The Source - Michael Cordy [2]
'You know who I am?' the killer asked.
He nodded. 'La mano sinistra del diavolo, the left hand of the Devil. The most feared assassin in the world.'
'My real name. Do you know my real identity? Look at me. Look at my face.'
It was now that the fear came – paralysing fear. He couldn't look up. He was too frightened of what he would see.
'Look at me,' the killer ordered. 'Look into the eyes of the man who destroyed your life and damned you to Hell for ever.'
He looked up slowly. His heart seemed to stop in his chest. The killer's face was his own. As he trembled in terror, the din of fierce barking pierced his nightmare and dragged him to consciousness.
Marco Bazin emerged slowly from his medicated sleep and opened his eyes, but the guard dogs outside his house still sounded like the hounds of Hell baying for his soul. Panicked and disoriented, he stared into the gloom. At first he didn't recognize his own bedroom: the clinic had filled it with so much equipment it was more like a hospital room. He wiped sweat from his forehead and scalp. His hair, thick for a man in his late forties, had been his one vanity. The surgeons had said it would grow back but had been less optimistic about purging the disease.
He slowed his breathing and calmed himself. He despised fear. A few short months ago, before he had admitted himself to the exclusive Swiss clinic near his alpine retreat above Davos, he had been the source of fear: la mano sinistra del diavolo. He was renowned for the ruthless efficiency of his kills, and it was said that once a client gave him a name its owner was already dead.
Now he was about to die.
Bazin's hand brushed the crotch of his cotton pyjamas, as if reaching for what they had taken from him. The surgeons wished he had come to them earlier, before the aggressive non-seminoma could spread. They'd told him to watch for several symptoms when this last course of chemotherapy was over. But the cancer was only one of his problems.
As he stared into the dark, listening to the instruments and his breathing, he took stock. He had told no one of his illness and the staff at the clinic had assured him of their total discretion. Yet he knew the whispering must have started. He had turned down three major jobs before he'd entered the clinic, and many other clients had tried to contact him while he had been incommunicado during surgery and chemotherapy. Soon the rumours would harden into conclusions, then actions. Clients would wonder why their calls had gone unanswered; some would suspect he was working for rivals. Enemies would scent blood and seek the opportunity to settle old scores. He may have been a lion once, a king of the jungle, but he was wounded now and the emboldened jackals were circling. If the cancer didn't get him, a bullet would. Either way he was dead.
The dogs barked again and panic surged.
For the first time since his childhood Bazin felt fear. Not of dying – the novelty of that had long worn off – but of what lay beyond death. Since diagnosis and surgery he had been forced to reflect on his life and concluded that, in exchange for losing his soul, killing for a living had yielded nothing of real value – only money and its hollow trappings. A chill ran through him. He reached for the string of wooden rosary beads on the side table – a childhood gift, kept more out of sentiment than faith. He focused on the expensive curtains drawn across the window and imagined the looming mountains beyond. Usually their beauty calmed him but now it intensified his loneliness.
Why were the dogs still barking?
He shook his head, trying to focus his mind, and checked the clock beside his bed. Three sixteen a.m. He heard the night nurse murmuring on the landing outside his room, then another, deeper, voice.
Bazin sat up, dizzy and breathless.
A man – at least one – was here. In his home. In the middle of the night.
It was no surprise