Assassin's Shadow

by Striker, Randy

  A rather pretty woman in her early forties sat behind the lone desk. She looked up when I came in. She had short brown hair and wore bifocals around her neck on a cord. I told her I wanted to enroll, and she fluttered about, concerned that I hadn’t made arrangements beforehand. She took some literature from a drawer and watched me closely while I read the price sheet. The courses were a week long. Three carefully monitored meals a day were provided. No tobacco, alcohol, or “outside” foods were allowed on the island. And it was unbelievably expensive.

  The rich are uncomfortable talking about money—small amounts of money, anyway. And to a very rich person, this would seem like a small amount.

  I slid the literature back on the desk. “This is fine,” I said. There was a pad and pen on the desk, and I took it without asking. “Please call my bank—I’m writing the number here—and have them draft a check. Also tell them to include a twenty percent gratuity for my trainer and for whoever else might be working with me here.”

  She nodded quickly. “Very well, Mr. MacMorgan.”

  The number was real and the bank was real. I have never cared much about money, but the year before I had stumbled onto a very great sum of it in the shape of Spanish gold. The money was nowhere near worth the amount of lives it cost, but now that I had it, I kept it banked safely away in government bonds—complete with a CPA to do the worrying for me. It allowed me no real freedom—that’s an individual accomplishment, and it has nothing to do with wealth. What it did allow me was a few mild extravagances, like the very best equipment and maintenance for my boat, shoes and clothes that didn’t fall apart after a year’s wear, and the chance to help some friends financially.

  Those few things—and a week’s stay on the exclusive St. Carib Island.

  The woman typed out an application for me, asked a few questions about my general health and the amount of weight I wanted to lose, then shoved some papers in front of me to sign.

  “There!” she said, finally. “Now all you have to do is take this sheet to the infirmary for your physical.”

  “Physical?”

  She nodded. “I’m afraid it’s necessary, Mr. MacMorgan—insurance purposes, you know. But most of the enrollees arrived this morning and have already had theirs, so you won’t have to wait long.”

  “Good,” I said. “I hate lines.”

  She laughed brightly. “Oh, there will be no line—that I guarantee.”

  The infirmary was a long low building built of white board-and-batten with a red cross above the door. I let the screen door slam behind me when I went in. It smelled of alcohol and medicine. A stocky nurse told me to have a seat; the doctor was busy with someone else right now.

  I wasn’t alone in the waiting room. A woman in her early thirties sat in one of the plush chairs, face buried in a magazine. And when she looked up briefly, it didn’t take me long to recognize the face. There are only a handful of actresses recognized around the world: Bergman, Bacall, Loren, Garbo, and a few others. And she was one of the few—very, very few—others. I don’t see many movies, but this woman had a face no man could ever forget. There were the wide dark peasant eyes, the perfect curvature of nose and Slavic cheeks, breasts heavy beneath silk blouse, famous legs long and dark, disappearing into her skirt.

  She looked at me, returned to her magazine, then looked at me again. You would expect some of the sexual impact of the woman to be missing once removed from the magnification of the giant screen.

  But it was all there: a sensuous, tumid aura of sexuality. Very, very few people—male or female—have it, or have it in that quantity at least.

  I nodded and smiled.

  Her smile in return was unexpected. My wife had been in films before our marriage, so I had made the rounds at enough of the Hollywood-type parties to know most actors and actresses as the insecure, chipon-the-shoulder burrow creatures they really are.

  But hers wasn’t the bright frozen smile of the celebrity favoring a fan. Looking over the magazine, she eyed me with what seemed to be feline interest.

  She said, “Was it you I saw climbing out of that lovely blue boat a short time ago?” The accent was Italian; a humid alto voice.

  “That’s right.”

  She waited for me to say something else, and when I didn’t, she folded the magazine, stood up, and walked across the room toward me, hips rotating on perfect hinges. She held out her hand, and I took it.

  “My name is Sonya Casimur.”

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t already know.”

  She gave me her screen look of sudden vulnerability. “Ah, you’ve seen some of my work. I hope you weren’t too disappointed?”

