Revenge of the Assassin

Pandemonium erupted as the congregation stampeded towards the altar, as far from the grenade as space would allow. Women tripped and men dragged them along as they scrambled for safety. A few climbed over the pews before throwing themselves flat on the benches in the hopes that the heavy, ancient wood could protect them.

Within a matter of seconds the president was at the heavy wooden doors. His men shouldered them open, racing against time to get him out before the grenade detonated and the house of worship became a slaughterhouse.

El Rey pulled the earphone out and placed it on the table next to the phone as he watched the chaos in the church. Satisfied with the panic, he turned his attention to the hotel and craned his neck to see above the building. A lone crow stood at the edge of the hotel roof, peering curiously down at the scene below. Startled by something moving behind it, the bird took flight, spreading its wings and flapping off over the top of the cathedral. El Rey watched its trajectory with a vague sense of unease, and then returned his focus to the roof, where he couldn’t see anything but the building’s facade.

Frustrated, he stood, still maneuvering the levers in the briefcase, and then caught sight of the president bursting out of the church and moving at flank speed to his waiting aircraft. The pilot hadn’t had time to start the engine again; startled by the abrupt exodus, he began flipping switches in preparation to power up.

A muffled explosion sounded from inside the cathedral. The grenade had detonated, causing unknown casualties and damage. El Rey couldn’t take his eyes off the unfolding drama in front of the church to check the result on the phone screen.

Halfway to the chopper, the president stumbled; his bodyguards lifted him from where he’d fallen painfully against the cobblestones. Whatever it was that was taking place in the church, they were safe. They hauled him upright without ceremony. He bent down and patted his knee, where the fabric of his Canali suit pants had torn, and his hand came away with blood. One of his detail barked a few words, and he began limping to the copter, one arm around the closest bodyguard.

El Rey glanced skyward again and his eyes caught the distinctive shape of the four foot remote controlled helicopter hovering over the roof of the Gran Hotel, fifty feet above the street. He thrust one of the joysticks forward, and it made a course for the front of the church, accelerating until it covered the distance in under fifteen seconds. He twisted a knob to increase the blade pitch for maximum speed and had to adjust for a light wind gusting off the square, but quickly corrected as he brought the craft to bear.

The president was nearly at his chopper’s door when his bodyguard at the church doors screamed a warning. The president and his two men swung around in puzzlement, trying to spot the danger, and then with a look of terror the president pointed into the sky, where he’d caught movement in the periphery of his vision. One of the men tried to pull him out of the way, but it was too late. A bright orange fireball exploded a few feet from where he stood, obliterating everything for a twenty foot radius and peppering the fuselage of the presidential helicopter with shrapnel and bloody bits of flesh.

The crowd went crazy and rushed the barricades, knocking back the steel frames and causing a near riot. Screaming and cries of panic filled the air as El Rey stood and closed the briefcase, then slid by the chair and began walking down the sidewalk in the opposite direction from the church, the phone and case abandoned now that they had done their job.

Cruz had watched in impotent horror from his vantage point on the empty boulevard as the oversized model helicopter zoomed silently across the square and went into a high speed dive at the church. When the detonation came, he knew instinctively it was too late to save anyone. The police helicopters hovering overhead weren’t any good against something that small and nimble, even if given time to react.

He swung around, studying the huge square and the people panicking, eyes searching for El Rey. He had to be there. Remote controlled airplanes and cars always required the antenna for the control box to be in direct line of sight, and they were generally limited to a hundred and fifty yards of effective range. That meant the assassin had to be within a hundred and fifty yards of both the hotel and the church. Cruz did a quick mental calculation and determined that he either had to be on his side of the square midway down the block, or on the far side of the square in roughly the same area, midway between the hotel and the cathedral.

Cruz peered down his side of the square first, but didn’t see anything significant. All the windows were closed on the surrounding buildings, and there was nobody suspicious on the sidewalk. He quickly surveyed the crowd chaotically milling around the square, trying to avoid being crushed by their own panicked behavior, but it was a mess and he couldn’t make anyone out. It was unlikely the assassin was in the multitude, given that everyone had been searched and the control device would be too large to easily use without being detected, so he quickly dismissed the possibility.

His eyes scanned the sidewalk on the far side of the square, looking for any anomalies. There. Cruz spotted movement. Everyone else on the sidewalk was hurrying in the direction of the cathedral, anxious to see what had happened, except for one figure, who was making a measured move in the opposite direction. He initially dismissed his instinct and then did a double take.

It had to be El Rey.

Cruz called out to Briones to get a car and stay on his radio, then ran down the boulevard in the direction of the figure, which was quickly closing in on the corner where the hotel sat. He increased his speed, his leg muscles burning as the healed bullet wound shot spikes of pain each time he landed on that foot. He radioed to the men in the hotel as he went, but everyone was upstairs guarding the room they’d discovered. It was no good. He’d be past the hotel by the time anyone made it down to the street level.

The figure turned the corner and disappeared from sight. Cruz estimated he was now a little more than a hundred yards behind. He gasped for air and increased his effort.

El Rey registered the federal policeman running down the middle of the boulevard in his direction, but figured that by the time he made it around the corner to follow, it would be over. Once he rounded it he increased his pace to a run and sprinted for an alley thirty feet up on the right. Several of the pedestrians who were hurrying towards the square leaped out of his way in surprise, giving him momentary pleasure.

After all, how often did they see a nun running the four minute mile down a busy sidewalk in the historic district?

The decision to carry out the assassination posing as a nun had been a natural, and to him, brilliant bit of subterfuge. In the square, any young or middle-aged men would have drawn attention given the manhunt in place for El Rey. And there was no way to take the president out with a shot — not with as many eyes on the windows as he’d expected, which had been borne out by the hotel fire drill. That left either a bomb or gas in the cathedral, which would have been impossible to reliably conceal given the size required to ensure the job got done. So he’d needed a method of conveyance that would deliver oblivion to the president at high speed, that was unstoppable and too small to bring down with ground fire.

He’d initially toyed with a number of other possibilities, including secreting a small cobalt source in the pew where he knew the president would sit — after an hour spent within a few feet of the radioactive source he would be dead of radiation poisoning within seventy-two hours — but it would be impossible to ensure it evaded detection. Even his grenade gambit had been iffy. He’d posed as a repairman two weeks earlier and appeared with a work order to replace the lights in the massive chandeliers and repair anything that was broken, enabling him to conceal the grenade, a small fiber optic camera, and a radio controlled release mechanism in its heart, but he’d actually been surprised that they hadn’t been found. It had never been intended to kill the president — too many variables, and it wasn’t nearly powerful enough to guarantee that the job got done. But it had promised to be effective in dividing his security detail and forcing him out into the open.

The remote control helicopter had been an intriguing possibility, and when he’d bought it on eBay before having it shipped to a freight forwarder in Mexico, he was certain he had found the solution to his problem. He’d sneaked up onto the hotel roof at five a.m. and placed the craft at the far end behind a ventilation duct, where it wouldn’t be discovered if an errant maintenance man went up for some reason. He knew that the roof would be locked the day of the president’s visit, and leaving the helicopter in place overnight in standby mode was a