The Assassin's Gift Read online

  Where was the vessel? Had it gone past already? Could Salvador still take the shot, or would the presence of the other vessel force him to delay it?

  Scanning right and left, Salvador looked for a boat. Or a cruiser.

  He could see nothing.

  Had it gone past on his side of the loch and was it in the lee of the hill beneath him, out of sight?

  Either way, it should now be far enough away from Kuznetsov not to matter.

  He looked quickly back towards the boat, noting that there were quite a few waves rolling towards the cove, and that the boat was bobbing up and down and rolling about in their wake.

  It must have been quite a large boat to cause such a disturbance, Salvador realised.

  He was just in the act of dropping the field-glasses and returning his eye to the rifle sight when Salvador saw it.

  It was just a fleeting glance, but one which registered firmly in his photographic memory, and caused him to momentarily stop in his tracks. About ten metres in front of the boat, Salvador's mind registered what seemed like a line of several large dark hoops rising from the water. Three distinct, thick, large humps standing proud of the water's surface. Salvador blinked and for a tiny moment his brain froze.

  At the same moment, just beyond the disturbance in the water, Salvador registered that a figure had come through the cabin door and was emerging out onto the deck.

  Salvador blinked again, clearing his brain and immediately refocusing. Settling in behind the rifle and finding the man on the deck, he drew the cross hairs to bear on the man as he stumbled unsteadily towards the edge of the deck and reached out for the handrail.

  It was Kuznetsov.

  Gripping the rail, the man looked out onto the loch towards Salvador and gawped, his eyes seemingly wide with surprise, or terror.

  Giving no thought for what it was that had startled Kuznetsov, Salvador breathed out, rested, and gently squeezed the trigger.

  The bullet entered through the right eye, and because Kuznetsov was standing at a slight angle towards Salvador, it left through a large hole lower down on the left side of his skull. It took with it most of Kuznetsov's brain, and all memories of whatever it was that Kuznetsov had just seen in those last few seconds of his life.

  Chapter 2

  Loch Ness

  Scotland

  July 28th

  10.25 p.m.

  Automatically reloading his rifle with one final bullet, Salvador quickly scanned the body now lying crumpled on the deck of the boat.

  It was obvious from the bloody mess on the deck and the state of Kuznetsov's shattered skull that his mission had been completed.

  Once again Salvador eased the crick out of his neck and stretched his fingers.

  Gently lowering his rifle and picking up the field glasses, Salvador scanned the water in front of the boat.

  Frantically searching for the three hoops he'd just seen rising from the surface, he zoomed out slightly so that he could take in a wider field of view and slowly scanned the loch around the boat.

  Finding nothing, he searched again, and again until he had convinced himself that whatever it was that he had just seen, was now nowhere to be found.

  Swallowing hard, Salvador dropped the glasses and rolled onto his back, closing his eyes.

  Recalling what he had just seen in the waters of the loch in the moments before his final shot, he replayed the strange images in his mind, over and over again.

  Three large, dark hoops, rising slowly but distinctly from the surface of the water?

  He felt a curious mix of emotions, none of which had much to do with the death of his latest three victims.

  Allowing himself another minute to study what he'd seen in his mind's eye, he then filed the memory away for future consideration.

  There would be time for that later.

  For now though, Salvador had to get off the mountain and away from the loch as soon as possible, leaving behind no trace that he had ever been there.

  Although it was unlikely, once the body on the boat was discovered, it was possible that an experienced detective may place the origin of the shot from somewhere on the far hillside, and send in dogs to find where the shooter had operated from.

  After Salvador had dismantled his gun and wrapped it and the field glasses in a heavy, durable, canvas bag, he rolled up the camouflaged hide under which he had lain for the past few days and collected his things together. Picking everything up and doing his best to reinstate standing grass wherever he had flattened it, he pulled on a glove, opened a plastic box which he'd filled up with cow dung from a field he passed each morning, and smeared it over the area where he had been lying.

  Just in case that wasn't enough to mask his smell, he then removed a can from his bag, and sprayed the area with a noxious liquid which he trusted from experience to deter a dog's ability and desire to detect anything in that space. In effect, it got right up their noses, and drove them away from the source of the scent.

  Once he was convinced that he'd left no traces of his presence behind, he left the area and hurried up the hill away from the loch and the busy road below.

  After fifteen minutes hiking he came to a gorge and started to descend to the sound of a river below.

  It was getting dark and although Salvador moved quickly, he was careful to ensure he didn't trip up on a tree root, or fall over a rock. The last thing he needed now was a broken ankle.

  Cautiously heading through the trees around the edge of the gorge he came to an impressive waterfall where he immediately searched for and found several heavy, large stones.

  Stuffing them into the canvas bag in which he'd put his rifle, he carefully moved as close as possible to the edge of the waterfall and launched the heavy bag as far out as he could into the centre of the deep pool at its base.

