Primary Target: Six Assassins: Book 1

by Heskett, Jim

  After a few more seconds of sensing and hearing no movement, a rippling fart from inside the nearby tent broke the silence. Low and rumbling, the kind of toot her dad would have let out after a steak and broccoli dinner. Ember stifled a chuckle, but she tensed and stayed quiet. She knew it was scientifically impossible to pass gas in a deep sleep, so it meant whoever had cut the cheese was either awake or sleeping lightly. She waited to see if the owner of the smell would shift any more, but it didn’t seem so. The general state of the campgrounds did not change.

  Now, on to the target.

  She had to make a decision about the tent flap. She could see from a hundred yards away it had a zipper holding it closed. Unzipping it would make too much noise. Rodney would wake up. She had no problem taking out a target while they were awake, but the issue would be whether or not he would have time to scream and yell and wake everyone else around them. She figured it was likely — most people didn't take too kindly to a stranger breaking into their tent while they were sleeping in the middle of the night.

  Due to the layout of the campsite, Ember had parked her car about a thousand yards away. Fleeing deeper into the valley was an option, but it wasn't one she wanted to pursue. Some of these people would have their phones nearby and could still have cell service. One call to the cops, and she could be trapped in the park. Even if they didn't have service, recording a video or snapping a picture of her would be unfortunate. Not ideal. She didn't have a pass in her car, and her license wasn't registered with the rangers as an overnight vehicle.

  No, she would not open the tent flap. She would examine the tent and then stab the dart through it, right into his neck. Still, a risky move, since she would have to guess at his exact location inside. She assessed the alternatives and decided that it was still the best option. She'd be able to easily determine which side of the tent he was sleeping on, but it would be more difficult to figure out on which end he'd laid his head. And if he were sleeping in the middle of the tent, she would have an even more difficult time getting the dart to his neck.

  Ember crouched outside the tent and listened. Breath pushing in and out of her mouth, trying to stay as still as possible. The cold was still there, still pressing against her skin and begging for her attention, but she was fully in the zone now. She was working, and there was nothing that could break her focus.

  Goosebumps dotted the pasty white flesh of her arms. Her hair felt cold on the back of her neck. Her hair brushed against her shoulder, tickling her and making it that much harder to maintain her concentration.

  Now more than ever, she wished she’d brought that damn hair tie. Maybe she could have found a straight twig or tree bark on the ground to make one, but it was probably too late for that now.

  Something in the tent shifted, and she heard a slight grunting noise. Rodney had turned over in his sleeping bag and cleared his throat, and thanks to the sounds, she could now picture him inside the tent. She knew where to stab through the material to get him in the neck. Everything was ready for her to complete the contract.

  She ran through the kill in her mind. Pictured Rodney’s prone, vulnerable body, warm inside his sleeping bag. A heartless rapist, a man who deserved what he was about to get.

  Ember held the dart high, prepared to move, when she heard a shuffling sound behind her. She spun, and her eyes opened wide when she saw the figure, blotting out the moon.

  Another assassin, standing over her.

  Chapter Three

  EMBER

  Ember looked up to see Niles Thisdell standing over her. An assassin from the Five Points Branch of the Denver Assassins Club. He held a serrated hunting knife in one hand. Covered head to toe in black hiking pants and black sweater, with a black skullcap pulled low and a black bandanna covering the lower half of his face. But Ember knew him by those almond brown eyes, brilliant and glowing even in the dark. Rail thin and lanky, testy and prone to emotional outbursts, Niles had the sort of grating personality she avoided at all costs.

  “Niles,” she hissed. “Get out of here. This is my contract.”

  Niles shook his head. She couldn’t see his lips behind the bandanna, but his eyes suggested he was smiling. “My contract, Ember. I have paperwork.”

  "So do I. Get out of here before you wake up half the campsite. This is a stupidly tenuous situation out here, and you're going to make it worse. Seriously. Not even joking. I'm almost done, so you need to keep out of my way."

