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Assassination. A word used to describe the planned killing of a person who is not under the legal jurisdiction of the killer, who is not physically in the hands of the killer, who has been selected by a resistance organization for death, and whose death provides positive advantages to that organization.

Assassination is an extreme measure not normally used in clandestine operations. It should be assumed that it would never be ordered or authorized by any Governmental Headquarters, though the latter may in rare instances agree to its execution by members of an associated foreign service. This reticence is partly due to the necessity for committing communications to paper. No assassination instructions should ever be written or recorded. Consequently, the decision to employ this technique must nearly always be reached in the field, at the area where the act will take place. Decision and instructions should be confined to an absolute minimum of persons. Ideally, only one person will be involved. No report may be made, but usually the act will be openly covered by normal news services, whose output is available to all concerned.

Murder is not morally justifiable. Self-defence may be argued if the victim has knowledge that may destroy the resistance organization if divulged. Assassination of persons responsible for atrocities or reprisals may be regarded as just punishment. Killing a political leader whose burgeoning career is a clear and present danger to the cause of freedom may be held necessary. But assassination can seldom be employed with a clear conscience. Persons who are morally squeamish should not attempt it. The techniques employed will vary according to whether the subject is unaware of his danger. Aware but unguarded or guarded. They will also be affected by whether or not the assassin is to be killed with the subject. Hereafter, assassinations in which the subject is unaware will be termed "simple"; those where the subject is aware but unguarded will be termed "chase"; those where the victim is guarded will be termed "guarded." If the assassin is to die with the subject, the act will be called "lost." If the assassin is to escape, the adjective will be "safe." It should be noted that no compromises should exist here. The assassin must not fall alive into enemy hands.

A further type division is caused by the need to conceal the fact that the subject was actually the victim of assassination, rather than an accident or natural causes. If such concealment is desirable the operation will be called "secret"; if concealment is effective it will be termed "terroristic."

Chase assassinations usually involve clandestine agents or members of criminal  Organizations.

In safe assassinations, the assassin needs the usual qualities of a clandestine agent. He should be determined, courageous, intelligent, resourceful, and physically active. If special equipment is to be used, such as firearms or drugs, it is clear that he must have outstanding skill with such equipment.

He should have an absolute minimum of contact with the rest of the organization and his one person should give instructions orally only. His safe evacuation after the act is absolutely essential, but here again contact should be as limited as possible. It is preferable that the person issuing instructions also conduct any withdrawal or covering action that may be necessary.

In lost assassination, the assassin must be a fanatic of some sort. Politics, religion, and revenge are about the only feasible motives. Since a fanatic is unstable psychologically, he must be handled with extreme care. He must not know the identities of the other members of the organization, for although it is intended that he die in the act, something may go wrong.

Santana Vargas threw back the lavish satin covers of the bed and padded silently across the deep pile Iranian carpet with effortless agility. Passing the window of the opulently decorated hotel suite he paused to pull back the thick heavy drapes, enabling him to look down onto the street outside. There seemed to be nothing out of the ordinary. The traffic was pretty much standard for the time of day, the afternoon light beginning to fade to darkness. The rain had stopped, and a never-ending train of automobile tyres spattered along relentlessly upon wet tarmac. There were no stationary vehicles that seemed out of place, no lone figures loitering in the shadows, in fact not any one thing in particular that aroused his suspicion or latent curiosity.

He had felt at ease, which was unusual, the afternoon had been spent leisurely, releasing a wide range of emotions and inhibitions that had not seen the light of day for a long time. It was rare for him to come across women that could hold his interest for longer than half an hour; they all lacked something in one way or another. Spoke too much – or too little, were looking for declarations of undying love that were impossible to fulfil. Women were just a major pain in the ass that he couldn’t wait to off-load. Wham bam! Thank you ma’am! There were no compromises as far as women and he were concerned. He virtually detested each and every one of them. Sure, he could admire and fuck a cute one like all men. But then an almost pathological loathing overcame him. He wanted her to dress, and get the hell out of his life. That instant.