  The Accuracy International AXMC long range sniper rifle was his preferred weapon of choice. It wasn't cheap, by any means, but he hadn't paid for it. It was part of the deal that he had arranged with those who had contracted him for the assignment. He had picked it up, as directed, from a hidden location near Stirling, and it was meant to be delivered back to the same place, upon completion of his task. However, Salvador had no intention of handing back a weapon covered in his DNA to someone who knew what he had done, and could at any point in the future, deliver him up to the authorities.

  Keeping it was not an option either. Salvador had no use for it. It was the perfect weapon for the assignment just completed, but useless for city work, or anything close-up. Salvador also made it a policy never to walk away from a kill carrying anything that could in any way link him back to it.

  Which is why, having thrown the rifle into the rock pool, he moved further upstream and ten minutes later found another deep pool to throw in his other bag, also weighted with large rocks, containing amongst other things his hide, the pullover and trousers he'd been wearing.

  Wearing fresh trousers, and a light cagoule, and having washed his hands, face, arms and shoes free of all traces of dirt from where he had been lying down, he headed up over the top of the hill and down the other side.

  By the time Salvador got to his car parked in the forest on the other side of the hill on the A887, it was dark, and there was almost no other traffic heading south from Invermoriston, the nearest town.

  Climbing into the back seat of the rental car, Salvador changed out of the rest of his clothes and stuffed everything else he was wearing into another bag. After putting on the fresh clothes he'd bought a few days before in Inverness, he slipped into the front seat of the rental.

  With the lights on his car switched off, he slipped the clutch and let the car roll out of the car park which was surrounded by trees, before stopping when he had a good view of the road in both directions.

  Only when he was convinced that there were no other cars visible in any direction, did 'Salvador' switch the car lights on and join the main road, heading first south, then later north-west to Plockton, a tiny, dreamy, Scot
tish hamlet as far away from Loch Ness as the local roads could take him.

  Shortly before Salvador got there, he took a detour over the bridge to Skye from Plockton, stopped the car midway across, and from the middle of the bridge dropped a final weighted bag with his last change of clothes into the sea far below.

  No one saw Salvador on the bridge.

  No one passed him later on the road to Plockton.

  And no one saw him pull into the driveway of the rental cottage.

  If they had, however, it would not have been a man that they would have seen getting out of the car, opening the front door of the fisherman's renovated cottage and slipping silently inside.

  It would have been a woman.

  Now wearing a tartan skirt, a blue cashmere jersey, a graceful pearl necklace and dark blue suede shoes.

  Even if someone had spotted the man hiking over the hill away from the murder scene on Loch Ness, there would be nobody now who could associate that person with the woman who was entering the cottage.

  Which was exactly what she intended.

  For in a world dominated by men, and where the most professional of assassins closely guarded their true identities, Salvador's greatest secret, and perhaps greatest strength, was that he was not a man at all.

  Salvador was a woman.

  .

  --------------------

  Thursday

  00.35 p.m.

  Tommy McNunn sat in his prison cell, sipping a glass of his favourite Rioja. He hated prison. Every second spent inside intensified his hatred of the man who had put him in it: DCI Campbell McKenzie.

  Tommy knew that the likelihood of him ever getting out of prison was very small, unless he took his future into his own hands and planned his own escape, - which he was going to do -, but in the meantime, he had business to conduct.

  Thankfully, money still bought favours, even in prison, and Tommy had no shortage of money. Illegal money. Squirreled away in lots of different accounts under false names, but accessible none the less.

  Which meant that Tommy could buy himself a lot of favours.

  In fact, if it weren't for the lack of a decent whisky and the fact that he couldn't leave whenever he wanted to, he had to admit that life in prison was nowhere near as bad as he had feared it would be.

  But the hatred still flared.

  He hated DCI McKenzie with every waking breath.

  He had vowed he would take revenge and now that his laptop had arrived and the guards had finally left him alone in his Wi-Fi enabled cell (another illegal perk that he had paid for, although rather handsomely), he was finally able to first download the Tor software he needed, set himself up with an account on the Dark Web, and then install his favourite VPN software.

  Tommy had done it all before, a million times. He could do it in his sleep. He had spent more time working and making money in the Dark Web than he'd ever spent on the Surface Web, his other name for the normal internet.

  After only thirty minutes Tommy was able to access the site he wanted, which was the reason he'd purchased the laptop, bribed the guards, and was taking these risks.

  'HitsforBits' was an online Dark Web assassin's market place. It was here you could name and detail a target and put a price on their head, and offer the contract to the general Dark Web public. Assassins for hire would take their pick of contracts they wanted, and bid for them, declaring how much they would do the job for, and when. The 'how' was mostly of less interest. So long as the target died, punctually when agreed, people seldom cared how they died.

  If the price, reputation and reliability of those who were interested in a contract were acceptable, HitsforBits acted as an intermediary. The Dark Web site took a percentage of funds transferred via its system, and ensured that the agreed sum in bitcoins was securely delivered to the assassin, according to the terms agreed between the contractee and contractor once, and only once, a target had been confirmed dead.

