The trafficking coordinator's name is Victor Sands. Forty-four years old. Employed, officially, as a freight logistics manager for a company that has been audited twice by the IRS and both times escaped with minimal penalty.
What the company actually coordinates is the movement of people. Women, mostly. Brought in from three different countries by a network that Gideon has mapped as carefully as he has mapped anything — the routes, the hand-offs, the money, the specific human beings at each node of the operation. Sands is not at the top of the network. He is third from the top. He is, however, the operational center. He is the person without whom the logistics collapse.
Gideon has been watching him for three weeks.
Not physically following — that kind of exposure is the thing Marcus warned him about on the phone last month, a warning Gideon did not need but received anyway because Marcus worries. Instead, he watches the pattern. The grocery store on Tuesday mornings. The gym on Monday and Thursday evenings. The house in Manayunk, a neighborhood of narrow streets and late-night bars, where Sands lives alone with a very large dog and neighbors who are close enough to be inconvenient.
He makes note of the windows. The angles. The neighbor's schedule.
He thinks about the method for two weeks before he decides. The method has to be invisible. It has to be consistent with a man of Sands's age and build and lifestyle. It has to have no forensic trail that leads anywhere.
He decides on micro-incisions. Precise. Internal. The kind of bleeding that begins slowly and accelerates over thirty-six to forty-eight hours, by which time the cause of death is apparent — hemorrhagic event — but the source is impossible to identify without a level of autopsy detail that no overworked city medical examiner will order for a man who has no family pressing for answers and no official connection to anything that would make his death interesting.
He writes nothing down. He does not need to. The plan lives in the part of his mind that does not forget.
Thursday night. The gym parking lot. Sands goes in at seven and comes out at eight-twenty-five. He is predictable. Predictability is not a moral failing, but it is a tactical one.
Gideon sits in his car across the street from the gym and watches the light above the entrance and thinks about the women who are somewhere in transit right now, in the logistics that Sands manages, and he feels the thing he always feels at this stage — not anger, which would be imprecise, but clarity.
Absolute, cold clarity.
He starts the car.
Next Thursday