I looked at him steadily. ‘Where do you propose I keep it? Besides, I’ve told you before: I don’t like violence.’
‘Unfortunately, violence likes you,’ said Ashely doggedly. ‘How many people nursing a bottle of whisky on the end of a pier and grieving the death of their best friend get accidentally shot in the head by a random gunman?’
Another sigh left my lips; my partner was being unusually vocal today.
‘And what about that drug dealer in New York, the one who stabbed you in the back?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, and let’s not forget Sudie.’
I grimaced. Sudie Prodson was a fifty-year-old accountant who used to work for a large international merchant bank in Boston’s financial district. Despite owning a penthouse in Back Bay with views over the Charles River and wearing thousand-dollar suits, Sudie had defaulted on his alimony on more than one occasion. When the collection agency retained by his ex-wife hired us to tail him, the accountant became enraged at this breach of his privacy and ran me over with his Lexus.
‘To be fair, he only broke my leg,’ I muttered into my coffee. ‘And I was fine by the end of the week.’
‘Really?’ Ashely countered with a sneer. ‘What about Louisiana?’
I looked away from his accusing gaze and shifted in the seat.
Even I had to admit Louisiana had been an ugly affair. We had gone looking for a missing fourteen-year-old girl called Carly Jennings, a bright-eyed and vivacious child. Jennings had met a man through an internet chat room a few months before her disappearance. The trail led us to the southern state of Louisiana via New York and DC, where we uncovered a child prostitution ring with connections to South America and the Far East.
Things started to go wrong when the Feds got involved. By the time the gun smoke cleared, two agents had died, and I had been shot twice. Jennings was found scared but unscathed at the bottom of a ship’s cargo hold bound for Mexico.
‘Louisiana was a fluke.’ I looked at the pancakes that had just landed before me, thanked the waitress, and reached for a fork.
Ashely grunted. ‘Lots of things in your life are flukes.’ The conversation was thankfully cut short by the arrival of a serving of artery-clogging fried food. He ignored my disapproving tut-tut and dug into his eggs.
We left the cafe a quarter of an hour later and drove across town to the Parker Hotel. The sky remained bereft of clouds. A few seagulls circled high above, white shapes flecked with gray. The Hancock Tower gleamed in the distance to the left.
Ashely pulled up behind a hot dog vendor and went inside the building. He returned within minutes and settled in the driver’s seat.
‘Gotze is still inside. Doorman said he arrived two days ago. Alone.’
I frowned at his words. This was unusual behavior for a Hunter; from the multiple attempts on my life over the centuries and inside knowledge provided by a couple of very close friends, I knew the minimum number of assassins assigned for an execution-style mission was normally two. Both the Crovir and the Schwatz Orders had strict rules on these matters, and any member going beyond their remit was severely punished, usually by a death. Was Gotze acting by himself?
I had wondered briefly that morning which side he belonged to. Then again, it hardly mattered. I was only surprised that the immortals were after me following almost a century of silence. It was becoming apparent that at least one faction still wanted me dead.
At four o’clock, Gotze had still not left the hotel. The hot dogs had proven to be sickeningly greasy, and three cups of coffee were burning a hole in my stomach. Ashely was on his fifth cigarette. At this rate, I was going to die from second-hand smoking.
The sudden purr of the engine finally jolted me from a semi-comatose state.
‘Is that him?’ said Ashely.
I looked across the street. A pale, thin man with ash-blond hair and a black overcoat had walked out of the hotel and was hailing a cab.
‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘That’s the man who murdered me, all right.’
Ashely twisted the steering wheel and merged into the peak-time traffic. Twenty minutes later, we had barely moved two blocks. The cab finally crawled onto Interstate 93 and headed toward the Zakim Bridge and the Charles River. It soon pulled off the highway and turned onto a side road. Ashely slowed the Chevy and followed.
