It was an expensive doll and it looked well-worn, and not just from the passage through the drain. This was a doll a child had held close for many nights. Something loved, something treasured. And now it was lost here in the darkness, on its way to oblivion in the ocean. Perhaps if the child knew where it was then he, or more likely she, might imagine her tattered friend to be off on some grand adventure. Otherwise…it was a friend who was lost and would never be found.
That thought came close to breaking the killer’s heart.
So many of his friends were lost to him.
So many.
He almost reached for the doll, almost pulled it from the water as the thing bobbed past, but he did not. He remained as still as the shadows and the grime-slick walls and the bones of dead rats. Instead, he watched the harlequin doll drown in the froth of converging sewer water and rush away into the great nothingness.
After a moment, he turned his attention to that rusted door. According to the records Pangaea had filched for him, that door led to a disused valve station whose purpose had been superseded by a more modern system controlled in an office on street level.
At a glance the door appeared to be forgotten, with years of rust crusted to the hinges and knob. The low-wattage service light was there to aid with routine inspection of this rechanneling chamber.
That was how things looked according to all official records and even on the service logs of the men who worked these tunnels. They knew the door was there, but they ignored it as they ignored hundreds of similarly disused doors, tunnels, chambers, holding tanks, ladders, and other detritus of an older age of public sewage. Like the subway systems in New York and London, here there were layers of new built on forgotten bones of the old.
However the killer had a separate source of intelligence that insisted that this door was not at all what it seemed. And that there were more than rust-frozen valves on the other side.
The killer was about to rise from his crouch when he heard something.
Very faint, very soft.
A footfall. A scuff.
Not an animal sound.
Human, though he could not tell more than that.
He did not move, aware that he was so deep inside a bank of shadows that he was invisible. His clothes were as black as his balaclava, and he had black greasepaint around his eyes. Only the whites of his eyes were visible in the light, and no light touched him where he crouched. The gear he carried — grenades, knives, and more — was arranged on his belt with cushions so they didn’t clink or rattle.
The sound came from a side tunnel to his left. From the memory of the tunnel schematics in his mind, he knew that the closest street access to that tunnel was at least a mile away. A long way to go in the dark. He raised the black cover of his watch and touched the face, reading the position of the arms. Three minutes past four in the morning. Far too late for the evening maintenance crew, two hours early for the day shift.
He waited.
There wasn’t another scuff. Whoever it was knew how to move quietly. The scuff had probably been a rare accident. An unseen patch of slime.
The killer drew his pistol. A .22 with a sound suppressor. It was poor at long range, but this man never killed from a great distance. He was selective and careful. It was not because killing up close provided some men with a physical thrill. That was not a factor in the function of either his heart or mind. It was a matter of not liking to make errors. Distance, especially in the dark, increased the risk of errors.
Errors were the result of sloppiness, nerves, or poor process.
He crouched, the pistol held in both hands, barrel pointed down, his forearms resting against his bent knees to keep the muscles from fatiguing.
Forty feet down the tunnel the shadows changed. A slender fragment of the darkness detached itself and crept forward with catlike grace.
In the bad light it was difficult to tell much about the figure.
Small, slight of build, moving with the ease of a dancer or a martial artist. Someone who knew how to move. No visible weapons in the hands; however, the black handles of knives stood up from sheathes on each thigh.
The killer pursed his lips in appreciation.
He watched as the figure approached the downspill of yellow light and paused, becoming as motionless as the killer himself.
Suddenly a sound broke into the moment as the rusted metal door opened. Despite its decrepit appearance, the door opened with a soft click and swung outward on nearly silent hinges. Three men stepped out. Two of them wore boots, jeans, and t-shirts; both wore identical shoulder holsters with .45 pistols snugged into them. The third man wore a hazmat suit with the hood off. The men in jeans drew their pistols and walked to the edges of the runoff trough, looking up and down into the shadows. The killer knew that they saw nothing, that they could see nothing; neither had allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness before trying to look through it. They didn’t see the killer, and they didn’t see the other figure crouched barely six feet from them.
The two thugs nodded to the man in the hazmat suit who reached through the doorway and lifted out a Styrofoam cooler of the type used to transport medical or biological materials. A red biohazard symbol was stamped onto the white plastic side. He walked to the edge of the trough and stood for a moment looking down into the eddying water. Then he set the cooler down.
The killer raised his pistol.
His intel had brought him here to this place, this time. His mission projections had him back at street level within eight minutes from first trigger pull.
Then everything changed.
The figure crouched in the dark moved.
There was a rasping sound, steel clearing leather, but no flash of metal. Like British commando knives, the blade was blackened. The figure rose from a crouch and swarmed among the men. The blade swept right and then left, and suddenly arterial blood geysered, spraying all the way to the curved top of the brick tunnel. One of the thugs reeled back, fingers scrabbling to stem a flow that could never be stopped. The second man staggered away and turned in an almost graceful pirouette, hands reaching out to break a fall that turned clumsy and artless. They collapsed like discarded puppets onto the stone walkway so quickly that the man in the hazmat suit was unaware of their deaths until bone and slack flesh struck the stones behind him.
He twitched and spun and was on the verge of crying out in shock and alarm, but the figure moved past him, sweeping an arm across his throat with such speed that arm and blade vanished into a dark blur. The man in the hazmat suit dropped to his knees and then fell forward, his slumping corpse humped over the Styrofoam chest.
It was the fastest thing the killer had ever seen.
How quick? Three seconds? Two?
The thugs and the other man lay dead. Blood ran in slow lines down the walls.
The shadowy figure stood facing the open doorway, knife gripped in one hand. The cuts had been so fast, the edge so sharp, that no blood clung to the weapon except a single pendulous drop that hung for a moment from the tip and then fell with the softest splash.
The killer watched all of this down the barrel of the .22 he held in hands that neither trembled nor swayed. He was thirty feet away, and if he’d to paint a fourth corpse onto this tableau he could have done it with impunity. Fast or not, the kill shot was his to take.