Diary of an Assassin (4 page)

CHAPTER
9

The inf
rared dot hovered over her left breast: he didn’t want her to suffer and didn’t want a closed casket.

Out of nowhere, Stephanie
turned and bent down. Rhett pushed a button on the side of the goggles and they switched to normal view. On the floor next to her, a young girl with a scrape on her knee was crying. Stephanie ignored everyone and got a wet napkin. She spoke with someone near the front who soon provided her with a Band-Aid.

Stephanie kneeled
in front of the child again and cleaned the small scrape on her knee before placing the Band-Aid, and sealing it with a kiss. The girl hugged her and Stephanie spoke to her a while, asking her what television shows she enjoyed and what she wanted to do when she grew up.

She
stood and turned back to the group of men that were speaking with her. Rhett flipped on the infrared again. For a long moment he did nothing but stare at the red dot prominent on her chest.

He
switched off the infrared and looked at her. She was smiling, pink lips spread across perfect teeth.
Though she was certainly beautiful by conventional standards, there was something else about her. It was that hidden pain that made Rhett want to throw his arms around her and protect her.

He lowered the rifle, took it apart, and put it in the backpack. Rhett took out his phone and opened the black app
. He texted two words:
Fuck you.

The reply came quickly, as if
the Messenger were expecting it:

Contract given to someone else. Cease activities.

Rhett looked up to the house and an image flashed in his mind: Stephanie on the floor with her brains spattered against clean carpet. He thought of her funeral and the little girl she had helped standing by her closed casket.

He stood and walked toward the building, tossing the backpack into a trash
bin outside.

The interior was immaculate
, with high ceilings and a waitstaff cycling around with hors d’oeuvre and champagne. Men in suits hung around in a separate room smoking cigars. He received odd stares as he walked through in hiking gear, and he smiled cordially and nodded hello to a few people that snubbed him.

He made his way to
the north side of the building where Stephanie stood across the room. He approached her. She noticed him and smiled.

“Lemm
e see,” Rhett said, “Stephanie, right?”

“Yes. Have we met?”

“A long time ago. We’re second cousins actually. Hey, my mama would get a big kick outta meeting you.” He dipped into a slight drawl. “She sees you on TV and says she’s your aunt to anyone that’ll listen.”

“That’s cute. I’d love to meet her.”

“Thanks, she’s right over here.” They began walking. “I gotta tell you, though, she’s losing it a little. She may ask you the same question fifty times.”

“That’s not a problem. I went through that with my mother as well.
Is it Alzheimer’s?”

As soon as they had turned a corner toward the kitchen, Rhett put hi
s hand over her mouth and pulled her down the hall. A bathroom was to the right. She struggled and tried to scream as he dragged her in and shut the door.

“Shh,” he said, pinning her against the door. “We have some things we need to discuss. But if you scream, I can’t discuss them with you. I’m going to remove my hand so we can talk. If you scream, I’ll have to knock you unconscious and take you somewhere else
so we can have this conversation. Do you understand?” She nodded. “And you’re not going to scream when I remove my hand, right?” She hesitated. “Right?” She nodded.

Slowly, he removed his hand. She was breathing heavily and a strand of hair
had fallen down over her eyes. Rhett backed away just a little in an attempt to calm her.

“I have money. You can have it if you just—”

“You need to listen,” he said, “and not speak. You’re in danger. You need to get on a plane out of the country. Use that money you just mentioned and disappear. I don’t know how long you’ll have to be gone for but you have to leave tonight.”

“Who are you?” she said, her hand inching for the doorknob behind her.

“Don’t do that.” Her hand stopped. “If you want to live, you need to leave the country tonight.”

“Why? What’re you going to do?”

“I’m not going to do anything. It’s not me you need to worry about.”

“Please, look, I have a—”

The doorknob turned and there was a knock.

“Occupied,” Rhett said loudly.

Stephanie said, “They’re right outside. There’s no other way out. They’ll see your face.”

Rhett exhaled. He took out his phone and opened the app, clicking on her dossier. He held the phone up to her so she could read.

“What is this?” she said.

“It’s the contract for your life. I was hired to kill you.” She began struggling
again. Rhett pressed his body against hers. “I’m not going to do it, listen to me, I’m not going to do it. But someone else will. That’s why you need to leave.”

“What the hell is this? Are you some stalker?”

“You need to listen to me very carefully,” he said, staring into her eyes, his voice flat and serious, “because no one else is going to warn you: you have a contract out on your life. The agency that handles the contracts has sent someone else. They probably sent someone else when they sent me. He could already be here. You need to leave the country.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why would I lie?”

A voice came from outside, “You almost done in there?”

“Just a second,” Rhett shouted.

“You’re crazy. You don’t know the difference between lying and the truth.”

Rhett looked into her eyes and saw that she wasn’t going to budge. He let her go. She spun around and opened the door and ran outside. An older man was standing out in the hallway. Stephanie was about to say something to him when she turned to look in the bathroom: it was empty. She looked down the hallway. No one was there.

“You all right, dear?” the old man said.

“Fine, fine. Thanks.”

“You look like you saw a ghost.”

“I think…I maybe did.”

June 30
th

I don’t remember much about those years spent in training. I remember that they made me a man. I had signed a liability waiver and was told by some of the other members of the class that they had us sign because every year, they had one death. They would only allow six students into this program and it had a fifty-percent attrition rate. So that left three of us. Of those three, one would likely die. Leaving only two in a graduating class.