  For a few seconds, they stayed rooted in their spots. Ember crouching next to the tent, Niles hovering over her, knife in hand. This was not a good situation.

  The Club forbade more than one assassin from taking on a contract. The Club also forbade bidding wars or anything that would pit token-carrying Club members against each other. Besides, it made no sense for a Five Points member to be here. Five Points assassins specialized in messy contracts. Brutal kills meant to send a message. Ember, while only taking contracts to kill people who deserved it, was also a clean assassin. She usually tried to make her kills look like accidents. That’s what she had been hired to do in this case. Kill a rapist, but make it look like he’d had a heart attack so there was no way it could ever come back on the victim.

  If Niles went to work on this rapist, he would leave the guy in a puddle of blood, and the campsite in such disarray onlookers would undoubtedly be alerted. Such a thing would have serious repercussions for everyone involved.

  “The hell you doing here, anyway?” she asked.

  “Like I said, I have this contract.”

  Ember raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you really need to go now, before this whole thing turns sideways.”

  “I’m not moving. Step away from the tent.”

  “Niles,” she whispered, her voice growing more intense. “Stop being a dick about this. You’re going to blow it for both of us. I don’t know how else to say it to you to make you understand.”

  ”Get out of my way,” Niles said in a low growl.

  “No. Let’s go somewhere and have a reasonable discussion about this. There’s been a mix-up.”

  But Niles didn’t make any effort to move. In fact, he even shifted his grip on the knife. An almost imperceptible move, but Ember noticed the tightening of his fingers out of her peripheral vision.

  “I hear you are a longtime student of Krav Maga and kickboxing,” he said. “Which do you prefer?”

  “I do not want to fight you.”

  He was about to strike. As ludicrous as it seemed, he looked poised to attack her in the middle of a dozen tents full of sleeping civilians.

  She waited for him to make his move so she could get the jump on him. Ember leaped to her right, rolling herself into a ball at the last moment so she wouldn’t slam into the ground and make too much noise. With tents spaced out every ten or twelve feet, it was like trying to maneuver through a field of landmines.

  Niles recovered, then turned toward her and jumped, knife high. In mid-air, he aimed the knife down, poised to land on top of her. She could barely make out his black-clad form in the darkness, but she knew enough about hand-to-hand combat to know where he would strike, and from what position.

  On her back, Ember had only a split-second to react. She pushed herself hard to the right, and Niles landed flat on his face in the icy dirt. She had to stop her momentum when she almost rolled right into the side of a blue tent.

  He was momentarily stunned on the ground. Ember flipped back over to the left, on top of Niles. Immediately, he struggled, making too much noise for Ember to contain the situation. His knife was on the ground next to him, and he tried to buck Ember off as he scrabbled to reach out for it.

  She didn't want to attack him. It was a terrible idea. But she didn't have a choice. Any second now people would start to wake up. She would be exposed. Above all, a member of the Denver Assassins Club had to maintain secrecy and anonymity among the general public. The Club and its two-hundred members had only survived and thrived for the
last fifty-plus years because civilians knew nothing about it.

  She reached to her back pocket and snatched one of the stun darts. With two in her hand, she dropped the lethal one on the ground so she could grip the one she wanted to use. Ember jabbed the dart into Niles’ neck.

  When she pulled her hand back, she realized her mistake.

  She had used the wrong one.

  A red dart stuck out of his neck. The blue one, the dart with the nonlethal stun poison, was sitting on the ground next to them.

  "Shit."

  The bandanna covering his face had fallen away in the scuffle. Spittle formed on his lips as his jaw strained. His eyes darted around, and he tried to cough. It was a guttural, involuntary noise, and she knew what it meant. Within a couple of seconds, his movements slowed and then stilled.

  Dead.

  “Damn you, Niles,” she whispered. “We’re in this hole because of your dumb ass.”

