A Game for Assassins (The Redaction Chronicles Book 1) Read Free

unnoticeable. One of his instructors had once commented you could lose him in a crowd of two people.
    Moving into an empty side street, he saw the target location up ahead: a small doorway with a brass plaque outside stamped with 'Import/Export', accessed by a twelve step flight of stairs. He climbed the darkened hallway, counting the steps slowly in his head as he moved forward. He settled the carnations more comfortably in his right hand and walked up the last few steps to the heavy wooden door with a glass viewing window that was the office of Al Saud Import/Export Company. He turned the handle of the door with his left hand, entered and closed the door gently behind him.
    He instantly assessed the layout of the room and its contents – the shadows of the curtained room, the ornate cabinets and pictures adorning the wall, the languid figure reclining back in an office chair behind the desk. The man was smoking French Gauloises and a small glass of Arak lay half empty before him on the desk. No other people present. Good.
    The assessment took a fraction of a second.
    Then Gorilla was moving forward, seeking to dominate the room. It took three strides to reach the desk. The man began to stand, extending a hand in greeting, smiling. “Monsieur Canon, how…” he started to say, but Gorilla had reached the front of the desk and quickly, but not hurriedly, raised the bouquet with both hands to chest height. The motion was deceptively casual.
    Confusion passed over the target's face. Why was this client pushing a bouquet of flowers at his face? Was it some kind of strange French custom? As the target reached his full height, he perhaps realized, belatedly, what was happening. Gorilla touched the delicate petals to the man's forehead, gently brushing his skin, and pulled the trigger hidden within the lethal bouquet twice in rapid succession. PHUT, PHUT!
    The sound was barely noticeable, nothing louder than a vigorous cough, certainly nothing to attract anyone's attention from outside. With the first shot, the man stared at Gorilla as though he had been smacked in the forehead with a cricket bat. His head rocked backwards, and through his own momentum, started to crane forward again just in time for the second shot to hit him, inches away from the first bullet. This time, however, the bullet didn't rock the target any further, instead his legs simply gave way and he dropped like a marionette whose strings have been swiftly sliced through. He fell in a crumpled heap behind the desk, work papers and invoices scattered all over him. What had been white was now red.
    Gorilla made his way around the desk and fired two more shots from the now ragged-looking bouquet into the target's head. Just to make sure – but he knew from experience that they were not necessary. The whole operation had taken no more than fifteen seconds.
A bit slow,
thought Gorilla, who hated shoddy shooting, especially in himself. No fancy stuff, no long speeches, just BANG and the target is dropped.
    After the extreme act of violence there was silence, the only ambient sound being the tat-tat-tat of an old air fan in the corner of the room.
    Gorilla's heart started beating at a rapid pace as a surge of adrenaline hit him. He took two slow, deep breaths, closed his eyes and started moving. He quickly returned to the office door, turned the door sign to read 'Reunion en cours', pulled down the blind and locked the door. He discarded the flowers on the desk and set about searching the rest of the office, striding swiftly from room to room. He moved silently, with the suppressed Beretta leading the way like a lethal tribune. Less than a minute later he was satisfied that he was alone.
    Job done,
he thought. Now all he had to do was leave without bumping into the bloody cleaning woman, or whatever random happening was liable to throw itself into the mix on these types of operations. But his concerns proved unfounded.
    He disassembled the Beretta, breaking it down