by Tom Abrahams
“You think you’re funny.” She looked at her watch. The time was right. To the second.
“There’s no thinking about it, dear.” Sir Spencer leaned on his knee and pointed at the assassin. “My sweet Mariposa, I am funny. You are malevolent. I am a commander and you are a soldier. I am atop the food chain, a veritable shark, and you border on chum. You are—”
The assassin lunged forward in an instant, her nails at Sir Spencer’s throat. She gripped his larynx as a climber would a rope. His eyes bulged, his tongue wagged, and he grabbed his attacker as they fell backwards onto the floor. His head slammed against the obsidian, dazing him as she clawed his throat with one hand and gripped his manhood with the other.
“I might be malevolent,” she growled into his ear before biting down on the lobe as if it were a raw piece of meat. “You are not funny.”
Sir Spencer flailed, trying to use his brute strength against her wiry frame. The fight, in the middle of a hotel lounge, must have seemed surreal to those seeing it unfold.
One man tried to approach, briefly touching the assassin on the shoulder. She turned and bared her bloody teeth. The man backed away, pulling his hand from her. He tripped as he backed up and fell to the floor, so he scooted backward.
The feral assassin was like a cheetah on a wildebeest. His strength was no match for her tenacity. Straddling him, she dug her knees into his ribs. She knew from the color of his face and the gargle leaking from his open mouth he was losing his fight.
She looked around. The crowd was growing. They were yelling and screaming. She was running out of time. So she ended it.
Pulling her hand from his throat, she lowered her elbow into the same spot and used all of her weight to crush his windpipe.
He coughed up a mixture of fluids. His pounding fists weakened and his fingers relaxed and his body twitched before going limp.
Sir Spencer was dead.
The assassin grabbed his cell phone and wallet from his pockets and pushed herself to her feet using his face. She adjusted her skirt and grabbed her bag from the sofa before marching to the exit. A pair of security guards tried to stop her, blocking the doorway.
She pulled a small blade from the outer pocket of the bag and backhanded it into the first guard’s chest before pounding it into the other’s neck. She stepped over them to the street and merged into the pedestrian traffic. A dozen steps along the sidewalk, she pulled the wig from her head, tossing it into a trash can. A bus, the one described to her in the instructions, arrived just as she met the corner. She pulled herself up the steps and found a seat.
The assassin pulled her phone from the bag and sent a text.
It is done.
*
Sir Spencer’s final moments were not how he imagined them. He’d long wished for a quiet death, perhaps in his sleep, after a good meal and a rich, nasal-clearing glass of scotch.
The knight was a man of incredible vision, among the few who could see the future as he wanted it to be and then mold it to his will. A combination of intelligence, brute force of intelligence, and sociopathic narcissism, his hands were printed on so many of the global events that shaped parts of two centuries.
He was at once deplorable and charming, a man as rare as the malted drinks he imbibed with passion. He died in an unforeseen, public way that so contradicted every aspect of his long life.
The girl, he thought, was beautiful. Her eyes were disarming, in fact. He didn’t even notice the wig was askew atop her head, giving her the appearance of a woman who’d not finished styling it before leaving the house.
Her fingers were long and slender, the bright polish a compliment to her complexion. Her skin was bordering on flawless. She appeared made of porcelain in the odd lighting of the bar.
Sunken in the folds of the overstuffed couch as she was, he couldn’t see her musculature, her wiry strength. The couch, as it were, served an unintentional camouflage.
He sat opposite her, confident the brief meeting would merely acquaint him with one of the few assets he’d not met. He’d heard of her, of course. Mariposa’s reputation for lethality and discretion preceded her. It was that reputation that allowed Sir Spencer to relax in the small chair, to let go of his cane.
As he did with everyone over whom he felt superior, he spoke slowly. His eyes and lips revealed as much as his words. It was intentional. He wanted her to know he was in charge, he was delivering orders, he was doing her the favor of meeting her in person.
