Night of the Assassin

Chapter 3

Sixteen Years Ago

The boy had grown considerably over the thousand days since Emilio had taken over his care, and had mastered all of the tasks he’d been assigned. He was remarkably self-possessed, excelled in his studies, and had worked diligently on his exercises. Emilio had transitioned him from hay to a real workout, in order to keep up with his rapidly-developing physique. His upper body was sculpted by a series of isometric exercises, culminating in chin-ups and push-ups; his lower body was conditioned with increasingly longer runs. Even as he approached his fourteenth birthday, he could easily be mistaken for two years older and his gait had taken on the measured confidence of an athlete.

Don Miguel had occasionally stopped by – each time he’d been surprised by the boy’s development. Gone for six months at a time, it seemed that with each visit, the boy was a few inches taller and with a few more pounds of muscle. Don Miguel was pleased with the metamorphosis and indicated his satisfaction with generous increases in the boy’s allowance, as well as in Emilio’s remuneration. The boy was now easily half of Emilio’s workload because the number of skills to be learned increased with his age. He was already an accomplished horseback rider and swimmer, and had shown considerable aptitude for archery. It wasn’t unusual for the boy to spend hours each day patiently firing at targets with his hunting bow, gradually increasing the distance as he mastered a given range. That was how he approached things – methodically, analytically. He’d quickly taken Emilio’s counsel to heart and worked at controlling his emotions no matter what the stimuli. Emilio had taught him any number of tricks to help him remain detached and calm in any situation.

On his fourteenth birthday, Don Miguel was nowhere to be found, but had sent a substantial financial stipend to be lavished on the boy’s newest tier of training – weapons. Emilio had received instructions to teach him to become proficient with handguns and rifles, and had sourced a variety of guns of all shapes and sizes. By this point, he knew the boy would practice until he mastered whatever the challenge was – and he wasn’t disappointed with his firearms progress. Within a year, the boy was a crack shot with any weapon you handed him, firing either right or left handed. He’d become ambidextrous through discipline and application, and spent three to four hours every afternoon at the private shooting range Emilio and he had constructed for his use.

Firearms were illegal in Mexico, but out in the country, with no neighbors for miles and with all the local police on the payroll, nobody seemed to mind the constant volleys of shots that echoed through the trees for hours on end. Nobody was being hurt, no harm was done and everyone was getting bountiful Christmas bonuses each year, so there was no reason to rock any boats. It was live and let live as far as law enforcement was concerned, which worked out in everyone’s best interests.

The boy quickly grew comfortable with any guns provided to him. As his fourteenth year transitioned into his fifteenth, he was exceeding all expectations Emilio had for him. One afternoon, shortly after the boy’s fifteenth birthday, Emilio performed the ultimate pistol test, bringing with him a Smith and Wesson. 357 Magnum revolver and a Ruger 9 mm semi-automatic. He set up two coffee cans thirty yards away from each other, paced off forty yards with the boy and held out both handguns.

“The target on the left, shoot with your left hand using the revolver. The one on the right, use the Ruger. Fire as quickly as you can while maintaining accuracy,” Emilio instructed.

The boy hefted both pistols, getting a feel for their weight. He knew from hundreds of hours of experience that firing a big bore revolver required different skills to firing a small caliber automatic. Besides the difference in recoil, which was considerable and had to be adjusted for, a revolver used each trigger pull to rotate the cylinder that held the bullets, requiring significantly more pressure and causing a reflex that would make most shooters fire high, pulling up from the target. Firing a revolver with both hands in a military crouch was hard enough, but doing so with his ‘weak’ hand while adjusting for the low recoil of the Ruger was an almost impossible challenge.

“How many pounds of trigger pressure on the Ruger?” the boy asked.

“I wonder, if you’re in a situation where you have to use someone else’s weapon, whether they’ll be able to answer that for you? My guess is, not.” Emilio replied.

The boy shrugged. Never hurt to ask.

He calculated the distance and then began firing, alternating weapons, rapidly, but not in an uncontrolled manner. The cans, which they’d filled with water, both sprouted leaks. After emptying both weapons in their direction they walked over to inspect the results.

Of six possible hits from the revolver, five had found their mark. All nine that Emilio had loaded the Ruger with found theirs.

