A/N: As always, thank you for reading, and for your reviews! :)
Paris was cold compared to the middle of Africa, and Alex found himself shivering a little as they left the airport.
Shale wasn't even thirty and looked even younger, so instead of the cover of father and son that Alex was used to, they travelled as half-brothers on Spanish passports. Shale spoke Spanish as his first language – Castilian Spanish like Alex, though a slightly different variation of it. Still, it was something that could easily be explained by being raised by different mothers. With Alex's more or less permanent tan and his hair dyed the same dark brown as in Nice, they could pass for family.
Alex didn't ask how long in advance Yassen had arranged for their covers. The man planned for every contingency. The cost of two fake identities would be nothing if they should turn out to be unnecessary. Shale would be the natural support for Alex, being closest in looks to him among Sagitta's two snipers, and with Alex's strong attachment to the team, maybe it wasn't a surprise that Marcus had chosen to side with them in the end.
It was still odd, though. He was used to travelling with Yassen or alone. Having someone else with him was … weird. Mildly unsettling. Even with someone he trusted.
Alex couldn't imagine it was much easier for Shale with his team on another continent.
They had read and memorised the file from Yassen. It was too dangerous to bring with them. They couldn't risk using SCORPIA contacts for anything, either. Yassen had acquired their new identities through other contacts and had arranged for the same to supply their weapons. To all intents and purposes, Alex and Shale were freelance for the week.
It was a weird thought. Alex didn't like to admit it, but he had grown used to SCORPIA's network of support. Intel, weapons, papers, anything. No wonder so many of their operatives stayed beyond the end of their contract. He felt alone in a way he hadn't before; reliant on the contacts Yassen had given them but with nothing else to draw on. He had no network of his own, no one to call. If something went wrong and they couldn't get in touch with Yassen, they would be entirely on their own.
No one stopped them at the airport. No one looked twice at them. Even customs didn't care. There was no local SCORPIA contact to have arranged for transport, but Shale had already booked a car through one of the numerous car rentals at Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was a perfectly bland, average Renault, just the sort of mid-priced car for two half-brothers taking a week off to see France before heading back home to Spain. It was a vaguely unnerving thought to Alex that for the past year, he had been more used to armoured cars than normal ones.
Yassen's contact for weapons brought them through Paris itself. It was a world removed from last time Alex was there, at the heart of the the old city. This time the address brought them to a neighbourhood that consisted mainly of newer apartment buildings to one side and a string of grey and white houses to the other, hidden behind solid fences and closed curtains.
Shale stopped the car and glanced at Alex. "I think this is more your area than mine."
Probably, not that Alex had much more experience with that sort of thing. He remembered SCORPIA's contact in Singapore but doubted this was anything like that.
"Right," Alex agreed. He didn't sound quite as confident as he had wanted to. Dealing with SCORPIA's own people was something very different. He trusted that Yassen's contacts were reasonably reliable, but it was still enough to put him on edge.
The weather outside was damp and a little chilly. It had been cloudy since they landed and looked to stay that way for at least another couple of days. Alex checked the address again and stepped through the gate, Shale close behind him. Up close, the place was definitely in need of some attention. Chipped paint, rust on the fence, and haphazard repairs.
A woman opened the door before Alex could knock.
"Yes?" she demanded in accented French.
"We're here about the motorcycle," Alex replied, following the script Yassen had given him. "The listing – a Gima?"
The woman looked dubious. "You can drive one?"
"My brother can."
She looked between the two of them, then nodded and let them inside. "As long as you pay cash, then. We'll talk."
The inside of the house looked a lot nicer than the outside had. The curtains were thick and allowed no one to look inside. The woman still checked them before she brought out a large, heavy duffel bag and held out her hand.
"Money."
Shale paid without argument and opened the bag. Two sniper rifles, two guns, several boxes of ammunition, a small pack of plastic explosives along with detonators, headsets, and a flat metal case. Alex opened the case and found a row of wicked-looking darts along with two glass vials. The sedative, then.
Shale had checked over the rest. One rifle had been customised for the darts but everything else were normal weapons.
