A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1)

by James Quinn

  A quick scan of movement on the street and he exited the car, nonchalantly clutching his lethal gift.

  He had killed men before during his time in the military, some in situations not dissimilar to this one, but never in such a coldly targeted, ruthless way. He knew he was more than capable of the task the colonel had given him; why else would he have been chosen? Gorilla had a special collection of skills that made him useful for jobs like this. He knew it, the colonel knew it and the hierarchy at Broadway knew it.

  He glided along the street, scanning from behind the dark glasses for people taking an interest in him, but again nothing. He moved like a spectre. That was one of Gorilla's talents, the almost intuitive skill to become unnoticeable. One of his instructors had once commented you could lose him in a crowd of two people.

  Moving into an empty side street, he saw the target location up ahead: a small doorway with a brass plaque outside stamped with 'Import/Export', accessed by a twelve step flight of stairs. He climbed the darkened hallway, counting the steps slowly in his head as he moved forward. He settled the carnations more comfortably in his right hand and walked up the last few steps to the heavy wooden door with a glass viewing window that was the office of Al Saud Import/Export Company. He turned the handle of the door with his left hand, entered and closed the door gently behind him.

  He instantly assessed the layout of the room and its contents – the shadows of the curtained room, the ornate cabinets and pictures adorning the wall, the languid figure reclining back in an office chair behind the desk. The man was smoking French Gauloises and a small glass of Arak lay half empty before him on the desk. No other people present. Good.

  The assessment took a fraction of a second.

  Then Gorilla was moving forward, seeking to dominate the room. It took three strides to reach the desk. The man began to stand, extending a hand in greeting, smiling. “Monsieur Canon, how…” he started to say, but Gorilla had reached the front of the desk and quickly, but not hurriedly, raised the bouquet with both hands to chest height. The motion was deceptively casual.

  Confusion passed over the target's face. Why was this client pushing a bouquet of flowers at his face? Was it some kind of strange French custom? As the target reached his full height, he perhaps realized, belatedly, what was happening. Gorilla touched the delicate petals to the man's forehead, gently brushing his skin, and pulled the trigger hidden within the lethal bouquet twice in rapid succession. PHUT, PHUT!

  The sound was barely noticeable, nothing louder than a vigorous cough, certainly nothing to attract anyone's attention from outside. With the first shot, the man stared at Gorilla as though he had been smacked in the forehead with a cricket bat. His head rocked backwards, and through his own momentum, started to crane forward again just in time for the second shot to hit him, inches away from the first bullet. This time, however, the bullet didn't rock the target any further, instead his legs simply gave way and he dropped like a marionette whose strings have been swiftly sliced through. He fell in a crumpled heap behind the desk, work papers and invoices scattered all over him. What had been white was now red.

  Gorilla made his way around the desk and fired two more shots from the now ragged-looking bouquet into the target's head. Just to make sure – but he knew from experience that they were not necessary. The whole operation had taken no more than fifteen seconds. A bit slow, thought Gorilla, who hated shoddy shooting, especially in himself. No fancy stuff, no long speeches, just BANG and the target is dropped.

  After the extreme act of violence there was silence, the only ambient sound being the tat-tat-tat of an old air fan in the corner of the room.

  Gorilla's heart started beating at a rapid pace as a surge of adrenaline hit him. He took two slow, deep breaths, closed his eyes and started moving. He quickly returned to the office door, turned the door sign to read 'Reunion en cours', pulled down the blind and locked the door. He discarded the flowers on the desk and set about searching the rest of the office, striding swiftly from room to room. He moved silently, with the suppressed Beretta leading the way like a lethal tribune. Less than a minute later he was satisfied that he was alone.

  Job done, he thought. Now all he had to do was leave without bumping into the bloody cleaning woman, or whatever random happening was liable to throw itself into the mix on these types of operations. But his concerns proved unfounded.

