Page 1 of Triple Threat

Chapter One

Lachlan…

There are skills and abilities that are highly valued in a professional hitman. It’s common to assume that these skills are hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, intimidation, the ability to drive aggressively, and well, the fundamental ability to kill another human being. I’m quite good at all of those things, but that’s beside the point. The real things that mark a successful hitman are confidence, competence, and situational awareness.

I will freely admit to having these things in spades, as well as being devilishly handsome. I’m a professional killer, a hitman for hire, and this is no small task in a world where 85 percent of so-called professional hitmen are government sting operations, smoking out people who are attempting to solicit murder. That’s an important distinction – I may be an assassin, but I am no murderer.I’m hardly something so mundane.

Thanks to the aforementioned situational awareness, I know that the checkpoint I am approaching has six people monitoring it – two are functional employees, one a supervisor, and the other three are armed security personnel. That’s fine, no concern of mine. They aren’t my target; they aren’t even a speed bump at this point. I flash the pretty one a rakish smile, at about a quarter capacity. I want to come across as casual charming. At half strength, my smile can cause physical changes in a woman’s body – flushed cheeks, stiffening nipples, and a certain arousal.

I regularly take advantage of this ability.

At full strength, I’ve been told it is a thing of terror. My partner, Roan, has told me that it’s a lunatic’s jeer, like the Joker if he were handsome, not caked in makeup, and just a little saner.

For this application, a quarter will do. She smiled back at me as I place my briefcase, laptop bag, and jacket in two different plastic bins to roll through the x-ray machine.

“Give me ten, mate,” Roan whispered through my earpiece.

“Shoes or no shoes?” I asked. There was a bit of generic European in my accent.With the smile, that vaguely cheesy accent was almost guaranteed to slide panties down.

“I’m sorry, sir, but unless you have a premium pass and background check on file, it’s no shoes,” she said, a hint of a blush coming to her cheeks. I knew what she was thinking about.

“Of course, madame, my apologies.” I untied one shoe, then the other, and studiously placed them in another bin.

“You’re good,” Roan said in my ear.

I stepped through the metal detector which flared red and a tone sounded, planned of course. “I knew I forgot something,” I said and pulled a stainless steel and gold pen from my pocket. I dropped it in the bin, and stepped through a second time, no red, no tone. Flawless.

This technological sleight of hand was an integral part of how we worked, Roan and me. He could be a few thousand miles away, sitting at an impressive computer terminal that would seem to emulate the hacker terminals from such movies, but better made – no mess, no scuff.

The amusing thing was that most of his rig was set up for the games he played. He could do almost everything we needed through one computer and two screens.

He linked into the system; something he did through the phone I carried. The trick was that I had to trigger their system before my bags went through the x-ray machine. This lets Roan’s electronic fingers slide into their system. As I was dropping the pen back in the tray, the monitor to the x-ray machine was fed a custom feed – swapped pictures of other bags. This sometimes, rarely, caused some raised eyebrows. It was surprising the sort of things that people carried in their luggage.

I carried three pistols and a pair of knives through the airport; no one the wiser. Two Beretta 93R pistols were in concealed holsters, a knife tucked into the elastic band of a sock, the third gun, a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun was in the bag, along with ammo. There were a few other sundry things I might need on this mission that were also included; you would think it would amount to much more than it was, but I was, in actuality, traveling light. One checked bag full of what normal people would travel with, and the briefcase as a carryon.

Flying was still the main method of travel; commercial had just become more tedious to get through. The trick was to stick to smaller terminals, municipal fields, small carriers, and largely avoiding any of the major airports. Roan could get through dated security systems and spoof basic metal detectors and x-ray machines, but some of the big backscatter rigs and protected systems were too actively guarded to even try to spoof.

The flight was pleasant enough, though the drink prices were highway robbery. A few gin and tonics should hardly cost that much. The gin itself wasn’t even top shelf. That was almost an abomination.

The job was almost a vacation in and of itself; take a flight out of the Ocean City municipal field, through Miami-Dade, and then on to St. Anne Island. Roan only had to spoof in once. After I was through Ocean City’s security, I didn’t have to do another security check until I went to re-board on St. Anne. Considering the clientele of the island, wealthy and privileged as they were, that was notoriously lax. No visiting politician or celebrity wanted some security person digging through their overpriced clothing because their new sex toy looked like a pistol.

No, the only security leaving the island was just to make sure that you hadn’t forgotten anything you came with.

St. Anne’s Island was a monument to wealth and excess, resorts clustered around the beach, a massive golf course, and amenities that were on par with the excess of Persian Gulf states. There was an artificial ski slope, because of course there was, and all the facilities were staffed by young people, attractive, and most only barely dressed.

The first time I had come to the island, I had almost succumbed to exhaustion. The sheer number of women who were there for the exact thing I wanted was breathtaking. Some were guests, others were staff at the resorts. But after that first trip, it wasn’t quite so enjoyable. It took me a while to figure out why.

There was no sport in it. They were here to be seduced, or to do the seducing if the visiting guests wanted it. I wasn’t some bloated, overweight, balding, boner-pill popping, asshole looking to sweat and wheeze my way through average looking newly single women and painfully inexperienced post-teen girls.

No, thankfully that wasn’t why I was at St. Anne’s.

I was at St. Anne’s because of a nasty breakup between a pair of former business partners, the Verbas. Emil and Radamir weren’t brothers, they had been married men. Now, they were divorced men. I had a folder of details about who cheated, and who stole what, but I didn’t care about the petty drama, as entertaining as it might be.

All I cared about was that Emil had paid us handsomely to make sure that Radamir didn’t enjoy his newfound freedom. More to the point, that he didn’t start talking to the wrong people. Emil didn’t want his ex spilling the secrets of the Verba business. One of the professional rules wasdon’t askabout whatever the business was. That wasn’t particularly important, unless the business involved one or more of the black trinities – guns, drugs, or money laundering.

Those three things tended to get even good hitmen killed.

Roan had done his digital snooping, and found out that the Verbas were human traffickers, pulling attractive young women and girls from the streets of Eastern Europe, Russia, and of all places, Ohio. This made eliminating Radamir easy to rationalize, and I felt like we might have even been overpaid for the job.

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