Page 51 of Assassin Anonymous

“Nothing,” I say.

As I’m pulling my shirt on she focuses on the bandage covering the knife wound on my stomach.

I look down and wonder if I pulled a stitch. I keep forgetting about it; the pain has subsided to the point where I barely notice it unless I move the wrong way, or I cough. But the bandage is clean, and…

“Oh shit,” she says.

It hits me, and my blood turns to ice. “You stuck your finger in there…”

“If it was small I could have missed it,” she says. “I told you it wasn’t foolproof. How is that even possible?”

He stabbed me. Stuck it in, pulled it out, didn’t even offer to buy me dinner first. How the hell could it leave a GPS device behind?

Then it hits me.

“A WASP knife,” I tell her.

“A what knife?”

“WASP. It’s nasty, made for hunting. It injects a bubble of carbon dioxide into the body cavity. It freezes and explodes. Maybe this was a modified version, just made to deposit something.” The thought of an electronic device inside my stomach makes me a little nauseated. “What are the options, besides exploratory surgery in this guy’s bathtub?”

Astrid shrugs. “Exploratory surgery in this guy’s bathtub.”

We throw our clothes back on and call to Gaius, who comes out of the bathroom. Astrid tells him, “I need a sharp knife, alcohol, some boiling water, as many towels as you have. Do you have any prescription painkillers?”

“Woah woah woah,” Gaius says. “What did I miss?”

I pull up my shirt to show off the bandage. “The guy stabbed me. I think the tracker might be in here. Which means this guy might be coming here. As much as I don’t want to do this, we need to get this out of me as quickly as possible.”

“All right, hold on, you absolute lunatics,” he says. “Give me a minute.”

He disappears into the bedroom and we hear drawers opening and muttering, and finally he comes back with a small black device that looks like a walkie-talkie, with a thick black antenna on the top. He plugs it into his computer.

“Signal jammer,” he says. “It’ll block the signal as long as it’s within twenty feet of you. But it’s going to interfere with your cell phone, too. You can turn it off to make calls, but I suggest you don’t. Soon as you do, this guy will have your location.”

I move to the window and peek outside, scanning the street. It’s decently crowded with pedestrians and I figure, maybe I’m overthinking this.

Then I see him.

The Russian is standing across the street. He’s wearing a green military jacket and smoking a cigarette, leaning against a lamppost like he’s waiting for a bus.

“Mark?” Astrid asks.

“How precise is this thing, Gaius?”

“Not to the spot. Probably a hundred-foot radius.”

He must know we’re in the area and we’ve stopped moving. So he’s waiting for us to show ourselves, or he’s just hanging back to keep an eye on us. I move away from the curtain before he can look up. “And how long is this going to take?”

Gaius hits a few keys. “Done.”

I peek around the curtain, careful to keep myself mostly obscured. The Russian finishes his cigarette and takes something out of his pocket that looks like a phone. He stares at it for a moment, then looks up, scanning the block, confused.

“What’s wrong?” Astrid asks.

I duck away from the window. “Seems timing was on our side. He’s across the street. But it looks like the jammer worked.”

She steps toward the window, but I grab her elbow. “Don’t look.”