gilesdereis
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It had clearly been a case of suicide. Really, who could steal a bunch of money from a company which is so obviously a front operation for the Korean CIA (they actually call it that) and NOT think that they are going to die in the process? The vic was clearly suicidal. I just assisted.
The Koreans, for whom I have great respect, are not averse to doing their own dirty work, and, in an earlier era, this guy would have been a hit-and-run case, or had a nasty fall of, say 20 or 30 stories. But times pass, and given the guilty party was both a US citizen, and also related to at least one well known politician, the Koreans contracted the job to me. Or, from their standpoint, contracted with my agent, who was all rattled by the whole thing. He suggested we talk. I was happy with the indirect and impersonal communication arrangement that we had set up. So, in the end, we didn't talk.
But the job itself was pretty straightforward. The first thing was to implicate him in a scandal, which had nothing to do with the six million Dollars that he stole, and, as he had a gambling problem of massive dimension, this was pretty easy. Using the Korean's news network, I made sure that there was a lot of press attention to his being accused of running an illegal gambling operation.
It seems that his marriage was on the rocks, anyway, because as soon as the press siege started, the wife moved out with the children. So he was all alone in the big house with its big mortgage, when I came for an unannounced visit. That made things easier.
Earlier I had come by when no one was home, and found where his gun (a rather nice SIG Sauer) was kept. On my second visit, about 2 in the morning, I zapped the vic with a Taser to keep his still, put the gun in his hand (fingerprints and powder marks) placed the barrel under his chin, and ducked to keep out of the way of flying brain matter.
The Koreans, being a government agency, are stingy about fees, but prompt about paying. There may be some value in their goodwill, although I would never consider calling in a favor from people like the KCIA, Mossad, SDEC or the like., any more than I would from the Mafia or its Russian namesake. You would always end up owing those sorts of people. Let them owe you, if possible.
After the job I took a short break at an expensive resort in the Bahamas. The diving was good, but the other guests were pretty uninteresting. The Korean fee paid for it. The fee was that small.
I had barely gotten home when I got another proposal from my agent. This one, he said, somewhat defensively I thought, would have a large paycheck attached to it. It was in a nearby country that I knew well and liked. Good food, good wine, culture, museums, ruins, attractive people in some areas.
From one standpoint, the target was not a surprise. They had been in the press, and I assumed that someone like this could be a prime candidates for «*an accident.*»
What was surprising was that the client specifically said that they did not want an accident, or «*natural causes.*» They wanted a straightforward hit. In fact, they seemed to want it to be messy.
Some background is required*: the head of government in the country in question has led a private life of the most public sort. A very Rich Man, he has acted – so far correctly – as if the rules don't apply to him. But he had gotten tripped up in a relationship with a woman for whom he seemed to have passed from any «*grey*» area of the law to outright criminal behavior. When something happened between the Rich Man and The Lady in Question, she suddenly got a sense of Public Duty and was prepared to shop Rich Man. His (many) enemies were going to use this woman to drive the Rich Man right out of politics and into prison, if possible.
Now someone was casting around for a «*problem solver*» to take out said woman. My first reaction was that this was a bad tactic by the Rich Man or his allies, since a murder would probably make matters worse for him. On the other hand, maybe this loose and loose lipped lady had some really ugly dirt, which had not yet made it to the press.
On reflection, a second thought occurred to me, which made this contract more reasonable. It wasn't the Rich Man, it was one or more of his countless enemies who were trying to hire me. Among other things, it was widely suspected that the Rich Man had links to the extensive gangster universe in his country. Which would also explain why they would be looking for an outsider. Local boys might be too close to Rich. And a messy hit would seem like the local neanderthals at work. Everyone would blame the Rich Man.
But, enough speculation. I told my agent to ask for a truly excessive fee, almost hoping that they would balk and I could pass on the deal. I am not all that «*in to*» women as targets. Call me old fashioned. On the other hand, for a price, I will ignore my scruples.
My agent socked them with a Really Big Number, , and, after some haggling, the clients agreed to a slightly lower but still staggering payment for this job. The half payment arrived from a major Swiss bank a few days later.
About the same time, a vast file came to my agent, and from him to me, sent via a probably neutral, untraceable internet source, with more details about the target, her lifestyle, her contacts, her finances, and so forth than I had ever seen in any similar document. It was astonishing that the detail included the address and description of the safe house, in which the prosecutors had stashed the Talking Lady. There was a round-the-clock police presence at the safe house. But the fine grained detail of the file – which only could have come from government sources – included one amazing fact about her police protection, which was very significant.
