by A. M Surtees
Jackson handed the five of us our tickets and instructed that we meet at Tullamarine Airport at 4am the following morning for the five thirty flight. This gave us the chance to get some things packed since we had no clue how long this would take. The last time we had an ‘all hands on deck’ case, we were gone for three and a half weeks.
This time, it was one of us and the attacker was trying to hurt us all. This, was going to take a while.
Chapter six
I was the second to arrive at the airport that morning. Approaching the counter to check in, I spotted Braxton Hughes, a six foot four, solidly built man with eyes the colour of honey and sunkissed blonde hair that hung in narrow waves around his broad shoulders. He too, was an assassin but his targets were mob bosses and corporate leaders. He worked those cases where you needed less sex appeal, more muscle.
Third to arrive was Marcy Hooper. Even though at only five foot two with brilliant blue eyes and jet black hair that was always worn in pigtails, don’t let her small frame and gentle looks fool you. She was a third tier black belt in Brazillian Jiu Jitsu and has brought down Brax before. Much to his surprise.
Marcy was in the same field as Mack; a computer hacker. She has yet to find a security system that she couldn’t get into. Her main role in Sydney would be to gain access to the secure server without a password to try and find something she calls a digital footprint which is like a mark that hackers can sometimes leave behind when they break into a system. This would help us to narrow down our search and answer the question as to whether or not the system was breached by a hacker, or with a password. If they used a password then our list would instantly get a lot shorter and it would confirm our fears of it being an inside job. Hopefully she could also back trace the breach and secure the stolen files. Knowing what was taken would put us one step ahead and help us to figure out what the point of all this was.
Fourth at the gate was James ‘The Garbage Man’ McLaren. Standing at around 5 foot 8 with a muscular build and your typical marines haircut, dark grey eyes that in some lights looked almost black and a deep cockney accent. He was scary when he had a job to do. Otherwise he was actually quite sweet and liked to prove that chivalry wasn’t dead after all.
James was, for lack of a better term, the garbage man – hence the nickname. He was the one we called to make bodies disappear and man was he good at his job. That being said, it was somewhat difficult to find a body that was no longer whole. The thought of what he does to those bodies terrified and impressed me to equal measure. For larger marks - and by larger I mean girth, not importance – he would filet the excess flesh around the thighs and stomach, taking it home to his two great danes who would spend all day chewing their way through it. Good luck finding a body when their flesh is in the digestive tract of dogs.
With fifteen minutes to spare before check in closed, arrived Dimitri Vermatov, a Russian doctor who brings a horrifyingly precise set of skills to the fold. Dimitri is six foot two with defined abdominals, chiselled features, well kept blonde hair and blue eyes the colour of the warm skies in spring. On a physical level he was the kind of man that women would lose sleep thinking about. Especially if he spoke to them with his smooth Russian accent.
The catch? While he was a qualified medical practitioner, even having a practice of his own back in Russia that he operated in for about five years before he came home to find his wife in bed with his brother. In Russia, family was everything so the betrayal from his brother sent him somewhere dark. He closed his practice and became a vigilante of sorts, capturing law breakers and making their deaths as slow and excruciating as humanly possible. It wasn’t long before he caught the attention of Jackson and was offered to move to Australia and work for us. The allure of being paid handsomely for his work was all it took and he was on the next plane here.
Now he’s sort of the middle man. We kill them, he turns the bodies into something disposable and James disposes of it. They do get their own targets though but for the most part it’s a team effort. Its when James and Dimitri pair up that things get a little unsettling. Actually a lot unsettling.
One job they did together still makes my skin crawl to even think about it. The mark was a drug dealer in Coburg that was selling drugs at the local schools, luring girls as young as eight years old into his van to pump them full of drugs and rape them. Usually we left such trivial marks to the police, sending them anonymous tips to lead them in the right direction, but this one was one of those ‘personal’ cases. One of this guys victims was Abbey, Jackson’s then fifteen year old niece.
The boys, who together are called ‘The Garbage Men’ were ready and waiting the next day for him to show up and like the predictable junkie he was, rolled around in his white van with blacked out windows fifteen minutes before school was set to let out for the day.
Police had been looking for this guy for months but it took Jackson less than three hours to find out where he would be targeting next. The police really needed to upgrade their resources. Safe to say when reports stopped coming in of new victims, the police counted it as a blessing and assumed he had been killed but didn’t ask questions. They were just thankful to finally be able to close the case.
James hijacked the van and drove it to a secure farmhouse on the outskirts of town, followed behind by Dimitri who barely waited for James to stop the van before forcing open the rear door and dragging out the dealer by his knotted amber hair.
Tying him to the chair that sat in the middle of the shearing barn atop a sheet of plastic, Dimitri sealed his mouth with thick grey tape while James brought in the tools they would need for the task.
