Springtime in Paris conjures up a mental image of warm days with leaves unfolding on the trees and lightly clad citizens eating and drinking at outdoor tables. This spring was just a little different the weather dictated a change for the people of that great city. Cold easterly winds had arrived in early April and had been in control of the weather for the best part of a month. It was as if Paris was on hold, its populace waiting to appear and take back their open air cafe culture.
Away from the café streets, in the suburbs, the tree lined avenues were composed of elegant terraced houses, fondly referred to by agents immobiliers as Maisons en Ville, once inhabited by single wealthy families. These families were long gone, having moved further away from the inner city to more rural locations. Children no longer used the streets, to play football, tennis or climb trees, where they had been supervised by mothers, nannies or older siblings. Today, where there were children, they were transported to an ecole maternelle or crèche early in the morning, not returning until evening. Streets were largely devoid of people during the working week. The vast majority of these beautiful old houses had been converted into small apartments inhabited by single people or single parent -families who paid the rent or mortgage through their efforts working in the city. Children playing in the streets today would be admonished if they caused any noise.
It was into this late afternoon, this quiet suburban scene, that an old man entered from a narrow side street. He was bent over, with a bushy unkempt grey beard, and with long greying shoulder length greasy hair, protruding from under a black beret. The shabby brown overcoat he wore, stretched tightly across his chest, was obviously two or three sizes too small for him. It had probably been a good quality coat when new, but that must been a long time ago. In each leather gloved hand he carried a white plastic bag, bearing the name, in green lettering, of a local convenience store. His movements were slow and deliberate, his head was bowed, as though he were scanning the pavement for a lost item.
In all, he wasn’t the type of individual to attract attention and certainly didn’t warrant a second glance from the tall broad shouldered chauffeur, who wore a grey suit and matching peaked cap. He had seen the old tramp on three or four previous occasions in this very street. The chauffeur had emerged from the silver grey limousine, just a matter of seven or eight metres in front of the tramp and held his right arm out from his body, to stop the tramp’s progress. He opened the rear door of the luxury car and held it open, his gaze averted to his right, where two men had exited the building and were headed down the well worn twenty or so sandstone steps towards him.
One of the men was tall, lean, and grey haired, giving him a distinguished look. He was dressed in an expensive dark grey suit and carried a soft pale brown leather document case. A younger, shorter, broad shouldered, blonde haired man was beside him, also smartly dressed, in a black suit, pale blue shirt and red tie.
The tramp was just three metres from the chauffeur, when he straightened up, the two plastic bags and their meagre contents crashed to the pavement. Now with his arms extended he gripped a pistol, fitted with a silencer, in his right hand which he supported with his cupped left hand and aimed it directly at the men on the steps. The Czechoslovak CZ75, nine millimetre semi automatic pistol, coughed twice, almost silently and the tall grey haired man folded lifeless to the stone steps, blood spurting from wounds above and below his left ear.
The young blonde man's face registered shock. He hesitated for a second, and looked down at his fallen companion, which was a fatal mistake. His right hand appeared from under his jacket, but the silver coloured snub nosed revolver it held, never fired. The long gun in the old man's gloved hands coughed twice more, the heavy rounds entering the young man's left temple and eye. The released energy pitched him backward against the stone balustrade and then onto the steps to lie lifeless beside the other man.
The chauffeur followed his dead colleague’s action, his right hand clawing inside his jacket, in a reflex action resulting from repetition during training, but it was a futile gesture, too little too late. For a split second he found himself staring into the long black barrel of the silencer, and again it was two rounds that struck him in the left eye and left cheek, bringing death before his hand could make contact with the hidden weapon.
The assassin stood over his victims, the weapon pointed at the body of the taller of the three dead men, looking for movement, but none came, except a very slight twitching from the young blonde man. The pools of blood, mixed with brain and bone tissue continued to grow. The CZ75 coughed again and another bullet entered the grey haired man’s temple.
This was the mark of the assassin, the expert. A final bullet to make certain the target was dead. The professional did not fire a number of hurried shots and then run away from the scene, hoping that the target was dead The taking of life and the successful escape was a very deliberate act that could only best be guaranteed if carried out by a professional. The killing of these three men bore testimony to that.
The assassin looked along the street to where an elderly man couple had just exited one of the tall houses, some two hundred metres away. They continued their slow walk away from the murder scene, unaware of the drama that had unfolded behind them. On the opposite side of the street, a middle aged woman was washing the steps leading up from the pavement to the front door. She did not look in the murder scene direction either. Three men had died in a matter of seconds, in broad daylight, unnoticed, in almost total silence.