  She sat back on her butt, arms wrapped around her knees, and glanced around the campsite. No stirring, no flashlights lightening the interior walls of the tents. But that didn’t mean no one had woken up. Eight thousand and ninety steps on the watch counter.

  She needed to hurry. Time was now out; she needed to be gone, and she needed to finish the job and get rid of Niles’ body.

  She drew another dart and returned to Rodney Palmer’s tent. With a quick jab, she thrust the dart into the tent fabric and into his flesh, high on his chest, above the sleeping bag.

  She heard him make a quick gasp, then nothing. His death was quicker than Niles’, and quieter.

  Ember pulled back the dart and examined the tiny hole it had made through the tent. Fortunately for her, the tent was well-worn and had plenty of scuff marks. No one would notice a nearly microscopic hole.

  Then she stood, shoulders heaving. Niles was dead on the ground. She scurried back over to him, found his bandanna and then hoisted him up over her shoulder. His weight almost took her down, but she bared her teeth and spread her legs to balance his lanky bulk.

  Ember hefted him all the way back toward her car, moving as fast as she could with a hundred and sixty pounds over her shoulder. Once a minute, she checked behind her as the campsite grew farther and farther away. No signs of movement from back there.

  No one had woken up. No one had driven by.

  She popped the trunk of her car and dumped Niles into it. His body folded like a collection of rugs, splayed about at odd angles, and she had to work his long leg and huge foot around a bit to shove it down inside.

  His cold, dead eyes were fixed on a point beyond her, his jaw still shut tight, as it had been the moment he’d died. Maybe Ember hadn’t liked him, but she still took no pleasure in seeing another Club member in good standing dead.

  Especially when it had been so pointless, and especially when it had been her to do it.

  Ember clenched her fists. “Damnit, Niles,” she whispered under her breath, “why did you have to be such a jerk?”

  As a chill set in and goosebumps tickled the back of her neck, the full reality of the situation’s consequences dawned on her. Ember had killed another member of the Club.

  A cardinal rule held sacred by every single member. It was one of the few rules that every Club recruit agreed upon after passing initiation, without question.

  Worse, she had broken the rule before. That time, she’d gotten lucky. They’d let her go with only minor punishment, but the Review Board had made it clear what would happen to her if she did such a thing again.

  Even though she had only intended to stun him, and even though the whole thing had been his fault because he’d attacked first, none of that mattered.

  "Damnit, Niles." She found herself growing angrier by the minute. Why had he been there? Clerical mix-up? How had two assassins been contracted for the same kill? The Club's machinery was supposed to prevent this from happening. Decades of fine-tuning the Club's laws and operating procedures were supposed to have kept them free from these mistakes.

  A pulse of fear ran through her. A primal and instinctive desire to run, to pretend none of this had happened. To cover this up and disappear, as she had contemplated many times before. To pull it off, she would have to never make contact with the Club again. Become someone else, with a new name, in a new country, far away. Rip up everything she had built here in Denver over the last three years and start fresh somewhere else.

  Ember knew that was ridiculous. First of all, she would never get away with it. The Club would find her and hold her accountable for what had happened. At least thirty or forty various Club members specialized in finding people who didn’t want to be found, no matter how far they had run. If she holed up in a Buddhist temple in Tibet, she might have a month of freedom before she woke up to a knife plunged into her chest.

  Also, running was dishonorable. For whatever reason, there had been two killers on this contract. In self-defense, Ember had killed the other assassin and completed the job. There would be consequences, and she would have to face them. Maybe the consequences wouldn’t be so bad. The Review Board wasn’t devoid of reason.

  Finally, there were other things in play that she couldn’t afford to screw up. People depended on her, and they wouldn’t be pleased if she simply disappeared.

  Ember whipped out her phone and placed a call to her mentor, the grizzled old woman named Fagan. Despite the late hour, Fagan picked up the phone after the first ring.

  “Something wrong, dear?” Fagan asked. She sounded alert, yet calm.