Well, I was not flying blind here, at least.
As always, I avoided arriving at the destination directly by air, flying instead to a town 200km away and renting a car to get to the capitol city. The car had a GPS, which I disabled as soon as I was out of the rent-a-car parking. I have a good sense of direction, and a GPS leaves a trail. I also had fake plates in my luggage.
I set up in a large, comfortable, middle range hotel which had lots of American tour groups. From there I spent two days finding a furnished apartment with a garage, which I rented for a month, paying cash in advance, and settled down to work. Hotels are fine, but someone is always keeping track of your coming and goings.
Then I went for a visit to the neighborhood of the safe house where the Lady was being kept. The house was on a secondary street near the embassy area. There was not a lot of pedestrian traffic, and quite a lot of cops around, both negatives for me. I began to wonder if an ambush would be better, but when I saw the motorcade for her, when she was being taken out for an interview with the prosecutors, it was clear that an ambush, with anything less than a car bomb, was a non-starter, and I had two brushes with car bombs in my early life and don't do those things.
As hanging around the safe house would be a dead give away, I came back at night to rig up two video cameras on streetlamps, which watched the house. These transmitted live pictures, which, for seven days while the batteries lasted, I could watch in on the tiny television I had, in the car, a couple blocks away.
The woman had round the clock protection. There were three shifts of eight hours, and three cops in each shift. It took me a couple of days of watching to work out the rotation order. I was interested in one group of cops, looking for when they would have the 10PM to 6AM shift.
That came on Day 4.
Since the press had not found the safe house, after a couple of weeks, the level of security had begun to decline. No one stays sharp when there seems to be no threat. So it seemed here, too.
On The Night, I put on a priest's soutain, which in addition to being roomy for carrying things, was not uncommon in the area, since there was a seminary a few streets away. In the mirror I found myself almost Jesuitiacal.
One cop, usually the youngest, would take the first watch outside. It was a mild night, but being mid-week, the streets were quiet after 11.
The cop on duty outside was tall and slender, with a boyish face. He looked surprised when a priest came to the gate, but then returned my friendly smile. To talk to me, he opened the electric gate and looked surprised one last time, as I put the silencer against his chest and shot him twice. He slid to the ground with a grunt, still looking surprised.
The body of the dead cop tumbled down the steps to the basement entrance, where he would be out of sight from passers-by there. I went around to the back of the house.
With a guard outside connected to a radio, the second cop, the oldest one, had been unconcernedly drinking a coke in the kitchen. He had shed his uniform jacket, and his gun and holster were on the dining table. He stood up when he saw a priest walk in the back door, but I put a bullet into his head before he realized what was happening. The exit wound sprayed the refrigerator with blood, and the cop crumpled to the floor in a heap.
What I had learned from that very detailed file was that I did not have to worry about the location of the third cop.
On the second floor was the main bedroom, and the old, marble stairs gave no sound as I climbed them, so I could hear the noise behind the big oak doors. It subsided when I got to the second floor, and, after a moment, I heard a shower start.
The heavy wooden door was unlocked, and the hinges well oiled, so I slowly pushed it open. I could see a police uniform, hung neatly across a chair, as the room appeared with the opening door.
It could have been either him or her on the bed. It was him. Sun bronzed, muscular, and naked as the day he was born. The cop on the bed was in a post coital daze, so was slow to respond when I stepped into the room. He sat up sharply, and took one bullet in the center of his chest, and one through his forehead, flinging the naked body back so that he sprawled, arms outstretched, half off the large bed.
I sat down and waited. The shower stopped. And the vic walked, naked and wet, into the room.
You had to give her credit. She had an amazing body, if a rather hard face. And she had presence of mind*: she walks out of the bathroom and the first thing that she sees in the bullet riddled corpse of the man she had been screwing just minutes before. But she didn't scream.
In an almost conversational tone, she said that she understood. That she would disappear. It wasn't necessary to do more. He (whom I assume was Rich Man) would never hear of her again. She would never ask for money.
What was more, she was credible. Here you had this naked goddess, promising that all you had to do was leave her alive, and all the problems would disappear. No matter what you had thought before, it would have been easy to take her at her word.
Some people just never take any responsibility for their actions. This always pisses me off.
