Since I've come to realize that this project might be longer than I expected, I have decided to add a few words of presentation for every chapter to help readers find their way in it.

I'm also trying to keep writing as consistently as I can. Sometimes it won't be much, but I promise I'll get to the end of it !

At the end of this first chapter I'll keep updating the contents (spoiler alert!).

So, this chapter is narrated from 87's point of view and it is just the beginning of the story.

200834SMAY17

It was a Saturday morning in Spring. Not that the day of the week had any particular meaning for 87. There were no weekdays or weekends in his life. And Spring, with its scent of flowers and the music of singing birds had no appeal for him. But accuracy was in his nature.

So it was Saturday 20 May 2017 at 0834 hours when his phone buzzed – as a rule he always kept the ringer off

You never know…

It was the Agency.

"Hello, 87, it's Benjamin Travis. I've got a new assignment for you. Name: J-O-H-A-N-N-A Surname: C-O-O-P-E-R, living in Chicago. Social security number: 328-95-7648. Priority: yellow but it might increase. No deadline, you can take your time, but you need to make it look like an accident."

"Copy. Johanna Cooper, Chicago, 328957648, yellow, no deadline, a clean job"

"Excellent. The money will be wired to your account as soon as the kill is confirmed. Goodbye, 87".

"Bye"

Damn!

It was the wrong moment. The Moscow massacre at the hands of Syndicate assets was still fresh.

A very bloody business.

34 dead bodies. 9 women, 4 children. Even a dog. A slaughterhouse just to kill one single target. And three Syndicate hitmen dead among them, one of whom a potentiated agent with under-skin body armour. The media had swarmed over the news like flies on a carcass. So the Syndicate chief, a few Russian bigwigs and even a prince from a royal family of the UAE had had to grease a lot of palms to silence the whole mess. The Agency, no need to say, had decided to play it safe for a while lest someone of their own screwed up and attracted more attention.

Though an Agent would never have made such a mess.

So he was not expecting any new jobs so soon. He was actually counting on it. And no-deadline clean jobs were the worst. One might have to wait for weeks for the right window of opportunity. And he didn't have weeks. He had finally found a trail that could lead him to the secret files the Syndicate had on Al-Bayati. That man was the key to all.

I MUST find him.

The last thing he needed in that moment was wasting time on stupid targets. But he had accepted the job and he was bound by his word. He had never breached a contract. He had never failed. He remembered the words of a book he'd read

"Death is like the wind. You can't argue with death. You can't stop it."

He was death. He just hit with surgical precision and not erratically like the wind. Many men had tried to corrupt him, to buy their lives doubling, even tripling his pay.

But you cannot negotiate with death.

He was not moved by greed, hate or bloodthirst. He just did what he did, what he had been taught. That was the life he knew, the life he had been designed for by Peter Aaron Litvenko. He was an assassin, a hitman, an Agent.

Litvenko had left the program in 1986. He had already frozen the project two years before, the last batch being produced in 1984. Officially he had said he was developing the ultimate breakthrough. What he was really doing, however, was creating his daughter, Katya – quatre-vingt-dix – and preparing to leave the program. And he did it. He ran away, lost his wife in the run but made it out of the country with the child.

The production of agents had stopped, but not immediately. They tried to produce other agents for a while but Litvenko had corrupted their data and the children that survived were not human enough to be allowed to live for long. The compound was a circle of hell in those years. He remembered the screams in the middle of the night, for many nights in a row. And then suddenly there was silence again for some time. He remembered one day, marching back from the morning training and passing right next to the nursery wing. There was blood seeping under the door and flowing down the corridor.

He must have been about five at the time. He wasn't sure. They were not allowed to have watches, let alone a calendar. Days were only marked by trainings and lessons, meals and rack time. That was all. And the seasons, of course. You could not help marking the seasons when you had to run outdoor for miles in rain, scorching sun, snow or hail. Spring was the best. Perfect temperature for physical exertion, some heavy rains from time to time but never too cold.

Just like that morning of May 2017. He had already run for a couple of hours, on a trail that circled the town. A light wind at his back had made the last miles even easier. He had taken a shower and gone down for breakfast. He was sitting in the hotel cafeteria waiting for his coffee. Black, no sugar. Not that he particularly liked coffee. Not that he particularly liked any food. He had the sense of taste, of course, but food wasn't for him what was for other people. People talked about food all the time, watched cooking shows, even cried over a dish. Not him. Food didn't evoke in him any specific emotional reaction.