He placed the weapon in one of the plastic bags, lifted both bags and reverting to his bent over posture, retraced his steps, quickly, but without panic, to the narrow side street which he had originally emerged from. The red Renault hatchback he had arrived in was parked a mere thirty metres away. In the street, maybe a hundred metres away, two people, a young man and an older woman were entering a blue car. They paid no attention to the tramp shuffling his way along the street, as they drove off.
Once inside the car, the two plastic bags were placed in a much larger black bag, on the floor of the passenger’s side. The beret, wig, bushy beard, eyebrows, moustache, black leather gloves, brown overcoat, grimy blue shirt, dark blue jeans, and heavily worn shoes went into the black bag. He wriggled into a fresh black sports shirt, smart grey trousers and black shoes The tinted car windows gave cover to the transformation from tramp to a man in his early to mid thirties with blonde curly hair, clean shaven, broad shouldered and with steely blue eyes.
This was James McAuley – a hired assassin, a man who would kill another human being, if the price was right. James McAuley was an Irishman who, in a parallel life, was a holiday magazine journalist, someone who would recommend holiday destinations to families whilst he was taking the life of another family man.
He sat for a few minutes, breathing deeply, coming down off that adrenalin rush that had carried him successfully through another contact. In a contact where there was the target and two armed guards, it would have been easy for the assassin to panic, unable to choose a target and take it out cleanly. If such a situation arose there could be shots fired by the bodyguards because they did not have silencers fitted to their weapons. They did not need silencers indeed, they wanted a lot of noise to attract attention or just distract the assassin from his mission. The more sound the better. If shots were overheard by people in the houses or streets, the police would be called.
Walking in from the narrow side street, into the contact area required near perfect timing. In all he had shuffled out of that narrow side street seven times, although he was armed and ready to complete the contract on just the last three occasions. But his timing had been out, just by seconds, but out none the less. On two of the days he had been past the stone steps in front of the house, before his target had exited the building and on the third he was short of it by thirty or forty metres. Having to run to close the gap was a no-no. To take the life of one or more men, in a close up contact in a residential street, required the assassin to be cool, calm and aware of everything around him.
Arriving breathless to a face-to-face confrontation, where one or more of the target’s guards was armed was a recipe for disaster – for the assassin! Firstly, there was the sound of gunfire from the assassin and possibly from one or two guards of the guards. Even if the assassin was not seriously wounded and managed to escape, such noise would most definitely draw residents to their windows and the police would be contacted. If he managed to escape, there was the real chance that someone would give a good description of the assassin and his escape vehicle. Preparation was the key word and checking details again and again avoided a disastrous end!
His mouth was dry. It always was after a kill, but his hands were steady. He produced a plastic water bottle and drank from it, in small sips. He checked his face and hands carefully for any evidence of make-up or adhesive residues. One small piece of makeup or adhesive would attract any policemen’s attention at an ordinary road traffic check. Such materials could be as damning as rounds of ammunition in his pocket. There was absolutely nothing he could do about gunpowder residue. That would be on his clothes and skin for days, requiring specialist washing to get rid of it. If he were to be taken to a police station, it would be easily identified, but then he had always maintained that he would never be taken alive by any police force.
Firing the motor, he engaged the gear lever and the car moved off slowly, to the end of the narrow street and turned into the steady stream of late afternoon traffic, as the homeward exodus of city workers began to gather momentum. The traffic was heavy, much heavier then he had experienced during the dry runs he had made on previous days, but it moved at a good pace, without interruption. He travelled perhaps five minutes when he met two police cars speeding in the opposite direction, sirens wailing. If they were heading for the murder scene, he was delighted. He felt he had put a considerable time between himself and the police, a time cushion, something he might need later.
He was well out into the country when he found the disused industrial building he was looking for. It had a large portion of its roof missing and in truth the old leather factory was only fit for demolition. It had, at one time, provided good paying work for hundreds of skilled people, now carried out by factories in Asia, at half the price. Less than three hundred metres further along, he turned onto a narrow country road, which suffered from a bad infestation of pothole-itis. He had made a number of dry runs to this torturous road and to the huge scrap yard situated at the end of it, with its gates open. Scrap cars and vans were stacked on top of each other, some perched at crazy angles.
A crane, whose long jib and toothed grab, searched out cars or vans, hoisted them into the air, swung them around and dropped them noisily into a huge crusher, which, like some alien monster, grabbed its prey and devoured it. In a few seconds the monster spat out a metal cube, ready for transporting to some distant re-cycling plant.
