Disclaimer: I don't own Human Target and intend no copyright infringement
Unfortunately their mysterious assassin didn't take her first encounter with Joubert as a bad omen.
Unusual, actually.
Most assassins - and criminals in general, for that matter - were highly superstitious. Joubert had always made a point of not letting his boys fall into this behavior and severely punished all signs of belief in the supernatural. Allowing that kind of stuff would have meant opening the floodgates for outside manipulation. Religion would have been okay, but that question never arose, neither with Chance nor with Baptiste, despite his name.
The assassin returned the very next day, apparently hell-bent to dispatch Brax as spectacularly as possible. Luckily Baptiste discovered the gas in the ventilation shaft to Brax' room before it could knock half the hospital out for a week. At least their adversary seemed to have some kind of scruples regarding collateral damage. The gas was so carefully composed, its concentration would have only killed all living creatures directly exposed to a concentration of more than eighty percent, e.g. only those people who happened to be in Brax' room at the time the substance was set free. Too bad for any nurses, doctors or cleaning personnel that happened to stop by, but the rest of the hospital's staff and patients would only have suffered from side effects such as nausea, massive headaches and numbness in the extremities.
Yeah, granted, "only" is quite the euphemism, considering that these symptoms would for the most part affect people already in some sort of a critical condition, but well, apparently she was not willing to become a mass murderer over this job.
Or maybe she was just working cost-effectively. Killing hundreds of innocent people would inevitably make her the target of fierce persecution by all branches of law enforcement... while the investigation of the single death of a notorious criminal would probably be dropped within a couple of weeks.
For the next five days, while Brax slowly recovered from the bacterial infection that Baptiste and Joubert so complicatedly had arranged for him by contaminating his drinking water, the two men were busy as beavers… with saving Brax from the still unidentified threat. Poison, blackmailed doctors, hidden needles... nothing seemed to be beneath that woman. Damn, she was resourceful! Not to mention that Baptiste and Joubert were faced with the extra trouble of having to do all that saving quietly, behind Brax' and his bodyguards' backs, so they wouldn't alert his organization and set the War of the Diadochi in motion.
"I'm getting too old for this!" Joubert snarled furiously on the third day as they struggled to clamber out of the hospital's central waste collection point. "This really makes retirement look appealing after all!" He wiped traces of vanilla pudding off his forehead and picked a piece of lettuce from his jacket.
"Retirement is not a bad thing", Baptiste replied, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he caught sight of why his hands felt so sticky. "You should find yourself a nice place in the sun and a lady friend. Maybe you should come visiting Greta and me... they've got plenty of property for sale there... we could be neighbors."
A vague shadow, unnoticed by Baptiste, flickered across the Old Man's face at the mentioning of Greta.
"So this is not enough to call you back into the Game?", he asked Baptiste, forced ironic smirk on his face that finally didn't escape his old employee's notice.
"Rolling around in rotten food and risking suffocation in ventilation shafts? Yeah, that's tempting..." Baptiste let the sentence trail off, kept his eyes trained on the Old Man. If he said something now... if he gave him another reason why he should get back into business... as Joubert's partner...
But then another load of garbage came down, they had to get out of the way and the moment was gone.
... ... ...
On the last day of Brax' stay at the hospital the assassin outdid herself. B. Brax didn't have many weaknesses, but one of his soft spots was definitely his love for cars. He had a garage full of classic cars, but his most cherished possession was a silver blue 1965er Corvette Stingray with black factory leather interior, a completely rebuilt 327/300 hp engine, AM/FM radio and four speed manual transmission. Brax' driver thanked God every day for granting him the opportunity to handle this treasure on wheels that he would have never been able to afford even in his wildest dreams.
Would he still have thanked God, had he known about the intricately designed little bomb underneath the car, set to explode once he drove faster than 40 mph?
Baptiste and Joubert had to ad hoc organize car mechanic uniforms and a car repair shop where they could work in peace. Not to mention the fact that they somehow had to talk the driver into letting them give the car a quick check up before he went to pick up his boss.
They paid a hooker, one of the expensive ones, to tell the driver some story about a special promotional offer, today only, for vintage cars... to solve the problem of the location they assailed an elderly car repair shop owner.
They really tried to be gentle with him, drugged him with a carefully considered dosage of ketamine through injection before he even had a chance to realize what was going on. He was sleeping on a makeshift bed in a backroom of the shop now.
"I seriously don't know how Junior could choose to make a living out of this." Baptiste wiped sweat from his forehead. "This is frustrating as hell - one problem not even solved, the next already shows up. And all the boundaries because of possible collateral damage... What a nightmare. He should have let me kill him…"
Joubert chuckled. "He always was like that, even back when he was in the business. Remember how he risked everything to save those sharks instead of simply shooting them and cutting them up?"
They both laughed at Junior's foolishness.
"I could have never killed him", Baptiste suddenly said.
They both stopped laughing. For a moment, silence reigned.
"I know", Joubert finally replied. "Shouldn't have asked that of you."
"And now look where he brought us." Baptiste laughed again.
Joubert thought of Ash and how ready the boy was to cross the boundaries his father fought so hard to respect. Only a little more patience...
"Yeah, look where he brought us...", the Old Man mumbled.