Uncommon Assassins

by F. Paul Wilson

  She nodded and turned back to Bes’fariq. “Give him a shovel before he sets off—he has several here that he uses to clear the well after sandstorms. Give him a choice. He may go into the desert and dig his own grave, or, if he stays here ...”

  Bes’fariq cut her off with a laugh. “Or, if he stays here,” he finished for her, “I will kill him when we return, more slowly than even the desert might kill him, and cut his body into pieces. I will then strew them across the desert, so widely that not even Allah will find them to bring them to heaven. If that is your meaning, then you are worthy of me, Zumur’rad.”

  I raised my head. “You would desecrate my corpse?” I asked. “What kind of man are you?”

  “Then you have heard what we said, old man—you know what is expected. As for me, I am a strong man. A man who takes from wellmasters like you. Do you understand me?”

  “You have taken from other wellmasters?” I whispered my horror. “You would blaspheme Allah by raiding His gardens?”

  “You do understand me. We leave as soon as our camels are saddled. In five days time we will reach El Mraiti and join with my army. We will rest one day, then make our return, arriving back here on the eleventh day after this morning. Do you see those clouds?”

  I looked out the hut’s door to where he pointed and saw wisps of cloud high above to the north. Empty clouds, but, when one sees the first whiteness, he always hopes that others may follow. I did not speak, but only nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Those clouds will have long disappeared when eleven days have passed. You will be like those clouds—do you understand me?”

  I nodded again. “You will leave water bags and food—my knife and my clothing—along with a shovel and three dying camels. Enough to allow me to get as far, perhaps, as the Hamada before the beasts perish.”

  “You do understand me,” he said as before. He smiled and put his arm around Zumur’rad’s waist, and led her outside to where his men waited.

  Ten mornings ago I left Bir Ounane. In two days time I reached this wadi and slaughtered my camels, then made my camp. I buried my camels, the better to let their flesh grow putrescent. Away from the drying rays of the sun.

  I dug my own grave.

  I lie in it this morning, the stench of my camels—already nearly dead from their sickness before I killed them—assailing my nostrils. It vies with the rot of my own wounded leg, a rot that has long since spread itself into the rest of my body. I lie and wait, gazing north toward the Hamada, where new wisps are forming.

  I think about layers. And second rains.

  The phantom rain already fell this morning, boiling the stench and the rot into steam. The morning before Bes’fariq’s army is due to return, weak with thirst from its own desert journey.

  I think about layers—I dreamed of my daughter last night while I slept.

  Except I have no daughter.

  I look at the sky.

  And the second rain hisses above the Hamada—it ends in moments, but this time the ground has been cooled to receive it. To let it puddle and gather and swirl on the rocky plateau. To spill into the wadi ...

  I hear a humming, still far in the distance—the sound that water makes moving on sand. A trickle, a flood, that will take my life’s spirit—the rot of my body—the stench of my camels—the poison and death that Zumur’rad left to me.

  And give it all unto the thirsty djinn who, by Allah’s grace, lie under the wadi, jealously guarding the ancient course that feeds the well of Bir Ounane.

  WISH I’D NEVER MET YOU

  BY JONATHAN TEMPLAR

  She’d suggested they meet in a small cafe somewhere away from the main shopping mall in a town he’d never heard of, and Warwick had agreed, quietly impressed by her choice of venue.

  It was the sort of nondescript, backwater hole he’d have picked himself, and when he arrived it didn’t disappoint. The coffee was served in mugs that had more rings than a Hollywood trophy wife. The special of the day was a tuna sandwich, would always be a tuna sandwich, and it would never, ever be anything remotely special.

  Warwick ordered it anyway.

  She was out of place here but, to her credit, tried not to let it show too much. Her cup had the faint smudge of another’s lipstick on the rim, and she dabbed at it with a tissue and swallowed her disgust.

  “Are you really sure you understand the implications of this?” Warwick asked her.

  She nodded her head. She had a sad face, but one that wasn’t naturally sad, had been made so by the events that had brought her to this midday liaison. She would be pretty when she remembered to smile again, or when the things that stopped her smiling had been prevented from happening in the first place.

  “Of course,” she said, but softly, as if she wasn’t sure at all. They never were, in Warwick’s experience. They would take the leap, they would contact him, plan to engage his services but they’d never really understand what it was they were considering, what the full effect of their decision would be.

  As long as they paid in full, Warwick rarely cared, but he believed that it was always in his own best interests to ensure that his clients knew as much as he could explain to them.

  “If you say yes to this, it’ll unwind the last five years of your life. This guy, this ...” he struggled for the name, having heard it only the one time and not caring enough to remember it.

  “M—Mark,” she said with a stammer, a fresh tear in her eye.

  “Mark. He’ll never meet you. I’ll find him and take him out at some point before you were ever due to meet him. You’ll never even know there was a Mark, your life will go off in another direction, and you’ll never know the difference.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You sure? Coz you need to remember that I can’t guarantee which direction your life will go in. Everything that happened to you in the last five years will change. You can’t pick and choose; if you decide you want Mark dead before you met him, then you reboot. Everything goes, what replaces it might be better, might be worse, but you can’t choose.”

