NUMBER ONE

CODENAME: ACHILLES

STATUS: ACTIVE, OFF DUTY

LOCATION: UNKNOWN

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There's nothing worse after a long night of heavy drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name. 

Or how you met.

Or where you are.

Or why they're dead.

Number One wasn't the first Intelligence Officer to wake up next to a corpse, but it was considered a bad show to not know who they were.  The glassy, vacant eyes staring at something beyond the room left him in no doubt that all life had fled. Stubble on the chin, so the corpse had probably been a man. That was a relief.  He wasn't straightening out in his old age.  He'd never live that down at the club.

The corpse had been a real looker in life. Almost as pretty as Number Six with eyes as blue as Number Seven. He’d also been young. Twenty years old at most. What a waste.

Number One dragged his attention away from the corpse. The harsh pre-dawn light creeping through the gaps in the blinds revealed an unfamiliar room. It didn’t feel right to belong to the dead man either. There was no personality here. No pictures on the wall and only the blandest of furniture. Beneath the blood, and oh God there was so much blood, every surface was bare.

This had to be a hotel room or maybe a serviced flat? Somewhere with CCTV and witnesses. This wasn’t some horrible accident. This was a setup. Which was almost a relief. If it was a setup then he was only tangentially responsible for the corpse. But it also meant that there was someone else involved. Someone who knew that he was here, naked and defenceless, in a blood stained room.

He had to get out.

Clothes. He needed to find some. If he tried to make a run for it in the nude he was going to attract all kinds of unhelpful attention.

He threw the covers back and swore under his breath. The poor bastard was in pieces. This was all so unnecessary. He slipped out of the bed, barely able to take his eyes off the dead man.

He picked his way across the anonymous beige carpet, eyes down, avoiding the many bloodstains. Suddenly his hands were clenched to fists, and he was ready to fight, and for maybe half a second he couldn’t work out why. There was a dark crumpled mass on the floor by the bedroom door. He must have caught it out of the corner of his eye and read it as a threat.

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On closer inspection it turned out to be his own trousers. He must have been drugged last night. That’s the only way his suit trousers would end up in a heap like that. 

As he pulled the trousers on, a single black feather drifted out of the folds and dropped to the ground. The feather went into his pocket. He could wonder about it later.

As he opened the door, some instinct told him to look back at the room.  From this perspective the apparently random splashes and smears of blood resolved into a five pointed star inside a circle.  A Pentagram.  Fuck.  Occult bullshit was outside his job description and well above his pay grade.  It was definitely time to leave. Let the experts deal with this.

The bedroom led directly to a small living area with a kitchenette attached. The same thick beige carpet. That settled it then, a high-end serviced flat. The cheaper flats had darker, harder-wearing carpet. The kitchen meant it wasn’t a hotel room and the minibar fridge proved that this was no-ones’ home. 

He’d have been happier with that deduction had it not been for the footprints heading away from the bedroom. Naked, bloody footprints leading to another door off the living room, probably the bathroom. They didn’t leave.

He put his own bare foot next to one of the prints. He didn’t have particularly large feet for a man his height but the print on the floor was half that size. The small feet suggested small stature but that was no comfort as he crept toward the door. If the killer was in there they certainly had a blade and they’d proved they could kill with it.

 The bathroom showed signs of a hurried clean up. Footprints showed that the blood-soaked killer had gone straight into the shower. They'd washed the blood off but hadn’t worried about any of the other evidence. There were bloody finger marks smeared on the both sides of the bathroom door and the outside of the shower.

There was also a message. Letters scrawled on the bathroom wall in blood.  ALL DEBTS WILL BE REPAID. 

It was amateurish. He didn't like that. You couldn't trust amateurs. They might do anything and for any reason. Professionals did things for predictable reasons. They did the things they were ordered to, or paid to, and they intended to go home at the end of it. Amateurs never left themselves anything in reserve for the return journey.

He really had to get out.  

Back in the living room he found his suit jacket on the sofa, but no sign of his shirt or shoes. His phone was in the pocket, inoperative, with the screen smashed. No wallet, no ID, no car keys. If he left now he’d look pretty conspicuous with no shoes and no shirt, but every instinct was screaming that he’d already stayed too long.

The front door was down a narrow passage from the kitchenette. He peered through the spyhole in the door. The corridor beyond was dimly lit but empty. Even so, he unlocked the door as quietly as he could. 

There was a sudden uneasiness as the door swung towards him. Those footprints had been awfully small. The killer probably wasn’t very tall. 

He didn’t see the person on the other side of the door. He saw movement. A dark haired head coming for him from a spot just too low to be seen through the spyhole. A glint of light on the edge of a blade. The sudden impact as something hit him in the middle of the chest. Another as the floor hit him on the back of the head. Then a weird wheezing noise as all the breath left his body.