Back in Victor’s hotel room, he connected to the VoIP call. His employer said, ‘I’ve got some more work for you.’
‘Gabir Yamout.’
‘But there’s a complication.’
‘Isn’t there always?’
‘Yamout is hittable for one night only, two days from now. I know this is the second time I’ve asked you to do a rush job, but I can’t help that. Time is of the essence here.’
‘Of course it is,’ Victor said. ‘You’re asking me to kill a major arms dealer with less than sixty hours’ lead time.’
‘I said I can’t help that. It’ll be different next time.’
‘Like the Farkas contract?’
‘Yeah,’ the voice agreed.
‘Like the Farkas contract that I had to rush because the rushed Bucharest job cut into my preparations?’
The voice didn’t answer.
‘This will be the third time in three contracts I’ve had to operate with a limited time frame,’ Victor said. ‘Three for three is not a reassuring pattern.’
‘I never claimed the work I needed doing was going to be easy. If it was, I wouldn’t need you now, would I?’
This time Victor remained silent.
‘As you can see from the dossier, Yamout is a pretty big fish,’ the voice said, moving on. ‘He’s the business partner of Baraa Ariff and together they run an extensive organisation that ferries mainly small arms from source to smaller, localised buyers. Who in turn sell them on to the end users. Their client list is huge and predominantly based in the Middle East and Africa, and over three decades of trafficking we believe they’ve shipped close to a billion dollars’ worth of guns to warlords, militias and terrorists.’
‘They sound like a delightful pair.’
‘Don’t they just? So stubbing Yamout out under our heel is going to make the world a far nicer place. You should feel good about that.’
‘I’m overjoyed.’
‘You sound it.’ His employer paused. ‘Yamout is going to be in Minsk to meet a Belarusian gangster by the name of Danil Petrenko. Petrenko is a typical Eastern European crime boss, but he’s happened upon a few crates of AKs he wants to unload. They’re meeting at the Hotel Europe, where Petrenko has a suite booked for the occasion. We don’t know how Yamout is getting to Minsk, or when he’s leaving again afterwards, but according to my intel Yamout isn’t likely to stay too long, either at the hotel or in Minsk, so you’ll have to hit him as soon as the first chance presents itself.’
‘Which means the hotel will be the only viable strike point.’
‘I guess. But you know more about it than me, so I’ll defer to your judgement.’
Victor said, ‘I hope you understand how that will complicate matters.’
‘How so?’
‘Yamout is a career arms trafficker, a man who has survived and thrived in a ruthless, dangerous profession; a man smart enough to keep his face away from a camera for the last decade. He won’t be meeting a foreign gangster on his own turf without substantial backup. And Petrenko won’t be meeting a foreign arms dealer in his city without a show of strength. That’s potentially a lot of guns pointing my way.’
‘Are you saying you’re scared?’
‘I’m saying that without proper time for planning and surveillance I’m going to have to do this strong. I won’t be able to stealth it.’
‘Kill him in an elevator with an axe for all I care.’
‘The chances of this going loud are extremely high.’
‘I can live with that.’
‘And a hotel is a very public space.’
‘I’m sure you’ll do everything in your power to keep civilians out of any crossfire.’
‘Fine,’ Victor said. ‘I’m going to need some guns, and I’m going to need to pick them up in Minsk no later than tomorrow afternoon.’
‘I can do that,’ the voice said. ‘What kind of guns are we talking about?’
‘A lot of them.’
After finishing the call, Victor slept, setting the alarm in his head to wake him at eight p.m. He exercised and bathed, thinking about the upcoming Yamout contract the whole time, wondering what he hadn’t been told, and whether that lack of information would get him killed. Accepting the position of an expendable asset came as part of an assassin’s job description, but that didn’t mean Victor had to like it.
Another arms dealer. A telling fact, and one his employer hadn’t elaborated on. Like his current target, his previous had been part of that industry, and though his first kill had been a contract killer, he had died to save the life of yet another trafficker, Vladimir Kasakov. Three members of the arms trade in three contracts. Two to die; one to live. For what goal?
Victor pushed the speculation from his mind. It wasn’t his place to know. He was just a triggerman. For years he had done everything in his power to not understand why the men he killed needed to die. But it was different this time. This time he wanted to know. He wanted to understand. He told himself it was for protection, because ignorance had almost cost him his life the previous year.
That justification didn’t sit right, however. There was more to it than that, whatever it may be. The distrust he had for his employer was palpable. He knew any job could be a set-up in the making, or this theme of rushed contracts could result in him walking into a situation he couldn’t walk back out of. If he had been working for some private client he wouldn’t go through with the latest job. He would cease communication and never contact them again. But resigning wasn’t an option. Private clients didn’t have the power to give him up to police forces and intelligence agencies the world over, or have access to satellite imagining, facial-recognition software, or the ability to call on thousands of spies and assets.
And when it was finally over, would his employer honour their arrangement? Would Victor be allowed to walk away from the CIA’s employ when he’d completed the last kill? Maybe the final job would come with a severance package of the two-in-the-head variety. But he had no choice but to see it through. If he ran, they would chase him, and they knew enough about him to succeed where others had previously failed.
Victor sighed. He wasn’t in a position to walk away from his CIA employer, but it was time to start thinking about the steps he would need to implement if he was to do so and remain breathing. A new identity was the first and most important thing. A clean identity, one he hadn’t used before. He didn’t know how many of his old aliases had been compromised. He couldn’t procure that now, however. But he would as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
He sat forward and typed another address into the browser window, bringing up a different email account he kept active as part of plying his trade. Among the hundreds of emails offering him cheap erectile dysfunction medication, the chance to make a fortune by simply handing over all his personal information to a friendly gentleman from Nigeria, and pills to increase the size of his penis, there was one of interest. He opened it up. It was a short message addressed to my friend, from a man named Alonso saying what a great time he’d had in Hong Kong but that he’d spent a lot of money there. He was on his way to Europe, only wasn’t staying long. The email ended with, how are you?
Victor considered. The Hong Kong contract with its high purse and the European one that needed to be done fast would have come to him for first refusal, but if he didn’t respond they would go to someone else. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of men around the world just like him. Victor had encountered enough of them to know he was far from unique, but that he had survived those encounters told him he was towards the top of the bell curve in his rarefied profession.
A month ago, he would have deleted the message without responding as per the terms of his employment. In light of the latest conversation with his control, things had changed. He needed to keep his options open. Victor composed a reply to Alonso, writing that it was good to have heard from him and that he would like to know more about his travels. He sent the message.