Assassin Read Online Free Page B

her that had made her a psychomagnet for so much of the past five years.
    Unsettled, she turned away and flicked off the light.
    Makedde padded back through the dark and crawled into bed, pulling the covers up high. She rolled to one side, pausedand then rolled over again. After a minute her pale, sinewy right arm strayed from the sheets to pull the laptop towards her on the bedside table. She flicked open the lid with one finger, the screen coming to life to illuminate the corner of the bed in a soft, alien glow. Could she get any more sleep? She scanned the dim room: the bedroom of Luther Hand, the man she could not shake from her nightmares.
    Wrong.
    Everything is so fucking wrong.
    Mak had lain low here for weeks now, and as if by osmosis she felt she was absorbing Luther’s invisibility, his separation from the world. Part of her was even beginning to relate to the dead assassin.
    The one-bedroom apartment had seemed almost unused when Mak first arrived, holding her gun and jumping at every shadow. She’d learned many things as a private investigator — how to dig up information, how to hack the most basic passwords, how to pick locks. Arriving here, double-checking the address she’d found on Luther’s laptop, she’d been afraid she would have to put her less-than-perfect lock-picking skills to use. But the last key she tried on his keychain had fit the main lock like a puzzle piece, despite looking, at first glance, like a key for a vehicle of some sort. Another fit the dead bolt. She’d let herself in and set off a screeching alarm system, but the little lock and unlock symbols on the key soon proved the solution to that problem. With a simple press of the button the alarm went silent and she was in, sheltered, his Glock shaking in her hand and his home at her disposal. The ease with which she’d entered this inconspicuous fourth-floor apartment and its ability to hide her from the outside world had seemed like an omen of some kind.
    And just like that this had become her temporary home.
    For weeks she couldn’t stand the sight of another person, didn’t feel safe even on La Rambla under cover of evening darkness in the busiest crowd of innocent tourists. But this secure cave had bought her time. And Mak had needed time. Time to recover. Time to learn about her would-be killer. Time to plan.
    She was not sure how long it had been since Luther had last used the apartment. The air had been stale, the fridge empty. There’d been only a few supplies in the cupboards and the microwave had the manufacturer’s plastic wrap still across it. There’d been no personal items in the apartment at all and she wondered if Luther Hand had even left his fingerprints behind. What he had left, though, were clear indications of a man obsessed with security. The balcony doors were covered over with slatted metal shutters made to look like a modern designer addition rather than the security device they were. And he had a small cache of weapons, a fake ID and a few thousand dollars in various currencies stored in a hidden compartment under a loose board beneath the kitchen cupboards. It was secreted so cleverly it had taken her ten full days to discover it. He had a Peugeot in a car spot in the alley outside. She’d checked it and found a sniper’s kit in the boot. It was not as large as the assassin’s kit he had been travelling with when he’d abducted her in France. Outside the farmhouse she’d found a black Mercedes packed with cash, jewels, a similar sniper kit and smaller weapons including a Glock, which had fallen out of the glove box along with four fake passports. The jewels and cash, she presumed, were the spoils of some recent job.
    But most importantly, she’d found this very helpful laptop in a briefcase in the car. It had proved at least as practical asthe cash. She’d mined it to find the address of this apartment. According to the collection of title deeds he had filed away, Luther’s lethal trade had