Angel and the Assassin: Be Brave

school
    gates beside Jack. “Work hard,” he called. He had just looked right to merge into
    traffic when his mobile buzzed. It was the secure line Conran had given him, and he
    had got back into the habit of carrying it everywhere. He snatched it off his belt.
    “You always seem to get me when I‟m at the gym or on my way.”
    “Parliament Square, twenty minutes. I‟ll be at the Winston Churchill statue.”
    Conran hung up.
    “Will you now?” Kael said out loud, but his adrenaline began to rush and the
    excitement he felt when a job was imminent surged through him. What a fool he
    had been to even think he could have an ordinary life.
    The day was beautiful. Mid-March and the sun was shining, which was rare
    for London. The streets were loud with early-morning rush-hour traffic. By the time
    Kael reached Parliament Square and found a place to park, Conran was sitting on
    the wall behind the statue looking at his watch. Big Ben struck ten o‟clock.
    “You‟re half an hour late,” Conran said, rising and beginning to walk across
    the grass.
    Kael did not respond. The stress of teaching languages to ungrateful morons
    was behind him. He had been feeling remarkably content the last few weeks. The
    Argentine hit had calmed him the way a long massage calmed a normal man. His
    birthday dinner had made him feel loved. All those years of loneliness, where all he
    had to look forward to was the next job in between long stretches of sex, staying fit,
    and visiting his mum, seemed a thing of the past. He had lived like some kind of
    animal with no family ties—a shark or a crocodile—feeding and fornicating but
    never feeling. Angel had made him human.
    Partly to irritate him and partly because he actually felt gratitude toward the
    man for setting him back on track, Kael threw his arm around Conran and
    squeezed his shoulders. “There are times I feel something akin to affection for you,
    Stephen.”
    “Get off, you fool.” Conran shook him off, making Kael laugh out loud and grab
    him in a tight body hug for no other reason than the pleasure of making the man
    squirm.

    Angel and the Assassin: Be Brave

    75

    “You know you love it.” Finally he released him. “Let‟s sit.” Kael pointed at a
    vacant bench a few yards away, and they sat down. “Right, what have you got for
    me?”
    “Have you settled into the fact that you are not meant to be in the classroom
    with ordinary people?” Conran extracted a folder from his briefcase and handed it to
    Kael.
    “Yes.” He took the folder but looked at Conran. “Killing has the same effect on
    me that prayer has on other people. It brings me close to God.”
    “You say things like that just for effect. But you are remarkably calmer since
    Argentina.” He nodded at the folder, and Kael opened it.
    A small photograph was clipped to a sheet of paper. The man was in his late
    forties and balding. Kael read his vital statistics. “Graham Clement. Five feet ten
    inches. Eleven stone six pounds. Brown, thinning hair. Clean shaven. No tattoos or
    scars.”
    “I‟m afraid you can‟t keep the picture, but knowing you, you don‟t need it.”
    “I could pick him out of a crowd six months from now.”
    “Yes, I know you could,” Conran acknowledged. “We want him back alive. He
    was supposed to appear before an in-camera tribunal. He was a scientist who blew
    the whistle on a pharmaceutical company that has been selling out-of-date drugs to
    be distributed in the third world. He demanded a big fee, which he is getting in
    payments, and then he managed to slip his minders.”
    “Why would he do that if he‟s getting what he wants?”
    “Because he has an addiction and he couldn‟t control himself.”
    “We all do. What‟s his?” Kael asked.
    Distaste crossed Conran‟s face, thinning his mouth into a sneer. “Young girls.
    He‟s being supplied by a man from Poland, Jarogniew Dudek, who has an extensive
    network of houses throughout Europe where he imprisons women, trafficked mostly
    from Eastern Europe but other places too—African countries and the Philippines.
    He deals mostly in sex slaves but also in male slaves for diamond mines and so on.
    We are fairly certain Clement is in a house outside Paris belonging to Dudek. Look
    at the next sheet.”
    It was the layout of a large, walled house. Kael quickly scanned and
    memorized it.
    “If he isn‟t there, then I„ll give you the locations of Dudek‟s other houses, but
    intelligence says he is.