“ Heh. Not bad. I would have guessed you wouldn’t have hit any with the revolver. The only problem is that the one you didn’t hit it with might have been the one you needed to save your life. We’ll need to practice this more, switch things up on you. And I want to start practicing shooting while running or riding in a vehicle soon. Once you master being able to hit anything using whatever you’re handed from a still position, we’ll kick it up a notch and have you simulate real combat situations where you’re not stationary.” This was high praise from Emilio, who was grudging with his accolades.

The boy smiled. He understood his performance was extraordinary. Nobody he knew could have done it. But Emilio was right. There was no room for error, and no satisfaction from being almost great.

Emilio’s only concern as the boy matured was the inevitable interest that he showed toward his daughter, Jasmine. She was a year younger than the boy but already a beauty, thankfully reflecting her mother’s genes rather than Emilio’s. Also highly intelligent, she was every bit the boy’s match when it came to anything intellectual, and there had been a simmering kind of sibling rivalry between them since they’d first met.

Jasmine’s mother had died when she was five, leaving Emilio to shoulder the burden of raising her, assisted by his sister and mother. One of the benefits of being a breadwinner of secure means with a generous employer like Don Miguel was that you could help with family members, and Emilio did his fair share. In return for which, the ladies, as he called them, raised Jasmine while he was working. It wasn’t a perfect situation but it had done well enough by her and she’d blossomed into a gorgeous, charming example of classical Mexican beauty, all gleaming black hair, white teeth and coffee-kissed skin.

The only quirk she’d shown was a deep interest in the occult, driven no doubt by a frustrated desire to somehow relate to her departed mother. She was Catholic, of course, as was everyone in Sinaloa they knew, but she’d grown restive with the faith and had taken to reading tomes of dubious virtue, on divining, and psychic powers, levitation and transmutation, and all manner of arcane, esoteric disciplines. Jasmine had of late taken to sneaking out and spending time with an old woman who claimed to read fortunes in one’s palm, as well as through studying tea leaves – all for a price, of course. Emilio had been worried, but the ladies had assured him that it was just a phase; a way to appear more mysterious as she came of age. He’d never understood women, having found them all equally inscrutable and impossible to read, so in the end he’d decided to take the advice of his mother and sister and let the fascination run its course.

Emilio’s days consisted of working with the boy and the horses. Once both children were home from school, his attention focused almost exclusively on the boy, leaving Jasmine to be trained by the ladies – in the feminine ways of the world. This wasn’t because of any lack of love on Emilio’s part. On the contrary, he lived for Jasmine. It was just that as she’d grown from a child into an adolescent he’d felt out of his depth, and now that she was thirteen, and moody, her body sprouting the curves that would attract members of the opposite sex like bees to honey, he had no idea how to deal with her. He rationalized that this was natural, and would hopefully also pass. She just needed to be around other women, to learn whatever it was they learned while he taught the boy how to do masculine things.

One Friday before Easter, the boy had come home from school with a bloody nose and some abrasions on his face, which after some hard questioning turned out had come about from a fight with an older boy who had been bothering Jasmine during recess; he had grown increasingly abusive and insulting as the day had worn on. The boy had rushed to defend Jasmine’s honor, only to be pummeled by the larger student, whose two years of seniority was enhanced by growing up in a household with three brothers who had taught him to fight. The boy’s education hadn’t yet moved to manual self-defense, but, looking at his bruised face, Emilio decided it was time to teach him how to use his fists.

As with most things, the boy learned quickly, and within a few weeks had mastered the basics of the primitive form of martial arts Emilio knew; really just a combination of rudimentary boxing and street-fighting techniques. But the boy was a sponge, and once he’d exhausted Emilio’s capabilities he lobbied for more advanced training – and given that it was Emilio’s job to provide him with the fullest possible education, they researched alternatives and quickly found a plethora of options. Culiacan was the nearest large city, a half hour drive from the ranch. It had a number of martial arts schools specializing in judo, karate, and kung fu. The boy convinced Emilio that his development warranted three classes a week. He added the stylized moves and holds he learned to his exercise routine, striving to perfect those as he had so many others.

There were no more incidents at school after the next altercation, when the boy knocked the older bully unconscious within a few seconds of the fight starting, the bully abruptly lost his taste for hassling Jasmine or picking on either of them. His classmates treated him with polite and cautious deference from that point on.

He didn’t mix with the rest of his peers and showed no interest in friendships beyond casual greetings-in-passing in the halls. That was more than enough interaction for him; he viewed his fellow students as inferior in every way – not because he was arrogant, but rather because he’d run an equation and found them wanting and immature. They were children, given to excitement or emotional flights, whereas he was almost an adult, always restrained. He was quiet and withdrawn and tended to keep to himself, preferring to limit his mingling to Jasmine during recess. They had grown close by virtue of their shared male authority figure. It was a brother-sister relationship, for the most part, but the ladies had cautioned both Emilio and Jasmine that things would have to change once they both matured.

