The Excoms

by Brett Battles

  The guard led her onto the dais where about two dozen people were waiting for the man of the hour. Ananke was taken to a spot along the back edge where she could wait out of the way.

  A few minutes later, the rumble of the crowd grew louder, starting on the left side and spreading through the ballroom like wildfire.

  Alonzo had arrived.

  Too many people were on the stage for Ananke to visually track the man’s progress, but the yells and whoops and shouts gave her a pretty good idea of where he was at any moment. Finally, he and his entourage climbed the steps and walked onto the stage.

  Alonzo was wearing a traditional Filipino barong—shirt made from white thin fabric with intricate designs embroidered down the front—over a white undershirt. His wife, a woman at least fifteen years younger than he was, wore a golden floor-length dress and a double strand of pearls. While the president looked genuinely pleased to be there, the woman looked ready to call it a night.

  There was much hand shaking and hugging as the candidate made his way to the podium at the center. When he finally reached it, he shouted something into the mic that made the crowd go wild. From Ananke’s position, it was near impossible to hear what he’d said, but it wasn’t important. The only thing that mattered was her cue. That came seven and a half minutes later, after Alonzo had made additional remarks and one of his aides waved Ananke forward.

  As she approached the podium, she received a raised eyebrow from her target. It wasn’t a look of suspicion, only surprise. Her height again, she guessed.

  She handed the untainted flute to the man’s wife, and the other to the man himself, and then took a step back.

  The couple raised their glasses, and Alonzo said in Tagalog, “Your support and belief in me will carry us to victory. And our country will be great once more.”

  It didn’t matter where she was, Ananke thought, politicians—regardless of ideology or language—always said the same damn things.

  The Alonzos lifted their glasses and drank.

  And there it was. R-ToFF delivered. Ananke’s job done.

  In approximately twenty-four hours, Alonzo would start feeling a slight headache. He’d likely play it off as a side effect of being so busy. The next day, his throat would be sore, and soon after he’d start coughing. On day three, he would be in a hospital’s intensive care unit, struck down by a severe case of the flu that would prevent him from campaigning during the critical final month of the election.

  Ananke started toward the stairs to finish her shift. This was the part of the night she had been dreading most. Perkins had been insistent. “We can’t do anything that might cause someone to wonder if the target’s illness was anything but natural. You’ll stay until the event is over and make everyone believe you’re nothing but a server.”

  As she reached the end of the stage, she heard someone shout behind her. Not in excitement or congratulations, but in terror.

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  Those who’d been on the dais had coalesced at the podium, most trying to peek around the person in front of them at something on the ground. Missing from the group was Alonzo.

  Ananke lowered her gaze so she could see through a gap that had appeared in the crowd. She spotted the candidate’s face for only a moment, but it was long enough for her to see his eyes had rolled back, his skin was turning blue, and white foam was dripping from the corner of his mouth.

  As an assassin, there was always the potential for an “oh, shit” moment. Ananke did everything she could to mitigate that possibility, but some things, like the true identity of a drug she had been given by her handler, were out of her control.

  Oh, shit.

  Acting like the commotion wasn’t her business, she moved down the stairs at her former pace and headed toward the checkpoint. While a few of those behind the stage were looking curiously at the backdrop that separated them from the platform, most seemed unaware anything had happened.

  Before she reached the guards, though, shouts rang out from the stage, informing all those in earshot that Alonzo was down.

  The guards at the checkpoint ran toward the stairs. The first sped past Ananke without even looking at her. The second, however, did a double take, and then seemed to connect the dots that the server who had brought the champagne might have had something to do with the chaos on stage.

  Skidding to a stop, the guard yelled, “Don’t move.”

  She looked at him, her eyes wide and innocent as she stepped toward him. “What? Why?”

  Another shout caused the guard to glance toward the stage. Before he could look back at her, Ananke kneed him in the groin, then leaned next to him as he doubled over, like she was checking to see if he was okay, and deftly removed the pistol from its holster.

  She shoved the barrel into his belly and scanned the room to see if anyone was watching her. A few moments earlier, the assault would have been witnessed by dozens of people. Now, everyone’s attention was on the dais.

  “You want to stay alive, you keep your mouth shut and stay bent over,” she whispered. “Nod if you understand.”

  His face still twisted in pain, he nodded.

  She guided him through the abandoned checkpoint toward the back side of the room. Plenty of people rushed past them, but none paid them any attention.

  In preparation for the mission, Ananke had memorized the hotel’s layout. She headed for a door along the back wall near the corner. As expected, it opened onto a hallway that led to several storage rooms and, via a locked door at the far end, the loading docks.

  She hustled the guard into the first storage room.

  “Do you have handcuffs?” she asked.

  “No,” he grunted.

  “In that case, sorry about this.”

  She meant it. The guy had only been doing his job—in fact, by suspecting her, had done it exceedingly well—and didn’t deserve the knee to his groin, or the one she now sent into his stomach.

