The assassin stood quietly in the bedroom of his intended target, a sliver of darkness in a room already dominated by shadows. The only light was from the target’s mobile phone, plugged into a charger on a bedside table but still illuminating every few seconds with a notification.

He held the razor-sharp carving knife in a comfortable grip outside his right thigh and

crossed the room on silent steps, avoiding the items strewn across the floor until he stood alongside the bed. The target was asleep but murmuring.

He crouched until his head was eye-level with the target, his dark wool suit making no sound. He opened his mouth slightly and tilted his head to better capture the murmurs leaving the target’s lips.

The rapidly repeated word would be an anomaly for most people, but the assassin froze. He kept listening as that single word was repeated with a whispered tone of pleading.

The word came one more time, raised in volume.

The assassin’s eyes narrowed and their dark depths studied the face in front of him. He rose with silent grace, moving back towards the door. Once there, he glanced back at the sleeping figure, before slipping out the door and away into the night.

Six months earlier. 

The familiar, comforting sight of Philip in all his sophisticated glory was just the relief I needed. My heart rate still slightly faster than normal, I covered the distance to the park bench he had selected on near silent feet. I’d known him for years and yet still felt the need to smooth down the navy suit and white business shirt that accompanied my simple dark tie. It was, after all, important for an assassin to blend in, especially one who had killed two people mere hours earlier.

Philip looked tired. His face, though always lined and drawn, was paler and seemed less animated than usual. There was a slight tremble to his liver-spotted hand as it rested on the rear of the bench. I put my personal concern aside as I scanned the area. No one in the immediate vicinity, a mother struggling to walk both a boisterous dog and a pram some 100 yards away, and the usual passage of joggers and walkers. Philip had picked a good spot.

I unbuttoned my suit jacket and sat next to him, breathing the fresh morning air. Philip’s dark, narrowed eyes were drawn to a few small tears in the leg of my suit pants; his eyebrow arched in a way that demanded an answer.

‘He had a dog,’ I shrugged dismissively.

‘Appearance,’ he started in his gravelly, preaching tone…

‘…is just as important as performance.’ I finished his quote with him, which drew a faint smile.

‘How are you, Valen?’ he asked.

I frowned, glancing in a circle around us, protective of my name. He acknowledged the mistake with a slight nod of apology.

‘Tired,’ I replied, gratefully accepting the coffee he poured into a ceramic mug from the thermos beside him – no plastic for Philip. Black, unsweetened. He knew what I liked. ‘It was worse than we thought. My timing was off; I was too late. But the girls are safe now, under Sister Mary’s care. All but one of them, anyway.’

There was silence for a moment, Philip’s dark eyes shifted from me to the water in front of us and I could see his lips moving silently in what I knew to be an inaudible prayer. Religion might seem out of place for a man who commanded an assassin, but Philip held to his beliefs tightly. I was never sure how that weighed into his decision-making; I had no such compunctions.

‘And our target?’ he asked, sharp eyes scrutinising my face.

I took another long sip of coffee, feeling the warmth spread through me and giving a sigh of contentment. ‘He couldn’t live with the guilt and took his own life,’ I replied, meeting Philip’s gaze evenly. ‘He had a client there who met his fate at the hands of the girl he’d killed.’

Philip nodded and we both turned to stare out over the lake. It was a still autumn day in Canberra, the capital of Australia, the promise of some warmth lingering on the horizon in the emerging sun and barely a ripple on the water.

The companionable silence stretched on, broken only by my rapid consumption of the harsh black coffee. It had been a tough job, physically and emotionally, and I could feel the tightening in my back and sides that hinted at the toll the job had taken on me.

To kill a man was easy enough, at least physically. But to remove suspicion of murder with an uncooperative target was another thing altogether. I leaned back against the bench’s weather-worn wood and gave my tired eyes a rub. I could have slept before coming to see Philip, but we had an agreement to debrief jobs as soon as possible after their conclusion. In the military, it was called a hot debrief.

‘I have another one for you,’ Philip’s voice was quiet.

