Nate ignored him. Something felt wrong. He crept over to the window and looked inside, but saw nothing except darkness. He briefly glanced around and didn’t see any overt cameras on the house or any of the neighboring houses. It didn’t appear as if security was a concern in these parts, and it made sense. The police had told him that the area did not have much crime, which is what had made his attack so unusual.
Pulling out his phone, Nate turned on the flashlight and shone it through the window. At first he couldn’t make out anything, but soon he thought he recognized the familiar shape of a body lying on the floor.
“Wally,” he whispered, “come over here and tell me what you see.”
Wally did as he was asked. It took him a few seconds as well before he was able to define what he saw.
“Holy shit, mate,” he whispered. “It looks like someone’s been flat-packed!”
“One way to find out.” Nate removed an item from his wallet. TheGrim Workshop key card was the size of a credit card but contained several flattened lockpicking tools, including several picks, rakes, and a tension wrench.
“What are you thinking?” Wally was looking at him quizzically.
“We need to get in there and see what’s going on. He might need help. The same guy that attacked me might have attacked him as well.”
“Then we should call the police,” Wally said.
“And say what? That we crept over to this guy’s house looking for information on a mythical city?”
“Fair point,” Wally conceded. “How do we know it’s not alarmed?”
Nate didn’t see any evidence that the house had an alarm system. “There doesn’t seem to be much security around here. If we trigger an alarm, we’ll run.”
“Good thing I stretched today.”
They had both changed before leaving. Nate had thrown on an olive-colored Barbour Ashby jacket and a pair of dark Prana pants to go with his dark-brown boots. Wally was dressed in similar tones. If they did need to run, they would both be hard to spot in the dark.
Nate moved to examine the lock on the door. It seemed to be a simple pin tumbler lock. He inserted the pick into the keyhole upside down, lifted the pins, and slowly withdrew it, allowing them to fall one by one back into place while he counted.
“Five-pin tumbler,” he whispered.
Defeating locks was something Nate was very good at. He had been trained in the army to do so, but most of his ability was natural aptitude rather than practiced skill. Rarely had he met a lock he couldn’t defeat, and a simple one such as this wouldn’t provide much of a challenge, even with the rudimentary lockpicking equipment he was using. It took less than a minute before he felt the satisfying motion of the lock’s tumbler beginning to turn.
“I’m in,” he whispered.
Nate rotated the lock and quickly withdrew his tools, packing them away. Pulling his sleeve down to cover his hand he gently pushed down on the handle and slowly cracked the door open. There was no alarm or sound of any kind. They waited for two full minutes before opening the door and slipping inside. In the service it was known as SLLS, which stood forStop, Look, Listen, and Smell. It was an opportunity to assess danger when entering a new environment, especially a potentially threatening one.
When they were confident that it was safe to enter, they used the flashlights from their phones to scan the living room directly inside the entrance. Nate knew immediately that he was right and something was wrong. The place looked ransacked, with chairs overturned, drawers opened, and random items flung about. Shining his light down on the floor he saw the body. It was a heavyset man in a suit who was splayed out in one of the many awkward positions that recently created corpses often found themselves. It appeared as if his skull had been bashed in, and blood and brain matter had poured from the gaping hole in his head onto the floor. Wally saw it too.
“Fuck me, that’s rank,” the British man whispered, covering his nose with his sleeve.
Nate walked over to a place where he could get a better view of the man’s face. Based off his profile picture on the organization’s website, this was Richter. He shone his light around the room once more. If there was anything useful in this place, or something that could have pointed to the reason its occupant was murdered, it would have been long gone after the thorough job someone had done. He stepped gingerly back toward the door.
“Let’s get out of here,” Nate said. The two men left the house and he relocked the door on their way out. Then they moved swiftly down thestreet back toward their hotel. Once they were a safe distance away, they finally spoke.
“I don’t suppose you want to call the police now?” Wally asked.
“I think it would be worse after we broke into a murdered man’s house, don’t you? Besides, they’ll undoubtedly find him in a few days. Speeding up that process won’t make him any less dead.”
“True,” Wally conceded. “So, what the fuck, then? What are the odds that the geezer you came here to meet is murdered around the same time someone tries to kill you?”
“A million to one.” Nate was now certain the two events were connected. A cold chill ran up his spine, and it wasn’t the cool night air. This was the first time he had felt personally hunted outside of a war zone.
“Maybe we ought to bug out and put some distance between us and this place,” Wally suggested.
“No,” Nate countered quickly. “We can’t. At least not yet.”
“Well, why the fuck not?”
