Chapter 24
3rd Pov
It has been a week since Calla helped Mox out by accompanying him to the meet. During that week, Calla has been trying to tail Vinny Cooper but it has proven to be difficult. He doesn’t adhere to any public schedules, and he changes his route to home and work irregularly, and never uses the same route twice in a row.
Because of this Calla doesn’t even know where he lives but she pays no mind to it. She decided to simply kill him, so all she need to do is to be patient and wait.
And that is what’s she’s doing now. Waiting patiently.
She is on the roof of a building that isn’t directly opposite to the UN building, but she still has a line of sight. The building she is on, is to the left of the UN-building if looked from the street, about 800 meters away. So all in all, easy shot for Calla even though she has to shoot a moving target that moves on the horizontal axle from right to left.
Usually when sniping, it’s ideal that the target is moving directly towards or away from the shooter but with experienced sniper it doesn’t matter.
She has waited here for 8 hours, patiently looking through her scope. It is 0800, and she took position at midnight. The window for the shot is about twenty meters, the distance of the driveway and the front doors. She knows that Vinny’s driver drops him off there, before going to park the car. She has seen this, five times already, and the next time will be Vinny’s last.
Calla sighs, while looking through the scope. She is wearing gray hoodie and black college pants. Behind her is a guitar case, where she can fit her sniper easily by taking it to two parts. She has five shots in the magazine just in case, but she intends to get the job done with just one.
A black car turns and drives through the gates of the UN. Calla follows the car through her sights, as she knows her target is in the car.
The car stops on the spot where Calla expected it to stop. She changes her breathing pattern a bit to ready herself, as she watches the car doors opening.
Four men steps outside. Vinny Cooper, A.K.A dr. White, and three of his bodyguards.
Calla keeps her crosshairs on Vinny while keeping an eye to the flags in front of the UN building.
She has a shot, but the wind is too irregular, so she waits.
Fifteen meters to the door, and the wind loosens up. The bodyguards surround Vinny on both sides and one on the back, so she doesn’t have a clear shot.
‘Yellow’ she thinks to herself, meaning she has an indirect shot. Red would be no shot at all, and green is the situation she’s waiting.
Ten meters to the door, the wind pics up again and he is still surrounded by the bodyguards.
Eight meters, and the situation is the same.
‘No unnecessary risks’ she thinks to herself. If she doesn’t get a green shot, she will not take it, as it would only warn Vinny if he doesn’t die. She can always do this another day.
‘Yellow’ She whispers, as the distance is only five meters.
She takes deep breath and holds it.
Regularly irregular is the best kind of security detail, that can be. To protect the mark while never falling in to predictable pattern is the professional way to protect.
And Vinny’s security is professional, but even professionals makes mistakes. The worst kind of mistakes for pro’s are to fall in to a routine. And that routine will be the demise of Vinny.
Calla watches through the scope as the leftmost bodyguard of Vinny breaks the formation and takes a few quick steps to open and hold the door for Vinny, just like the other times when Calla watched this situation through her binoculars.
Four meters, but the wind is too rough.
‘Yellow’ at three meters too.
The flags fall as the wind stops.
‘Green’
*BAM*
The bullet impacts Vinny’s left temple, destroying the hypothalamus of the brain and exiting from the other side where it impacts to the right side bodyguards left shoulder.
‘Confirmed’ Calla thinks to herself, as she witnesses the body of Vinny falling to the ground.
'Operation killVinny is accomplished' She finishes her thought process, as she is backing away from the edge of the roof.
She doesn’t waste time as she expertly takes her rifle to two pieces and puts them into the case, and starts making her way to the other side of the roof, towards the access point.
She hastily goes the stairs down, keeping her hood on. There aren’t any cameras in the building, and she knows what route to take in the street so that she can’t be spotted by the street cameras in a few block radius.
Meanwhile in front of the UN-building one of the bodyguards is tending to the wounded one, while the one that went for the door is pointing towards the direction where the shot was taken from, to the men who rushed outside.
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They are already coordinating with the police so that they can lock up a five block radius, but they know that a sniper is hard to catch.
After the direction of the shooter is pointed, the guard who left the formation to open the door can only berate himself.
The moment the shot was taken he realized that the shooter was waiting for him to leave the formation. At that moment Mr. Cooper had a bodyguard to the right and behind him, so the only spot with guaranteed direct shot was from the left.
A week or so prior to this, Cooper had told his bodyguards to be more vigilant, because there was a threat on his life, but didn’t tell more. They had been extra careful in everything these past few days, and now because of him, or rather the routine where he always opens the door, cost them their boss’s life.
But there isn’t much he can do now, and the other guards had fell to the same routine as him, as they always let him open the door. The only thing they can do now is to improve from this, if they ever want a contract again.
…
Calla has made her way back to the library now. She took a cab a few blocks away from her shooting spot and exited the area just as the first responders were starting to lock the grid down, but the cab didn’t get inspected. She took the cab to a location, few kilometers away from the library and took a different cab from there, just to be safe.
Now she is in the library, with a satisfied smile on her face as she is eating a muffin. The reward for her, she bought prior to the shooting. With her other hand she studies the card she received from ‘Darrel’, and thinking she rests for the rest of the day and contact’s him tomorrow.
Before that there is one call she wants to make. She has put it off for too long and now is as good time as any.
Changing her clothes to a white knee-high dress with a brown jacket on it and a fedora. She is wearing comfortable shoes and has tied her hair to ponytail that hangs on her back from underneath the fedora, and the big round sunglasses are the last thing she puts on before heading out.
