Disclaimer: All property is the property of their respective owners. I will also apologize in advance for any and all grammar errors I make.
Marcus Delavee was a killer. He could sugar coat it anyway he wanted, but the truth wouldn't be so easily changed. When he was eight, his father had taken him hunting for the first time in the backwoods of Arkansas. A cool mist had ghosted the tree floor, the remnants of the previous night's thunderstorm. Small arms covered in goose bumps had raised a .22 rifle to his shoulder, and a child's finger pulled the trigger. His father had cheered the killing of that squirrel as a great accomplishment, but Marcus had felt so much more. When the firearm had jolted in his hands he knew a boy's hand had picked up the .22 that morning, but a man's now held it. He tried explaining this epiphany to his friends, but they merely laughed him off and went back to playing tag. One had even said that guns scared them. That was when Marcus learned that he was different from the other children. His father, a former member of the U.S. Army Rangers in World War Two, had called that difference his "killer instinct." No matter what it was called, Marcus used it to lethal effect. He quickly revealed himself to be a prodigal marksman, and the ignition of a primer preceded the deaths of many animals in the woods surrounding his home. Marcus's first trophy kill, an eleven point buck, still hung from the same wall at his father's house. He had toyed briefly with archery, but abandoned the pursuit after a few months. Marcus liked the report of a rifle. That instantaneous victory cry, followed by the smell of gunpowder hanging in the air like an incense candle, was the greatest thrill he had ever found. His father had supported his expeditions until he saw the addiction it had become. He had tried to pull Marcus aside, tell him that hunting wasn't about death, but Marcus already understood as much. Killing the animal was just a bonus; it was the hunt itself that he craved. Still, his father had scaled back their trips to a monthly affair, determined to ensure his son respected the sport. At seventeen, Marcus had enlisted, with his father's consent, into the Marine Corps. After thirteen weeks of being molded into a marine, and twelve weeks spent in specialized sniper classes, he wore a new, minted uniform. It was probably the proudest moment of his life. Marcus never got to prove he belonged though. The Vietnam War had ended years before he had graduated and no new conflict cropped up. Annoyed, Marcus left the Marines after his four years were up. Within a week some secretive man wearing an expensive suit showed up with a job offer in one hand and a business card in the other. Best Marcus could figure, his new job's description was somewhere between private security and corporate assassin. Whatever his occupational title, Marcus had found his niche within Shadows Incorporated. They employed him as one of their "Direct Action Specialists" or DAS agents. Nations could contact Shadows Inc. to handle certain volatile situations by sending DAS agents to analyze and resolve their problem. Even the United States government made frequent use of them. That was why Marcus had been up since three in the morning, watching the same number of armed guards patrol the grounds of a cartel boss's estate in Los Angeles.
Marcus had no disillusions about the life of a sniper. He didn't glamorize the life as one where he would be frantically rushing from place to place, assassinating dangerous foreign leaders every day, because he knew what he'd signed up for. Others idolized his life as a "One Shot, One Kill" lifestyle, but the actual firing of his weapon was only the climax of the experience. The vast majority of his time on missions was spent doing exactly what he was currently doing. Watching, and waiting. Memorizing everything he observed through the scope of his Remington700 and never even thinking of pulling that trigger. He was a silent watchdog, meant only to kill after every other objective had been achieved. That moment was quickly approaching, as all three of the guards were drawing their weapons and looking around frantically for something. Sensing that something was definitely off, Marcus keyed his radio into their frequency and was greeted with silence.
"Amateurs are probably hot micing." Marcus grumbled to himself, amazed at the proclivity towards incompetence in the Cartel.
*You'd think that people who make millions, even billions, in untaxed revenue each year would train security that was actually worth a damn.* Marcus thought, as he switched his radio back to his handler Cassie's frequency.
Cassie is a piece of work. A spit-fire blonde with brilliant green eyes, the only thing faster than her mouth is her typing skills. When Marcus first met her she could decrypt and reconstruct three pages of binary code a minute, and that was before she'd installed the latest dexterity cybernetic from SabreTech CyberNetics. Marcus had found her in his old handler's office. Cassie had been nothing more than another teenager wearing a tattered grey sweatshirt to him. She had acted like the world was her oyster, and much to Marcus's chagrin, she still did. After asking why she was intruding, Cassie replied with remarkable confidence, though it seemed like arrogance at the time to Marcus, with her hood drawn tight around her head.
"We both know Shadows Incorporated only pairs the best with the best." She took a step back and framed the room inside the box made from her thumbs and index fingers, taking the entire space in at a glance. Cassie continued to speak in the same tone, dropping her hands to her side and facing Marcus as she did so. "I'm just familiarizing myself with the space is all."