We drove through a series of increasingly rundown neighborhoods. Snatches of hip hop music drifted in sporadically through the car’s half-open windows. Hobos scoured the alleys behind shops and stores, some of them pushing their worldly belongings in broken shopping carts. We stopped at a set of traffic lights and earned a battery of hostile stares from a group of teens standing next to the intersection.
Less than a mile away, sunlight glinted on the steelwork of the Tobin Bridge. We were not far from the water.
The roads became deserted. Stretches of disused land appeared on our right, graveyards for the corpses of burnt-out cars and broken white goods. By the time we entered the maze of derelict buildings that bordered the Mystic River, Ashely had put the Chevy into a crawl.
Red taillights flashed up ahead. The cab pulled to a stop next to an abandoned warehouse. Gotze climbed out and stood watching as the car drew away. He spun on his heels and disappeared in an alley at the side of the building.
The Chevy rolled to a standstill. Ashely turned off the engine. We glanced at each other before exiting the car.
Sandy loam crunched softly beneath our boots as we made our way toward the alleyway. The blares of car horns carried on the wind from the toll bridge. In the blue skies above, a seagull screeched and whirled smoothly on invisible currents.
I heard the crack of the bullet a heartbeat before it hit the ground next to us. Ashely swore as I yanked him into the lee of a building.
‘I thought you said he had a sword.’ He took the Glock out.
‘Hunters are trained in the use of a range of weapons,’ I replied quietly.
Another bullet whizzed out of the alley. It was followed by a wild cackle.
Ashely raised an eyebrow. ‘Why is he laughing?’
‘I don’t know. I asked him the same question last night. All he did was laugh louder and call me a half-breed.’ I grimaced. ‘It doesn’t sound like healthy laughter to me.’
‘I know what you mean,’ muttered Ashely. ‘It kinda reminds me of that Jack Nicholson movie.’
‘“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”’
‘No, “The Shining”,’ said Ashely. Another cackle followed. ‘Now what?’
Before I could muster a reply, Gotze’s words drifted on the breeze toward us. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ he shouted from the alley.
Ashely pursed his lips. ‘He does a bad Nicholson impression. Just for that, he deserves a bullet.’
I touched his shoulder and silently indicated the roof of the adjacent building. He nodded. We turned and headed for the broken side door we had walked past earlier. There was a tortuous creak of metal as we squeezed through the gap between the frame and the doorjamb.
The inside of the warehouse was unusually warm. The air was fetid and smelled of death. We strolled past the rotting carcass of a raccoon and moved toward the rickety stairs at the southwest corner of the building. Broken bottles, crushed cans, and dirty syringes littered the corridors on the upper floor. Beyond a roomful of damaged mannequins and rust-covered sewing machines, a door opened out onto a fire escape. It was a short climb to the roof.
The wind had picked up. It brought with it a range of smells: the organic stench of the river, the rank odor of oil from a nearby refinery, the chemical stink of the tannery half a mile away. The acrid reek of gunpowder.
I pulled Ashely behind an air vent just as the bullet ricocheted off the hot asphalt yards from our feet.
‘He’s a smart bastard,’ grunted my partner.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Northeast corner of the roof?’
‘Yes,’ I murmured.
&
nbsp; ‘I can smell you, half-breed! You stink higher than a skunk!’ shouted Gotze from the neighboring rooftop.
Ashely looked at me and cocked an eyebrow.
‘I showered this morning,’ I said, deadpan.
He shook his head, rose to one knee, and fired two rounds at the opposite building. An answering volley scored cracks in the rooftop five feet from where we crouched.
‘He’s either a crap shot or he’s playing with us,’ muttered Ashely.
‘I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.’ Neither Order forbade their Hunters from playing with their prey. In fact, the Crovirs were quite famed for it.
‘If we sit here any longer, he’s gonna shoot us like fish in a barrel,’ said Ashely. ‘What say we get the hell out of here?’
I nodded. He let off another five rounds. Before the last bullet left the muzzle of his gun, we were up and running toward the next vent.
‘Why isn’t he shooting—’ Ashely started to say as we neared the metal tower.