Dimitri withdrew a medical bag and raised a small needle containing a clear fluid, waving it in front of the dealers face and chuckling as tears welled up in his eyes before plunging it and several others like it, into various parts of the body. It was a local anaesthetic so that while the dealer remained awake, he wouldn’t actually feel the pain. This was by no means considered merciful. It just meant that he would suffer on a psychological and visual level, rather than a physical one. Besides, the pain would make you pass out long before the fear would. Which was exactly what Dimitri wanted to avoid.
The screams were muffled by the tape as James used a filleting knife to peel back small slivers of the dealer’s flesh, throwing them into the bag that Dimitri held open for him. They were going to take their time and he deserved it. The things he did to these girls, to Abbey, were things even I wouldn’t do. No matter the price.
James had sliced off almost half the epidermal layer of skin from the legs, arms and torso when he handed the knife over to Dimitri who after giving him a blood thickener to slow the blood loss as much as medically possible before causing an instantaneous stroke, started to peel away at the dermal and subcutaneous layers, exposing the nerves and muscles that were tucked underneath. The visual dismemberment was enough to cause the dealer to pass out, waking straight back up with a jolt when Dimitri injected him with adrenaline, his screams becoming heaving sobs as he made numerous attempts to beg for mercy.
That was when things got hectic. Dimitri cut the sides of the dealers underwear before allowing James the pleasure of the assassins take on a circumcision. While Dimitri was the doctor and could have probably done a sufficient job, James was the butcher who knew how to carve deli meats so that every slice was exactly the same thickness. And that’s what he did. With a carving knife, he held the tool the dealer had used to hurt these girls, between the blade and his thumb and sliced it up like a roll of salami. Hearing about that part made me vomit and turned Jackson’s face a ripe shade of green. I think if they hadn’t described it the way they did, even he would have lost his lunch. Safe to say none of us ate salami for quite a while after that story.
One thing James and Dimitri both had in abundance, was patience. They understood the poetry of taking their time with a mark, of making every moment count. That was what made them so impressive. Dimitri knew how to capitalise on the fear and
James knew how to filet with such a finesse it was almost like a dance the way he moved with a blade in his hand. To a kill he would take his knife roll that contained a different knife for every action, including a cleaver that would glide through muscles and tendons like butter and would cut through bones as if they were loaves of freshly baked bread.
After almost six hours the dealers heart finally stopped beating and that was when the dance began. With swift motions the body came apart, the meaty flesh dislodged from the bones which were bagged separately. By the time they were done, James and Dimitri were able to fit the entirety of what was once a human being into one reusable plastic grocery bag and two twenty litre tubs. The bones would be ground down into mulch and combined with soil and fertiliser before it was donated to the community garden and the meat was skinned and minced then what wasn’t fed to the danes, was gifted to the animal shelters. The communities were always grateful for the donations and no one ever suspected a thing. That was what made the boys so highly sought after. On their own they were dangerous. Together they were downright diabolical.
Chapter seven
After checking in to the hotel under the pseudonym of Rose Hathaway – the badass lead character from one of my favourite books, I took a quick shower to freshen up before meeting up with the other guys at the bar downstairs to discuss possible ways of bringing down the person who infiltrated the Sydney office and put Penelope in intensive care.
I had been placed in charge of operation by Jackson because he knew that it was as personal for me as it was for him and after being around the system for the last twelve years, I knew the way things were run like the back of my hand. However it also landed me the responsibility of assigning tasks to each of the others and ensuring that everything ran smoothly.
“Ok guys, I know Jackson put me in charge here, but I really need for this to be a team effort if we are going to catch this bastard.”
“Pfft, you just don’t want to be the one who gets chewed out by Jackson if the mission gets screwed up.” Marcy snorted in a tone that made it clear she was neither happy to be here nor happy to be taking commands from me. She might have a problem with me, but now was not the time for her personal vendetta.
“Marcy, you don’t have to be here if you don’t want to. I can call Jackson and we can have you on the first flight back to Melbourne tomorrow but be warned that if you got on that plane, your time with us would be over.” My voice was firm and commanding. She knew I was serious which was obvious by her slinking back into her chair with the same expression one would expect from a high school student who had just been threated expulsion by the headmaster.
“Just so everyone is aware, if this mission goes pear shaped because of us not working together as a team, not only will we all cop a ‘chew out’ as Marcy so eloquently put it, but we will all be arrested and thrown in jail for the rest of our lives. We’ve all broken the law in this line of work, I mean hell, I’ve lost count of the bodies I’ve dropped in the last eight years. James and Dimitri have done the same, so has Braxton and Marcy, so have you. Maybe you should get on google and check the minimum sentence for breaching Australian Federal Police databases to make fake criminal records, or to create fake identities without permission, hmm?” My tone turning to a softer, more concerning tone, “Why do you think Jackson picked us? Because the five of us are not only the best he has, but we also have the most to lose if the system is compromised.”
“She’s right Marce” chimed in Braxton “If she goes down, we all go down and that includes you.”
