Thirst No. 3 by Christopher Pike Page A

[email protected].”
    “That link will just lead to another link. It won’t help me.”
    “That’s all I have.”
    “I’m warning you, seriously, you don’t want to lie to me again.”
    “My broker’s a very private person. We’ve never met.”
    “Not true,” I say, and I know this for a fact.
    “It is true. There’s no reason for us to meet.”
    I shoot his right kneecap with my silenced pistol. A .45 is a powerful round for a handgun, but it cannot compare to the armor-piercing bullets Claudious Ember and I were using a few nights ago. Marko lets out a muffled cry and drops to one knee. His wound isn’t fatal—nor will he lose the leg—but he’s bleeding freely. I speak to him in a sympathetic tone.
    “I know what you’re thinking, Marko. It doesn’t matter what you tell me, I’m going to kill you. You’re also thinking that if you hold out a bit, then break down and give me something,anything that’s useful, I might at least spare your family. To be blunt, all of this would ordinarily be true. But you’re wrong to think I’m an assassin and someone has hired me to kill you. I hate professional hit men, and when I cross paths with one, I usually kill them. Also I’ve studied your family, and your wife and children, and they appear to love you, although they would be hurt to know what little love you’re capable of.”
    “I care for my family,” he says, breathing heavily. He does think I’m going to kill him.
    “Fine. Right now—before your wife gets worried and comes looking for you—I want to talk business. Tell me the name and address of your broker.”
    He hesitates. “Rita Centrello. She lives in New Jersey, a small town called Olive. 2112 Oates Drive. She’s an old broad, in her seventies, harmless as a fly.”
    “Mafia?”
    He shrugs. “It’s not like you think.”
    “If you warn her that she’s going to have a visitor, I’ll come back and kill your family. Understood?”
    “Sure.”
    “IIC. Have you heard of them?”
    He hesitates. “Yeah. Before Randy, they gave me a contract for a woman in the Bay Area who worked for them. Michelle Ranker. They’ve given me regular jobs over the last five years. Always paid top dollar. It made Rita and me wonder, you know. To be blunt, Rita doesn’t know anything about them.Believe me if you want, I don’t care. But I asked Michelle what their big secret was.”
    “Right before you killed her?”
    “Hey, she was in a talkative mood. She told me she’d tell me if I promised not to kill her. What the hell. She didn’t understand how this business works. I told her what she wanted to hear and she swore to me that IIC was working for the Antichrist. That they were preparing the way.”
    “How?”
    “By making truckloads of money. She said they were spread all over the world, and had controlling shares in more companies on Wall Street than you can imagine. But she said no one knew about them, not really. They were strictly behind the scenes.”
    “How do they make their money?”
    “I asked her that. She babbled on about something called the Array.”
    “What’s the Array?”
    “I don’t know. She started crying then, begging me not to kill her. I got impatient and hit her. That was a mistake. She started talking crazy stuff. The kids, she said, she was the one who paid the kids. A hundred bucks a month, that’s all IIC paid them.”
    “Who were the kids?”
    “Beats me. It sounded like they were a bunch of normal kids. They weren’t psychic, and they knew nothing about thestock market. But Michelle did say they were all from the third world. She acted like she was their mother. She said she made sure they got their checks each month. But then she started sobbing. She said that was her big mistake, that she had talked about them once in public. That’s why they had sent me to kill her. She got real hysterical at the end, I don’t think anything she said was reliable.” He pauses. “You’re not just busting my