by Jamie Smith
Now Giorgos felt on the verge of cardiac arrest. Where was he? A box of the Merlot on its side was the only sign to him that anyone had been there.
Johann climbed out, his face still unreadable, and led the dog around the vehicle, checking the underside.
“Let’s move this along, Giorgos,” he barked, seemingly satisfied.
“A pleasure as always, Johann,” Giorgos rasped as he climbed back into the truck. “Where is he?” he breathed, his brain racing and wondering how and when Nathan had got out. He fired up the reluctant machine and rolled through the gates to the next check point.
This is new, he thought to himself, and noticed that the place seemed to have at least treble the number of guards normally there. Not good news for his rookie assassin, wherever he was.
“He’s alone. Just the old man and his wine,” he heard Johann shout.
He slowed to a stop. Up ahead he saw Zurga standing near the front door. He was holding a gun.
Something wasn’t right. He saw a movement to his right and saw two guards standing about ten feet away. He looked to the left and saw the same on that side.
All four raised their weapons.
“Skatá.” Shit.
They turned out to be his last words.
All four opened fire simultaneously. Giorgos’s old leathery skin was no match for white hot metal and his body was thrown from side to side as he was riddled with bullets.
The clicking of empty chambers signalled the end of the shooting. A guard approached slowly and after poking Giorgos with the barrel of his Kalashnikov, signalled to the group that he was dead.
Zurga, who had watched the proceedings from the doorway, walked purposefully towards the truck, which had died along with its owner. He was wearing a bullet proof vest and holding a Glock 17 pistol, a present from the Americans for his recent services.
“Open the door,” he spat to the guard, who obeyed immediately.
Giorgos’s broken body slumped sideways, his head stopping him from falling out and leaving his body contorted.
Zurga opened fire and emptied the entire magazine from the gun.
The body fell to the ground. Blood quickly pooled around Giorgos and the Jericho 941 tumbled from his overcoat pocket in the fall. Zurga felt some of the tension leave his shoulders.
“Search the vehicle,” he ordered the guards as he approached the corpse. This is who they send to kill me? he thought. And there was me thinking I was a high-profile target, how humbling.
“All clear, boss,” said a guard. “There’s nothing in the back except for crates of wine.”
Zurga smiled and walked to the back. Wine was running freely from the doors, with many of the bottles destroyed in the gunfire. “What a waste!” he groaned. “Even if it is Greek muck.”
A box near the door was on its side and seemed to have escaped the attentions of the bullets. He pulled out a bottle and lifted it up. “Merlot!” he exclaimed. “This night just keeps getting better.” The top had come loose in the fall but the wine was still good and he swigged straight from the bottle. “Bring the rest inside,” he commanded as he ambled back towards the house.
***
On the hill across the small valley, Nikita lowered the scope on the sniper rifle. There was nothing about his cold expression to suggest he felt anything at the death of Giorgos. Nothing but a single tear snaking its way down his dusty cheek.
Losing a man was not a part of the plan.
CHAPTER 10
Nikita picked up the sniper again and raised the scope to his eye. He was lying flat on the ground, obscured by the low, coarse shrubs that covered the hills hereabouts. With his dark skin and black clothing, he was totally lost in the shadows, stretched out on the hard earth. The sniper pointed out in front of him looked like an extension of his body, making him appear like a black dart waiting to pounce.
He surveyed the scene across the valley. The guards were back patrolling the grounds but were noticeably less vigilant. Two of the guards were at the body, one picking up the Jericho and placing it into his belt, while the other laughed.
Nikita gritted his teeth. They would be first.
Panning the scope around the complex, he focused his attentions on the building windows. Little could be seen other than an elderly woman in a small, ground floor bedroom, packing a bag.
In a large, upstairs bedroom he could see an outline of what he thought was Zurga. He was drinking wine straight from the bottle. Time to move, thought Nikita, as he pushed himself up, before slinging the sniper over his shoulder and making off through the underbrush at high speed, making barely a sound on the dry ground.