Working together was going to be tough. Myself and the boys especially, were accustomed to working solo, or in the case of James and Dimitri who sometimes teamed up, pairs, but we all had a very different way of getting the job done. I cant really imagine the boys using sex appeal to get close to a mark and I cant imagine there will ever be a day where I’d be willing to cut someone up, even if I do think the way James operates is borderline artistic genius.
Unlike the rest of us, Marcy was more of a ‘hands off’ kind of girl. She was much happier staying behind a desk and only ever got out in the field if there was a computer system that couldn’t be hacked from the base and that was very rarely. If the information on the servers hadn’t been compromised then we wouldn’t have even brought her but there was no way we would be able to back track the stolen files so we needed her behind a computer as much as she needed us out there knocking heads for information. The only way we were going to solve this and save all of our jobs would be if we worked together as a team because in Sydney, the only ones we can count on to not be corrupt, is each other. As soon as we walked into that building, everyone would be a suspect until we could prove otherwise.
James volunteered to join the agents that had already been stationed at the hospital in case the attacker came back to finish the job with Penelope and keep her from ever identifying her attacker. That’s assuming the possibility she even saw her attacker and this wasn’t a blindsided attack which could kill any chance we had of gaining any possible leads.
Agreeing with the idea I suggested that Dimitri to go to the hospital as well. With his medical background, he would be extremely useful when it came to getting information from the treating doctors and both getting a clear idea of Penelope’s injuries and a possible timeline for recovery.
Braxton was instructed to visit Penelope’s apartment since that is where she was attacked. We might be able to get some kind of clue from there that would help us narrow down a list of possible suspects. Even something as simple as identifying the gender of her attacker would cut our search in half. Not knowing if this was done by a male or a female, friend, foe or colleague, makes it that much harder to even begin to track down the person we were after.
That left me and Marcy. Oh the joys of working side by side with a self-righteous little computer nerd. I needed to quickly learn to better manage my enthusiasm if I was going to be working in such close proximity to her. I mean hell, if I’m jumping for joy all the time at working side by side with my bestest buddy in the whole wide world, however will she get any work done? There wasn’t really any animosity between Marcy and I but we just irked each other. It wasn’t anything personal, sometimes two people just don’t get along.
Together we would head up to Sydney headquarters and while she was making her way into the system and noting down every employee code that had been entered for file access in the last six months, I would be interrogating until they cried or confessed. These weren’t my people but Penelope was and one of these people hurt her, or invited someone else to hurt her and when I found them, I was going to hurt them and then when Jackson gave the order, I was going to end them. No sex appeal needed for this one. This was war.
In Melbourne I may rely for the most part on being sexually appeasing for the marks, but I did also have other tricks that were sometimes called upon even when sex wasn’t required. For one thing, I have a special knack for spotting a liar a mile away. Growing up on the streets teaches you a thing or two about survival and knowing who you can trust and who is just out to make your life hell is one of them. But every skill brings a downside. Like my ability to see right through people, ended up breaking me down completely.
When your very own mother says to you, “My darling girl, I just want you to come home and let me take care of you” and you know that what she really means is “Your step father is going to leave if I don’t get you to come home so he can continue to assault you while I’m in the other room” it tends to tear you up a bit. That’s when I decided that no one would get the better of me again. Instead, I would use their animalistic desires to lure them in and then I would put a bullet in them for good measure. Getting paid handsomely for it was just an additional perk.
Some say it takes someone with a truly dark heart to take the life of another human being, to take away their choice to live and you know what, they’re probably right. But when I do engage sexually with a mark, most of the time it’s not even them I im
agine opening my legs to. It’s my step father. Sick, I know, but it’s the only way I can stay completely detached and ensure I never miss the shot afterwards. My blind hatred for him is what keeps me killing without fear of remorse.
In the beginning I will see them, I will call them by their name to get them excited but once their hunger reaches a certain point, I switch off and begin to picture my step father, every detail of him burned into my mind after abuse that started when I was nine years old until I finally got up the courage to run three years later. I would hear the sounds he made and the things he would say whenever he caught himself with his pants down and alone in a room with me.
By the time my marks reached climax, they were no longer the name on the work order. They were Dwayne Andrews. A man with no shame, no compassion, no understanding of boundaries. A child molesting piece of garbage who filled me with a rage that could not be satiated with anything less than the glorious sensation of watching him die. Over and over again, mark after mark, bullet after bullet. There would never be a person on this earth who had the ability to enrage and terrify me to equal measure. Jackson ensured me that one day I would get my chance but as long as he remained with my mother, we all knew she would turn me in so I had to wait until she either left or died and then he was done for. That was a day that couldn’t come sooner.
Sometimes I would dream about the day I finally got to kill him rather than images of him I created in my marks. I would cross the line between punishment and torture, enlisting James and Dimitri to help me make his death not just brutal, but poetic. The problem was that even though I was a trained assassin now, the idea of being in the same room with him forced me against my will, to retreat back into the image of that sweet, innocent, wouldn’t hurt a fly, damaged little girl and that thought terrified me to the very core.