He wanted her to know she was one of many, a replaceable cog in a large, perpetually spinning wheel. And she played right into the conversation, as he predicted she would.
“How many others?” she asked.
Sir Spencer could see the disappointment in those eyes. She thought she was special. She thought herself an outlier. He’d wounded her with a single swipe of the blade.
“Including the musicians, singers, and actors? Or are we focusing solely on the formerly downtrodden addicts and malevolents like you?” He dug the knife a little deeper.
She didn’t answer him. He saw her eyes transform from hurt to anger. They flashed as her pupils shrank to pinpricks. Her manicure disappeared as she clenched her fists into tight balls.
“Didn’t like that characterization?” Sir Spencer licked his lips and awaited the verbal follow-up to her physical reaction. He smiled and scratched an itch on his chin. He needed a shave. He’d do that upon returning to his room. A nice hot shower and a heavily lathered shave. He could smell the menthol. After the shave, a good dinner. Some seafood would be good, maybe shellfish. Barcelona was known for its seafood. The closest he got to seafood in prison was something akin to fried catfish. They told him it was catfish. He doubted it.
“How many others?” she said through clenched teeth.
“I don’t know, really.” Sir Spencer flicked his tongue back and forth between his teeth, tasting the buttered prawns he planned to devour. They would go so well with a nice dry, crisp white wine. Even a rosé might do the trick. The shrimp and its buttery goodness would cut the acidity of the wine. He salivated at the Pavlovian thought of it.
“Dozens at any given time. As some grow up or melt down, we add new ones. One Britney dies, and another Britney grows in social influence. Heath pops his clogs, and Zac sees a resurgence of opportunity. Those are the influencers, mind you. As for the malevolents…”
Sir Spencer, for all of his discretion, was a name-dropper. He’d always let those dwelling on the seabed below him know he swam at the surface among the sharks.
“You think you’re funny.”
“There’s no thinking about it, dear.” Sir Spencer leaned on his knee, wondering if he was boring her. Did she have somewhere better to be? Of course not, she had to listen to him.
“My sweet Mariposa, I am funny.” He pointed at her as he spoke, drawing her eyes to his. He wanted her full attention. “You are malevolent. I am a commander and you are a soldier. I am atop the food chain, a veritable shark, and you border on chum. You are—”
Sir Spencer couldn’t react fast enough. The girl came at him so quickly, launched like a loaded spring from the sofa. He could see her long fingers coming at his face. He couldn’t deflect her grip as those fingers and their sharpened nails dug into his throat.
He grasped at her head, but her weight forced them down. His head slammed against the floor and his vision blurred. He couldn’t focus. He could feel the pressure against his neck, the pain of her nails digging in his skin, gripping his windpipe.
Sir Spencer would have pled for his life had he been able to speak. His tongue was thick in his mouth, lodged between his teeth as his body struggled for air. His body, already racked with pain and screaming for oxygen, flinched and throbbed when she gripped between his legs. He was powerless as she leaned into him. Her eyes, pupils large as dimes, were wild with rage.
“I’m malevolent,” he heard through the heat of her breath. It was hard to know what she was saying; his mind blurred from the pain. He was f
ighting consciousness until a sting and throbbing pain pulsed against the side of his head. He couldn’t hear what else she said. The world was darkening.
She was so strong, so powerful. She was the animal the Brethren bore.
In the dim haze, Sir Spencer saw a blur over the assassin’s shoulder, which grew in size before shrinking from view and disappearing.
There was pressure against his ribs, pushing from his lungs the last droplets of air.
Sir Spencer’s life didn’t flash before him. There was no bright light toward which to walk.
It was pain, both acute and dull, and darkness. The yelling and screaming around him was his final symphony, the chorus of his final breath.
The darkness complete, there was a final push against his throat and he gagged. The pain subsided; the cacophony silenced.