The ground suddenly gave beneath us as a section of the roof collapsed. In hindsight, it had been a pretty obvious trap.
We landed in the room with the mannequins with a thunderous crash. Above the noise of the falling debris, I heard a harsh grunt from Ashely. I dug my way out of a pile of inanimate figures, wincing at the sharp stabs radiating from several cuts and bruises, and turned toward him.
He was lying stiffly next to the bank of industrial sewing machines. A forty-inch-long steel rod rose through his left thigh and pinned him to the floor.
Alarm darted through me. ‘That’s not good,’ I said, meeting his eyes. He gritted his teeth in response.
A dull thud drew our gazes to the ceiling. Gotze had cleared the gap between the two warehouses. Rapid footsteps sounded above our heads and a shadow appeared against the patch of blue sky visible through the jagged hole in the roof.
‘Found you, you dirty half-breed!’ hissed the immortal.
My eyes widened as I looked past the barrel of an M9 Beretta pistol into the face of a madman.
‘Go!’ shouted Ashely.
The deafening noise of the semi-automatic filled the confined space. I sprinted across the room, deadly shards erupting around me. Blood bloomed on the back of my left hand. I reached the far wall, hit the fire door with my shoulder, and emerged into bright sunlight. Gotze’s wild cackle reached my ears as I sailed over the railing of the fire escape and dove into the river.
Bullets riddled the water behind me when I cleaved the dark surface. I swam further into the murky depths and twisted around until I floated in the eddies. Shots scored the choppy currents above once more; by the look of things, Gotze had loaded another magazine into the Beretta.
A dull roar echoed in my ears as I debated my options. The Hunter would not kill Ashely. This I was certain of. Instead, he would use my partner as bait to lure me out.
That’s what I would do if I were in his shoes.
I turned with the faintest of misgivings and let the current carry me north.
It was two hours before I got back to the apartment. Night had long since fallen across the city. The driver of the cab that I eventually managed to hail sniffed at me suspiciously before allowing me into his car. His disposition did not improve when I handed him a wad of soggy dollar bills at the end of the journey.
After checking the rooms for signs of forced entry, I showered and redressed my wound. I then did something that would have surprised Ashely had he been able to see me.
I headed for the painting of Monet’s 1906 “Water Lilies” that hung above the mantelpiece in the living room.
I stopped beneath the canvas and gazed at the mesmerizing shades of blue for silent seconds. Of all of Monet’s works, this was the one I found the most soothing. It had taken several years and a considerable amount of money to convince the artist to make another copy for me.
I took down the painting and laid it on the couch before turning to face the wall once more. I touched a section of the cool white plaster and keyed in a code in the small electronic pad that emerged beneath my fingers. A ten-inch-wide partition slid open next to the pad. I pressed my right hand against the fingerprint recognition screen and looked into the retinal scanner above it. Seconds later, the entire wall retracted by a foot with a ponderous noise.
A metal panel descended from a hidden recess in the ceiling.
No one knew that I owned the apartment complex. Ten years ago, following the death of my best friend at the hands of the Hunters, I set up a company made up of twenty fictitious shareholders and named it Baldr Inc. I bought the building and the freehold for the land it stood upon. Over the years—at times using independent contractors, but mostly doing the work myself—I modified the tower block for my own personal use. Prospective tenants to the building all underwent detailed background checks. As it was, the apartments on the ninth and eleventh floors were never leased. Mine was the only apartment in use on the tenth floor.
I considered the display of weapons that now occupied what had once been the east wall of my living room. Although I abhorred violence and opted not to carry a gun, my life as an immortal had taught me that weapons were a necessary evil. I hesitated before selecting a Glock 17 and a Smith & Wesson .45 ACP. I tucked the guns inside the holsters on my thighs and loaded a handful of magazines in the belt at my waist. My gaze was finally drawn to the center of the panel.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, during the early Edo period, I spent several formative years in Japan; I had been traveling through Asia at the time and had come across an interesting rumor concerning a man called Miyamoto Musashi. Miyamoto was a samurai who hailed from the then Harima Province of Japan and was reputed to have won all the duels he had ever participated in, beginning with his first one at the age of thirteen. To this day, he is still considered one of the most famous sword masters in Japanese history.
