(14.1) Know Thy Enemy

Chapter 14, Part 1

Something my years had taught me was that assassination required recon, careful planning, and patience. To be a successful killer, you have to know your target. You need to know what foods he likes, who his friends are, what kind of women (or men) he likes in his bed, and what he likes to do in his free time. This small amount of information is usually the easiest to discover and offers countless opportunities to people like me.

After you get all those bits of information you can move on to the planning portion. Planning a kill, especially against those hard to reach targets, is by far the biggest pain in the ass imaginable. Once you have the method of your kill established, you have to account for all sorts of side factors.

If you’re going with poison, you have to be sure that you make it yourself and that every chemical you buy is bought with cash, usually at a mom and pop store or some other place with little to no surveillance. With explosives, the same theory applies, but you need to be extremely careful with the detonator construction. If you aren’t wearing gloves when you build it, the oils from your hands and therefore your fingerprints can caramelize in a fire, leaving a nice set of fingerprints for your local forensic team to trace back to you.

If you’re teamed up with someone else, it’s best to just kill them when the job is done. Be smart about it though, take a cue from your favorite movies and TV shows and shower before you kill them, making sure to scrub off all the dead skin cells and make sure your hair isn’t going to fall out and leave the cops with your DNA.

Patience is the key to any successful assassination. You need to choose your moment to strike, and more often than not it takes a long time for your target to leave you an opening. This is why I’m not a general fan of on-the-fly killing. It’s too easy to get caught up in the slaughter and leave presents for the wrong people to find.

Luckily for me, any DNA or fingerprint indicators I may have left for Vegas PD to find in the past couple of days are going to match up to a John Doe corpse that was “stolen” from the morgue.

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When I got back to my room, I put the files I’d smuggled on the nightstand to start my research on the Heroes.

Drake Cash aka David Wilson was on the top of the pile. It looked as though he’d taken up the alias after a stint as a Mafioso enforcer. His D7 profile said that he excelled in demolitions and hand-to-hand techniques. The armory log in his file showed a penchant for silver knuckles along with a series of high explosives. Hand grenades and anti-personnel were among his most common acquisitions. He’d had a wife, but she was killed by the Romano Family after Drake became an informant. He delved into underground prize fighting and was on his way to a tournament when he’d been picked up by D7.

Kim Itou was next and had the thinnest personnel file I’ve ever seen. It had three pages total, saying that he spent a good majority of his life homeless and addicted to anything that would get him high that he could get his hands on. Kim wasn’t even his real name though because of his addictions, the only thing about his past that he could remember was that he’d worked for the Yakuza. The D7 PsyOps Division had done some delving, and though they’d removed his desire to use narcotics of any kind, his brain was so damaged that the only thing they were able to glean was that he’d used a machete in his former line of work. In his short time as a D7 agent, he’d shown an uncanny knack for discerning the differences between human looking Ombra and humans. A report filled out by him was the reason Angel was revealed to be, in fact, a vampire. His armory log showed a set of machete as the only weapon he’d ever bothered checking out, though he has been known to take small cartridges of various combustible materials. His parents may be alive, but he has no memory of them.

Samuel Levenheath could be described easily. He was a nerd with a gun. Graduated MIT with a Master’s in Computer Technology and earned his living doing “security testing” for major companies. He’d shown a smattering of psychic ability since his arrival at D7 but wasn’t powerful enough to join with PsyOps, though they’d keep an eye on him. His armory log showed he used handguns with an extraordinarily large clip and more ammo than one would need, telling me he wasn’t a very good shot. His parents are alive and living in Wisconsin. No siblings, no known relationships

Dmitri Volkev was a huge man that liked huge weapons. He spent time as a member of the Russian Mob, and is the only person in the group who was actually put on trial for murder, but the witnesses were blown up on the way to the trial. He’s shown proficiency with anything that has a trigger and is fond of anything that makes bodies difficult to identify. His armory log runs the gamut from handguns to RPGs. His parents were killed during the cold war and his sister was discovered with a russian necktie shortly before he himself joined the mob.

Johnathan Dammers was a medical student who paid his way as a Hollywood stuntman. An unfortunate accident left him with holes and dead tissue in a majority of the muscles in his upper body. He dropped out of school and never did stunts again until one day, he showed up to a gym and was capable of lifting almost twice his weight. An investigation by D7 was completed after a report was filed by Kim Itou, revealing Dammers as having been the recipient of an Ombra symbiote. This creature is of a type unknown to D7 and has shown to fill and reconstruct the damaged tissue in Dammers’ upper body. The only known side-effect is the secretion of a powerful acidic substance which Dammers keeps in check through the use of bandages soaked in a base compound of an opposing pH level. His armory log was the longest and showed that he was the only one in the group who knew his way around a medical kit or a grappling hook. His parents live in Massachusetts with his younger brother Stephen.

“So,” I said to myself as I closed the last file, “I’ve got to kill a boxer who likes silver, a druggie who can sniff out non-humans, a nerd who can’t aim, a guy who gets his rocks off by blowing shit up, and Batman. Great.”