"Thank you," Alex said. It didn't hurt to be polite.
The woman nodded. Alex didn't know her name and she didn't know theirs. It worked for everyone. They were on their way again ten minutes later, with the weapons packed safely away.
"We'll need to zero them," Shale said. "We'll find a quiet place to do it."
Alex nodded. "Clothes, too."
Something meant for outdoor use. They had brought normal clothes, not really in a position to get the sort of clothes they would need for France in December in the Congo. They could easily end up spending days watching Duval's home and waiting for the shot.
They spent the night in a small, inexpensive hotel in Orléans. Fluent in French, Alex handled anything and happily chatted with the man behind the counter. As the CIA and MI6 and SCORPIA had long since learned, there were few covers as good as travelling with a child, and Alex was still very obviously a young teenager.
They both felt better the next morning. Good food and a solid night's sleep had worked wonders. A visit to an outdoor supply store got them the rest of the equipment they needed, five undisturbed minutes near a car that didn't seem to have been moved in a while got them a set of extra licence plates, and a drive south would give them a less populated place to zero their rifles. By the time anyone potentially called the police on them, they would be long gone.
Most of the drive passed in silence, both of them focused on the days ahead.
"The darts for you?" Shale eventually asked.
They were about equal with the sniper rifles, experience had shown them as much. Malagosto generally didn't train snipers but preferred to steal them fully trained from elsewhere. Yassen Gregorovich did, though, and he had not allowed Alex to do less than his very best. Shale wasn't anywhere near Yassen's level but then, very few people were.
Alex could handle the killing just as well as Shale could, at least in theory. Yassen had made sure of that. Alex still appreciated the out he had just been given. He had enough nightmares and memories to haunt him already. If Shale didn't have a problem handling it, Alex wasn't too proud to refuse that bit of kindness. The fast-acting sedative could still very well kill Duval, but it wasn't a bullet, and somehow that mattered. Maybe it was selfish to make Shale do it instead, maybe he should be the one to do it as the person in charge of the operation, maybe he should just accept it and get it over with because he would have to be Orion for this to have any chance of success, but Alex couldn't make himself refuse.
"Yes," he agreed and continued a heartbeat later, just a little quieter. "Thank you."
Shale didn't reply, just reached out to ruffle Alex's hair before he focused on the road again.
They stopped in a reasonably remote forest area to zero the riles. It wasn't as remote as they would have liked, but it would have to do. Between necessity and experience, they were finished and gone again fifteen minutes later, long before anyone could track them down for questioning.
They had everything they needed. All they had to do now was get to their target. It still felt wrong to Alex, driving through the Loire Valley and its idyllic houses and landscapes, knowing they were there to kill people. He didn't ask if Shale felt the same. He really doubted it. No one else seemed to have a problem with assassinations. He didn't doubt he was the only one of Malagosto's graduates who did, and Shale had served as a sniper for years. He would have no qualms about killing.
They found Duval's home after a couple of tries, a small, secluded château surrounded by an immaculate lawn and a forest beyond the grounds. They parked the car on a dirt path in the forest, well out of sight, and changed the licence plates. The path itself was mostly overgrown, a pretty sure sign it saw very little traffic. Duval had few staff and little security. According to Yassen, the man valued his privacy and had grown too confident in his anonymity.
Yassen had left the details up to them. None of them knew what conditions would be like, what sort of opportunity they would get. The final decision of when to act and how to do it would be Alex and Shale's.
With Duval handled, Alex would stay to watch and pick off any additional trouble. Hopefully the sedatives would do the job for that, too. Shale would get the car and retrieve Duval; the risk of someone identifying Alex's figure as a teenager was too great, even masked and with heavy clothes on. They would both have preferred someone else to handle that part, the drive and retrieval both, but that wasn't really an option. They needed to keep it as low-key as possible, and that meant as few people as possible. Shale did the run back twice before they got settled and timed it at just below two minutes, plus the time to drive back and get the gate opened. A short run, but a long time in case something went wrong.
It also made the whole mission feel uncomfortable real to Alex. It wasn't just theoretical anymore.
