Coming through customs at Mexico City’s Benito Juárez International Airport Felix Volker was in a rare good mood. Today was his thirty-ninth birthday. He was fit, he was going into an op that wasn’t going to be easy—therefore it would be satisfying—and when it was done, he would be a rich man, relatively speaking.
He’d been born to a factory worker father outside of Leipzig in what had been the war-shattered east zone, and a mother who spent her days reading smuggled American movie magazines rather than cook or clean. His two older sisters—dead now for all he cared—had taken after their mother and were nasty-tongued slobs who had taught him all about sex, starting when he was about five.
Felix had made his way across the border into the west in the woods south of Lubeck with his uncle Bruno a year before the fall of the wall when he was thirteen. For the next four years he bounced between construction jobs and some state-sponsored welfare programs until he was eighteen and could join the Bundeswehr, where he had been taught to kill with a variety of weapons, including his bare hands, and where he had learned to love the smell of blood and the other bodily fluids that leaked out of a man at the time of his death.
At times, waking in the middle of the night with an erection, he remembered his dreams; they were never about sex, but always about killing. And when he was in the middle of the act of assassination, he always became sexually aroused. Fucking Pam at her tiny apartment had meant nothing more to him than a stylized act of murder.
At the time of his other-than-honorable discharge from the KSK the shrink had recommended that he seek psychiatric help. “You end up killing your family—your father and mother and especially your sisters—over and over again, with nothing to show for it. In the end you will certainly destroy yourself.”
In the end Volker had waited until the army psychiatrist had gone on a skiing holiday with his mistress outside of Munich and had killed them both in their chalet bed in the middle of the night.
The military investigators had questioned him, but in the end they left him alone, figuring that the doctor had probably been murdered by the husband of his mistress, himself a psychiatrist. Nothing ever came of it.
He took a cab to the Royal Hotel in the Zona Rosa, where he had a quick lunch, and then took a cab back out to the airport, where he was dropped off at the Air Canada entrance. When the cab was gone he walked down to the American Airlines counter, where he checked in electronically.
Fifteen minutes later he showed his boarding pass and passport to the security agent and was passed through the electronic scanning devices back into the international terminal.
Walking down to his gate for the flight to Atlanta, his heart rate never rose above fifty—about the same as when he killed someone. It was another aspect of his physiology that had baffled the KSK shrink. Whenever he was in a high-stress situation—on the battlefield or in bed having sex—it was always the same. His heart never worked hard. It was as if he didn’t care. Which he didn’t.
* * *
The flight to Atlanta was uneventful, and once he was through customs with just his one carry-on bag he took the shuttle over to the Hilton, where he checked in under his work name, Tomas Spangler, a Swiss citizen from Bern, paying for it with an American Express gold card.
The room was nice. Upstairs he ordered a roast beef sandwich and a couple of beers from room service, and while he waited he stared indifferently out the window toward downtown several miles away.
While on an op he’d lived for short periods in luxury hotels as well as shit holes. He’d never cared which. He’d also slept in bombed-out buildings, under a tarp in a construction zone, behind a pile of rocks in a battle zone in Afghanistan, and aboard a stinking freighter. That he was in the United States didn’t matter either. The location, that is. He was here to do a job, after which, depending how big his payday was, he would take a couple of years off, though he had no earthly idea where he might hole up or exactly what he might do—nothing except killing interested him much.
When the sandwich and beers came he gave the man a nice tip and went back to the window to stare at essentially nothing, while he mechanically ate his meal and drank the beers.
Afterward he used his encrypted cell phone to call Pam. “I’m here.”
“When will you be in place?”
“Tomorrow. What about the others?”
Pam didn’t answer; she was gone.
* * *
First thing in the morning Volker checked out and took the shuttle back to the airport. He rented a Ford Taurus at the Avis counter, using the Spangler credit card, ID, and international driving license. By eight thirty he was on I-85 heading northeast toward Norfolk.
He tuned to a country-and-western station and matched his speed with most of the other traffic. The morning was bright and sunny, and for the first time since he could remember, he was actually horny. And he smiled.