DESCENT by Lars Emmerich

Author:Lars Emmerich [Emmerich, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lars Emmerich

34

Kittredge awoke in the bed he’d shared with Nora the previous night. He’d spent the day drinking, snoozing, and dialing the various Copenhagen-born Sergios whose phone numbers he’d harvested from the interwebs, as a geeky former lover jokingly referred to the internet. None of the Sergios were dead, at least not the ones he’d spoken to.

As he rinsed the sleep from his mouth with a healthy swill of vodka, the last of the bottle he’d bought the previous day en route to the hotel from Nora’s flat, it occurred to Kittredge that, given the time he’d already invested in the project, he really should find the phone numbers belonging to the remaining Sergios on the Copenhagen list. There were three left to find.

He rose, rinsed off the evidence of his earlier self-love, again with Sergio on his mind rather than the brunette beauty whose body he’d devoured repeatedly over the past two days — why was he continually looking over the fence at greener grass? — and dressed in the second of the two outfits he’d bought after cleaning up the dead goon’s body parts the day prior. He wrapped his scarf around his neck to hide the bruising from yesterday’s near-strangulation. He had to agree with Nora. His neck looked awful.

He had a vicious headache, and his stomach hurt. He realized that he hadn’t yet eaten. Kittredge stuffed some crackers into his mouth from the basket of junk food next to the mini-bar and washed it down with his vodka. It would have to do for the moment. He had work to do, he decided.

Kittredge ambled down to the hotel’s computer room. It sat inside a small business center with keycard access, and Kittredge chose the computer furthest from the door. In case of an intruder, the extra distance would maximize his reaction time, which he suspected would be suspect given his blood-alcohol content.

It took Kittredge the better part of an hour to find the three telephone numbers. As he jotted the last one down, belonging to a Sergio Joao Valenzuela, born twenty-five years ago last week, a thought struck him. Right before both of the assaults he’d suffered over the past couple of days, he’d been doing exactly the same thing: searching for Copenhagen-born Sergios.

A chill suddenly ran down his spine. That was the third common denominator between attacks. All three of them involved Sergio in some way. Even after his grisly death, Sergio had a part to play in the attacks against Kittredge.

He gathered his papers, deleted the search cache from the computer, and hustled from the business center.

The route back to his hotel room took him past the registration desk. “Excuse me,” the desk clerk said, somehow knowing from Kittredge’s appearance that he wasn’t German and would therefore likely be most effectively addressed in English. “Are you Herr Peter Kittredge?”

Jesus. How did he know that? But he soon recalled the answer. Since the rise of what the bureaucrats called Radical Islam, a redundancy in Kittredge’s view,

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