The First Kill of Two-Ten

It was the dead of night when a convoy of black SUVs with dark, tinted windows pulled up to the entrance of a four-star French hotel. It looked exactly like any other motorcade one would see on the road carrying rich, important and influential people, but for this particular convoy, the ‘precious cargo’ was neither influential nor important; he was just a plain, old ruthless crime-lord whom many countries would love to be disposed of.

Juno Hernandez was a heartless Mexican gang leader who dealt in human- and drug-trafficking, as well as piracy and genocide. Half the world’s countries cursed him with a shorter lifespan, but there was only one division under the Central Intelligence Agency that was really going to take their word seriously.

Now, as the minutes ticked down towards midnight, twenty stories above the ground, on the roof of an apartment building six blocks across the street from the hotel, a dark silhouette was lying on her belly with a lethal Dakota T-76 Longbow sniper rifle trained skillfully to her waiting form. Shadowed under the cover of an empty, black sky, the figure had neither moved, nor had she twitched, since she first set up her post on the roof a couple of hours ago. And unless he or she had access to a high-powered, high-resolution or a thermal-imaging satellite, one would think she was just a piece of cloth that had strayed into the wind from a housewife’s laundry.

She had been trained well – too well, perhaps – to remain still in that position for so long a time and she hadn’t fallen asleep either. She was just waiting, patient yet alert, for the right moment. She wasn’t going to complain; she had had to wait longer than this during previous mission.

This was nothing …

Doors opened on either sides of the front and rear SUVs and men dressed smartly in suits emerged and swiftly arranged themselves around the convoy. They scanned up and down the road for anything that appeared out of the ordinary. Nothing. They radioed in the report, and moments later, the doors at the back of the SUV in the centre opened.

Her grip on her rifle tightened, specifically at the trigger. This was the moment she had been waiting for; she now held Juno Hernandez’s life at the very tip of her right index finger. There was no escaping for him. She could feel the adrenaline now rushing in her veins and instincts immediately kicked in. She had done this too many times that she had no doubt she could now do it in her sleep. As her pulse quickened, her breathing became short and shallow; she kept every breath steady to control the demeanour of her body and prevent herself from any sudden movements. She had already aligned her rifle’s silenced barrel to the point where Hernandez’s head would be in two seconds.

She felt a sense of emptiness in her conscience; all her emotions had been shut behind a barricade that she had formed strongly in her mind over the years. There was no pity or mercy for the man at the receiving end of her rifle, no fear for what she was about to do. She felt neither happy nor proud either.

In her mind, all she could think about was the people whom Hernandez had killed mercilessly, the lives and families and homes he had destroyed for the sake of his own profit. She especially detested the thought of small children orphaned during the process. Well, here he was now, at her mercy, and she bore no hesitation to execute him in public – just like how he had murdered all the innocent beings in front of the entire world.

The minutes faded into seconds. Her anticipation gnawed at her guts.

Without the guidance of a laser pointer, relying completely on her years of training and field experience, she calmly gazed into her scope and pressed down on the trigger. At the moment, a loud whistle filled the quiet night, echoed by a few explosions, completely cushioning the already soft and barely audible ‘pop’ from the barrel of her rifle. The sky lit up with fireworks of all colour, sizes and patterns, blanketing her dark form in a bright and ethereal silhouette before disappearing again almost instantly. A new year had come and the last thing the world would remember Juno Hernandez by was how his head had exploded like a watermelon being struck with a baseball bat in one of the most romantic cities in the world.

He was her first kill of 2010.