  He disassembled the Beretta, breaking it down into its component parts – suppressor, magazine, and slide. Picking up the spent casings from the shots he'd fired, he placed them all into his inside jacket pockets before leaving the office. His presence raised not even a glance as he exited the office and made his way onto Hamra Street, heading back to the Squire's taxi. Moments later, Gorilla opened the rear passenger door and dropped down into the seat.

  “Okay. Off we go. But take it easy, no gunning the engine or high speed,” he said to the driver.

  The Squire nodded and began to move the car out into the busy traffic. “Was everything okay my friend? Any problems?”

  Gorilla placed the pieces of the Beretta into the satchel before tucking it back under the Squire's seat. “Everything was fine. The less you know about it the better.”

  “I understand. You will tell your organization that I performed well. That I was of use?”

  Gorilla nodded. This Squire had performed exactly as he'd requested. Good driver, adequate weapon choice, no flapping. “Of course. My people will no doubt reward you well. You were very good.”

  “Inshallah. Thank you, and where to now, my friend?”

  “The airport. I have a flight to catch.”

  By the time the body of the target had been discovered, Gorilla would be winging his way to Paris before travelling home to London. A circuitous route for sure, but it would at least keep the trail he left down to a minimum.

  He settled back and watched the sun cast the Corniche and the mountains in the distance in a yellow haze. Glancing down, he noticed a single speck of blood on the lapel of his jacket. It was a testament, and in fact the only proof, of his first Redaction.

  * * *

  Warsaw, Poland – October 1962

  The long watch of Tomasz Bajek began on a bright Saturday afternoon and had started some three hours earlier when he had taken over the surveillance shift.

  The operation, bizarrely enough, was in Warsaw Zoo, which to Bajek seemed a strange place for a group of fully grown men to be trying to blend in unnoticed on a warm weekend. But he supposed that foreign agents did not have the luxury of working only on weekdays.

  The zoo had been rebuilt in 1949 following the bombings of the Second World War, and was now one of the main attractions of the new Poland. He had already completed three rounds of his sector of the zoo and was now sitting down, rocking the pram that he'd been pushing for the past few hours. To the casual observer, he no doubt looked like a devoted new father who had been ushered out of the house by his frantic wife on the weekend, to spend some time with his progeny. The zoo was a relatively inexpensive day out.

  However, all was not as it seemed. Bajek was not a new father, and the pram held nothing more than a toy doll, wrapped up in multiple layers of blankets and bonnets on the off-chance that an overzealous member of the public should desire to see the baby. All that was visible were two bright blue eyes peeking out. He could think of nothing worse than wandering around a zoo for hours on end. He had never visited the zoo before, he hated bloody zoos, and after this job was finished he would never want to visit it again.

  In reality, Tomasz Bajek was a young, junior officer in Poland's internal security service. He had been working in the counterespionage department for the past four years, helping to catch spies and traitors.

  Normally he was tied to a desk, but today, due to a shortage of staff, he had been seconded to one of the roving surveillance teams. A break from the drab head office was always a pleasure.

  He was the sixth operative in an eight-man team, which ranked him somewhere above
a headquarters cleaner, but below the filing clerks. Each of the team had their own designated areas inside the zoo's grounds. Two surveillance vehicles were also part of the operation - one was disguised as a refuse collection truck, circling the perimeter, whilst the other was that workhorse of security services; a repair wagon, complete with a suitably slothful workman who'd taken many hours to do not very much at all.

  Bajek had the area covering the park and wild boar enclosure. Pleasant enough, but not when you're waiting nervously to capture a western spy.

  The job had been passed to them by the Russians. Unusually, a senior KGB officer by the name of Major Krivitsky was in command of the operation. Squat, vulgar, disdainful of the Polish intelligence officers under his command, Krivitsky had set out his stall in a blunt manner at the morning briefing.

  He stood at the head of the team, his large knuckles resting on the desk, chin jutting forward, soulless black eyes fixed on them, daring them to challenge his authority. He had then proceeded to lay out his experience. Fought in the Great Patriotic War, lifelong communist, an NKVD officer before they had changed their name to its current anagram; agent-runner, spy-catcher, hard bastard and the one person you don't want to cross. And all spoken in the absolutely lousiest Polish Bajek had ever heard. The man's voice was guttural, and at times almost incomprehensible, but it was clear enough to get his briefing across.

