KILLING SARAI(66)

“Sarai, listen to me carefully,” he says. “If you choose to go with me you need to know that you could be killed. I will do everything in my power to keep you safe, but it’s not a guarantee because no matter how much you trust me, you should never, under any circumstances trust anyone fully. In the end, you can only trust yourself. I am not your hero. I am not the other half of your soul who could never let anything bad ever happen to you. Trust your instincts first always, and me, if you choose, last.”

I nod apprehensively.

“So what will it be?” he asks. “France or Los Angeles?”

I don’t really have to think about it because I know what I want, but I pretend to think about it to make me appear less irrational.

“Los Angeles,” I say letting out a breath.

Victor gazes into my eyes for a moment, a look of contemplation and even a bit of wavering settles on his expression.

He stands up and straightens his suit.

“Then pack your things,” he says as he walks away. “We leave in ten minutes.”





CHAPTER THIRTY





Victor





I had hoped she would choose France, but I knew she would choose to go with me. I could still very well take her to France and set her up with everything she needs and my conscience would be clear. But I bypassed the meaning of rational where Sarai is concerned a long time ago. She may very well die in Los Angeles, but I gave her a choice. I all but spelled out the potential consequences of her decision. I didn’t exactly tell her everything, but there is a method to my madness. I can’t allow her time to contemplate what she might do because in this business sometimes a life or death decision comes when you least expect it. And that is the kind of scenario she needs to experience.

Perhaps a part of me hopes she doesn’t make it through the mission because then I will be free of my…shortcomings when it comes to her. But the other part of me, the part that I’m still struggling with that brought her with me as far as I have…

That’s an entirely different issue.

If she lives then I’ll find it necessary to confront it.

If she dies…If she dies then I will go back to my normal life and never find myself in a situation like this again.

“His name is Arthur Hamburg,” I say, laying a manila envelope on Sarai’s lap next to me on the private jet. “He owns Hamburg & Sthilz, the most successful real estate agency on the west coast. But his most lucrative business is more underground.”

Attracted by my silence, she looks up from the photo she removed from the envelope.

“What is his other business?” she asks, as I knew she would.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “The information that I choose to give you is all that you need.”

She cocks her head to one side. “But you know more,” she accuses.

“Yes, I do,” I admit. “But as your employer, you never ask questions about the personal nature of any mark unless you’re unclear as to how you’re going to eliminate him. What he does for a living, who his wife is, his children, if he has any, his crimes, if he has any of those, they don’t matter. The less you know about his personal life, the less of a risk there is for you to become emotionally involved. I give you a photo, tell you his frequent whereabouts and habits, designate a manner in which I prefer the hit to be carried out: messy and in public to send a message, or discreet and accidental to avoid an investigation, and then you take care of the rest.”

She thinks about it a moment, the photo of Arthur Hamburg clutched in her fingertips.

“Wait,” she says, “so you’re saying that you don’t only kill bad people. You also kill innocent people?”

A small smile, I admit unbecoming of me, lifts the edges of my mouth. “No one is innocent, Sarai,” I repeat something she said to me once. “Children, yes, but everyone else, they are as innocent as you or I. Think of it this way if it makes you feel any better: to have a hit placed on you, you must’ve done something or be involved in something illegal or ‘bad’ as you call it.”

“I thought you said that I was innocent,” she reminds me. “And that’s why you didn’t kill me.”

“You were,” I say. “And I wasn’t ordered to kill you by my employer. Javier’s offer was considered a private hit, it didn’t go through my employer first. Private hits are the ones that get innocent people killed. Wives wanting their husbands deaths to look accidental so they can collect their inheritance. Scorned lovers pay private parties to kill their girlfriends out of jealousy and vengeance. I don’t take jobs like those and my employer has never given me one. My Order deals only in crime, government corruption and a host of other things that make bad people bad. And sometimes we eliminate people who might be considered innocent, but who are a threat to a large number of innocent people, or an idea.”

Her eyebrows crease gently as she looks to me to elaborate further.

“Would you have killed Robert Oppenheimer if you knew he was going to head the invention of the Atomic Bomb? Or, eliminate a scientist before she completes her lifelong quest to create a deadly virus in her lab that is intended only to be used against an enemy country in a time of war?”

“Yes, I guess I would,” she says. “Though something like that is sort of like playing God with people’s lives. You’re convicting someone of a crime before it happens.”