Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

TARGET ACQUIRED BY CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN AND TIM LEBBON

Miranda had always thought one of the beauties of Venice was its anonymity. A city of magic and elegance, so unmistakably Italian — so iconic — it was nevertheless a place where one could vanish completely. In the crush of tourists in St. Mark’s Square, disappearing was simple, but it was only a tiny bit more difficult in the city’s less traveled alleys. Tourists were everywhere, clothing and faces and styles from all around the world. Almost from birth, Venetians learned not to see them, to let all of those unfamiliar faces blur together until they became, for all intents and purposes, invisible.

Invisibility made a killer’s job much simpler.

She carried a large coffee in a travel cup from a busy café, both part of her masquerade and a caffeine junkie’s necessity. This mission would have been so much simpler a few weeks earlier, in the middle of Carnival season, when meandering the bridges and alleys of Venice wearing an actual mask would not have seemed at all out of place. But mid-March worked just as well for Miranda, really. She had spent a lifetime mastering the art of the true masquerade, disguising herself without any mask at all. Changing her walk and her bearing, her body language and demeanor, her hair and her style, her tone and her language.

In a beige wool coat, gray leggings, and high black boots, with a burgundy-and-white-checked scarf that set off nicely against her dark features, she bore the look of just another British tourist. The badly folded map in her left hand completed the picture, and she made sure to pause to glance at it now and again for a sense of verisimilitude. The day’s high temperature would barely reach forty-five Fahrenheit, so the stylish hooded coat would seem sensible and not at all out of place, and it would hide a variety of weapons.

Weapons she did not expect to need.

The cobblestones beneath her feet were damp from rain, but as she emerged from an alley onto the Fondamenta Orseolo, a narrow walkway that ran beside a canal, she saw the way the water lapped up onto the steps at a gondola station, and she knew that some months it was not rain that dampened those cobblestones. The sea was rising and the city was sinking, both slowly, both surely. In time, the whole city would be underwater, washing away the evidence of a great civilization, and centuries of crimes. The city flooded so regularly now that in many buildings the ground floor had been filled with concrete, surrendered to the future. The last time Miranda had visited Venice she had hidden two corpses in one of those ground floors, the night before the concrete had been poured.

Venice hid a multitude of sins.

But none of those sins were as black as Joe Ledger’s.

From behind thousand-dollar Dita Cascais sunglasses, she caught sight of him crossing Ponte della Piavola fifty feet ahead. Precisely where she’d expected him to be. Miranda had measured her pace, timed every pause, so that the two of them would be in this very position. For eight days she had arrived before dawn to take up her position behind the construction fence of an eleventh-century church whose renovation had been abandoned for more than a year. A forgotten place, nearly as invisible as the face of a tourist. From behind the fence, she had watched the façade of the neglected apartment building where Ledger had been laying his head, emerging after he emerged, every morning a different persona for her, a different masquerade.

Miranda had followed him, timed his walk from the apartment building to the crumbling, abandoned villa where he’d been convening daily with members of a European antiterror task force. Each day she appeared to be meandering instead of stalking. Morning after morning she had scanned the architecture and the canals for ambush points. Nothing had satisfied her.

Last night, she had run out of patience. The desire to see Joe Ledger dead outweighed all else.

Now she reached the bridge and paused to sip her coffee and consult her map, glancing both directions along the canal. A gondolier called happily to another passing by, then disappeared beneath the bridge. A young couple — American by the look of them — ate pastries and drank coffee in the gondola, gazing around with wide eyes at the dying beauty of the place. Miranda had been on a gondola tour once, but so many of the narrow canals stank of piss that her stomach churned at the idea of eating or drinking anything as a gondolier poled his narrow vessel around those tight dank corners.

But she didn’t care about the gondola. She counted seconds, let a dozen people pass over the bridge before her, and then continued on. For several seconds she lost sight of Ledger, something not easy to do with a man as large and formidable as he appeared to be, but then she saw the back of his head, spotted the freshly clipped hair that he’d had buzzed three afternoons before, and she felt reassured.

