The Client Killer (Chapter 1)

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

www.murphyseyes.com

E-mail: [email protected]

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Content

Chapter 1        Rapidus

Chapter 2        Ristorante Il Giardino

Chapter 3        SafeComm

Chapter 4        Envelope on Window

Chapter 5        Recalled

Chapter 6        Mission: The Coconut

Chapter 7        The Bystander

Chapter 8        Very Very Basic Mistake

Chapter 9        The Pray

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Chapter 1 Rapidus

The darkness in Frankfurt didn’t fall so much as it accumulated. On a late autumn Sunday, the city seemed to settle into its own weight, the damp air thickening around the streetlights. From the third floor of Number 7 Mainer Kirche Straße, the River Main was a black, unreflective void, a heavy line cutting through the city. The bridges spanning it were functional, steel-and-concrete structures that looked less like connections and more like sutures holding two halves of a tired municipality together.

This part of the south bank was quiet. It was a silence bought with high property taxes and the sort of architectural restraint that signaled old, bored money. There were no sirens here, only the occasional, distant hum of a luxury sedan or the mechanical click of a heavy gate.

Georg Schneider stood by the kitchen window. He liked the precision of his apartment. When he had bought it three years ago, the renovation had taken eight months—four more than the contractor had estimated—but the delay had been worth it. He had overseen the wiring himself. He had ensured the floorboards were leveled to a fraction of a millimeter. Everything had its place. Everything functioned within expected parameters.

He checked his watch. 11:14 PM.

The waste truck would arrive early on Monday, a loud, hydraulic intrusion into the neighborhood’s peace. To avoid the clutter of mid-week refuse, he performed the task now. It was a cycle of management: creation, accumulation, disposal. Same as life.

He moved through the apartment with a practiced economy of motion. He gathered the bags he had prepared: organic waste in a compostable liner, rinsed plastics, paper, and general refuse. Each was tied tightly, the knots precise.

The hallway of the building was dim, lit by a recessed LED strip that cast a sterile, pale light across the polished stone floor. Georg stepped out of his door, the weight of the bags pulling at his arms. The air in the stairwell was cool, smelling faintly of floor wax and the dampness creeping in from the street.

He reached the ground floor. The heavy front door clicked shut behind him, sealing the silence of the building back inside.

He stopped.

Near the blue paper-recycling bin, tucked into the shadow of the alcove, there was a shape that didn’t belong to the geometry of the entryway. It was a slumped mass, dark and irregular against the clean lines of the recycling station.

Georg adjusted the grip on his bags. The plastic crinkled, a sharp, lonely sound in the hallway. The figure didn’t move. It was huddled low, a person or perhaps just a heavy coat discarded in haste, but the stillness was wrong. It wasn’t the stillness of sleep. It was the stillness of something that had been dropped.

“Excuse me, do you perhaps have some coins? I am starving.”

The voice was soft, clear, and entirely out of place in the sterile quiet of Mainer Kirche Straße.

Georg didn’t look. He felt a sharp, localized irritation. This was a neighborhood of architects and lawyers, not a place for the transient. The homeless belonged near the Hauptbahnhof, amidst the noise and the steam of the transit hubs. This was an intrusion, a breach of the local equilibrium.

“Sorry. No money,” he said, his eyes fixed on the lid of the paper bin. “Only garbage.”

“Thank you! Have a nice evening!”

The reply was unnervingly polite. The tone was bright, almost cheerful, which only heightened the sense of wrongness.

Georg ignored her. He focused on the mechanics of the task: the weight of the bags, the alignment of the plastic against the bin’s rim. He felt her gaze. It wasn’t a heavy stare, but a faint, persistent pressure against the back of his neck, like a change in barometric pressure before a storm. He refused to acknowledge it. He finished with the bins in six seconds.

He turned toward the heavy entrance door.

“Have a nice evening!”

The voice came again, projected from the shadows of the alcove. It was low, intended to respect the silence of the street, yet it possessed a clarity that made it impossible to ignore.

Georg paused, his hand hovering near the door handle. “Same to you,” he muttered. The words were a reflex, the hollow politeness of a man who simply wanted the interaction to end. He didn’t look back.

He inserted his key. The lock turned with a familiar, metallic resistance. He pushed the door open and stepped into the dim, polished hallway.

Behind him, the heavy door began its slow, controlled arc back toward the frame. The hydraulic closer hissed—a precise, mechanical sound that Georg usually found comforting. He was an electronics engineer; he understood the logic of systems, the reliability of well-maintained hardware. He stepped into the corridor, his back to the street.

As the door narrowed the opening to a thin, vertical sliver of the night, a sound broke the silence. It wasn’t a bang. It was a dry, percussive thump, like a heavy book hitting a carpeted floor.

The 9mm round, suppressed and efficient, traveled through the closing gap. It struck Georg in the base of his skull.

There was no struggle. His body jolted once, a brief, violent spasm of muscle, and then he collapsed forward. He hit the stone floor with a dull thud, sliding several inches before coming to rest in the pale light of the LED strip.

The door clicked shut. The latch engaged with a final, decisive snap.

