87's PoV. Where 87 finally finds out some of the truth about his target and realizes his first impressions were wrong.
211512RMAY17
The target had finished her shift at 1400 hours and 87 had followed her with his drone as she ran through the park and up the hill at the centre of the pine tree wood. The total route amounted to 7.6 miles.
Not bad.
She arrived at home at 1512, took off her shoes and started massaging her left calf which seemed to be aching. 87 assumed it was a cramp but when she rolled up the trouser leg and exposed a long scar on her calf he was momentarily stunned.
It was a nasty scar. Not too recent but definitely bad. It took half the length of her left calf, and it looked like they'd had to remove part of the muscle.
Running must be painful.
He realized that that was something big. He had found no traces of accidents in her recent records on the hospital database but the proof was there. He had to search better.
He was deeply annoyed when he found the information he was looking for in less than two minutes. He had really done a poor job with his first background check. It was all there, on the web, with just a mild data access restriction which he easily forced. He had just not expected to find her there, in the US Army database.
A soldier.
She had enlisted at 18, right after the high school. She had studied in the army medical school in Bethesda and specialized in emergency medicine. Johanna Cooper was a second lieutenant on reserve and had been deployed a few times as medical officer in war zones. She had been first in Afghanistan in 2008, then in Iraq in 2009 where she had been slightly injured by a bullet which had grazed her left hip. She then was sent to Somalia in 2011 for the operation Enduring Freedom and then again in 2012. When she was at home she lived in Fort Benning working as medical officer in the army hospital. Until she had moved to the St. John Hospital in 2014 upon her request. In 2015 she had volunteered for a relief mission in Chile after the earthquake where she was badly injured when an oxygen tank exploded in her ward of the primary care centre they had set up in a school in Conception. She had risked losing her left eye and left leg but they had managed to save both.
Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle started to form a coherent picture. The hard training, carrying a weight during the run, the discipline in her daily routine, even her behaviour with men made sense.
No fitness freak on a diet. No naivete or obsession. That was just a soldier who was working hard to recover from an injury and who had transported into her new civilian life the habits she'd learnt when she served.
87 saw her undress and take a shower, put on some underwear, swallow half a pill of benzodiazepine and go to sleep. She had set the alarm at 1900, she'd sleep about three hours. Her partner was busy with his lover, buying a new fridge at Walmart. It was the perfect moment to enter the house again: 87 could bug her watch, which she had left in the bathroom, and leave without risk.
He crept in softly and reached the bathroom. The tracker he inserted in the watch had a built-in gps, a microphone and even a heart-rate monitor. It was nanotechnology, a very expensive toy. A remainder from a delicate mission to kill a Chinese multi-millionaire.
Getting out of the bathroom he took a glance at her bedroom. She was sleeping on her stomach, almost sprawled on the bed, a mass of voluminous brown hair spread on the pillow. She was wearing only a pair of white knickers and a white vest which had rolled up a bit. Her left side was exposed and from where he was standing he could read her past on her skin. The nasty scar on her left calf. The skin on her hip which the vest had uncovered and where he could distinguish the tiny mark of the bullet which had grazed her in Iraq. The tattoo on her left arm with the logo of the division she was in in Afghanistan – the crying eagle of the 101st. The minuscule, almost invisible scar over her left eyebrow. Her muscles, full and well defined. Her long legs. The generous curve of her breast under the vest.
It was as if he was seeing her for the first time. She was not pretty. Pretty was not the right word to describe her.
Attractive?
No. It was not an attractive body, at least not in a classic way: it was not a body made for pleasure – like the ones of many women he'd met
he'd had
voluptuous, supple, mellow. Easy. Tasteless. Hers was a body with a story, and a purpose.
Beautiful? Perhaps.
He had been sloppy. This target was not banal. He didn't know why they wanted her dead. He never asked.
But I always find out, eventually.
Not that it was any of his business, but if he had to make it look like an accident, he didn't want to choose a death cause that might point into the client's direction by chance.
What mattered, however, was that the idea he had been forming of her up to that afternoon had proved sadly wrong. That was not like him. Accuracy was all, and he had been blatantly inaccurate.
I've just been too busy with my own mission and this target is only a distraction.
But that was not a justification. That was not acceptable.
It must not happen again.