He Died Well
Yassen Gregorovich had killed many men. Most of the time it had been from a distance: a bullet in the head from the barrel of a sniper rifle. They didn't expect to die. They didn't see the man who killed them. It was over quickly and Yassen had forgotten what they even looked like a few days later.
On other occasions it had been more at close quarters. He'd slashed a few throats and broken a few necks: not his preferred method of killing but sometimes easier to arrange. Once or twice they'd put up a fight, but usually by the time they'd even realised he was there it was too late. A few times his targets had known what he was about to do and begged him not to go through with it, but that had only been on the odd occasion and had made no difference.
There had been the times when he'd used poison too, but he wasn't usually there to see the results of that. There had been one occasion when he'd stood and watched a man die from a dose of atropa belladonna; watched as he choked and spasmed and cried and screamed and begged before finally going still. A wholly undignified death, really.
That had been the way most of them died. How could they face up to death with dignity when they hadn't seen it coming? And if they had then they did everything they could to resist it.
There had been one though. One who was different.
Yassen had planned it as a close range kill. Normally he didn't choose to work that way, but in this case it made things far simpler. He'd found access to his target's hotel room via the balcony late one evening. There was the possibility of the balcony door being locked, which he'd taken into consideration, but as it happened the hot, humid weather meant his target had left it open in order for air to circulate round the room. Yassen had crept inside in absolute silence, equipped with a pistol and silencer, to find his target sleeping on the bed. He'd intended to kill him that way. If the target died in his sleep it would mean less trouble for them both.
But it hadn't quite worked out like that. Yassen was certain he hadn't made a noise, but something caused his target to suddenly sit bolt upright in bed and stare straight at Yassen, who must have been silhouetted against the moonlight streaming in from the open full length windows. The man gave a short yelp of surprise, but not a prolonged scream. Yassen kept his finger steady on the trigger, having enough self control to not fire in panic.
The man on the bed blinked a few times and squinted at Yassen, then realising he had a gun pointed at him muttered, "Jesus…" and reached his right hand to the nightstand.
Seeing the movement, Yassen spoke out in a voice that was simultaneously calm and menacing. "Don't move."
The man stopped. "I'm just turning the light on," he offered as an explanation, "I want to be able to see the man who's about to shoot me."
It was a strange thing for him to say, Yassen thought. On the few occasions when he'd spoken to his targets before they died, the first thing they all said – in one way or another – had been, "Don't kill me." The first thing this one had requested was to be allowed to turn the light on.
Yassen glanced at the cabinet his target had been reaching for, and seeing the only thing on it was indeed a lamp he nodded. "Alright."
The man flicked the switch on the lamp so that everything in the vicinity of the bed was illuminated with a yellowish light. Yassen could see the face of his target more clearly now: a face he had already committed to memory from the files he'd read and the days of shadowing him – tanned skin, rugged black hair, thin lips, a long nose and a few wrinkles around the dark brown eyes. A face now set in an expression of fear, but a fear the man seemed to be fighting to control.
His target took a deep breath in an attempt to control his shaking, and then spoke. "Why?"
Yassen couldn't help but smile at that. He may have missed the first one, but he'd gone straight to the second thing they all said. Yassen gave the same answer he'd given on all the previous occasions. "Because I'm being paid for it."
The man breathed deeply again before speaking. "What if I could pay you more?"
Interesting, Yassen thought. He wasn't verbally attacking him for having no morals or for killing for money. Instead he was trying to bargain.
It still made no difference. "You can't."
"I might. Tell me how much."
Yassen didn't want to answer that. The man would see it as being a price on his life, when really it wasn't. To Yassen it was just a fee. "It doesn't matter. I've already signed the contract."
The man nodded. "There really is no way out of this, is there?"
"No." Yassen stated it simply as a matter of fact.
"If I try and make a run for it, then…"
"I shoot you before you've even reached the door." Yassen finished.
The man gave a hysterical laugh. "I thought that might be the case." He looked as if he was trying not to cry. "Look, I don't want to beg but I don't want to die either."
Yassen studied the man as he tried to regain his composure. "We all have to die eventually. It's just that for you it's going to happen today." He thought he should probably just get on and do it now, but his target had handled things quite well so far. He wanted to give him chance to say whatever last words he had to say, even if Yassen was going to be the only person around to hear them.
The man looked straight at him and spoke.
"I have a son. Alex. He's six."
That caught him off guard. They always did that, bring in their children to try and make him feel guilty. It was just unfortunate that this one's kid had that particular name. But if he allowed himself to think of the father of a certain other Alex, his target might just walk out of here alive after all, and Yassen couldn't let that happen.
He pushed all thoughts of John to the back of his mind and continued to look at the man, who was still talking. "I don't want him to see me like… with blood everywhere. Is there a way you can do this without making a mess?"
"Not if you want it to be quick."
"What's the quickest way for you to do it?"
"The quickest way is for me to shoot you between the eyes."
"And will that…?"
"There'll just be a small hole in the front. You'll have a much larger one in the back of your head. There'll be a lot of blood and fragments of your skull." This was rather surreal, Yassen thought, discussing the means of death with his target.
The man swallowed as if trying to prevent himself from being sick. "Is there any other way?"
"If you prefer I can shoot you through the heart. There'll still be a mess but they can clean it up for your funeral."
"And how painless is that?"
"Relatively painless. It could take you up to four minutes to be fully brain dead once your heart's stopped, but I doubt you'll be conscious for any of it."
The man nodded and seemed to come to some kind of conclusion, "Ok. Do it like that."
That was a strange conversation, Yassen thought, but began to reposition the gun so he was aiming at the man's chest.
"Wait!"
Yassen paused, deciding to let the man speak.
"What if you miss?"
Yassen looked at him, for the first time ever making full eye contact with his target as he was about to kill them. "I won't."
He pulled the trigger.
And that had been that.
They'd found the body next morning lying on the blood soaked bed. The media outlets of course speculated about who the killer was, as nobody had any idea. On the face of it it was no different to the other occasions Yassen had killed liked that.
Except it was different. The others hadn't behaved the way he had. They'd sworn at him, shouted at him, insulted him, begged him, tried to fight, tried to escape, tried to tell him he wouldn't get away with it…But in the end none of it made any difference. They'd all died, and done so after managing to disgrace themselves.
But just this once things hadn't gone quite the way he'd expected. He'd thought he knew everything there was to know about the way humans would behave when faced with the prospect of death, but this man had challenged that notion. Most people would do anything to survive; it was after all ingrained into their psyche as part of their most basic instincts: survival was imperative. Humans were just so hard-wired to cling on to life by whatever means necessary that when death did come, most of them died poorly.
He had always suspected there must be a few people who were accepting of the prospect of death, who knew that death was inevitable and if it came for you then you had to accept it. He was one of them: as an assassin he had to live with the reality that his life expectancy was short. But he'd never before come across anyone so ordinary who managed to face death so well.
He thought of the man's son, Alex, and wondered what he must be thinking right now. He would be grieving, obviously, and angry at the man who killed his father, but Yassen wasn't sure if he would be wondering at the manner in which his father died. Surely he would be proud to know he had a father like that, who had faced death bravely and not tried to run away, but it was unlikely he would ever find out.
If they ever were to meet, Yassen thought he would like to tell the boy about what had happened to his father. Not that it ever would happen, of course, but just if it did. The boy would no doubt want to know why his father had died, but that wasn't important. What was important was that when people asked about his father, he would be able to tell them the truth:
He died well.