We were trained in everything. Much of it I didn’t see how we could use. Facial drawing, how to follow someone without be
ing seen, high-speed driving, martial arts with an emphasis on pressure-point fighting, lock picking…the list goes on and on. But the bulk of the day was spent on physical conditioning and weapons. The weapons training seemed to mimic history. We began with bare hands, and then moved on to simple weapons like the staff, and then the knife, swords and spears. By the time we got to guns, we thought we were deadly. But we had no idea what deadly was until we met the arms master.

He was lean and muscular with hair that came down to his shoulders. All of us, including the women, had to shave bald and it was surprising that they
’d let someone grow their hair out. He spoke with a French accent and rumor was he came from French intelligence.

The first time we met the arms master,
the title a moniker of his choosing, we were taken out to the forest. Several targets were set up hundreds of yards out, far enough that we could barely see them. The arms master laid several firearms on the ground. “Count,” he said. He took the rifle first and fired several rounds; then he took two pistols and fired simultaneously. Then a submachine gun that seemed to fire a hundred rounds before you could blink. “How many?” he said. One of the students said, “Fifty-six.” I had counted that many as well so I agreed.

He walked us to the targets.
The bullets had obliterated the head and heart and touched nowhere else. “Count.” We quickly counted the holes. There were exactly fifty-six.

The arms
master looked us over. “My name is Gustav, and I will show you how to kill people.”

CHAPTER
10

It was nearly
9:00 p.m. when Rhett saw a car drop Stephanie off at her condo. Her husband wasn’t with her and he hadn’t seen him at the family reunion either. She said something to the driver and he got out and walked her to the door. She turned off her alarm and went inside.

Rhett sat on the roof of the building across from her again. He had fished out his backpack from the trash and
had the receiver set up, the sound of high heels on hardwood filling his ears. Stephanie closed all the blinds except for the one on the top floor. He saw her move in and out of view a few times before she appeared in workout gear with a small towel.

A van pulled up on the street below. It was white with a logo on the
side. Rhett watched it. The driver exited and checked a few things in the cargo hold before returning to the driver’s seat. The van was double-parked. Rhett reassembled his rifle and peered at the driver through the scope. He went back up to the house and saw Stephanie on a treadmill upstairs. At the van, the driver was out now and smoking a cigarette. Rhett flipped on the laser scope, a small red dot appearing on the man’s throat.

The driver’s cell phone rang.

“Hello…yeah…no I’m here now. K…K…I’ll just leave it. Bye.”

Rhett followed the driver as he went to the back of the van and pulled out a box. He began walking on the sidewalk…and
past Stephanie’s condo. He went to a neighboring home and left the box on the doorstep with a Sticky Note on the door. After getting back into the van, he pulled away and went up the street. Rhett lowered the rifle.

He
opened his phone and checked the black app: there were no texts from the Messenger.

He leaned back in the folding chair he had brought with him and glanced up to the moon. A slit of light in a black sky with a few clouds hovering around it. The night air was cold, at least for someone used to a tropical island, and he was glad he wouldn’t be doing this anymore. He knew the terms: once a contract is denied, you
do not receive any others. He was officially retired.

His father had worked
in a warehouse pulling fifteen-hour days six days a week. He worked so much that he developed ulcers and hypertension. He died at forty-two of a massive heart attack. Work literally killed him. Rhett had promised himself he would never be like that. He thought regular, soul-killing jobs were what caused the rampant unhappiness, alcoholism, corruption, and drug use that was pulling civilization down in the familiar pattern that has repeated throughout history. He’d chosen a different path. And now retired at thirty-four with all the money he could ever want, he had no idea what he would do.

He reached down to the water bottle on the floor and
caught something slide out of the top window of the house next door. He recognized it immediately: the extended barrel of an FR F2 sniper rifle: the standard sniper weapon of the French military.

Rhett grabbed his rifle and aimed
. Without time to flip on the scope, he let out one shot, the spit hardly more than a whisper. It struck the barrel, blowing off part of it and leaving jagged metal in its place.

The FR F2 let out a shot that echoed up and down the street. It burst through the window of Stephanie’s workout room and went wide by about
nine inches, the round embedding itself in the wall rather than in the back of her skull.

A man glanced out the window, short-cropped hair and a leather jacket.
Their eyes locked before he disappeared into the house.

Rhett was on his feet, dropping the rifle and pulling out his .22
, which he kept tucked in his waistband. He sprinted down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. The front door of the home next door was open and Rhett ran inside.

The house was quiet. He went gun first into the living room and swung left and right before heading into the kitchen and
standing beside the back door. He glanced out the window but didn’t see anyone. Just then he heard footsteps behind him. The man with the rifle dashed down the stairs.

Rhett fired as the man jumped into the hallway. He fired again at the man’s foot but it
stepped away and he missed.

Rhett ran around the corner
to find the broken barrel pointed at his chest. He leapt backward as the round went off and grazed his chest, tearing away a streak of clothing and leaving a thread of blood in its place.

Rhett
shoved his back against the wall and glanced quickly around the corner. The man vanished into a room and Rhett followed.

Rhett glanced in, keeping his head near the floor where the man’s weapon was unlikely to be pointed. A window was open over the bathtub and
its screen had been kicked out. Rhett ran to the back door and opened it as the man was hopping over a fence. He held up his pistol but it was too late.

The man had jumped into
the neighboring yard, causing a dog to start barking. The patio’s glass door slid open and a woman stepped outside. She screamed as the man ran past her and into her house.

Gripping his pistol
Rhett followed him and, running past the woman, dashed through her home. He reached the sidewalk just as a late-model Camaro was peeling out and speeding down the street. He aimed for one of the back tires, but by now the entire neighborhood had lurked out onto the sidewalks, and kids were standing around.

He replaced his weapon and
dashed upstairs to retrieve his gear before heading down the sidewalk and disappearing into the crowd.