Moira MacTaggert had been waiting for years for him to make a mistake.
He went by many names. Magnus was his code name, known throughout the international community as the most efficient, and most ruthless, spymaster and assassin. Erik Lensherr was his preferred alias, the quiet young man with the indistinguishable accent and smooth, handsome face.
Birth name Max Eisenhardt. Moira was one of the few people privy to the fact. Maximilian Eisenhardt, born to Edith and Jakob Eisenhardt in Heidelberg, Germany, raised Jewish his family fled to Poland after the Nuremberg laws were passed, but were captured not long after and at the age of fourteen he was incarcerated in Auschwitz concentration camp. Prisoner number 214782. Jakob Eisenhardt perished in the camp showers, but Edith and Max seem to have disappeared from the record books.
Moira looked down at the dingy photograph attached to the file. It had been taken in a ghetto in Poland, shortly before the Eisenhardts were apprehended. A group of teenaged boys stood in rags, their thin faces staring up at her, all hungry eyes and narrow mouths. Their clothes hung off their bodies at the same time hiding and making painfully clear their malnourished states. But their wide smiles lit the picture, spreading between sharp cheekbones.
At the centre of the group of youths stood Max Eisenhardt, with the biggest smile of them all, far too much tooth in such a young face. It was his Bar mitzvah, a little late, delayed by their flight from Germany. Held in secret no doubt, as so many were in those days, in underground synagogs across Europe the young Jewish boys and girls were allowed a day to feel proud of their heritage.
The happiness frozen in the photo was marred by the knowledge of what happened mere months later, when the Ghetto was ransacked by Gestapo agents, the survivors being dragged into the various camps across Europe. It was very likely that most of the children in the picture were long dead.
But not Max Eisenhardt.
The CIA had been tracking the string of murders for over a decade now, the brutal killings performed by the international enigma that was the assassin Magnus. Magnus killed indiscriminately, or that was how it appeared. There was almost certainly reason behind the kills, a pattern linking the dozens of bloodied corpses that ranged in placement from Asia to South America. Some victims made more sense than others, like the Italian mob-boss found sprawled on the floor of his Vegas hotel room, naked and bloated, throat gaping open grotesquely, or the most recent one, a young Spanish immigrant who'd been linked back to a criminal organization in Madrid that was thought to be associated with powers in the Soviet Union.
Others were by all appearances, completely random. Magnus disposed of an elderly hotdog vender in Toronto, a hotel concierge in Chicago, a whole bar or people in Mexico City. The kills were only connected by the method of murder, a neat slash to the throat, often the only wound but not always, and his calling card, a silver German coin tucked into their pocket. Flashy and melodramatic, and a little sloppy as it gave the police a method with which to track his erratic course around the world. But that was his only sloppy habit, other than that he was impeccably careful not to slip up.
And then his mistake, Mrs Isabelle Maximoff, a pretty young widow living in New Jersey.
A mistake for multiple reasons. First, to have murdered somebody directly tied to his favourite persona, so called Mr Erik Lensherr. Mr Lensherr had been employed for seven months at a steel mill in Trenton, had lived in a boarding house with Mrs Maximoff and two other tenants for the same amount of time.
Second mistake, leaving the body in his room, rather poorly disguised as attempted rape gone wrong. He could have at least tried a little harder, it had taken no time at all to discern that no such assault had taken place. That in itself wouldn't have been very detrimental in the end if it hadn't been for mistake number three...
He should have killed the other occupants of the house.
The landlord Mr Samuel Sawler and his wife Diane, and Joseph Klein, a grad student at Birkbeck. There were also the many employees he'd worked alongside for months, unmasked and exposed. These were people who knew his face, knew his mannerisms and habits, and knew his name.
On a hunch they'd used the few photos they'd had of Maz Eisenhardt, simply because the timing fit with he boy's halted paper trail, and the murders had started in Germany with a few ex-Nazis. The crime scenes had been far less impeccable than the ones in the years following, but it was where he coins had begun to appear. The neighbours coworkers had looked at the photos, the Bar Mitzvah one and one from a few years later, from the Auschwitz records of Max at seventeen, the last documentation of his life. Every single witness had given positive identification.
They finally had a name.
Moira had been waiting for years, ever since she'd started tracking the faceless killer, for him to make a mistake. Now she had a whole plethora to choose from.