Michael walked on, using the sound of the car to gauge its distance. The car was closer now. He listened intently. If it sped up, it would be trying to hit him. If it slowed down, someone in it would be planning to shoot.
Four more strides and he sidestepped to the right to put himself between two vans.
There was the growl of the engine speeding up, then a loud squeal of tires as the driver braked, and then the tires spinning. There was the slam of a car door, then fast footsteps, leather-soled shoes dashing toward him.
Michael knelt on the ground, looked under the van beside him, and saw the feet of the running man. He went up on the balls of his feet and waited, then launched himself into the space between the van and the next car. Like a football tackler, he hit the man with his shoulder and slammed him into the car. The man’s own speed, combined with the force of Michael’s tackle, made the impact hard and damaging. The man was hurt, and he was down. In a second, Michael had his legs wrapped around the man’s body like a wrestler would, and he was tightening the strap from his suitcase around the man’s neck.
After a few more seconds of intense effort, Michael sensed a change and let go of the strap with his left hand. He pulled it, and it came off the man’s neck and the man lay still. Michael rolled the man’s body away from him and then knelt over it, rapidly patting its pockets and running his hands along the sides, the legs, the small of the back. He found a large folding knife, but no gun.
He looked up from the man and his eyes went straight across the aisle of cars where he heard the engine again.
He heard another car door slam, then more footsteps. This time he saw the reflection in a rearview mirror of a man moving from the direction of the car sounds to the opening between two cars where Michael had run.
The driver seemed to have assumed that Michael had been killed by his friend and that now it was his responsibility to help clean up. Michael slid under the van beside him and slithered toward the front. Then he heard leather-soled shoes again, running this time, making that chuff, chuff sound when the balls of the feet hit the pavement. He used it to tell where to look for the man’s feet.
When he saw them, he slid out on the other side of the van. He stood still and waited until the man was near the back, then came around the front of the van to approach him from behind. Michael hooked his left forearm across the man’s face at eye level, jerked his head backward, and brought the knife across the man’s throat. Michael quickly withdrew his arm and pushed the man hard with his other hand. Blood spurted out in a stream from the man’s open wound as he lay sprawled on the pavement between the cars, bleeding heavily.
Michael ran along the aisle, got into the car the two men had left there, and drove it between two white lines into a parking space. He pressed the key fob to lock it and then ran back to where the first body lay. He picked up his leather bag, reattached the strap to it, and began to walk.
His eyes caught headlights at a distance. It was the shuttle coming in the entrance. He trotted to the end of the aisle and stepped out to flag down the bus before it got close enough for the driver to see the two bodies lying between the cars.
6
Schaeffer checked in for his flight to Sydney as Paul Foster, received his boarding pass, and then used some of the waiting time in the airport shops buying clothes. He had gotten splashes of dirty water on the clothes he’d worn in the Long Stay Car Park. He was sure that he’d picked up some blood spray too, although he couldn’t see it. He also wanted to change his appearance as much as possible.
He found a guidebook to Sydney in a tourist shop and looked up the weather. It was late autumn there now, with temperatures between 14.6 and 22.2 degrees Celsius—not much different from May temperatures in Manchester. He still automatically translated the numbers to Fahrenheit, even though he didn’t need to anymore: it was about 58 to 72 degrees.
He replaced the clothes he’d been wearing and left those in the trash in the distant restroom where he got changed. He spent the rest of the wait near a gate far from the one where he would be departing. He approached his gate right as the plane was boarding, so he could minimize the time he spent standing still. As he approached the gate, he stared intently at each person, looking for watchers. He doubled back to be sure nobody was following him, then waited for his boarding group to be called and got in line. As soon as he had made it past the doorway into the boarding tunnel, he began to feel a bit better.
He made it down the aisle of the plane and pushed his bag into the overhead compartment. Soon the airplane’s doors were closed, the plane pushed back onto the apron, and then it bumped along on the pavement, its wings vibrating slightly. It stopped, the engine noise swelled, and it roared off and upward into the sky.
The flight was enormously long—fifteen thousand kilometers—and his first stop would take place after twelve hours. He would wait in Singapore for two hours and then endure eleven more hours to Sydney. After that, he would find his way to a section of Sydney called “The Rocks.” It produced no image at all in his imagination, but according to his guidebook, it was the right place to go.
It was incredibly far, and that was the idea. It was his attempt to do things the way Meg wanted. At one time that would not have occurred to him, but he wasn’t just humoring her. For his whole working life and afterward, he had followed the strategy that Eddie Mastrewski had taught him: “If you learn there’s a contract out on you, don’t hesitate. Find out who it is and go after him. Don’t bother wasting bodyguards or underlings. Go right to the one who pays them all. Find him and stop his heart any way you can. You don’t get anything for giving his people an extra hour of open season on you.”
In this situation he’d never done anything else. Maybe it was time to use Meg’s idea instead. He was alive, the ones who had followed him were dead, and he was flying away at over six hundred miles an hour. Maybe this was going to be the end of the killing. If Australia turned out to be safe and pleasant, she would join him.
He lay back in his seat and thought about the start of his life as a killer. When he and Eddie had talked about it years later, they always called it “Opening Day.”
The memory of that day nearly fifty years ago was clearer than the sight of it had been at the time. He could remember all that had led up to it, could see and feel the bright warm sunshine and the excitement and anticipation, and could hear the voices of the people around him that day. But this time through, he knew all the rest of it too. He knew what was going to happen, and he knew what it meant, and how the world was going to change, and how he was going to change. What would have surprised him at the time were the many ways in which he would be exactly the same. He would still be the boy, feeling and thinking and wondering the same at sixty as he did that day at fifteen.
He walked along the sidewalk with Eddie, aware of the difference in their sizes. Eddie Mastrewski was bulky and strong, not much taller than the boy was at fifteen, but broader, with a bull neck and big workman’s arms and legs.