Blood of the Assassin (Assassin Series 5) (34 page)

“What’s eating you? You look like someone just walked across your grave,” Cruz asked him, taking in his agitation.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’m just looking for meaning where there isn’t any. Something about the plane scare... it’s probably nothing.”

When they opened the rooftop door they were immediately struck by the stench of jet exhaust, which had bled an amber stain across the skyline. Supposedly the smog was far better than a decade earlier, but it was hard to tell that morning, and everyone’s eyes began watering within five minutes of being outside.
El Rey
took a few steps away from the group, his attention pulled to something on one of the nearby equipment enclosures – movement. A large black bird – a crow – was grooming itself, but seemed to sense the assassin’s scrutiny and abruptly stopped before fixing him with a beady eye. A chill ran up the assassin’s spine, and then the bird flapped into the air, away from the men and their airport, leaving them to their mundane duties.

He returned to Cruz’s side and they did a circuitous tour, nodding at the snipers, who were slowly panning their rifles, watching for any signs of a threat through their scopes. Briones nudged
El Rey
and motioned to the binoculars, the impulse to join them in their vigil too strong to resist. The Chinese jumbo jet had coasted to a stop in the designated area and made a half turn so that the doors would be facing away from the city – a common-sense measure that put the plane’s bulk between the nearby buildings and the spot where the helicopter would land. Everything seemed to be under control, the security impenetrable.

Perhaps they would get lucky, and the German had decided to skip his date with destiny.

Cruz looked at his watch. Twenty more minutes, and the helicopter would be there.

Rauschenbach squinted through the ventilation grill louvers at the plane in the distance. Only a few minutes to go now. Hundreds of hours of effort and planning would all culminate with a man he’d never met dying a mile away so that he could retire four million dollars richer. What a strange and wonderful world it was.

He’d watched the snipers take up their positions after a hurried reconnaissance of the roof, and fortunately the closest was at least fifty yards away. That solved a lot of problems for him, because he could shift the grill open a few inches, which would afford him just enough room to slip the rifle barrel out and sight the scope through the gap. Once the jet had drawn to a stop, he’d pinged it with the laser range finder, which read fifteen hundred and ninety-six meters – farther than he’d hoped, but not by much, and still doable. The variable now was the crosswind. It had been impossible to get an accurate reading on the velocity from inside the shaft, so he had to guess – he figured it at seven miles per hour, but couldn’t reliably judge what it was out in the middle of the field, on the runways.

Wind had always been a risk, but he’d seen no other viable alternatives. The damned Mexicans had put measures in place unlike anything he’d ever seen. He now had a grudging admiration for their acumen – several other options he’d considered had been cut off as he’d watched the preparations, so they had at least one person who knew what he was doing.

His digital watch made an almost inaudible beep and he became more alert. The door to the plane would open at any moment, the stairs would roll forward, and then the great man would step out into the Mexican sun and move down to the tarmac, where he would be greeted by the mayor and a row of suited dignitaries, and then be whisked off to the helicopter and up, out of the German’s reach. His chance would come either at the top of the stairs, or once the target was standing, being greeted by the government wonks.

The moment he had been waiting for arrived. The door swung wide, and a few seconds later the mobile steps that were waiting nearby lumbered forward and pressed against the fuselage in an almost lascivious manner, west meeting east, the thrusting stairs unmistakably phallic to his eye.

A winsome young woman looked out from the plane doorway and then moved onto the platform, followed by a coterie of hard-looking security men in matching navy blue suits, their jackets bulging with weapons, ear buds discreetly in place, eyes no doubt scanning automatically from behind the darkened lenses of their sunglasses. They were small even in the high-powered scope’s lens, but he felt increasingly confident as one, then two, and then finally two more stepped onto the landing, turned outward to face any attack, their job to give their lives to shield their charge from harm.

Not this time, boys. It’s not your lucky day.

