by Tim Michaels
He paused, as if deciding whether or not to say more.
Then he continued, “I think I’m doing more good now than I was when I worked for the government. That mission Smith mentioned. He and Frank are really worried about something, and have been since I was hired about two years ago. They talk about it like they’re trying to save the world. It worries me, because in the government, the people who had that attitude were the cowboys. But Smith and Frank aren’t cowboys. They’re as level-headed as it gets. If they’re scared, I’m scared.”
I was genuinely curious. I had a feeling that without Smith’s cause, I wouldn’t be here. But Marco wouldn’t have told me what that cause was, even if he knew.
“Do you miss it?” I asked.
“What, killing people?” he asked, “As opposed to the other things I do? No, no I don’t miss it. I prefer knowing that I make a difference. Even if I don’t quite know how, I think I am helping accomplish something important. Smith and Frank think so, and I trust their judgment.”
We spent the next few hours discussing my projects: the Prince, Frangulyan, Zhou, and Field. Marco also asked me about Jacob Feingold, the falling tree guy. I told him I had nothing to do with that. He looked skeptical, but said “OK” and we moved on.
Marco critiqued my approach to the jobs I did do. He thought I was creative and imaginative, which could be a positive when dealing with a tough target. But he also thought I was too quick to use convoluted schemes, that I didn’t get to the point so-to-speak. And when we got to the Field job, Marco said I was an idiot who had gotten careless. I hadn’t tested the napalm bomb sufficiently to know how powerful it would be. I hadn’t found alternatives to checking into the RV park under my own name, and having made that mistake, I should have made myself scarce at least a day before Field was blown to bits if not called the whole thing off entirely.
Marco was somewhat fascinated by the characters I often used – Fernandez, the Caipira, his cousin Pedro, Muller and the two Dusty Kleins. I viewed it as a way to achieve my goals and add some fun to the job. He viewed it as tradecraft, and on a deeper level, a way to get some detachment.
“That’s not a bad thing,” he said, “But be careful you don’t start treating it like a game. What you got into, what you chose to get into. Make the wrong mistake and you’re finished. Jail or death.”
He had a point. I wasn’t afraid of dying though I really didn’t want to end up in prison. But either one would prevent me from finishing my mission. We were silent for a moment.
The silence stretched. Marco had given me a lot to chew on. I sat back and started to think. He pulled out his laptop and started doing some work.
Later, I was pleased to find the plane was equipped with a couple of foldout treadmills. I ran for about thirty minutes, and Marco for an hour and change. His pace was much faster than mine. The plane even carried a shower, though I was admonished to keep mine to less than two minutes. By then it was getting late in the day. The stewardess came over and asked us if we wanted dinner. The galley was surprisingly well stocked, and had a real (albeit very small) oven and stove. I had a grilled salmon with capers and asparagus that was very good. This was certainly not like the food I was used to eating in steerage on a commercial plane. Later, our seats folded out into almost-full length beds.
I dreamed of H and Jeremy. Jeremy was a little older, a little taller, a little more of a little boy and less of a toddler than when I had last seen him. He also had a more impressive repertoire of words than when I had last seen him. He wasn’t even wearing diapers any more. H had changed her hairstyle. It was shorter and more modern and it looked very nice. Not surprisingly, her outfit was new and she had on a pair of boots I hadn’t seen before. In my dream, they were on the plane with me, going to Argentina. It was an odd dream, not the least of which because, when I woke up, I realized that recently I hadn’t dreamed of them that often.
In the morning, over a breakfast of eggs Benedict, Marco asked me to articulate why I was doing what I was doing. I told Marco about my family. I showed Marco photos I had stored on my phone. I also unfolded the sketch of the three of us that H had drawn on Jeremy’s birthday.
