Free No Time Left by David Baldacci Page B

his newspaper with one hand while he twirled his umbrella with the other.
    The man’s obituary appeared in the city newspaper two days later. He had succumbed to some inexplicable malady that had left
     him in agony before killing him. An autopsy would be done to see what had caused the poor fellow’s demise. His bereaved family
     lay in ruins, his business disintegrating without his stalwart hand at the helm.
    As Becker sat in his apartment a thousand miles away reading the account on the computer he knew he could save the poor medical
     examiner the trouble.
    “Compound 1080,” he said aloud. He knew that the man had died of ventricular arrhythmias. Compound 1080, discovered by German
     chemists during World War II and used in various pesticides, disrupted cellular metabolism and with it the citric acid cycle,
     also known as the Krebs Cycle, depriving cells of energy. The poison worked rapidly and did incredibly unpleasant things to
     the person injected with it. The cylinder in Becker’s umbrella point had been filled with enough Compound 1080 to finish off
     the fellow in a matter of hours. There was no antidote and his last few hours of life, Becker knew, had been filled with unimaginable
     pain that no human could withstand. He had no doubt screamed to his God for mercy. He was a religious man, Becker knew, having
     followed him and his beautiful family to Mass the Sunday before plunging his umbrella point into the unfortunate gent’s hamstring.
     His God had not answered back. Even all-powerful gods bowed before poisons with no known antidotes.
    Becker was a student of history, or at least certain esoteric parts of it. He’d gotten the idea of the umbrella delivery system
     from an attack carried out by the Bulgarian secret police in the 1970s against a person making trouble for the government.
     Why reinvent the wheel? However, he had put his original spin on the matter because the Bulgarians had used that old standby,
     ricin, as the killing agent. Compound 1080 was, at least in his mind, far classier.
    He used his computer to check his bank account, making sure that the remainder of his kill fee had reached his overseas bank.
     He would never read or think about the man again. He would not mentally commiserate with the widow or the children who’d lost
     their father. There was nothing productive about that. If he had those types of feelings, or weaknesses rather, he would not
     have chosen this line of work. It was a job, just a job. And it was time to move on to another one. Becker was much in demand.
     That came from never having failed and being unwaveringly discreet.
    A week later the letter arrived in the mail. It was time to go to work again.
    He stepped aboard another plane, landed, rented a car, and drove to the man’s house out near the water. It was a beautiful
     estate set amid rows of mature oak and maple trees, fat bushes draped in bloom, flower-lined stone and gravel paths that meandered
     in and out of sight. The home itself was large and at least two centuries old with the plentiful trappings of that era’s architecture,
     gables and Doric columns and balustrades, lichen-covered ashlar quoins at the corners and rows of arched windows in front.
     He was ushered into the library by a dour woman in a black maid’s uniform. The shelves were filled with old books that looked
     well read, and the vast room had a pleasant aroma of mingled scents, leather, tobacco and candle wax.
    The man who joined him moments later was tall and cadaverous, with a horseshoe of white hair remaining on his head. His mustache
     drooped over his small mouth. His teeth looked false. He wore a set of ancient tweeds, with an overly starched collared shirt
     and a drab tie that disappeared down into a waistcoat, which looked as though it would be scratchy to the touch. Across its
     front was a fat watch on a gold chain. He sat down behind an enormous mahogany desk meticulously organized and motioned for
     Becker to sit