Forced to Change Ch. 08

Chapter 8

The room contained two women and eight men, including me. We were in a shack in the middle of the jungle, less a room than a box. Ten people to take out an army. I liked those odds.

No one ever woke up one day and said, "I'd like to be an assassin," at least not out loud. If I had to put our job description down on paper that would be it: assassins. To even think the way we did was a oneway trip to jail or a mental hospital. We were all smart enough to hide what it was we actually did for a living.

I turned over the glossy photo of Kathryn Rollins. She was an anomaly and I didn't like anomalies. It was a simple fact: Kathryn wasn't important enough to warrant our attention.

If she'd been one of the other students involved I could see the political angle or financial gain. I could be wrong. Just being in the right school could have given Kenneth Rollins the connections he needed to pull us in. I knew better than to assume that low economic status meant no power.

Kathryn's mother had died from breast cancer. The diagnosis was initially missed because she was breastfeeding her daughter. By the time they found the cancer, she was end-stage. She died before Kathryn turned one year old. Kathryn wanted to be a doctor and find the cure to cancer because of the way her mother had died.

Eight months ago Kathryn had graduated from Greenwich Country, a private prep school. Her father, Kenneth Rollins, ran the maintenance department for the school. He'd taken the job for the benefits, the most important being that his daughter could attend the school tuition-free.

Kathryn was involved with the Build-A-Village program, which sent students to undeveloped areas of South America, where they helped build whatever was needed. Kathryn volunteered with the program every summer after turning sixteen. She'd written most of this information in her college essays, which I'd just read in the files.

Six months ago she'd finished helping build a school in a small village ninety-three miles, or almost one hundred and fifty kilometers, from Cantana—a stone's throw from the box I sat in now. The other twenty students on the trip had been born with too much money.

The average parent of a Greenwich Country student ranged from corporate CEO to professional athlete. They were from rich to upper-middle class. If Kathryn were any one of the other twenty kids that had disappeared the day before they were scheduled to return home I would have understood this mission. It was barely front-page news by the time I received the assignment a full four months after the other students were ransomed back to their parents.

I'd seen the media storm surrounding the Build-A-Village group that was taken for ransom half a year before. The television had displayed Kathryn's picture, the same picture under my hand, along with another of Paul Donnelly, Jr. They were the only two students who hadn't been returned when the ransom monies were paid.

The media had moved on to other stories by now, but four months ago the news highlighted the story when the rescued students from the trip were safely returned home. Paul Donnelly, Jr. was officially reported dead, and Kathryn Rollins was missing and presumed dead, according to the reports. It was tragic, but with Kathryn assumed dead everything was seemingly resolved.

Still, my current orders didn't make sense. It was possible some of the parents wanted revenge. The rich, privileged, and entitled do live by a different set of rules. Mostly the parents seemed relieved and ready to put the incident behind them. That left the Donnellys and Kenneth Rollins as the possible clients. Kenneth Rollins didn't have the money to pay for our services, so that left the Donnellys.

Of course the missing person wasn't rich. All the overindulged, important kids had been returned already. I figured that for the other students the program was less about giving back. I saw it as a way for them to alleviate the guilt of being born with too much of everything.

Kathryn was rich, but not monetarily like her classmates. She was rich in her father's love and spoiled by it, too. Who cared about the scholarship girl on the trip? Just the poor black janitor, her father named Kenneth Rollins.

"We need to talk," I said. The other people in the room had shifted into smaller groups, giving me and a man I knew only as Carter a sense of privacy. We could have been the only two people in the place.

"Of course. Anything," Carter answered.

"This isn't what we do. It doesn't feel, right." The last caused a pregnant pause in the air, then the other conversations started up again as I pushed the folder across the table. I'd read every line, seen every picture. I didn't need the folder any longer. Carter and I stared at each other.

"You're getting paid. Really, that's all that's important here, right?" His voice was cheerful and smiling, his eyes steady. "Look, I vetted the client. He's clean." Carter had his work face on, the one that said he believed his words and I should, too.

"Vetted the... Who's the client?" My voice carried, although I spoke low and quietly. I had my suspicions, but a little confirmation would be nice.

"You're overthinking this. She's probably dead, right?" His words lingered in the air between us as if they had mass. He raised an eyebrow at me. It could have been the look on my face. Why was he telling me to kill her? How did he know she was alive? What could she have done?

Nothing, from the information I had. Nothing at all. The rest, the other students, had been rich kids. Not her, not Kathryn. Carter had vetted the client. Paul or Natalie Donnelly? Both? Kenneth Rollins? There was a client and that meant this wasn't a government assignment, although it felt like one.

On paper it was a regular mission. We were supposedly here to rescue Kathryn Rollins. Everyone else was expendable on paper. Capturing Jorge and Noel Riaz alive was a bonus. Except Kathryn Rollins. For me alone, she was expendable, too.