***
“Going somewhere?” Cato asked, ducking under the doorframe as he entered Maria’s small room.
She barely glanced up from the suitcase laid out on the bed which she was filling with her meagre possessions.
“Fifty years I serve this house, but I never see such thing as this. Josef is a bad, bad man.”
“You think you can just flee?”
“You intend to stop me?” Maria said, pausing and looking up at her colleague.
Cato smirked at her. “To the contrary, Maria.” He reached back into the corridor and pulled his own suitcase into the room with his rangy arms.
She grinned a crooked smile and snapped her suitcase shut.
“I suggest we leave now, while the fool is distracted by his wine,” said Cato, picking up Maria’s suitcase as well.
As they made their way down the corridor towards the front door, they heard the drunken calls from Josef upstairs. “Maria! Maria! Come here, you old crone!” He screeched to the house, no doubt wanting her to clean his room for the next batch of whores, or some such thing.
The pair quickened their step. Reaching the front door, Cato then pulled it open and they moved out, heading along the track towards the steel gate.
“You look like you’re leaving us,” said the guard as they got to the gate.
“We are,” said Cato, lifting his chin and attempting to leave no room for doubt.
“You see, that might be a problem,” said the guard. “If word gets out of what happened here tonight there would be a lot of problems. I prefer to make problems go away, and right now you two are a problem. I’m going to have to make you go away.” He reached for a gun at his waist.
“Please, no,” Maria sobbed. Cato moved in front of her as the guard raised the weapon. Embossed on the side of it was the word Jericho. The guard smiled as he began to squeeze the trigger.
BANG.
Cato and Maria fell to the ground. They couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, and everything hurt. There was just a blinding white light.
Cato began to realise he wasn’t dead, and he heard the groaning of Maria next to him. His hearing returned and he heard a dull thud close to his feet as his sight slowly returned.
Through the smoke from the flash grenade appeared a figure cloaked in black with a gun raised in one hand and a khaki green sack in the other. Cato realised that the thud at his feet was of the guard hitting the ground; a double gunshot to the head had left him dead, still with the stupid grin on his face.
His senses returning, he saw that Maria had broken her arm; it was sticking out at a strange angle and she looked up at him, and for the first time he saw something other than irritation or apathy in her eyes. Now he saw fear.
There were two cracks in quick succession and another guard fell, another double tap to the head.
Guards were now appearing from everywhere, as the man in black holstered his gun, dropped to the ground, tossed a sniper to the ground next to him and opened the bag. In less than two seconds he was back propped up on one knee and holding an enormous gun with a long feed of bullets trailing from it.
He took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger, wreaking destruction across the entire site. Starting from one side of the vast lawn he mowed down guard after guard. As the weapon began to move round in Cato and Maria’s direction, Cato threw himself do
wn on top of the old woman, who moaned loudly, and the bullets passed above him. He could feel the back of his shirt move from the wind of the closely passing bullets. His senses still slightly askew, he viewed it all as if from far away, the screams of the security guards feeling like an abstract backing track.
Suddenly the bullets stopped, and daring to look up, he saw the gunman grappling with the feed of bullets.
Maria pushed at him with her good arm and he rolled off. “Help me up,” she croaked, the old cantankerous energy feeding her again. He pulled her up and she staggered over to the gunman who widened his eyes in surprise, and reached for the gun at his waist.
“No need for any of that.” She swatted at him. “Now move over.” She stood beside him and lifted the ammunition belt with her good arm.
“Cato, don’t just stand there ogling; don’t pretend you don’t know how these work. I know all about your old activities against the Turkish swine.”
He loped over, aware of gunfire now beginning to return in their direction. He put his hand under the long shaft of the APB, which was still balanced on the knee of the black garbed man. He felt the skin on his hand sizzle from the intense heat of the weapon, but gritted his teeth and with the butt of his left hand, threw his force behind it and hit the opposite site of the loading belt. With his burned hand he pulled at the belt until he felt the familiar click of the jammed bullet dropping into place. He stepped back and the shooter nodded at him with cold eyes. He was a lot younger than Cato had first imagined; he couldn’t be more than twenty years old, the butler realised with a jolt.