  She straightened up in her cheap plastic chair, looked at Warwick with a new resolution. “You want to know what he did to me, what he did to my life?”

  “I don’t want to know anything. There’s a man out there walking around with a history. You pay me and I’ll go back and take him out five years ago, and everything he has done since then will never happen. I’d rather not know too much about what I’m wiping out, thanks all the same.”

  “He’s a bastard, he’s a cheat, he’s a liar and I can’t live one more day without him. I was going to kill myself, you know? I had a bottle of pills and a bottle of vodka and I was all set to end it all. But I couldn’t do it and you know why? Because I hate the taste of vodka. If I’d had some rum in the house, I’d be dead by now. And then I heard all about you. And I figured, well, the son of a bitch left me, why shouldn’t I get another chance, why should I be the one to die?”

  “Look, I really don’t care. You pay me what I ask, I don’t care if he’s the fucking patron saint of sunshine and puppy dogs, he’ll have been dead for five long years.”

  “You’re asking for a lot of money,” she said. “It’s everything I have. More.”

  “See, this is where you’re making me think you don’t understand the principles involved in this at all. I take this guy out, then this is all money you’ve never earned, or borrowed, or stolen, however the fuck you get it. It’s money that never existed.”

  “Then how—”

  He raised a hand to silence her. There were tricks of his trade that he was never prepared to discuss with an outsider, even someone who, for all intents and purposes, would no longer exist after he’d completed the job he was being paid to do. The temporal trickery of the bank of Tempus Frugal was something even Warwick couldn’t get his head around. All he knew was that any money paid to him for an assassination sat snugly in his account regardless of the continued existence of the person who had paid it in, ea
rning interest from a decade before it had been deposited. ‘Off-shore’ didn’t even begin to cover it. Temporal tax laws were literally being rewritten every day since the breakthrough.

  She chewed a few seconds up, pondering it all one last time.

  “Do it,” she said, and pushed the dirty coffee mug away.

  She even paid the bill.

  Five years ago

  She’d told Warwick, with as little detail as he wanted, that she’d met the man she’d married on April 11 at the marina.

  This was all he needed.

  He’d submitted it to the Guild and they’d run Mark Scropan’s name through the time lines, found nothing that would cause too much damage if he was terminated prematurely, and therefore sanctioned the hit. It had taken little research to track him back from the spot he was due to meet her to a specific hotel and a specific room. He’d been in town for a business deal, the two of them had met by accident after a bird had shit on her shoulder and he stopped to help her clean up the mess, the sort of story that might in other circumstances have sounded charming but felt like more than Warwick would have chosen to know.

  It would be an act of kindness the guy would never have the chance to share.

  It would have been easy to execute him at the marina; it was a confirmed physical sighting so Warwick knew he would definitely be there, and it was an open area with a variety of vantage points. There was no risk of being apprehended; as soon as the target was executed Warwick would shift back to his contemporaneous moment five years into the future. Any trace evidence, from DNA to shell casings, that was left behind would be of no concern—it technically didn’t exist yet.

  But Warwick liked to do things quietly and with minimal attention unless he was specifically paid to do otherwise. So he’d decided on one bullet in the back of the head before his target even left the hotel. Clean, swift, merciful.

  It was a nice hotel, swanky. But like many swanky things, the surface sheen hid a lot of defects. The guy on the door for one, who Warwick figured he could have skipped past dressed in a tutu at the head of a river dance and not been picked out of a subsequent line up. Lax security was good, a decent elevator service was even better, and wouldn’t you know it, he got both. He was carried in an elegance of mirrors and Muzak up to the tenth floor, fingering his concealed Luger all the way like it was a budding erection in his pocket.

  Warwick found the right room, opened it with something clever that hadn’t been invented yet, and stepped into a yellow gloom created by heavy curtains and soft lighting. He pulled out the Luger, hugged the wall with his back, and slid along the narrow entrance hall into the main room.

  Mark Scropan was still in the king-sized bed, facing away and covered by the crisp hotel sheets. Warwick had hoped for this, hoped to reduce any potential drama down to nothing. He crept over to the bed, raised the gun, and put a bullet into the head that dozed beneath.

  He knew straight away he’d fouled up.

  The sound was wrong, the sad phut of the bullet passing through not bone and brain matter but cotton and goose feather. His eyes became more accustomed to the light and he saw that he had been a fucking idiot to ever think this was the shape of a man before him rather than a quickly assembled golem made of pillow and cushion.

  “Shit,” Warwick hissed, and then heard the altogether louder retort of someone else’s weapon. The shot took him in the shoulder, reducing the bone to ruin. Warwick spun with the impact, his Luger falling from his compromised hand to the thick weave of the luxury carpet.

  There was another man in the room, dressed in sleek black and holding a semi-automatic of a design that Warwick didn’t recognize, more advanced than anything he’d ever seen. He could tell from the man’s aura that he didn’t belong in this time either. He’d come from further forward than even Warwick had.

