Page 43 of Assassin Anonymous

“What gave it away?”

He waves me over to the table. “New Yorker, too. You got that dry sort of attitude down tight. Kenji still running that meeting?”

“That he is.”

“He’s a good egg, isn’t he?” The man offers me his hand. “I popped in, I dunno, three or four years ago, when I was in the States visiting my daughter. I’m Ray.”

We shake. His hand is huge and feels cast out of concrete. I wonder what kinds of things he did with this hand. “Mark.”

“Mark. We don’t often get visitors, but they’re always welcome. I’d ask what brings you to town, but the thing I’ve learned doing this is, the less questions the better, am I right?”

“You are right. But I’m struggling today and I’m glad the timing worked out.”

“How long you got?”

“A few days out from a year.”

“Little over eight myself,” he says. “Good on ya, that first year is a big one. Now let’s go get you a day closer.”

He gestures me toward a circle of chairs, in the center of which is a small table holding the same kind of sound-dampening device Kenji uses to keep our meetings private. As I take a seat, another man enters. He looks like a boxer—cauliflower ears, bald head, thick in the shoulders but still light on his feet. He gives me a hard stare and then glances over at Ray, who nods.

“All right,” the man says in a soft and lyrical Irish accent that belies his demeanor, “new faces today then that we’ve got?”

A woman enters next. She’s tall, lithe, her black hair in a short pixie cut. Japanese, I think? If so, probably not Yakuza because that’s a boys’ club, so maybe she’s a freelancer. She gives me a brief nod as she whisks herself into a seat and folds her hands in her lap.

There are eight chairs set up but when the third man enters, Ray says, “That’s everyone. We’ll get started in a moment, so grab yourself a cuppa.”

The temperature of my skin rises, like a spotlight has swung onto me.

The man who entered, his black hair is going gray, his nose is sharp, his eyes hard as coal. There’s a scar on his chin, peeking out through a few days of stubble. He has the lean body of an Olympic swimmer. His name is Jean Lavigne. He’s a French assassin, code name Noire, which may lack the panache of Pale Horse, but it is very French, so there’s that.

Our paths have crossed.

Six years ago, a group of Algerian Islamic militants set off a bomb filled with nails and gunpowder in a train station in Lyon. Four killed, dozens wounded. Lavigne was sent to kill Zain Hassan, the group’s leader. Problem was, Hassan had information vital to America’s national security, so I was sent to stop Lavigne.

It wasn’t a job I felt good about. The math was sloppy. Lavigne was a professional and he was doing his job. Hassan was a piece of shit; two kids were disfigured in the bombing. But according to my calculation, taking him alive would save more lives down the road, so it had to be done.

Which is why I didn’t kill Lavigne, I just slowed him down. He was closing in on Hassan in Qatar, so while he was en route to Hassan’s last-known location, I took off his ear from five hundred feet with a scope. That gave the Agency team enough time to go in and scoop up their target.

Lavigne looks me up and down before sitting across from me. He knew it was the Pale Horse who did it, and I know he was looking for revenge. He put feelers out, trying to find me. He got close once, too, in Morocco. But he never saw my face. I try not to stare at the knob of pink, mottled skin where his left ear should be.

“All right, everyone,” Ray says, taking his seat with a steaming paper cup of tea. “As you can all see, we got ourselves a new one today. All the way from the U.S. of A. Why don’t you introduce yourself to the group, friend?”

“Hi, I’m Mark,” I say, trying not to pay too much attention to Lavigne so as not to tip him off, “and I’m a killer.”

The group claps for me.

“Hello, Mark,” Ray says.

The meeting starts. The Irish boxer, Liam, reads the literature. Once we get through everything, Ray asks if anyone wants to share, and he seems to gesture to me, out of deference to me being a guest, but Lavigne raises his hand.

“I’m Jean, and I am a killer,” he says in a sloping, breathy French accent. “I haven’t killed anyone in three years. I am having a very difficult day today.” He pauses and stares down at his hands folded in his lap.

This is the exact opposite of what I came here for.

He continues: “I was in the supermarket yesterday. There was a little boy…” He takes a deep breath. “I heard him say to his mother, ‘Mommy, what happened to that man? Is he a monster?’ ” He tilts his head down like he can hide his ear. “I don’t blame the child. There are still days I want to find the man who did this and show it to him. I have worked very hard to leave that life behind. We carry things in here.” He touches his chest. “But it is the outward reminder, the thing I see in the mirror every day, that I struggle with. It says to me: ‘You can never change. You will never be whole.’ ”

He bends forward, the processing of this emotion making him smaller.

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