They ended up spending three days in that forest, getting a solid look at the place and surroundings and simply watching Duval's home. It wasn't cold, not really, but the ground was damp, and it rained the afternoon that first day, light but persistent. Good outdoor clothes kept them dry and warm, but Alex was still pretty miserable.
They had a good count of the staff by the third day and Yassen's intel had been right. The château was small and needed few people to run it; probably an additional layer of security. Duval had what looked like a housekeeper that kept the place clean. A personal assistant – valet, butler, whatever he was – that they frequently spotted near Duval through the windows. A cook, of course. A gardener came around on the second day to care for the place. There wasn't much to do that late in the year, though Alex could imagine it would be very different come summer.
Beyond that, Duval had security in rotating shifts. There were always three guards present, and that wasn't counting the security built into the château itself. The fence and gate were pretty solid, enough so that Alex and Shale would need explosives to deal with it. Duval wasn't quite that lax. Alex couldn't even blame him for getting overconfident, though. Duval's records were pristine. It wasn't just a fake name and some passable paperwork; it was a rock-solid second identity that existed in every government database in France. He had a legitimate passport and a career as a comfortably successful stock trader that was approaching retirement. He paid his taxes, voted in every election, and had made a hobby of caring for his château. He had a birth certificate, school records, and a solid employment history, even for the time when he had actually be in the service of French intelligence under his real name. He went to the dentist, had his medical check-ups like his doctor recommended, and donated to charity.
There was nothing tying him to SCORPIA or any other illegal activities. No one had been able to pin Yu's connection to SCORPIA until Ash had turned sides again, but he had been the acknowledged head of a massive criminal organisation of his own. He'd had a lot of enemies without adding SCORPIA's to the list. Duval was invisible. Only the fact that Alex had met Duval, had seen the man up close, let him recognise him the first time they caught sight of him through a window. His clothes were different, his body language, everything. It was Duval, Alex knew it, but the change into his secondary identity was so complete that Alex didn't doubt most would be fooled.
It was no wonder no assassin or intelligence agency had ever targeted him outside of operations. Duval looked perfectly average. Perfectly harmless. If Alex had met him on the street, even knowing what Duval looked like, he would very likely still have overlooked him.
Whatever Duval had paid for the cover – and Alex knew that had to have been a lot – it was worth every pound. He had seen legitimate identities less credible than that.
"Target confirmed?" Shale asked beside him, the first time they caught a glimpse of the man himself through an ornate window.
"... Target confirmed," Alex agreed, and even then he had to watch for long seconds to be sure.
Duval at home, in his second identity, was a very different man than the cold, emotionless member of the executive board that Alex had met in Paris. That man had reminded him vaguely of Blunt, just … deader and a lot more lethal. With little security – no more than could be excused by his wealth and home – a solid background, and a home that was remarkably hard to find even with detailed instructions, Alex would be surprised if even most professional assassins would be able to track him down. His lack of security wasn't even overconfidence, Alex realised. It was a calculated risk and part of what kept him safe. What kept him from drawing unwanted attention. A unreasonably high level of security would raise a number of red flags to someone looking for one of SCORPIA's elusive board members. One middle-aged stock trader with only the security expected of someone wealthy but not overly influential, however …
Duval looked utterly harmless. Average. Enough so that Alex six or even three months ago would have doubted this could actually be a member of SCORPIA's executive board. Shale trusted Alex to get it right, and Alex … only the meeting in Paris meant he was sure. Unlike most of Duval's surviving colleagues on the board, there were no good photos of the man in circulation. The ones Yassen had given them had been taken at long range. Anything French intelligence would have was worse than useless after two decades and likely plastic surgery. The man was as much of a ghost as Yassen Gregorovich.
Yassen could have sent no one else, Alex realised as well. Not only because of trust, but because even with Yassen's photos, someone who had never met the man wouldn't be able to tell for sure the target was right. He could easily have hired an external contractor for Yu's assassination, the man had been recognisable, but not Duval.
