Small print up close wasn’t crucial to an assassin’s trade.
Yes, he was physically better than he’d been when he was twenty-five, injured in a gunfight and recovering in a hospital in the Philippines, or thirty, in prison in Senegal and nearly starving on rotten rations. Or thirty-five, in hiding in France and barely seeing the sun and getting no exercise.
Now he was fit, fast, sharp, and capable.
Physically, he was all he needed to be to do what had to be done now.
But mentally? Did he still have what it took to look a man in the eyes and end his life?
The bad news was he did not know the answer to that question, but the good news was hedidknow exactly how to find out.
—
It took Campbell Coyle another five minutes before his spade struck what he was looking for, and a few minutes more to dig it out.
Three cases, each the size of a roll-aboard, and each covered in electrician’s tape and thick plastic tarp to keep them safe from decay.
He’d buried them here years ago, hoped he’d never need to retrieve them, but something that had always been ticking in the back of his brain told him that a day like this might come.
Finished with this stage of tonight’s work, he tossed the shovel out of the hole, climbed out with a plastic-wrapped case, and carried it back to a small equipment shed next to his house.
He retraced his steps twice more, and soon he had all three cases on a long simple table in his shed under the light of a single bare bulb.
Casting a long shadow as he worked, he used gardening shears to cut the plastic and tape away, then hung the shears back on the wall and looked at the hard plastic boxes that he had not laid eyes on for such a long time.
They were not numbered; he realized he should have numbered them, but he put that out of his mind and opened the one on the far left first.
It was full of cash. Euros and pounds sterling, U.S. dollars, wrapped in tight plastic bundles.
He retrieved a duffel bag from inside the cottage, then returned, pulled a pack of each, and tossed them into the bag.
He opened the next case and looked down at several handguns packed in foam along with extra magazines and three suppressors.
There were six pistols in all, but he chose only one. A Russian Makarov.
It was loaded with a magazine full of .380 rounds, and he pulled three more mags out of the case and put them on the table.
The gun would need cleaning, the extra mags would need loading. He retrieved the suppressor for the corresponding caliber of the weapon, and this went right into the duffel bag.
In the third case he found ammunition and small gold bars.
He was almost certain he would not need gold where he was going, but he was damn sure he would need the ammo. He took three hundred rounds of .380 ball ammunition and another hundred rounds of .380 hollow-point, and he put these on the table.
It was nearly two a.m. by now, but he had hours’ more work to do before the sun rose.
He cleaned the Makarov, screwed on a long suppressor, loaded his mags, and walked outside, again into the cold.
He’d do target practice under cover of darkness. Again tomorrow. During the day he would train in his cottage with his knives. He would run in the hills, pore over his false identities to rememorize everything on them.
He would train with the pistol, train with the knives, work his body as he worked his mind, because though he was still a very fit man, the muscle memory of his past life needed to be refired somehow, and that could only happen if he put himself through the paces of training.
And then, maybe in a month, maybe in two, he would reach out to a neighbor—not Mrs. Brown—about watching over his livestock and his home, and he would map out his plans for the next days, weeks, maybe months.
He did not know what the future would hold, but the drive to fulfill his objective had grown in him from the moment he had looked in the back of that Peugeot in his driveway twelve hours earlier, and each minute since.
He had spent nearly a decade playing the role of Jon Jo Sheehan. A kind man. A simple man.
But now he was Campbell Coyle again.
