Better Off Dead: (Victor the Assassin 4) Read Online Free Page B

noise. She needed to hear. She needed to hear whether the Swede made it or not. She willed him not to make it.
Sorry, my sweet
. Twenty seconds remaining.
    With ten seconds left, she tensed, readying herself to make a break for it, or if it sounded like the Swede made it, to turn around and hurry back the way she had come. She wondered if the Swede had come to the same conclusion. She wondered if he was silently willing her to die like she was him.
    At four seconds she heard the Swede move. He had counted too fast. Not unsurprising, given the heightened circumstances. Or maybe she was counting too slow. It didn’t matter.
    She heard the scrape of the soles of his shoes on the ground as he launched into a run, as she had instructed. She heard the urgent footfalls. She pictured him powering out of the unit, veering left towards the exit, sprinting down the alley of space between the rows of units, reaching the —
    Two muted clacks reached her ears. The footfalls stopped.
    Bad news for the Swede. Good news for the Finn.
    She dropped to her knees and then her stomach, crawling fast, not worried about noise, knowing the killer was out of line of sight, over near the facility’s reception building and main gate. He couldn’t be in two places at once.
    The Finn crawled through the final hole and out on to the far side of the last unit. The cool night air felt magical on her sweat-slick skin, but there wasn’t time to enjoy it. She had a single moment of opportunity – a single advantage – and she needed to make it work. She rose to her feet.
    The killer was at one side of the facility, she was at the other. All she had to do was —
    She felt something brush against her face – fast and surprising – then pressure on her throat as it tightened. An image flashed in her mind: the killer buying bungee cord.
    It formed a noose around her neck, closing off her windpipe, sending burning pain and panic flooding through her. The Finn grasped at it, dropping her gun, trying to dig her fingers behind the cord, but there was no room. The slack had been stretched out of it by her own weight and the killer above her – on the roof of the unit – pulling upwards.
    Her feet struggled for purchase. Her face reddened. Her eyes bulged. She tried to speak, to beg, but only a gurgling wheeze escaped her lips.
    The upwards pressure of the noose kept her jaw locked shut and the cord away from her carotids. Otherwise, she would have passed out within seconds as the blood supply to the brain was cut off. Instead, the bungee cord suffocated her, extending the agony to over a minute. Her teeth ground and cracked. Her lips blued. Capillaries burst in her eyeballs.
    Eventually, oxygen deprivation induced a euphoric state of calm and well-being. The pain ceased. The Finn stopped fighting. Then she stopped moving altogether.

SIX
    Victor was still for a moment as the night breeze flowed over his face and through his hair. It slithered down his collar and up his sleeves. Cold, but gentle and soothing. His heart rate, slightly elevated from the exertion, fell back to a slow rhythm. He opened his hands and let the bungee cord fall away. Below him, the body collapsed to the ground. He felt nothing except a little soreness in his palms. Without the heavy-duty welder’s gloves protecting his hands the friction burn would no doubt have taken away skin along with sweat. The bungee cord’s inherent slack wasn’t ideal for strangulation, but its light weight and flexibility meant it was a fast, manoeuvrable noose. The proof was in the result. The woman couldn’t be any more dead.
    He rolled up the padded groundsheets that he’d laid across the unit’s roof to muffle the noise of moving back and forth across it, and lowered himself on to his good leg. Once inside his rented unit he put on some shoes and began packing up his equipment. He hadn’t required all of it, but the more superfluous items he purchased the less chance there was of the team