9

Westminster Pier, London

Jason enjoyed London.

First, the rich blend of sizes, skin colors, and languages made it easy to disappear into a crowd. He seldom had to completely alter his face. A pair of sunglasses plus a light tweak that created a hook in his nose was all it took, hardly any pain at all.

Second, and more importantly, London was the home of the Mare Street Museum of Curiosities.

He visited the Mare Street Museum whenever he was in the city, paying his six pounds for a cup of tea and access to the dusty aisles crowded with shrunken heads, pickled fetuses, and archaic books. The cacophony of oddities soothed him, somehow. It was the only place in the world he felt completely at home. He supposed it reminded him of his childhood in New Orleans. He’d lived for a time above a cluttered French Quarter store, in a home where his mother at turns tortured and ignored him.

It was more than nostalgia that attracted him to the Mare Museum, though.

The museum was a place where the rules were upside down. Here, the deformed and demented were brought into the light. They were celebrated.

He liked to think of his skull ending up at the Mare once he died.

That would be a thing.

He’d discovered the ability to change his facial features at age six, after his mother had squeezed her hand into a fist and punched his face. He could call up the pop-squish noise of his nose exploding at will, all these years later. The blast of pain so sharp it momentarily blinded him. The satisfied expression on his mother’s face.

He could no longer remember why she’d hit him, but he knew he’d been unable to breathe. Hot blood had gushed. His destroyed nasal passages sent the liquid the wrong way. His mother watched him struggle, sipping and sucking on the cigarette that she hadn’t even set down to punch him.

He’d instinctively put his hand to the hamburger of his nose and pulled it away from his face. The pain was excruciating, but it meant he could breathe. He chewed air like a starving person and bolted to the bathroom, locking the door behind him.

He stared in the mirror, his eyes already bruised from the blow.

His nose was altered—broken, certainly, but also a whole new appendage. It amazed him how quickly a new nose changed his appearance. He stayed in the bathroom that entire day. When the bleeding stopped, he worked the cartilage like a muscle, flexing bits, suspending them in place, twitching others. It hurt a hundred times worse than any punch, the pain driving him to scream out, but it was worth it when he discovered that he could morph and hold the shape of his nose as readily as other people could raise an eyebrow or crack their knuckles.

As time passed, with repetition and a growing tolerance to pain, he’d learned to modify the shape of the skin around his eyes and mouth and raise or lower his cheekbones as well. At the time, he figured it was some rare double-jointedness. When he was old enough, he researched it. As near as he could tell, he had sentient Sharpey’s fibers, the microscopic fingers of collagen that connected bone to muscle to skin.

If he’d been born one hundred years earlier, he’d have been killed or put in a freakshow.

Instead, the ability to adjust his appearance at will led him to this job. With wigs, colored contacts, a variety of clothing, and his fingerprints shaved off, he was impossible to trace.

He carried the Mare Street Museum’s peacefulness with him as he rode the Tube toward Parliament. He had a job to do before he met with the Grimalkin.

Reluctance tugged at his shoulders like a too-tight coat. He preferred to work alone but understood he had to reestablish himself after the Alcatraz fiasco. It had cost him his beloved mentor, Carl Barnaby, who was now in jail. After a workplace error on such a grand scale, Jason recognized he was lucky the Order had allowed him to continue living.

He would prove himself worthy of this second chance, even if it meant working with a partner.

Besides, the Grimalkin was mythical, a genius codebreaker and assassin equally skilled with a gun, poison, or a knife. The Grimalkin was purported to be the manager who’d fired Peruvian activist María Elena Moyano, Russian human rights activist and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and the most famous firing, Benazir Bhutto, the first and hopefully last female prime minister of Pakistan.

Attributing these deeds to the Grimalkin could be baseless lip-flapping meant to bolster a reputation. The world of assassins was not above that, though Jason had never resorted to telling lies about himself.

And truly, he didn’t care which famous women the Grimalkin had let go. Jason was only interested in the famed assassin’s knife skills, which were superhuman, if true. The story went that the Grimalkin was dining with a man who was eating a steak. The Grimalkin stood, sliced the man’s throat, and sat back down so silently, so whip-quickly, that the man didn’t know his neck had been cut until he tried to swallow his meat.

Jason knew such a thing was possible, technically. He’d slit enough throats himself. Knowing it was conceivable didn’t mean that it had happened, though. He would have to ask the Grimalkin. He might have the opportunity to improve his own knifework.

As he detrained, Jason patted the sheathed blades inside his suitcoat pocket the way another man would check for his wallet. The Westminster stop was crowded with tourists and locals alike, green wristbands and scarves identifying those in town for the accord. He fought the urge to push back against the flow, instead melting into it, thinning his lips and extending his forehead as he strode to Westminster Pier, face down.

He didn’t glance toward the Eye, the enormous Ferris wheel. He hugged the Thames, flicking his glance toward the benches.

People ate popcorn. They laughed. A bearded man wearing a soaring British flag hat shoved Stonehenge tour pamphlets toward people, who shook their heads and walked on. The conversations were a loud hum of American English, British English, French, and Arabic.

Fifteen feet ahead and to the right, a young man with Middle Eastern features studied his phone. He appeared pensive, as if he’d meant to meet someone who hadn’t shown up. He glanced to his right and to his left, massaging his neck.

Jason neared. He smiled, brilliantly. The man, certainly no older than twenty-one or -two, couldn’t help but beam back, his eyes confused, apologetic.

I’m sorry, I don’t remember you, they said.

Jason nodded. He held out his hand. The man mirrored the gesture. People slid by on each side, chattering. Jason raised his other hand, the handshake morphing into an embrace. The man was too polite to correct Jason’s familiarity.

What happened next took seven seconds.

Jason’s right hand circled the youth’s neck, slitting his throat from behind. The young man struggled, slightly, and Jason laid him on the bench as gentle as a lover. He unclasped the bomb belt he wore under his trench coat and threaded it around the man, his features going slack for a moment from concentration. He unfolded a newspaper and laid it across the young man’s face. If someone was walking by, they’d think Jason was checking on an itinerant who’d maybe had too much to drink, and they would avert their eyes, not wanting to get involved.

The belt clicked and the timer set, Jason stood, smoothing his face.

He strode toward the nearest steps, a sign telling him he could choose to walk toward Parliament or Westminster Abbey once he attained street level.

There was not a lick of blood on him.

He reached the street before the screaming started.