Page 48 of Assassin Anonymous

“This is a weird question, but the main character doesn’t get away with it, right?”

She squints a little. “No, he ends up in prison. Sorry if that’s a spoiler.”

“The book was written a hundred and something years ago, I think we’re past the point of it being a spoiler,” I tell her. “Just wanted to make sure the guy gets what he deserves.”

“Well, that’s the question now, isn’t it?”

I rack my brain for a witty rejoinder. Nothing comes to me.

“Don’t worry, there is both crime and punishment.” She smiles as she puts the book in a plastic bag. As she’s handing it to me, there’s a pounding on the front glass. Astrid is waving her arms, beckoning for me to come outside.

The second I’m through the door she takes off, not even waiting to see if I’m behind her. We cut through the crowd, but there are so many people on the street I’m not even sure who we’re after. Two blocks later we’re hustling down the stairs of the Leicester Square Tube station, and then running through the turnstiles, down the escalator, and onto a waiting car, where the doors are just about to close.

It’s packed shoulder to shoulder. I find a place that I can grab a handrail and Astrid leans into me and whispers: “Gold jacket.”

There we go. He’s not easy to miss. A stocky Black man with close-cropped hair, a gold bubble jacket, black jeans, and gold sneakers. He has a heavy set of expensive noise-canceling headphones strapped over his head, bopping in time to music.

His name, Astrid said, is Gaius.

No one knows who runs the Via Maris. It’s a small operation. Probably only a handful of people, which is how they do it without being caught. The site looks like it was designed and set up twenty years ago, but something like that doesn’t need flash. It just needs to work.

The person at the top is someone who goes by the handle Hannibal Khan. Whether that’s a mash-up of the serial killer and the Star Trek villain, or the conquerors, I don’t know. It’s a pretty cool name, though. Better than GJoubert.

It’s amazing Khan has evaded capture for so long. The Silk Road, the original darknet marketplace, went bust after two years. Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name Dread Pirate Roberts, got nabbed by the feds, but not before making hundreds of millions of dollars. Had he not gotten caught, he was on track to make billions.

Hannibal Khan, meanwhile, seems to be a bit more clever. The Via Maris has been around for twelve years now, and I’m sure law enforcement is all over it, but so far, it’s still up and running.

And Gaius, according to Astrid’s source, is the man who runs the tech end of things.

We nearly miss it when his stop comes up, because he nearly misses it. He’s lost in his phone and bolts off at Earl’s Court at the last second, and Astrid and I muscle through the crowd just in time. He’s still oblivious to our presence, and it’s not like we’re keeping too far back, so he’s definitely not a pro. That’ll make this whole thing a lot easier.

We follow him up the escalator and down two streets, where he stops for some Indian takeout, and then finally to his apartment complex. It’s a newer building, fancy, all sharp angles and floor-to-ceiling windows, which means it probably has decent cameras, so even though Astrid follows right after, I grab her arm and hold her back.

“C’mon,” she says. “He won’t even notice us slipping in.”

I point at the doorway, and even from across the street, the black dome-shaped camera is visible above the doorway. “Hold on,” I tell her.

We stand and wait and watch, and I hope for a little luck—which comes when a light goes on in a window at the end of the fourth floor. Now we just have to get inside without ending up on video. No sense in leaving a trail of bread crumbs for the Agency or the Russian or whoever to find.

We passed a hardware store on the walk over. I lead Astrid in that direction and duck inside to buy a can of spray paint.

Hardware stores, a hitman’s best friend.

We head back toward the building, and as I step into the vestibule, I pull the scarf up over my mouth and shoot a little blast of paint onto the lens. Because the dome is black, the paint isn’t apparent unless you look close. Then I buzz an apartment on the second floor.

An angry voice comes back, “What?”

“Delivery for 5B. Just trying to leave it in the hall.”

The door buzzes. We take the stairs to the fourth floor and head toward the end. There’s only one apartment it could be, and no cameras on the way. We get to the door and knock, and after a moment, a soft voice comes from behind it. “Yes?”

“Delivery,” I say, putting on my best faux-British accent, which I’m sure sounds terrible.

There’s a pause, and a shuffling behind the door. Probably Gaius looking through the peephole, but I’ve positioned myself so he can only see a small portion of my body, and Astrid is standing against the wall.

“Leave it, please.”

I pull the felt marker out of my pocket. “Gotta sign, mate.”

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