How I Became An Assassin
The First Mission: Part III
"...to learn about their plan..."
"Why were we eating in the clearing if we were just going to go back to the town?" May asked as the car rumbled back onto the smooth main road.
"Anything new in small towns sticks out like a sore thumb," he replied, turning left onto a small paved road. "Sitting in that convenience parking lot just begs for people to stare at us."
They parked at a small store and went inside to buy some provisions such as canned food and a bag of rice. After loading everything into the car, they set off again. Drew turned away from the main road, steering the car onto a small paved road.
He continued on that paved road for a while, until the concrete ended and a crude dirt road was all that was left.
They passed by some cottages with an air of mustiness and neglect. These were probably summer homes, with untended gardens and cobwebs spanning the beams during the majority of the year. Eventually, the shrubbery around them grew thicker and thicker, with dappled sunlight streaking through the trees.
Drew's eyes narrowed, trying to find something in this low visibility.
"Look for a break in the trees," he said, as he furrowed his brow slightly in concentration. "It should be somewhere around here."
May looked round, perplexed, at the crowded trunks all dotting along the road.
"Is that it?" she said, pointing at a little overgrown path splitting from the dirt road. Shrubs thickly grew along the sides, leaving only a small path between them. Drew stopped and reversed, turning into it. The car protested as it tried to push through the branches and bushes blocking its path. Drew just gunned the engine harder, urging the car through it. May winced as she heard the branches scraping along the car's aluminium sides.
After 10 minutes of slowly forcing their way through the road, they arrived at a small wooden bunkhouse, set in a small clearing. Drew slung his backpack over his shoulder and walked over to the door. May grabbed hers as well, trailing behind him.
He took out a lockpick set and started unpacking it on the floor. "While I'm doing this," he said, without turning around to look at her, "Rearrange some branches or whatever and make it look like we never drove through the path. Or even better, erase the path's existence."
May just stared dumbly at him for a second. "The entire path?" she asked. Drew nodded and waved a hand at her to shoo her away. "If I erase its existence, how are we even going to get the car out of here?" she interjected, not moving an inch.
"Then I'll tell you to clear a path back when we're leaving." he replied. "Go on, now."
May grumbled and got to work, taking a set of tool from the camping supplies. She started by snapping off the suspicious looking half-broken branches dangling from the trees, then tossing them along the path. She pondered awhile on how to 'erase' the existence of the path, especially where it joined the dirt road. After a few minutes of thinking, she started methodically hacking off a bush at the base with a hatchet, hitting it over and over until she could bend it and put her body weight on it, snapping it free. She dragged it over to the fork in the path, and used a trowel to dig a shallow hole, then placed the bush there and replanted it.
'Well, I hope the bush survives,' May thought, eyeing her ad-hoc work.
She headed back, daintily hopping through all the obstacles thrown along the path.
By the time she got back to the clearing, Drew was already inside, some noise coming through the barely the cracked-open door. May slipped inside, noting that Drew had already brought all their things from the car inside.
The bunkhouse was small and musty, with two rooms: a large open area with a small kitchen, and through a doorway May could see a line of bunk beds. Trash was littered here and there. A few mice skittered about. Drew had placed one of the lanterns they brought on the table, sending bright cheery light throughout the whole place.
"It's an old bunkhouse for woodcutters back in the day," Drew said while unpacking some supplies from their bags. "It's been abandoned for quite some while now. We're going to be here for a while; help me clean this place up a bit."
May took a towel from her pocket and tied it round her face in a makeshift mask. She picked up an old broom lying on the floor and helped sweep away the decades of grime and trash into a corner. She reached for her backpack and took out a set of daggers, swiftly impaling any mice she saw. She picked them up by the tail and flung them out into the bushes.
In a corner of the common room, there was a small kitchen area. It had a counter with shelves above it, a sink, and an old wood-fired stove. "I don't think we'd be able to use this stove, wouldn't we?" May called over to Drew who was poking around the bunk beds. "The smoke would be seen for miles."
"We have a small stove in the camping set, right?" Drew responded. "We'll just make do with that."
May tried turning on the tap in the sink, and wasn't surprised when nothing came out of it. She shrugged and tried cleaning the kitchen counter, then opened the shelves above. There were quite a lot of old canned foods in there, though they expired half a century ago.
