Angel Time (The Songs of the Seraphim 1)

The plastic was the weapon I could use most easily when I encountered difficulty, but I never had. I dreaded the blood. I also dreaded the cruelty of it. I detested cruelty in any form whatsoever. I liked things to be perfect. In the files, they call me the Perfectionist, the Invisible Man, and the Thief in the Night.

I counted entirely on the syringe to do this job, obviously, because the heart attack was the desired effect.

It was an over-the-counter syringe of the kind used by diabetics, with a micro needle that some men couldn't even feel. And the poison had a huge fast-acting chaser of another over-the-counter drug that would sink the man almost immediately so that he'd be in a coma when the poison reached his heart. All trace of both drugs would clear his bloodstream in less than an hour. No autopsy would reveal a thing.

Just about every chemical combination I used could be bought in any drugstore nationwide. It's astonishing what you can learn about poison if you really want to hurt people and you do not care what becomes of you, or whether or not you have any heart or soul left. I had at least twenty poisons at my disposal. I bought drugs in suburban drugstores in small amounts. I used the leaf of the oleander now and then, and oleander grew everywhere in California. I knew how to use the poison of the castor bean.

It went as planned.

I was there by nine-thirty. Black hair, black-rimmed glasses. Smell of cigarettes on the soiled gloves.

I took the creaky little elevator up to the top floor along with two people who never glanced at me once, and followed the snaking corridors out into the air and past the herb garden till I came to the green railing over the courtyard. I leaned on the railing and observed the clock.

All this was mine. To the left was the long red-tiled veranda, the long rectangular fountain, with its bubbling urn-shaped jets, with the room at the end, and the iron table and chairs beneath the green umbrella right across from the double doors.

Damn. How I loved to sit in the sun, in the cool California breeze, at that very table. I felt an intense temptation to scrap this job, and sit at that table until my heart stopped racing, and to simply walk off, leaving the pot of flowers there for anyone who might care.

I moved sluggishly up and down the veranda, even making my way around the rotunda, with its plunging circular stairways, as if I were checking the numbers on the doors, or just gaping at things as people do who roam the whole place as I did, on a whim. Who says a delivery boy cannot look around?

Finally the lady came out of the Amistad Suite and slammed the door. Big red patent-leather purse and breakneck high heels full of sequins and gold, skintight skirt, pushed-up sleeves, yellow hair flying. Beautiful and costly no doubt.

She was walking fast as if she was angry and she probably was. I moved closer to the room.

Through the dining area window of the suite, I saw the dim outline of the banker, beyond the white curtains, hunched over his computer on the desk, not even noticing that I was looking in at him, probably oblivious because tourists had been looking in all morning.

He was talking on a tiny phone, with an earpiece, and hammering the keys at the same time.

I made my way to the double doors and knocked.

At first he didn't answer. Then gruffly he came to the door, opened it very wide, stared at me, and said: "What!"

"From the management, sir, with compliments," I said, in the usual hoarse whisper, the bite plate making it hard for me to pronounce the words. I held up the lilies. They were beautiful lilies.

Then I moved right past him towards the bathroom murmuring something about water, they needed water, and with a shrug, the man went back to the desk. The open bathroom was empty.

There might be someone in the tiny toilet compartment, but I doubted that and heard not a single telltale sound.

Just to be sure, I went in there for the water, and drew it from the spout in the tub.

No, he was the only one here.

The door to the veranda was hanging wide open.

He was talking into the phone and hammering on the computer keyboard. I could see a cascade of numbers flashing by.

Sounded like German, and I could understand only that he was irritated with somebody and mad in general at the whole world.

Sometimes bankers make the easiest targets, I reflected. They think their vast wealth protects them. They rarely use the bodyguards that they need.

I moved towards him, and set the flowers in the center of the dining room table, ignoring the mess of breakfast dishes. He didn't care that I was at his back.

For a moment I turned away from him and looked up at the familiar dome. I looked at the soft beige pine trees painted along the base of it. I looked at the doves ascending through the mist of clouds to the blue sky. I fussed with the flowers. I loved the fragrance of them. I breathed it in and some faint memory came back to me, of some quiet and lovely place where the scent of flowers had been the very air. Where was that? Does it matter?

And all the while the door to the veranda stood gaping and there came the fresh breeze. Anybody walking by could see the bed and the dome, but not him, and not me.

I moved swiftly behind his chair, and I pumped thirty units of the deadly stuff into his neck.

Without looking up, he reached for the spot, as if batting away an insect, which is almost always what they all do, and then I said, slipping the syringe in my pocket:

"Sir, you wouldn't have a tip for a poor delivery boy, would you?"

He turned. I was looming over him, smelling of peat moss and cigarettes.

His ice-cold eyes fixed me with fury. And then suddenly his face began to change. His left hand fell away from the computer keyboard, and with the right he groped for the earpiece. It fell out. He let that hand drop too. The phone slipped off the desk, as his left hand slipped to his leg. His face was slack and soft and all the belligerence went out of him. He sucked in his breath and tried to steady himself with his right hand but couldn't find the edge of the desk. Then he managed to raise his hand towards me.

Quickly I took off the garden gloves. He didn't notice. He couldn't be noticing much of anything.

He tried to stand but couldn't.

"Help me," he whispered.

"Yes, sir," I said. "You just sit right here till it passes."

Then with my plastic-gloved hands, I shut his computer, and I turned him back in the chair so that he fell silently forward on the desk.

"Yes," he said in English. "Yes."

"You aren't well, sir," I said. "You want me to call for a doctor?"

I looked up and out at the empty veranda. We were right opposite the black iron table, and I noticed for the first time that the Tuscan pots overflowing with lavender geraniums had tall hibiscus trees in them as well. The sun was beautiful there.