I raised an eyebrow, surprised. Our jobs were normally broken up by at least a few weeks to give me a chance to recover physically and emotionally.

‘It comes from James.’ His voice was even softer and it was clear why. A gnawing pit had opened in my stomach and not just because I was ravenous. The only James he was likely to refer to by a single name was the head of the federal security service, called the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO. Bad enough that he knew of the existence of our rogue, highly illegal operation, even if he did think we were a private investigations firm; for him to task us directly was inherently dangerous.

‘His son has joined a NERE group.’ Philip raised a hand to address the incredulous look on my face. National Extremists and Racist Extremists were an increasing occurrence in the Western world, covering everything from neo-Nazi groups to anti-immigration advocates. These groups were rarely of interest to us and operationally dangerous to investigate, being prone to violence and suspicious of any outsiders. ‘I know,’ he added quickly, ‘that this is unusual for us. But James is worried, more than I’ve ever seen.’ I was aware Philip also looked more serious and more tired than I could remember.

‘The boy’s girlfriend has also joined.’

So that was it. It was an unusual relationship, but given the strong links between their fathers, it made sense for James’s son to date the Prime Minister’s daughter.

‘Contact with their parents?’ I asked, accepting the case with no further protest.

Philip smiled his gratitude, paired with an affectionate pat of my forearm. ‘Limited, by email. Only two from each of them, and the last email from each is identical. It’s all here for you.’ He reached down and picked up a messenger-style briefcase – an expensive brand named Tumi – complete with a small combination lock. It was an indiscreet way to exchange information, and I couldn’t help but glance around us once more.

‘ROE?’ I asked, studying him closely.

Philip was quiet and the silence stretched on for long moments. The gentle lapping of the lake water was disproportionately loud against the sudden lack of speech from the man who dictated just how messy my life was about to become.

‘Get them out. Your rules of engagement are by whatever means necessary.’

As the burst of warm water hit my body, I gave silent thanks to Philip for his choice of hotel. Tucked away in the city’s inner south, it was new but still managed to flaunt the water restrictions that turned most of the hotel showers in Canberra into ineffective dribbles. This was a glorious cascade of water that engulfed my entire body, washing away some of my weariness and soothing some of the pain in my back and left side.

I hadn’t opened the file Philip had given me yet, focused instead on the mental sorting that was required after a kill job. The emotional toll of controlling the fate and life of another human was more than most people could take. I’d never struggled with the moral side of what we did, perhaps because of the careful selection process of our targets. But I spent time after each job reviewing my work, criticising each decision and filing away the lessons for next time.

The lead had come from our analyst, Jack, a specialist in open source intelligence, or OSINT. He had discovered Mercham Myers, a Canberra-based member of an outlawed motorcycle gang, on the dark web, the secretive corner of the internet home to the most horrific of human desires. Myers was advertising services that included sexual favours from underage girls, drugs, or any combination of the two. Even Jack, an affable, smart kid used to researching people’s darker practices, had sounded particularly revolted by this case.

It was further evidence of a flourishing criminal underground along the length of the East Coast of Australia that specialised in the abduction and sale of sex slaves. Philip had sent a detailed, anonymous report to local law enforcement who had been unable to access the bulletin board and didn’t pursue the case. In truth, police departments lacked the sophisticated capability to conduct an online investigation on the dark web so that made it a problem for us to solve.

Myers had been so eager for money that when Jack reached out it only took three messages for Myers to offer a review of his ‘current collection’. When I met him yesterday, his only security check was a quick pat down that failed to find any of the weapons secreted on my person. Perhaps he’d been reassured by my scruffy appearance and ability to blend into this criminal world, given it was where I had spent most of the last five years. I was, after all, a criminal by any definition of the law, responsible for more deaths than even the most heinous mass murderer in Australian history. He let me in and led me down to a makeshift room, two floors under the semi-vacant house that served as a front for his endeavours.

