I slid my glove back on and went to work on the lock with the Ice picks. Less than a minute later, the tumblers fell into place, and the door snicked open. I dropped the picks onto the gravel, where they would soon melt away, given the warm, muggy night. Then I drew in a breath, stepped inside, and quietly closed and locked the door behind me.
I stood at the end of a long hallway that stretched for about fifty feet before splitting off left and right. I paused again, looking and listening, but I didn’t hear any heavy footsteps from the guard stationed out front coming in this direction. No rustles of clothing, no creak of another door opening, and nothing else to indicate that someone had seen me approach and enter the building and was headed this way. That was another reason I’d decided to do the hit here: the lack of security cameras. Oh, a couple of cameras were trained on the compound entrance, out where the guards were sitting in their shack, but there was none at all inside the offices, which meant that there was no chance of anyone seeing or recording what I was here to do.
So I pushed away from the door and headed toward my ultimate destination: Cesar Vaughn’s office.
According to everything I’d read and observed about him, Vaughn wasn’t the sort of man who went in for a lot of frills, so the building was solid but bare. White paint covered the ceiling, and thick Persian carpets stretched across the floors, but that was it. No art decorated the walls, no sculptures sat in the corners, no potted plants perched in the windows. This building was about business and business only. I couldn’t decide if I liked it or not.
I moved quickly and quietly through the hallways, gliding from one part of the structure to the next. I glanced into every room that I crept by, but all of the offices were dark. For a moment, I wondered what Sebastian was doing tonight, if he’d found another girl to spend the evening with since I’d turned him down, but I pushed away the pang of longing that rippled through me. Finn and Fletcher were right. I should forget all about Sebastian, because he was certainly going to do that to me. Besides, I needed to focus on the job at hand, not daydream like some silly, simpering girl who’d never been on a date before.
I crept up to the end of the hallway that I was skulking along and peered around the corner. Vaughn’s office stood at the far end of the next corridor over. The door was closed, but he was in there. Light leaked out from under the door, highlighting the gold threads in the carpet in front of it, and I could hear the faint tap-tap-tap of his fingers on his keyboard. I felt safe enough to ease over to his office door.
Then I waited.
A minute passed, then another one, but those tap-tap-taps kept up a soft, steady rhythm, as Vaughn typed out whatever report, e-mail, or other work he needed to finish. I drew in a breath and reached for the knob to see if the door was locked—
A phone in the office rang, making me freeze and momentarily interrupting Vaughn. A faint murmur sounded as he picked it up and spoke to whoever was on the other end of the line.
I bit my lip, hating the delay, but I couldn’t exactly murder him while he was talking on the phone. So I drew in another breath, thought of Charlotte, and palmed one of my silverstone knives. The familiar weight of the weapon steadied me, centered me, and prepared me for what was to come next: the death of Cesar Vaughn.
I started to reach for the knob again, but the handle started turning on its own. Too late, I realized that I couldn’t hear Vaughn talking or typing anymore. I bit back a vicious curse, because I’d made such a simple, rookie mistake. I’d been too cautious, too slow, and I’d waited too long to strike. Now he was leaving his office, for whatever reason.
And I had nowhere to go.
Oh, I could have rammed my knife into Vaughn’s back the second he stepped through the doorway, but that wasn’t my plan. No, I needed him to be in his office before I attacked, firmly out of earshot of the guard at the front desk on the far side of the building. If I tried to take him out here in the hallway, he might scream and bring the guard running. The chance of that happening was small, but I didn’t want to risk it, not when I’d already screwed up my approach. No, I couldn’t kill Vaughn now, not unless there was no other choice.
My eyes darted left and right, even though there was nothing to see. The hallway was too long for me to have any hope of sprinting down it and disappearing around the corner before Vaughn stepped out of his office. That left me with only one option.
The door opened outward, and I darted behind it and plastered myself to the wall there, hoping that Vaughn wouldn’t shove the heavy wood open as wide as it would go and that he wouldn’t stop to close the door behind him.
But Vaughn was in a hurry, and he merely pushed the door open and started moving down the corridor at a fast clip. I caught the wood right before it slammed into my face, then eased to one side so I could peek out from behind the edge of the door.
Vaughn never looked back. He thought that he was all alone, which made his sudden departure more puzzling. It wasn’t like he was strolling to another office to check in with one of his workers, and I didn’t think that he was leaving the building for good. Otherwise, he would have taken the time to turn off his office lights and grab the briefcase that he always carried. I hesitated, wondering where he was heading and why he’d picked such an inconvenient time to go there. Maybe it had something to do with the call he’d received.
I had no choice but to follow him. For all I knew, Vaughn was, in fact, rushing home for the night, and I wasn’t about to let him get anywhere near Charlotte again. Not after I’d seen that dark, haunted look in her eyes today at the Pork Pit. I wanted to kill Vaughn in his office in order to minimize the noise and maximize my getaway time, but if I had to improvise and take him out elsewhere, so be it.
Vaughn rounded the corner of the hallway and stepped out of sight. I pushed the door away from the wall, slipped out from behind it, and hurried after him.
10
To my surprise, instead of heading toward the front of the building to speak with the guard, Vaughn made his way to the loading dock, stepping out of the same door that I’d Ice-picked open earlier. I was glad that I’d remembered to lock it behind me. Vaughn threw the lock, turned the knob, and went outside, disappearing from view again.
I bit back another curse, wondering where he was going and how many more ways I could mess up such an easy assignment. Vaughn should have been bleeding out on the floor of his office by now, not traipsing around like he didn’t have a care in the world. Maybe Fletcher was right to keep looking over my shoulder. I hadn’t exactly been the smooth, suave assassin so far tonight.