He turned right, driving between hundreds of coloured metal cubes, eventually pulling the car alongside a single storey brick building with a metal chimney, belching out whitish grey smoke into the atmosphere. He switched the engine off and put on the leather gloves, removed the pistol from the bag and quickly thumbed the live rounds from the magazine into a small plastic bank change bag.
A man, wearing a faded, blue boiler suit, dirty black beret and with a hand rolled cigarette clamped between his lips, emerged from the building and motioned James to follow him, which he did, clutching the black plastic bag, containing all his disguise materials and the CZ75.
The heat from the roaring furnace was incredible, leaving James to wonder why the metal roof or the chimney itself did not melt. The man opened the heavy furnace door with a long steel bar, and James threw the black bag into the flames. The door was quickly slammed shut and James and the man left the building.
‘Il reste six belles dans le sac,’ James said and handed over the bag.
‘Ouais,’ the man said. ‘Merci, mon ami.’
James was happy that the pistol would be destroyed in the furnace, indeed he insisted on being at the scene of the destruction, but throwing live ammunition into a fire was not recommended. The old fireman could dispose of them as he pleased, perhaps to some gangster friend. There was always a market for live nine millimetre ammunition.
Outside, the red Renault he had arrived in had disappeared. It had been replaced by a silver Citroen, the car he had hired at the airport. James handed the man a brown envelope containing money, which brought a broad smile to the dirty face. As he eased himself into the Citroen, the boiler suited man pointed to the crane. James was just in time to see the red Renault being dropped into the crusher. He waited a few minutes until the car was converted into a metal cube before he moved off. Any clues it held as to his identity were on their way to oblivion.
As he pulled out of the narrow potholed road, into the heavy traffic, he began to relax. With the red Renault now a metal cube, the weapon and the disguise items incinerated, and with no witnesses he knew of, there was precious little left to tie him to the assassination. The six weeks total time spent watching the target, making the dry runs out of the city to the scrap yard had been well worth the effort. As George, his mentor, had said many times, ‘There is no such thing as too much preparation.’ The hit itself had been perfect and all that was required now was for his safe return to England to be perfect too. He reckoned he could give himself the luxury of congratulations on a job well done.
There had been little room for error on this special assignment. There was only one point where the target was vulnerable and that was for only a few seconds and for just two afternoons per week. James had narrowed the potential target areas to two; the target’s own family home and his mistress’s apartment. A little more research and the family home was eliminated. He did not want to take the target down at the family home where there was a real chance of the two teenage daughters witnessing the killing of their father. He did not want the daughters to suffer that trauma. During the troubles in Northern Ireland there had been a number of such incidents leaving numerous children traumatized.
There were however two afternoons each week, when the government industrial development civil servant, visited his mistress. The man had been involved in secret discussions with a French crime syndicate to fix government contract prices. Billions of Euros were involved over a five year period, but the civil servant tried to increase his share of the scam. He became greedy and the gang found out. Such a situation could not be tolerated and a contract was discussed and a fee agreed with James’s firm.
One outcome of an enlarged European Union was closer ties between criminal gangs. They were only too pleased to co-operate with each other and this hit was an example of working together when it mattered. A timescale was also an item for discussion. In the completion of this contract, time was not of paramount importance and the longer the target remained alive, the more he and his bodyguards began to relax. They had begun to feel that the offended gang were not going to take action.
Half an hour later he turned the car into a small country hotel carpark, where he had been resident most of the time during the last six weeks, between short visits to London. At the opposite end of the carpark, an all weather sports pitch was playing host to a group of youngsters playing a football match. Most of the boys would have been fifteen or sixteen years old, with a couple about thirteen, the same age as his son. This was something he missed – watching his son play football every week. Firstly the authorities kept him in jail and then his wife would not allow him to see his son play football and his daughter play hockey. Friends used their video and digital cameras to record his kids in action, when playing for their school teams, but it was not the same as actually being there. James was denied one of a father’s duties; that of cheering his son and daughter on and encouraging them to the highest level possible in their chosen sports.
One of the boys dodged two defenders as he attacked the opposition team down the left wing and then stroked the white ball high across the face of goal, where it seemed to hang suspended, awaiting a striker’s attention, but none came The goalkeeper had no challenge as he plucked the ball from the air.
He turned away from the teenagers’ football match, removed his laptop computer and brief case from the car and headed into the quaint family hotel, which had provided him with an excellent base to plan his special assignment and provided a rich area to find holiday centres to be reported on in the magazine.
