It was never a rare occurrence for him to fall silent during a conversation, and in the case of my request, silence could only mean he was at least thinking about my proposal. I didn’t care for the life of either the girl or her guardian, but interfering in the trials could never be a good thing.
“This is highly irregular, but I can see merit in it. Can you upload some footage of Helen’s shooting skills?”
All training at the firing range was recorded and kept for a month. “Give me five minutes,” I said.
I tapped away on the nearby desktop computer and connected to the CCTV network. Finding the relevant section and time recorded was straight forward, so I picked a five-minute section to send to the boss. Any section would have been suitable such was Helen’s accuracy.
More silence followed as he watched what I sent him. I peeked through the window, absorbing the calmness of the nearby ocean, and wondered what would happen if a boat were to find us just a mile inland.
“Okay, the lady has potential. It will save us hiring outside help for the sniping part of the mission. Just get her to practice at the long-range targets, and do it tomorrow. We only have a small window for this mission, and we need everyone ready. The mission outline will be arriving by fax. Get Diablo in there with you.”
“Yes, sir. Speaking of Diablo, he’s making some weird changes here like the shower block.”
“I’m well aware, Talissa. I didn’t expect you of all people to have a problem with it. He came to me with the idea, to allow you all to know each other well. Now, is there anything else? My time is too precious to debate the sanctity of your body, which you’ve used as a weapon on dozens of assignments now.”
In this line of work, one knew when to push a point and when to let it go. Arguing with an unseen superior would get me nowhere, except possibly an early grave. But I had one concern about communal showering.
“Emily’s only sixteen years old. It’s not right…”
“Talissa, I don’t expect my subordinates to question me on the running of this place. You’re great at what you do, but you’re not irreplaceable. I’m the boss here, and I don’t care for second-guessing. Goodbye.”
I remained seated while I waited for the fax to arrive and read the assignment details in full before requesting the other participants to meet me in my room. The sun still hadn’t made its daily exit yet by then, and there was no evening meal in our bellies, either. But they were all keen. Diablo was the last to arrive at the meeting, avoiding the smiles Helen threw his way as he sat on the chair that was near my desk.
“Emily, shit is about to get real. You’re going to be used as human bait for a real nasty piece of work and there might be people trying to do bad things to you,” I said. She looked young but free of innocence.
“Bad things?” Her mouth twisted at my wording choice. “Like stick their cocks in my mouth? Do these lips look like they don’t know the taste of a big meaty…?” she looked Diablo’s way.
“Fine. Just trying to make sure you know what could happen.” I shifted my attention to her guardian. “You need to fit in some long range target practice. We need a competent sniper who can rock a cocktail dress.”
She certainly had the figure to carry off a high priced dress. I visualised her in a light blue, spaghetti strap, figure-hugging outfit. Great as a distraction for male eyes, but nowhere to conceal a weapon. Her rifle would need to be left in the location from which she would be covering us.
“Diablo, you will act as my partner. We’ll pose as sellers of young flesh to members of high society, and our client prefers young American blondes. We need to get his interest in Emily and flush him away from the rest of the party. He’ll most probably have a three or four-person security detail, which won’t be a problem for us as Helen will be on sniping detail. If we can avoid it, we don’t take anyone out apart from our target and, if need be, his minders.
“So who wants him dead?” Diablo asked.
There were times when we were told and times when we weren’t—and times when I was privy to information I couldn’t share with my fellow mission operatives. The others didn’t need to know this mission was yet another case of furious ex-wife syndrome. We always gave them a good week or two to change their mind, reminding them that although we operated smartly without leaving a trail for the authorities to follow, a decision to have an ex-husband or partner killed shouldn’t be rushed into.
“I don’t have that information. We just need to make sure this man’s head ends up in a box to send to our client. Any concerns you have should be settled with the hundred grand we’ll all receive for a successful job done. This is the man we need to take out.” I showed them all in turn a picture of the man’s face, name, and personal details.
“So do I have to fuck that dirty old man?” Emily asked.
“We’ll do everything to avoid that,” I answered.
“You don’t have to treat me like I’m your child. I know what our jobs here involve. I lost my virginity at fourteen. I’ve been with boys my age and men old enough to be my dad. And girls too.”
“It’s okay, Talissa. She’s done it all already,” Helen said.
I kept a straight face, but part of me wanted to slap Emily for admitting the things I, myself, wanted to engage in when I was her age. I had to focus on the mission at hand.
I showed the others the layout of the three levels of the building where the exchange would take place, a private mansion holding secrets of horrific crimes. I had no doubt we would come across some heavy opposition if we weren’t stealthy enough.
Helen studied the diagram, noting the locations of the windows. “I’ll need to get to this side of the mansion to get the best view of what’s happening inside, and even then, I’ll be restricted. Try and arrange your meeting to take place in this room here.” She pointed to a large entertaining area. “If the blueprint is correct, there would be a lot of glass along the wall of that room.”
“You’ll be situated on a jutted edge with a sea wind blowing in your face. You’ll also need to counter in a trajectory range as bullets pierce the glass,” Diablo said.
