Handsome Rob Assassin
Page 1
Handsome Rob, Assassin
A Handsome Rob Gig
Blaze Ward
Knotted Road Press
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About the Author
Also by Blaze Ward
About Knotted Road Press
1
Handsome Rob.
His identity paperwork said Roberto Segura. Six-foot-one. One-ninety-five. Black eyes. Black hair. Hispanic genotype. At least the last five were accurate. And his beloved mother remained at home seventy-five light-years away, so nobody was likely to hear him called by any other name around here.
The doorway he stood in opened up to a dive. One of those bars just this side of being condemned and torn down, except that it somehow kept passing inspections. Rob assumed greased palms somewhere, but didn’t care enough to dig in and find the truth.
He was a spy, not a cop.
Until recently, he’d been a Field Agent for Lincolnshire’s Guardia Civil Interior, The Service, as it was known. Today, he was working as a training officer, of sorts.
The Service had been running a mission where the parameters had gone a little sideways, but only after they’d set it up and put everyone into motion in the field. It was supposed to have been a simple thing. A courier going in to pick up a packet from a double agent.
Sometimes, you just develop that ninth sense, the one that tells you someone has a high-powered rifle with a telescopic, gyro-stabilized, ballistic computer attached, waiting for you to step into the killing zone so they can maintain plausible deniability later when a literal bolt from the blue strikes you down for having made one or more of the gods angry.
With Rob, everyone always presumed it would be one of the male gods, jealous that Handsome Rob had seduced some particularly beautiful woman they’d had their eyes on, but hadn’t opened enough time on the calendar to get to her yet.
Earlier that day, back at Headquarters, the Director had been listening to an update from his Chief of Operations, the folks known around the building as the Cowboys on Three, and had caught a hint of something everybody else might have missed.
But Miguel Cabrill had already proven that he was more than just a long-term political appointee warming a seat. The man had spent sixteen years reading ops reports and interviewing agents after missions. He had learned a few things.
He had stopped Rudolfo Alcazar, Dolf, cold and picked up a phone.
One thing had led to another. And another.
Fortunately (unfortunately?) Rob had been in the headquarters building just a few floors below Miguel, doing his weekly qualifying with pistols.
So now he was walking through the entryway of this dive, studying the lowlifes and braggarts around him.
The first thing that struck him as “off” about the situation was that far more people were here than should have been in a joint like this on a weekday afternoon. It wasn’t even happy hour.
The economy around Puerto Peñasco was too good right now for that many men to be out of work, unless they were seasonal carpenters, and even those folks tended to take gigs on the fishing boats down in the marina in the winter.
Yeah, Rob could see why Miguel had taken one look at this shitshow and upgraded things from junior field agent to the Service’s current golden boy. At least golden until he screwed up and turned into just another tool in the chest.
But this room felt like it needed more than just a regular field agent making a drop.
So Miguel had called in that favorite boy and put Handsome Rob on the case, in spite of the fact that he was now an assassin.
Of course, assassination was supposed to be a most methodical thing. Study your opponent for weeks to learn her patterns and blind spots. Ripple outwards at least two layers to understand who else might be involved at any given moment and how to use them as stepping stones if you needed to make contact.
Maybe you used poison in their favorite coffee mug. Perhaps it was a bomb, if you wanted to make a public statement. Or that theoretical high-powered rifle with a telescopic, gyro-stabilized, ballistic computer attached, if being struck down by the gods was on someone’s calendar for the day.
Hard faces scowled up at him as he walked by tables, an obvious outsider dressed a little too nice for this place. He did wear worn dungarees and a rain shell like theirs, but not old and worn. No oil stains or threaded collars.
It probably would have been less of a problem if the punks in here had all been dressed in off-the-rack suits badly tailored. That would at least have meant he was dealing with semi-professional gangsters. Men and women who lived by a code and understood that there were rules to the game.
These men were just mean drunks. Rugby players a little too deep into their pints, and grumbling at the pretty boy walking by to take a spot at the far end of the bar.
Like maybe the bastard didn’t understand that he’d have to get through every single one of them to make it back to the door if trouble erupted.
Rob smiled cheerfully at the nearest one until the fellow went back to his mug. Being at this end of the bar meant that nobody was going to be behind him if he had to open fire with the class four pulse pistol tucked under his rain shell. That he’d be able to pull the two stun grenades from his left-hand pocket and toss them into the room as party favors if anybody pissed him off.
Handsome Rob, Assassin.
“Beer,” Rob said to the hard-faced bartender with the buzzed hair and scarred ears as the man meandered down. “Something brown or porter.”