  As he groaned, she wrapped an arm around his neck and cut off circulation to his brain. Within seconds he passed out.

  After dragging him behind a shelving unit, she returned to the door. All was quiet on the other side, so she slipped out and sprinted to the end of the hall.

  There, she removed both of her shoes, broke off the heel of the left one, and pulled out a key made entirely of plastic. If Perkins had given it to her, she would have suspected it wouldn’t work. But she had done her own recon and obtained temporary possession of a master key from which the plastic one was created. The door opened without a problem.

  Several cameras were mounted over the loading dock. Perkins had told her it was live-view only, no recording, but given what had just happened in the ballroom, she had to assume he was lying. Either way, they could aid in her escape. As she ran into the loading area, she made sure to face one of the cameras like she didn’t know it was there. If it was recording, soon the image of a tall Filipino female murder suspect would be everywhere.

  Fortunately, Manila did not have a citywide CCTV system like London did, so beyond the hotel, there was no organized surveillance network. Four blocks away, she found a quiet spot down a dark alley where she removed the applications from her face that had drastically changed the way she looked. She wiped away what she could of the makeup that altered the color of her skin, but because she couldn’t risk the time to do a thorough job, she knew she didn’t get it all. If she steered clear of any bright lights, though, she should be okay. Off, too, came the white shirt and bow tie, leaving her in a white spaghetti-strap top and the black pants. She disassembled the guard’s gun and dropped several of the pieces on the ground.

  One street over, she tossed more of the gun and the heel of her broken left shoe into the bed of a passing truck. The rest of that shoe and all of her right one were dumped next to a pile of garbage from where they would likely be stolen within the hour. The last pieces of the gun went into a drain.

  Now she was just an unarmed foreigner walking through the c
ity, albeit barefoot.

  As a professional assassin, Ananke had developed a survival guide over the years.

  Rule number one: the client was not her friend.

  Her employers were a mix of agencies and other individuals operating in the murky world of intelligence, and they all had their own agendas. Most of the time they played fair, but even then their goals would always take precedence over those of any temporary employees.

  Rule number two: safeguards, safeguards, safeguards.

  An example of this was the recon she’d done at the hotel and the master key she had duplicated. In addition, and also unbeknownst to op leader Perkins, she had arranged for a safe house if things went sideways. Located three miles from the hotel, the gardener’s quarters sat at the back of a sprawling property owned by a family with old Filipino money, and was secured using Ananke’s new favorite tool, Airbnb.

  She arrived nineteen minutes after handing Alonzo his champagne. She had no intention of staying for long. First thing she did was wash away the remaining makeup, restoring her skin to its natural caramel tone. She then released her hair from the bun it had been in and pulled it into a ponytail.

  A black plain T-shirt, a pair of jeans, sneakers, and a Tokyo Giants baseball cap completed her transition from Filipino server to African-American tourist. From a slit she’d cut into the bottom of the mattress, she extracted a messenger bag containing three sets of false IDs, two sets of hard plastic lock picks, a stack of Philippine pesos, and three thousand US dollars. She left the equivalent of a thousand dollars in pesos on the dresser with a note explaining a family emergency had taken her away in the middle of the night.

  Her last stop was back in the bathroom, where she removed the fan vent and retrieved a Glock 39, a matching suppressor, and full box of .45-caliber ammo. These went into a special section of the bag. Though they wouldn’t go undetected during a physical search, they would be invisible to visual checks and most scanners. She reached back into the vent and grabbed a plastic bag containing four disposable phones and two dozen SIM cards.

  She stuck a SIM card into one of the phones and called Shinji.

  He picked up before the fourth ring and said in Japanese, “Nakamura Restaurant. Sorry we’re about to close, so—”

  “It’s me,” she said in English.

  “Oh, hey. Didn’t expect to hear from you for another day or two.” Shinji’s English was flawless, which made sense given that he’d been born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley east of Los Angeles, and had yet to set foot in his ancestral home of Japan.

  “I need a way out,” she told him.

  “Can do.” A click and the line went silent. Thirty seconds, another click. “The earliest flight leaves in ninety minutes. Can you get to the airport in time?”

  “No planes.”

  “Oh, well, you should have told me that.”

  “No passport checks.”

  A pause. “Is there something I should know about?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you supposed to be monitoring the news?”

  “Of course I am, but if you’ve seen one Filipino soap opera, you’ve seen them…oh, wait.”

  Over the line, the sound of a television increased, and Ananke could now hear a correspondent reporting that presidential candidate Alonzo had collapsed.

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?” Shinji said.

  “No.”

  “So probably not good.”

  “Your deduction skills never cease to amaze me.”

  “How about a ship?”

  “Given that I’m on an island, that seems the logical choice.”

  Shinji found a Panamanian registered ship called Loretta’s Star that was due to leave Manila an hour before sunrise. An agreed-to sum was transferred into a Cayman Island account, and arrangements were made for a skiff to ferry the “girlfriend” of the captain to the ship after it was underway.