  It wasn’t a question. It was a request for a compliment. But I had no compliment to offer. She was a beautiful woman, a beauty in the classic sense—certainly one of the most beautiful women in the world. But, in filling that role, it also seemed to imply that she was a property of the world—much as a great painting is thought to be a property of the world. And because of that, I found myself strangely uninterested in her. While her sensuality was very real—an almost tangible thing—the quality of her face, her voice, her being, seemed to be the inventions of a filmmaker. Or a dreamer. Maybe I was being unfair. But you can’t argue with your emotions.

  “I don’t know a thing about films,” I said. “Or acting.”

  “Oh?” she said, surprised. And then she laughed. “But it was you on the boat?”

  “You seem very interested in boats.”

  She gave me a vixen look, probing my eyes with hers. At that moment the bulky nurse came out. She said, “Miss Casimur, the doctor will see you now.”

  Sonya held my eyes momentarily before sweeping away. She said, “Perhaps it is the boat I am interested in.”

  “Perhaps?”

  There was the peasant smile beneath sensuous dark eyes. “The boat and perhaps something else. Perhaps . . .”

  10

  Sonya Casimur, the actress, arrived at my cottage unexpectedly about an hour later.

  I had taken the prescribed physical from a knobby little doctor with a smoker’s cough, took a minute to get my gear from aboard and batten down Sniper, then rambled up to my cabin to grab a shower before the afternoon classes began.

  A couple of months before, I had had a carpenter friend of mine build me a solid little hiding place for the tools of my new trade. Mounted flush into the fighting deck is a six-foot fish box. It is insulated, has dual drainage plugs, and possesses enough room to store a thousand pounds of fish and ice.

  He said it would take him a day. It took him almost a week. He cut out the fish box and set it aside temporarily. Using teak planking and endless yards of good rubber molding, he built a waterproof storage compartment beneath the fish box that even an expert would be hard-pressed to find. Open the fish box and you see absolutely nothing. But lift at the drainage holes, and the bottom slides away, revealing what looks like nothing more than teak deck. Pull at the brass hinges, and the deck swings up, exposing more space than I hope I ever need for my weaponry.

  So I wasn’t worried about leaving the things D. Harold Westervelt had given me aboard.

  My cottage was a neat little two-room board-and-batten antique that smelled of old wood and damp sand. There were about fifteen such cottages built in a row on the top of the mound by the shady walk. They all had names painted on signs: Mandango, Conch, Sanibel; names borrowed from the local islands and animal life. My cottage was Frigate. There was a sitting room with wicker furniture and seashells on the windowsills. The air conditioner clattered and wheezed like an old machine gun, and I switched it off in favor of the ceiling fan. I stowed my duffel bag beneath the brass bed, then stripped off my clothes.

  The bathroom smelled of soap and rank mineral deposits from the island water. But they kept the water good and hot, and I spent twenty soapy minutes sluicing the day away, finishing with a cold shower that burned the genitals and tightened the skin.

  And I had just wrapped a towel
around me, walking toward the little bedroom, when I saw someone standing at the screen door.

  “Yeah?”

  “I guess you didn’t hear me knock—but I see that I am interrupting your bath.”

  It was Sonya Casimur. She made no motion to leave.

  “So come on in.”

  “You’re only in a towel.”

  “And you’re only wearing a bathing suit. I can take it if you can.”

  She swung open the screen door, laughing. “So blunt, you Americans. So refreshing.” She wore a black one-piece suit cut so low in the back that the narrow valley of buttocks could be seen. The suit was tight, with a competitive quality to it, the kind you see on the female Olympic swimmers. It was taut over heavy breasts, showing the topographic outline of areola and nipple, and veed up sharply at the soft convexity of inner thigh. She had a towel wrapped around her neck, and her short black hair was mussed. “I stopped to see if you wanted to go for a swim.”

  “I thought this afternoon was when the drill instructors got ahold of us.”

  She grimaced and sank into one of the wicker chairs. “My God, don’t remind me. This is my second stay on St. Carib. After the first I vowed never to return.” She reached down meaningfully and gathered a thin wall of fat on her thighs between thumb and index finger. “But on film, even this much extra weight makes you look bloated. And I just don’t have the willpower to do it on my own.”