He squeezed the trigger and began the awful slaughter once more. Some of the remaining guards had got closer and now the trio could see with dreadful closeness the damage the automatic weapon did to the victims, ripping through muscle and bone like knives through butter. The many Alsatians were fleeing from the bullets, their owners all now lying dead or dying, and the gunman passed over them, a fact not unnoticed by the butler.
Maria had a ferocious look in her eyes, her grey hair loose and her right arm hanging limp and crooked at her side. She looked more like a battle-hardened old warrior than a septuagenarian maid.
Suddenly the shooter stopped and surveyed the scene. The windows were broken, the walls pitted and around twenty bodies littered the field and track within the barbed wire fencing.
There was no sign of Zurga.
Maria cackled. “It reminds me of beating the Turks in seventy-four, and what a glorious day that was.”
Cato smiled in spite of himself, but the dark shooter eyed them suspiciously. The butler turned his attentions to the old woman’s arm, despite her trying to bat him away. He looked at her. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“The same place as you, you think I don’t know of your time in Limassol for the Cypriot Guard, Cato? You’re a Greek hero. I was there to nurse the wounded.”
He smiled fondly at her. “Then it sounds like you were far more the hero than I.”
Her eyes crinkled as he touched her forehead on his and she kissed him on both cheeks.
As she pulled away to lie down, suddenly she was thrown backwards as a bullet went straight through her heart. Her look changed from a gentle smile to one of mild surprise as she clutched the crucifix at her neck.
“Theé mou,” she muttered. My god, and breathed her last breath.
Outrage and pain ripped through Cato’s whole bean-like body. He snatched the sniper from the ground and spun, spotting the guard on the roof and in one swift movement took aim, exhaled and fired. A distant cry was heard as he hit his mark and the guard fell forward from the roof and toppled the two storeys to the ground to land in a crumpled heap.
He tossed the sniper to the ground and knelt back next to Maria. He brushed his fingertips across her brow and gently closed her eyes.
“Wait here,” Nikita said to Cato, as he crouched and softly but quickly made his way towards the fortress.
The accent of the strange gunman was not placeable to Cato, who sat back on the grass and wrapped his arms around his long legs.
Nikita glided across the grass, moving past the litter of corpses lying in his wake and towards the door. Now for Zurga. He pulled the Makarov from his shoulder holster, nudged the front door open with it and made his way cautiously inside. He padded confidently through the house, the blueprints tattooed into his mind from his studies and meditation earlier, and moved up the stairs towards Zurga’s room.
He heard him before he saw him.
A gurgling and sputtering sound was emanating from the bedroom and Nikita kicked open the door, gun raised. Zurga was on his bed, again shirt open and bottle of wine beside him. The most obvious difference from the scene Maria had earlier seen was that this time Zurga had soiled himself.
Zurga’s eyes were half closed, but narrowed further as he saw Nikita enter the room.
“The wine?” he asked, before breaking into coughs and sputters again.
Nikita nodded, and pulled the hooked, serrated knife from the sheath at his waist.
If Zurga was shocked or afraid of the knife he did not show it. “They said that wine would be my undoing. That, but never… one of you.”
Nikita could see the effects of the massive dose of pink oleander flowers he had inserted into the bottles of Merlot were in the advanced stage. One of the most toxic plants in the world, the mottled red rash spreading across Zurga’s face and the diarrhoea were some of the more visible symptoms. Inside, Nikita knew, his organs were failing and quickly. A fact illustrated as Zurga lurched to the side and vomited. It was heavily laced with blood.
Nikita moved towards him, knife in hand.
“Save me,” Zurga pleaded, wheezing heavily as foam bubbled at the corner of his mouth.
“This is the only salvation I can give you now,” Nikita replied, and thrust the knife into his heart.
Zurga’s eyes widened in pain and shock and he grabbed Nikita’s arms, pulling him closer. “Who are you?”