I stretched a bit to let the water from the shower flow over my side, the warmth cancelling the pain from my bruised flesh. It wasn’t the two men I had killed that I saw as I closed my eyes, it was the victims. There had been seven girls there, ranging from early- to mid-teens, in varying states of drug-induced aloofness. Myers had paraded them before me, unafraid of the visible signs of their punishments, from sores on wrists and ankles to an array of bruising and needle marks in small, angry collections. They had the glazed eyes and quiet compliance of the heavily drugged.

‘Ignore that one,’ he shoved one of the taller girls firmly enough to make her fall to the ground. ‘She almost bit off a man’s cock.’ He took my silence as shock and nodded, telling me in graphic detail the punishment she would endure. I calculated the chance of killing him on the spot despite the snub-nosed revolver he had tucked in his pants. Ultimately, it wasn’t the proximity of his firearm but the fact it would be difficult to make it look like a suicide and then corral the girls to safety.

I examined the remnants of the job through the shower screen, the water not yet hot enough to create steam that would otherwise obscure the glass. Looking back at me was a man with deceptively youthful features, though I was just closer to 30 years old than 40. I kept my light-brown hair cut short, almost shaved on the sides and back and just a little longer on top. This meant I could get away without touching it unless I was trying to impress someone. Dark brown eyes and a mouth prone to a sardonic smile, often at highly inappropriate times. My features were tanned enough to pass for European if I needed to, plain enough that I’d never be called handsome but ensured I had a decent success rate when I tried to distract myself with female company. My body was average enough, lean and lightly muscled with a tone that needed further encouragement through gym time that I had dodged too much lately. A collection of scars of varying sizes and shapes, a patina that spelled out my history of surviving in a world that had done its best on a number of occasions to beat me. As usual, I glanced away from them, unwilling to go down the mental path of their history right now so as not to interrupt my review of the job.

I’d returned to Myers’ house only a few hours after my reconnaissance, keen to act before he delivered the girl’s punishment. Myers’s security measures were easy enough to bypass, given they consisted largely of padlocks and standard door locks that took less than half a minute each – I’d been careful to take note of each lock as he escorted me in earlier. Picking locks had been something that had taken a lot of time for me to learn, but like any tradecraft, if practised enough it was something that stayed with you. In this case, it was made considerably more difficult by the Oakley tactical gloves I wore that provided the fusion of protection from leaving fingerprints, and a tactile feel that only interfered with finer precision details like lockpicking. I put up with them given the hardened knuckles gave the option of hand-to-hand combat without leaving tell-tale DNA or bruised knuckles.

After breaking in, I closed the front door but left the next two I encountered open in case I had to make a quick exit. I headed through the house with quiet footsteps and found Myers in a makeshift lounge room, two floors under the semi-vacant house that served as a front for his endeavours. He was dozing in an armchair that would have looked old in the 1940s.

He was alone, his feet facing two closed doors that were separated by a wooden-panelled wall occupied with an archaic TV set. I assumed one of the doors led to where he kept the girls and the other possibly to his bedroom, even though it seemed likely he slept exactly where he was; the floor was covered in discarded food wrappers, pizza boxes and beer bottles and the chair was worn and stained with grease. I couldn’t work out what was more disgusting – his food-covered, hairy stomach that refused to stay hidden under his greasy t-shirt, the equally food- and grease -filled beard that seemed to start just under his eyes and progress to his chest, or the exercise book on the floor beside him with names and bookings for the use of the seven girls.

A bench that ran the full length of the room was also full of signs of his ‘business’: sex toys, leather garments and related paraphernalia in various states of cleanliness, along with the revolver I’d seen on him earlier. Paired with the room’s fetid odour, it was all I could do to keep from gagging.

I picked up a studded leather collar from the bench and extracted the ceramic knife tucked into the front pocket of my pants. I made a small hole in the collar to ensure it closed tighter than intended, though it was probably meant for leaner necks than the repulsive, sleeping beast before me. It was only then that I heard a sound that made my skin crawl. Knuckles hitting flesh, coming from one of the closed doors only a metre or two away. It turned my patient, deliberate speed into furious action.

