CHAPTER 2 – The Shot
The city felt different the second night—emptier, as if Antwerp itself were holding its breath.
Null arrived before dawn, taking the long way around two separate blocks to confirm nothing had shifted since yesterday. Same parked delivery vans. Same dead camera at the alley mouth. Same security pattern: two men outside the office at 09:40, target out the door at 09:42, sedan at the curb at 09:43.
Except there would be no school group this time. He'd checked. The teacher who'd led them through yesterday posted a new schedule on the school's public site—Thursday field trips, not Friday. People love their routines. Routines are how they die.
He let himself into the empty flat across the street, the lock yielding after the slightest pressure. The room was a box of dust and dimness. He wiped the windowsill with a gloved hand, then paused, listening. The city hummed through the glass: street sweepers, a bus braking two blocks over, a bicycle bell too loud in the quiet.
He set the bag on the floor and built the world he needed: mat on the warped wooden boards, rifle body and barrel reunited with a soft, practiced twist; suppressed, not because silence was everything but because silence bought seconds; bipod splayed, legs ratcheting into place; scope mounted, screws finger-tight then snug with the tool he kept taped inside the bag's lining. Two breaths. A minor adjustment to the cheek rest. One more to the stock length.
No custom masterpiece. Not yet. That would be for the kind of job that drew satellites and task forces. This was something else—personal for someone, perhaps, but to him just a geometry problem. He sighted down the corridor of the street, tracing the short arc from brass handle to sedan door, counting the bricks between them, translating distance to drop without thinking. The numbers had lived behind his eyes for years; when he blinked, they still glowed.
He checked the weather once more: air cool, a faint river breeze angling east, not enough to bully a properly weighted round at this distance. The smell of rain lingered from the night before, iron and stone, the city's breath after a storm.
He didn't think about the name in the file. He never did. Though he knew it—Jean-Baptiste Laurent, cabinet-level power—he kept it as a label, not a person. Names tempted care, and care leaned toward hesitation. You could be careful without caring. The difference was survival.
At 09:35 he did his second sweep: alley to the left—empty; balcony three floors up—shadows and dust; office windows—shapes moving, one larger than the others, a broad-shouldered guard doing the perpetual slow turn of the bored professional. Good. Bored is predictable.
He loaded a single round, pressed his cheek to the stock, and allowed his breathing to straighten into the metronome his hands understood. Inhale four. Hold. Exhale six. The scope sharpened the world to the span of a doorway, a glinting sedan roofline, and a slice of gray sky.
At 09:41 the guard appeared. He opened the door, glanced left, then right, eyes passing over the blind spot where Null lay. The second guard stepped into view, hand on the radio, chin dipped in the universal posture of men waiting for the person who paid their rent.
Then Laurent.
The minister's hair was a fraction neater than yesterday. The kind of change someone made after seeing themselves on a TV broadcast and not liking what they saw. His mouth shaped a word to the nearer guard—Null couldn't read it from this angle, but he watched the shared rhythm, the nod, the half-smile of a man who assumed the day would obey him.
Null settled the crosshairs where fabric met sternum. He didn't go for the head at this range—not with glass and reflections and the micro-twitches of men who thought they had time. Center mass punished hubris. Center mass erased variables.
The sedan door clicked. A gull cried from the river.
Inhale.
Hold.
The trigger broke like a whispered agreement.
The sound was a cough pressed into a pillow. Laurent's body rocked, the suit jacket folding oddly as if a thread had been snipped through its middle; he staggered toward the guard, mouth open in an O that never completed a sound. The guard's hands were already moving—one toward Laurent's chest, the other to the radio—even as training fought instinct. The second guard pivoted toward the office door, hunting angles and ghosts.
Null was already pocketing the casing. The rifle unfolded into harmless components. The duffel swallowed the parts whole, foam fitted to keep them from kissing while he moved. He rose without urgency, without the jerkiness of guilt or adrenaline. He had outgrown both.
Down the dim stairwell. One flight. Two. He paused by the first-floor landing and took a microcloth from his pocket, wiping the rust-stained banister where a forearm might have brushed it. Then the corner, where his shoulder could have kissed wall. Then the old, brass doorknob. Ninety seconds translated into a dozen erasures. He left no skin behind.
On the street he became someone else: posture relaxed, shoulders not quite square, head angled down like a man counting his steps. The duffel rested behind his hip, strap across his chest, a commuter's burden rather than a soldier's kit. Two women passed him chatting in French about a sale—their laughter clipped and quick. Someone shouted from an open window. A tram sang its brakes.
He didn't look back.
At the corner he turned, stepped into the sheltering noise of a café where an espresso machine hissed like a radiator, and ordered a black coffee in a soft, unobtrusive Dutch. The barista barely looked at him. The television above the bar showed a cartoon. He watched the steam rise and vanish and felt the tendons in his hands ease, not in relief but in recognition. The pattern had completed. The geometry had held.
He sipped once, set the cup down, left a coin the exact price plus an ordinary tip, and walked out into the filtered light of midmorning.
The car he'd prepped was three blocks west in a pay-by-cash garage where the cameras worked just well enough to reassure the owner and just badly enough to be useless to anyone else. He crossed the threshold, passed the attendant with the same small nod he'd given two days earlier, slipped into the driver's seat, and let the duffel rest on the passenger floor between a folded rain jacket and a cheap umbrella with three bent ribs.