“I am the Black Russian,” whispered Nikita coldly, remembering Giorgos and Maria, and pulled out the knife, the hook pulling chunks of heart muscle and sinew with it. He forced himself to watch as the light in Zurga’s eyes faded.
Once Nikita was sure he was dead, he began his gruesome work with the cruel knife on the former double agent, to ensure it looked as grisly as possible as per his instructions from the ambassador. Wiping his hands on one of the only remaining blood and excrement-free patches of bed sheet, he turned away from the horrific scenes in front of him and headed down the stairs and out onto the lawn.
When he got outside, he saw Cato and Maria faced by a pair of angry, and apparently hungry, Alsatians. Cato was cowering, with Maria over one shoulder, and was trying to back away. Nikita briefly thought how leaving him to the dogs could make his life easier, but immediately thought against it. That’s an ending I wouldn’t wish on many, he thought to himself and drew his tranquillizer gun, quickly unloading two darts on the dogs who staggered briefly before collapsing and falling still.
Cato looked at him gratefully before he realised that Nikita had a gun raised at him.
“You have seen me; I cannot let you live. It is a matter of national security,” Nikita said softly.
Cato nodded knowingly. “I suspected as much, though which nation’s security, I wonder?” Then, tilting his long sloping head, he added, “You do not have the eyes of a killer.”
“Neither do you.”
“My killing was done to protect my family and the people I love,” he replied, looking sadly down at Maria.
“Mine also.”
Cato nodded gently. “Then be careful it does not claim your soul. It claimed mine.”
“I think you are wrong; I see a lot of soul in you. I am truly sorry about your friend,” he said, nodding at Maria.
Tears welled in Cato’s eyes. Then, smiling benignly, he closed his eyes for the bullet.
Nikita raised the gun and knew what he must do. As he looked down his arm
at the old man looking so serene and accepting of his fate, he lowered his arm.
I’m an assassin, not a murderer, he thought to himself.
Cato’s eyes opened slowly.
Nikita was gone.
CHAPTER 11
Nikita strode back down the track, taking a brief diversion to collect the wire cutters he had buried in the undergrowth after cutting his way into the compound only thirty minutes earlier. So much had happened so quickly. It did not take long to kill.
He was in a daze. So much killing he had carried out, and the deaths of two good islanders were on his hands now too. He thought suddenly of Elysia and felt sick.
It all felt at a distance, like the work of someone else. He didn’t like it, but didn’t feel overly burdened by it. Becoming colder than a Siberian winter, he thought to himself.
He brushed it all from his mind as he pulled a huge mobile phone from his ammo sack and carefully dialled Kemran. “It is done; the site will need to be cleared.”
“First a photographer is needed to help spread the word.”
“That is your concern; my assignment is completed.”
“Do you require extraction?”
“No, I will find my own way.”
Nikita ended the call, turned to face the track and began his journey home. Ordinarily he would work to remain hidden after such a mission, to keep his identity secret and leave no connection to the scene of the crime. But in such dark and rural territory he would be able to see and hear any vehicle or person approaching long before they were able to see him.
In the warm night, Nikita prowled the dusty road, hearing the buzzing of the cicadas, noticing the feather-light fluttering of bat wings overhead. Now a true assassin, he was tightly wound and saw everything.
Sometime later he arrived back at the turn off to his hotel. The moon was cloaked by clouds, rendering the hotel complex almost invisible, with only a couple of lights dotted around the site.
He circled around to the back of the hotel, making his way through rough, hard soil and tough tufts of grass, and entered slowly, keeping to the dark shadows. His skin prickled; something didn’t feel right. Nothing visible, only a feeling. He approached his apartment cautiously, eyes alert for tripwires or traps. After satisfying himself there were none, he padded silently to the door. He turned the key soundlessly and drew his handgun from the hip, easing the safety off with a tell-tale click before moving sharply through the doorway, gun aloft and covering the whole room as rapidly as he could. It was clear.