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  Four

  Dustin Stevens

  Four

  Copyright © 2010, Dustin Stevens

  Warning: All rights reserved. The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work, in whole or part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, is illegal and forbidden, without the written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Characters, settings, names, and occurrences are a product of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, places or settings, and/or occurrences. Any incidences of resemblance are purely coincidental.

  A good hit man has no conscience at all.

  -Pete Diopoulis

  Dear Michael,

  Many days have passed since we last spoke, and I fear many more will pass before we speak again. There is so much left to tell you, so many things that I have never had the words to say.

  I have no illusions of self-importance. I have done so many things in my life that I am not proud of, but I can honestly say that I have always been proud of you. You have always been a beacon of hope for me, a clear heading through every tempest, a guidepost every step of my path.

  I can only hope I have been some semblance of the same for you.

  I am not a wordsmith and have never claimed to be. I am but a simple woman and am here now asking you to give me another chance. I know I can make you proud.

  I love you Michael,

  Sarah Beth

  Prologue

  Four.

  That’s what they call me.

  Who they are isn’t really that important. We’ll get to it in time.

  For right now, focus was on the why.

  The name has multiple origins, depending on who you asked. The people that pay me good money for my skills called me Four because they know I operate by four ironclad rules. I apply them to every aspect of my dealings, regardless of the circumstances.

  They are non-negotiable.

  Again though, I fear I might be getting ahead of myself. Much like the they, set aside the rules themselves for a few minutes. We’ll get to them soon enough.

  Back to the why.

  The people that know me only by reputation referred to me as Four because of the services I provide.

  This might shock many, but in today’s society there is quite a demand for hit men.

  Executioners. Assassins. Trigger men.

  Most of the time, these people are skilled professionals. They do what they are contracted to and cash a very nice paycheck in return. Everybody, with the exception of the target, walks away with a smile on their face.

  Like most things in life though, it is far from an infallible system. Every now and again, things go wrong.

  A shot flies errant. A rope breaks. A fuse gets wet.

  Whatever the reason, things don’t go as planned. That is where I come in.

  When things get messy, people call me. I am the clean-up man, just like the number four batter in baseball.

  For as many hitters as there are working, there are very few that specialize in my line of work. I am the David Ortiz of the criminal underworld.

  The Barry Bonds, minus the steroids scandal and the faux apology.

  One does not just happen to find themselves in my particular line of work. Being a clean-up man comes with a heightened set of expectations. Not only is it my job to finish the hit, but I have to make it look like a byproduct of the original attempt.

  Nobody can know a second attempt was made.

  Every once in a great while, I am even be asked to eliminate the failed hitter themselves. I don’t like to take on those cases, I avoid them if I can, but like Winston Churchill once so succinctly pointed out, we’ve already established what I’d do for money, after that we were just haggling on price.

  And what a price it can bring.

  Most people read this and assume I am some clandestine instrument of the mafia, an operative of back alleys and darkened streets. Truth is, I’ve worked for everyone from oil tycoons to disgruntled heiresses, government agencies to major universities. I’ve done jobs in six different countries on three separate continents.

  So, why don’t people just come to me first? Why do they bother going with someone that might botch an operation and face the need for my services?

  The answer to that is rather simple.

  I am out of their league.

  If someone wants the best they must pay for the best. If they can get the same result for a fraction of the cost, they might as well.

  No point hiring Scorsese when a kid from the A/V department at the local high school will do.

  Of course, it is that exact line of thinking that leads to most of my business. That’s how it went with my latest job.

  To set the stage, the bad blood between Theo Mavetti and I stretches back to the Atlantic City Incident of ‘95. Wanting to save a buck, he hired locals to get rid of some new muscle that was squeezing in on his turf.

  To be expected, the locals got in over their head, opened fire in a public venue, almost turned the thing into an East Coast reenactment of Beirut.

  Making matters worse, the new muscle wasn’t moving in on them at all. They were nothing more than a protection detail down from the City, looking out for one of their guys on a weekend bender.

  That’s when Theo decided to bring me in.

  He needed the whole thing to go away. Needed the local boys to meet a quick and definitive end. Needed enough of the New York crew put down to make it look like an issue between two groups of thugs and nothing more.

  In no way could anybody know he’d been involved.

  I told him it was no big deal. We agreed to a price and I did what was asked of me.

  Problem was, I was a little too efficient in my work. Theo decided that since I was on hand, he’d take care of a few other lingering issues he’d been having. Decided to have me wipe out half the goons in Atlantic City.

  I was a business man, so again I did what was asked of me. When I went to collect my additional fee though, he insisted he only be charged the original price we’d agreed upon.

