“I could just kill her,” he said.

* * *

It didn’t matter what the man’s name was. It didn’t matter where he came from, or where he was going next.

He was no one, from nowhere.

He moved through the nightclub, crazy pink and purple lights pulsing all around him. The music pumped and thumped. Behind him, on the dance floor, people cheered and shouted. He was headed toward the VIP section.

He was young, he dressed well, he was tall and blond. He looked like a big, healthy, rich northern European, a man who liked to ski in the winters and spend the summers on the beach. He wasn’t that, but it didn’t matter what he was.

He was here for only one reason.

The girl Elizabeth had been taken. She was gone. The operation was a success. Now his job was to sever the last tie between Elizabeth and the rest of the world. That tie was straight ahead of him.

She was a young woman named Rita Chadwick, a very rich and spoiled girl. She had a made a terrible mistake and sent her friend to certain death. She didn’t even know this yet. Look at her! She was sitting at a table in the VIP area, pouring champagne and laughing with a group of her admirers.

She was pretty, with long black hair, but the way she opened her mouth when she laughed made the man think of a shark.

As he walked, he removed from his pocket a ten-gram syringe, pre-loaded with sodium pentobarbital in liquid form. It was a high dose, and would kill her in moments, either from paralysis of the diaphragm or from cardiac arrhythmia. He pulled the paper wrapper from it.

His intention was to simply walk up to the railing behind her, pop the syringe into her neck, and depress the plunger as far as it would go. He had administered injections many times in the past, and he didn’t need to deliver the entire ten grams to kill her. She was small. Ten grams would kill her several times over.

After the injection, he would simply leave the building through the nearest emergency exit, not twenty meters past her. Her friends would see him, yes, they would. But they were all drunk, and his work would be done before they could move.

Later, they would describe him to the police. Only by then, he would no longer appear as they described them.

Ah. Here was Rita. He was moving close to her now. People were milling around very nearby. That was fine.

Rita would never speak to anyone about her friendship with Elizabeth Barrett.

She would never speak to anyone about her friend Ahmet and how they met.

She would never speak to anyone about how Ahmet and she dreamed up a plan to help Elizabeth Barrett escape from her confinement.

She would never speak to anyone… again.