  A network of Polish spies had been rolled up and now the Russians wanted the chance to get their hands on a live, western case officer. But no ordinary western agent, not someone who worked through the Embassy, someone who had the safety net of diplomatic immunity.

  No, this was a non-official cover operative sent in on the 'black' to retrieve incriminating material. “The deal is this. You can have the Polish agents, we want the westerner,” glowered Krivitsky. “A show trial,” said Krivitsky, “to embarrass the Americans, the British, whoever the fuck it was. Then a prolonged interrogation, some Gulag time and then we sell him back to the West for one of our agents in a few years' time.”

  So who was this agent? What did he look like?

  “We don't know, so don't ask. Tall, maybe, young, sure. That's all we got, and we won't be getting any more where that came from,” murmured Krivitsky, who seemed loathe to give out any more information than he absolutely needed to. The rumor Bajek had heard was that the Polish spy Krivitsky interrogated hadn't had a strong enough constitution, and had decided to play the game no more. Permanently.

  “We got a trap set for him,” Krivitsky had announced. “A time and a place. We set the 'all clear' signal. Chalk mark on a lamppost on Marszałkowska Street. Means come and empty the post-box. Dead letter drop. He thinks he's getting the keys to the Kremlin, but we are going to be there rolling him up. So remember… you work for me. You do as I say. You don't, I make sure that you are sweeping the shit from the sewers for the rest of your life.”

  The dead letter box was in fact a loose brick, third row down, sixth brick across in a wall that surrounded the Herpetarium. It was located behind a small bush that provided, briefly, cover from any surveillance. The repair wagon which housed a member of the surveillance team had a discreet long lens camera pointing at the entrance to the pathway.

  The plan was to observe the target entering the tiny pathway between the wall and the shrubbery, alert the rest of the team, and they would then move in to make a hard arrest on the foreign agent and detain him once he'd exited.

  Over the past few hours they'd seen a few possible candidates for the soon-to-be-captured spy, but none of them fit the profile of a foreign intelligence agent. An elderly couple walking arm in arm, a mother on a visit with her two playful children, the usual retinue of courting couples. The most likely candidate had been a tall man of middle years, western business suit, but who had quickly been identified as a party official.

  One of the team had 'worked' him months ago after a suspected security leak from his Ministry, and the most contentious thing about him was his love affair with a junior secretary from the admin section. The team quickly ruled him out and minutes later, he was seen walking towards the park, hand in hand with a young flaxen-haired girl who was definitely not his wife.

  Bajek glanced at his watch, it was 4.45p.m., the light was starting to fade and the zoo would be closed within the hour. Maybe they were in for a no-show, or maybe the spy had picked up on the surveillance and decided to abort the emptying of the letter box, which meant that he might be stuck walking around the zoo again tomorrow. Damn.

  He heaved his heavy frame off the seat and decided on another series of ambles around his route, pushing the pram, and feigning interest in the limited selection of animals the zoo had to offer. He completed one circuit, returned for a second, and it was at the commencement of his third, and what he hoped would be final rotation around the zoo, when he heard the sound of the whistle.

  The whistles had been issued to all members of the team and were the equivalent of an early warning system. Not especially cutting edge, but effective nonetheless. “You see him – you blow the whistle. Got it?” Krivitsky had warned at the briefing session.

  Bajek turned his head in the direction of the peal. At first he saw nothing – just the zoo in its familiar state, visitors examining the animal enclosures. Normality. Then he saw a movement. A man of similar age to him, dark haired and skinny compared to Bajek's bulk, dressed in a workman's overalls and jacket, running at full pelt from the direction of the dead letter box, and seemingly, heading towards the main pathway which led to one of the exit points.

