Silencer Read Free

assassination by a government-sponsored gringo and the grandson of a couple of Mexican wetbacks.

5
    We’d pinged the target two days ago outside the grocery store in Jaco, loading bottled water and provisions into the back of the pick-up. And once I found the shack I knew why. He wasn’t in Costa Rica alone. I recognized them all – the three small children, two girls and a boy, and the much younger wife – from the Vauxhall photos. She had shoulder-length jet-black hair, high cheekbones and dark-brown eyes, the classic South American beauty queen. I reckoned Jesús would die a happy man.
    If you take the knock-on-the-door option, there’s a decision to be made: do you wait until it’s fully open so you can ID the target before firing? That’s high risk. You’ll be in the killing area longer than is healthy, and whoever answers the door may take the trouble to check who’s delivering the good news.
    So why not start blasting as soon as you hear someone approaching, then barge inside to check who you’ve hit? I didn’t want any of that. The Wolf was a player; he practically invented the game. But drop the family as well? That was the Wolf’s favourite trick, not mine.
    Another option had been to wait until he went back into town for food and water. But drop him on the move or close up and in an urban environment? There’s always a third party with eyes-on. At least we had a concealed fire position in the jungle, a clear arc of fire, and the capacity to exfiltrate unnoticed.
    I’d opted for a distance shoot and picked up the Mauser froman embassy-sponsored dead letterbox. The weapon was used by hundreds of thousands of hunters around the world. The German Army still used them for ceremonial duties. Best of all, it wasn’t only quick for the spooks to acquire covertly when the Wolf was in-country, it was untraceable. And that’s harder to manage than you might think.

6
    ‘Still four hundred and forty-seven metres, is it, Dino? It hasn’t been scared off by that fucking haircut of yours and legged it down the valley?’
    Dino turned to me and grinned. Flecks of the Spam he’d been munching speckled his teeth and its unmistakable aroma wafted towards me.
    We were on hard routine. On the way in and all the time we were in the fire position, there was no cooking, no flames, no smoking – not that either of us did. Even our shit travelled with us in plastic bags. If the target didn’t show because we’d fucked up and missed him, or if for any reason I couldn’t take the shot, we might have to come back again. Nothing could be left to give away our presence, even after he’d been dropped.
    Which was a pity, because right now I was quite tempted to stake Dino out on the ground and leave him to the insects that still hadn’t finished with me.
    ‘Mate, do you always dye your hair?’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The chicks love it, hombre .’
    ‘Platinum blond? They obviously can’t see that what’s inside your nut is dark brown.’
    He looked puzzled for a moment. Then his face collapsed into an enormous grin. His chin headed east and his nose headed west.
    He’d been in a lot of fights, he said, and most of them were over women. He loved them all: any shape, age or vocabulary. His basic philosophy was that everything in life boils down to getting laid. And why not? He was in his late twenties with a cock instead of a brain: how else was he to think? Certainly not about this job. He didn’t seem to give a fuck if it was a success. He was wasting time here in the jungle, without an eligible woman in sight. ‘You take the shot, hombre . Then we bug out to Miami, right, and I show you some things.’
    I knew what was going through his head as he got busy with the range finder again, and it had nothing to do with the target.
    ‘Not Toronto?’
    He’d met a couple of Canadian tour-company reps in one of the Gulf-coast bars a couple of months back, taken them both to dinner, then back to his king-size