“That’s not my biggest problem. What I want to know is how do I get a rifle to that spot?” Helen asked. The location she needed to be at was situated within the boundary of the property.
“It will be in pieces and put in a cake box. If you need to lift the lid, it will look like a proper cake is there, but pray they don’t try poking or prodding too much,” I answered. “Your cocktail dress will be too tight to hide anything.”
Diablo looked her way and smirked. At times, I wondered if he thought about anything besides sex.
“So what will I be armed with?” Emily asked.
“Your good looks and young age will be all the weapons you need. And your mind,” Diablo said.
“So we spend the next three days studying every square inch of these blueprints, Helen practices her long range shooting, and Emily, you’ll be concentrating on hand-to-hand combat and disarming armed men.” I looked over my three fellow mission operatives. Diablo, experienced. Helen, resourceful with a gun, and Emily, young and energetic, ready to make her first kill. I had to admit it was a good team.
What could go wrong?
Chapter 3
The party’s official starting time was at 7PM, and we needed to be there half an hour prior. Diablo, Emily, and I travelled in a black SUV left for us at the location that the helicopter had dropped us. Helen travelled alone ahead of us in an identical vehicle. A big part of our mission depended on her working as our backup eyes, which meant she needed to get through the house and set up her position.
Communication between us would be difficult until she could unpack the fake cake box and set up her hands-free kit. On the other end of the communication line, Diablo would be the ears and voice for the pair of us, able to hide a hands-free kit in a hollowed out novelty keychain.
The journey had been long, but Diablo and I managed to avoid conversation of our built up
sexual tension. The communal shower proved to serve him well, a lone male among a group of anywhere between six and ten females on a daily basis, the number differing depending on when some of them were deployed on missions. I must have been old fashioned because the idea of having sex in front of other people never appealed to me. I had never needed to do so on a paid mission, so why would I want to fuck this arrogant Spanish prick in front of all my fellow assassins?
Emily had tried to get with him, trying to seduce him a few times in the showers, but thankfully, Diablo displayed a little morality and declined her repeated offers. Helen’s offer was a different story—the two of them screwing like a pair of horny teenagers just a few feet from where I showered. But each woman he had sex with, his eyes were on me the whole time.
A voice cracked through the loudspeaker of Diablo’s phone. “Wish me luck. I have arrived at the mansion.”
“Good luck,” I said. Once set up, she would be able to relay information on how many people were located inside the house and where. We hoped to keep the body count down on this mission, but if we had to take everyone out to get our hands on our target, Big Bill, then we were more than prepared to do so.
I always loved driving along the coast. The calming scent of the ocean and the endless shades of blue settled my nerves and made me realise that in a big world, I’m just one single organism sharing the air with a few billion others. And as we passed the sparsely populated area, I could see from the size of the mansions and scope of their properties why this was the case.
“Nearly show time. Are you good back there?” I asked Emily.
“Yeah, I just have to look pretty, which isn’t hard.”
I mumbled under my breath. She was right, of course, with her silky blonde hair and sleek body, which appeared as though it had developed well before she was due, Emily was simply stunning. From a perverted point of view, I understood why dirty old rich men would pay a lot of money for her. But as much as the girl pissed me off with her attitude, we couldn’t fuck this mission up.
I turned off the road when I saw the mailbox with the number 1124 attached. About twenty feet further up the pebbled terracotta driveway, we had a security gate to pass through.
A baritone voice crackled through the speaker box, “Name and nature of business please.”
I took a short breath. “Mr and Mrs Bosworth with a package for Mr William Watsburg.”
There was a slight pause, and I imagined a faceless man searching through a list looking for our aliases. I resisted the urge to turn and look back at Emily, who might have been nervous about the silent seconds ticking over. But I knew it was just standard procedure.
“Drive on through. Continue up the path until you are directed by the personnel on where to park. Have a nice day.”
I pressed with the lightest touch of my foot to accelerate along the driveway. The sight of a three-storey mansion surrounded by an artificial oasis held our attention as we basked in its magnificence. I surmised how lucrative the drug and illegal arms trades must pay in comparison to an assassin’s work.
As I glanced at Diablo, I hoped he was ready for whatever we might have to face and that Helen had reached her location. Diablo smiled at me reassuringly, and when I turned back to the path, we saw our first human on the property, staring as we approached, with what looked like a semi-automatic rifle slung over his shoulder.
The black suited man waved us toward him, his eyes invisible to us behind his thick sunglasses. On closer inspection, I estimated him to be even taller than Diablo and just as wide. As we slowed to a near stop, he walked around to my window and pointed in the direction of a vehicle similar to ours, indicating we should park to the right of it.
I didn’t see any point in verifying the readiness of my two fellow operatives. Like me, they didn’t display an ounce of nervousness. Nerves give you away when you dance in the devil’s playground, and the result could well mean a quick death, or worse, a slow and painful one.
A pair of men similarly armed to the one who guided us to where we parked met us outside the car and escorted us to the entrance of the house. Diablo and I walked side by side with Emily out in front of us.