Seven minutes and two bridges later, she paused in front of the immaculately clean plate-glass window of a shop that sold marionettes. Saints and Pinocchios and Carnival puppets were on display, including a Bauta and a jester who seemed to be sparring. Someone had rearranged the display in the three days since she’d stopped in the same spot to study them.

When she turned and glanced down at her map, eyes flicking back up to track Ledger, she saw him entering the dilapidated villa. Once the place had no doubt been full of light and color and music and art. Now the stonework had begun to crack and crumble and crude graffiti had been painted onto the foundation, just at the waterline. Another forgotten piece of the great history of the city. Time and neglect would swallow it before the sea ever could.

Miranda had no idea what the task force might be working on, or why they were meeting in secret here in Venice. She had identified agents of Interpol, Italian military, and OSCE operatives. The grouping suggested an imminent terrorist attack in Venice, or at least the suspicion of one, but it was Joe Ledger’s presence she did not understand. Most of the world remained unaware that the U.S. government had added yet another covert agency, the Department of Military Sciences, to handle the continually evolving dangers created by scientific advancement. More than likely, the Americans had insinuated themselves into a European operation both uninvited and unwelcome.

She wondered what the rest of the task force might say if they knew they had a traitor among them. A murderer. A terrorist. A man who would take whatever he learned of their activities, twist it, and use it against them. Who would kill hundreds of innocents, soak the cobblestones of Venice with their blood, just to make a point.

As he had done with the Royal London Hospital, orchestrating the explosion that had killed hundreds of people. Including Tess.

Just the thought of her name sent a fresh wave of pain rippling through Miranda. No one on the street would see it. Not while she was in the midst of a hunt, not while she needed to keep up the masquerade. But one reel of their years together kept playing over and over in Miranda’s head, the joyful grin and the laughing gleam in Tess’s eyes as she tucked a lock of red hair behind an ear and stared at the engagement ring on her finger. They’d climbed all the way to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral and stood in the Whispering Gallery, just inside the dome. If you whispered from one side of the dome, anyone standing directly opposite on the far side could hear every word with perfect, almost sensual clarity.

She’d asked Tess to marry her.

Later they’d walked among the roses in Queen Mary’s Gardens in Regent’s Park and Tess had kept shaking her head and stifling a laugh behind her hand. Then had come that joyful grin and the tuck of hair behind her ear, and those nine words — the words that played on a continuous loop in the back of Miranda’s mind.

“I can’t believe I’m going to be your wife,” Tess had said.

But she never would be.

The next morning she followed Ledger along a similar route, though not identical. Close to the old villa once again, she veered off and entered a run-down hotel. This was the day. After much thought, Miranda had decided to take him out in the open.

Her main intention here was Ledger’s death, but she was equally concerned with her own escape. Ledger had been the main triggerman for the London hospital bombing, but Miranda knew there must have been others involved whom she’d need to mop up. She’d discover their names, track them down, and kill them, and every time it would be Tess’s smile urging her on.

She’d only briefly considered trying to glean these names from Ledger. One look at him had convinced her that this would be a bad idea. The man was a killer, just like her, though more brutal and indiscriminate. He was calm and detached and, for a big man, almost as invisible as she was among the crowds, and just as alert to danger. That was what made this such a challenge. Although she was confident of her skills, she also prided herself on her sense of self-preservation.

She had no intention of getting close enough to Ledger to ask him any questions. Two shots to the chest, one to the head, less than a second between the first and last shot. That would be her justice. She’d snipe him when he went for lunch, put him down, and make her escape in the panic and chaos. That was what made the hotel rooftop a perfect location for the ambush.

She’d checked into a second-floor room under a false name the day before, and passing reception now, she offered the old hotelier a small nod and smile. He barely acknowledged her. Only when she was out of sight around the first landing on the narrow staircase did she increase her speed, passing the second floor without a pause. On the third floor she moved swiftly along a hallway smelling of cleaning products and the ingrained must of ages, pausing outside a locked wooden door that bore no number or spy hole. The sign read STAFF ONLY in Italian. She had already been inside.