  Closely behind the runner, although with no chance of ever catching his quarry, was Stefan, the oldest member of the surveillance team, sporting a bloodied nose. Poor old Stefan had one hand pressed to his nose, trying in vain to stem the flow of blood, and the other swinging, in an effort to propel him forward faster. It appeared the spy hadn't wanted to be taken and had fought back.

  Then all the whistles seemed to be blowing at once, alerting the rest of the team to move in, and it was then that Bajek seized his chance. He wasn't a natural runner, nor was he particularly fit despite his youth, but he did have one vital advantage. He was standing at a 45-degree angle to where the spy would be in a matter of moments. If he could cut across the grass he would be able to intersect the runner's route, blindside him and bring the man down with a body charge. Bajek's bulk would be no match for the thinner man; he would simply knock him off his feet.

  The pram which had been his surveillance partner for the past few hours was flung, discarded, toy baby and all, and he was off! Pumping his arms, thrusting his legs along to propel him forward, he caught sight of the man from the corner of his eye. It was a race for survival. Bajek for his chances of promotion and escape from his prison-like desk; the spy, he was sure, for his life and liberty. Ten seconds to go, he was sure he could make it…

  Five seconds to collision. Bajek, the hero of the service, the man who brought down a ruthless western spy… blood is pumping in his ears… the only sound he can hear is the noise of his heart thundering…

  He can see the man clearly; young, certainly, but with a tough, handsome face… three seconds, almost…

  But then something strange happened. The man seemed to trip, stumble, but then regained his balance. Bajek nearly has a hand on the spy's jacket collar when he finally hears the report.

  At first, Bajek becomes aware of the Russian shouting, in fact, screaming would be a more accurate description. Then the crash of numerous rounds being fired, the 'whizz' of bullets passing by him, the screech of the caged animals as they react with fear. Then the spy seems to stagger – at least to Bajek – but still the gunfire continues. Who the hell had a gun on the team? Bajek thinks. I thought we all had whistles.

  The final few bullets seemed to explode into the running spy. One to the shoulder, and the final one – the most serious – took him in the rear of the skull, providing him, momentarily, with a pretty red halo before he crashed unceremoniously to the ground. The
world seemed to stop, a breath held in anticipation of more to come. But no more do come. The bullets have done their work. The spy was splayed out face down, his arms and legs twisted at odd angles so that he resembled a child's rag doll, tossed aside in a fit of pique.

  Bajek knelt down to examine the wounded man. There was a mass of blood and grey matter, caked all over the concrete path.

  The left side of his head had been blown away, a fatal wound, but to the man's credit, he was still clinging to the last remnants of life. His body twitched every few seconds, his eyes rolling wildly and his jaw worked as though he was trying to speak.

  Bajek moved closer, so that his ear was almost touching the man's lips. At first there was nothing, then with a massive effort a word came out in a hoarse whisper… to be repeated again and again and again. Each time, the strain on the dying man took its toll, but still he expelled the same word until finally he had nothing left to give. His eyes rolled back into his head and he slipped away. Bajek closed the man's eyes and raised himself to one knee.

  The rest of the team stood stock still, like mourners at a funeral, which in a way they were, Bajek supposed, providing a cordon to keep the public onlookers away. And there at the back of them all stood that bastard bloody Russian, the so-called professional, the big man from the KGB, who had fired the fatal shots.

  The Russian stood now like a child chastised, hands at his side, pistol still in his right hand, a guilty look, a look of shame in his expression. His eyes cast around the Polish team and he dismissed the shooting with a shrug. It was then that Bajek, the junior officer, who was only a rung up from the office cleaner, snapped and lunged at the man. No deception, no thought or planning, just a straight charge and jump to reach the Russian's throat.

  “I almost had him… you… you… butcher!”

  Both men went down in a tangle, the pistol dropping to the floor as Bajek started beating at the KGB man with fists, elbows and feet. Bajek found himself being pulled back hurriedly and restrained. He was pulled one way while Jan, the team leader, picked up the Russian, dusted him down, and began to apologize, moving him in the opposite direction.