Primary Target: Six Assassins: Book 1

by Heskett, Jim

  “Housekeeping,” the muffled voice said from the other side.

  “Not right now,” Xavier said as he inserted a wad of Skoal tobacco into his mouth. Another guilty pleasure.

  After a slight pause, another knock. “Housekeeping.”

  Xavier stood and drew a six-inch blade from the sheath on his hip. “I’m busy,” he said, his gravelly voice strained to speak louder.

  “When shall we come back, sir?”

  "Later. I don't care when. Just not right now, dammit."

  Another pause. Xavier raised the knife and took a step toward the door. The last thing he wanted this morning was to kill a civilian for such a silly reason as barging in on his work. But, if it had to be done, it had to be done. Xavier was okay with making a tough decision in the field and then working to justify it later.

  Next came the sound of something shuffling on the carpet, moving on to the next door. Another knock, and a warning about housekeeping, more quiet this time. They’d left, thankfully.

  He waited for a few seconds, holding his knife, standing in place. If it had been a trick, he would expect the attack to come now. To set him on edge with the knock, then to give him a false sense of security by making him think the event had ended.

  But, ten seconds later, no attack had come. Maybe it actually was just the facilities crew knocking on his door. Xavier put the knife back into its sheath and picked up the rifle. He carried it across the room and set it next to the window, then moved the chair back into position. While he would like to spend all day staring at the rifle, it was time to get to work.

  He had to compensate for the overhead sun, so he adjusted the curtains on either side to block out most of the glare. Next, he did some mental math to work out the distance to his target. Usually, with the subsonic ammo, he had to make careful calculations with the wind and keep the distance to a reasonable limit. The ammunition, sized exactly like standard rounds, worked by being slightly heavier, so the rounds would fly just under the speed of sound, preventing the telltale crack of a gunshot. For that reason, they didn't have quite the distance of the lighter, faster rounds. Today, however, he didn't need to worry about it so much. His target was only on the other side of the parking lot.

  Today's main issue wasn't wind speed, distance, or angle. Today's problem was that he would be shooting through glass, and possibly a screen as well. A single sheet of metal screen was no match for any projectile, but after hitting even a thin pane of glass, the impact angle could change the round's trajectory enough to throw off the whole shot.

  It was likely he’d need to shoot twice or three times for that reason.

  Xavier moved the trashcan closer to the window so he could spit tobacco juice into it. A few seconds of rolling his neck around his shoulders and deep breaths loosened him up. Above all, he had to breathe. He'd been trained well and put in hundreds of hours of shooting practice, and he still found it amazing how much of a difference simple, focused breathing made to the outcome.

  He extended the bipod supports and set them on the windowsill, then he placed the stock against his shoulder. He took the caps off the scope and peered through to the next building over from his hotel.

  Directly into the second-floor window of Ember Clarke’s condo.

  Chapter Nine

  EMBER

  Ember climbed the stairs to her condo in Boulder. Just off Highway 36, a short walk to campus, next to the Millennium Hotel. Condo life wasn't her favorite thing in the world, but she preferred it to house living: having to take care of a yard and house siding and painting and all that stuff. Ownership of a lawnmower seemed like something that would fully signify her transition into adulthood. Barely into her thirties, she wasn't quite ready to make that leap. Maybe in the next couple of years, she might browse the lawnmowers at Home Depot, to see how she would feel about them. Check prices and that sort of stuff, maybe even get into a heated debate about lawnmower brands with one of the gray-haired employees. But buying one? Not yet.

  Plus, it was great to have some amenities. She didn’t spend a lot of time at home, but there was a condominium pool and hot tub out back, and she’d spent a few evenings soaking new bruises in the 103-degree spa.

  But living in a corner apartment with a neighbor on the other side of the walls, she did have to deal with noise from time to time. Given her chosen profession, it would be easy for her to eliminate those problems, but she wasn’t one to seek those sorts of answers to minor problems. And Ember had always remained adamant that she would only kill people who deserved it. Playing music at full-blast and arguing loudly didn’t quite qualify as something worth killing over. Almost, but not quite.

  She waved to the hot guy with the massive biceps and the tattoo sleeves who lived four doors down from her. The brawny man often followed an adorable little blonde girl with good cheekbones. Father and daughter, both of them in the upper crust of America’s most beautiful people.

  He waved back and flashed a smile. A few lines appeared on his forehead and cheeks when he did, and Ember had always guessed his age to be around forty. Right in her wheelhouse. She didn’t go for younger men or even men her own age. A little bit of gray in the hair and a touch of crow’s feet around the eyes got her engine running for some reason she hadn’t yet puzzled out.

  She didn’t know his name, but they’d been neighbors for a solid year or more now. She wasn’t the kind to go to the condo mixers at the office or to hang out for hours by the pool during the summer months. Her pale skin wouldn't tolerate such sunny leisure. They had exchanged pleasantries a couple of times, though. Once, he’d moved a weight bench into his apartment, shirtless and sweaty, and he’d gotten a good laugh when he’d caught her staring.

  “No kid today?” Ember now asked him.