Sir Spencer died unshaven and unfed.
*
“Excuse me for a moment,” President Felicia Jackson interrupted her aide to check her phone. “I need to take this.”
She stepped into a space adjacent to the conference room in which she and her team were discussing key elements of their SECURITY pitch.
The message told her the job was done. Sir Spencer was dead.
It wasn’t something she’d planned. At least not so soon, especially after all of the trouble it took to free him. But his man, his asset, made a mistake with the hotel murder. It could compromise the mission.
If the mission failed, she risked being exposed. It was all the worse that reporters were printing stories about him being alive and that Matti Harrold saw him at Camp David.
He needed to die, regardless of the backlash from the Brethren. They would understand. If their plan succeeded and moved to the next phase, they’d forgive her indiscretion. If it didn’t, she was likely out of favor anyhow.
He deserved it, regardless. He’d nearly killed her when the Capitol exploded. Had she not run as fast as her Jimmy Choos could carry her, she would have lain among the martyrs on the Mall.
Did he think she’d so easily forgive and forget? Was he naïve enough to believe that betrayal could go unpunished?
For years their relationship was built on a healthy, if not illegal, give and take. She would provide favorable legislation and the support to pass it in Congress. He would help with connections away from Capitol Hill. He would help her acquire true power, the invisible strength not seen on C-SPAN or the network news. Even when Dexter Foreman chose Blackmon over her for his vice presidential replacement, Sir Spencer assured her she was in the fold, that he wouldn’t be confirmed.
“No worries,” he told her. “You’re poised to ascend. I promise.”
It was fair trade, until it wasn’t.
He’d cut her out of the loop in the days before President Foreman’s death. He and his motley crew of idiots closed ranks. They left her out in the cold.
Even pleas to the Brethren yielded nothing. It was too dangerous to discuss, they’d told her. See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, or some philosophical crap like that.
She’d watched Blackmon stake his claim. She had to fight the urge to call him out on the floor of the rotunda when they first addressed the nation after Foreman’s death. She wanted to expose the backroom deals, the president’s murder, the secret plot underway, and the grand plan decades in the making.
But that would have exposed her as much as it would Blackmon or any of the so-called Daturan pawns. She’d have been done, her ascension cut short. So she’d kept quiet and fought for her rightful place on the throne.
She’d arrived in spite of Sir Spencer, not because of him. She was responsible for what she’d accomplished.
President Felicia Jackson took in a deep breath against the quickened pulse in her neck. She held her finger above the keyboard on the phone and paused before typing her encoded response.
Good. On to the next one.
A Deo et Rege.
The President smirked at the Latin turn of phrase. It was particularly appropriate given the untimely death of a man who called himself a knight.
CHAPTER 37
PASEO DE TAULAT
BARCELONA, SPAIN
Jon Custos sat forward in his chair, cycling through the channels on Barçes’s prized television. He was growing concerned his indiscretion at the hotel would become the problem Sir Spencer feared.
There was, however, no news of the flight attendant’s death on any of the channels. There was abundant coverage of the G12 summit and the arrival of the foreign dignitaries.
Custos stopped on one of the channels. A reporter was standing amongst the protestors outside the World Trade Center. The crowd was much larger than when he’d left hours earlier. He supposed it would grow bigger still, and that was good. He needed a large crowd.
He pressed what looked like a pause button on the remote, but the television didn’t respond. He pushed it again. Push. Push. Push. The images on the screen wouldn’t freeze.
Custos cursed in three languages and stood. Stomping into the bedroom, he yelled loud enough to wake up Fernando Barçes.
“You don’t have a DVR?” he asked in Spanish. “You can’t pause or rewind your television?”
Barçes, lying on the bed, shook his head. He smacked his lips and took a deep breath.
“You disappoint me, viejo.” Custos slid to the edge of the bed and rested his hand on the man’s chest. “I don’t like disappointment.”
Barçes blinked against the words. His muscles tensed.