  She eyed me up and down, starting involuntarily at the shark-attack scar on my waist. “My God,” she said, “that’s awful.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot. I didn’t mention your chubby thighs—why should you mention my ugly scar?”

  Her eyes described wonderment. She couldn’t tell if I was joking or not.

  “My thighs—you think they really are fat!”

  “You’re a real porker, Sonya.”

  My grin keyed hers. It was a nice smile; some of theatrics gone from it. “You don’t like me, no? But why?”

  “I don’t even know you. But I am kind of curious about this come-on of yours. No, don’t give me that innocent look. I’m a bad audience. Why the unsolicited interest in me, Sonya?”

  She hesitated, wondering if she should stick with the film-vixen role. Finally, she decided better and dropped it altogether. It cut her Italian accent in half. She stood up and talked with her hands animatedly. “It’s this goddam spartan routine here! Jesus, I just don’t know if I can take another seven days and nights of it. The staff treats you like a bad soldier, and the fat men who are in the classes look at me like I’m something good to eat. Their mouths—they practically water. It gives me the—how do you say?—the goose bumps!”

  “But it was your decision to return. Why did you?”

  She practically exploded. “My decision? Hah! It’s that goddam agent of mine! He treats me like a naughty child when I gain a few pounds! He told me that if I weighed over fifty kilos before we started filming in Greece, he would send me here!”

  “You thought he was lying?”

  “Yes! That bastard doesn’t even know how to bluff—and he is fat himself!”

  I couldn’t help laughing. It came rolling out of me in long swells. She stood before me, every man’s vision of sexuality, every director’s dream, pouting like a child.

  “So how did you think I could help all that, Sonya?”

  A light came into her wide Italian eyes. “The boat is yours, no?”

  “The boat is mine, yes.”

  “You have food on the boat? Maybe some cigarettes and liquor?”

  “I have food and beer. No cigarettes.”

  “But that is something!” The charm came back into her voice; the theatrics returned to her smile. “If you would share those things with me, would it not be easier on both of us?” And when I didn’t react, she continued, “And maybe I could find a nice small part for you in my next film?”

  “I have no interest in being an actor, Sonya. And I’ve been looking forward to this little vacation for too long to take a chance of getting kicked out for breaking the rules.”

  The shock registered on her face. And then came the outrage. She practically sputtered. “You would deny me!”

  “I’m giving it my best shot.”

  “Why, you . . . you bastard.” For a moment I thought she was going to try to slug me. Instead, she whirled on bare feet and stomped out of the room, calling over her shoulder, “And that scar of yours! It is ver-r-ry ugly!”

  I got my first look at Samuel Yabrud that afternoon.

  It was at the first “general” workout. Later, they told us, we would be separated into coed groups based on the type of training we required. They had issued us all blue running shorts, high-quality running shoes, and expensive blue sweatsuits with St. Carib embroidered on the pocket. There were about forty of us, not counting the dozen or so instructors who strutted around barking orders. Most of the enrollees were middle-aged, more men than women. All wore the careful hairstyles of the successful executive, and they ranged from slightly overweight to very fat indeed.

  There was a boys’ camp atmosphere about the place. St. Carib’s wealthy pupils clapped their hands like cheerleaders, grinned and beamed, and jumped to every order. Seeing them, I could understand D. Harold’s theory about the place. These were the people Marina Cole would describe as Lions—some of the most successful Lions in the world, probably. And after bearing the weight of the Lion’s crown for a lifetime, they seemed more than happy to abdicate for a week. They had paid big money to be bossed and prodded and ordered about—and that’s damn well what they wanted.

  And got.

  It made them smile like children. For a week, they didn’t have a care in the world. They didn’t have to make a single decision or follow a financial trend, or worry about headlines in the Journal.

  And Samuel Yabrud was grinning and clapping his hands right along with the rest of them.

  He was an immensely fat man given to sweating. He was balding, black curly hair forming a wreath around his head, and the Semitic nose angled hawklike beneath heavy eyebrows. His weight made him look shorter than he was—maybe five eight—and his warmup covered him like a tent.