Women, skilful in the art of meeting their own ends; grabbing bitching and backstabbing their way through life in pursuit of the unattainable. Convinced that open legs, would open doors. Why they couldn’t use the fucking doorbell…

Women could spend months, even years tracking and pinning a guy down. Only to spend the next fifteen years trying to dump him, usually when she realised that he didn’t measure up, financially, sexually – or both. Vargas was of the opinion that he should approach a woman in the street that he hated, and give her the keys to his house and car. That’s what it amounted to in eventuality.

Devious witches the lot of them only out for what they could screw out of him. He could do without them. And apart from the physical needs that got the better of him from time to time, he pretty much avoided and did do without them. A meaningless screw was more than adequate. Ties and complications were out of the question. As was handing over his hard earned cash to some Louis Vuitton freak with porridge for brains.

Natalie Hart had seemed different somehow. He couldn’t quite work out if she were a breath of spring air, or a thunderbolt from the blue, he supposed that was dependent on how one looked at life. But she was unlike most of the women typical to him. A little feral and over-opinionated perhaps, but then he wasn’t exactly inviting her to meet the family.

He headed towards the mini-bar, and mixed a Bombay Sapphire and Tonic; glancing as he did so in the direction of the disorderly outsized bed containing an equally dishevelled Natalie Hart. She appeared to be sleeping soundly, lying face down with her arms at her side, blonde hair spread messily across the Egyptian cotton pillows. Kind of reminded him of a dead Monroe. Silvery pale and motionless; emanating a soft perfumed glow that was both translucent, and yet visible in the early evening light.

Vargas let out a deep, mournful sigh as he contemplated the tranquillity of his surroundings, peace was not indigenous to Santana Vargas; he was more inclined to death and destruction. He approached the laptop on the mahogany desk near the window and began to read.

In resistance situations, assassination may be used as a counter-reprisal. Since this requires advertising to be effective, the resistance organization must be in a position to warn high officials publicly that their lives will be the price of reprisal action against innocent people. Such a threat is of no value unless it can be carried out, so it may be necessary to plan the assassination of various responsible officers of the oppressive regime and hold such plans in readiness to be used only if provoked by excessive brutality. Such plans must be modified frequently to meet changes in the tactical situation.

It is possible to kill a man with the bare hands, but very few are skilful enough to do it well. Even a highly trained Judo expert will hesitate to risk killing by hand unless he has absolutely no alternative. However, the simplest local tools are often much the most efficient means of assassination. A hammer, axe, wrench, screwdriver, fire poker, kitchen knife, lamp stand, or anything hard, heavy and handy will suffice. A length of rope or wire or a belt will do if the assassin is strong and agile. All such improvised weapons have the important advantage of availability and apparent innocence. The obviously lethal machine gun failed to kill Trotsky where an item of sporting goods succeeded.

In all safe cases where the assassin may be subject to search, either before or after the act, specialized weapons should not be used. Even in the lost case, the assassin may accidentally be searched before the act and should not carry an incriminating device if any sort of lethal weapon can be improvised at or near the site. If the assassin normally carries weapons because of the nature of his job, it may still be desirable to improvise and implement at the scene to avoid disclosure of his identity.

For secret assassination, either simple or chase, the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed, it causes little excitement and is only casually investigated.

The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve.

Bridge falls into water are not reliable. In simple cases a private meeting with the subject may be arranged at a properly cased location. The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous snatching upwards of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the "horrified witness", no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary. In chase cases it will usually be necessary to stun or drug the subject before dropping him. Care is required to insure that no wound or condition not attributable to the fall, is discernible after death.

There were two main qualifications essential for his line of work. A complete lack of principles and no conscience, he prided himself on having even less than the statutory requirements. He could blow out someone’s brains, or have a person incarcerated for years on phoney terrorist charges without so much as a backwards glance. It certainly didn’t pay anyone to piss him off, not even mildly. Santana Vargas wrote the handbook of dirty tricks, and it was widely used by others in his field; amongst whom he was fairly infamous, legendary even. Dirty tricks or not – who cared? They were effective. Santana Vargas was a King amongst cunts. And he basked in the glory.

It wasn’t that he was a masochist, rather he felt justified that the subjects who came under his scrutiny were some of the lowest forms of life ever to crawl upon the face of god’s earth, total sewage in his view.

