Free Consent to Kill by Vince Flynn Page A

extensively, and he appeared to have no problem spending money. He did, however, have a problem paying his bills, which the assassin reasoned was why a price had been placed on his head. For a man who had pissed off the wrong people, he was acting unusually calm. Especially when the people he had offended were Russian Mafiosi. The assassin had been working on his Russian over the last several years, and found the language by far the most difficult of the five he spoke fluently. He did not prefer to operate in the former Soviet Union, but the old communist country and its satellites were the largest growth market in his line of work. They were ruthless bastards willing to kill anyone who screwed them on a deal no matter how illegal or legitimate it may have been. They wanted a guaranteed return on their investments, and when a deal didn’t perform, the paranoid thugs immediately jumped to the conclusion that they’d been double-crossed. He guessed that was what had happened with the Turk. He didn’t know for sure. To find that out would have involved asking a few questions, and as a general rule, he asked only what he absolutely needed to know.
    He and his partner had used a medium-range parabolic microphone to listen in on the Turkish man’s phone calls as he went for his midmorning walks. The man had told a friend yesterday that the Russians were simpletons, but that they weren’t crazy enough to try to kill him in London. The comment struck the assassin as pure idiocy, and it caused him to wonder how the Turk had lasted as long as he had. The man was fifty-eight years old and had been involved in this type of stuff for twenty-plus years. Underestimating one’s enemy was a classic tactical mistake—one that was usually born out of stupidity or arrogance or both.
    He leaned against the street lamp and checked his watch, careful to keep his head tilted down. There was a camera pod mounted on the light above him. It was twenty after ten. He was dressed in business attire with a long black trench coat and fedora. His black hair had been lightened to a sandy blond, special contacts made his brown eyes appear hazel and they were further concealed by a pair of black-rimmed glasses with clear lenses. An umbrella dangled from the crook of his left arm that held a twice-folded copy of the Times. The sky was gray and looked as if it might bring rain at any moment.
    Two days in a row the Turk had appeared at ten in the morning to take his walk to the park. He donned an earpiece and the entire trip, there and back, he talked on his phone and smoked cigarettes. He was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched, which, when one looked at his comments, was not surprising. Like the majority of the men the assassin had killed, the Turk was a man of habits. He always stayed at the Hampshire when in London, and, weather permitting, he took daily walks to St. James Park, went back to the hotel for lunch, then to the bank where he kept an office and then afternoon tea at Browns.
    Something was throwing him off his normal schedule this morning and the assassin was beginning to worry. Yes, it looked like it could rain at any moment, but the weather was no different than the previous two days. There was a fine line between rushing a job and sitting on it too long. Long surveillance periods could lead to boredom, hesitancy, and sometimes inaction. They also increased the chances that someone would notice you. On the other hand, rushing a job before you had a complete sense of the overall tactical situation could be even more disastrous. Maps had to be memorized, schedules scrutinized, and multiple modes of transportation put into place. And in London one could never forget about the omnipresent security cameras.
    The assassin was beginning to doubt that the Turk would show. He would either have to dispatch him when he was coming out of his afternoon tea or wait another day to kill him in the park. As he was weighing his two options the