It took three days of waiting. It could easily have taken twice that, and then Alex would have had to make the call – stay, even though the window of opportunity for being mysteriously absent was closing fast, or call off the mission. He was glad he wouldn't have to make that choice.
Alex had learned patience over the months with Yassen, but he was still tired and restless and bored out of his skull by the end of it. His clothes, unchanged for all three days, were stained and reeked of sweat and forest floor, the same combination of damp soil and decomposing leaves that Alex had been up close and personal with for entirely too long by now. He wanted to get up, desperately wanted to work out, to move, to go for a run, wanted to do something, but he could do nothing but wait. Restlessness had overtaken his apprehension about their mission by the second day and hadn't let up since.
Shale had the patience of a trained sniper, but Alex really didn't, and it took conscious effort to stay put.
They finally got the opening they needed on the afternoon that third day, when the gate opened soundlessly and a dark car drove into the courtyard. It wasn't Duval's usual car. That one was visible through the windows in the garage, a vintage Aston Martin that definitely wasn't armoured to the same level that the new arrival almost certainly was.
The car stopped. The windows were dark, but Alex caught a glimpse inside as a single man in a casual suit got out.
"Bodyguard," Shale breathed. Alex agreed. The man looked like one. There was no one else in the car that he had spotted those few seconds, though. Just the driver.
One of the security guards approached the man. They looked tense for a moment as they exchange a few words. Then the tension eased and they greeted each other with the casual ease of colleagues. A check to make sure everything was fine, or that was Alex's guess, anyway.
"I think that's B6 or B7 armour on the car," Shale continued, still in that low voice. "It looks a little heavy for anything else. We probably won't be able to get to the driver, even with armour piercing rounds. Might still be worth a shot or two when the rest are down."
It was different from working with Yassen but there was still something soothing about Shale's quiet comments. Alex had good aim but little practical experience with that kind of assassination, much less the need to improvise. There had always been orders. Instructions. And, if everything had gone wrong, the reassuring presence of Yassen nearby, even in Miami. The added responsibility of being on their own wasn't welcome.
Yassen was in a league of his own, but Shale still had half a decade of experience as a sniper and didn't seem to mind taking over Alex's training for a while.
They watched and waited in silence. The driver turned off the engine. The bodyguard and the security guard chatted amiably. Ten minutes became fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. The staff seemed to be used to waiting or they knew it would be pointless to get annoyed.
Finally, more than half an hour later, the door opened. Duval appeared with his assistant and a second security guard. It was the first time Alex had seen the man outside of the château and not through a window.
Without glass between them, Duval looked marginally more like the man Alex had met briefly. Even then, it would have been very easy to dismiss it as just a vague resemblance. Duval had no identifying features, no visible scars, no distinctive marks. Even his body language was different; his body language and his way of interacting with his staff. They didn't act with the understandable fear and respect that SCORPIA's people had shown on the boat in Paris. The crew on the boat had been silent and respectful, never even glancing at the board room or the people there. They had known the punishment for curiosity. Duval's personal staff was respectful, certainly, but they didn't have the same fear.
Alex seriously doubted Duval's regular staff at the château actually knew exactly what the man was involved in. Even the security staff probably only got an edited version of the truth. Enough to take their job seriously and not ask questions, and nothing more.
Six targets, including their primary one. Two security guards, the bodyguard, the driver, Duval's assistant, and Duval himself. Three possible complications unaccounted for – the housekeeper, the cook, and the third security guard of the afternoon shift. There could be more they didn't know about, but they would deal with that if they had to.
Alex handled the darts; that made Duval his target. The rest …
"Duval has priority," Shale said, his voice little more than a soft breath. "Focus on the bodyguard and the assistant afterwards. I'll take out security and try for the driver."
Duval would be the hardest shot, Alex knew. He had to go for exposed skin, preferably the neck. Anything else carried too much of a risk of body armour.
It was a short walk from the main entrance and to the car. The bodyguard snapped to attention, as did the security guard. Alex saw them speak but could hear nothing from that distance. He breathed out slowly. Focused on his target. Let everything around him fade away until there was nothing else in the world but Duval and his movements.