The biggest issue I had was that normally there were a few mercenaries mixed in among official police types for jobs like this, maybe one or two people to color outside the lines of the law. I tended to stay away from that kind of assignment. This whole group was hired killers. Every man and woman involved had killed without hesitation, with no cause other than payment.

If we were performing a black ops mission, assigned but 'not assigned' by the US government, it would have paid a lot, but nowhere near what we expected to earn here. This was a massive payday. This was a once in a lifetime deal. Kathryn Rollins was most likely dead. Only if she wasn't dead, Carter was telling me to kill her anyway. The conflicting orders shouldn't have bothered me and I had to wonder why they did.

"Right," I said. She'd vanished. It made sense. No one had asked for her ransom, therefore she was probably dead. I wanted it all to make sense even though nothing did.

"So what's the problem?" Carter walked around the table, his voice dropping as he got closer. I noticed. Everyone in the room noticed.

Was I going to be a problem? Their eyes darted in my direction although they continued to talk as if they noticed nothing. I knew Carter had a weapon on me, probably a gun.

"No problem," I said. I stopped talking. My pulse didn't race. These questions, my doubt, had inched me close to being killed. Another wrong word and I would die. I stopped thinking as my mentor approached me with a gun—hidden, but on me. In a moment, I could die.

"Good. We breach at oh four hundred hours. Agreed?" Carter placed his hand, the one that had held a weapon a moment ago, on my shoulder. He knew me too well. He'd trained me, after all.

"Agreed," I said. I had no illusions that the gun I couldn't see would put a bullet in my brain if I said anything else.

I sat back in my chair as Carter left, staring around the room and meeting the occasional eye. I knew that two of them were looking at this assignment as their last. They saw what it paid and had decided they were getting out. I still had questions, but I wasn't going to ask anything else.

One man sitting at the table challenged me with his eyes. It didn't matter that Carter's exit said that I was okay, that I was in. Hank had a family. His son was on his way to college and his daughter had just finished law school. I didn't know most of the room as thoroughly, because it wasn't like we had company picnics. I'd worked with the man I knew as Hank a few times.

Hank liked to talk about his wife and kids while waiting for a target. If there's one thing you do a lot of as an assassin, it's waiting. He was one of the two ready to be done with our group. Hank's time as a hired assassin was over. He was a talker and most of the room knew his intentions. You don't retire from being an assassin. He was the one who should worry about living to see the sun rise; he certainly wouldn't see it set. I didn't know who would take him out, but it wasn't me.

My reservations should have remained silent as I met his eyes. There was nothing like being in a room full of killers and knowing they would rather see you dead than give up the kind of money this job offered.

Even though Hank was going to die, his family would get his share. There's a code to this line of work. There's also an unwritten rule that you shouldn't have a family, and if you do, you certainly shouldn't talk about them. Family makes you vulnerable in a line of work where vulnerability is often fatal. This mission was as close to a 401K package as anyone in our line of work could get.

Retirement had a different meaning for us than for the average person. Hank was tired of the killing and was acting suicidal. His family didn't even realize he was still alive. He'd cut off all contact years ago to protect them. In a few months they would have enough money to do whatever the hell they wanted for the rest of their lives. A part of me assumed Hank knew he was about to die. It was a weird life.

Some of the others needed to believe we were actually here to rescue Kathryn Rollins. Like I said, there's a lot of blood on our hands. This was the kind of mission that helped some not to feel like such a monster. I didn't care one way or the other.

I'd liked the idea of a rescue mission. It was why I agreed. Except Carter had told me to kill her. If I found her first, which was very likely because I was just that good, well, I would kill her. It wasn't bragging, just fact. The assembled group was going to do this no matter what I said. If I wasn't careful, I wouldn't see another sunrise. Carter may have decided I was fine, but the rest were looking at me as a threat. Find and kill.

Carter knew that Kathryn Rollins was still alive. If he knew she was still alive then that meant the client knew she was still alive. So who the hell was the client? Did they want her dead or did Carter want her dead? Carter was right; I was overthinking this entire thing.

"Agreed," I whispered. I stared at the map of Cantana in my head. I could see the files, the people, the players, and the target. Find and kill. It was just that simple. Find and kill. We were supposed to take Jorge and Noel Riaz alive. Not kill them.

Kathryn Rollins didn't compute with everything I trusted about a life of killing for a living. I'd killed innocent people before, yet I wondered about the implied kill. What crime could an eighteen-year-old girl have committed to put her on my hit list? Or rather, Carter's hit list. I was just his tool.

"...She's probably dead. Right?" Most of the people in the room hadn't heard the same thing I had at the same briefing. It was the order Carter had made about the girl privately, yet in front of them. The briefing said to take the targets alive. That's not what I do. That's not what we do. Yes, I was overthinking this. I really needed to stop.

If she was alive, if she was there, then we'd have a lot of money. If she was dead, had died already, then we'd have a lot of money. It was win-win. I would never need to work again or sit in another shack in the middle of the forest with trained assassins. I could quit too. Instinct told me there was something way off about this assignment. But I couldn't say no, so I agreed.