ASIM_issue_54 (24 page)

I smile and wait for the others.

Head Shot

…Dirk Flinthart

Silver and salt.

He fed the hand-made rounds into the magazine one at a time, feeling for that firm snap that said the bullets were properly placed, ready to go. They left a light film of oil on his gloved fingertips, which was as it should be. There would be no spent casings for the authorities to find, because he was a professional—but precisely because he was a professional, he always took the extra precautions. His fingerprints existed nowhere, in no collections, no files, no government records.

Silver and salt. He thought of that last meeting with Aherne, halfway up the bleachers in the crowded, cheap seats where nobody could possibly eavesdrop.

“You understand why we want you,” Aherne said. “The other two … one is a patsy. An idiot ideologue. The cops will find him, and he’ll take the fall. There’s a cut-out in place to take him down as well, just for certainty.”

Double redundancy, redoubled. That was good. They were taking this seriously. As they should. “The other?”

“A pro,” said Aherne. “One of ours. He knows about the patsy. Thinks his job is to make a clean hit, in case the patsy can’t shoot straight. He won’t be found.”

“You’ll clean him as well.” It wasn’t a question. It didn’t get an answer. Aherne didn’t even look away from the ball game. The hunter smiled, mostly to himself. “You were thinking of cleaning me too.”

Aherne nodded then, still watching the game. “Naturally. But in your case, there are … factors. You know how we work. We expected your suspicions. We know you will take precautions. No matter what I tell you, you’d take precautions anyway. That’s how you do your job.”

“True,” said the hunter, then rose in a cheer with everyone else as Aaron belted a fastball, hard and high, right over the fence at center left. When the cheering and yelling died down, he dropped back into his seat, and said: “And you have nobody else with my expertise. You can’t be sure this won’t happen again.”

“Exactly why we’re doing this,” said Aherne, crumpling his paper cup in one big-knuckled hand. Flat, warm beer ran over his hairy wrist, trickling like piss to the stained concrete under the benches. “They have to know we know. They have to know we won’t stand for this. Doesn’t matter who they get, or how high they go: this is over the line, and we won’t stand for it. They have to know that if they try this again we won’t hesitate, no matter who gets in the way.”

The hunter drained his soda, and took a bite from his home-made sandwich. He never ate anything prepared by someone else, nor drank anything that wasn’t from a sealed container. “You know who’s behind it,” he said. “This message you’re sending. It’s going to reach them, too?”

Aherne shot him a sideways glance, blue eyes bloodshot under craggy grey brows. “Not that it’s your business. But yeah. The Cubans behind this, we already put them on ice. The know-how they got from one of them jigaboo countries close by. Haiti. You know where it is?”

The hunter restricted himself to a nod. Asking someone in his line of work if he knew of Haiti was a lot like asking a Nazi-hunter if he could point to Germany on the map.

“Haiti’s a shit-hole already,” said Aherne. “We’ve got people in there. On the ground. They’re picking up loose ends. Pretty soon, won’t be anyone on that black-ass-backwards island knows shit.”

Recalling wild, mountainous, secretive Haiti, the hunter had his doubts, which he kept to himself. “Good,” he said. “This is a hell of a job you’re asking me to do. Wouldn’t want to be doing it again, if your Cubans didn’t get the message.”

“Oh, they’ll get the message,” said Aherne. “You just do your job. Do it right. Let us do ours.”

That was the end of it. The last conversation. After that, there was only a wire: $250,000 into a numbered Swiss account. Also a date, a time, a location.

And here he was. Under the street, where nobody ever thought to look. Close to the action. So close he wouldn’t even need a scope, though he’d use one anyway. Just to be sure. Because even with a magic bullet, you still needed a head shot to put one of these fuckers down. Even the simplest and slowest were hard to kill. The dangerous ones, the strong ones with their identity and their memories intact—they could survive almost anything.

Except salt and silver; a head shot.

Up above, the noise was building. Down here in the concrete tunnels of the storm water system, all the voices, all the words were lost, echoing back and forth until all the sense was gone, only a building cataract roar remaining. The hunter lay his cheek against the stock of his gun, sighting down through the scope, checking his reference marks: the streetlight; the ‘no-parking’ sign; the underpass to the east. Normally he didn’t work like this. Mostly he got in close, for certainty. Couldn’t do that here. Under the street, in the storm drain: close as he could get, and hope to get away afterwards.

The noise built, the echoes amplifying until his head filled with white, meaningless sound. Like standing under a waterfall. Must be getting near now.

How had the Cubans got so close? Aherne wouldn’t say. Security, he said. Sore point, more likely. Probably it was pussy. The target was a famous pussy-hound. There were ways to get close to a man like that; close enough to administer certain poisons, deliver certain drugs. Close enough to
bite
.

He thought about the photos Aherne showed him. The slabs of raw meat and offal on the famous dinner settings. The man himself, his mouth bloodstained and feral, shoveling wet, reddish lumps into his face. You could fake stuff like that, of course, but the hunter was a professional, and you couldn’t fake it all. There were receipts. Purchase orders. Changes in pattern that wouldn’t mean anything to most people, but to a hunter, to someone like him, it was enough.

And if it wasn’t, there was the target himself, the motorcade coming into view down the slope towards the underpass as the noise climbed to a roar. You could see it, if you looked. The scope picked it all out in merciless detail: the dark bruises beneath dull eyes, the thinning hair, the skin grey under carefully applied makeup.