They conspired to injure and intimidate ordinary unsuspecting individuals who were less than able to defend them selves against the horrors of political warring factions, of drug cartels and illegal arms dealers. The people Vargas was in the business of ‘putting out of business’ thought they had the right to maim and kill others in an attempt to put across their hollow messages, or profit from the ill gained proceeds of their crimes. The evil bastards who dissected small babies and stuffed them with contraband as their parents searched in the vain hope of finding their Infant alive. Only to discover that a new Mom was peddling the now dead product of their hope for the future, across a Stateline, cradling her ‘sick’ chid to the nearest emergency department, the border police fell for that line every time. And all of that, just to enable them to drive the latest Mercedes Benz. As cold as Vargas was, the terrorizing of innocent people reviled and sickened him. He didn’t do torture, drew the line at that, to him it was unprofessional and pointless. But if that’s how his counterparts got their kicks well that was fine. He had no problem with it, just didn’t like the smell of it. The torture cells of a cold war era Cuba. Blood, faeces, vomit bleach…wholly unpleasant, and usually unnecessary. Vargas had a way of getting information out of people, and rarely had he so much as drawn a drop of blood. Unless he’d had to assassinate them of course.

Individuals who terrorised and hurt the innocent were deserving of Santana Vargas’ personal touch and deserved all they got. A bullet behind the ear usually amended any risky situation, and he rarely took prisoners. Why feed the evil bastards? Like for like in his opinion. He had once planted bogus bomb plans on a neighbour who’d irritated him with his incessantly prying questions. This had culminated in an interrogation of 36 hours complete with rubber hoses and fuse wire until he’d called off his legion of directorially enrolled psychopaths. Hadn’t meant to cause the guy any lasting harm, but had caused him to reconsider behaving like an asshole of the first order. The memory of that still caused him to laugh inwardly. The neighbour in question never did harass him or any of his fellow tenants again; he simply retreated silently into the monotony of his life, which had by now at least been briefly enlightened.

And the amount of pockets and baggage he’d slipped packages of cocaine into – well he’d lost count. That was an old trick. But he could get a ‘mark’ off the street for years with that one before it went to trial. Coke planting was as low as you could get, he had never known anyone manage to get out of that, but at times these stunts were necessary.

He wondered momentarily of the whereabouts of a young Algerian he’d found it necessary to set up a couple of years previously. Knowing, but being unable to prove beyond doubt that he was part of a terrorist cell planning to kill hundreds, possibly thousands of people in a deadly Ricin attack. Vargas had planted Castor Beans and bomb making equipment in the guy’s apartment in Paris; he had ultimately been imprisoned for twenty years without possibility of parole. But the bust had been disastrous; an undercover agent had got stabbed to death as the result of a breakdown in intelligence. Vargas had blamed himself. He had sent in unarmed men thinking that the apartment had been empty. The Algerian had been home, and five officers were stabbed in the resulting chaos, one fatally. Vargas’ colleague had been married with their first child on the way.

Some mistakes were indelible.

Vargas breathed deeply, swigging back the cold fluid and swallowing loudly. He had trained as a Doctor in Cuba; and was highly skilled in the capacity of preserving life. Now he had gone into reverse, his personal headcount of lost souls beyond even official figures. Why did a man resort to this? What had happened to send him down the trail of devastation and destruction? Had this journey been necessary or could it perhaps have been avoided? Tears sprang to Vargas’ eyes; he knew the train of thought that would follow them, the haunting imagery that was to play over in his mind, like an old movie. Except the actors and the situations were real.

The stark blueness of his eyes gave the impression of frozen pools, glazed over with iridescent ice. If eyes were a reflection of the soul, then Santana Vargas was the walking dead. Virtually no one had ever looked straight into them, except perhaps his wife, and Natalie hart.

Had his beautiful wife Suzanne cried out his name as she was raped and tortured, had she died quickly, or piece by piece as her hooded tormentors had shrieked and laughed at her as she writhed in agony? Was she aware of the final indignation of having her head hacked off as the murdering bastards whooped and yelped in delight?

Was she now cradling their baby son James who had died of meningitis aged only two months? He closed his eyes and imagined the picture.

Now, through warm salted tears, he recalled the justification for the voyage along his chosen route.

The problem at hand?

Was Natalie Hart’s death a convincing suicide?

*****

Francesca Tucker

All characters and situations are fiction and the copyright of the author.