  It was a great system, and Tommy McNunn had used it frequently before he had been arrested and locked up in prison by DCI McKenzie.

  Tommy was an honourable man. He kept his promises, and people respected him for that.

  And now was the time to keep another of his promises.

  Calling up the contract form, Tommy began to fill it in online.

  He filled in the four most important boxes first.

  Name of Target: DCI Campbell McKenzie

  Contract Price Offered: £600,000.

  Location: Scotland

  Target Death Time: Within one month.

  Tommy filled in the rest of the form, - the small print -, hit UPLOAD, and took another sip of his Rioja as he watched his contract go live.

  Within thirty minutes he had his first acceptance.

  Within an hour, he had three.

  Tommy checked his watch. The closing date for applications was in 48 hours.

  There would be no messing around.

  Tommy wanted McKenzie dead.

  And soon.

  Chapter 3

  Plockton

  Scotland

  Thursday

  8.25 a.m.

  Alessandra Moretti stepped out of the shower, dried herself and put on her underwear. Not wanting to draw any attention to herself, she omitted applying any makeup or dabbing herself with any of her perfumes, and instead, put on her sailing clothes and blue sailing jacket and stepped out the front door of the cottage.

  Now her work was done, she wanted to relax, and having discovered that Plockton had its own sailing school and offered sailing boats for hire, she could think of no better way to relax and consider the events of the day before.

  Alessandra owned her own small sailing yacht, and she had spent many happy years sailing around the Mediterranean and along the ever changing coastline of Africa.

  She loved to sail, to feel the power of the wind driving her through the waves with salt water splashing on her face. Sailing exhilarated her, and she loved the sea.

  Alessandra was not a recluse, but she enjoyed the solitude she found being miles from the shore, alone with the elements and her own thoughts.

  It was her escape.

  Whenever she finished a mission, she would head to the port wherever her yacht, 'Sea Bream', was last moored, and then disappear out on her boat for weeks or months on end.

  Another of the reasons she was so successful as an assassin, was because when she dressed normally as a woman she could easily blend into any background, and not be noticed.

  A curse to others, but to Alessandra a blessing, was the simple fact that without makeup she was not at all remarkable. She never stood out in a crowd. Slim, of medium height, with brown hair, and dark green eyes, she could join a group of people and be lost, without drawing looks or attention from anyone.

  However, like many of the pop-stars and celebrities of the modern age, the moment she applied makeup, she would be transformed. The ugly duck would become the swan. Men would take second-looks as she walked past them in the street, and other women would be jealous.

  Without makeup, Alessandra was practically invisible. With it, she could quickly become the centre of attention.

  Which was why, most of the time, Alessandra chose to wear no makeup at all.

  Leaving the cottage she had rented, it was a short walk along Plockton's only street beside the sea wall, to the boathouse where she filled in a few forms, showed some false ID and charged a boat rental to a false credit card.

  According to the rental agreement, she was Alice Brandon, a teacher from Chicago.

  For professional reasons, Alessandra had many different names and identities, but Alice was one of her favourites. The name was chosen for her by the Spaniard who specialised in such things, and where he got the false names from, she did not need or want to know. Besides, 'Alice' was as close as most people could get to Alessandra in day-to-day conversation and of the many false identities she had, this was the one she felt most comfortable with.

  Within thirty minutes, havin
g rigged and set the sails on her rented Merlin Rocket she was out in the bay, sailing out around the headland towards the open sea. Only then, with the wind blowing through her hair and cold salt spray landing on her cheeks, did she begin to feel relaxed and alive.

  Almost immediately, her mind cast back to the episode the evening before. Something strange had happened yesterday out on the loch, and she didn't quite understand what it was.

  Her imagination was as good as anyone's, but she wasn't one to let herself loose on flights of fancy, but... she had definitely seen something. Something unusual.

  In the moments before she had managed to assassinate Kuznetsov, a large disturbance in the water had rocked his motor cruiser. From the size of the wake which she had seen hit the boat, it had to have been something large. And the three large humps she had seen rising out of the water in the seconds before she had taken the final shot, had got her mind working overtime.

  Alessandra was Italian, but even in Italy the legend of the Loch Ness monster was known by almost everyone. In fact, in Italy, whenever an Italian thought of Scotland they thought of four things: whisky, rain, bagpipes and the monster. Alessandra had an open mind about most things but she was a pragmatist and not a fantasist. She didn't believe in ghosts. She didn't believe in aliens. But so many people had claimed to have seen the monster from Loch Ness that she had always wondered if perhaps it could be true.

  Tacking from port to starboard, she pulled in the mainsheet a little more, leaned back and closed her eyes. In her mind's eye she recalled for the umpteenth time the picture of those three humps in the water.

  Thinking logically, she tried to convince herself that they were something normal, but try as she might, she couldn't rule out the possibility that she had seen something amazing. And not being able to rule it out, she was forced to allow herself to ask the question: 'had she really just seen the Loch Ness Monster?'