How many Primes did Diatheke have? If they were a House, they would be unstoppable.
Alessandro kept swiping, the faces moving too fast for me to register them. He hardly looked at the screen. He must’ve memorized them and was now going through them just to reassure himself.
I counted eighteen cards. The last one said “Average” so they weren’t all Primes. Still. That many killers under one roof would give anyone pause.
Finally, Alessandro straightened. “There are no butchers in their roster.”
“How complete are your records?”
“Complete enough.” He locked his jaw.
“Maybe he’s a recent hire?”
Alessandro shook his head. “Etterson was an experienced assassin. They wouldn’t send a rookie after her.”
He stared at the laptop, his expression dark. How did he get those files? More importantly, why? This went beyond any due diligence one would do to research his competitors. It would have taken months, possibly years to compile this database. Alessandro was hunting Diatheke.
“My turn to ask questions,” I said.
He smiled. “Go.”
“Are you trying to take out a competitor? Is there another assassin firm pulling your strings?”
“I don’t work for a firm. I’m here to kill Sigourney’s murderer.”
I raised my eyebrows and nodded at his laptop. “And so you threw this together on the fly?”
“Fair enough.” Alessandro leaned back against the table and crossed his arms. “Benedict has been on my radar for a while. I need to ask him some questions on an unrelated matter. It has nothing to do with House Etterson.”
“How important are those questions to you?”
“If it’s a choice between the Etterson contract and his life, I’ll kill him. I can find my answers in another way.”
“How did Sigourney hire you, what are the terms of your contract, what do you know about Halle?”
“She hired me through an intermediary. She was in the business, and she was aware of my particular job requirements.”
“Which are?”
“Privileged.”
“Alessandro, she’d been out of the game for almost ten years. How did she even know about you? You would’ve been in your teens when she quit. Have you been doing this since you were fifteen?”
His face shut down. “I have a certain reputation.”
“What kind of reputation?”
“The kind people like Sigourney make a point to note.”
What the hell did that mean?
“The intermediary arranged a call,” he continued, “during which Sigourney told me that her old firm was coming after her. She indicated they had pressured her to come out of retirement for a high-profile job, which she declined. She didn’t tell me who the target was, said we would discuss it in person. She didn’t think Diatheke would move on her immediately. She expected them to come back with a higher offer, which she also intended to reject.”
“Clearly she was wrong.”
“Yes.”
I thought out loud. “For them to insist that she come out of retirement after so many years means the target was someone she had access to and they didn’t.”
“Or they didn’t want it traced to them.”
“Did she say why she wouldn’t do it?”
Alessandro grimaced. “She said that if she didn’t kill him, she would be in danger. If she did kill him, her entire family would be done. I got the feeling that she wasn’t sure she could complete the job. It was a no-win situation. One way or the other, someone would die.”
“So a dangerous, high-profile target. Male. Someone she knew.” We would have to go through Sigourney’s files again.
“Someone who scared her,” Alessandro added.
“I don’t understand why Diatheke let her walk into their building and take out the money. They knew they were going to kill her.” That had to be some conversation.
“Two separate things. She earned the money, and if they didn’t pay her, nobody else would work with them. The greatest sin in this business is to withhold money earned.” His voice dripped with disgust. “They have no problem killing a parent in front of their kids or blowing up a car full of charity workers; but if they don’t get paid, they lose their shit.”
For a hired killer, he had a lot of disdain for the profession. And he didn’t say we. He said they.
He made sense though. It probably wasn’t the best idea to cheat an assassin out of their paycheck.
“She didn’t think her children would be in danger.”
“Normally, they wouldn’t be.” Alessandro shrugged.
“Professional courtesy?” I couldn’t quite keep the skepticism out of my voice.
“There’s no such thing. If you must eliminate an assassin and things go sour, leaking the fact that they were a hired killer douses the heat. Nobody extends sympathy to murderers.