“The Bosworths have arrived, sir,” one of the men spoke into a walkie-talkie.
We waited for about half a minute before an older man greeted us and allowed us inside. “Please take the staircase on the left, and when you get to the top, turn around, and take the next flight of stairs to the third floor.” He studied Emily and frowned.
“You must look too old,” I said to Emily when we were out of earshot of the butler-looking type.
“It’s the tits,” she said.
As we crossed the floor on the second level between staircases, we received a curious look from a group of men and women drinking glasses of champagne. From my research, parties like this were commonplace at the mansion. Despite public perception, the rich and distinguished were much wilder behind the doors of a party than a bunch of college kids at spring break.
A man we knew from our mission dossier as Charlie Appleton greeted us as we reached the top of the second staircase. “Ah, good evening Mr and Mrs Bosworth, and who’s this young lady?”
“Her name is Kandi, and she is as sweet as her name suggests,” Diablo said.
Charlie walked up close to Emily and looked her up and down. He extended his hand to her. “Security, please frisk the two of them. You know how paranoid Bill is.”
Another pair of heavily armed men made their way to us, each one selecting one of us to pat down. The guard who frisked me made a point of feeling me through my red silk dress, cupping my breasts and ass with his gorilla sized hands. But anyone who knew anything about the game we played knew the mansion of a rich drug lord wasn’t the place to file a complaint of sexual harassment.
“Yeah, she’s good,” the guard said, giving me one last look, or should I say my breasts. The other guard nodded and allowed us to enter the main entertaining area.
The room only had a number of armed men inside, the majority of the guests yet to arrive and fill up the dance floor. It was decorated like a 1970s discotheque, a mirrored ball hanging in the centre of the wooden floor, a smoke machine near the stage and an oval shaped bar serving every type of cocktail imaginable.
“This place really gets pumping after ten. You should both stick around,” Charlie said. He had a hold of Emily’s hand. “Big Bill has asked me to check over his potential purchase on his behalf.”
The guards in the room walked over to watch the proceedings as he pushed Emily out in front of him. We knew something like this could happen, but it didn’t mean I could escape the feeling of disgust that filled me as I waited for what would happen next. The trick, though, was not to allow my true feelings to surface, or else my charade as a salesperson of young female flesh would meet an abrupt end.
“Dear Kandi, I do what is known as quality control for dear old Bill, so I’m going to need a good look at the merchandise, just to make sure he’s getting value for his pussy dollar.”
Right then, I swore if I had the chance, I would put a bullet in Charlie before we left. All I could do though was watch as Emily removed her singlet top and little denim shorts and to stand in the middle of the room in matching white bra and panties.
“Oh, very nice, but I’m going to need to see a little more.” Charlie smirked. A couple of the guards chuckled and added their names to my to-kill list as Emily unclipped her bra and then lowered her panties to the floor.
“See, grade A merchandise, as promised,” Diablo said.
“That’s some fine looking Kandi,” Charlie said. He unzipped the fly of his black pants. “But I need to make sure she can use that luscious looking mouth of hers.”
******
Emily was given a new set of clothes to wear, a matching pink frilly short skirt, and singlet top to put on over her own underwear. It gave her that look of innocence mixed with mischievousness, and likely to be the subject of a sick perverted man’s desir
e. As much as I would have liked to stop things from reaching that point, I knew Emily would most likely have to screw the dirty old goat before killing him.
“Our host will be with you shortly, and on my recommendation, you will be well paid.” Charlie smiled at me and touched Emily’s chin. “I hope you have access to more merchandise like this.”
“I doubt you could afford such luxuries on a henchman’s wage,” Diablo said.
Charlie closed the space between him and Diablo in a split second. “You best be careful how you speak to one of Big Bill’s associates.”
“Oh boys, a girl could nearly drown in this flood of testosterone,” a woman in her thirties said as she entered the room.
“Who the fuck are you?” Charlie asked.
“My new associate, Beth Bachman.” Bill followed her into the room. The irony of his nickname Big Bill wasn’t lost on me. He would have been lucky to hit five feet in height. “And she has some interesting information.”
“Someone in this room has been paid a lot of money to kill you, Bill,” Beth said, pulling a pistol from her side. She looked at me, taking in every detail of my body. “Well, I doubt you could be concealing anything harmful under that costume.”
She took a step toward Diablo and grabbed him between the legs. “Looks like this guy’s carrying a big weapon, but he doesn’t seem to be armed. And your little girl has been stripped to nothing already. So maybe it’s you, Charlie.” She turned around to face the sleazy henchman.
We hadn’t anticipated a scenario like this as part of the mission. Diablo still hadn’t been able to connect his communication device, and from our position, we couldn’t see any sign of Helen. We had no idea who this woman was, but she was right about someone paying a lot of money to have Bill killed.
“Bill’s my boss, so no Bill, no big paycheck,” Charlie said.
Beth studied each of us in turn and then settled her gaze on me. “Come. Let me get you a drink.” She reached for my hand and put her pistol away. “That’s one sexy dress you have on there, babe,” she whispered in my ear.
7PM - Talissa Page 2