She picked the lock and entered again, cautious as ever.

Tess grinned at her from inside. A shadow, a memory, the two combined to flash her a fleeting, startling image of the dead woman she loved. It happened from time to time, and on every occasion Miranda found herself momentarily thrown. She was a woman in complete control — always aware of her surroundings, conscious of who was around her, cognizant of escape routes and angles of fire. She’d spent most of her adult life never sitting with her back to open doorways, yet the doors that these memories of Tess crept through were in shadowy places she did not know. Her own mind surprised her. It made her feel less in control, yet she welcomed these interludes. It was as if Tess were still with her, just for those few brief, beautiful moments.

She’d discovered from the coroner’s report that Tess had been one of thirty people crushed to death when a ward ceiling came down. A nurse, she’d most likely been trying to save her patients.

“Not now,” she whispered, breathing deeply. Shadows and sunlight formed more mundane shapes, and Miranda headed past the window and toward the small wooden staircase, heading up.

The rooftop was unchanged from yesterday. Two telltales she’d left across the access door remained in place, as did the heavy canvas bag she’d hidden hooked into an air-conditioning exhaust duct. The AC in the hotel probably hadn’t worked in years, and the duct was spattered with pigeon shit and caked dust.

Ensuring she was out of sight behind the low-rooftop greenhouse, Miranda opened the bag and went about constructing the rifle.

“You’re so good with your hands,” she remembered Tess saying. That had been one evening in Paris, when Miranda had to fix a broken balcony door in their hotel room. Tess’s playful smile had made Miranda weak, and she’d felt a momentary pang of guilt — her hands had slit throats, punched, and killed, as well as bestowing intimacies.

Tess had never known. Miranda was pleased, because her fiancée had been a good person and would never have understood.

Assembling the weapon without conscious thought, Miranda spent those few seconds drifting back to the explosion’s aftermath. She had become a machine focused on information, accessing countless police, MI5 and Anti-Terrorist Squad transmissions. She’d even hacked into a series of electronic COBRA meeting minutes, gleaning as much information as she could about the perpetrators as quickly as possible.

Grief had driven her on. Revenge had burned bright, fueling her, feeding her. Never once had she allowed herself time to pause and breathe. To do that would be to crumple. Perhaps when this was done she would allow herself that brief loss of control.

But probably not.

With the rifle assembled, Miranda crawled across the filthy rooftop to the parapet. She’d planned and memorized the route to minimize any chance of being seen from surrounding buildings. There were only a few buildings higher in this neighborhood, and most of them were far enough away to lessen the angle of sight.

The time was close. Lying behind the rooftop parapet, she stared up into a clear blue sky and felt the sun on her skin. Tess had loved the sun. She could spend hours sitting in sunlight, reading, listening to music, or simply relaxing, letting her thoughts fly. Miranda was the opposite. Her mind was always working, even though often she did not betray that externally. For her, relaxing was akin to letting down her guard.

“You’ll be able to relax soon,” she whispered, not entirely certain if she was speaking to herself or to Tess.

Down in the street, she heard the bustle of tourists and the peeping of moped horns. She would soon silence that street. The gunshots would be loud, reverberating between the buildings. The sight of the big man falling, his brains splashed across the window of the café where he went for lunch, would stun everyone silent.

When the screaming and chaos began, Miranda would make her escape.

Anger seethed within her, eager for the kill. “You see?” the tall man with nine fingers had said to her. “There? And there?” He’d shown her photographs of Ledger at the hospital the day before the explosion. Documents. Mobile phone data. Every shred of evidence had confirmed his assertion that Ledger was responsible for the explosion.

She’d asked the nine-fingered man what his motive was in revealing this to her.

“My nephew was in that hospital. I know the kind of man Ledger is, and I can’t do it myself.”

It seemed the man had known the kind of woman she was, too.

