million. Is that the amount they offered you?”
He nodded.
“So, with one of us dead, they’d be left with only one of us to take out. Not a bad deal. You say there’s no ticket waiting for me at LaGuardia? Actually, I’ll bet there’s a ticket waiting for each of us at LaGuardia. You told me you were staying in the city. Where were you really going to tonight?”
“Spain.”
“And if you arrived there, they’d have you killed. If I arrived in Paris, they’d have me killed.”
“Why are they doing this?”
She shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe we know too much. We’ve had access to the kind of information that could lead to blackmail, especially after this last job. Nothing we’ve ever done for them has been this significant or created this kind of media attention. Obviously, our time is up with them. Both of us are being targeted.”
“They could be watching us now.”
“You and I never enter a place without first scoping the area. It’s what we do. I saw nothing unusual when we came inside. Did you?”
“I didn’t.”
“But that doesn’t mean that someone isn’t outside now. Or maybe even in here with us. To be safe, we probably should eat and look less intense.”
She cut into her steak and took a bite of the cool meat. She poured herself more wine and said that the steak was good. She reached down for her handbag and parted it open. He watched her. She had another bite of steak. Her fork dropped from her hand. She bent to pick it up and as she did, she moved her body in such a way that no one in the room could see her grab the bottle of steak sauce that was on the table and drop it into her handbag.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Reaching for my fork. I’ll need a new one.” She looked around for their waiter, caught his eye and motioned for another fork. A new one arrived swiftly.
“What are you up to?”
“You’re going to shoot me in the head,” she said. “You’ll photograph it for them and send it along, just as they asked.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Do you trust me, Alex?”
“After this conversation?”
“I need to k
now if you trust me. If anything that happened last night meant something to you, I need you to weigh your feelings and tell me if you trust me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Fair enough,” she said, cutting off another piece of meat. “I get it. Five million is a lot of money. I don’t know if I can’t trust you, either. So, I’ll need to take a risk because last night did mean something to me and I also think it did to you. You’re going to shoot me in the head and you’re going to send them that photo.”
She pointed her fork at him. “And then you know exactly who we’re going to kill.”
CHAPTER THREE
“You need to be more clear with this plan of yours,” he said.
“It’s simple. We find an alley or go to the Park. I lie on the ground, you pour that steak sauce around my head, you splatter my face with it and then you take your photo. Blood always looks dark at night. It would never look red. They know that. They’ll believe what they see because it will look real. I know what a dead face looks like because I’ve dealt my share of them. They want dead? We’ll give them dead.”
“It’s not a bad idea,” he said.
“It’s a brilliant idea. The question is whether you’ll choose to kill me for real because you believe you still have a chance to get that money. If that’s what you’re thinking, here’s what you need to know. Don’t expect the money to be deposited in your bank account tomorrow morning. It won’t be there. They’ll know you didn’t board the flight to Spain. They’ll know you sensed something was off and they’ll come after you with everything they’ve got. We’re not the only assassins in the world, Alex. I’ve worked with some of the best and so have you. Imagine if they got Vincent Spocatti to do the job. I’ve worked with him. I know how good he is. What would you do if they contacted him? He’s the best in the business. Nothing personal, but you’re no match for him. Neither am I.”
She picked up her glass of wine and sipped.
“Why is all the focus on me?” he said. “How do I know you’re not planning to kill me?”
From Manhattan With Revenge Boxed Set Page 1