  We stood in lines of ten during the preliminary stretching exercises. I got as close to Yabrud as I could. On either side of him were younger, wellmuscled men wearing the same group uniforms. Their faces, hair, everything right down to their stoic expressions were right out of the CIA mold.

  There was no doubt in my mind who they were. And from the swift knowing looks they cast at me, there was no doubt in their minds who I was.

  They were Yabrud’s bodyguards, his personal shields lent him by the U.S. government in the event that FEAT’s assassin did take a shot.

  They were the defense.

  And I was the offense.

  One of them studied me for a moment, then gave me the slightest of nods. I nodded back. And I knew that unless one of us needed help very badly, a word would never be exchanged between us. They would stay in the background as much as possible, giving me latitude to work. But beyond that, they couldn’t offer much help. It was a thin line they had to walk. Assassinating an assassin—however necessary—fell under the heading of illegal activity. And the CIA was officially out of the illegal-activity business.

  And that’s why D. Harold Westervelt’s top-secret organization had had to be formed.

  So the St. Carib staff stretched us and bullied us, demanded enthusiasm with our calisthenics and supreme effort with our brief rope climb. Everyone else but the CIA duo huffed and puffed and labored. But I barely broke into a sweat. As far out of shape as I was, this was child’s play.

  It was during our slow lap around the island that Heiny came rumbling up beside me. I had taken care to stay behind Yabrud, so I was well toward the end of the pack. Even Sonya Casimur had loped past me, running deerlike—but not so fast she didn’t have time to contort her mouth and make a face at me.

  “Slowpoke!” she had yelled.
<
br />   And I had yelled back, laughing, “Some of that fat on your thighs must be muscle!”

  Heiny was grinning. He seemed happy to see me. He filled out the white staff warmup suit as if he were built of tapered cement.

  “My American friend, you run so slowly!”

  “Just saving my energy, Heiny.”

  “You got the bad leg?”

  “I’ve got two bad legs. And too much damn weight to carry.”

  “Hah! You kid old Heiny now. See!” He pointed ahead to where Samuel Yabrud chugged along. “Even that fat piggy is ahead of you. Could be you are running so slow that we will put you in Miss Casimur’s group?”

  “Now why would you think that?” I gave him a lockerroom grin, hoping he would think just that.

  “She is no fat piggy, yes? Very beautiful, that actress.” He made a cupping motion, hands to chest. “And nice bazooms, huh!”

  “She is certainly very pretty.”

  “Hey, Matrah knows that you are on the island,” he said suddenly.

  I looked at him. “Yeah?”

  “He allowed me a message to give you. Thinks that I hate you after last night. That is some laugh, huh?” He chuckled and actually slapped at his thigh. “Matrah wants to see you in his office before dinner.”

  “You think he’s going to kick me off the island?”

  “Kick you off? Hah! No, you have already paid the money. And he loves the money more than he hates you. But I do not know why he wants to see you. I talk to you later, my American friend. I arrange for you and Miss Casimur to be in the same group. Heiny can arrange the whole thing.” He trotted off toward the head of the pack, waving.

  St. Carib’s “experiential education” program was a lot like a plush boot camp for the wealthy and overweight. They prodded at the fears of the individual, then allowed the group to overcome them. They made us fall backward off a tower into the arms of four team members. They had us swing across a shallow ravine on a rope held only by the chubby hands of our group. Samuel Yabrud balked at that; said in perfect English that the physics of it was impossible. He said that he weighed too much and his team members weighed too little. That’s when the St. Carib staffers really got nasty. One of the slim Mediterraneans marched up to him and, nose to nose, dressed him down like a drill instructor. “Fat bastard” was the kindest thing he called him. I expected Yabrud, supposedly a master of international negotiation, to at least argue back. Instead, he cast his eye earthward like a bad child, walked dejectedly toward the rope, and made the swing after a long hesitation. And when he made it—successfully—the change that came over him and his group was amazing. They all held their fists high in the air like conquerors, hooting and slapping each other on the back.