They took around an hour making the bunkhouse habitable once more, the sun high in the sky by the time they finished.
"Now that we've settled in," Drew said, stretching, "It's time for us to start moving."
He slung a small messenger bag over his shoulder and indicated for May to do the same. They changed into hiking-appropriate clothing and brought some ropes, slung round their shoulders. They then set off, walking through the trees, Drew leading the way holding a handheld GPS.
They went through the woods for quite some while, the quiet rustling of the leaves under them merging with the sounds of the forest. They passed a small stream, its water trickling merrily through the rocks. The trees were starting to thin when Drew stopped, put the GPS back into his bag and started climbing up a sturdy trunk. May followed behind him.
They climbed and climbed until they were just under the forest canopy. Drew sat on a limb, taking out a pair of binoculars. May did the same, 3 branches below him. She wrapped the rope around the trunk and limb, then tied it to her makeshift harness, made of another piece of rope. She was not going to risk falling off this tree.
"For my personal mission, we're going to spend a lot of time observing," Drew said, polishing the lens of his binoculars. You see that mansion over there, in the distance? We're going to watch their movements."
The mansion was so far away that it looked like a tiny model home. Around it surrounded its grounds, a sprawling garden with various paths dotted through it. A small mini-golf course was seen in the corner.
"I want to know the movements of everything in this home," Drew continued. "Write it down in your notepad. We'll compare notes every evening."
May nodded, zooming in on her binoculars and sweeping the length of the estate.
They observed the estate for two weeks, every day just a repeat of the last. They spent the time in shifts. During the first week, May observed during the daylight hours, and the second observing throughout the night, using infrared cameras to continue watching for movement.
"We've got quite a lot down now," May observed, putting down her marker with a flourish. On the table was a large piece of paper, the grounds carefully drawn out, location of security cameras marked and their angle of view. Red dotted lines indicated guard patrol routes, with their patrol times written neatly in the legend below. Other colored dotted lines indicated the rounds for other staff such as the cleaners and gardeners. Placed along the sides of the map, they had small paper circles with faces on them, each indicating one person who lived in the grounds. The owners were an elderly couple, and they had various employees tending to their needs and the grounds.
"One problem is the two owners haven't left the estate during these two weeks," Drew said, ruffling his hair in frustration. "We're going to have to stake out for a while longer."
May went over to the cupboards, looking for breakfast. Their supplies were dwindling pitifully low.
"Drew, I think we'll need to make a grocery trip soon," she called, looking between a can of kidney beans and a can of ketchup beans for breakfast. "We don't have much food left."
"Let's go out for some food today, then," Drew said decidedly, getting up and starting to pack some things. "Get your gear and bags together, we're going to have to make this journey on foot. The car isn't going anywhere for now."
Instead of trudging the blocked path to the dirt road, they slipped through the trees, moving in the direction of the town.
By the time they arrived near the main street, it was nearing noon. Drew led the way, walking along the crisp pavement to a small farmer's market.
They got some fresh vegetables and fruit, and stocked up on more cans and rice provisions.
"It's a great time for camping, isn't it?" Drew said amicably to the old lady running the store. "We're going backpacking round the country."
Next, they went to the convenience store once more, going in for a new snacks. They made a stop at the hardware store for more propane for their stove, then started getting ready to head back.
They were trudging along the side path back to their woods, summer houses lining the path, when Drew paused, eyes growing alert. May heard it too - the distant sound of a car engine. He removed his backpack and slid it under the hedge next to him, and then crawled under it as well. May followed suit. They stayed there in silence, waiting…
A Rolls-Royce sped past them, the smell of gasoline trailing after it. This car was from the estate!
Drew hissed to May, "Let's go," and slid out of the hedge and sprinted after the car, leaving the heavy supplies where they lay.
Following the car's trail, they ended up running back to the main street. They saw the car parked outside a diner, a little ways down the road. Drew hummed for a while, thinking intently for a few moments…
"Bring our things back to base," he said to her. "Carry as much as you can and I'll carry the rest on my way back."
May nodded and turned on her heel, going back to the side path. She turned around when the main street was about to slip out of her sight, and watched Drew slip into the diner. She shook her head slightly in bemusement.
'It's a dangerous thing to do, going in such close contact with the people we're observing,' May thought amusedly.