He pulled a handful of coins from a pocket and sat them on the bar in front of him. More than enough for an afternoon of drinking, and maybe a statement to everyone in here that they’d have to put up with him that long.
Or a reasonable tip for the house if he ended up getting rude on the punks in here.
Rob watched the man pour and slice the mug like the man’s life depended on the precision of his cut. Rob didn’t figure they’d drop a mickey finn into his drink without any provocation, but he had also taken a few things on the drive over here. They’d mostly neutralize anything Rob managed to get in his system from this place. Either way, he’d have one hell of an optical migraine later or have to take some antidotes that always made him fart.
But Miguel had asked him to come in on his day off, his training day, and run a mission with no recon, no prep work. Nothing but a decade of service and the sort of luck and experience that had gotten him adopted into the Can’t Shoot Straight Gang.
It was a shame Roxy, aka Mrs. Jones, hadn’t been in town. She might have gone through a room like this and set a new high score.
Rob was comfortable being in the top five percent for gunmen available. To date, he had killed exactly one person, and that was before he’d become a certified assassin. She had been a women Roxy had already shot hard enough to bleed the villainess out in another five mi
nutes had Rob ignored her, but he’d been that pissed.
Assassination sometimes meant destroyed organizations, rather than lives.
Rob was rather good at that part.
His pint arrived and Rob handed the man two coins instead of one. The afternoon already looked like it might get ugly.
The grumbling had largely subsided to the point Rob could ignore it if he chose. He did. Anyone coming over to deliver a threat or a punch was going to be looking up Rob’s pistol before he got that close anyway.
The identity he was carrying right now included a license to carry a concealed hand cannon. It even said Roberto Segura. Not that anyone would be able to figure out who he really was if someone managed to run his identity numbers into the system downtown.
The Service had doctored him up a close-enough persona on the off chance that he had to do something here on Ramsey. Shooting some punk in a bar like this would get him arrested, after which Dolf or someone would come down to the station and have a friendly conversation with someone else about the Official Secrets Act.
Rob might not even miss his dinner reservations. Pity he didn’t have a date, but the place was the hottest spot in town and he’d rather go by himself, since he was single right now.
Still, Rob let a sense of complete invulnerability waft over the men around him like pheromones, as a way to deflect them onto weaker prey.
That was all it was right now. Middle school hijinks by punks that had never gotten past that stage of development. Listening to the same music as when they were fourteen. Eating the same food. Wearing the same clothes.
Being the same snotnosed punks they had been then.
Conversation died off. Heads turned. She did that to a room.
Rob glanced left to make sure nobody was sneaking up on that side before turning right to study her walking the rest of the way into the main part of the bar.
She’d dyed her hair since the last time he’d seen her.
Strawberry blond now, still long and with bangs that looked just a little ragged. Probably on purpose, knowing Mac.
She was approaching fifty-two right now, but the way she was dressed and made up suggested twenty-two. Rougher dungarees than his, worn with age. Tucked in, button up dress shirt in peach. Brown leather jacket with a rough surface. Probably Service issued, so it would stop knives and small pulse pistols in a place like this.
Her hair was tied up and tucked through the back of a cap with a long brim that shaded those gorgeous eyes and made her seem elusive. Maybe even vulnerable.
Rob wondered how many men had fallen for that.
She reached the edge of the open space and seemed to notice all the man staring at her like hungry hyenas. She smiled left to right like a spotlight, blinding every one of them with lust and inferiority in equal amounts, barely pausing as she recognized him at the far end of the space, minding his own business.
Handsome Rob had absolutely no business being in this room. Not in the middle of a hand-off supposedly happening shortly. This was not his part of town, and Mac knew many of the places he tended to hang out.
They hadn’t dated, but had gotten as close as a twenty-eight-year-old man and a fifty-one-year-old woman might get while falling short of anything physical. You gotta keep hearts and emotions off the table in this business. Just two agents employed by the Service and living triple lives.
He was just a backup that hopefully Mac didn’t end up needing.
Esmeralda Mac MacTavish. She’d joined the Service before he’d been born, working in Data Analysis for nearly thirty years until Miguel had asked her to pretend to be a field agent long enough to save Handsome Rob’s life.
Afterward, she had decided she liked the lifestyle, and took a lateral that was a demotion in status and became a nerdy field agent.
Because there were times when you needed a nerd, even if she still looked like the fashion model she’d been when she was eighteen.
Criminal accountants reacted better to pretty women than bad boys, frequently.
And that was her mission.
Miguel had just felt iffy enough about the setup to send in a killer, in case things got out of hand.