His phone vibrated once, twice, three times—the cadence he expected. He slid in an earpiece, the plastic warm from his skin.
"Null," he said.
The voice that answered carried a mild distortion, enough to freight it into no one and everyone. "Confirmed. Clean. Funds released."
"Copy."
A pause that could have been a smile. "Availability?"
"Later," he said. He disconnected.
The engine's idle softened as he merged into the ordinary flow of city life: parents dragging reluctant children across a zebra crossing; a tourist wrestling with a map that had more art than directions; a cyclist flying through a yellow light like a dare. Normal swallowed him whole.
He did not go far. Normal has blind spots, and he had learned to live inside them.
He parked two districts away and carried the duffel up to a one-room rental whose lease belonged to a man who did not exist. Inside: wallpaper peeling from damp, a single chair, a table that wobbled if you breathed at it, a brown curtain that had once been white. He closed the door, locked both locks, wedged the chair under the handle out of habit, and opened the bag.
He cleaned each piece of the rifle until the metal shone with absence, oil and cloth eating away the faintest suggestion of a fingerprint. The barrel would be sold for scrap in three parts by week's end; the scope would cross a border in the false bottom of a suitcase and never return; the trigger assembly would vanish somewhere it could not be found by anyone who wanted to find it. The casing—caught between finger and thumb—would be dissolved in acid. The bullet, wherever it lay under the minister's jacket, belonged to someone who could not talk.
He set the cloth down. Sipped water. Let his breath even.
That should have been the end.
But he found himself reaching for the small audio recorder he'd retrieved from the office's air vent the night before, a flat, square device disguised as a maintenance tag. It had captured two days of meetings he hadn't needed. Curiosity is a liability, he reminded himself. Curiosity ruins pros. Still, he toggled it on.
A chorus of room tone. Footsteps. Doors. The same guard's voice he could have picked from a crowd now. Then Laurent, smooth and sure, discussing dates and timetables in that tone of men who bend calendars. Null let it play, eyes closed, measuring the cadence against the memory of the man falling. It anchored the moment; it would unmoor him if he let it.
"…committee is finalized," Laurent said on the recording, words shaped by the faint echo of the office. "The oversight draft you sent is… creative, but the language on 'exceptional procurement' needs to be tightened. We don't want anyone looking east and finding… well. You know."
Another voice, lower, with the clipped consonants of a man who'd spent too long on parade grounds. "We can't afford discovery. Not again. Kryvos nearly—"
Null stopped the recording. The air in the small room felt thinner.
He didn't press play again.
He didn't need to.
The word crawled along the back of his neck and settled there, cold as old metal. He had known it once in sand and smoke and the sour smell of cheap diesel. He had heard it over radios and read it on papers that burned faster than they were filed. It belonged to a year his passport had buried and to faces whose names he could say only when he was certain there were no microphones in the room.
He placed the recorder back in the bag and closed the zipper, slow and precise. He sat without moving for one full minute because discipline was the line between a professional and a ghost with a death wish. When the minute ended, he stood, washed his hands like a surgeon degloving, and dismantled the chair-wedge from the door.
He left the room without the duffel. He had already made the decision—one he would have denied if asked. The rifle parts would be collected later by a pair of hands who didn't know his face and didn't care to. The recorder would be moved ten blocks in a different bag, then ten more. Nothing that held that word would live in one place longer than the hour.
On the street, the day had warmed. The light hit the river like hammered steel. He walked with the crowd, his pace set to the city's hum. His eyes did their work: reflections in shop windows, the echo of footsteps behind him, the rhythm of taxi engines at the curb. None of it signaled danger. The danger was in his chest, a new variable threatening the clean lines of his world.
He found a payphone that still had a dial tone—miracle—and fed it coins from three different pockets. When the line clicked live, he spoke two sentences in a soft, unremarkable accent to a number that only ever rang once. A man he had never met would move an item from one place to another. That would be enough for today.
Then he did what he always did when a pattern completed. He disappeared.
Hair, posture, glasses: changed in a public restroom where no one looked up. Jacket: reversed. Bag: traded for a cheap canvas tote bought from a street seller whose voice was smoke and gravel. He ate a sandwich he did not taste. He stood at a tram stop for twelve minutes and did not board. He crossed the river on foot because cameras liked bridges and bridges liked faces.
By evening, the news would flood feeds and televisions. A minister, dead between his car and his front door; a government, somber; a nation, shocked. People would argue about motive and meaning and the word "security." They would invent names for a man none of them had seen. He would not read the names. He never did. He did not leave stains to name until he had to. He did not pose for myths.
At dusk he changed cars again, choosing a battered hatchback that smelled of old pine cleaner. He drove toward the ring road, merged, exited, merged again—three changes in twenty minutes, each mapped to the path of least attention. The city shrank behind him until it was a band of light and then a suggestion and then nothing at all.
Night gathered. The road unspooled. The rain held off as if the sky, too, had learned restraint.
Only when he was sure no one followed did he allow himself one last replay—the breath, the break of the trigger, the minister falling. He filed it with the hundreds of other moments that kept him who he was instead of who he had been. He did not attach a feeling to it. Feelings were for later, after rituals and checks and long quiet hours where no one could hear him think.
He exhaled, steady and slow, as the kilometers rolled under his tires.
Tomorrow, there would be another message. Another number string. Another address. Another geometry problem.
But somewhere, locked inside a recorder that would not sit still, a single word glowed like a coal.
He did not touch it. Not yet.
He drove on.