She grabbed half of the supplies from the hedge and made her way back to the hut. After slipping through the woods, she took out her handheld GPS and trudged back to the clearing. She put away the provisions into the cupboard, then eyed Drew's bag.
He had some documents in there, and had never let May see any part of it. Every fiber of being was screaming to look into it, but she was pretty sure he had a few mechanisms in place that would alert him if she ever tried to mess around with his things.
She thought about the brown file in the glove compartment and wondered if it was still there.
'I helped out in that case, so looking at his report shouldn't matter, right?' she thought as she went to the car, took out her lockpick and easily unlocked the glove compartment. She opened up the file, reading its contents.
Target name: Bianca Rosewood
Leech and Kill
The following information has been extracted:
-Alta Corp is in talks with Berlitz Ltd. for a flagship cooperation between the companies, estimated value at 100bn, slated to roll out in two years
-Bianca has been handling the internal finance reports for Alta Corp
-Funding for this will draw capital from its intermediaries such as….(May skimmed through the list of 20 names quickly)
-Significant amounts of money have been transferred to various shell companies and overseas hedge funds, all directed by Bianca. The exact figures are shown below in Tables 1 to 5…
-The transfer of funds was directed by her father, she was not informed of the reason but suspects foul play in the cooperation…
-The death of Bianca will suggest that the financial reports will now be handed by her cousin, the second-in-line for the succession to the CEO position…
-The cousin is YYY, aged 35 years, currently operating in an overseas intermediary in Shanghai…
She flitted through the rest of the file, skimming through the tables. This corporation and these accounts were different from the ones Drew was going through back at the arena. She wondered how they were linked together.
She made a mental note to herself to research on the linkages between Alta Corp, Berlitz Ltd., and the accounts they had been poring over. She neatly put the file back together and locked the glove compartment once more, then decided to take a nap until Drew came back. All those days of stakeouts were exhausting.
She went into the bunkhouse, took a packet of crackers and brought them to her sleeping bag placed on one of the wooden bunk beds. She ate a few crackers then slowly drifted off to sleep.
May's eyes snapped open. It was pitch black in the bunkhouse. No more light streamed through the cracked windows.
She staggered over sleepily to turn on the lantern. It cast its warm glow over the bunkroom, illuminating every corner. Drew hadn't returned yet.
May dug around her bag for her earpiece, slipping it in and turning the receiver on.
A similar feeling of deja vu washed over her and she had a feeling she'd be waiting all night for a call. She put a small pot of water on the propane stove and brought it to a boil, sipping a mug of tea while she pored over their hand drawn map once more.
She was 90% sure that Drew had somehow followed them back to the estate, or why else wouldn't he be back?
'Let's try to guess his location now,' May mused. She guessed that the car went back to the estate in the early evening. So Drew would have to go through the west side to avoid the guards, and slip among the bushes to dodge the cameras panning the entire yard...and then...what? Did he slip into the estate, or had he parked himself inside a bush for the night?
She took another sip of tea, and decided to curl back into her sleeping bag. She waited for a while, waiting for any calls, before falling back into slumber.
Drew didn't come back, nor did he call her, for the next three days. May snuck back out to check under the hedge, and he hadn't picked up the supplies hidden there.
Was he still in the estate? Had he been discovered? It didn't seem that possible, as wasn't Drew one of the best in the corporation?
May had been idling round for the last three days, and she was getting quite bored. She had gone to the stakeout point to watch the home, but saw no sign of Drew, nor any indication that something was amiss in the estate.
'Well, I've already gone as far as the hedge,' May thought. 'Might as well enter the town for a while.'
Painfully aware that she had no money on her, she walked past a bakery and small diner, her stomach screaming for something that wasn't canned food.
She walked along the small and short main street, seeing a central building in the middle. It was probably the town hall.
Upon walking closer, she noticed a side entrance with the plaque 'Town Library'. She walked over and tried the doorknob. The door swung open with a creak. An inviting scent of old books lured her in.
It was a small library, with around ten shelves of neatly lined books. A wooden desk at the front had two notices placed on it.
'Hiring – full time librarian'
'Please use the checkout system on your own. The librarian post is currently empty.'
She spied two old-style computer monitors tucked into a corner of the library. She made a beeline there, sitting down at the rickety wooden chair, drumming her fingers impatiently as the old machine started booting up slowly.
