Revenge of the Assassin

She forced herself to stop the negative internal dialogue. What she was doing was protecting the one she loved, as well as herself. The assassin was right. The priority was on staying alive and together, not on sacrificing everything over a tenuous ethical belief. Every year thousands of innocent people were slaughtered in the cartel clashes in Mexico, and many of those people no doubt had laudable morals. But they were still dead, and nothing would bring them back. She took a deep breath and steeled her resolve. It was too late to second-guess herself now.

Dinah saw the sign for the large department store and made for the entrance, taking care to move quickly into the clothing section. After a few moments of glancing around at the selections, she chose a pair of jeans and two tops and approached the changing rooms, where an attendant showed her to a cubicle.

Five minutes later she emerged and handed the clothes to the girl at the counter with a shake of her head. She didn’t really like anything.

Stalling for time, and so as not to be too obvious, she browsed for other items for a few minutes, straying into the underwear section. Finally, appearing to have exhausted her shopping enthusiasm, Dinah wove her way through the aisles, retrieved the little phone, and pressed redial. A few seconds later the assassin answered.

“It’s there.”

Shortly thereafter, a middle-aged man with a thick beard and a beret strode to the attendant carrying a pair of slacks. The woman quickly confirmed that he was carrying only the one item and then directed him to take whichever stall he liked — the area was empty, the store having only opened half an hour earlier.

El Rey quickly located the hidden note wedged into the crack he’d created two days before in the flimsy surface of the wall and extracted it using the folding blade of a razor-sharp survival knife. Satisfied that he had gotten everything Dinah had left for him, he waited another minute, and then returned the pants to the attendant before unhurriedly strolling out of the store.

Back at his apartment, he pulled the cotton out of the bottom of his cheeks, where he’d stuffed it to form the appearance of jowls, and wiped away the makeup that had completed his transformation into a debauched older man. He scratched absently at his beard as he read Dinah’s small, precise handwriting and smiled. They knew nothing of consequence. His scheme was working perfectly, and there were no loose ends. The president would be dead in due course, and he would retire again, permanently, a very wealthy fellow with abundant time on his hands.

His arm bumped the mouse connected to his laptop, and the screen blinked to life, revealing a set of blueprints and a schematic for the construction of the device that would terminate the president’s stay on the planet. He’d already ordered the necessary item from eBay in the United States, and the shipping company was due to deliver it within seventy-two hours. Some modification would be required, but that was fine. It would give him something to occupy his idle hands with while he waited for the big day to arrive.

Holding his arms above his head, he stretched and then tossed the cotton balls with the greasepaint on them into the trash. No time to lounge about. He had a meeting tomorrow and wanted to be prepared for anything. That was a big part of why he was successful.

He was always prepared.

Chapter 20

El Rey drifted through the streets of Mexico City like a ghost, blending in with the crowds and avoiding being in any way conspicuous. The morning rush hour was finally over, in the sense that it was ever over in one of the most populated cities in the world, but the sidewalks in the area of town he was navigating were still jammed, as were the streets. Music blared from storefronts hawking women’s clothing, appliances on payment, shoes, pets — every imaginable variety of oddity, all to the beat of Shakira at a hundred-plus decibels.

As he strolled past open-air taco stands, to the heady smell of pastor and grilled onions lingering in the air, he casually eyed his surroundings for any signs of threat. It was automatic, and he scanned each sector in his vicinity with clinical detachment, even as he appeared to be a man without a care in the world, taking in the sights.

He disliked meeting anyone new, but couldn’t see a way to avoid it. He was running up against a deadline and, given the urgency of the situation, he had to rely on Aranas for help in securing the more difficult to acquire goods he’d need for the job. The president’s speech was rapidly approaching and he didn’t have time to source some of the harder to procure materials. It left him with precious little leeway in terms of preparation, but he wasn’t worried. He had come up with a plan that, even by his standards, was audacious.

The neighborhood gradually degraded, and the clothing stores transitioned into automobile parts shops and muffler repair bays, interspersed with the odd internet cafe and small market. Blankets lay on the sidewalk, trinkets and obviously stolen items spread out upon them, the vendors shamelessly offering their goods for fractions of their legitimate worth. He noticed that the foot traffic had grown sparser as the district became rougher, and his nose crinkled at the pervasive odor of garbage wafting from the alleyways.

El Rey resembled a day laborer, with a stained, red Feyco baseball hat pulled low across his brow and knockoff Oakley sunglasses he’d bought three blocks back for seven dollars. He wore baggy black cargo pants and a long-sleeved burgundy rayon dress shirt, crumpled and stained as it would be from days of wearing it while pulling wire runs or laying flooring. He’d darkened his complexion with a deep base and trimmed his beard into an elaborate goatee and set of Elvis sideburns, presenting an image of a worker who was desperately trying to proclaim some sort of hipness, but failing miserably. He knew from experience that people would focus on the most memorable attributes, and the unusual facial hair would ensure that is what they remembered — the face behind it would be almost forgotten if anyone tried to describe him.

Three blocks from his rendezvous point he paused in front of a hardware store with racks of toilet seats and shower heads proudly mounted on a board outside the windows, guarded by a surly, overweight man eating a bag of potato chips. He’d caught a glimpse of a Federal Police truck moving down one of the parallel streets, which triggered an immediate internal alarm. It might have meant nothing, but his senses moved to high alert. His eyes scrutinized everything with increased intensity from behind the shades, roving over the buildings and vehicles, looking for any signs of surveillance. He didn’t detect anything, and after a few minutes of ambling down the block without noticing anything amiss, he turned the corner and made for his destination.

The streets were scarred with potholes and grooves from where the asphalt had worn bare, leaving filthy gravel or pools of odiferous liquid collected in the pits. A dilapidated Eighties American sedan adorned with Bondo and primer prowled slowly down the way, street gang thugs glaring from its tinted windows as it rolled past him. Traffic had thinned out, and instead of the manic bumper to bumper morass a few blocks back, only a few cars navigated the increasingly shabby roads.

His anxiety increased again as he glanced at the windows above street level, noting that many were open, their interiors darkened to the point where making out the occupants was an impossibility. The hair on his arms prickled under the synthetic material of the shirt as he felt a sensation of being watched. This was the wrong kind of setup for a meet, at least, according to his preferences, but it would have been a dream come true for a hit.

A cat shot out from behind a dumpster, startling him, and raced off down the street in vain pursuit of a gathering of pigeons it had spied strutting by. He watched as the emaciated feline made its play, failing to snare any of the birds as they flapped effortlessly away to safety. He could sympathize with its disappointment — he’d been there, although thankfully, only once.

With only one block to go, he still didn’t see anything overtly alarming. Perhaps he was just over-thinking it. Still, the vague sense of unease lingered, and he’d spent too many years refining his instincts to ignore them. Outwardly, he projected nothing, and if anyone had been watching him there would have been no giveaways. His gait didn’t change, nor did he seem in any way on guard, or interested in anything but making his way to whatever drab existence awaited him.

When he arrived at the rundown building that was his rendezvous, he continued walking past it, fishing for his cell phone in his shirt pocket, then shifting the empty black nylon backpack to his other shoulder as he held it to his ear. There were a number of other pedestrians on the block, most of them down on their luck, moving with the sickly shuffle of the perennially downtrodden. Mexico was a hard country, where, if you fell, you didn’t get up, and