The first bullet caught her in the belly, doubling her forward, the second, almost directly above it, went between her two large breasts, and the third, as the force of the two slugs drove her backwards, tore into her throat, exiting into the wardrobe door that she bounced against, with her blood exploding from her gaping-with-shock mouth.
Like a nude puppet with its strings cut, the body collapsed to the floor, head lolling sideways, as the last shot had severed her spinal cord. Her already big eyes were wide with a final astonishment, and quickly rolled back in their sockets.
Before I went to check on the vic, I took a look at her last sexual partner, whose unblinking and unfocused eyes were staring at a point on the ceiling, and noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring on his dead left hand. The wages of sin, I said to him, silently.
My automatic had one round left in the chamber. For no good reason I put that into the chest of the naked, and already dead cop, draped across the big bed. The corpse jolted from the impact.
The vic was not even twitching when I checked her. A separated spinal cord pretty much ends everything all at once. Amazement that she was dead was the last human emotion on her face.
No one seemed to take notice of a priest, walking casually through the neigborhood. My car, nice and legally parked, was there, and started without problems. I was out of the area within fifteen minutes, long before any checking or unanswered calls alerted someone that there were three dead cops and one dead witness in a safe house.
The next day I took a morning coffee at the bar down the street from my short term rental, and the television news was all about the dead woman. Photos of her with the Rich Man, and official pictures of the three dead cops kept popping up. Everyone was talking about it.
That afternoon, I packed and drove back to the town where I rented the car, to return it, after having ditched the fake license plates. En route I disposed of the soutain, and disassembled the pistol I had used, leaving bits of it in different places as along my route.
By the time I returned the rental car the news for Rich Man had darkened. There was a near riot in front of the Rich Man's official office. The cops were, as always, particularly incensed that someone had killed not one, but three cops.
I flew out, the next day, seeing on the airport televisions that there were reports that the prosecutors were going to charge the Rich Man with murder. In an unrelated development, but one which fed the public interest, the fact that one of the dead cops had been found naked in the vic's bed had come out. I wondered if that guy would get the Official Cop Funeral.
Within a few more days, the Rich Man was hounded from office, and took his private jet to another country, which had weak extradition laws, all the time protesting his innocence.
The Rich Man was clearly far from at his best at the end, protesting that he had nothing to do with the murders, that he had been framed by his enemies. In fact, when I listened to him, even I didn't believe him, although I knew that what he was saying was true.
Giles
The Koreans, for whom I have great respect, are not averse to doing their own dirty work, and, in an earlier era, this guy would have been a hit-and-run case, or had a nasty fall of, say 20 or 30 stories. But times pass, and given the guilty party was both a US citizen, and also related to at least one well known politician, the Koreans contracted the job to me. Or, from their standpoint, contracted with my agent, who was all rattled by the whole thing. He suggested we talk. I was happy with the indirect and impersonal communication arrangement that we had set up. So, in the end, we didn't talk.
But the job itself was pretty straightforward. The first thing was to implicate him in a scandal, which had nothing to do with the six million Dollars that he stole, and, as he had a gambling problem of massive dimension, this was pretty easy. Using the Korean's news network, I made sure that there was a lot of press attention to his being accused of running an illegal gambling operation.
It seems that his marriage was on the rocks, anyway, because as soon as the press siege started, the wife moved out with the children. So he was all alone in the big house with its big mortgage, when I came for an unannounced visit. That made things easier.
Earlier I had come by when no one was home, and found where his gun (a rather nice SIG Sauer) was kept. On my second visit, about 2 in the morning, I zapped the vic with a Taser to keep his still, put the gun in his hand (fingerprints and powder marks) placed the barrel under his chin, and ducked to keep out of the way of flying brain matter.
The Koreans, being a government agency, are stingy about fees, but prompt about paying. There may be some value in their goodwill, although I would never consider calling in a favor from people like the KCIA, Mossad, SDEC or the like., any more than I would from the Mafia or its Russian namesake. You would always end up owing those sorts of people. Let them owe you, if possible.
After the job I took a short break at an expensive resort in the Bahamas. The diving was good, but the other guests were pretty uninteresting. The Korean fee paid for it. The fee was that small.
I had barely gotten home when I got another proposal from my agent. This one, he said, somewhat defensively I thought, would have a large paycheck attached to it. It was in a nearby country that I knew well and liked. Good food, good wine, culture, museums, ruins, attractive people in some areas.