It took me an entire year to convince Miyamoto to take me on as an apprentice. During that time, I became proficient in the country’s language and its various dialects, and immersed myself into its strange new culture. Once under Miyamoto’s tutelage, I learned the art of Niten Ichi-ryu, a two-sword fighting style he had perfected using a long blade, the katana, and a shorter blade, the wakizashi; in combination, the two blades were known as the daisho. Miyamoto was a hard taskmaster and it was almost a decade before he came to be satisfied with my technique, and this only after I defeated him in a duel. When I left Japan, he had a daisho made for me as a leaving present. Carved into the blade of the katana was an identical copy of the intertwined alpha and omega birthmark over my heart.
I lifted the ancient swords from their stands in the middle of the metal panel, grabbed a long coat from the closet in the hallway, and headed out of the apartment. At the end of the corridor, a keypad-operated door opened onto a private lift that took me eleven floors down to the basement of the building. I stepped out into a dark void, turned, and flicked a series of switches on the wall to my left. Light flooded the large subterranean space before me.
The basement was off limits to the other tenants. Bar the lift access and the virtually invisible security doors that opened out onto a back alley, there was no other way in or out of the lower floor of the apartment complex.
As I crossed the concrete floor, my steps echoing off the distant walls, my thoughts turned to the events of the last twenty-four hours. One question overrode all others in my mind. Why were the Hunters on my trail again? I wondered briefly whether I had crossed their territory in some way and brought myself to their attention once more. I discarded the notion straight away; if the Hunters had wanted to find me, they could have done so with maddening ease in the last hundred years.
The more I pondered the matter, the more I felt the urgency to know the answer. I was not usually one for premonitions, but I could sense storm clouds gathering on the horizon.
I stopped in front of a sleek machine that looked like it had been built for spe
ed. The GSX1300R, known simply as the Hayabusa, is a 1299 cc, four-cylinder, 16-valve engine hyper sport bike that can do zero to sixty mph in two-point-six-seven seconds. It was, and still is, the best motorbike ever made by Suzuki and the fastest two-wheeled vehicle I have ever handled. I was one of the lucky few who had managed to get their hands on a limited-edition midnight-black version.
Moments later, the Hayabusa roared through the streets of the city. It was raining again. I ignored the wet spray rising from the asphalt and headed swiftly across town. The roof of the Cramer building soon appeared between the maze of dark office blocks that crowded the stormy skyline; as the scene of our last battle, I had no doubt that Gotze would be waiting there for me. I grimaced. He probably thought it was poetic justice or something.
The alley behind the tower was blessedly empty. I braked to a stop and switched the engine off. The low growl of the Hayabusa whined into silence. I parked the bike behind the dumpsters, walked back to the middle of the alley, and studied the fire escape several feet above my head. I took a couple of steps back, ran, and jumped. The fingers of my right hand closed on the lowest rung of the ladder. It slid down smoothly to the ground.
I started to climb.
Dark skies loomed above me when I neared the top of the steps. I stopped and crouched against the side of the building, my hands closing on my guns while I strained my ears. Other than the harsh patter of rain, the clamor of traffic from the avenue, the rumbling of distant thunder, and the dull thrum of blood in my skull, I could hear no other noise. I raised my head slowly above the concrete parapet.
‘Welcome, half-breed,’ said Gotze from somewhere in the darkness.
A gasp left my lips as I was abruptly lifted from the stairwell by a pair of unseen hands and hurled through the air. By the time I landed on my back and skidded halfway across the water-slicked rooftop, I had fired half the rounds in both guns.
They all hit their target.
‘Hey, Cain, you never told me he was this puny,’ said the giant in front of me in a thick Eastern European accent. He looked down and fingered the holes in the fine wool, roll-neck sweater stretched across his chest.