As she waited to kill the man who’d murdered her beloved, it was the moment of Tess’s death that played over and over in Miranda’s mind. The terror she must have felt. The shock. The awful realization when the building collapsed around and onto her, and the pressure, the pressure, the unrelenting crushing pressure as…

Miranda had seen enough people die to know what her fiancée must have looked like when they scooped her up.

She glanced at her watch. She was expert enough to not shift position, however uncomfortable she became. Any movement could give her away. The drainage hole afforded a good view down along the street, and she’d already run through events the previous evening. Now, all she had to do was wait.

The rifle lay propped before her, barrel contained within the hole’s shadow, nothing protruding beyond. She viewed along its sights. This was close-in work, no scope required. She could put a hole in a tin can at two hundred yards, and this would be less than fifty.

“Come on, you bastard,” she muttered, berating herself for talking. But no one would hear her up here, other than the pigeons that cooed and shit around her. Even they’d become used to her. One had even pecked at the grip on her right boot.

The lunch crowds passed by below. A few people stepped into and out of the café, but none of them was Ledger. She looked at her watch again. It was past 1:00 PM, usually he’d have been and gone by now.

Miranda breathed deeply and calmed herself. Tess smiled in her memory.

“Come on. Come on.” The whispers were little more than breaths, and when she heard another breathlike sound behind her, for a second she thought it was a pigeon flapping its wings.

A second was all he needed.

“Nice and steady,” a voice said.

Miranda held her breath, hands squeezed around the rifle. She could roll, bring the weapon up out of the drainage hole, finger squeezing as it came, and fire.

“I’ve got about three pounds of pressure on a four-pound grip,” he said. “Don’t even think about it. Drop the rifle. Crawl back on your belly.”

For a crazy second Miranda thought about making her move, but then she came to her senses. His voice was so assured and in control. And she hadn’t even heard the pigeons move.

No one was that quiet and smooth.

She let go of the rifle and pushed herself back, just a little.

“Now roll over and sit up, hands where I can see them.”

As she rolled and sat, several pigeons fluttered and took flight as if only just surprised. Ledger crouched ten feet across the rooftop. The access door was still closed behind him. She saw scuffs on his knees and the toes of his boots, a smear of dirt on his left elbow. He’d climbed the fucking wall.

He held a pistol in one hand, the other hand cupping the grip. He was a big man, hard, but he exuded grace and control.

“Now then, we’re going to—”

“I’m going to kill you,” Miranda said, surprising herself with the venom in her voice. It must have surprised him, too, just for a second — his eyes went slightly wider, his head lifted a little.

“Not any more,” he said. “Maybe if I hadn’t seen you following me two days ago. Maybe if you hadn’t given yourself away like the amateur you are.”

“So shoot me if you think I’m an amateur.”

“I don’t go around killing people for no reason.”

“Bullshit.”

Ledger shrugged slightly, never taking his eyes from her. “I’ve taken pieces off the board, sure, but there’s always been a reason. So don’t give me one.”

“I’ll give you hundreds, but only one of them matters to me. Royal London Hospital. You killed the woman I love.” She pressed her lips tight, trying not to betray her frustration. She shouldn’t be talking with him. Making this feel personal might strip away her edge, and until now she’d kept the grief and burning need for revenge buried under a veil of professionalism. She couldn’t let that change.

She had to make her move.

“I got the bastards who did that,” he said, and she could hear the uncertainty. Fear at being found out, no doubt.

“I’ve seen enough evidence to nail you to the cross, Ledger. I’m here to do just that.”

She sensed his confusion. His eyes flickered past her to the rifle she’d left lying beside the parapet. That was all she needed.

Miranda flowed. Every shred of her power, every ounce of grace, went into rolling to her right and powering toward Ledger. He fired his gun and the bullet whispered past her ear and over her back, so close that her clothing flicked and her belt tugged. Then she was on him, one hand batting his gun hand aside, the other driving up into his chin in a palm slap that cracked his teeth together.