A portly functionary moved onto the platform and then slowly down the stairs, followed by six more bodyguards, who stationed themselves at the base of the steps, facing the waiting Mexicans like life-sized pawns in an elaborate chess game. Four more members of the Chinese delegation then exited the plane and descended, and Rauschenbach’s pulse slowed as he focused upon modulating his breathing, every iota of his awareness now concentrated on the image in the scope. The procession seemed to go on forever, and then the Chinese leader’s distinctive profile emerged from the gloom, a politician’s smile plastered on his face with all the warmth of rigor mortis, ferret-like eyes darting to and fro. For a fleeting moment it was hard for Rauschenbach to believe that the largely unremarkable doughy-soft features, the man’s butter-faced expression tinged with distaste, were those of the second most powerful man in the world.

The Chinese leader stood just outside the doorway, frozen in a photo-op moment, waving at a non-existent crowd for the cameras, and Rauschenbach began exhaling his carefully metered final breath, his finger caressing the trigger with a familiarity born of intimacy; and then his Zen-like calm was shattered when an Aero Mexico jet’s engines roared as it began its takeoff run, momentarily blurring across the scope’s field of vision and disrupting his concentration.

“Shit,” he cursed; and the first opportunity was lost as the Chinese leader edged forward and descended the steps, his bodyguards having taken up position in front and immediately behind him, a slow-moving Asian conga line inching down the stairs as the bemused Mexicans waited in a kind of suspended animation.

Rauschenbach gathered himself and returned to trailing the crosshairs on the target’s head, following the leader’s movements until he arrived at the base of the steps. There he paused, but only briefly – not long enough for the slug to cover the distance. That was the tricky part about a long-range shot: You needed the target to be stationary for at least several long seconds, or by the time the bullet reached him, he could have moved.

He watched as the Chinese leader stepped forward to greet his Mexican hosts, and then stood stock still as the mayor made a few ceremonious statements of fellowship and greeting – the second moment the German had been waiting for. Every fiber of his being seemed to synthesize down to the scope, and his pulse beat in his ears as he exhaled his lungs’ accumulated air and pulled the trigger.

~

The Chinese leader was irritable, but trying not to show it – the trip across the Pacific had been bumpy, and he’d lost a night of sleep as they’d continually changed altitude, trying to find comfortable air. Thankfully, he only needed to sign the document and nod agreement, and then he would be out of this stinking city, the air a travesty, the smell of toxicity as plain as if he was standing in front of a mass grave.

Not that China was any better, but he didn’t have to go out in the soup, and his residence and the party headquarters where he conducted his business were filtered and purified and climate-controlled. Now, standing under the sun’s glare, a blanket of amber filth stretching as far as the horizon, it was getting to him after the long flight and the drying effect of the jet’s processed atmosphere. His eyes burned as he stood grinning at the group assembled on the tarmac, doing his obligatory courtesy wave to demonstrate how warm and inviting the misunderstood Chinese pseudo-communists really were, and he had already begun counting the seconds until he could get back in the plane and take off as he took the first red-carpeted step leading to his waiting hosts.

Once he was on terra firma he forced himself to listen attentively as the rotund Mexican idiot in the poorly cut suit badly mangled a greeting in Mandarin – the mayor, one of his entourage whispered in his ear. The waiting helicopter’s slowly rotating blades beckoned to him like a love-struck virgin as he endured the boob’s prattling, smiling the entire while as his eyes itched in rejection of the polluted sky.

~

Rauschenbach watched through the scope a nano-second after the gun bucked into his shoulder, and then his quivering smile of triumph froze as the little Asian man’s expression changed, just a little, as if he sensed the approach of the bullet.

~

The Lapua Magnum round whirled in deadly rotation as it streaked across the runway, its end point the center of the Chinese leader’s temple; and then an imperceptible shift occurred as it crossed runway number two – a gust of wind coaxing it westward, a rogue eddy toying with it like a kind of cosmic joke. And yet still it raced towards its destiny, ultimately missing the Chinese leader’s cranium by a few scant millimeters, thrown off trajectory by the shifting vagary of the mercurial breeze, and punched into the tarmac thirty yards behind him, unnoticed. The noise from the helicopter as well as the landing and taxiing aircraft all around the delegation masked the sound of its impact, the telltale whining snick of a ricochet lost on everyone as the Mexico City mayor assured the leader that they were now brothers in peace and prosperity.

