Hitman's Romance

This story develops slowly and has no graphic sexual scenes. It's largely told in narrative form, so if you don't like that kind of story, pass it by. The story is fiction and any resemblance in the story to a person living or dead is purely coincidental. All persons engaged in sexual activities in the story are over the age of eighteen.

HITMAN'S ROMANCE

I never met my father. As far as I can tell, he impregnated my mother shortly before the end of her senior year of high school and then vanished from her life like a puff of smoke in a high wind. To this day I have no idea of his name, how he and my mother knew each other, or if he even knows that I exist.

Mom managed to hide her pregnancy until after she graduated. When her parents finally discovered that their daughter was with child, they threw her out of the house. With nowhere else to go, mom ended up moving to a rural community in north-central Pennsylvania, where her widowed great-Aunt Sally ran a luncheonette, moving into the apartment above the restaurant with Aunt Sally and working for her as a waitress. Between that and public assistance, she eked out a living for us.

To my knowledge, mom didn't date at all during the first six years of my life. Whatever had happened that resulted in her pregnancy had put her off men, perhaps for good. Or at least that's what she had told Aunt Sally, who related this to me some years later. And she held this position fervently until Sam Bowie came into her life.

Several years after mom moved in with Aunt Sally, our little town was surprised to discover that an unknown corporation had purchased a thousand acres of timberland that had been cut over some thirty years earlier and left to regenerate on its own. The corporation, BT Security, established a security training center, with activities ranging from executive protection to counter-terrorism training. There were also some counter-insurgency training programs that attracted foreign military special forces units to the center. Much later, I was to learn that BT Security was a front for one of the three letter federal agencies that wanted an off the books facility that allowed them to do clandestinely what they could not do under public scrutiny.

Sam was the director of the training center. He was in his mid-forties, retired military, now a government contractor. It would also be some years before I learned that Sam also had several other roles, none of which would pass muster with most law enforcement agencies.

My mother was cute rather than beautiful, personable and engaging, but had created an apparently impenetrable barrier against relationships with men. Somehow, Sam looked through the walls she had erected and saw the warm and loving woman I experienced as her child. A bachelor, he decided that she was the woman he wanted in his life. Sam could be very persuasive. There was very little Sam wanted that Sam didn't get. But he had to work very hard for months, eating breakfast at the luncheonette several times a week and flirting constantly with her, before he was able to convince mom to even go out on a date.

I think what finally convinced mom that Sam was worth lowering the barriers she'd erected was his interest in me. From early on, he strove to include me in their relationship. He took me out to the center and allowed me to experience much of what the public portion of the center provided. He taught me to fish and hunt and to catch and throw a baseball, took me camping, and generally treated me like the son he'd never had. If he was trying to woo mom through me, he'd chosen the right approach. Six months after their first date, mom and I moved into Sam's house at the training center and my life changed dramatically.

Shortly after mom and I moved in with Sam, Aunt Sally sold the luncheonette and retired. She'd seen her great-niece delivered into the hands of a man who she was sure would care properly for both her and me and she could finally lay the burden of caring for us down. She was the grandmother I never had and the only one I'd ever know.

Life with Sam was radically different from anything I'd known before. From the moment we moved in with him, he began training me as if I were a client, teaching me all of the skills that the center programs taught, drilling me constantly. I spent hours working on martial arts in several disciplines, rifle and handgun training, stalking and hunting, escape and evasion techniques, and, as I got old enough to reach the pedals and see over the steering wheel, high speed driving with an emphasis on avoiding or defeating pursuit. By the time I was sixteen years old, I had skills many special forces soldiers twice my age would envy. In addition, Sam forced me to learn several languages so I could communicate with the foreign clients. I ended up fluent in Spanish and able to make myself understood in both Arabic and Russian.

Sam and mom never married. I don't know why. I do know that Sam was the one great love of her life and that she was all he had ever wanted in a woman. For all intents and purposes, except legally, she was his wife and he was her husband. And, to my great joy, he was the father I'd never had and I the son he'd never had.