  Until then, Ananke had a few hours to kill.

  4

  ANANKE CAUGHT A cab two blocks from the safe house and gave the driver the address of the building where she’d last met with Perkins. The driver had his radio on so loud she couldn’t help but hear the latest news about Alonzo’s condition.

  Most of it was no more than rumors. The reporter even said several people in the ballroom claimed to have heard gunshots right before Alonzo collapsed. The reporter had already turned the story into a possible assassination attempt. Though he was overdramatizing it—as his lot was wont to do, he was actually right. Which annoyed her because it would only legitimize sensationalism in the future.

  Ananke did learn one piece of news. Alonzo had been taken from the ballroom to a nearby hospital. No updates on his condition, though. Of course, she didn’t need them. If he wasn’t dead already, he would be soon enough.

  That son of a bitch Perkins had done a masterful job of setting her up.

  “Since we’re only putting him out of action temporarily, I’m thinking a nice case of R-ToFF Flu would work great. How’s that sound to you?” That’s how he’d presented her with his plan for dealing with Alonzo.

  That sounded good to her. Many kinds of synthetic flu had been developed for just such purposes. R-ToFF’s appeal was that it would gestate in a target’s system for twenty-four hours before laying him up for weeks and likely leaving him frail for a long time after that.

  Though her job was usually to kill, there were a few times when she’d been hired to deliver a less permanent type of hit.

  As she cursed Perkins under her breath again, a report came over the radio saying police were looking for a tall Filipina last seen at the hotel.

  If the cabbie only knew who he has riding in his backseat.

  At least Perkins hadn’t leaked details of what she really looked like.

  Yet.

  The taxi turned onto the street where Perkins had been staying.

  When they were still half a block away from his building, Ananke said, “This is fine.”

  As soon as the cabbie pulled over, she paid and hopped out.

  A few scattered businesses were still open, restaurants mostly, the rest having locked their metal shutters for the night. Unusually, no one seemed to be eating at any of the outside tables, though at a few of the restaurants several customers stood in the doorways, looking inside. When Ananke walked by one of these places, she discovered why. Everyone’s attention was on a television broadcasting a chaotic scene outside what appeared to be a hospital. Even the restaurant’s staff had stopped to watch.

  She wondered how long it would be before word got out that Alonzo was dead.

  Dear God, let me be on the ship by then, she thought as she moved down the street.

  Perkins had been using a set of rooms above a dress shop. She approached the building from the other side of the street and stopped before she got too close.

  At least one light was still on in his flat. She pulled out the disposable phone. The crappy device came with a crappy camera that had a crappy zoom, but it was better than nothing. She pointed it at the second-story window and zoomed in. Though the curtains were closed, she hoped to see movement, but either Perkins was staying away from the lamp or he was already gone.

  From her previous visits, she knew he’d rigged the main building door so that a buzzer sounded in his room every time it was opened. He’d also put a camera on the street somewhere. She’d seen the live feed playing on a dedicated monitor next to his computer. Unfortunately, she’d never taken the time to figure out where the camera was. All she knew was that she couldn’t go much farther without entering the frame.

  She backtracked to a gap between buildings that led to the next street over. The narrow passage stank so strongly of garbage and God knew what else, she was forced to pinch her nose to keep from retching, and it wasn’t until she reached the uneven sidewalk of the other street that she could really breathe again.

  There were no restaurants on this street, only rundown apartment buildings and a
few empty lots.

  Perkins wasn’t a stupid man. Not completely, anyway. So Ananke knew he’d likely extended his surveillance to the building behind his. She allowed herself a minute to search for where he might have placed a camera, but spotted none. To play it safe, she broke into the building next to the one behind Perkins’s place and took the stairs to the roof, then crept onto the place directly behind his.

  At the back, she looked down on the roof to Perkins’s building.

  Quiet and empty. Just how she liked it.

  His building was a floor shorter than the one she was on, so she lowered herself over the side and dropped the remaining few feet. The stairwell door was locked, but the mechanism was cheap and she picked it in no time.

  She moved inside and sneaked down the stairs, searching ahead for cameras. As far as she could tell, she reached the landing of Perkins’s floor undetected. She eased the door open and peered into the hallway.

  Camera, mounted on the wall opposite Perkins’s door.

  She didn’t recall it being there before.

  She might be able to disable it by tossing something at it, but a) she didn’t have anything to toss, and b), the resulting noise would alert Perkins if he was inside.

  Screw it. She’d have to hope he wasn’t watching.

  Lock pick in hand, she rushed out of the stairwell and inserted the pick and tension wrench into the lock on Perkins’s door. Seven seconds later, she shoved the door open and rolled into the room, coming to her feet—ready to fight—halfway to the desk Perkins had set up as his control center.

  The computer and monitors were gone. She looked toward the mattress Perkins had slept on. His bag was also missing.

  “Dammit,” she muttered.

  She knew finding him there had been a long shot at best, but God, how she had hoped she would.