Once he turned sixteen and she fifteen the inevitable occurred; the two became inseparable in spite of admonitions from the adults. Jasmine was gorgeous by then, and at an age when many Mexican girls in past generations were married and having their first children, so it was foolish high hope on everyone’s part to expect that the two wouldn’t find each other, living out in the country as they did, and in the same compound. The boy had grown from a gangly colt into a self-possessed young man with looks that made females glance at him twice. Jasmine had noticed the transformation over the past year and her interest in him had moved from sisterly to something considerably warmer. Eventually, they discovered their curiosity and admiration was mutual and their passion quickly stoked to a boiling point they both gladly yielded to.

The couple found time to sneak away even while under near-constant watch, as young lovers usually did, confounding the best intentions of their guardians. They’d spend long hours in each other’s arms, in the barn, or hidden away in one of the recesses of the main house. Once they’d fully discovered each other they were like prisoners who’d crossed a long, dry desert and found themselves at an oasis, with no limitations on how much they pleasured each other. Their coupling soon became a daily event and for the first time in his life, the boy found himself enraptured by another human being. His attraction to Jasmine was magnetic and primal, and before long he was hers, body and soul, willing to go to any lengths to be with her or make her happy.

The boy was even willing to entertain Jasmine’s quirky ideas about the nature of reality, and indulged her penchant for spirituality and the paranormal, which at that point had developed into a borderline obsession. Every other utterance was regarding what fate, or the stars, wanted, which the boy attributed to her exotic nature and bored intellect. But she was deadly serious about her belief that there was more to the universe than what could be proved or seen, and so it was that three months after his sixteenth birthday he found himself agreeing to accompany her to the lair of the old woman who claimed to be a medium, so she could read his future.

That morning, they set off down the road on their bicycles, trailed by a pick-up truck carrying three men wearing cowboy hats and toting assault rifles. Even though Don Miguel was hardly ever in evidence, he insisted that the boy be protected at all times as though an attack on the ranch was imminent. This was just another way in which he was different than his cartel brethren – he was a meticulous planner and left nothing to chance. That had stood him in good stead throughout his life; he was ever-vigilant to possible threats to his family or entourage.

When they reached the clapboard hovel where the woman lived, marked with a battered roadside sign proclaiming Madame Sirena to be a medium extraordinaire, the truck pulled to a stop a discreet distance from the dwelling. The couple leaned their bicycles against the front of the house and, hand-in-hand, the pair ascended the three rickety steps. Jasmine knocked on the door, flakes of sun-bleached paint flaked off under her knuckles. After a considerable pause, the door was opened by an ancient gray-haired woman wearing a red gauze gypsy shawl trimmed in small gold coins. She fixed the couple with a one-eyed stare – the vision in her other eye having been lost long ago. The boy was momentarily repelled by the milky-white pupil, but instantly hid his reaction and braved a tentative smile.

“Ah. So this is the young man! Welcome, Jasmine, mi amor. Welcome. Look at him. He’s a strapping one, yes? Handsome, you were right about that, and strong as a bull, I’d wager. Come in, come in…” Madame Sirena insisted, gesturing at the dank gloomy interior with her claw-like hand. The boy noted in passing that she smelled like hastily applied cheap rose water, and sweat – a thoroughly objectionable combination that would stay with him as a reminder of unpleasantness for the rest of his life.

“Here. Sit at the table. Let’s see what we have here, eh? First I’ll look at your palm, and see what the gods have written for you in terms of love and life…and then I’ll do a reading.” She peered at him in the gloom. “It’s customary to leave a tribute for the spirits’ divine cooperation in producing an accurate reading, young man,” she hissed at him, in what he presumed she imagined to be a sly manner. Jasmine nudged him with her elbow and the boy fumbled in his pocket and fished out a two hundred peso note, placing it in the straw bowl the woman had balanced near the table’s edge. The bowl and the money therein quickly disappeared and the Madame moved around the room, lighting candles and incense. She pushed the button on a portable stereo sitting on a decrepit book shelf; vaguely-Asian music began to drift through the space, low volume, atmospheric dissonance to create a mood, more than anything.