I approached Myers quietly, thanks to my beloved Ecco boots, their soft soles almost soundless on the hard-concrete floor. The collar was around his throat before he stirred. He started to move as I closed the clasp into my newly created hole, unable to repress the snarl that came from my mouth as I choked off his air supply with a sharp wrench. The greaseball clawed at the collar around his throat, desperately trying to get some air in. Being careful to avoid any further marks on him, I used a quick open-palm strike on his throat, even as his sledgehammer fists moved from his throat to me, raining blows down on my back and side. I controlled him as best I could, making sure I didn’t use firm finger grips on any part of his body that would bruise, and glad he was hitting me rather than trying to get some space in between the collar and his throat. It didn’t take long for the fight to leave him, blood dribbling from swollen eyes and a bloated tongue protruding, half bitten off.

The sounds continued next door, accompanied by a distinctly male voice that was too muffled for me to understand. I was through the door with a fury that overwhelmed operational prudence, scanning the dark hallway to find the source of the noise. As I pushed the door open, a blur of motion was upon me before I knew it, something sharp sinking into my calf. I could barely make the dog out, such was its manic motion, but I took it to be some type of Bull Terrier. I pulled out the small taser I carried as a backup, quickly changing the voltage so as not to kill the animal.

A burst from the weapon made the dog let go with a yelp. A second burst and it slumped onto the ground, unconscious. Muttering a soft curse, I looked at my leg. It hurt like hell. There was a bit of blood on my skin, but nothing on the ground.

Two doors down on the left, the noise continued so I quickly hobbled to the door and shoved it open, sweeping inside with taser poised. There was a man in the room, his face a mask of exertion, sweat pouring from his chubby face and dripping off the ends of a thin moustache. His fist was raised mid-blow, his other hand circling the throat of a girl that was so unnaturally immobile that I knew she was beyond my help. It was the girl Myers had singled out as a ‘trouble-maker’, though even recognising that was difficult with what the man had done to her face.

The man started to draw a small blade from within his coat but I was already on him, slamming his head into the wall and bringing my fist down with enough force that the ulna bone in his forearm audibly snapped and he dropped the knife. In a smooth motion, I reached down for the blade and slammed it upwards under his chin at a forty-five -degree angle even as his scream of pain started to form. He was dead before the blade reached its final resting place within his skull.

I took a step away and composed myself, tucking the taser back into its leather holster just behind my left hip. I’d seen plenty of dead bodies before, but this girl’s death was a waste of a young life. I packaged the thought away in the back of my brain to be dealt with over future sleepless nights. She had one more purpose to serve. I lifted his body, which had slumped over her, long enough to put the hilt of the knife in her hand. It was imperfect, but it would do and was likely to pass quick scrutiny. I assumed any investigator would be horrified that the girl had been literally beaten to death and would silently cheer that she had managed to grab a knife and kill the man before succumbing to her wounds. There wasn’t much I could do about his forearm that would be too convincing, but using one gloved hand, I pushed him off her and let him slump down hard on the floor, which tucked that arm beneath him. I fact-checked my proposed scenario: the man had beaten her and in the final moments of her life, she’d snatched his knife, buried it under his chin and he’d fallen onto the floor, breaking his arm in the process. His blood was on her face, her prints on the knife.

I took a step back and looked over the room and myself, making sure I had left limited trace of my presence. With one last look at the two bodies, I left the room, walking with only a slight limp past the unconscious dog and to the lounge-room. I pulled Myers’ pants off and put one of his meaty hands on his crotch. A pornographic magazine replaced the exercise book of clients, which I tucked into the waistband of my suit pants. Death by asphyxiation caused in the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

The dog was likely to be put down if left to the police and I knew someone who could look after the girls better than the authorities. With two calls, I ensured the girls would be collected by my reluctant, occasional ally, Sister Mary, and the dog by Eleanor, a no-nonsense inspector at the Royal Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, before police even knew the scene existed. I wasn’t sure how it played into the ethical framework of both women, given their exposure to my violent tactics in the past, but they had both shown a willingness to ignore the messier side of the scenes I provided to remove victims from a system that would invariably fail them.