She made a small exclaim of delight when she saw that the computer was connected to the Internet. She opened up a search engine, rapidly searching for information on Alta Corp and Berlitz Ltd. For the accounts they were poring over in the arena, May doubted that inputting their account numbers would give any results. It seemed like an insurmountable hill to find the linkages between these three.
May would have preferred to have copied the information down, but she knew it was too dangerous to do so. Drew would definitely find out about the paper eventually. She memorized as much information as she could, scrolling through news articles, business magazine publications, and company (and its subsidiaries') websites. She then tackled the quarterly reports for its shareholders, skimming through the two companies' side by side, looking for any mention of a cooperation between these conglomerates. There was none.
A half hour later, she wiped the search engine and browser history clean, and shut down the computer. She lithely went out the door, heading back to the hedge, slinging the provisions on her shoulder and making her way back to the bunkhouse.
Drew still wasn't there. Seems like he was fixated on making his personal mission a one-man mission. May was just a barnacle, an annoyance, he was forced to bring along. Left to her own devices while he was executing whatever plan up his sleeve he had.
'Isn't he going to go hungry, though?' May thought as she ripped open a bag of hot-dog buns, toasting them on the propane fire with a fork. 'Unless he's been actively stealing from the kitchens or something.'
The days of waiting for Drew lengthened. May started training on her own, climbing trees and moving from a clearing to the next without touching the ground, making it a little game to see how much ground she could cover by swinging from tree to tree. A few days of climbing later, she got bored of that. She thought of using her hunting and fishing skills in real life situations, and went to the stream halfway to the lookout point. That stream was too shallow for large fish to swim through, so she decided to try hunting.
She went back to the bunkhouse and took the bow. It was a modern and sleek one, with weights to stabilise the shot, along with a set of steel tipped arrows. She shot a few times at the bunkhouse door, calibrating her shots. When she was satisfied, she slung them over her shoulder and was walking until she found a good tree, when she spied a rabbit on the ground.
She slowly docked an arrow, clipping the arrow to the string and pulling the string back. The rabbit was eating a plant, blissfully unaware. She pulled the string taut until she rested her hand on her cheek, then closed her non-dominant eye. She had less than a second to aim before her arms started shaking and made the shot imprecise. Aim and…fire! The arrow whished straight onto the target, giving a bulls-eye hit. By the time May had walked over to her kill, the rabbit had stilled.
She brought it back to the bunkhouse and skinned it neatly, carving out the meat and adding it to a makeshift stew. It was filling and a good diversion from the weeks of canned food they'd gone through. She left a small bit of stew for tomorrow, on the off chance that Drew came back and she could show it off to him.
She settled back into her sleeping bag, and was just getting comfortable when she heard a small crackle of static.
She wormed out of the sleeping bag, dove towards her earpiece and hooked it to her ear.
"Hey," he said quietly. His tone of voice seemed normal, like he was just talking about the weather, not a hint of awkwardness about being on radio silence for so long.
"Why haven't you called?" May asked, her voice a little accusing.
"My earpiece ran out of power," he replied nonchalantly. "Took a while to figure out what to do about it."
"I'm in the estate," he continued, "And I'll stay here as long as possible until we need to go back to the arena."
May raised a brow. "How are you even hiding in there for so long?" she asked suspiciously.
"Oh, I'm an employee here now," Drew replied with a laugh. "It's a long story, but they ended up hiring me that day."
"One of their chambermaids will quit tomorrow," he added after a short pause. "You can…show up at the estate tomorrow, looking for a job."
"Please don't tell me you spent these past several days cooking up a plan to get someone fired," May said dispassionately. She could practically see his smirk right now.
"That was just a small chore to be taken care of, in the grand scheme of things." he replied smoothly. "Now, just show up all nice and bundled up with a bag at the estate at around 10am tomorrow. I – no I mean another worker – has put in a word for you, writing a letter of recommendation about his friend."
The next day, May made her way up to the front door of the estate, going through a long gravel path before reaching the fountain that was the centerpiece of the mansion. She walked up to the front door, pressed the bell, and waited.
I went off on a tangent about archery because I took an archery class last year, it was really fun. Survival and adventure stories are my life, I've read too many books about them...Hatchet series, Castaway series, On The Run+Kidnapped series, damn I read a lot of books when I was younger lol.