A Game For Assassins

Chapter One-2

“The package?”

“Under my seat. It's the best I could do at short notice, but I think it will suffice.”

Gorilla reached under the driver's seat and withdrew a small satchel. Inside, covered by a square of muslin, lay his work tool for the day – a Beretta M1951, complete with a bulbous noise suppressor. Old but reliable – not his preferred weapon – but given the limited resources available, it was certainly acceptable.

He quickly tested the spring in the magazine, checked the action of the weapon, attached the sound suppressor, smacked home the magazine and let the slide roll forward. A quick chamber check, to ensure the bullet was seated properly and then he flicked the safety on.

His only other piece of equipment was a bouquet of carnations. To the casual observer, he would look like a man on the way to meet his lover or mistress, but the bouquet would hide the silenced Beretta in a sleeve nestling against the flowers. Gorilla concealed the weapon inside the bouquet and cradled it in the crook of his left arm.

The target was a Lebanese-born contract agent by the name of Abu Qassam, who had been playing both ends against the middle in French North Africa, operating for the British but betraying their operations to the FLN, the French National Liberation army.

Things had come to a head when it was discovered that he had personally taken part in the t*****e and murder of a key British intelligence asset in the region. Realizing that he'd gone the length of the rope, he'd fled to his native Beirut where, mistakenly, he had assumed he could hide and would, years later, be safe.

The British could forgive him his betrayal, to a degree. But the murder of one of their own – never! They had set about planning retribution. A tracking team was assembled; favors were called in throughout the intelligence community, sources were cajoled and leaned upon…until they had his new name. Then they had an address. Then they had a time and date. And it was at that point that the small man in the lightweight summer suit, Gorilla, was summoned.

His unit's expertise was dealing with enemy agents, traitors, extremists – and this was his fledgling operation for them. A 'hit' they said, a quick in, quick out. Do this right and there'll be a step up the ladder, maybe even permanent secondment. In truth, Gorilla knew very little about the background of the case, the bare minimum, and to be frank – that was way too much anyway. For this kind of operation, the only information he required was a time, a location, and a description; anything more was showing off on behalf of the case officer running the show, in his opinion. His only priority was to get the job done and get out with a clean pair of heels.

“I will wait here,” said the Squire. “I can give you at most five minutes, after that you will be on your own.”

Gorilla nodded. “Five minutes is more than enough time; I'm not planning on having a chat with him. Keep the engine running.”

A quick scan of movement on the street and he exited the car, nonchalantly clutching his lethal gift.

He had killed men before during his time in the military, some in situations not dissimilar to this one, but never in such a coldly targeted, ruthless way. He knew he was more than capable of the task the colonel had given him; why else would he have been chosen? Gorilla had a special collection of skills that made him useful for jobs like this. He knew it, the colonel knew it and the hierarchy at Broadway knew it.

He glided along the street, scanning from behind the dark glasses for people taking an interest in him, but again nothing. He moved like a spectre. That was one of Gorilla's talents, the almost intuitive skill to become 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 b****y 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 into its component parts – suppressor, magazine, and slide. Picking up the spent casings from the shots he'd fired, he placed them all into his inside jacket pockets before leaving the office. His presence raised not even a glance as he exited the office and made his way onto Hamra Street, heading back to the Squire's taxi. Moments later, Gorilla opened the rear passenger door and dropped down into the seat.

“Okay. Off we go. But take it easy, no gunning the engine or high speed,” he said to the driver.

The Squire nodded and began to move the car out into the busy traffic. “Was everything okay my friend? Any problems?”

Gorilla placed the pieces of the Beretta into the satchel before tucking it back under the Squire's seat. “Everything was fine. The less you know about it the better.”

“I understand. You will tell your organization that I performed well. That I was of use?”

Gorilla nodded. This Squire had performed exactly as he'd requested. Good driver, adequate weapon choice, no flapping. “Of course. My people will no doubt reward you well. You were very good.”

“Inshallah. Thank you, and where to now, my friend?”

“The airport. I have a flight to catch.”

By the time the body of the target had been discovered, Gorilla would be winging his way to Paris before travelling home to London. A circuitous route for sure, but it would at least keep the trail he left down to a minimum.

He settled back and watched the sun cast the Corniche and the mountains in the distance in a yellow haze. Glancing down, he noticed a single speck of blood on the lapel of his jacket. It was a testament, and in fact the only proof, of his first Redaction.

* * *

Warsaw, Poland – October 1962

The long watch of Tomasz Bajek began on a bright Saturday afternoon and had started some three hours earlier when he had taken over the surveillance shift.

The operation, bizarrely enough, was in Warsaw Zoo, which to Bajek seemed a strange place for a group of fully grown men to be trying to blend in unnoticed on a warm weekend. But he supposed that foreign agents did not have the luxury of working only on weekdays.

The zoo had been rebuilt in 1949 following the bombings of the Second World War, and was now one of the main attractions of the new Poland. He had already completed three rounds of his sector of the zoo and was now sitting down, rocking the pram that he'd been pushing for the past few hours. To the casual observer, he no doubt looked like a devoted new father who had been ushered out of the house by his frantic wife on the weekend, to spend some time with his progeny. The zoo was a relatively inexpensive day out.

However, all was not as it seemed. Bajek was not a new father, and the pram held nothing more than a toy doll, wrapped up in multiple layers of blankets and bonnets on the off-chance that an overzealous member of the public should desire to see the baby. All that was visible were two bright blue eyes peeking out. He could think of nothing worse than wandering around a zoo for hours on end. He had never visited the zoo before, he hated b****y zoos, and after this job was finished he would never want to visit it again.

In reality, Tomasz Bajek was a young, junior officer in Poland's internal security service. He had been working in the counterespionage department for the past four years, helping to catch spies and traitors.

Normally he was tied to a desk, but today, due to a shortage of staff, he had been seconded to one of the roving surveillance teams. A break from the drab head office was always a pleasure.

He was the sixth operative in an eight-man team, which ranked him somewhere above a headquarters cleaner, but below the filing clerks. Each of the team had their own designated areas inside the zoo's grounds. Two surveillance vehicles were also part of the operation - one was disguised as a refuse collection truck, circling the perimeter, whilst the other was that workhorse of security services; a repair wagon, complete with a suitably slothful workman who'd taken many hours to do not very much at all.