While waiting for my two helpers to arrive, I was caught on the implausible nature of the crime. We were less than ten miles from the centre of Canberra, a small, sleepy government town of around 400,000 people. For such a bold, ongoing crime to take place in the city that housed Australia’s federal police and multiple other enforcement agencies defied belief. This enterprise should have been identified and shut down a long time before these particular girls were at risk. Who knew how many others had passed through Myers’ grimy hands, and so close to the nation’s political centre.

Still, scratch the surface of any highly bureaucratic city and you were sure to find corruption and crime, usually fuelled by the scourge of modern society: drugs. I had lived in Canberra for most of my young life, working in clandestine operational roles for government agencies rarely spoken about in public, so knew only too well the murky underbelly of the place. If I was honest, I’d lurked on the fringes of that world for most of my life, both professionally and personally.

Eleanor arrived about 15 minutes later, meeting me at the door with a silent nod and accepting the still-unconscious dog I carried out and passed into her care. Typically taciturn, she turned and left without a word. I knew the dog would go through a range of behavioural tests that it well may fail, especially with my recent experience with it, but it would have a far better chance in Eleanor’s care than with the police.

Sister Mary was another half-hour and waited near the door. She was a petite woman, young enough to have shocked me when I first met her, given my assumption that all nuns were septuagenarians at best. She was barely 30 and from what I’d seen of her face under the traditional habit, she was pretty. As I opened the door and looked down at her, her features searched mine. I was sure Mary saw me as a soul to salvage, to bring me into the fold of her flock. I held up a hand to keep her where she was. One by one, I shepherded the mute, drugged and confused girls out to her, helping her load them into a Transit van discreetly parked alongside the house. There was substantial risk of exposure, but if we left the girls to be ‘rescued’ by the police, they would be questioned, statements taken and eventually put into care. Then, if they found the right care facility, right when they had started to heal and forget the ordeal, they’d be thrown out of the drastically under-resourced system and left on their own. At least with Sister Mary, the focus would be on finding their families at the same time as rehabilitation.

With the last girl delivered into the Sister’s care, I relocked the padlocks I’d picked, exiting back through the side door. Outside, I peeled my Oakley gloves off and was tucking them into my coat pocket when I heard a noise near the front of the house. Quick, quiet footsteps carried me to the corner, only to see Sister Mary lingering. I smoothed my hands down over my suit coat so that, tears in the leg aside, I’d look like an early riser ready for work, and stepped towards her.

She started as I approached and I could see her discomfort with my proximity as I drew close. It was only natural, given this was the third crime scene I’d called her to. ‘Are you alright?’ she murmured softly, bright green eyes looking me over. I smiled and nodded. ‘Take care of them, Sister,’ I replied in an equally quiet voice. ‘Make sure they get another chance at a normal life.’

She nodded, her modern nun’s coif shifting a bit with the movement. ‘I will. God bless you.’ I didn’t reply, but ushered her to the driver’s seat of the van. Before she opened the door, she paused and looked back at me with a look of hesitant enquiry. ‘Valen, are you sure what you do is right? What would the Lord think?’ My normal response to such questions would be flippant, perhaps even insulting, but I respected her beliefs enough to bite my tongue.

‘Sometimes there is no other way,’ I replied. ‘Even your God is fond of vengeance, Mary. As for what he thinks, someday I’ll find out. Until then, I walk in the darkness to help others find their way back out.’

I really didn’t want a religious debate with her, especially on the driveway of a house where I’d committed two murders. Her eyes searched mine for a moment or two more. ‘Don’t linger so long in darkness that you can’t be saved.’ She pressed her hands to my chest and stood up on her tip-toes to kiss my cheek. Without another word, she climbed into the van, now full of stunned girls who seemed on the verge of hysteria, and drove away.

Once she was clear, I made the anonymous call to the police from my ghosted iPhone.