  Big mistake.

  Sparing the details, not until a few Polaroid’s of yours truly standing beside his sleeping daughter’s bed surfaced did he pay me what I had coming.

  That was over ten years ago. We hadn’t spoken since.

  That’s why I was more than a little surprised to get a call from him a few days ago.

  Part of me wanted to tell the bastard to eat the ass-end of a gun. The other half though, the more pragmatic, capitalistic half, decided to listen to what the man had to say.

  As is often the case, the pragmatic half was right. It knew the situation must have been nothing short of hell itself for the old man to be calling me.

  Turns out that was an understatement.

  Turns out it was something so bad that the son of a bitch had no choice but to utter the words, “Get Four on the phone.”

  Four.

  That’s what they call me.

  Chapter One

  Rule One.

  Never do anything until the money arrives.

  Unlike some others, I was fortunate enough not to learn this lesson the hard way. It was the first and most important rule I had even before I realized I had rules.

  In my possession are two bank accounts in Switzerland and a matching pair in the Cayman Islands. It might sound a bit cliché, but until somebody discovers a better way to hide money on this planet, it is what it is.

  All four are the end result of a routing process that sends the funds through a dozen locations, running the spectrum of countries and currencies. By the time the money gets done bouncing around and lands itself in my possession, there is no way anybody could piece together its origin.

  On
ly one person has ever been foolish enough to try. It didn’t end well for him.

  The process started when the call came in. An eight hundred number was picked up by an answering service in an unmarked building in an unknown town. An automated voice told the caller to leave a detailed message with all pertinent details.

  Number of people. Location. Time frame.

  The message is explicit that the caller is never to leave their name. That part comes later, if and when I decided to take a case. Until then, I maintain plausible deniability at all costs.

  After that, I wait twenty-four hours.

  Always. No exceptions.

  Part of that is to make them sweat a little, discern just how serious they were. If someone was desperate, the delay was enough to make them go elsewhere.

  Despite whatever loss of income it might represent to me, in the end it always turned out to be a good thing. I refuse to work with desperate people. They tend to be sloppy, which is the polite way of saying they always end up doing something stupid.

  The other part is to give me a little time to do my homework. Look into the caller. Research the targets, the area.

  Determine if I even want the job. When you’re in the position I am, being selective is a luxury I can afford.

  If everything checks out and I decide to do business, I respond. Again I route the call through a service, the signal bouncing all over the globe.

  I don’t even let them hear my real voice.

  The only thing my response gets them is a price and an account number. There is no negotiating. Everybody who calls me knows this.

  Per rule one, when the money arrives, I go to work.

  There is no denying that conducting business in this manner gets tedious. At times, it becomes flat out bullshit. All said though, it is a necessary evil.

  For one, there is never a trail of any kind back to me. My entire existence is nothing more than a phone number. Not only does it provide me with some modicum of security, it acts as an initial screening process for me.

  If someone is connected enough to get their hands on that number, they are connected enough to enlist my services.

  Second, all face to face contact is eliminated.

  A few of the old timers, men like Mavetti, knew me in another life, long before I got to this level. I’ve taken steps to remedy that and even my own mother, God rest her soul, wouldn’t recognize me today.

  Nobody that hires me knows anything beyond the few details I choose to give them. Even then, it is in measured amounts and often part of my cover.

  Who I am is inconsequential to the services I provided.

  Sharing anything will only serve to get me killed.

  The sequence was no different than any other time. A call came in detailing four hits to be made as soon as possible. I listened with my usual level of detachment, not at all fond of the truncated time table requested.

  Immediate time frames smack of desperation. I’ve already made my feelings on that known before.

  It wasn’t until I got to the end that my interest was piqued.

  Ten years had passed since my last run-in with Mavetti. Enough time that I didn’t recognize his voice right off.

  On my second pass through I paid closer attention. There was some fatigue present, an unmistakable wheeze from his years spent sucking on cheap cigars. Under it though was the same self-conceited rasp I remembered from all those years before.

  By the time I played it a third time, my skin was on fire. It was impossible to mistake the voice coming through the line. No way to push the image of him sitting behind his desk, a cheap Aloha shirt hanging open across his chest, from my mind.

  There was no idle chit chat. No mention of who he was or the fact that we had done business before. Nothing more than the details requested.

  Four people, all within walking distance of the finest academic institutions in the world.

  Done within the week.

  Nothing about the job was anything to bat an eye at. I’ve done much larger jobs in much stranger locations on more than one occasion.

  Still, the simple fact that Mavetti was calling told me he was in a bind. Taken together with our already complicated history, I decided right off I wasn’t going to take the case.

