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Fallon was not a man prone to question or marred by pangs of conscience. And the early stages of the job progressed without being terribly struck by either. A man like Fallon could not view human beings with any higher regard than, say, crash-test dummies or department-store ma
And his latest assignment should’ve have gone down like all the others, all in place and on schedule. Fallon following his instructions to the letter to make sure all family members were inside before triggering the blast.
Detonators were a thing of the past mostly, cell phones the thing these days. Simple matter of wiring the trigger chip with a number and then dialing it at the appropriate time. There’d be a brief delay, several seconds or more, but that wasn’t a problem in this case.
Fallon took his throwaway cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Let it ring once and then settled back to wait from his car parked safely down the street, counting the seconds out in his head.
One…two…three…
By five, Fallon began to feel edgy, and at ten he redialed, let it ring twice this time. Counted the seconds again.
Same result. Nothing.
Setbacks were nothing new to Fallon; failure something else again. There was no time to consider what had gone wrong. Better to focus on damage control, what to do from here. Fallon had weapons, a bounty of them. But murdering an entire family in the suburbs with guns and knives without a clear plan of access and approach would be a desperate move not befitting a professional of his level. Worse, he’d be acting rashly with the eventual outcome dictated by fortune instead of forethought. Better to come back, rethink the next step tomorrow.
Except tomorrow turned out worse.
The next book on the honors English list was called Joh
The book was short. And Fallon understood nary a word, much less what the book was supposed to be about. Antiwar, that much was clear, if nothing else. So he decided to focus the class’s discussion on war itself, something he knew plenty about.
But Mr. Beechum, of course, didn’t, which meant Fallon couldn’t appear to, either. He listened to the surprisingly intelligent, unsettling comments made by his students. Unsettling because it made him realize how much he missed that part of his life for its simplicity and clarity. The ability to kill for a cause with impunity. Of course, the cause meant little to Fallon; it was the impunity he embraced with a fervor and passion unknown in any previous segment of his life.
An unpleasant end to his military career was as expected as it was inevitable. Fortunately, there were plenty of private firms willing to pay far more while letting him practice his same skills. That, too, ended badly, in an embarrassing scandal for the company and yet another inglorious dismissal for Fallon. But there was no shortage of work for a man with Fallon’s skills, and he’d been stateside barely a week when a similarly ex-member of the same private firm came calling with an offer to join a network of professionals whose work was appreciated instead of vilified. Fallon didn’t bother himself with delusions of morality, of right and wrong. He did what he did, and he liked it. Simple as that.
The class agreed with the book’s antiwar stance. Fallon wished he’d been able to tell them the true side of things. About the various pleasures a man could derive from watching a face explode to a bullet or the guttural gasps a victim makes when a knife digs deep and tears. He wished he could explain that violence was something to neither be shu
Just like him.
To make his point, Fallon decided to stray from the lesson plan and introduce the only story he actually remembered reading as a boy. Read so much the pages actually disintegrated, the words disappearing until there were no sentences left and Fallon reluctantly discarded the handout. He hadn’t thought of that story in a very long time until now, glad to find a copy ripe for photocopying in the school library.
“‘The Most Dangerous Game,’” the librarian said, reading over Fallon’s shoulder as collated copies spit out from the machine’s feeder. “A true classic. But a bit violent, don’t you think?”
When Fallon returned the following morning, the target family was gone, whisked away in the dawn hours by shadowy men in black SUVs, if the neighbors were to be believed. FBI or federal marshals, no doubt, extricating Fallon’s targets into witness protection Fallon had never failed before, but there were percentages involved in everything and here the odds had finally caught up with him. He found himself obsessing over every move he had made to retrace where he’d gone wrong. The wiring, perhaps. Maybe a bad chip. A reception or transmission problem, even.
That was why Fallon was awake in his motel room when they came. Four of them, all well-armed and well-skilled enough to know not to drive their car too close to his room in the motor court. But they’d left their headlights on a second too long, enough to alert Fallon that someone was coming.
He gauged the distance suggested by the strength of the headlights and counted the seconds again.
One…two…three…
The door blew inward at six, Fallon unleashing a fusillade that was every bit the equal of his four would-be killers. So much passed through his mind as the bullets chewed up the walls around him and the smell of blood mixed with sulfur and cordite. The roar from the three guns he managed to reach drowned out the screams mostly, and Fallon was screeching away from the scene before another light snapped on in any of the nearby rooms.
The reality of the moment struck him, and fast. The fact that his employers wouldn’t stop with these four men, especially since Fallon had so effortlessly executed them, was no less a reality than the fact that his time as a contractor was effectively over. There was no redemption or second chances. He had gone from the very best at what he did to irrelevant in the seconds it had taken him to gun down four men.
Catch-25.
Fallon had effectively prepared for this moment, while never really considering it a possibility. Money would not be a problem; he had plenty of it stashed away. The issue was getting to it safely, making the necessary arrangements with according precautions, and such things took time. That meant disappearing without the use of any of his various identifies, all of which could be compromised now. His employers and conduits knew too much about him, his habits and patterns. Disappearing meant relying on none of them, becoming someone else entirely while laying the groundwork for his permanent departure from parts known.
There were plenty of Third World countries into which he could vanish, only to resurface as a man with a different identity boasting the kind of skills that were always in need. Fallon couldn’t imagine himself wallowing away the time on a beach, no matter how beautiful or plentiful the women. His life had been defined by killing for too long to either risk or want change.
For now going off the grid meant avoiding all forms of security cameras and public transportation, including buses, trains and airplanes. Rental cars were out, as well, and stealing too many cars could leave the kind of pattern he needed to avoid.
That left hitchhiking. Mr. Beechum’s was the fifth car in a week to chance picking him up. Fallon didn’t kill the others and hadn’t expected to kill Beechum until the ditzy man kept speaking enthusiastically of the new job he was headed for. That’s when the plan unfolded for Fallon, and the best he was able to do for Beechum in return was kill him in quick, painless fashion.