Our idyllic family life came crashing down one cold December evening. Mom had run into Williamsport, the nearest city of any size, to do some Christmas shopping. On the way home, she stopped at a Scheetz for gas and to use the facilities. As she walked out of the bathroom, she walked into a robbery. Three armed druggies, high on meth, were bludgeoning the cashier. When mom turned to run, one of them shot her, killing her. The three then fled, leaving mom dead and the cashier and two other Scheetz employees badly beaten.

All of this was captured on the store's security cameras. The state police took the recordings and began looking for the suspects, but the cameras were not of the highest quality and the footage was grainy.

I had never seen Sam angry in the ten years we'd known him. He was the most even tempered, controlled man I'd ever met and I'd met a lot of men at the training center in the years I'd lived there. When the state troopers came to inform us what had happened to mom, I finally got to understand what was meant when someone described a level of anger as "cold fury." Sam's anger wasn't an explosion, it was the iciest rage I'd ever seen. For the first time since I'd known him, I was genuinely afraid of him. He was in a behavioral mode I couldn't begin to understand, but I recognized it as something more dangerous than a ticking time bomb. And it got worse when the autopsy revealed that mom was two months pregnant with Sam's child, a boy.

Sam came to me after mom's funeral. "I'm going to take care of this. Those scumbags shouldn't have been running around free. Since the law didn't deal with them, I'm going to."

"What do you mean, Sam? How are you going to take care of this?"

"Better you don't know the details. Suffice it to say that when I'm done, there won't be any more women at risk from these guys or the people who provided them with the drugs."

"Sam? Won't you get in trouble?"

"That's my worry. I can't let your mom go un-avenged."

"Please be careful. I can't lose you too."

Somehow, Sam got a copy of the footage from the security cameras and called in some favors from one of the three letter agencies to get the quality enhanced. With a clear picture of the perpetrators, Sam turned the day to day operations of the center over to his number two and went hunting. This time he wasn't looking to bag a buck or a turkey. He was hunting men and he was not going to stop until he bagged his quarry.

With clear photographic evidence, Sam was able to run facial recognition software that allowed him to identify the men who'd robbed the Scheetz and killed mom. All three had lengthy criminal records and should have been serving time, but had been released because of jail overcrowding and lenient prosecutors. Sam decided that if the legal system had allowed these three to run loose, turning them over to it to deal with their latest crimes would be a waste of time. Plus, he wanted not only them, but the drug producers and distributors that were providing the drugs which these men were using.

He picked them off one by one, isolating them and then, I later learned, interrogating them using techniques that would have caused the most aggressive interrogator at Guantanamo Bay's terrorist holding facility to quail. Having pumped them dry of information, he then disposed of them. They simply vanished from the earth as if they had never existed. Then he began working his way up the food chain, one link at a time. By the time he finished, an entire drug distribution network had disappeared and five separate meth labs had gone up in flames, killing the workers in each of them and, in two cases, causing small forest fires in the nearby state forests. Meth supplies had virtually dried up for a fifty mile radius.

When he finally returned home, Sam merely told me that he'd addressed the problem and had dealt with the men who'd killed mom. We never discussed the details, but I understood that justice had been served. Or at least he'd avenged mom's death.

With mom gone, Sam increased the scope of the training he was providing me, including training on how to bypass security systems and access secured areas. He increased the intensity of the training as well, particularly the martial arts, firearms and edged weapon training and that relating to stalking and hunting and escape and evasion. I had expected him to encourage me to enlist in the service when I graduated high school, but to my surprise, he told me, "I've invested too much time and effort in you to take a chance on some lucky jihadi taking you out with an IED or in a firefight. I want you to work directly with me and join the team here at the training center as an instructor." And so I did. "Work with me" turned out to have a far different meaning than I anticipated when I agreed to become training center staff.

