“Quarry,” he said, damn near purring, “the act itself may indeed be simple-a trigger is pulled, a heart is ripped apart, a skull is shattered and the brain within turned to useless sludge. But what leads up to the act does indeed take care and precision and information. Not unlike a military operation, as you indicated.”
“Okay,” I said.
The blue eyes gave me a laser look. “In the future, you will be paired with another member of my little army.”
I shook my head. “Not what we talked about. I work alone.”
He turned a hand over. “Actually, this time you will work alone. You may do several jobs alone before I team you with another. That is, in part, a precaution on my part.”
“I don’t need protecting.”
“Perhaps not, but I do.” He sipped coffee, then gazed at me coldly. “I am not risking an employee into whom I’ve invested time and money and effort and energy on a…new recruit, shall we say. You will have to prove yourself in the field before I pair you up with a partner, a partner of my choice.”
I was frowning. None of this had come up in his sales pitch. “Why the hell would I need a partner?”
His eyebrows lifted in a facial shrug; we might have been discussing a sales campaign for this year’s model whatever-the-fuck. “The way our contracts are carried out is a time-proven technique and a painstaking approach that I am pleased to say has never yet resulted in either an arrest or death for any of my associates.”
Later I would come to question this assertion, but at that moment, I felt reassured by it, and I stopped fighting the notion of working with somebody else, at least long enough to let him explain himself.
Which he did: “Each contract initiates a two-pronged effort. First, a man goes in and quietly gathers information, primarily through established surveillance techniques. We will spend as much as a month getting down the pattern of a target, and never less than a week. We are preparing for a surgical strike, and we need to know when the time is right for getting in and getting out without any collateral damage.”