  “You… could say that.”

  Fagan sighed. “Well, you’re still alive, and it doesn’t appear that you’re calling me from jail, so the contract couldn’t have gone that badly.”

  “It did.”

  “What happened?”

  “This Rodney Palmer contract; it came from a legit client?”

  “Yes, of course.” Fagan’s voice changed, dropped a few tones. “It was done over the message board, as usual. Severe background check, payment in full prior to completion. Everything was done right, as far as I could see. What happened?”

  “And there were no other assassins contacted about this job? No other members of any other Branches documented any paperwork or any notes about it at all?”

  “No, Ember, nothing like that. It was all by-the-book. Are you saying there’s someone else there?”

  “Yes, you know that really annoying skinny guy Niles from Five Points?”

  “Yes, I know him.”

  “He’s dead in the trunk of my car. He attacked me first, and I meant to hit him with the stun dart, but I was a bit distracted and tagged him with a poison dart instead.”

  For a few seconds, Fagan breathed and said nothing. After a long silence, the grumbly old woman said, “Shit.”

  “Yep, that’s exactly what I was thinking. How did we get here? Who messed this up?”

  “I don’t know,” Fagan said. “And, it doesn’t really matter, does it? However it happened, the end result is the same.”

  “I’m hosed. That’s the end result you were referring to, right?”

  “Yes, you are more or less hosed. What do you want to do?”

  Ember sucked in a breath. “Well, I know people in San Francisco, New York, London, Madrid, Cape Town. I could be on a plane in two hours. I want to run, but I know that’s just the panic talking.”

  “It wouldn’t do you any good. You know that.”

  Movement to her left made Ember remember where she was. She closed the trunk, but then realized it was only a trio of deer, wandering along the hillside, toward a creek. She hadn’t realized the animals loitered this much at night.

  “No, I know I can’t run. This was self-defense. He was going to kill me and steal my contract. I did what I had to do, even if it wasn’t the way I meant to do it.”

  “I don’t know if the Review Board will see it that way.”

  Ember sighed. “I know that, too. But this isn’t my fault.”

  “I’ll make some phone ca
lls. The Board will want to see you, probably first thing in the morning. Go home and get a few hours of sleep, if you can. No way to know what’s going to happen when you stand before them. Consistency isn’t one of the Review Board’s strong suits, but I don’t need to tell you that.”

  “True.”

  “By the way, did you complete the contract?”

  “Hell yeah, I did. I’m not going to let a prick like Niles Thisdell stop me from doing my job.”

  Fagan gave a morbid chuckle. “That’s my girl. I’ll call you when I know more.”

  The call ended, and Ember looked at her phone's darkened screen. She sucked in a breath of cold mountain air and let it eke from her lips a little at a time. Hell was about to rain down on her.

  Chapter Four

  EMBER

  Day Two

  The young assassin opened the door to the hallway. Head held high, she strode down the hall, and the heels of her shoes clacked against the wood floor and echoed around the walls and ceiling. She tried to look confident, even if her stomach roiled with bile she thought might eject as projectile vomit at any second now. She wasn’t sure if skipping breakfast had been a good idea or not.

  She rounded the corner and turned down another, shorter hallway. She nearly bumped into an older man standing with his arms crossed. He stood a head taller than her. He also had a near-perfect physique, and not just for his age. She’d pegged him at somewhere in his mid-fifties, but she’d never had the guts to ask.

  “Charles,” she said, nearly gasping. “You scared the crap out of me.”

  Charles smiled, but Ember could see that it didn’t reach his eyes. The smile quickly dissolved into a look of concern. “Sorry about that,” he said. “I was only trying to make sure I found you.”

  She sighed. “Yeah. I’m here. About to get my ass handed to me by the Board.”

  “I heard,” he said. “Everyone’s heard. Everyone in Boulder Branch, maybe even everyone in the whole DAC. I just wanted you to know that I’m here for you. Most of us are.”