She intends to make the call from a payphone just to be on the safe side, even though she trusts Linda, she knows that some people might have anticipated her call to her.
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NYC police department
Pov Linda
I’m watching the emergency news that tells how some UN-dude was shot and killed by a sniper.
“Why I’m getting the feeling, that this is connected to our little miss assassin.” Brian says with a smirk. We are alone in det. Simmons office, waiting for him to meet us. We haven’t gotten anywhere with our investigation of the organization, nor Calla, but we haven’t focused much on her now as we are going through the evidence found in the facility in Brooklyn.
Though it was all destroyed.
“No point in guessing, we should just focus on the tasks at hand.” I replay to him but I think he’s right. This Vinny was probably a member of the organization and Calla took him out, but it doesn’t matter anymore as his dead and if he left evidence lying around about his connections to the organization, I will found out about it sooner or later.
“You are right. We don’t have much to go on for now. Our best hope is for the man who was involved in the Washington D.C. shooting to wake from his coma, or for the tech teams to recover something from the labs computers.” Brian says, and I nod in agreement. Though I don’t have high hopes for the tech team. The computers were blown to bits in the explosion.
*ring ring* My phone rings as I’m thinking about the possibilities.
Not a number I recognize but it often isn’t. I work for the intelligence in J.A.T.F. so it’s the norm to receive calls from burners or such, but this call is coming from here in new York, and it looks to be a pay phone at that.
“Excuse me.” I say as I stand up and head for the empty conference room, where people has taken measures to make eavesdropping nearly impossible.
“Hello?” I answer the call and the answer I hear brings a smile to my face.
“Hey Linda!” Calla greets me from the other end.
“Calla! Where are you? Are you okay? How are you doing?” I excitedly barrage her with questions, even suprising myself about how worried I have been.
I’m sure my colleagues wouldn’t appreciate me talking to her with out trying to trace the call, but we decided that we concentrate on the organization now, rather than Calla. I know it’s only an excuse for me, but I’ll still take it.
“I’m okay and doing good! I saw you in Washington but the pests ruined our reunion…” She says, her voice starting happy but getting gloomier towards the end of that sentence.
Pests?
“But I can’t tell you where I am now, I’m sure you understand…” Her voice getting a bit timid before she continues “And you? Are you okay?”.
“Oh I’m doing just great after flying over the Atlantic to catch up with you and going through the bodies you dropped and the battle zones you left behind…” I say, dripping with sarcasm, before adding: “But I’m glad you are okay.”
“…”
“Calla? You still there?”
“Yeah… I’m sorry for causing all this trouble. Are you mad at me?” She replies, her voice sounding scared. My heart aches to the sound of her voice. She may be an assassin but she is still a teenage girl and I was the first person she had any positive form of contact with, outside of Al-Aman.
“I’m not mad Calla. I’m just worried. Can you tell me anything more, like what you have been doing and are going to do? Is the Vinny Cooper assassination your handiwork? You should know that we are now concentrating on the organization rather than you.” I ask her, not really expecting an answer, but it’s worth a shot.
I’m sure others wouldn’t approve of me telling Calla that we aren’t actively searching her anymore but I don’t care.
“Oh, that, hehe.” She chuckles at my question, and that pretty much answers me.
“Yeah it was me. He worked for them. I’m not going to get in to it now, as I don’t know much either, but I can say that Vinny was a high-ranking member of them as far as I know, but there were reasons why I took him out before interrogating him. I know they call them self the Caturix movement, and that they have one member in the pentagon. Here, I sent you a photo.” Calla says and as she finished, my phone vibrate from incoming message.
It’s sent from a different number, probably a burner phone. After opening the message I see a picture of a man with angular clean shaved jaw, and a neat black hear that is combed to the back. with only one lock of hair escaping and hanging lightly above his green eyes.
The photo is taken through a sniper scope from the building in Washington, where the shoot out took place. The man in the photo is right at the center of the crosshairs. I can’t help but grinning as the photo is so Calla like.
I hold the phone back to my ear as I heard Calla started talking again.
“They called him ‘red’, and Vinny was called dr. white, so I think he too, is a high-ranking member of Caturyx. And you should now I’m going to ease of from the hunt of the Caturyx for a while now and lay low.”
“Oh, that’s some good intel. And I’m glad you decided to lay low. I don’t have to worry about you so much, but I would prefer if you just came back to us…” I mutter the last sentence so I’m not sure if she heard me.
“Heh. I don’t’ think I’m doing that anytime soon but when things cool down we could meet, but let’s not worry about that now. But anyway, I think that if you are tracing this call you should be getting close to discover my location, so it was Really nice talking to you, and I call you later, gottago bye!”
*beep beep beep*
“…”
Well that was rude. But I’m not mad, I understand why she would do so and I would’ve probably done the same. I do hope to see her soon though…
I lower the phone from my ear as I start heading out of the room, and walk back to Simmon’s office.
“What are you so happy about?” Brian asks me with a smirk as I made my way back.
I’m still smiling from the phone call, and from the information that Calla is alright, and for her help at pointing the Pentagon guy to us. Now we have something to go on.
“I just received some good intel so listen up…” I start explaining him about the intel Calla gave. I’m not going to say where I got it but I’m sure he figures it out in like three seconds. It’s okay, I trust him. Well, as much as I trust any ex-CIA but there isn’t really anything he or any of us can do about Calla right now.