Free Path of the Assassin by Brad Thor

Renault truck pulled up and double-parked outside. A man in a cap and tan coveralls with the name of his company, Premiere Piscine & Spa, embroidered across the back, entered and ordered a drink at the bar. The assassin watched him. He was right on time.
    The man smoked a cigarette and made small talk with the bartender. Ten minutes later, he paid his bill and went downstairs to use the toilet. He had more than enough time to get to his job at the Ritz and they never let him use their toilet. The Ritz demanded that all deliveries, repairs to common areas, and the cleaning of the pool happen in the dead of night, as if by magic, so that guests would never be troubled by the appearance of any stray workmen.
    The man stood on the dirty footrests of the Turkish toilet and began to relieve himself. When his steady stream of relief could be heard outside, the assassin emerged from the adjacent cabine, jerked open the pool cleaner’s door, and put two bullets into the back of his head with a silenced French nine-millimeter MAS pistol. The assassin dragged the lifeless body out, careful not to get any blood on the floor, and crammed it into an adjoining storage closet, where it wouldn’t be found until, at the earliest, the next afternoon.
    Quickly, the assassin pulled on an identical cap and pair of tan coveralls with Premiere Piscine & Spa embroidered across the back and then threw the duffel into the storage closet and closed the door. With the dangling cigarette and lowered head, no one suspected the figure leaving the café was anyone other than the pool man.
    The assassin drove to a narrow, dimly lit street in Paris’s thirteenth arrondissement. A large key was fitted into a rusting lock, which opened a set of aging double doors, and the truck was backed into a filthy rented garage. It took the assassin only a matter of moments to load the required materials and be back on the road.
    At the service entrance of the Ritz, the assassin parked the blue Renault and off-loaded a host of pool-cleaning supplies onto a handcart, including three large plastic barrels labeled “Chlorine.”
    The security at the hotel was the absolute best in Paris. With the wide array of celebrities and dignitaries the hotel hosted, it had to be. The guard at the service entrance was paid to be vigilant, and he knew all of the regular service providers, including the pool cleaner.
    “Where is Jacques tonight?” he asked, trying to get a good look beneath the cap at the pool cleaner’s unusual eyes.
    “Migraine,” responded the assassin with a disinterested, blue-collar Parisian accent.
    “I’ve never seen you before.”
    “Jacques keeps all the important jobs for himself. I get the shitty pools out in the suburbs. But, at least I don’t have to do them in the middle of the night. Do you have a copy of the fax?”
    The man looked through the stack of paperwork he had been handed at the beginning of his shift, and sure enough, it included a fax from Premiere Piscine & Spa, which stated that Jacques would not be able to make it tonight and that his coworker would be doing the pool cleaning. Faking it had been easy. The assassin had contacted Premiere weeks before and had asked to be sent a quote for pool cleaning. With that in hand, all that needed to be done was to copy their cover sheet and program a new fax machine with the correct number, so that when it arrived at the Ritz, everything would appear to be in order.
    The guard recognized the blue Renault, the fax was in keeping with hotel service policy, the replacement was wearing the company uniform, and the entire pool area—the entire hotel, for that matter—was monitored with video cameras, so he could see no reason not to let the worker pass. He did, though, have one more question.
    “Why all the supplies?”
    “Bacteria.”
    “Bacteria?”
    “The last time Jacques was here, he noticed a slight buildup. He didn’t have enough chemicals with him to do a proper shock treatment, so it