  Knowing all that though made it impossible for me not to respond or even worse, to call and politely decline.

  Maybe it was my ego getting the better of me, but I decided to have some fun with him.

  Instead of refusing the offer, I replied with an exorbitant price tag. I won’t brag about the details, but there were a lot of zeros attached to the end of it.

  Enough to let the prick know I was in charge and I didn’t appreciate being called out of the blue.

  The money came in less than an hour later. Half to Switzerland, half to Cayman.

  If the old man wanted my attention, he had it.

  Every instinct I had told me to refuse the cash and walk away. I already knew he must have a real hard case to risk calling me. Coupled with the window he wanted the jobs done and the instantaneous turnaround, he reeked of anxiety.

  None of it made for a real compelling case on my side.

  I let my instincts mull things over for an entire night, trying to convince myself to give it up and move on.

  Of course, it only took my pragmatic side thirty seconds to remind me how nice those matching seven figure deposits looked in my bank accounts.

  That was all it took. I was in.

  There is a process to my work. Regardless of how large the job or who the client, I approach each one the same way.

  The first thing, always, is to find out everything I can about the targets.

  Most people in this line of work don’t believe in writing anything down.

  Those people watch too many movies.

  That adage only applies if you know you are being watched. If that is the case, a person shouldn’t be in this line of work to begin with.

  Fact is, most people in the world preferred to live in a self-obsessed daze. They barely make eye contact with people they pass on the street, let alone stop to check what someone might have written down on a legal pad.

  I find it better to have a few items in writing than to risk mixing something up or targeting the wrong person. Once the leg work is done, I’ll shred and burn it all anyway.

  The most invaluable source of information I have ever found is the local public library. Every living person has gotten curious and ran a Google search on someone before.

  A potential mate. An ex-lover. A new employer. Maybe even themselves.

  What most people don’t realize though is the breadth of information available if they know where to look.

  Social security numbers, credit reports, transcripts, addresses, children’s names.

  In my opinion, the library is the best place in the world to perform anonymous research. Any schmoe with an ID can get a library card. From there, it is easy.

  Swipe in, sign on to the internet, and search to your heart’s desire.

  The visited sites are saved under your card for the duration of the session. Once you log out, the data is erased forever.

  At any given time, I am a member at seven different library branches under seven different names, though the locations and names change from time to time.

  Not once has anybody given me so much as a second glance.

  On a pristine fall Friday morning, I was one of three people sitting in the library. Less than an hour before, I called in to my day job and told them I had been asked to speak at a conference. I was going out a few days early, wouldn’t be back for a week.

  The information was accepted without a thought.

  There were two other people seated amongst the bank of computers I found myself at, each of us evenly spread out. The other two were both middle aged women, no doubt searching for men or jobs, neither paying me any heed as I fired up a browser and went to work.

  When I first started doing this years ago, it would have
taken me days to put together this kind of background material on four people. Now, thanks to technological improvements and the Freedom of Information Act, it took less than two hours.

  On the same legal pad I jotted down professions, addresses, bank account numbers, anything I might find useful. For the most part I just needed the home address and the place of employment, but I liked to have the other stuff on hand in case I needed it.

  The sad reality was, most people spent ninety percent of their lives at home, at work, or somewhere in between.

  If you were trying to target somebody, your efforts had to start there.

  Pages of notes folded tight and secured in my bag, I closed the browser I’d been searching in and opened a new one. I pulled up a travel website and just three minutes after signing in, I was the proud new owner of an overpriced plane ticket.

  Roundtrip to Boston.

  Chapter Two

  Six hours.

  That was the direct flight time to Boston. Far too long to be comfortable, but short enough that no real aches set in.

  A man that made what I did, and was under the time constraints that I was, didn’t bother with connections. Just a lot of hassle to save an extra fifty bucks.

  No upside at all in that for me.

  Though it may seem a bit counterintuitive, I always made a point of enduring the discomfort that came with flying coach. Without fail I booked the back corner seat on the plane and was one of the first people to board and the last one off.

  While it might be the least desirable seat on the whole aircraft, whatever bit of physical discomfort I felt was worth it.

  If I couldn’t get the seat I wanted, I’d book on the next flight out that I could. Simple as that.

  Years of being in this profession had taught me to never be anywhere that I was sitting stationary for very long. Even worse, where people could parade by and stare at me.

  Even in my day job, my face was rarely visible for very long at a time.

  The flight into Boston was fairly quick and painless. I never bothered with heavy arms, explosives, or anything that might leave a trail, so checking baggage wasn’t a problem. Most of my necessary tools could be carried in regular shampoo or shaving cream bottles, the rest I picked up on the fly.