Then I told Marco how wonderful they were. I told him about H, about how important doing the right thing had been for her. I told him about Jeremy, and how important it was for me to set an example for my son. And then I explained my mission, and why my cause was just. I told him the people who made the decisions that had killed my wife and son, who profited from it and showed no remorse, should not be allowed to affect anyone else’s life.
“Why do you keep calling your wife H?” Marco asked.
“Her given name was Hepzibah, I kid you not,” I said, “Her mother was a dear lady, but she marched to the beat of her own drummer. A very different drummer. H hated the name Hepzibah and from the age of 5 she refused to let her mother call her that.”
I paused for a second. Something didn’t add up.
“But I would think you know that. Don’t you have a dossier or something on me?” I asked.
“No, I don’t,” Marco replied, “I’ve studied the jobs you did, but that is all. Mr. Smith wants my unbiased opinion. He wants to know how much to bet on you.”
I was silent. I didn’t much like being someone’s prized racehorse, but being the nag that gets sold to the glue factory didn’t appeal to me either.
“Now I have another question for you,” Marco said, interrupting my thoughts, “How big is your list of targets? When will you be done?”
“There are eighteen names on my short list,” I said, “And a few more maybes.”
“That’s a lot of people you want to kill,” he said, quietly, “Sooner or later your targets are going to figure out they are targets, making them harder to get.”
After a moment, he continued, “And what happens when you’re done? You aren’t going to go back to a nine to five. And by then you’ll be a hunted man.”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” I said, “I have a job to do and I’m going to see it through. That’s all I know.”
I could see Marco deciding whether to press the conversation, but by then we were on our descent. I looked out the window – it was big country, with lots of valleys, streams and enormous hills in the distance, much like parts of Wyoming.
Chapter 8. Training
We landed and were met at the airfield by Juan, the caretaker. Marco had a small suitcase, I had nothing. We drove for fifteen minutes, never once leaving the farm. Finally, we arrived at the main house of the estancia.
I was shown to my room. The closets and dressers had clothes and shoes for me, and by the looks of it, everything was just my size.
“Change into sweats and meet me downstairs in half an hour. We have a busy day ahead” Marco told me.
Thirty minutes later, we walked out of the main house. Our warm-up suits were the same ones used by the Argentine national soccer team, sky blue and white. We took a Land Rover up a dirt path in the opposite direction from the airfield. After ten minutes, we rode up a hill about a hundred feet high. Below was a small valley. Marco drove down the hill into the valley, stopping at a large cinderblock and concreted shed. He unlocked the iron gate, pulled open the door and switched on the lights. Inside was a small armory: pistols, assault rifles, grenades, and that was just for starters. There were also boxes and boxes of ammunition. In addition, there was a lot of lower-tech weaponry – baseball bats, spears, knives, saps, and even a couple of blowguns.
“You’re going to learn how to use all of that,” he said.
And over the next week, I did. I learned to kill from up close. With a pistol (“Use a twenty-two, put it in the back of the target’s head and fire twice”), with a knife (“Same place as the bullet of a twenty – two, or the jugular, or the heart”), or a grenade (“Toss it at the target’s feet and quickly wal
k away”). I learned to kill from closer still – with a garrote, or a syringe full of poison. And then there were exotic methods, like the blow-gun, which I really enjoyed.
I also learned to use a Canadian-built sniper rifle. It was an amazing piece of equipment, and within a day I was hitting a target the size of a man’s heart from two hundred yards away. Then we moved up to the big guns, so to speak: a fifty caliber belt-fed machine gun on a tripod, shoulder-fired missiles and a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Any of those tools would have saved me an incredible amount of trouble in Ternos, let me tell you.
“Don’t get me wrong; firing this thing is a blast,” I said. “But when am I ever going to have an RPG, Marco?”
“You have to know what these things can do, even if you never use them again,” he said, “Besides, the guys you go up against might have them.”