Shale's quiet voice broke the silence again. "Three, two, one -"
Alex pulled the trigger almost the same instant as Shale's rifle fired. He knew he got it right even before the dart struck. It hit the side of Duval's throat, a sliver of dull metal almost invisible in the cloudy winter weather. Duval moved like a viper, hand snapping to the dart, but it would already be too late. Alex's attention shifted to the bodyguard. The man was already moving, but the situation was quickly descending into chaos. One security guard was down, Duval was swaying, and Alex heard Shale fire again a heartbeat after he fired his second dart.
His second shot was less graceful and more rushed but it didn't matter. The dart hit the bodyguard in the middle of the throat and probably went deep enough to cause actual damage. The assistant was moving, too; he clearly had some sort of training but not enough. A third dart hit his thigh, Alex gambling on the lack of body armour there.
He heard the rifle fire again beside him, the first shot aimed at the armoured car. Another shot followed almost immediately after. Then Shale pushed the rifle in Alex's direction and took off at a run.
Alex focused on his scope and the château and trusted Shale to handle himself. He didn't dare to look away.
The château was still. Dead. There was blood on the gravel where the security guards had fallen and two holes in the glass of the driver's side of Duval's car. Not quite armoured enough, then.
Alex struggled to push aside the sudden nausea and focused on the building instead. He didn't look at the dead bodies, didn't check to see if Duval or the bodyguard or assistant were still breathing. Just focused on the building and the few people he knew were still inside.
The world around him was utterly silent. No animals, no movements, not even the soft sound of Shale's breathing. The seconds stretched on. Had Shale reached the car yet?
A flicker of movement behind one of the windows near the entrance caught his attention. He recognised the uniform of the guard and wondered if someone had called the police yet. What were their instructions in case of trouble? And would those instructions go out the window with that many dead and their employer unmoving on the ground?
The man seemed to hesitate, still protected by the windows. Check on his colleagues and boss or stay inside? Were their attackers still around? The stillness stretched on. The man vanished from sight and reappeared in the shadow of the door. Maybe he thought the snipers were long gone, or maybe he had just miscalculated the direction of the shots. Either way, Alex saw his chance.
With the man standing still – mostly shrouded in shadows, but recognisable – it was an easy shot. The needle hit the guard in the throat and the drug kicked in almost immediately.
The man swayed. Tried to grasp his gun but lost his grip on it. He stumbled and fell a few seconds later, unmoving on the ground.
He was still breathing, at least. Alex tried not to look but it was impossible not to in the long seconds it took to check the man was out cold. Then his attention drifted back to the château.
Finally the silence was broken.
"Status?" Shale asked through the headset.
"I got the last security guard. No sign of other issues. You?"
"About to blow the gate," Shale replied.
Alex nodded though Shale couldn't see it. A sharp crack cut through the stillness, dulled by distance. A muted thump told Alex the gate had just fallen over.
The car appeared shortly after. Alex focused on the château and trusted Shale to handle the rest. The man moved fast to restrain Duval thoroughly with duct tape. They had to keep up the image of a kidnapping. If someone found the darts they had used, so much the better. They had left no fingerprints, but the heavy sedative would speak volumes about their intentions.
Alex risked a glance to see Shale half carry and half drag Duval to the car and dump him in the boot. He didn't bother to be gentle.
"Primary objective secure, still alive and breathing," Shale reported as he got back behind the wheel. Alex had seen it but it was still nice to get it confirmed.
"Copy."
Time to get out of there, then.
Alex packed away the rifles and their few other possessions with swift, practised motions and set off in the same direction as Shale had. It was like the morning run in Russia again, the careful balance between speed and not stepping wrong even once. He knew the time it took, and it still felt like an eternity before he saw the car.
Through the forest, down to the small, private road, and the spot they had agreed on, and while Alex didn't breathe a sigh of relief to see Shale there, it was close. The sound of the car door closing behind him was the best sound he had heard in days.