~

“Un-fucking-believable,” Rauschenbach muttered, even as his fingers gripped the back of the rifle chamber to unscrew it and eject the spent round and slip another into place. He knew from practice that it would take exactly seven seconds. Attempting to reload it any faster only caused it to take longer, as though the rifle resented his rushing and battled him accordingly. There was no point in trying to hurry it. The target would either still be standing there, or he wouldn’t, by the time the rifle was ready again.

~

El Rey
grabbed Cruz’s arm and screamed in alarm as he stared through the binoculars at the far terminal in the distance.

“A shot. I just saw a flash on the Terminal One roof. Get the Chinese leader out of here, and radio the sharpshooters over there. He’s on the roof. The last ventilation housing before the hotel.”

Cruz was so shocked to hear the otherwise quiet assassin raise his voice that he stood for a second, frozen. Then he leapt into action, turning to watch the delegation even as he raised his radio to his lips to sound a warning. Visions of the leader’s skull exploding in an eruption of bloody effluvia played through his head as he put out an all points alert, and yet nothing happened. The mayor continued to drone on in a stage voice, struggling to make himself heard over the helicopter’s din, but other than a small nod of the Chinese leader’s head, the ceremony continued relentlessly forward.

“Come on. We need to get over there, now!”
El Rey
grabbed Briones’ arm as Cruz issued terse commands, and then the three of them were running for the roof door.

“You! Up on the far roof, on the other terminal. Last ventilation structure on the right. There’s a shooter,” Cruz yelled at the nearest sniper, who looked at him like he was mad before turning his weapon and sighting at the building a mile across the air field.

“Get out of my way. Now,” he bellowed, as three more
Federales
armed with rifles burst through the door. The startled men leapt aside as the trio ran for the exit like madmen and then disappeared down the steps in a flurry of furious activity, Cruz’s voice barking commands into the radio even as he ran down the stairwell like the devil himself was coming for his soul.

~

Rauschenbach seated the bolt home with a final twist and cocked it before peering into the scope again, half expecting the opportunity to have passed, four million daydreams sailing away for distant shores with nothing to be done about it. But fate had smiled upon him, and the little man’s oddly shaped head, resembling a genetically warped gourd, hovered in the crosshairs as though he was posing for a portrait.

The German sensed what had happened on the last shot, and corrected for it by pointing the rifle just a hair off center, and repeated his exhalation, this time accompanied by a silent prayer to a deity he didn’t believe in as he gently massaged the trigger. The weapon bucked again, and then his attention was pulled from the image in the scope to a federal police sniper running towards him at flat out speed, the business end of his weapon pointed in his direction.

~

It seemed as though the mayor’s enthusiastic oration was drawing to a close, and the Chinese leader smiled broadly, this time with genuine happiness at the thought of getting on with the signing. The mayor’s wife, who stood beside him like a pig that had fought its way out of a Chanel factory outlet store by putting on clothes, beamed at him like he was dessert, and he heard the clicking of shutters as the grouped media memorialized the moment for posterity.

His eyes burned like hellfire from the smog, and he was wondering about whether one of his people could get him drops when a tickle began deep in his septum, making his eyes water, and then, in spite of his iron will, his lids automatically squeezed shut, and he sneezed.

“Salud!” the mayor exploded, as his wife laughed and clapped her hands together, and then everyone had a chuckle as the Chinese leader grinned again, a slightly sheepish look on his face, and then pointed up at the sky and uttered the single word that would endear him to an entire generation of Mexicans, the R sound admittedly coming out sounding more like an L, but other than that, remarkably sincere.

“Gracias.”

~

This time the bullet flew straight and true, unhampered by stray atmospheric anomalies, and had it not been for the random interceding of an allergic purging of nasal airways, would have turned the leader’s frontal lobes into pudding. But in spite of the best efforts of the artisans who had carefully milled the rifle barrel, the countless hours spent on ballistic improvements that would enable a fingernail-sized projectile to cut through the air at near miraculous levels of accuracy, and hundreds of dedicated hours at firing ranges honing the highly specialized skill of long-range shooting, despite breakthroughs in optics that made distant objects appear to be no farther away than across the room, the most deadly working assassin in the world...missed.