Chapter Four
His name was Carl Henderson, or at least it was this time, and he was in town on business. He had just arrived in Seacouver the day before and, while too old a hand at his job to feel excited, did enjoy the anticipation of a successfully closed deal. He had been at his occupation for over twenty years now – longer than most in his line of work – and had risen to a rather elect height within its ranks. He was what is known as a "fixer", among other things. True professional assassins could be difficult to contact and expensive as all hell, but for those who had both the need and the means they often represented a perfect solution to some of life's problems. "Carl" had been quietly and effectively plying his trade for those twenty odd years and was never at a loss for interested parties. Middle management hoodlums, syndicate high-rollers, corporate power brokers, over-zealous politicos – all these and more had both fallen before his cross-hairs and paid him to pull the trigger.
He was good at what he did – very good.
Taking no more than five or six contracts a year, he planned to retire at fifty a quite comfortable man. For now, however, he sat on the end of his rented bed at the Marcombe-Royale Hotel (his two favorite words being "plus expenses") and considered. He had allowed his mind to wander freely for a bit, to relax and clear it, but now he had brought it to a focus on the job at hand. Spread on the floor before him were two separate maps of the city, aerial stills of very specific locations, floor plans of several select buildings including this one and a single photograph of the target. It was a frame taken from the record of a very fortunate security camera. He had the entire eight second sequence on video as well but this frame he had singled out. He'd cropped the subject and processed the image up to 300% scale, running a number of filters to squeeze the most out of the pixels. It was the resulting print that now held his attention.
His gaze caressed, almost tenderly, the black, white and grainy image of the dark-haired woman. It wasn't much but, when combined with other resources at his disposal, it would be enough. The woman in the picture was a killer, at least according to his client. Fair enough – he wasn't in a position to throw stones on that score. Any similarities between himself and his target rapidly faded, however, when one took method into account. To hear his client tell it, the unassuming woman he was looking at had cut off his wife's head with a heavy edged weapon. Cute. The husband certainly didn't think so, and to prove it he was paying Carl $150,000, plus expenses, to serve justice more quickly and surely than the courts ever would.
Apparently, the grisly murder had put a period at the end of a whirlwind romance that had seen the couple married just three weeks after they'd met. If Carl hadn't taken pains to keep their conversation professional and brief the client would've gone on at great, exhaustive length about his bride – her beauty, her poise, and an alluringly enigmatic…something that promised a lifetime of secrets to explore. Well, that promise was broken to pieces by a nut with a sword. Crazy world. Carl wasn't being paid to make sense of it.
If his hard-won information was correct this particular nut, Salera Neves, was a recent and rather successful entrant into the cutthroat (ha) world of processed snack foods. Make that very recent – Carl could find no record of Ms. Neves prior to 1993. In August of that year she had seemingly appeared out of nowhere, bought out several small western European bakery concerns and quickly turned them into an impressive little conglomerate, shipping preservative-laden dainties throughout the continent.
And she cut people's heads off.
The scarcity of information on his target, coupled with the killing, had led Carl to briefly wonder if she too was, in fact, an assassin. Decapitation, however, was simply not in the toolbox of his trade, and he'd quickly abandoned the notion. "Whatever you are…", Carl breathed into the quiet of the room, a wry and humorless smile cracking his weathered face, "…you are not long for this world". His hard eyes moved to a chestnut brown vinyl golf bag in the corner. In it were six Henrikson irons of various wedges, two fairway woods, a Trevino driver with a DuraBalance shaft and a custom-modified modular M-16A2 single-shot to semi-automatic recoilless rifle with a Hawk-I laser-ready scope and electronic push-button trigger.
Carl Henderson was not a golfer, and his hunter's mind traced patient, thoughtful circles around and around the thought of his prey – tighter, tighter and tighter still.