  The hot guy shook his head. “She’s with her mother in Broomfield this week.”

  “There are worse things than spending a week in Broomfield. Not many, but I’m sure I could think of some if I really tried.”

  The hot guy chuckled. “Days are getting pretty short. Going to snow soon. I can smell it in the air.”

  “I didn’t know you were old enough to smell the weather.”

  He shook his head. “I feel like I am sometimes, but it’s the skiing I’m thinking about. When I can, anyway. It’s hard to get up to the mountains with my schedule.”

  “Braving I-70 on the weekends is not for everyone. And, by that, I mean it’s not for me.”

  “Not into waking up at four to strap skis or a board on top of your car?”

  “Four in the morning? As in a.m.? I feel pretty proud of myself when I get up before six.”

  He shrugged. “When you’re a dad, bedtime at 9:30 becomes par for the course.”

  “We’ll see, if I ever become a dad,” she said.

  He gave her a smile and nod as he opened his front door and disappeared inside. Ember let out a slow sigh. She realized she’d probably never get a chance to learn his name, let alone go over to his place to borrow a cup of sugar. A year squandered, and now she’d probably end up dead before anything romantic could happen there. No ski trips and late-night hot tub sessions for the two of them.

  Inside her two-bedroom condo, she stood in the living room and took stock. The nature of her work made her paranoid, in a good way. In a safe way. Coming home, she always did an inventory of where she had left things. She was careful to place certain objects out on tables and note their position. If someone had broken in, she would know if the angle of a ceramic bird or a carefully placed pen had shifted. She even measured the space between the door and the frame after leaving it cracked — a surefire way to tell if someone had been snooping around. After checking all the usual markers she left out for disturbance, she let her shoulders relax when she couldn't find anything out of the ordinary.

  Hands on her hips in the middle of the living room, she made a few rotations to examine the contents. She had always preferred the spartan existence. Couch, coffee table, couple chairs at the small di
ning set, modest television. She had a couple of framed black and white Ansel Adams landscapes, which she knew was tacky and basic, but it was better than having nothing on the walls. Ember had always intended to go out and purchase proper art, but it had never been high on the priority list. Most of the home improvement list had been left undone. Despite describing herself as a “homebody,” she wasn’t actually home often.

  “If I was never gonna come back here, what would I take?”

  The condo did not answer back, but she already knew the answer. Not much. Probably only the photo album, a relic of the past containing actual printed pictures trapped under cellophane holders on individual pages. That's the only place she would find pictures of her little brother, since he'd been dead almost ten years. A casualty of mistaken identity during a drive-by shooting in Southern California.

  Still, she wandered around the condo, picking up a few items here and there. Her Microtech Halo V knife, the no-longer-available-for-purchase Rotorua Mud Scrub she guarded like the Hope Diamond, her vibrator, all the spare boxes of ammo for her Enforcers, and the single Blu-Ray in her collection: a copy of Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion.

  She tried not to think about the depressing fact that all of her prized possessions in the world could fit into the main compartment of her Osprey backpack with space left over. Living with so few possessions usually gave her a sense of pride; now, it was sad. Even choosing to keep the photo album took her a minute to ponder, because if any of these six assassins took her out and a civilian found the backpack near her, there was way too much personally identifying information in it. That was much more discomforting than the idea of someone finding her vibrator near her dead body.

  But she couldn’t leave it behind, either. It’s not as if she would toss it into a fireplace and watch it burn. Maybe that was the smart move, but she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.

  She picked up the photo album and turned it over in her hands. As she opened it to scan through the pictures trapped on those stiff pages, the window across from her cracked. A single hole appeared.

  She dove to the floor; the photo album went flying out of her hands.

  That had been a bullet. No doubt about it.

  The hunt had begun.

  She hadn’t heard anything aside from the sound of the cracking window, but she knew immediately what had happened.

  Sniper rifle.

  She crawled around the couch, then peered up at the window and the tiny hole.

  Something suppressed; subsonic ammunition, barely audible.

  Before she lost the opportunity, she reached for a black sweater that she had folded and laid on the arm of the sofa. She crawled closer to the window, then tossed the sweater straight up.

  There was another crack like the sound of snapping fingers, and the sweater fell forward with a gentle nudge from the second round.

  Here we go.

  Chapter Ten

  EMBER

  After the initial two shots of sniper fire, ten full seconds passed before anything else happened. She waited beneath the window, breathing and thinking. The shooter was obviously the assassin who had taken the contract to kill her, which meant they were trained. A sniper rifle wasn’t an afterthought for them; they’d used one before.

  She knew then that they were probably finished. This wasn’t a movie, and they weren’t firing a machine gun into her room. One shot missed, the second had fooled them — or they thought they’d actually gotten her.

  Either way, the assailant wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for Ember to stand up. They would know better. Ember didn’t know for sure what kind of rifle or ammunition her assailant was using, but it was something small and quiet enough that the blasts had been only as loud as a hand clap. Plus, the bullet impacts had not blown out the window. Only small holes with tendrils of cracks spread out from them.