  Warwick’s knees felt wobbly, but he was determined to stay upright.

  “He sent you, didn’t he? Scroton? Had the same idea as my client. I didn’t think the boy had it in him.” His shoulder hurt furiously, but he realized it wouldn’t matter for long.

  The man with the gun shook his head. “Don’t know nothing about no boy, pal. This is all coz of a girl, a girl you ain’t never gonna meet no more.”

  And then Warwick knew what had passed through the minds of everyone he’d assassinated over the course of the last two years, the confusion, the despair, the sudden realization that a future they were supposed to live through, a future that they had lived through, was now being shut down at the source.

  And then the only thing to pass through his mind was made of hot lead.

  Mark Scroton strolled happily onto the marina, enjoying the kiss of the sun on his face, no longer quite so bothered by the palaver at the hotel. He’d been forced to switch rooms at a moment’s notice due to some ’unforeseen’ problem with the plumbing or some shit; it was all a bit vague. But on a beautiful day, such things never mattered for long. The seagulls were out in force today, circling overhead and threatening to dump on anything that dared to step foot beneath them.

  Mark believed that even that would be unlikely to ruin his mood.

  Mina watched him pass, thought that he looked far more handsome than she was used to seeing him, minus the five years of a relationship that would break his heart and, ultimately, his wallet.

  These moments were always disconcerting, the knowledge that a person you had met, spoken to, come to a business arrangement with, would never recognize you ever again, even though you had grown rich from their purse. She was still quite new to this; she’d only discovered she was Temporally Advantaged a little over a year ago, so the novelty had yet to wear off. She wondered if it ever would, and she certainly hoped so.

  Scroton strolled off toward the nearest row of boats, hands in his pockets and a smile on his face. Mina had been here for hours, safe in the knowledge that he wouldn’t be meeting his future wife today, that fate had already intervened to make that impossible.

  Well, not fate perhaps. The bonnet of Mina’s stolen Prius.

  Mark’s no-longer-future-wife would spend a long few months having her legs carefully pinned back together rather than taking long moonlit walks, but at least she was alive. He had stipulated that. She was a money-grabbing whore, he had told Mina at great and colorful length, and he wished that he had never met the bitch, but he didn’t want her dead.

  This suited Mina. She always tried to arrange these interventions, these assassinations of the future, without ending a life. The Guild frowned on it at first, she figured because it always meant a little more work to configure alternate time lines that accommodated a living subject rather than the absence of a dead one, but they always sanctioned her jobs eventually.

  She’d hung around because of her last visit to the Guild and the impression she’d got from the time clerk that he’d seen the details of this particular job before, that the names and the scenario had been familiar to him. They wouldn’t say, never did, but Mina thought that someone else was going to be here today. That the wife had the same idea as the husband, that she too had decided to abort the relationship before it was born. There would be another assassin here, one hired to take down Mark Scroton. She wouldn’t interfere, even though Mark was her client. That would be unethical. But she was curious all the same. Wanted to see another of her trade in action, perhaps learn a few tricks for future reference. She rather hoped it was that Warwick guy she’d met one time at the Guild chambers. He had made quite the impression.

  But Mina had been wrong; for once her instincts had let her down. Mark Scroton went about his business in peace, not meeting any shit-covered women or gun-toting assassins. He even brought himself an ice cream.

  Mina got up from the wall she had been perched on and prepared to go home, back to the future, a suddenly richer future thanks to a fortune that Mark Scroton would never know he’d paid her.

  And then she had a flash. It happened now and again, was an unwelcome consequence of being Temporally Advanta
ged. The time lines were shifting, a new future was being mapped and Mina was at its epicenter.

  But the images that flashed across the back of her mind were not of Mark Scroton and the girl with the broken legs. It was Mina herself, and the man she’d just been thinking of fondly, Warwick. Meeting here, at this very spot, working on the same couple from different sides. And agreeing to a drink back in their contemporaneous moment.

  And then ... it was like a slide show on fast-forward—there was sex, lots of sex, and then there were children, and a family, and grandchildren, so many grandchildren, and they had children as well, an empire of them and oh, the things that they were going to build. Things that so many others would want to break down, would go to any lengths to shatter. Hire anyone that could promise to end it before it started. Hire someone like her.

  And it would all start right here, and right now.

  Only ...

  Then the flash was gone, and she remembered none of it, as it had never existed and was never going to exist. But, for a long time afterwards, Mina found herself poking at the back of her mind as if she had a cavity in her memories, a hole that should have been filled but would always be empty.

  And sometimes, just for a moment, she would remember a face. A man’s face.

  But she had no idea who he was.

  THE BLUELIGHT SPECIAL

  BY J. CARSON BLACK

  Manfred “Mickey” Finn wasn’t what you’d call bipolar, except in his vocation of choice: racing thoroughbreds. He made his living not in the middle but in the poles apart—the highest of the high and the lowest of the low. He had strings of claimers all over the Midwest and played the game to perfection, knowing when to claim a horse and when to drop him in class and when to unload him altogether. His horses all looked like a million dollars, but none of them was worth much, except one.