As long as I'd known Sam, he'd occasionally disappeared for anywhere from a few days to several weeks. "On assignment" was how he described those absences. He never talked about any of the assignments, although there were times when he returned with evidence that he'd been roughing it for the period while he was gone. Once I had become part of the staff at the center, Sam read me in on what he was doing on those assignments.

Basically, Sam was a paid assassin, working for several three letter federal agencies to remove individuals who threatened the well-being of the United States but were either too politically connected in countries allied to the U.S. to permit direct governmental action or, like several of the drug lords he'd dealt with, located in countries where a formal U.S. action would create diplomatic chaos. And occasionally, he'd been tasked to remove a criminal living in the U.S. who had successfully avoided the judicial system.

Sam operated both with a small team of like-minded and equally skilled individuals and on his own. Since he was now almost fifty-five, he was looking to groom me to succeed him. Without citing specific targets or activities, he described in general terms what the assignments entailed, the nature of the targets, and confirmed that payments were made to an offshore account for successful execution of each assignment. If I joined the team, I'd initially be operating in support of Sam or one of his teammates before being given independent tasks.

I've said that Sam was persuasive and using those powers of persuasion he convinced me to join his team. I made my first kill on an assignment in Mexico, where he and I had been sent to remove a senior lieutenant in a cartel who was engaged in human trafficking with a focus on moving ISIS and Al Qaeda members across the border into the U.S. A three letter agency focused on homeland security wanted to disrupt that flow and we were sent to remove the driving force behind it.

Sam and I spent nearly a week concealed in the scrub on a ridge overlooking the cartel member's home approximately two thirds of a mile from the front door. We alternated between being the spotter and being the shooter, one of us behind a high powered telescope, the other behind a Barrett.50 caliber rifle.

I was on the rifle when our target made his appearance. Sam gave me the adjustments necessary for wind and temperature, which I cranked into the scope. When the target paused on his porch, some 1200 yards away, I took the shot and hit the target in the chest. The 750 grain bullet did its job and resulted in one less human trafficker. Sam and I quickly withdrew to the evacuation point and the job was done.

For the next five years, I performed four to five assignments a year. Some were teamed with Sam. Others with one of the other teammates. Two were solo jobs. Each was completed with the target removed from the board.

Simultaneously with these assignments, I was now a full fledged instructor at the training center. Sam had rotated me through various skills training modules to prepare me to succeed him as the director when the time came for him to retire. That time came all too soon.

Sam had never much cared for doctors and had not maintained anything remotely resembling an annual physical checkup routine. But when he began to complain of abdominal pain and a lack of energy, I finally nagged him until he agreed to go see a primary care physician. That visit resulted in a referral to a specialist who quickly diagnosed the problem. Sam had late stage pancreatic cancer. By the time of his diagnosis he had, at most, a few months to live.

Sam immediately began preparing me for his departure from the scene. Aside from pushing his masters at the three letter agency to place me as director of the center after his death, he also began revealing things about his life that I'd had no knowledge of. He provided me with the account numbers and passwords for his Cayman Island accounts, none of which would appear on his inheritance tax return. He informed me that I was his sole heir as he had no living family to whom to leave his worldly goods. And, to my great delight, he told me that I was the son he'd never had and that he was looking to me to carry on his legacy. I choked up at that.

Sam then dropped a bomb. "Matt, there's something you need to know about me. In addition to the sanctioned assignments I've done over the years, I have had another job. I've been a contract killer. My controller is a guy named Max. He and I have an arrangement. I require he tell me who the client is and why the target is being eliminated. The targets he's asked me to handle have been the scum of the earth - Russian and Albanian mobsters, the occasional Italian mob member, industrial spies, and corrupt law enforcement. I made clear I wouldn't do domestics - that is, take out a husband or wife or boyfriend or girlfriend. And I won't do anything that might potentially harm a child. Those jobs paid very well and a lot of the money in the Cayman Island accounts came from those jobs."

"Why are you telling me this now? Is this some kind of confession? Am I supposed to provide absolution? How did you get involved in this? This isn't the Sam I know."