Like everything else.

They had made sure to erase all of those possible weaknesses from their gene pools. So eggs were just eggs. He ate them in the morning with a slice of bread because they were nourishing and fast to digest. The best rational choice for breakfast. And coffee was just coffee. He drank it because everybody did and not drinking coffee at breakfast might attract attention. And attracting attention was always to be avoided.

But nobody was looking at him. At the table on his right a mother and daughter were planning their sightseeing tour, looking at a tourist guide, endlessly going back to the same pages and trying to no avail to squeeze in their plan two incompatible destinations. The girl, about 14 years old, looked elated and glanced furtively towards the door at the porter, 21, who appeared more flattered by the girl's attention than he should have been.

Not a wise man.

The mother was tired, played nervously with her wedding band, exposing, from time to time, a perfectly tanned ring finger.

She's been on holiday pretending to be single.

The waitress was hiding her pregnancy under a bulky jumper. Her boss did not know. The cook did.

Opposite him a man in a smart suite talked obsessively on the phone, in a loud voice, about selling and buying stocks while an older man, a colleague, read the newspaper with ostentatious indifference. The older man was actually listening very carefully and quietly repeating names and numbers to remember them. There was no one at the other end of the phone, the younger man was just trying to keep up appearances but the state of his shoes and the fake watch gave him away.

87 did not need to focus to collect all this information. A twinge in the voice, an involuntary tic, an imperceptible glance: minuscule, irrelevant details that flowed through his five senses and got immediately stored, ready to be retrieved in case of need. His mind was constantly alert, ceaselessly accumulating data of any sort. He could tell how many cars had run by while he was eating his breakfast or list in precise order the plates and cups arranged in the glass cabinet at his back without a second look.

The coffee arrived when he had finished his eggs and bread so he asked the waitress to put it in a paper cup and went back to his room. Even though he had already been running he had planned to do some proper physical training after breakfast. However, the plans had changed. He had a new target.

Let's see what this dead-woman walking does for a living.

He found her easily: 32 years old, an attending physician at the Emergency Medicine Unit of the St. John Hospital in Chicago. She had a partner, Brian Mullighan, 31, an attorney specialized in healthcare law. No children. 87 memorized her home address and her picture then booked the first flight to Chicago and left for the airport.

By the time he arrived in town he had already found a small studio opposite the target's flat where he could set his observation point. He started watching and listening with his infra-red binocular and laser microphone. The house was empty so he wasted no time. He entered without effort – they had no alarms or cameras – and started bugging the house: he put a microphone in every room, bugged the landline and hacked the wi-fi router. Then he moved on to the video surveillance: he set micro-cameras in the air-conditioning grids and in the lamps and checked the visual from his pc to be sure all areas of the house were covered. When satisfied he left and went back to his studio. The observation phase had started.

Index of contents (Spoiler alert!)

1.1 87's PoV. The beginning of the story.

1.2 87's PoV. Something about 87's background story and his mission.

1.3 87's PoV. First impressions on Johanna, the target, and her partner.

1.4 87's PoV. Something more about 87 and the target, and a little bit of action.

1.5 87's PoV. Where 87 makes a small mistake and Johanna proves to be tougher than expected.

1.6 87's PoV. This chapter develops the storyline of 87's mission but also shows details about Johanna's professional life.

1.7 87's PoV. Where 87 finally finds out some of the truth about his target and realizes his first impressions were wrong.

1.8 87's PoV. 87 learns to esteem Johanna, or maybe not….

1.9 87's PoV. 87 is not surprised by what he learns about Holster's murder but is shocked by a new revelation about Johanna.

1.10 87's point of view. Just another small piece of the puzzle falling into place.

1.11 This is the last chapter for this section, still from 87's POV.

2.1 87's POV. This is the morning of K-day, the last few hours of remote observation.

2.2. 87's PoV. A crucial scene for Johanna and Brian (and a goodbye for the latter).

2.3 Johanna's PoV. Her first meeting with 87.

2.4 87's POV of what has happened at the airport.

2.5 Johanna's POV. Where we learn something more about the explosion in Chile and why she's going to Baltimore.

2.6 87's POV. Where 87 fails again but the final twist will prove him right.