Page 86 of Assassin Anonymous

“He killed someone important to me. He left that scar on my back. Did you ever wonder about why I stuck with you? Anyone with sense would have run. When I found out you were the Pale Horse, I thought I could use you to draw him out. Maybe soften him up. I didn’t know you were the one who went soft.”

“I didn’t go soft.”

“Okay, Gandhi.”

The elevator doors open onto a cavernous parking garage. It’s half empty, spots occupied mostly by black, anonymous-looking sedans and SUVs. Astrid steps out first and tells me to follow. I consider hitting the close door button, but it probably won’t shut on her in time.

“The white van, over there in the corner,” she says.

There’s only one, so I head toward it. “You know, Gandhi said if he had to choose between cowardice and violence, he’d choose violence.”

“Then he’s tougher than you.”

“I’m not a coward,” I tell her.

“Coulda fooled me.”

“You know how hard it is to spend your whole life doing what I did, to be good at it like I was, and to decide to stop? I didn’t make that choice once. I have to make it every single day.”

“Look where it got you.”

“It worked until it didn’t. Why did you take the signal jammer?”

“Once I realized you were useless to me I figured I would draw Kozlov out. But he hasn’t turned up. Then I got the call from Ravi. Figured our paths would cross eventually.”

“Why did you sleep with me?”

She hesitates. “Girl’s got needs.”

I can’t see her face, but from the way she paused, I can tell that’s not the whole truth.

“Where’s Kenji?”

“He was gone two minutes after you disabled the security,” she says. “Saw an opportunity and took it, I guess. Heard it on the radio right before you came in. At this point I don’t need him. I just needed you.”

I stop at the back of the van. She waves the gun so I’ll back off a bit, and she opens the door. The inside is completely stripped, and there’s a metal cage between the back and the front.

“You understand killing Kozlov won’t bring that other person back, right?” I ask.

“Get in the van,” she says.

“You know what anger like that is?”

“What?”

“Drinking poison, hoping the other person dies.”

“Get in the van.”

I climb in and lower myself to the floor as she slams the door. She walks around and hops onto the driver’s seat, stashes the gun on the passenger seat, taps on her phone a little, and drives. We wend our way through the garage and onto the street. It’s hard for me to sit comfortably, so I settle for lying on my back.

After a couple of blocks she says, “I don’t get it.”

“What?”

“The not-killing thing. I know what we do isn’t going to win us a seat in heaven. But how far do you take it? Say you could go back in time, right? Wouldn’t you kill Hitler?”

“Why does it have to be about killing him? If you could go back in time, why not go back further, to when he was a kid, and show him the love and understanding he never got? Dissuade him of all the messed-up notions he had? You haven’t saved seventy million people. You saved seventy million and one.”