Page 19 of Assassin Anonymous

“You were pretty gung ho twenty minutes ago.”

“The reality is starting to sink in,” she says. “I’m not waiting for the plane. You have to give me something right now.”

She grabs my arm as she says this, digging her thumb into my skin. The look on her face is a mix of anger and—I think—desperation. I get it. This is a lot to ask of a person. I owe her something.

Unfortunately, there’s only one thing I can give her to guarantee she understands the gravity of this.

I tell her: “They called me the Pale Horse.”

She steps back. Her eyes go so wide I can see bloodshot white all the way around green irises. She shudders like she stepped into the cold night air. She keeps stepping back until she’s against the far wall.

At this point I don’t know what else to say, other than: “I’m sorry.”

Her eyes fall to the floor and her shoulders slump. I want to cross the room to her, want to comfort her, but my hands suddenly feel the way they used to: sharp, designed to kill. Not at all appropriate for what she needs right now.

What she needs is for me never to have knocked on her door.

Not tonight, not all those years ago, either.

I say it again—“Sorry”—and head down the ladder, giving her some space to process what I just told her.

4

At times, because of one man’s evil, ten thousand people suffer. So you kill that one man to let the tens of thousands live. Here, truly, the blade that deals death becomes the sword that saves lives.

—Yamamoto Tsunetomo, Hagakure: The Way of the Samurai

Singapore

Fifteen Years Ago

The Millennium Hotel juts into the Singapore skyline like a giant domino: broad on two sides, thin on the other two, darkened glass gleaming in the harsh sunlight. The air is so humid it’s like trying to breathe underwater, my blazer and khakis sopping up pools of sweat.

The Marina Bay neighborhood is bustling with a lunchtime crowd of locals walking with singular purpose toward lunch and tourists gazing like zoo animals at the sights. The concrete-and-glass architecture is just standard enough that this could stand in for any midsize American city’s financial district. The only differences: no homeless people digging through the garbage or sitting by the curb, and no cops in sight.

Poverty isn’t really a thing here. The only thing thicker than the humidity in Singapore is the money. And as for the cops, that’s a mix of two things: self-policing rooted in national pride, and an Orwellian network of surveillance controlled by an authoritarian regime that enjoys liberal use of the death penalty.

The other main difference is the racial makeup: a preponderance of Chinese people, with a spattering of Indian and Malay, which is pretty representative of the country’s demographics. As an average-looking white guy, I stand out. Not ideal, but not much I can do about it.

I finish pretending to smoke a cigarette and toss it into the waste bin next to me, which is a hundred feet from the front door of the hotel and conveniently located in a rare camera blind spot. The smoldering cigarette lands inside the paper bag I already disposed of, the inside of which I coated with nail polish remover. I don’t wait to see if it catches, I just make my way up the stone path and through the heavy revolving doors into the lobby of the hotel.

The space is grand, just bordering on opulent, full of white marble and gold trim, a contrast to the shadowy façade. The focal point in the middle of the circular lobby is a gurgling fountain, filling the air with an ozone smell, surrounded by people in business wear. There’s a banking conference in town, which brought out just enough white people, so I can blend in a little better. No one pays me any regard, which floods me with a tingle of excitement.

They have no idea what’s about to happen.

By the time I make it to the front desk, someone outside is yelling. All around me, shoulders tense, eyes dart to the front, the tranquil space suddenly filled with tension. At the main desk is a young Malaysian woman in a cream-colored dress, a pastel-pink tudung wrapped around her head and shoulders. She offers a megawatt smile with no eye contact and holds a finger up before hustling to the front. I lean over the counter and slip the USB kill switch into the side of her computer monitor, tap the enter button on the keyboard, and pull it out. It’s in my pocket before she’s left the lobby. I walk toward the elevator bank and climb aboard.

The kill switch disabled the hotel’s cameras and security and erased any video they had stored. It probably screwed up a bunch of other stuff, too. This thing is like dropping a rabid Tasmanian devil into the server room. It’s effective but not discerning. It’ll take a while for hotel security to find the problem and repair it. By the time they do I’ll be gone, all without my face appearing on camera.

At the top floor I step into a quiet, blue-carpeted hallway and head toward the stairwell. I know the hotel is expensive because instead of handles the doors have actual doorknobs. Two more flights up and I find that the door to the roof is locked, but thanks to the kill switch, the alarm won’t be enabled. I use a snake pick to sweep the tumbler, and after a few passes all the pins click into place.

The roof is forty stories up and completely exposed to the brutality of the sun, making it ten times hotter than the ground. The Marina Bay Sands looms in the distance, hazy in the heat. Probably the most signature building in the Singapore skyline, it looks like someone balanced a surfboard across the top of three identical towers. Beyond the Sands is the vast ocean, dotted by massive container ships, stretching out to a smattering of islands and the South China Sea.

From here I can see a good chunk of the country, a bucolic mix of man-made structures and verdant vegetation. Yesterday a chatty cabdriver told me he can bike the circumference of the nation-state in four hours. I’d love to try that, but I suspect I won’t be staying long after this job is done.

I pull the nylon rope and grapple concealed inside my jacket, then shed my top layer, leaving me in a white button-down and khakis, a climbing belt and harness concealed underneath. I would have preferred tactical gear, but this operation presented a number of challenges.

According to the brief, Jonathan Campbell is a CDC biochemist looking to trade his expertise to the highest bidder in return for wiping out his gambling debts and giving him some more money to play with. Since his concentration is biological weapons, this could be bad.

---