The boy studied the walls and noted with amusement that there were countless photographs of mediums and seances and spooky-looking scenes, interspersed with turn-of-the-century posters depicting supernatural events and expositions. The overall effect was somewhat clumsy, but effective for the local peasantry. What Jasmine found so fascinating about this was beyond him, but if it made her happy, so be it. Seemed a small enough price to pay to find heaven in her embrace.

The crone approached the table and switched on a dusty yellow hanging lamp with an intricate brocade shade that directed most of the light to the center of the table. She gestured at him.

“Give me your hand. The right hand. Palm up. Just relax. This won’t hurt. Much,” she assured him, then cackled. He wondered whether she’d gotten her act out of central casting for a C-level horror film, the kind that were popular at the local cinemas with badly dubbed Spanish or blurry subtitles. Still, he played along, and placed his hand on the table.

The woman took it in hers and made a variety of sounds signaling deep thought.

“Hmmmm. Mmmm…yesssss. Oh. I see your love line is clear. You will only have one real love in your life, and it will be early in your time here. Hmmmm. Your lifeline is different. It’s long, but has many breaks, signaling something unusual. Maybe illness, maybe brushes with death. But it continues, so you will prevail through it all…hmmmm.”

This went on for a while and he pretended polite interest in the ambiguous generalities about his possible future. Of course, with Jasmine sitting there listening, love would be early and intense and genuine, which held an element of truth. When he was with Jasmine, he felt like an eagle soaring above the clouds. The intensity of his feelings for her were almost scary. It gave her power over him, which his training advised him to recoil from. Still, hormones were not to be denied, and he was smitten, no doubt.

The palm reading finished, the old woman trundled over to a cabinet and withdrew an ancient deck of cards, placing it on the table after shuffling them for several minutes.

“This is the tarot. It knows all, and tells all. Nobody can hide the truth from the tarot, and its words possess the wisdom of the ages.”

Sure they do, he thought. Two hundred pesos worth, to be exact. Including the cheesy canned tunes and the gypsy act. He wished she’d get on with it. He could think of a dozen different things he’d rather be doing with Jasmine just now, all of them involving nudity and absent an old crone’s ramblings.

The woman began her reading, and paused at the end after she’d revealed all the cards. The boy was absently studying the photos on the stained wall behind her, his attention caught by a photograph of a raven, or crow, perched on a barbed-wire fence. Something about it chilled his blood, but he didn’t know why. He’d tuned out her prattle in favor of making productive use of his time, thinking thoughts worthy of his energy rather than listening to superstitious mumbo-jumbo.

His awareness grudgingly returned to the table, pulled from the photo of the crow, as the putative Madame contemplated the meaning of the cards. She pointed at several, with a trembling finger.

“This is Death. It’s placement in the reading is ominous. It can signal many things, but in this sequence, it hints that you will be constantly surrounded by death.” The woman continued droning, but the boy was zoning out again. Gee, good guess. Living in Culiacan, with Don Miguel as your protector and benefactor, you’re going to be surrounded by death. What a stretch, and a surprise to one and all. The nonstop weapons and survival training that Jasmine had no doubt chatted with the woman about couldn’t have been a tipoff or anything. Hell, all he had to do was close his eyes and he could bring death to the surface, fresh as though it had only occurred just yesterday. Incredibly insightful so far. He was getting his money’s worth. What was next? Danger? Uncertainty?

“And this, the defining card, is the King of Swords. But it’s inverted. Which is a negative sign. It can mean many things, most of which involve destruction and selfish consequences…”

“Inverted?” the boy asked, finally interested in something she’d said.

“It’s upside down,” the medium explained in a tremulous voice.

“Not to me,” the boy observed. He was sitting opposite her.

They were both correct.

The reading drew to an uncomfortable close, the woman seeming suddenly anxious to be rid of them. No doubt she’d done her shtick for the two hundred pesos and was hoping for more revenue for the day. The boy couldn’t believe anyone would buy this hackneyed song and dance and he was annoyed when Jasmine lingered, murmuring with the old biddy, as they both flicked furtive glances at him.

Once they had ridden their bicycles back home, Jasmine seemed withdrawn and distant, showing no interest in a romantic interlude. She hadn’t responded well to the boy’s mockery of the reading, taking it as a personal affront to her sacred beliefs. In retrospect, he could have chosen his few words with more kindness. ‘Baffling bullshit’ could be misinterpreted, as could ‘superstitious idiocy’.