  She studied the holes on the wall and thought about her next-door neighbor. On the other side of that wall was Ember's bedroom, so it's not likely they could have punctured all the way through that room and into the next apartment.

  As soon as she’d caught her breath and made a plan, Ember scooted on her hands and knees over to the kitchen, where she kept a bulletproof vest in the drawer underneath her oven. Along the way, she kept checking the window for any sign of the shooter. But by now, the sun had risen high enough that a massive glare from the mirrored windows of the Millennium Hotel next door prevented her from seeing anything outside.

  Ember yanked open the drawer and then draped the vest over herself like a blanket. She figured she was low enough to the ground that she was out of sight, but better to be safe.

  Next up was a way to defend herself. Her Enforcers were sitting in her purse, on the end table next to the front door. She shimmied back across the carpeted floor toward it. If she reached up to grab her purse, she would put herself in the sniper’s line of sight. So she grabbed a leg of the end table and gave it a shake until her purse toppled over. Out came lipstick, tissues, laser pointer, tampons, gum, her wallet, and a flood of paper receipts. Finally, her two pistols. She grabbed them both with one hand and scooted over toward the window.

  There hadn't been a shot in at least a minute, but she wasn't going to take any careless chances. Ember moved to the left of the window and then pushed herself up the wall. She properly donned the vest and then took a pistol in each hand. Unfortunately, the noise suppressors were in her car. One pull of these triggers and the whole condo complex would know what was going on in here. She knew from a neighbor calling the cops about something six months before that they had an approximate four-minute response time.

  So she stood with her back against the wall and waited. Another minute passed with no shots fired. Pushing out a few quick breaths to clear her head, Ember leaned out in front of the window and raised her pistols. Nothing there.

  That meant the attacker was now on their way here, to check on their kill, or they’d fled the scene, looking to come back later.

  The shots had clearly come from the Millennium Hotel across the street. Somewhere up high. But, after squinting through the glare, she could see no open windows and no one in any closed window looking in her direction.

  She pulled the drapes shut over the windows and moved a chair into the middle of her living room. If the shooter came over from the hotel room and looked in, she didn’t want them to be able to get an easy, clear shot. She sat not directly in front of her front door, but at a slight angle. Enforcers up, arms locked, Ember sat in the chair and pointed the guns at the front door. She closed her eyes and listened. If someone came barreling up the stairs outside, she would certainly feel the vibration in the walkway out there. But she might hear someone doing it quietly, too.

  A full minute passed. She opened her eyes. Nothing happened. Staying here was already shrinking a rapidly-closing window, so she had to go.

  Ember threw on her coat, keeping her arms retracted inside the sleeves so she could hold onto her Enforcers without them being seen. She opened the front doorknob with her knee, pulled the door back with an ankle, and jumped out onto the walkway. Nothing. No one there. Hot tattooed guy was not there. No one on the stairs. Same cars in the parking lot.

  An idea occurred to her as she returned inside and put away the coat and the guns. Ember ran into the kitchen and opened her junk drawer. There she found Scotch tape and a length of red yarn leftover from a drunken evening a few weeks ago when she'd decided to get into knitting for some reason and had bought a bunch of supplies online at two o'clock in the morning. The next day, she'd forgotten all about it. When the yarn had arrived, and she'd been confused, she had investigated if it were possible to put a breathalyzer on her credit card after midnight.

  She went back to the living room and taped one end of the yarn to one of the bullet holes in the window, and then walked the yarn over to the holes in the wall. She had to make an educated guess about exactly which hole lined up with the corresponding one in the window, but she was pret
ty sure the round that had shot the sweater had landed lower on the wall than the first shot. She taped down the yarn.

  She did the same thing with a second strand of yarn and more tape, tracing the line of the second gunshot hole, giving her two threads to follow.

  Next, she retrieved the laser pointer from the floor next to the front door and lined up the beam with the taut yarn. The red dot appeared on the fourth floor of the hotel, to the second room from the west end.

  She repeated the process for the second strand, finding that it pointed to exactly the same spot.

  Ember shoved her pistols into her waistband and left the condo.

  Chapter Eleven

  EMBER

  Ember studied the framed fire escape room layout picture in the hotel lobby. She had a reasonable certainty the shot had come from room 416. Hands in her pockets, she took several deep breaths to calm herself. Ember was used to people shooting at her. It happened once or twice a month. But it never failed to get her heart pumping and her senses heightened. She figured it was probably a good thing. If being shot at didn’t put her on edge, that would be a concern.

  She had been to a Club lecture about adrenaline and other chemicals that flared up when the mind felt as though it were under attack. Having dopamine around helped control fear, anxiety, restlessness. Having too much of it caused schizophrenia and panic. In her training and continuing education, Ember tried to focus on what chemicals were responsible for her current emotional state, and whether or not she could will herself to control them.

  She approached the front desk. A young man stood behind it in his buttoned-up vest, with hair that looked as if it had been swept across his forehead by a tornado. He had enough acne on his face that placed him under the age of twenty-five, but also a world-weary look that put him past high school.