Later, I learned to scuba, hang-glide, paraglide, parachute, pilot a small plane, and even drive a Cascavel, an armored reconnaissance vehicle built in Brazil. A year earlier I would have called it a tank. Our curriculum also covered more pedestrian vehicular pursuits such as evasive driving on a closed circuit.
“I know my life insurance agent wouldn’t like any of this,” I told Marco at the end of a long day.
In addition, I also learned all manner of breaking and entering techniques. Marco taught me to open locks, hotwire cars, and break into safes. The farm also had a variety of alarms and I was taught to deal with each type.
After six weeks in Argentina, we flew to Lima, the capital of Peru. As we walked the downtown area, he told me, “Mr. Smith has a security company based in Lima. The new trainees are doing a training exercise today. They’ve been told to track you. You, on the other hand, want to get to our hotel without being followed by any of them.”
He looked at his watch, “You have two hours.”
I looked at him.
“Well, get a move on it,” he said.
Afterwards, Marco told me I had been successful. We repeated the exercise five times in the next day and a half and I managed to do it every time. After that, Marco assigned me to tail other people whose instruction had been to lose me. I wasn’t as good at that, succeeding only about half the time. Part of my problem was that I stood out among the shorter, stockier, more Inca-looking population of Peru. But even taking that into account, I was clearly better at running and lying in wait than at chasing.
Marco was pretty sanguine about the whole thing. “You can’t be good at everything,” he told me, “Nobody is. But you have to know your strengths and weaknesses.
“Lurk and pounce,” I said.
“Huh?”
“It’s from a novel by a science fiction author named Vernor Vinge,” I said. “I lurk and pounce. And then I run like hell and hide. I am not so good at striking while on the move, or staying and fighting.”
The next day Marco handed me five suits. They were all Armanis, and, as it turned out, perfectly tailored to my body. I wondered how that trick had been pulled off since nobody had taken my measurements.
“For the next few days, you are going be on the bodyguard detail for Tanako Katani. He’s President of Iwa Ao Select Machinery in Japan. Mr. Smith is the biggest shareholder. I want you to see what it’s like from the other side,” he said.
We went to the Miraflores Park Hotel, where Katani was staying in the Penthouse. He was traveling with three bodyguards. I made it four.
“Aren’t you a bit small to be a bodyguard, Mr. Fredericks?” Katani asked in perfect English, using the name by which I had been introduced.
I nodded, but said nothing.
“James is part of Mr. Smith’s advance team,” Marco told him, “We thought it was time for him to see what the other side of the job is like. He also needs to get a feel for Lima for an assignment he has coming up.”
Katani had meetings all week, and I followed him around day and night. I learned that being a bodyguard is often mind-numbingly boring. But no matter how bored you are, you have to keep an eye on everything. As I had learned in Ternos and at Big Ellie’s Diner, a threat can come at anytime from anywhere.
When Katani was in meetings to which his bodyguards were not invited, I talked to my counterparts. They were all surprisingly smart. They talked about how important it was to prevent the client from getting into trouble in the first place. Katani was a pussy cat, but other clients weren’t always easy. Many clients liked to drink or keep irregular hours, which of course made it difficult for the bodyguards to maintain the appropriate level of attention. Many seemed to feel that because they had bodyguards, they could take added risks. A drunken client picking fights in a crowded bar could get himself, and more likely his bodyguards, severely hurt or even killed.
“Economists call it the Peltzman effect,” one of them told me. “A lot of people have a tendency to take more risks when they have a better safety net.”
I also learned there were many female bodyguards.
“A male bodyguard can’t go into the ladies’ room,” another bodyguard mentioned, “And there are a lot of wives and mistresses of executives. And these days, a lot of female executives too. Besides that, I’ve been told by a woman I worked with that women can sometimes de-escalate the threat level more quickly than a man can. I guess there’s some truth to that.”
After a few days, Marco came back to collect me. He was wearing an earpiece. I asked about it, but he said nothing.