Officially it was Addison’s disease, a glandular syndrome with symptoms including weight loss, difficulty in standing up, changes in mood and personality, and even a craving for highly salted foods. The hunter grinned mirthlessly. There were other explanations for symptoms like that. But Addison’s is how history would remember it—if he did his job right, at least.

Steady, now. The big, black car cruising slowly down the hill. No advance vehicles to interfere with his sight-lines; Aherne had seen to that. Steady. Rest the specially-made rifle on the bipod, match the movement of the car, bring the cross-hairs onto the target. A little commotion (perhaps a shot from one of the others?) and the man in front slid neatly to one side, out of the way. An instant of perfection: squeeze the trigger.

Silver and salt. One round only, and the target’s skull exploded away above his eye. A pink cloud expanded, and wet lumps spattered the car’s trunk.

The screaming began, but the hunter was already turning away. He retrieved the single, spent shell, folded the bipod away, and even while he was still breaking down the weapon, already he was walking away, striding coolly down the dark, echoing drain towards his waiting car and the carefully planned getaway.

One shot. The hunter shook his head, and almost laughed. A quarter million dollars for maybe an ounce of silver, and the US was no longer led by an untouchable, undead President.

It was almost too easy.

Stalin had been a whole lot scarier. For Stalin, he’d needed a wooden stake.

Roasted

…Robert Porteous

Chôn set out on the sixth day after the full moon. It was the best day to begin a journey, especially one as dangerous as his.

The wake of his boat spread silently behind him, a glassy arrowhead scored into the mirrored water of the Lyric River. Although he was small, he was sinewy and his breathing was even as the boat slipped quickly upstream with easy, smooth strokes of his oars.

It was still early, with only the first hints of dawn percolating down through the mist, and there were few other boats. Two old women were being rowed quietly downstream by a granddaughter to collect lotus flowers in the first light. Fishermen on long boats laden high with tiers of woven lobster pots cast them one by one into the shallows. Some of them recognised him, Chôn the hunter they called him or maybe Chôn the weasel, and turned their heads away. To them, he was the foundling son of his step-father. His step-father, the loner, always drunk, always brawling, who died owing everybody money.

As always, he did not show that he had noticed their disrespect. But this morning, he sat straighter as he rowed. When he got back they would have to respect him, all of them. And he would marry Lo-an, the headman’s daughter.

The river was still wide here, the clear water of the channel winding unbanked through the rice-dimpled paddies that stretched out on either side to the shrouded limestone cliffs. Squat stone funerary boxes sat on clay mounds at the edges of fields, where farmers’ families laid their dead so that their spirits could continue to watch over the rice in death as in life.

Chôn hoped to die at home. It was bad luck to die in the forest without a monument, like so many hunters, one’s spirit condemned to roam without rest. But he had taken all necessary precautions. He had set out on a day the village shaman had determined was auspicious, and had left an offering of cooked food and incense at his house-shrine. He had even killed the rabbits the day before so that unhelpful spirits would not be drawn to his departure by the blood and squealing. But most important of all, he had studied an ancient scroll that told of how a brave man could achieve greatness.

A dozen fat rabbits now lay trussed at his feet, rocking gently as he rowed. It had taken him most of the day before to prepare them. First, he had gutted each one, carefully removing the entrails. He had squeezed the grass and pellets out of the long intestines and rinsed them before tying one end. Then he had filled them with the ripe red berries he had collected from high in the forest over the last week. When each was full, a knobbly motley worm, he had knotted the top and rinsed the outside and then washed his hands before winding it back into the rabbit. It was important to not get the bitter berry-juice on the fur or the bait might be rejected uneaten. His wife-to-be, Lo-an, had sneaked from her father’s house to help. She had crouched over each little carcase sewing it shut as he took the next rabbit from the hutch.

He thought of Lo-an, standing at the river’s edge in the dim pre-dawn light, bidding him a silent farewell, one hand resting on her belly, her eyes moist. For a moment, the steady rhythm of his oars faltered and the sudden splash of the missed stroke startled two red-headed cranes into flight. If he returned successful, he would be able to ask her father for permission to marry.

If he was not successful, he would not see his child born.

Soon the rhythmic splash, splash of the lobster-pot fishermen faded into the mist. The river narrowed, the limestone karsts towering above him. As he rowed, Chôn watched their ranks receding behind him, the forested pillars melting away like a line of giants marching into the clouds.

After half an hour more, he steered the boat into the shallows and pulled it up onto a narrow sandy beach fringed with tall slender palms and a stand of bamboo. At one side, a dark passage framed by two massive, buttressed Sau trees marked the start of the path up the cliffs. Chôn kneeled, cleared a space and nestled a flat stone in among the Sau roots, making an improvised shrine for a votive offering of some cooked rice, parcelled up in leaf.

He carefully opened the drawstring pouch hanging from his neck and tumbled three areca nuts, each wrapped in betel leaf with a little lime, out into the palm of his hand. The harmonious combination of the nut and the leaf symbolised a happy marriage. He offered the first nut, with a prayer that he would have a long and happy union with Lo-an, that he would see his child. Then he carefully replaced the other two nuts in the pouch. One was for nightfall. The third would be an offering here in thanks … if he got out.