They stopped briefly by a remote side road well away from Duval's home to replace the licence plates with the proper ones again and dispose of the stolen ones. They changed clothes to something a little less filthy and burned the old ones. The rifles were wiped down, just in case, and buried with the licence plates. Any evidence they could dispose of, they did.
They didn't want to risk crossing a border with a kidnapping victim in the car but they didn't need to. They just had to get well away from Duval's château. Yassen didn't want to run the risk of interrogating him. He simply wanted the man to vanish and had the contacts to make a body disappear without question or trace.
Alex and Shale's destination was an address in the south of France and an undoubtedly fake name to get in touch with. They couldn't risk a hotel but stopped at a deserted rest stop to give Duval another round of sedative and catch a brief nap.
Up close, the man looked harmless. Like any other middle-aged male. Alex looked away before he could be reminded of just how human Duval looked when he was sedated. The man was cold-blooded and ruthless, had been ready to have Alex shot if there had been the slightest doubt about his suitability as Yassen's second, but he still looked deceptively harmless now.
Duval was still alive, with no bad reaction to the drug, but there was already a running countdown, Alex knew. Even if Duval hadn't already been marked for removal, the lack of water would get to him eventually.
Alex called ahead, a brief conversation with the contact to agree on a time and rattle off the all-clear codes that both sides expected, and a few hours later, in the very early morning, they found themselves staring at a small crematorium in an idyllic, secluded part of the countryside.
For a moment, they just stared. Then Shale shrugged.
"Efficient, I guess," he said and got out.
Alex hesitated but followed a moment later. Efficient. The pragmatic sort of solution that Yassen favoured. Alex wasn't even sure why he was surprised.
Shale hauled Duval's unconscious body over his shoulder. Yassen's contact met them by the door.
"Do you have an appointment?" he asked in French.
"Arranged for by our father," Alex replied.
The man nodded, satisfied with the expected response, and let them into the silent building, past what Alex assumed were the normal, public areas and into a room in the back. Their contact watched as Shale dropped his cargo on the sole bit of furniture there, a metal table on wheels to one side. Then he frowned slightly.
"The body is still alive," the man told Alex, switching to English. "The agreement was a dead one."
Right. The nausea was back – an overdose of the sedative was an option, but he would need to go get the rest of the drug in the car – but before he could do anything, Shale took the two steps to Duval's unconscious body. Alex looked away the moment he recognised Shale's grip on the man's head, familiar from Malagosto and Yassen's lessons, but it did nothing to hide the sickening crack that followed as Shale snapped Duval's neck.
It sounded horribly loud in the still room. Shale checked for any pulse and glanced at their contact. "One dead body."
The man nodded swiftly. If he was bothered in the least by the murder, it didn't show. "Clean and neat. A pleasure to do business with you."
A solid stack of cash changed hands. The body would be cremated, the ashes carefully disposed of. No evidence.
One more murder for his count. Alex hadn't finished it, but he had still been in charge. All of a sudden, he wanted out of there. Away from the creepy stillness and the thought of the many dead bodies that had passed through the building.
"Let's go," he said.
Shale seemed to agree. Neither spoke until they were outside again and Alex took a deep, shuddering breath of clean, cold air. His hands were trembling; the sudden crash of adrenaline from days of tension and the moment he realised he wouldn't have to handle Duval's murder himself. He wanted to say something, anything, but before he could, Shale broke the silence.
"You're fifteen," he said quietly. "You've killed enough already without adding that sort of clean-up to the list. SCORPIA's opinions can go hang."
A surge of something flooded Alex – relief and wild gratitude and the quiet horror of a murder committed in front of his eyes – and he shuddered against his will.
He hadn't wanted to. He could have done it, Yassen had made him prove it at Malagosto, but Shale had made sure he wouldn't have to, and -
"Thank you," Alex said just as quietly and tried to put everything into those words.
Up ahead was the first, faint light of winter dawn. Alex didn't take the time to admire it. Just got in the car with Shale and let the man take the wheel. They followed the winding road around a corner. Behind them, the crematorium vanished from view.
Alex didn't look back.
Next: Sometimes Alex suspects the debriefings take longer than the assassinations do.