We took a cab to Rimac, a lower-middle class neighborhood. Then we started walking. The longer we walked, the seedier the area got, until we ended up in a dumpy little building off of a small alley. The building had a small sign that said “Hotel” on it. I felt very conscious of the fact I was wearing an Armani suit. Marco was as well dressed as I, but if he felt out of place he wasn’t letting it show.
We walked inside, into what passed for a lobby. It was a small hotel, of the sort that will rent rooms by the hour, by the day, or by the week. We walked past the front desk and up the stairs, stopping in front of room 313. Marco put on gloves and had me do the same. Then he opened the door to the dingiest hotel room I have ever seen.
“Don’t touch anything,” he said, closing the door behind us.
“What?” I asked.
“I’ve put out a contract on your head,” Marco said.
He looked at his watch.
“In a few minutes, two men are going to walk through that door. I told them you and I are negotiating a drug deal, but that I think you’re an American cop. I’m paying them $10,000 to remove your head. But frankly, since they expect both money and drugs in the room, I wouldn’t be surprised if they plan on killing me as well,” he said.
I stayed silent, processing the information.
“These guys are the baddest of the bad. They’re not just professional killers; they also traffic in underage girls. One of them killed a guy with a chainsaw last year. Just sawed off both arms and waited for the SOB to bleed to death,” Marco said.
He touched his earpiece.
“OK. They’re in the building,” he said, “Just the two of them, they didn’t bring anyone else. They should be here in about a minute.”
He handed me an automatic, a .45 with a sound suppressor on it. The gun, a Brazilian made Taurus 24/7 Pro was jet black with a checkered polymer contour grip. It felt cool and comfortable in my hand.
I slid the magazine out. It was full. Twelve bullets. I did a quick check of the gun. It seemed OK. I slid the magazine back in and flicked off the safety. This was a big gun. It had lots of stopping power. It was loud and fast. It wasn’t meant for finesse like a .22.
“Remember, we’re in this country illegally,” Marco said, “We have to be ghosts. We can’t be around when the cops get here. Once these guys step through the door you kill them quick and then follow me. The gun is untraceable and you d
on’t want to be caught with it. Leave it behind.”
I looked around. I stepped to the right of the door. It would swing in that direction, making it hard for someone entering the room to see me.
Meanwhile, Marco walked over to an armoire sitting on the opposite wall which an unobstructed line of sight to both the door and my position. Unlike everything else in the room, the armoire looked new and extremely solid. It had a thick metal door with a six inch by three inch glass plate in it. It was very out of place, clearly not standard issue furniture for that low budget hotel room. He slid open the door of the armoire – it was completely hollow, like a large upright casket. All of a sudden I realized that the armoire was bulletproof. From inside, the bulletproof glass would give Marco a perfect view of everything that was about to happen.
And then I realized one more thing: it was too quiet in the room. The thugs would be expecting noise. I quickly switched on the TV, and then got back against the wall.
A moment later, the doorknob started to move. Then both men burst into the room. One of the men had a large revolver, the other a shotgun. The man with the shotgun saw Marco through the green glass in the armoire door and fired on it. There was no effect.
The second thug looked around for another target, his eyes wild.
Through the painfully loud noise of the shotgun blast, the unpleasant smell of gunpowder, and the fear, my heart rate which had been racing slowed to what felt like a crawl. With perfect calm, I stepped up to the man with the revolver, and in the same movement, put the gun to the side of his face and fired. Without waiting to see the results, I rotated my arm. The man with the shotgun had pivoted and was lowering it in my direction. I fired at his chest, a big easy target, and then put a second bullet in his head before the body hit the ground.
It was over. I expelled the ammunition clip and let it fall to the floor. A second later, I dropped the automatic too. I kicked the gun under the bed and the clip to the far side of the room. By then, Marco had stepped out of the armoire and was headed out the door. He had a Brazilian .45 too, one that he hadn’t used, which he put on the bedside stand.