Whatever the woman’s ability to divine the future, one thing changed forever from that afternoon on. Jasmine and he were never the same, which he directly attributed to the vicious old witch’s black predictions. She had the ability to foretell the future, all right, in that she had initiated a subtle campaign to undermine their relationship, for who knew what reason. But he learned quickly that the power of superstition could be significant – a lesson he would carry forward with him into life. And he vividly remembered the final card that seemed to have such an effect on the old faker – the oldest of the tarot face cards, the reversed King of Swords.

The previous months had passed with the topic of how to deal with the romantic fait-accompli aired often among the elders. It was a constant sticking point between Emilio and the ladies. Emilio was of the opinion that if the boy was going to be sampling his precious hothouse flower’s bounty, he should plan on getting married, the sooner the better. The ladies argued against any sort of confrontation, partially because of who he was, as well as mitigating their youth. Neither Jasmine nor the boy had been aware of the seething disagreement their tryst caused, not that either of them would have been particularly interested in the older adults’ opinions. Youth believed in its supremacy, as always, and the young were typically convinced that the aged had little grasp of how the modern world worked.

Emilio and the ladies were terrified that the boy would use Jasmine for his pleasure and then break her heart, and so it was with considerable surprise that Emilio found the boy to be increasingly moody and dejected as his sixteenth summer wore on. When Emilio confronted him, the confession that the couple had been intimate came as no shock, but his complaint that Jasmine had grown disinterested in him and decided that they weren’t compatible did. Emilio didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved, but the boy was suffering, as only those experiencing the tender cuts of young love can, so he redoubled his training and poured on the challenges. The boy lapped it up, growing more adept each day, and eventually moved beyond his infatuation with Jasmine, even as she showed no further interest in him. It was as though a switch had been thrown – she’d swung from obviously enamored to wanting nothing to do with him, confounding not only the boy, but also the adults. Still, Emilio sensed that there was unfinished business between the two, and got the impression from the boy that his passage to other girls would be a bitter one, tainted by Jasmine’s memory.

From the boy’s perspective, Jasmine’s rejection was an abandonment, serving to remind him how foolish it was to trust others or allow them into your emotional life. It was during that sixteenth summer that he made the mental resolution to be an island, impenetrable and aloof, using others for his convenience but nothing more. For the first time in his life he’d opened up and entrusted Jasmine with his heart, only to be repaid by her spitting in his face for his trouble. His rigid training provided the solution: never allow anyone to get close, never reveal your true self, and never care.

And so it was that he found a philosophy that was useful, that afforded him some relief in his time of confused pain. Others had no innate value beyond what they could do to further his agenda or satisfy his needs. They were objects that only existed as minor moons orbiting his solar system, in which he was the sun – the giver of life and the destroyer of worlds. His narcissism was not unusual for isolated youths who found every task or challenge laughably easy, but the combination of his past and Jasmine’s snubbing of him, transformed him into the very character that the old medium woman had described when articulating the meaning of the reversed King of Swords – a selfish megalomaniac who would go to any lengths to satisfy his needs, even if it resulted in the destruction of others.

The boy had slim interest in considering the ramifications of his chosen worldview. His training now consumed all of his free hours as he sought to exceed even the highest bars Emilio could conjure as challenges. He’d increased his Dojo sessions to five times a week and had become adept in most of the offered techniques. His school had graduated him early due to his advanced academic performance so he set about studying engineering and architecture in earnest, mainly as a guide to understanding how things operated or were built. He had a ravenous intellect unlike any of his instructors had ever seen; a young man who could do or be whatever he wanted. The future was beyond bright for him and he soon discovered that there were many willing young females who sought his attention – and so, in time, Jasmine became a distant memory.

The remainder of his sixteenth year was spent in rigorous pursuit of excellence, whether they were intellectual, physical, or defense-related endeavors. His teen years were a defining period, where he honed his proficiency to a razor’s edge. Never before had Emilio seen someone who could shoot as well or expertly disappear into the woods without a sound and become untraceable, or swim as athletically, or remain inscrutable through any circumstance. The discipline Emilio had sought to instill had yielded incredible dividends. The boy was almost superhuman in his commitment and self-possession. It was as though providence had blessed him with a surplus of fitness and acuity. By the time he was due to turn seventeen, Emilio was satisfied that his work with the boy was done. He’d made the transition from boy into young man, and the world was now his playground, to do with as he liked.

Which made it all the more surprising when he vanished without a trace on the morning of his seventeenth birthday.