Movement
“Movement.” The voice crackled in my ear.
I froze, holding my breath and waiting for the voice to continue.
“East wing, by the fireplace.” I let out a breath and nodded to myself. It was the other side of the house. I silently took another step forward, my silenced Beretta 92 out in front of me, pointed down. It didn’t matter how cool it looked to hold the gun near my face like in the movies – it took longer to bring up that way.
I ducked under a window as I walked past it, careful not to let any part of my body be seen. Even if the target was in the far end of the house, there could be a maid or the butler, and I didn’t have the sniper’s view to help me – I was at the back of the house.
“He’s sitting in front of the fire, now,” the voice said again. It belonged to Ivan Petrach, the sniper of our team, formerly a Delta Force Sniper before recruited by the CIA. He was lying flat on a hill nearly eight hundred yards away from the house.
I finally made my way to a back door of the huge mansion. I took out a lockpick-gun from one of the pockets of my cargo pants and within seconds the door was opened. Any electronic security had already been disabled by another member of our team, Megan Cooper. She sat about a block away in a surveillance van – dressed as a van belonging to a phone company – watching everything on her monitors.
I heard another voice through my earpiece. “In position,” the voice whispered. Jason Chandler was set up by a large window of the study, where our target was currently sitting by his fire. I put my lockpick-gun away and said into the mic, “going in now.”
After checking with Megan to make sure the coast was clear, I quietly opened the door and stepped inside with a combat-stance, my gun out and searching.
I stayed to the shadows and walls, and made my way to a large hallway but didn’t turn the corner.
“Wait.” I stopped instantly. I heard footsteps coming from the hallway. A few moments later Megan said I was clear, seeing the servant walk into another room on the security cameras. I quickly but silently made my way to the end of the hallway and crouched near a door that I knew led to the study.
“Ready,” I said to Jason over the wireless communication system.
I opened the door and before the target could say a word, I had put two bullets through his forehead – one slightly to the right, the second dead-center.
I closed the door behind me and saw Jason in the window, gun pointed on our target in case I had trouble. I walked to him and opened the window, climbing out of it before we both made our way away from the house as Megan stopped playing the looped feed from the security system.
I knew it would only take about thirty seconds for our target’s staff to realize what had happened, so we made our way as quickly and quietly as possible while Ivan covered us from hundreds of yards away through his night-vision-scoped sniper rifle.
A. Page in the Stacks 