Parkerson finished work for the day and stood up from his desk. He walked around to his door and peered out. The office was nearly empty; it was a quarter past six. Almost everyone had gone home.
Jamie was pulling her coat on by her desk. She smiled at Parkerson. “Need anything before I go, Mr. P?”
Parkerson let his eyes wander over her body for a moment. Admired her smile, her long, coltish legs. “I’m fine,” he said, shaking his head. “Get out of here already.”
Jamie winked and tossed him a little wave. Then she turned to go. Parkerson watched her until she’d disappeared down the hallway. Then he ducked back into his office.
He sat down again in front of his computer. Shut down all of his work windows and opened the VPN he’d created, a virtual private network that would hide his activities from the office servers. He turned on a program he’d devised to cloak his IP address, thus preventing any prying eyes out in cyberspace from figuring out his location. Then, satisfied, he logged into the database.
There had been some activity since Saturday’s job. Three new applications, all of them interesting in one way or another, each of them potentially lucrative. One was time-sensitive—a week on the outside. The other two could percolate.
Three new jobs. And no sign of any slowdown. The program was a success, just as Parkerson had always known it would be.
It had been six or seven years now since he’d dreamt up the scheme. Since he’d first recognized the profit potential in murder. The country was at war, and the economy was thriving. Death, Parkerson realized, was a commodity like anything else. There would always be a market. The trick was to exploit it.
Murder for hire. The connotations were ugly. Some shady back-alley thug with a pistol and a duffel bag filled with dirty money. Some sad sack killing his wife for the insurance payoff. Sleaze. Desperation. And, above all, incredible risk.
These days, though, a man could do anything from ordering pizza to finding a girlfriend online. Why not make killing just as simple? Quick and easy. Mitigate the risk. Murder with the click of a mouse.
Parkerson devised a business model. An online database, efficient and anonymous. He’d farm out the killing. Keep his own hands clean. Let someone else do the risky stuff while he counted his money in the background.
He’d searched for months for suitable assets. Common criminals wouldn’t do; they’d get greedy, or scared. They’d make mistakes, freak out at the first complication. Too imperfect. Too human. Parkerson needed better.
He needed drones: cold, clinical, and totally malleable, capable of carrying out instructions quickly and self-sufficiently without ever compromising the program at large. What he needed were trained killing machines.
He found them in steady supply. Two wars were raging. Young men and women were returning from the combat zones by the planeload, many of them psychologically scarred and extremely vulnerable.
It had taken some time, but he’d perfected the formula. Young veterans, loners, traumatized by the war. He found them at veterans’ centers and army hospitals and reeducated them. It was a messy procedure, fraught with risk. Some assets didn’t take to the training, and Parkerson had realized very quickly that though he’d hoped to run the program without ever having to actually kill anyone himself, the assets’ seemingly boundless capacity for failure meant he was going to have to get his hands dirty, and often.
The first candidate had hanged himself within hours of meeting Parkerson. The second had possessed a frustrating immunity to the reeducation process, and an equally frustrating tendency toward attempts at escape. Parkerson had rewarded both men with unmarked graves, and in those early, messy months he’d buried defective asset after defective asset, all of them either too fucked up in the head or not quite fucked up enough for the job.
Little by little, though, Parkerson had learned how to choose the right candidates. Mastered the training regimen. Slowly but surely, the attrition level dwindled. And, just as surely, the program began to thrive.
Still, even the good assets came with expiry dates, no matter how good they were. This current kid, Lind, was on his fifth kill, geriatric in asset years, and Parkerson knew it was almost time to start looking for a replacement. In the meantime, though . . .
Parkerson clicked on the first application, the time-sensitive client, and set about confirming the kill.