Free The Informant by Thomas Perry Page B

There were surveillance cameras, sign-in sheets, calls made to verify appointments before anybody was permitted to go to the elevator. On the tenth floor, all the people in the reception areas, cubicles, and hallways stood between the elevator and the target. When he left work, he walked a hundred yards with a couple of colleagues and went down with thousands of people into a subway. When he came out at his stop, he was a hundred yards from his high-security apartment. The only times to get him were the walk to the subway or his walk from it. When the day came, the boy wore a baseball cap and carried his outfielder's glove. He and Eddie joined the crowd on the sidewalk and came up behind the man. Eddie reached into the boy's glove, pulled out a small pistol fitted with a silencer, shot the man twice behind the ear, and put the pistol back in the glove. The man fell onto the sidewalk, Eddie grabbed the boy and stepped around the body, as though shielding him from the sight of the man dying of a heart attack on the street. Other bystanders stepped between the boy and the dreadful spectacle, trying to get their bodies in his line of sight while others knelt beside the body. In less than a minute Eddie and the boy were down the steps to the platform and getting on the subway train.
    The boy found that after a while there were very few jobs that seemed difficult to him. Most of the time it was like turning off a light. Eddie would walk up to the side window of a car stopped in traffic, pull out a pistol, fire a shot into the driver's head, and walk on. Or he would knock on an apartment door, wait until he saw the peephole turn dark because the man inside had his eye up to it, and then fire through the door into the man's chest.
    "Learn your trade," Eddie said. "You do that and you'll always have the edge. You'll be luring people out into the night when your eyes are used to the dark and theirs aren't. Plan a job for days, but do it in seconds. The guy should be dead before he has the time to figure out if he should be scared or not. You walk into a store or a restaurant to get somebody, you're like an egg in a frying pan. If you take too much time, you heat up and burn. Do it fast and get out."
    By the time he was sixteen, he had acquired the discipline and the skills. He had also picked up Eddie's philosophy. Eddie had said, "Everybody dies. It's just a question of timing, and whether the one who gets paid for it is you or a bunch of doctors. It might as well be you."
    After all these years, the essentials of killing had not changed. He needed to kill Tosca, and if Tosca wasn't at his house in Glen Cove, the next place to look was his house in Canada. From New Jersey he drove to Rochester, New York, and found a hotel near the airport. He had always liked staying in hotels like this because they were full of men exactly like the one he was pretending to be. They were businessmen, most of them in sales, visiting their clients on regular rounds. But an increasing number of them were entrepreneurs trying to get some fledgling enterprise a loan from a bank or license some bit of software from another company. Sometimes when he was having a meal in a mediocre restaurant in an airport hotel, he would be seated near a table of five or six of them, all smiling and chuckling through the flop sweat as they tried to sell each other things. There would always be one or two so young that they looked unaccustomed to wearing suits. But there would also be a man a generation older who might be a district manager or an owner, depending on the size of the company.
    When he had first started working long-distance hits, he had looked just like one of the young ones—a bit skinny and awkward. Now he looked like the older one, the boss who knew the way these trips worked. The older man knew that his side wasn't going to go home with everything they came for, but also knew the company could live without it. The older man was usually a little calmer,