Bullseye (Michael Bennett 9)

“Which means what? They’re not involved? Putin’s not involved?”

Paul shook his head again, then shrugged.

“Maybe not. Maybe it’s one of the oligarchs who want to take Buckland out. Heck, maybe the oligarchs want to take Putin himself out. Every time you think you’re getting a bead on this, something new pops up that makes it impossible to say what the hell is going on.”

“It’s like those Russian dolls. What are they called?” I said.

“Matryoshkas,” said Paul, nodding.

“Exactly, Paul. You nailed it. From day one, this whole case has been one big mind-screwing matryoshka. The doll within the doll within the doll.”

Chapter 77

The British assassin thumbed away his well-cleaned dessert plate, took out his blue pack of Gitanes, and lit one for himself and his wife off the linen-draped table’s candle.

What a meal! he thought as he flicked ash onto his coffee saucer and blew smoke up toward the ceiling.

There had been beef tongue carpaccio, roasted quail, risotto with shaved pecorino, smoked eel on black truffle toast, jowl of pork. Each dish perfectly cooked and washed down with bottle after bottle of 2007 François Lamarche La Grande Rue.

He’d caught the foodie bug back when he was a teenager and worked in kitchens all over London. He’d actually been a line chef at Le Gavroche for three months, as a fill-in, and was prepping at the Fat Duck, in Bray, when he got his call from the marines.

When this was over, first order of celebration was going to be eating their way across the continent, starting in France, he thought as he looked out the window beside him at the city lights. He glanced over at his sexy wife and pictured them cruising through Burgundy’s quiet villages in something unconscionable, like an Aston Vantage or a Bentley Continental GT, her blond hair flying as they ripped around the vineyards and hills and gravel bends.

“Everything okay?” asked Jill, the Culinary Institute–trained chef and apartment owner as she came in to clear the plates.

They had jumped with both feet when they saw the Asian thirtysomething’s ad on an underground dining website for a farm-to-table, cooked-to-perfection gourmet feast. They were actually seated in the glassed-in balcony of her twentieth-floor apartment in a high-rise in northern Manhattan, of all places.

It couldn’t have worked out better. With the shooting still fresh in the news, they had to stay out of the public eye until the job was over.

“Perfect, really,” said the assassin’s wife. “How rude of us. We forgot to ask if it is okay to smoke. It’s been ages since I actually had a postmeal smoke at the table.”

Jill, who’d already been paid the fee of eight hundred dollars in cash, smiled.

“Please—you’re my guests. Mi casa es su casa,” she said as she left with the plates.

He was stubbing out the Gitane in the glass ashtray Jill had brought them when his disposable phone rang.

“Are you this stupid?” was the first question he was asked by the client’s electronically disguised voice when he answered the phone in the bathroom.

“It’s fine,” he said.

“It’s not fine. You shot a cop and a spook. The spook’s at death’s door.”

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” the British assassin said. “Playing for keeps isn’t for the squeamish. Have you the final route? I’ve been waiting.”

“I just sent it to your e-mail.”

“I see it,” the British assassin said, looking at his smartphone. “No changes, then?”

“No. They’re going with the original route. It’s a lock.”

“Good, then. I’ll expect the last of it by close of business tomorrow.”

“Close of business?” the client said. “That’s not in the contract. The second after he’s confirmed dead, the escrow will be released to you. Be it an hour later or a year. That’s the deal. Killing him. That’s the important part here. Finishing the job.”

“No problem,” the British assassin said with a yawn as he looked at himself in the mirror.

“So you’re good to go now, right? You don’t have to deal with Levkov anymore, do you?”