From one standpoint, the target was not a surprise. They had been in the press, and I assumed that someone like this could be a prime candidates for «*an accident.*»
What was surprising was that the client specifically said that they did not want an accident, or «*natural causes.*» They wanted a straightforward hit. In fact, they seemed to want it to be messy.
Some background is required*: the head of government in the country in question has led a private life of the most public sort. A very Rich Man, he has acted – so far correctly – as if the rules don't apply to him. But he had gotten tripped up in a relationship with a woman for whom he seemed to have passed from any «*grey*» area of the law to outright criminal behavior. When something happened between the Rich Man and The Lady in Question, she suddenly got a sense of Public Duty and was prepared to shop Rich Man. His (many) enemies were going to use this woman to drive the Rich Man right out of politics and into prison, if possible.
Now someone was casting around for a «*problem solver*» to take out said woman. My first reaction was that this was a bad tactic by the Rich Man or his allies, since a murder would probably make matters worse for him. On the other hand, maybe this loose and loose lipped lady had some really ugly dirt, which had not yet made it to the press.
On reflection, a second thought occurred to me, which made this contract more reasonable. It wasn't the Rich Man, it was one or more of his countless enemies who were trying to hire me. Among other things, it was widely suspected that the Rich Man had links to the extensive gangster universe in his country. Which would also explain why they would be looking for an outsider. Local boys might be too close to Rich. And a messy hit would seem like the local neanderthals at work. Everyone would blame the Rich Man.
But, enough speculation. I told my agent to ask for a truly excessive fee, almost hoping that they would balk and I could pass on the deal. I am not all that «*in to*» women as targets. Call me old fashioned. On the other hand, for a price, I will ignore my scruples.
My agent socked them with a Really Big Number, , and, after some haggling, the clients agreed to a slightly lower but still staggering payment for this job. The half payment arrived from a major Swiss bank a few days later.
About the same time, a vast file came to my agent, and from him to me, sent via a probably neutral, untraceable internet source, with more details about the target, her lifestyle, her contacts, her finances, and so forth than I had ever seen in any similar document. It was astonishing that the detail included the address and description of the safe house, in which the prosecutors had stashed the Talking Lady. There was a round-the-clock police presence at the safe house. But the fine grained detail of the file – which only could have come from government sources – included one amazing fact about her police protection, which was very significant.
Well, I was not flying blind here, at least.
As always, I avoided arriving at the destination directly by air, flying instead to a town 200km away and renting a car to get to the capitol city. The car had a GPS, which I disabled as soon as I was out of the rent-a-car parking. I have a good sense of direction, and a GPS leaves a trail. I also had fake plates in my luggage.
I set up in a large, comfortable, middle range hotel which had lots of American tour groups. From there I spent two days finding a furnished apartment with a garage, which I rented for a month, paying cash in advance, and settled down to work. Hotels are fine, but someone is always keeping track of your coming and goings.
Then I went for a visit to the neighborhood of the safe house where the Lady was being kept. The house was on a secondary street near the embassy area. There was not a lot of pedestrian traffic, and quite a lot of cops around, both negatives for me. I began to wonder if an ambush would be better, but when I saw the motorcade for her, when she was being taken out for an interview with the prosecutors, it was clear that an ambush, with anything less than a car bomb, was a non-starter, and I had two brushes with car bombs in my early life and don't do those things.
As hanging around the safe house would be a dead give away, I came back at night to rig up two video cameras on streetlamps, which watched the house. These transmitted live pictures, which, for seven days while the batteries lasted, I could watch in on the tiny television I had, in the car, a couple blocks away.
The woman had round the clock protection. There were three shifts of eight hours, and three cops in each shift. It took me a couple of days of watching to work out the rotation order. I was interested in one group of cops, looking for when they would have the 10PM to 6AM shift.
That came on Day 4.
Since the press had not found the safe house, after a couple of weeks, the level of security had begun to decline. No one stays sharp when there seems to be no threat. So it seemed here, too.
On The Night, I put on a priest's soutain, which in addition to being roomy for carrying things, was not uncommon in the area, since there was a seminary a few streets away. In the mirror I found myself almost Jesuitiacal.
One cop, usually the youngest, would take the first watch outside. It was a mild night, but being mid-week, the streets were quiet after 11.
The cop on duty outside was tall and slender, with a boyish face. He looked surprised when a priest came to the gate, but then returned my friendly smile. To talk to me, he opened the electric gate and looked surprised one last time, as I put the silencer against his chest and shot him twice. He slid to the ground with a grunt, still looking surprised.