She drove one foot between his and turned, still grasping his right arm at the wrist, tripping him and using his own weight to drop him to the rooftop. She went with him, drawing up her knee to land on his balls with all her weight.

He switched to the side, grunting as her knee crushed into his thigh.

Miranda head-butted him in the nose. She felt a warm splash of blood. Driving a fist into his left ear, hard, she rolled to her left.

Ledger had recovered from his surprise. Spitting blood, he followed her movement, twisting hard to free his shooting hand. He still grasped the gun, and Miranda knew she had to force him to let go or this was over.

She focused all her strength and attention on that hand, twisting, trying to haul it across her leg so she could break his wrist. Ledger did everything he could to prevent her from doing so.

Which was exactly what she wanted.

He didn’t see her right hand swing around, the blade glinting in the hot Venetian sunlight, its razor sharpness kissing against his neck.

Now, she thought, and one flick would open his carotid artery. She’d watch him bleed out on this dirty rooftop, and it might be days before anyone found his body. Blinking Ledger’s blood from her eye, she saw Tess tucking her hair behind her ear, saw her beautiful smile.

Ledger grasped the moment, writhed and flowed in her grip, releasing his gun and plucking the knife from her hand, smacking her down onto her back, pressing the knife against her throat.

Blood smeared his face. He breathed hard, but not panicked. He was totally in control.

“Fuck you,” Miranda hissed, and she so wished she believed in any sort of God. If she did, then perhaps now she’d be looking forward to seeing Tess again.

It felt like a minute, but must have been only seconds.

“Whatever you think I did, you’re wrong,” Ledger said. He sat up, left hand raised in a gesture of truce, right hand still pressing the knife hard against her throat. Fighting her for less than a minute, he’d already grown to know her well.

Then he did the thing that shocked her even more than his stealth. He cast the knife aside and backed off her, both hands raised as if in surrender. The blade skittered and skidded along the rooftop, but Ledger remained on his knees, hands in the air, gaze locked on hers. Still on her back, Miranda was so stunned that at first she couldn’t think to move.

“The hospital bombing — I was one of the investigators, not one of the evil pricks behind it,” he said. “I made them pay. They’re not going to hurt anyone again.”

Heart pounding, breath shallow, Miranda scrambled to her feet, crouched and ready for a fight. Ledger still didn’t move. He’d had her, could have slit her throat, but he’d tossed the knife away. He was on his knees now, there would be no way for him to catch her if she ran for the knife or her rifle. All she had wanted was his death. She could feel it now, a tangible thing, could see in her mind’s eye what his face would look like when he breathed his last. Her hands opened and closed as she studied him. But while she was picturing Ledger’s death, she couldn’t see Tess’s face in her mind’s eye.

“Go on,” Ledger said. “Grab a weapon if it makes you feel safer.”

Miranda felt the hatred and grief rush up inside her. She took a step toward him. “I don’t need a weapon to kill you.”

“The way you fight, maybe you don’t,” Ledger said.

Nothing more. No explanation for throwing the blade away, no wheedling plea for his life, no further defense. Just letting his words sink in.

“I’m just supposed to believe you?”

“Up to you,” he said. “I guess in your situation, I’d want to backtrack to whoever put the wrong guy in my crosshairs, figure out their motives.”

Miranda felt the Italian sun on her back. From somewhere far off, two men began to shout amiably to each other — something about an upcoming wedding. She could smell peppers roasting on a grill in a patio restaurant someplace close by. Tess had never been to Venice, but she would have loved the people here. Loved the sounds and the smells and the ancient magic of this place.

She ignored Ledger now, walked back over to the edge of the roof, and picked up her rifle, began to break it down and pack it away. Her back remained to him for long seconds, so she wasn’t surprised when she stood with the gun case and turned to see that he’d risen to his feet. His hands were at his sides, but he’d kept a respectful distance.

Still, his eyes were hard. “Seems like we’ve got mutual enemies now.”

