Night of the Assassin (Assassin Series 4_prequel) (7 page)

Sure they do
, he thought. Two hundred pesos worth, to be exact. Including the cheesy canned tunes and the gypsy act. He wished she’d get on with it. He could think of a dozen different things he’d rather be doing with Jasmine just now, all of them involving nudity and absent an old crone’s ramblings.

The woman began her reading, and paused at the end after she’d revealed all the cards. The boy was absently studying the photos on the stained wall behind her, his attention caught by a photograph of a raven, or crow, perched on a barbed-wire fence. Something about it chilled his blood, but he didn’t know why. He’d tuned out her prattle in favor of making productive use of his time, thinking thoughts worthy of his energy rather than listening to superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

His awareness grudgingly returned to the table, pulled from the photo of the crow, as the putative Madame contemplated the meaning of the cards. She pointed at several, with a trembling finger.

“This is Death. It’s placement in the reading is ominous. It can signal many things, but in this sequence, it hints that you will be constantly surrounded by death.” The woman continued droning, but the boy was zoning out again.
Gee, good guess
. Living in Culiacan, with
Don
Miguel as your protector and benefactor, you’re going to be surrounded by death. What a stretch, and a surprise to one and all. The nonstop weapons and survival training that Jasmine had no doubt chatted with the woman about couldn’t have been a tipoff or anything. Hell, all he had to do was close his eyes and he could bring death to the surface, fresh as though it had only occurred just yesterday. Incredibly insightful so far. He was getting his money’s worth. What was next? Danger? Uncertainty?

“And this, the defining card, is the King of Swords. But it’s inverted. Which is a negative sign. It can mean many things, most of which involve destruction and selfish consequences…”

“Inverted?” the boy asked, finally interested in something she’d said.

“It’s upside down,” the medium explained in a tremulous voice.

“Not to me,” the boy observed. He was sitting opposite her.

They were both correct.

The reading drew to an uncomfortable close, the woman seeming suddenly anxious to be rid of them. No doubt she’d done her shtick for the two hundred pesos and was hoping for more revenue for the day. The boy couldn’t believe anyone would buy this hackneyed song and dance and he was annoyed when Jasmine lingered, murmuring with the old biddy, as they both flicked furtive glances at him.

Once they had ridden their bicycles back home, Jasmine seemed withdrawn and distant, showing no interest in a romantic interlude. She hadn’t responded well to the boy’s mockery of the reading, taking it as a personal affront to her sacred beliefs. In retrospect, he could have chosen his few words with more kindness. ‘Baffling bullshit’ could be misinterpreted, as could ‘superstitious idiocy’.

Whatever the woman’s ability to divine the future, one thing changed forever from that afternoon on. Jasmine and he were never the same, which he directly attributed to the vicious old witch’s black predictions. She had the ability to foretell the future, all right, in that she had initiated a subtle campaign to undermine their relationship, for who knew what reason. But he learned quickly that the power of superstition could be significant – a lesson he would carry forward with him into life. And he vividly remembered the final card that seemed to have such an effect on the old faker – the oldest of the tarot face cards, the reversed King of Swords.

The previous months had passed with the topic of how to deal with the romantic
fait-accompli
aired often among the elders. It was a constant sticking point between Emilio and the ladies. Emilio was of the opinion that if the boy was going to be sampling his precious hothouse flower’s bounty, he should plan on getting married, the sooner the better. The ladies argued against any sort of confrontation, partially because of who he was, as well as mitigating their youth. Neither Jasmine nor the boy had been aware of the seething disagreement their tryst caused, not that either of them would have been particularly interested in the older adults’ opinions. Youth believed in its supremacy, as always, and the young were typically convinced that the aged had little grasp of how the modern world worked.