He had notes to type up and a couple of articles to finish off and email, with photographs, to Jenny and Sarah in the next day or two, certainly before the end of the week. He tended to keep some work back, so that he could create the impression that he had been working hard on various projects, not having time for any other illegal activities. He knew he would have little or no time in the next few days for anything but work. That was the way he planned it. If something were to go wrong and the police should arrive to throw awkward questions at him, a heavy programme of computer work to be finished would leave his legal representative something to play with.
His mobile sounded just as he entered the hotel. It was Kirsty.
‘Please don’t say anything James. This is hard enough for me to say and do. I’m taking all my clothes, shoes and bits and pieces and my work files and computer out of your apartment tonight. I have a couple of girlfriends who will help me to pack it up and move it out. You know we have no future together - we both know that…’
‘Kirsty, Kirsty, this is not the right time and definitely not the right place! Do you know where I am right now? I’m in the foyer of a hotel. Hardly the best place to discuss our future. Surely you can wait until I get home. You made it appear like it was the end of the world, because I wouldn’t sit down and discuss what you said was our future. If that’s so, isn’t it important enough to wait a few days until I’m home to discuss it properly?’
The hotel receptionist looked at him, and then looked away, embarrassed.
‘What future?’
‘Isn’t that what you want to talk about? If I was to talk like you are now you would accuse me of not giving a damn or of just wanting to throw away all these months of investment and go our separate ways? Surely we owe ourselves a little bit more consideration?’
‘James, you know I desperately want kids and I’m running out of time. The doctor was quite clear – every month that goes by makes it more difficult for me to get pregnant. I have only another couple of years where my chances of becoming pregnant are pretty high. After that things are less certain. Deep down I don’t think you really want any more kids. You have your boy and girl, a family already in position in Belfast. That’s not fair to anyone you marry or embark on a long term relationship with. I thought we could have made a go of it together, but really it’s not on. I was fooling myself. I hope you meet someone you can be happy with and I really mean that. Please don’t ring me. You would talk me round and that would get us nowhere. We would only be putting back the evil day, so please don’t ring me.
Thanks for everything. You treated me as though I was a princess, and that’s very rare in men these days. How I wish I had met you ten or twelve years ago. I really enjoyed every hour with you, that’s until a few weeks ago and that’s when it all went wrong and if we were completely honest with each other, we needed that talk to make us think about the future and face reality. Be careful. A part of me will always love you!’
The phone was cut off before he could reply. He rang back immediately, but her phone was switched off. He desperately wanted to talk to her, but deep down knew she was right. He was very fond of her, but was he fond enough of to give her the commitment she so desperately wanted? He had avoided serious talk for so long, but Kirsty had forced the issue, something that could not be avoided any longer. The hotel receptionist was again looking at him, with a measure of sympathy on her pretty face; at least it looked like sympathy.
He had met Kirsty about ten months earlier. Their romance had developed slowly and they had enjoyed each other’s company, on the whole. Then things changed. She introduced him to two of her friends who were both engaged to be married within months. A pregnant girlfriend was also introduced and there were constant references to how well she looked in her condition. Kirsty wanted to move in with him on a permanent basis and she had made it clear that she wanted children, sooner rather than later.
On average she would stay over at his riverside apartment two or three nights per week, mostly at weekends. She was a very attractive girl, dark brown hair, petite figure and some two years younger than himself. She had been married for nearly five years, was divorced, and much to her disappointment, left the marriage childless.
She managed an electrical wholesale business not far from James’s apartment, which was how they met. He made a complaint about a CD player and it was Kirsty who addressed that complaint and got it replaced for him.
Unfortunately, over the past two or three months, she and James were not having a smooth time. Kirsty had instigated talks with James about their future on a number of occasions, but they always ended on a sour note. He was reluctant to get too deeply involved in these types of discussion, but Kirsty did not give up easily. She continued to corner James at every opportunity. He was now afraid that she would try to become pregnant whether he wanted it or not, and that was something he had not sorted out in his own head, not yet anyway. He had not contemplated a family with Kirsty or any other woman. He had two beautiful kids in Belfast and although he had no access to them, he continued to hope that his ex wife would change her stance.
Neither of them was happy with their situation and if one or other were to say it was over, the other would probably welcome it although protesting at the same time. He felt bad about his negative attitude towards her, but in truth it was fear that fuelled his negativity. He had never worried much about a girl spending a night or two in his apartment. He could accept that, but a full time live in girlfriend was a source of great worry.