Marcus had thought she was crazed and he'd told her as much. Jonathon Fox was the best there'd ever been and she would have to go "familiarize" herself somewhere else. Her reaction was to laugh him off and walk out of the office. The place was hers in a week, and the day she moved in her baby, an extra plush rolling chair, Marcus wondered how he'd ever managed without her. She provided updates in half the time with twice the accuracy over Johnathon. Cassie was both Marcus's link to and his buffer from the information provided by Shadows' central command. Everything that Marcus was informed of had to be filtered through Cassie first. She often browsed the BattleNet and provided these updates directly. Cassie believed that the data packets command came up with were too "fluffy." Translation, they were chocked full of useless and repetitive information. Right now, Marcus needed quick and concise.
"Cassie something's up. I think it's about time I start rolling in there." Marcus informed her, speaking into the small handheld radio he had attached to his shoulder and securing his Remington with a sling to his back.
"Agreed, everything in the compound just went dark." She replied, the official tone and lack of any joke accompanying her message was a clear indication of worry on her part.
"Everything?" Marcus asked in obvious confusion, gathering the last of his gear, a personal audio recorder, as he spoke.
"Cameras. Alarms. Motion detectors. Everything." Cassie confirmed. "Do you think DHS is making a move? It wouldn't be the first time the right hand of government didn't know jack shit about what the left was up to."
She was right, It wouldn't be the first time. Several ops had been blown and months of planning went to waste because Secretary A wouldn't walk down the hall to tell Secretary B to leave Senior Bad Guy the Hell alone. But this was different, Marcus could feel it in the way his gut was twisted in knots over what was happening inside that courtyard.
"I don't think that's the case this time."
"Just be careful Marcus. It'll be bad press if you get killed in the streets of L.A."
*Hasn't ever helped before.* Marcus thought ruefully. Thinking back to all the times careful hadn't been enough to stop a stray bullet from leaving him with a new scar. Quickly, he checked the release mechanism on his parachute and without a second thought threw himself out the window of the twenty-second floor of an office building he'd been using as his spider hole. The skyscraper had been built only months before and few of the floors had been properly furnished yet. That, coupled with its location overlooking the target building, made it the perfect place to do overwatch from. A few seconds after his jump, Marcus was a safe enough distance away from the office to unleash his parachute. He pulled the ring and . . . nothing. The main chute had failed to release and Marcus was still hurtling towards the ground at an alarming rate.
*Alright stay calm Marcus. You just need to release the emergency chute that's all.* Marcus thought in an attempt to avoid panicking. Doing just that, he was relieved to find that at least one chute was willing to function properly. But Marcus rapidly realized that too much time and altitiude had passed. He had maybe a thousand feet before he landed in the garden and the emergency chute would never slow him down enough to actually survive the impact. Knowing a bed of roses would do absolutely nothing to cushion his inevitably traumatic landing, Marcus maneuvered himself to land feet first and prayed that the research developers at SabreTech knew what they were doing.
Marcus felt his mind slow as he neared treetop level. It was a clarity he was well accustomed with, as it was the calm when life or death was one split second decision away. "Do or die." Marcus mumbled under his breath, watching the leaves pass in an instant and firing off the kinetic buffers installed throughout the entirety of his legs as he spoke. The bone shattering impact was absorbed and dissipated by the cybernetics grafted to the muscle and bone of Marcus's legs, and rather than winding up as a bloody mess for the groundskeeper to deal with, he went tumbling into a rose bush. His uncontrolled crash only came to an end when the low brick wall he collided with didn't give way. Winded, seeing stars, but thankful to be alive Marcus struggled to his feet.
On muscle memory alone he cut the cords holding him to his chute and then he quickly tried to get a handle on his surroundings. Marcus knew from the numerous cuts he'd sustained that his landing had placed him in the outer courtyard. He knew from days of constant, focused reconnaissance that this area was nothing more than flowers and covered walkways. It was an idyllic front hiding one of the largest smuggling rings for the Cartel in North America, and if everything went according to plan, Marcus was about to bring it all crashing down.
Author's Note: Well that's that I guess. Please review as this is my first story and I'd absolutely love to receive some pointers. I'm sure, given the title, that you were probably expecting Elizabeth, Booker, and the like to be in this chapter, and I WILL include those elements. I just felt the need to start this story with a little description of a new character's life. Bonus points to whoever can find out the time period from context clues. They don't do anything but WHOO bonus points.