“It’s not your fault you are poor.” Custos shrugged. He patted Barçes’s chest. “I forgive you.” The old man’s body relaxed against his hand.
“It is the little things,” Custos said as he stood, “that separate the poor from the wealthy. The little things, like a DVR or an automatic ice maker in the refrigerator.” Custos walked toward the bedroom door and stopped. He turned around, his hands planted on his hips.
“You know that was a disappointment too,” he said across the room. “I have to make my own ice. Get the plastic tray out of the icebox, pour water into the little, empty cubes, put it back into the icebox, and wait for it to freeze.”
Barçes blinked back tears. Custos imagined the undulating, tidal ache in his stomach was returning.
“I’ll get you some painkillers, viejo,” he said. “I have to tell you, it’s so inconvenient here. Think of how much television you miss because of the time it takes to make ice. And you have no DVR. Such a disappointment.”
Custos ignored the faint, useless plea for mercy from Barçes, his unwilling martyr, as he hung in the doorway. His arms were extended above his head, his fingers gripping the molded frame. He looked as if he might try a pull-up. He whistled the first movement of Carmina Burana to drown out the soft cries, slowly swinging back and forth.
“Your mercy will come in the afterlife,” he offered, stopping short of Orff’s crescendo. “O Fortuna!” he said forcefully, the air rushing from his lungs as he spoke. He dropped his arms to his sides and turned back to the living area.
Again seated in front of the television, with the volume a touch louder, he watched a live report from the front of the World Trade Center. This reporter was much closer to the entrance, with no protestors visible in the scene behind her.
“The president of the United States, Felicia Jackson, is now here,” the narrow-waisted brunette explained in Spanish, turning her body to reference the entrance to the hotel. There was a cadre of security guards, uniformed and plainclothed, on either side of the large doors.
“We also know the prime minister of the UK is here,” she reported with credible enthusiasm. “The Italian government is also on site and, sources tell me, is already meeting with representatives from the Spanish delegation.”
Custos was paying more attention to the activity behind the reporter than to what she was saying. It appeared to him the front entrance was open to the public, despite an identification check and a security pat down. He could deal with that.
“Ther
e is a dinner tonight,” the reporter droned as the camera moved past her shoulder and focused on the security checkpoint. “We understand that representatives from all of the member countries will attend. The meal includes authentic Spanish dishes, including salmorejo, pisto, salchichón, pulpo a la gallega, leche frita, and both red and white sangria.”
Custos had one concern, looking at the checkpoint as another guest moved through and held up his room key: the bag check. He needed a way to smuggle the device past the manual search. An X-ray or metal detector would have been much better. He’d have to improvise.
The camera zoomed out and panned back to the reporter. “Of course, the dinner is a prelude to the importance of these meetings. The United States is pushing a multilateral agreement that would force governments to share sweeping electronic surveillance of its citizens. President Jackson called it SECURITY for the future. Critics say it’s something straight out of the George Orwell novel 1984.”
Custos laughed at the comparison and stood from the chair. He pointed the remote at the screen and powered it off, mimicking the sound of gunfire as he pushed the button.
“Painkillers, painkillers,” he mumbled. He found a bottle in the cabinet above the sink. They weren’t much, little more than migraine tablets. Custos read the back of the bottle, uncapped it, and shook out a few into his hand. He grabbed a glass, filled it with tap water, and whistled his way back to the bedroom.
He walked over to the bedside and offered the pills to Barçes, leaning over to cradle the back of the old man’s head. When his fingers gripped Barçes’s sweaty neck, his confidence evaporated.
Barçes was burning up. His skin was hot to the touch. His fever flushed his cheeks and forehead. The vacant pleas for help moments before were likely from febrile delirium.
Rather than helping his patient drink the water, he poured it across the man’s forehead. He bolted to the kitchen and returned with a pair of ice-filled hand towels and placed one under each arm.