Outside, Mainer Kirche Straße remained unchanged. The streetlights continued to cast their feeble, yellow pools onto the pavement. The darkness remained undisturbed. All that remained of the encounter was the fading echo of a sound so quiet it might have been nothing at all.

The woman rose from the shadows. She didn’t linger by the bins. She moved with a steady, unhurried rhythm, melting back into the darkness of the side streets.

Georg Schneider would not be found until the morning. A neighbor, perhaps, coming down to check a misplaced delivery or heading out for an early walk, would find him in the ground floor corridor. The scene would be clinical: a man slumped against the polished stone, a single entry wound at the base of the skull, a corresponding exit wound. No forced entry. No shell casings. No witnesses. The police would find a 9mm projectile lodged in the masonry, but the person who fired it would be a ghost.

Madelyn Emmerson did not run. Running invited the gaze of the curious or the vigilant. Instead, she maintained a purposeful walk, turning first onto Erthal Straße and then toward the quieter stretches of Wald Straße. She found a large, industrial waste container tucked into a recessed alcove, shielded from the street by a graffiti-scarred wall.

The transformation was mechanical. She stripped off the bulky, oversized hoodie and the stained, heavy trousers, shoving them into the depths of the bin. The persona of the starving woman was buried under layers of refuse, destined to be compacted and hauled away by the Monday morning collection before the city had even finished its first cup of coffee. Beneath the layers, she wore dark, nondescript trousers and a soft, charcoal-grey jacket that didn’t catch the light.

She ran her fingers through her hair, shaking it loose from its tight confines, feeling the weight of it settle against her neck. The cool night air felt sharp against her skin. She took a single, slow breath, drawing in the damp, metallic scent of the river.

A hundred meters later, she turned left onto Ufer Straße. To her right, the River Main was a vast, black expanse, swallowing the reflections of the few passing cars. The city was indifferent to her, just as it was indifferent to the man cooling on the floor of Number 7. The headlights of a distant sedan skimmed the water’s surface like searchlights looking for nothing in particular. Madelyn did not look at the water. Her eyes remained mobile, scanning the reflections in shop windows, the dark gaps between parked cars, and the empty spaces of the sidewalks. It was a passive, habitual observation.

She found the car exactly where she had left it: a grey Volkswagen Golf, the kind of vehicle that exists in a state of permanent anonymity. She slid into the driver’s seat, the movement fluid and quiet. The door closed with a muted, heavy thud, sealing her into a small, private world of plastic and fabric.

She sat for a moment, hands resting on the steering wheel. She waited for the internal hum of adrenaline to subside, for her pulse to settle into its natural, resting cadence.

Then, the checklist. A glance in the rearview mirror. A check of the side mirrors. A quick look over her shoulder. She pressed the start button. The engine caught instantly, a low, unobtrusive vibration through the chassis. She pulled away from the curb, merging into the sparse late-night traffic without a sound.

The navigation system glowed with a dim, blue light, a pre-set route laid out before her. It was a long drive north. She wouldn’t reach her apartment in Hamburg until the sky began to bleed into grey at the edges of the horizon.

Rapidus Air and Sea Logistics was designed to be invisible.

On paper, it was a standard freight forwarding and supply chain management firm, headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia, with a regional hub in Hamburg’s HafenCity. It specialized in the movement of heavy goods across European borders—a business that required constant travel, frequent meetings, and a legitimate reason to be present in every major port and rail terminal on the continent.

Internally, the company operated with a highly integrated, specialized structure that masqueraded as corporate bureaucracy. The Accounting Department didn’t just balance ledgers; they performed deep-dive data analysis to track movement and capital. Operations wasn’t concerned with shipping lanes so much as surveillance and field logistics. Customer Service handled the delicate work of intelligence collection and secure communications, masked by the polite, scripted cadence of client relations. Even the IT Department served a dual purpose, providing technical support for field operations and ensuring digital footprints remained scrubbed or redirected.

The Administration Department was the most vital component of the machine. They were the architects of reality. They manufactured the paper trails that allowed operatives to exist in any space: forged IDs, meticulously crafted itineraries, hotel bookings, flight tickets, health insurance, even the mundane debris of a lived life—restaurant bills, parking tickets, cinema stubs. If a story required a history, Administration built it, one receipt at a time. HR was a lean, surgical unit, stepping in only when a subject required more direct, physical interrogation.

Then there was Sales.

Madelyn Emmerson led the Sales division. She was rarely in the Hamburg office, a fact that was officially attributed to her heavy travel schedule and her role in managing high-value accounts across Europe. Within the quiet, professional confines of the company, she had earned a nickname that was whispered more often than it was spoken: The Client Killer.

It was not a metaphor used by adrenaline-fueled enthusiasts. It was a clinical description of her function.

When Madelyn visited a client, the business was never lost. The client was simply removed from the equation. She was the final stage of a lifecycle—the ultimate clean-up crew for when a contract became a liability. She ensured that when a relationship ended, there were no loose ends, no lingering shadows, and no witnesses to the termination.

Georg Schneider had been a client. His account had reached its natural conclusion.

Rapidus was a Department of Defense unit, a specialized asset reporting directly to Lieutenant General Sean Miller, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. As the grey Volkswagen Golf merged into the North German traffic, the mission was already transitioning from active execution to the administrative phase of closure.

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