Looking around the room, Rob had already started a countdown timer in his head to the first person he had to shoot. Bartender was high on that list, only because the bruiser looked like the kind of fellow who kept a bungstarter behind the bar and knew how to use it in a scrum.
Collateral damage if that happened, but he’d have brought it on himself by drawing a weapon when Rob was holding a class four pulse pistol, and we can’t any of us be friends at that point.
Mac turned, having spotted her lunch date. Or whatever cover she was using.
Again, Rob had spent thirty minutes reviewing case files instead of three weeks. He was here as an insurance policy and nothing else.
One that looked like it might be paying off shortly.
Mac moved to the booth where a middle-aged accountant stood out like a lily in a blackberry bramble. She even leaned in and kissed the man lightly on the lips before sitting across from him. It put her back to the door, but she knew she had coverage there. Otherwise, she might have slipped in next to the accountant.
Place like this didn’t have a waitress, exactly. In the movies, you always had that pretty bar maid who was an upcoming actress working on the breakout role.
Rob had spent too much time with Jorge and his fictional film companies that occasionally made movies, so he understood things like this from a Hollywood perspective as well as a Service one.
Doughy, middle-aged ex-biker dude with complicated tattoos wandered over there with a menu and took drink orders, probably trying not to drool.
Fifty-two-year-old Mac was a babe and three quarters. Twenty-two-year-old version probably should have been a proscribed weapon. Accountant certainly looked like a man who knew he had won the lottery.
Shorter than her six-even, though Rob had only ever seen the man seated. Probably weighed less than her one-fifty, but she’d been hitting the gym and running with the boys more, trying to get up to one-sixty of muscle. He was half bald and looked like a stiff breeze might carry him away.
It was an acceptable cover, as those things went. Wealthy, middle-aged male. Young, beautiful, desperate female who finds a sugar daddy.
If only you stupid bastards knew.
They made small talk while Rob watched out of the corner of his eye, most of his concentration on the punks to see which ones were made men and which were just hangers on looking for a gig.
Someone must have made a quiet comm call, because trouble walked into the bar about the time the waiter delivered coffee.
Five of them.
Señior Guadarrama himself and four punks, him in a custom suit, double-breasted. Muted green in a way that only worked if you had that many dinars to drop on it. Fedora on his head at a jaunty angle. Topcoat worn like a cape on his shoulders. Mid-forties from the skin around the neck.
Rob couldn’t see the man’s shoes from here, but he was willing to bet they cost more than most of the punks in here earned on a good month.
The room fell so silent that Rob didn’t feel out of character turning to look.
The bar had the feeling of a spectacle about it.
To give her credit, Mac didn’t break character when everything fell apart. She had a pocket stunner tucked in somewhere, but it wouldn’t do much good against pretty boss and his four dwarves.
Or a roomful of wannabe killers.
Thirty minutes of prep, when he should have had two months. It had been enough to know that Señior Guadarrama over there was high on a bunch of different lists, police as well as intelligence work.
Nobody had ever been able to prove anything enough to even bring charges. The man had his hands in all sorts of crime and trouble, but Rob was a spy, not a cop. The Service didn’t get involved with things like that.
Or hadn’t, until something came up that suggested the man had started running guns for a Sal
onnian criminal Syndicate. Once it crossed interstellar borders, the Service took notice.
Miguel had sent Rob in as an alternative to having a Heavy Rescue Assault Team standing by on the roof. They probably were as well, but he was in the room, and they were all at least thirty seconds from responding to anything when trouble erupted.
That might be the difference between life and death right now.
“Hello, Tomasito,” Guadarrama boomed over the room. “Introduce me to your pretty, new girlfriend.”
The man slipped his coat off and handed it and the hat to two of his punks as a show of dominance that probably impressed the hyenas.
To Rob, it just took two men out of commission for however many seconds elapsed between the start of trouble and the time they managed to get a gun out.
Rob leaned himself onto the bar so he could watch in a disinterested, I walked into the wrong bar today kind of way. A couple of punks at tables nearby looked at him askance, but his hands were visible and the look on his face was petite boredom.
Guadarrama sat next to Mac instead of the Accountant, boxing her in. It also provided her two hundred and fifty pounds of insulation if things got messy in the next ten seconds.
Rob let a single twinkle into his eyes as he calibrated movement vectors.
One of his instructors had impressed an important lesson on Rob, even before Jorge and his gang refined it and hammered it home. Dress nice, look professional, and have a plan to kill every single person in the room. You never know when you’ll need it.
All eyes were on the performance over there, as they should be. Again, Rob checked his blind spot on the left, but that was why he had chosen this corner in the first place.