The body of the dead cop tumbled down the steps to the basement entrance, where he would be out of sight from passers-by there. I went around to the back of the house.
With a guard outside connected to a radio, the second cop, the oldest one, had been unconcernedly drinking a coke in the kitchen. He had shed his uniform jacket, and his gun and holster were on the dining table. He stood up when he saw a priest walk in the back door, but I put a bullet into his head before he realized what was happening. The exit wound sprayed the refrigerator with blood, and the cop crumpled to the floor in a heap.
What I had learned from that very detailed file was that I did not have to worry about the location of the third cop.
On the second floor was the main bedroom, and the old, marble stairs gave no sound as I climbed them, so I could hear the noise behind the big oak doors. It subsided when I got to the second floor, and, after a moment, I heard a shower start.
The heavy wooden door was unlocked, and the hinges well oiled, so I slowly pushed it open. I could see a police uniform, hung neatly across a chair, as the room appeared with the opening door.
It could have been either him or her on the bed. It was him. Sun bronzed, muscular, and naked as the day he was born. The cop on the bed was in a post coital daze, so was slow to respond when I stepped into the room. He sat up sharply, and took one bullet in the center of his chest, and one through his forehead, flinging the naked body back so that he sprawled, arms outstretched, half off the large bed.
I sat down and waited. The shower stopped. And the vic walked, naked and wet, into the room.
You had to give her credit. She had an amazing body, if a rather hard face. And she had presence of mind*: she walks out of the bathroom and the first thing that she sees in the bullet riddled corpse of the man she had been screwing just minutes before. But she didn't scream.
In an almost conversational tone, she said that she understood. That she would disappear. It wasn't necessary to do more. He (whom I assume was Rich Man) would never hear of her again. She would never ask for money.
What was more, she was credible. Here you had this naked goddess, promising that all you had to do was leave her alive, and all the problems would disappear. No matter what you had thought before, it would have been easy to take her at her word.
Some people just never take any responsibility for their actions. This always pisses me off.
The first bullet caught her in the belly, doubling her forward, the second, almost directly above it, went between her two large breasts, and the third, as the force of the two slugs drove her backwards, tore into her throat, exiting into the wardrobe door that she bounced against, with her blood exploding from her gaping-with-shock mouth.
Like a nude puppet with its strings cut, the body collapsed to the floor, head lolling sideways, as the last shot had severed her spinal cord. Her already big eyes were wide with a final astonishment, and quickly rolled back in their sockets.
Before I went to check on the vic, I took a look at her last sexual partner, whose unblinking and unfocused eyes were staring at a point on the ceiling, and noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring on his dead left hand. The wages of sin, I said to him, silently.
My automatic had one round left in the chamber. For no good reason I put that into the chest of the naked, and already dead cop, draped across the big bed. The corpse jolted from the impact.
The vic was not even twitching when I checked her. A separated spinal cord pretty much ends everything all at once. Amazement that she was dead was the last human emotion on her face.
No one seemed to take notice of a priest, walking casually through the neigborhood. My car, nice and legally parked, was there, and started without problems. I was out of the area within fifteen minutes, long before any checking or unanswered calls alerted someone that there were three dead cops and one dead witness in a safe house.
The next day I took a morning coffee at the bar down the street from my short term rental, and the television news was all about the dead woman. Photos of her with the Rich Man, and official pictures of the three dead cops kept popping up. Everyone was talking about it.
That afternoon, I packed and drove back to the town where I rented the car, to return it, after having ditched the fake license plates. En route I disposed of the soutain, and disassembled the pistol I had used, leaving bits of it in different places as along my route.
By the time I returned the rental car the news for Rich Man had darkened. There was a near riot in front of the Rich Man's official office. The cops were, as always, particularly incensed that someone had killed not one, but three cops.
I flew out, the next day, seeing on the airport televisions that there were reports that the prosecutors were going to charge the Rich Man with murder. In an unrelated development, but one which fed the public interest, the fact that one of the dead cops had been found naked in the vic's bed had come out. I wondered if that guy would get the Official Cop Funeral.
Within a few more days, the Rich Man was hounded from office, and took his private jet to another country, which had weak extradition laws, all the time protesting his innocence.
The Rich Man was clearly far from at his best at the end, protesting that he had nothing to do with the murders, that he had been framed by his enemies. In fact, when I listened to him, even I didn't believe him, although I knew that what he was saying was true.
Giles
