Page 4 of Safe Enough

He was working back in the days when billionaires were rare. Back then, a hundred million was considered a threshold level. Below a hundred mil, you were poor. Above, you were respectable. People called a hundred mil a unit, and most of Ryland’s clients were worth three or four units. And Ryland noticed something: rich husband, rich wife. The wives weren’t rich in the sense their husbands were, of course. They didn’t have units of their own. But they had spending cash. It stands to reason, Ryland said to me. Guys set them up with bank accounts and credit cards. Guys worth three or four units don’t like to trouble themselves with trivia down at the six-figure level.

But the six-figure level was where Ryland worked.

And he noticed that the blood he was spilling was dripping all over minks and diamond chokers and Paris gowns and perforated leather seats in Mercedes Benzes. He started searching purses after a while. There were big checking balances in most of them, and platinum cards. He didn’t steal anything, of course. That would have been fatal, and stupid, and Ryland wasn’t stupid. Not stupid at all. But he was imaginative.

Or so he claimed.

Actually, I like to believe one of the women handed the idea to him. Maybe one a little feistier than normal. Maybe when it became clear what was about to transpire, she put in a counter-offer. That’s how I like to think it all started. Maybe she said: “That rat bastard. I should pay you to off him instead.” I know Ryland’s ears would have pricked up at that. Anything involving payment would have gotten him interested. He would have run the calculation at the same hyperspeed he used for any calculation, from a bullet’s trajectory to a risk assessment. He would have figured: This chick can afford a six-figure coat, so she can afford a six-figure hit.

Thus, the greatest trick of all.

Getting paid twice.

He told me about it after he got sick with cancer, and I took it as a kind of anointment. The nomination of an heir. The passing of the baton. He wanted me to be the new Ryland. That was okay with me. I also took it as a mute appeal not to let him linger and suffer. That was okay with me too. He was frail by then. He resisted the pillow like crazy, but the lights went out soon enough. And there it was. The old Ryland gone, and the new Ryland starting out with new energy.

First up was a stout forty-something from Essen in Germany. Married to a steel baron who had recently found her to be boring. A hundred grand in my pocket would save him a hundred million in hers. Classically, of course, you would hunt and strike before she ever knew you were on the planet. Previously, that would have been the hallmark of a job well done.

But not anymore.

I went with her to Gstaad. I didn’t travel with her. I just showed up there the next day. Got to know her a little. She was a cow. I would have gladly killed her for free. But I didn’t. I talked to her. I worked her around to the point where she said, “My husband thinks I’m too old.” Then she looked up at me from under her lashes. It was the usual reassurance-seeking crap. She wanted me to say. “You? Too old? How could he think that about such a beautiful woman?”

But I didn’t say that.

Instead, I said, “He wants to get rid of you.”

She took it as a question. She answered, “Yes, I think he does.”

I said, “No, I know he does. He offered me money to kill you.”

Think about it. How was she going to react? No screaming. No running to the Swiss cops. Just utter stunned silence, under the weight of the biggest single surprise she could have heard. First, of course, the conceptual question: “You’re an assassin?” She knew people like me existed. She had moved in her husband’s world for a long time. Too long, according to him. Then eventually, of course, the inevitable inquiry: “How much did he offer you?”

Ryland had told me to exaggerate a little. In his opinion it gave the victims a little perverse pleasure to hear a big number. It gave them a last shot at feeling needed, in a backhanded way. They weren’t wanted any more, but at least it was costing a lot to get rid of them. Status, of a sort.

“Two hundred thousand US dollars,” I said.

The fat Essen bitch took that in and then started down the wrong road.

She said, “I could give you that not to.”

“Wouldn’t work for me,” I said. “I can’t leave a job undone. He would tell people, and my reputation would be shot. A guy like me, his reputation is all he’s got.”

Gstaad was a good place to be having the conversation. It was isolated and otherworldly. It was like there was just her and me on the planet. I sat beside her and tried to radiate sympathy. Like a dentist, maybe. When he has to drill a tooth. I’m sorry … but it’s got to be done. Her anger built, a little slow, but it came. Eventually she got on the right road.

“You work for money,” she said.

I nodded.

“You work for anyone who can pay the freight,” she said.

“Like a taxicab,” I said.

She said, “I’ll pay you to kill him.”

There was anger there, of course, but there were also financial considerations. They were forming slowly in her mind, a little vaguely, but basically they were the exact obverse of the considerations I had seen in the husband’s mind a week previously. People like that, it comes down to just four words: all the money, mine.

She asked, “How much?”

“The same,” I said. “Two hundred grand.”

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