“So Ian Williams and the ISI want to kill the Senator to what… cancel his vote?”
“Possibly.”
“If they kill him, does the bill die?”
“Possibly.”
“But it sounds like you’re talking about legitimate businesses here. A big corporation wouldn’t be involved in something like this. It would be financial suicide.”
“Agreed. We don’t fully know the ISI’s involvement yet, or how it plays into the legal opioid marketplace. My understanding is that the Big Pharma companies are not directly involved in this themselves. The ISI seems to be working with a group of shadow investors.”
“What about this woman you want us to find, Jennifer Upton? Why would Williams want her dead?”
“That’s what I need you to find out. I suspect she’s our missing piece. My hope is that she’ll be able to illuminate much that we currently don’t know.”
“Does she know she’s in danger?”
“I don’t know, considering that we’ve yet to make contact. But assuming you’re able to locate her, your top priority is to bring her in and get her to a safe house. Once you do that, contact me.”
“Williams may already believe that we have her name, since we spoke to Rojas.”
“Correct. This all assumes that she hasn’t been killed already. The fact that she’s out of reach right now could mean either that she’s dead or that she’s gone underground. Consider this me being optimistic. Please do what you can to find her.”
Chapter 16
The assassin had used many names over the years, but Hugo was his name by birth. He’d first killed a man at the age of sixteen. For revenge.
Hugo’s father had taught him how to hunt in the wilderness of Quebec. Together, they’d shot black bear, white-tailed deer, and moose. Some of their hunting trips would last days, involving deep treks into the forest using snowshoes. That had made hauling the animal carcasses back to their home difficult. But often the most difficult tasks in life could be the most rewarding. Especially when conducted in the company of one’s father.
Their town was very small. Everyone knew each other. The winters were long and harsh.
Sometimes hellishly so.
One afternoon, Hugo and his father were returning from a hunt when they heard screams coming from their home. They left the sled that carried their prize and hurried into the house.
Hugo’s mother was on the bed and on her back, eyes wide and face battered. The town drunk stood over her, holding a large curved blade. The man was a thuggish brute who had been thrown in the town jail twice for assault.
Hugo’s father ran to the man but was cut down, blood pouring from his wounds. Hugo tried firing his hunting rifle from the hip but missed. The drunk ran out of the home, and Hugo tended to his father’s wounds. But they were too deep. His father was dead within minutes. Hugo called the police and an ambulance. They took his mother to a hospital and apprehended the town drunk.
Hugo’s mother was a mess, crying hysterically at the loss of Hugo’s father. The local prosecutor wanted to interview Hugo and see if he would testify in court. But Hugo had no intention of letting the courts decide the fate of his father’s killer. It was a small town. And Hugo knew the cops. His killer would be transferred to a larger prison the next day, so Hugo had to act fast. When the jailer went to the bathroom, he left the jail cell master key set on his desk. Hugo took his hunting bow and seven arrows with him.
From a range of less than ten feet, he unloaded the arrows into his father’s murderer. Shafts of death plunging into his flesh. The screams of pain lasted only a moment as the arrows entered his lungs and made it too hard for the man to make a sound.
It looked incredibly painful.
It was immensely satisfying.
That night, Hugo took out several thousand dollars from various ATMs — his life savings — bought a ticket from Quebec City to France, and disappeared.
A few weeks later, he would join the French Foreign Legion under an alias, and his real training would begin. Hugo spent ten years in the Legion, traveling to various parts of the globe. He became an expert soldier, deploying to Afghanistan and several nations in Africa.
It was in Africa that he’d been approached by his first private employer. Half a month pay for two hours of work, he was told.
Hugo shot a man who hours earlier he did not know. Even when he was killed, Hugo didn’t know his name, only a face and an address. He placed two bullets into his chest as he entered his home. Then one bullet in his head, before he walked away.
The employer appreciated the quick, reliable work, and Hugo found that he would rather become a contract killer than stand any more guard duty for a nation he wasn’t particularly loyal to, on a continent he didn’t care for. But it was Africa where he stayed, for a time. Working for another two years, refining his technique and gaining experience, before being picked up by the European placement agencies. That was where the real money was. Russian, Turkish, and Italian organized crime seemed to have a never-ending desire to kill each other off. And they were willing to pay top dollar to do so.
Eventually, the Pakistanis found him, and Hugo became exclusive.
Most assassinations in first-world countries required creating as much separation from the crime scene as possible. But killing someone this close to Washington, D.C., had been a unique challenge. The security cameras and sophisticated tracking technology put in place to track terrorists meant that any movement Hugo made would be a potential red flag to American government eyes. The Ron Dicks assignment had taken twelve hours to plan, and six hours to execute. Other than that, Hugo stayed put in D.C., remaining in the same rental unit he’d secured a week earlier. Enjoying the sights. Going to bars and restaurants.
It was in this small flat near Dupont Circle that he’d received the most recent message from Syed, his Pakistani contact. The main job. The reason that the ISI had sent their most prolific international assassin to the States.
Hugo had gone to the dead drop site and picked up his message within three hours. At the dead drop, he obtained another of their special thumb drives. After returning to the flat, he connected the thumb drive to his computer and entered the passphrase, which then brought up a series of screens. A sort of timed quiz, one in which he had to answer each question quickly and correctly or else the information would self-delete, which it would do anyway after thirty minutes.
When he was finished, he read over the file. It was a mission brief. The Pakistanis were playing a dangerous game by being this bold. But that wasn’t his decision to make. The fee was very good, and that was what mattered.
Hugo deleted the files and then checked his watch. He would sleep here tonight, then fly out in the morning.
To Wisconsin.
Ian Williams’s convoy pulled up to the Gulfstream, his security men eying their surroundings as he walked up the ladder to the jet and got in.
His assistant handed him a phone.
“It’s him.”
Williams nodded. They used the best antitrace software and encryption programs. The hardware was purchased in China and flown over by Williams’s men. He didn’t trust American companies. Williams had heard too many rumors of NSA agents embedding their own little surprises into US-sold devices.