Emilio and the ladies were terrified that the boy would use Jasmine for his pleasure and then break her heart, and so it was with considerable surprise that Emilio found the boy to be increasingly moody and dejected as his sixteenth summer wore on. When Emilio confronted him, the confession that the couple had been intimate came as no shock, but his complaint that Jasmine had grown disinterested in him and decided that they weren’t compatible did. Emilio didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved, but the boy was suffering, as only those experiencing the tender cuts of young love can, so he redoubled his training and poured on the challenges. The boy lapped it up, growing more adept each day, and eventually moved beyond his infatuation with Jasmine, even as she showed no further interest in him. It was as though a switch had been thrown – she’d swung from obviously enamored to wanting nothing to do with him, confounding not only the boy, but also the adults. Still, Emilio sensed that there was unfinished business between the two, and got the impression from the boy that his passage to other girls would be a bitter one, tainted by Jasmine’s memory.

From the boy’s perspective, Jasmine’s rejection was an abandonment, serving to remind him how foolish it was to trust others or allow them into your emotional life. It was during that sixteenth summer that he made the mental resolution to be an island, impenetrable and aloof, using others for his convenience but nothing more. For the first time in his life he’d opened up and entrusted Jasmine with his heart, only to be repaid by her spitting in his face for his trouble. His rigid training provided the solution: never allow anyone to get close, never reveal your true self, and never care.

And so it was that he found a philosophy that was useful, that afforded him some relief in his time of confused pain. Others had no innate value beyond what they could do to further his agenda or satisfy his needs. They were objects that only existed as minor moons orbiting his solar system, in which he was the sun – the giver of life and the destroyer of worlds. His narcissism was not unusual for isolated youths who found every task or challenge laughably easy, but the combination of his past and Jasmine’s snubbing of him, transformed him into the very character that the old medium woman had described when articulating the meaning of the reversed King of Swords – a selfish megalomaniac who would go to any lengths to satisfy his needs, even if it resulted in the destruction of others.

The boy had slim interest in considering the ramifications of his chosen worldview. His training now consumed all of his free hours as he sought to exceed even the highest bars Emilio could conjure as challenges. He’d increased his Dojo sessions to five times a week and had become adept in most of the offered techniques. His school had graduated him early due to his advanced academic performance so he set about studying engineering and architecture in earnest, mainly as a guide to understanding how things operated or were built. He had a ravenous intellect unlike any of his instructors had ever seen; a young man who could do or be whatever he wanted. The future was beyond bright for him and he soon discovered that there were many willing young females who sought his attention – and so, in time, Jasmine became a distant memory.

The remainder of his sixteenth year was spent in rigorous pursuit of excellence, whether they were intellectual, physical, or defense-related endeavors. His teen years were a defining period, where he honed his proficiency to a razor’s edge. Never before had Emilio seen someone who could shoot as well or expertly disappear into the woods without a sound and become untraceable, or swim as athletically, or remain inscrutable through any circumstance. The discipline Emilio had sought to instill had yielded incredible dividends. The boy was almost superhuman in his commitment and self-possession. It was as though providence had blessed him with a surplus of fitness and acuity. By the time he was due to turn seventeen, Emilio was satisfied that his work with the boy was done. He’d made the transition from boy into young man, and the world was now his playground, to do with as he liked.

Which made it all the more surprising when he vanished without a trace on the morning of his seventeenth birthday.

Eleven Years Ago

The navy base in Veracruz, Mexico was expansive, crawling with personnel and equipment. This was the primary headquarters for the Gulf region and was where the specialized training for the country’s equivalent of the SEALs took place – the
Fuerzas Especiales
, or special forces. This elite team had just been created after a reorganization of the Navy’s marine infantry – the marines. The brass had decided it needed a special response organization that was trained to far higher standards than the already elite marines, and so they formed a group of five hundred specialist commandos, to be trained in explosives, parachuting, military diving, sniping, urban combat and vertical descent. They would be Mexico’s ultimate ninja squad, to be used in the most dangerous of circumstances, on the most hazardous of missions.

