Snakehead

dangerous if you’re in crime. He liked to have a black coffee and a cognac every night at a little café in the square opposite St. Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina. That was where they were going to kill him. John let me know when the hit was arranged. It was going to be at eleven o’clock at night on November 11. All the elevens. We’d be there waiting. We’d let them take Caxero—he was a nasty piece of work and we might as well let Scorpia get him out of the way—and then we’d move in and grab John. But we’d let Yassen escape. He’d report back to Scorpia. He’d tell them that their man had been captured.
    “It had to look good. I was in charge of the operation. This was the first time I was given command. I had nine men, and even though John was our target, we were all carrying real ammunition—not blanks. Yassen might have been able to tell the difference. He was that smart. We were all wearing concealed body armor. John wouldn’t be aiming at us when we moved in, but Yassen would. And we already knew he was a crack shot.
    “I’d put a couple of my people in place that morning. The cathedral had these two towers—one on either side—and I put one in each. I remember it also had two clocks. One of them was five minutes slow. I thought it was strange, the two faces showing different times. Anyway, the men in the towers had night vision glasses and radios. They could see the whole town from up there. They’d make sure that nothing went wrong.”
    Ash paused.
    “Everything went wrong, Alex. Everything.”
    “Tell me.”
    Ash sipped his whisky. All the ice had melted.
    “We arrived at Mdina just after ten thirty. It was a beautiful night. This was November, and all the tourists had gone. There was a sliver of a crescent moon and a sky full of stars. As we came in through the south gate, it was like stepping back a thousand years in time. The roads in Mdina are narrow and the walls are high. And all the bricks are different shapes and sizes. You can almost imagine them being put in place one by one.
    “The whole place felt deserted. The shutters were closed on the houses, and the only light seemed to come from the wrought-iron lamps hanging over the corners. As we made our way up the Triq Villgaignon—that was the name of the main street—a horse-drawn carriage crossed in front of us. They use them to ferry tourists, but this one was on its way home. I can still hear the echo of the horse’s hooves and the rattle of the wheels on the cobbles.
    “I got a whisper in my earpiece from the lookout in the tower. Caxero was in his usual place, drinking his coffee and smoking a cigar. No sign of anyone else. It was a quarter to eleven.
    “We crept forward…past an old chapel on one side of the road, a crumbling palazzo on the other. All the shops and restaurants were closed—some for the whole winter. I had seven men with me. We were all dressed in black. We’d spent half the day studying the map of Mdina, and I signaled them to spread out. We were going to surround the square, ready to move in.
    “Ten to eleven. I could see the time on the cathedral clock. And there was Caxero. He was a short, round man in a suit. He had a fancy mustache, and he was holding his coffee cup with his little finger pointing into the air. There were a couple of cars parked in the square next to some cannons and a waiter standing in the door of the café. Otherwise, nothing.
    “But then, suddenly, they were there…John Rider and Yassen Gregorovich—or Hunter and Cossack. Those were the names they used. They were five minutes early…that was what I thought. That was my first mistake.”
    “The clocks…”
    “The cathedral clocks. Yes. One was right and one was wrong and in all the tension I’d been looking at the one that was five minutes slow. As for Yassen, it was like some trick in a movie. One minute he wasn’t there, the next he was, with John next to him. It was a ninja technique—how to move and to stay invisible—and the irony was it was probably your dad who’d taught him.
    “I don’t think Caxero saw them coming. They walked straight up to him and he was still holding that coffee cup in that stupid way. He looked up just as a complete stranger shot him in the heart. Yassen didn’t do it quickly. I remember thinking that I’d never seen anyone so relaxed.
    “I was worried that my men wouldn’t be in place yet, that not all the exits from the square would be covered. But in a way that didn’t