Russell Blake - Revenge of the Assassin

He supposed if he was going to change the way he looked, he might as well improve things to the extent it was possible. So celebrity pirate it would be. He just hoped that the healing would be faster than the doctor had indicated. No point in wasting any more time than necessary.

When he came to after the surgery he was groggy, with his entire face wrapped in gauze. Nina and an equally stunning young woman were attending to him. Nina explained that they would be there for him twenty-four hours a day, staying in the en suite apartment in shifts. For now, he’d need to take anti-inflammatory medication along with pain relievers and antibiotics in his IV drip, so he could expect to be out of it for the next few days. Ice would also be regularly applied to reduce the swelling and subcutaneous bleeding.

The doctor came in four hours later and said, “You will look like you lost a fight with a bear for the first week, but within ten days you’ll be mostly better, and within three weeks or so, a new man. I will check back with you today before I leave for the night, and the girls will be here round the clock. Anything you need, any discomfort you feel, just let someone know, and we’ll deal with it. No point in this being any more unpleasant than necessary,” he assured his patient, and then with a wink at Nina, he departed.

El Rey slept most of the day, except for a few trips to the bathroom. The following morning, the doctor removed the gauze to change the dressing, and indeed, he looked like he’d been in a brutal car accident. It was to be expected, but still, wasn’t pleasant to see.

By the end of the first week, the swelling was receding and the deep purple circles under his eyes and around his chin were fading. The small sutures from the implants were removed, and by day ten, he was looking human again, the bruising now diminished to yellowish-tinged skin that the doctor assured him would look normal within another few days. The doctor spent time with him inspecting his new features, pointing out the delicate nuances he’d created for a more natural look. El Rey had to admit that the surgeon was a truly gifted artist — it was a remarkable and natural-appearing transformation.

The face looking back at him when he shaved every few days was similar to the one he remembered, but different enough to be another person — albeit a better looking one, which he supposed had been the doctor’s intention.

On the sixteenth night, as El Rey stepped over the doctor’s lifeless body on his office floor to clear all traces of his surgical procedure from the computer, he was actually sad that a valuable resource like the physician had to be terminated. But in his business he couldn’t take any chances, and there was no point in dwelling on collateral casualties.

Nina’s corpse lay upstairs in the suite, and all that remained after the computer scrub was for the second nurse to arrive at nine p.m.. After attending to her, he’d be done with Rio for good. He’d already erased the security camera footage, which was stored on a tape backup and a hard drive in a maintenance room, so once the second girl was dispatched he was good to go. Standing in the office, El Rey studied the doctor and debated pulling the Mont Blanc pen out of his eye socket and then decided to leave it in place.

He extracted the hard disk from the computer and then painstakingly sorted through the file cabinet for any paper records of his stay. Once he’d located them, as well as the attached before and after photos, he busied himself with burning them in a metal garbage can near an open rear window and then settled in to wait for his final victim to show up. He had nothing against the night nurse, just as he’d borne Nina no grudge, but what needed to be done wasn’t a matter of like or dislike.

By his calculations he could be in Sao Paolo by midnight after a short private plane ride, and then tomorrow he would be winging his way to Venezuela — his next stop before meeting with the elusive kingpin, Don Aranas. If all went well, he’d call in a few more days and be ready to meet within a week.

Don Aranas sat on the beach in Zihuatanejo, watching as the water reflected the twinkling lights of the boats anchored off the pristine stretch of sand. He was the only patron of the luxury resort’s oceanfront restaurant, which had closed early to host a private party — for one. As agreed, his bodyguards had stayed away, although two watched Aranas sipping a Bohemia beer at the small white plastic table on the sand, peering at him through the scopes of their sniper rifles from the hotel looming behind him. If his guest arrived and harmed the Don in any way, they were instructed to blow the man’s head off — a reasonable precaution, Aranas felt, even if it technically violated his agreement with El Rey .

He glanced at his watch in irritation — the meeting had been for nine p.m., and the assassin was now ten minutes late. Aranas was not a man who liked to be kept waiting, no matter who it was. He vowed to give it another five minutes, and then he’d finish his beer and leave — and El Rey would have bigger problems than just the Mexican government trying to hunt him down.

A small girl, perhaps six years old, approached him from the darkness of the beach on wobbly bow legs and held up a small hand-carved turtle with a bobbing head. Aranas waved her off. He was in no mood for trinket buying. The girl was insistent and placed the turtle on the table before running off down the sand spit into the night. Aranas took a final pull on his beer, then noticed a slip of rolled-up paper protruding from the turtle’s head. Looking around but detecting nothing unusual, he carefully extracted the note and unfurled it, reading the few words before nodding and pushing to his feet.

He took his beer and walked to the water’s edge, where the gentle lapping of the surf was almost lake-like in its lack of intensity, and began walking towards the town a mile or so away. Three minutes later, a fishing panga pulled up a few yards from him, beaching its bow in the wet sand, and the pilot gestured to Aranas to climb aboard. Once he had scowlingly done so, the boat backed off the beach, its engine frothing from the reverse thrust before it cut around in a circle and headed towards the open ocean, rapidly becoming invisible in the moonless night.

“Sorry for the drama, but I didn’t like the looks of the scopes trained on you from the hotel. I thought I was clear about this,” El Rey said, throttling back the large outboard when they were nine hundred yards from shore.

Aranas studied the man’s dim outline at the stern, a baseball cap pulled down low over his brow and a week-old beard masking most of his lower face. He was completely unremarkable, which Aranas supposed was the point. He noted the night vision scope on the bench next to him, along with a black waterproof nylon bag that was ominously long.

“My security head wanted some options if you gunned me down on the beach,” Aranas replied, shrugging.

“Out of courtesy, I didn’t kill the snipers, however I’d prefer if we could operate with a little more trust. I’ve done work for you before, always satisfactorily, so you should have no reason to doubt me,” El Rey said.

“Fair enough.”

“Now that you have me here, what is this situation that requires me to come out of retirement? And why will nobody but me suffice, out of all the available contractors in the world?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“For twenty million, of course I can. But I didn’t fly halfway around the world to speculate. We have five minutes before I drop you off over at the malecon in town. It would be a more productive use of both our time if you simply told me what’s required,” El Rey said reasonably, his soft voice barely audible over the burbling of the outboard.