"To answer your last question first, Max was the guy I reached out to to help me find the three who murdered your mother. When he retired from the agency, he started a service arranging contract hits for the agencies he'd worked for. He knew what I did to the people who were involved in the drug trade here and he used that as leverage to recruit me for his service. And it turned out that several of the assignments we performed for Max were unsanctioned. Max went off the reservation and you and I have both eliminated people that none of the agencies using our services approved. We're both at his mercy if he ever reveals what we've done."

"And to answer your earlier questions, no, it's neither a confession nor a request for forgiveness. I wanted you to know because Max has you on his radar screen. He wants you to continue what I was doing - taking out some of the worst of the worst."

"That's a big ask, Sam. It's one thing to do what we do with sanction from our masters. It's another to freelance, even if the cause is arguably righteous. We could end up in jail for life or even get the needle for that kind of work."

"True. But in my defense, I've removed a lot of trash from the gene pool over the years. I'd have a hard time criticizing you if you'd continue to 'take out the garbage', so to speak, after I'm gone. And you are going to have to make a decision after I'm gone because Max definitely will reach out to you to take contracts for him."

"I'll think about it." With that, I left to go back to work, my head spinning at what Sam had revealed, the leverage Max had over me, and what he was asking of me.

I was still considering how to deal with the problem Sam had dropped in my lap two weeks later when Sam lapsed into a coma. He died just a day later. I'd lost my father figure, my mentor and my guiding light. And I still had no idea how to handle the call from Max which was inevitably coming. And I had no idea that Sam had left out one important detail when he made his disclosure to me, a detail I wouldn't discover for years. Sam had kept careful records of all of his contacts with Max relating to assignments, both sanctioned and unsanctioned. It was a violation of every off the books mission security practice Sam had taught me. However, I'd be grateful in the extreme when I finally had need of that information and discovered it existed. But that was to be some time in the future.

Our masters at the three letter agency which owned the training center accepted Sam's recommendation and a few days after Sam's death, I was notified that I'd been appointed as the new director of the training center. That same day, I took Sam's ashes and had a pilot friend scatter them over the training center from the air. Sam would forever be linked to the facility he'd stood up and managed for most of my lifetime.

It took us a bit of time to organize because of the distance some of the invitees needed to travel, but we gave Sam a riotously drunken sendoff, the first I'd ever experienced. His friends and former colleagues, the staff of the training center, a number of former pupils and a handful of the locals showed up to his memorial service, after which we went through more beer, wine and hard liquor of various types than I'd ever seen in one place outside a state store. I think Sam would have enjoyed the party.

Max didn't give me a great deal of time to mourn. Less than a month after Sam's death, I got a call from a number I didn't recognize. I answered it and found Max on the other end of the line.

"Hello Matt. This is Max calling. I know Sam told you who I am and what I do. I have an assignment for you."

"I'm not sure I want to take Sam's role in your little service organization."

"You have no choice Matt. I'm sure Sam made that perfectly clear to you. You've participated in a number of unsanctioned kills. I have the documentation to prove it. A conviction for any one of these will put you in prison until you're old and gray. I'm not asking you whether you want to participate. I'm telling you that you will take Sam's place. Now let's talk about the assignment."

"Sam's rules apply. You have to tell me who the client is and why the target is being eliminated. I don't do domestics or anything that might result in a child being hurt. Do you understand?"

"Certainly. Those were Sam's rules. I lived with them when Sam was performing the services so I can live with them when you are the service provider. Now let's talk about your target."

My first target was a senior MS-13 lieutenant in the Virginia suburbs. He and his bodyguards had kidnapped, raped and murdered the 19 year old daughter of a prominent businessman. The police had been unable to build a case against the rapists and the father had come to Max for private justice. My instructions were to remove the lieutenant and as many of the gang members as I could within a fairly limited period of time, particularly focusing on the bodyguards. The father wanted his justice before what would have been the young woman's twenty-first birthday.