After the young man had abruptly departed Sinaloa he’d floated around Mexico for a few months, creating the appropriate paperwork so that he could join the navy under a new identity. He quickly impressed his commanding officers with his supernatural weapons capabilities and was placed on the fast track for the new group. He was the dream candidate for the job: young, athletic, a prodigy with weapons, smart, fearless, and extremely tough. If there had ever been a vocation specially made for him, being one of the new navy commandos was it. Even the motto resonated with him –
Fuerza, Espiritu, Sabiduria
. Force, Spirit and Wisdom. He had all three in abundance and he’d arrived at the perfect place to continue the education he’d begun with Emilio. Much as he’d liked his mentor, it was clear to him that he’d learned all he could and needed to go somewhere designed to produce professionals if he was going to progress as he wanted.

He’d signed up a few months after his seventeenth birthday, although his new paperwork put his age at eighteen and a half. That was a necessary artifice, as was his selection of a name so that he could start anew, without any baggage from his past. The young man was now calling himself Raul Terenova, which was as good as any other, he supposed. Names were unimportant to him. They were disposable, as was most everything in his life.

Raul excelled in the brutal training conditions, which truth be told were kinder and more relaxed than the ones he’d imposed upon himself for years. But he learned a lot, especially on the explosives side. There was nothing like the military to proffer the kind of training you just couldn’t get in civilian life, no matter what you did. His goal was to be an expert in every aspect of combat the special forces could teach him, and with his tenacity and discipline, he’d quickly climbed to the top of his class and established records. He became the model for all men who would follow, demanding more from himself than anything his trainers could have mustered. Young Raul was far more motivated than any of his classmates to get all he could out of his service years. He viewed them as a stepping stone, whereas his peers would go on to be career soldiers.

Becoming a naval commando had been an idea he’d grown fixated with when he was sixteen, after reading about the service’s plans to create a specialized group of super soldiers. He didn’t have any burning desire to become a marine but if he was going to excel in the field he’d been contemplating, the more skills he had, the more valuable he would be. None of which he told his recruiting officer. To the navy, he’d presented himself as a fiercely patriotic young man who wanted to escape from a dull existence at home in rural Chiapas and don a uniform that would get him instant respect – and a life of adventure and action.

During basic training, he had stood out as far above the quality of the other green recruits. His scores on the written exams had floored the instructors. Here was a candidate who was blisteringly smart, who could swim like a fish, shoot like a marksman, and had the physical prowess of a professional athlete. There had been no question about moving him ahead of the queue and putting him into the specialized marine training – and from there it became obvious that he should be one of the new elite commandos.

Today, they were working on specialized sniping – long range, which was considered to be anything over a thousand meters, or almost thirty-three hundred feet. At such extreme distances, a variety of elements came into play, including wind strength and direction, humidity, temperature, elevation, and rate of movement if it wasn’t a stationary target. While there were recorded instances of snipers successfully killing from more than twenty-four hundred meters, those were considered anomalies. At sixteen hundred meters, the target was a mile away. To hit that distance with accuracy was considered virtually impossible, although advents like laser rangefinders and computer software that would calculate the various elements had improved the odds.

The day’s exercise was on targets at a confirmed distance of a thousand meters, or roughly three quarters of a mile. The rifle they were using for the exercise was an American-manufactured Barrett M82, a .50 caliber rifle with an effective range of eighteen hundred meters, or considerably over a mile, although accuracy became iffy after nine hundred to a thousand meters. Sixteen hundred meters was considered acceptable if you were trying to hit a bomb or something larger than a human torso, but there were too many variables that could affect accuracy. Many snipers preferred the smaller .338 rifles for precision, however, the official sniper rifle for the marines was the Heckler & Koch PSG1 firing a 7.65 millimeter round. The problem was that the weapon’s accuracy dropped off at eight hundred meters, so special forces had secured fifteen of the much larger payload Barrett rifles as a trial for standardization – to substitute the PSG1.