Miranda inhaled slowly. Exhaled. She believed him, of course. How could she not, when he’d given up an opportunity to kill her and put his life in her hands instead? It gave her some comfort to know the people responsible for the hospital bombing had been dealt with, but it was cold comfort indeed. She had wanted to get vengeance for Tess herself.

She carried the gun case at her side and headed across the long roof. This time she heard Ledger’s footfalls as he followed her. Pigeons scattered in an irritated shush of wings.

“You’re not just walking away after that,” Ledger said.

Hatred had distracted her before, too much noise in her head. Now she listened to the rhythm of his footfalls and the shifting of his weight on the roof as he caught up behind her.

“Look, whatever your deal is, I need to know what you know,” he went on. “I get it, you want to take out the people who pointed you at me, tried to get you to pull the trigger for them, but I was the target. So we need to talk. I don’t know you well enough to just assume you’re gonna get the job done. Damn it, are you even listening to—”

She sensed it the moment before his hand landed on her shoulder. Her fingers wrapped around his wrist and she drove her other elbow into his gut. Still holding that wrist, she twisted out to one side, wrenched his arm back, and swung the gun case with perfectly calculated force. It struck Ledger’s skull with the sound of a cricket bat connecting with a ball. He staggered, but the son of a bitch was so strong, so determined, that he stayed on his feet. He’d been staggering to his left, trying to stay upright and keep her from dislocating his shoulder, and now she released her grip on his wrist.

As he righted himself, turned to face her, shooting her a pissed-off look that said all of his patience was at an end, Miranda snapped a high kick at the center of his chest. Ledger stumbled back a foot — but the roof had only six inches left to give. His arms pinwheeled as he went over the edge. Knowing there might be eyes on her, Miranda didn’t stay to watch him hit the water, but she heard the splash in the canal as she bolted back toward the stairs.

A trace of guilt flickered through her mind as she fled, gun case in hand, but it was gone as swiftly as it had arrived. Ledger could have killed her. If the tables had been turned, she doubted she’d have been so understanding. But he’d taken the vengeance that should have been hers. The killing wasn’t over, but the important killing — the killing that would have given her a sense of balance — had already been done, and Miranda knew that would haunt her for the rest of her life. That, and images of Tess that would continue to flicker into view, continue to linger in her thoughts, the ghost who walked the corridors of her heart. She couldn’t escape the feeling that the two most important moments of her life had been stolen from her before she’d even lived them.

A wedding and a killing.

In a narrow back alley, passing over a canal in a dilapidated part of Venice that the tourists never saw, Miranda pitched the gun case into the water and walked on without watching it sink into the murk.

There would be other guns.

Christopher Golden is the New York Times number one bestselling author of Snowblind, Tin Men, Of Saints and Shadows, and many other novels. With Mike Mignola, he co-created two cult-favorite comics series, Baltimore and Joe Golem: Occult Detective. As editor, his books include the anthologies Seize the Night, The New Dead, and Dark Cities. Golden is a co-host of the pop-culture podcast Three Guys with Beards, co-founder of the writing workshop and literary event company River City Writers, and frequent conference, school, and library speaker. His works have been published in various languages around the world. Please visit him at www.christophergolden.com.

Tim Lebbon is a New York Times bestselling writer with more than thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories. Recent releases include The Silence, The Hunt, The Family Man, and The Rage War trilogy (licensed Alien and Predator novels). Forthcoming novels include the Relics trilogy and Blood of the Four (with Christopher Golden). He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award and has been short-listed for World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Awards. A movie of his novel Pay the Ghost, starring Nicolas Cage, was released in 2015, and other projects in development include My Haunted House, Playtime (with Stephen Volk), and Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark). To find out more, please visit www.timlebbon.net.

EDITORS’ NOTE: This story is a crossover between the Joe Ledger series and Scott Sigler’s novel Nocturnal. In that novel, San Francisco homicide inspectors Bryan Clauser and Pookie Chang follow a trail of brutal serial killings tied to a secret, subterranean war that has raged through the city for more than a century.