Night Witch - Midnight Martini

(References in the story to specific music are designed to be used as audio cues that can significantly enhance the experience of this story. I suggest the reader, if they are able, access YouTube for 'Trance Falling Star Compilation 4' and 'Medaka Chilled Good-Byes.')

The best female aerobatic pilot in the world today – and possibly simply one of the best pilots of all time outright - is unquestionably the Russian, Svetlana Kapanina. What makes her so good is difficult to know for sure, there are so many factors involved: equilibrioception, kinesthetic senses, fast reflexes, high arousal thresholds, stable psychology, extreme fitness...

But the basics of training necessary for all performance athletes were not side-stepped either. Practice, preparation, and rehearsal. Watching the preparations of an aerobatic pilot like Kapanina was a sometimes mystifying thing. Standing out on the tarmac in early morning dim light, left arm raised halfway up and rigidly held out to the side, fingertips at shoulder height, and then suddenly quick strong and aggressive yet economical flicks in across the body with the right arm, hand balled up, and all combined with half-rotations of the erect body, followed by a tight punching forward movement of the right arm, and then a half-bow of the upper torso like someone who was all of a sudden being very sick... And all of it at super-quick speed until you, the observer, felt dizzy just watching these movements and actions even though she – the person you were looking at - had both of their white rubber-soled sneakered feet mostly always firmly planted on the ground and with only brief moments of one heel lifted to a toecap contact to the ground in order to pivot around quickly.

Practice, preparation, rehearsal.

It all looked like some exotic alien dance.

Vertical rotational balance and proprioception were things that depended both on the natural and trained vestibular senses. Lateral balance and horizontal plane rotational kinesthetics likewise. And accurate sensing of angular momentum and linear acceleration too.

Tekla the Russian 'Night Witch' was one of three extreme performance athletes who attended the exclusive private training group led by Svetlana Kapanina. ...A very covert, and private, training group.

Sometimes they pumped the air out of the highly specialised and completely enclosed small gym area. Sometimes they added extra nitrogen, sometimes extra carbon monoxide, sometimes ozone. All the while bio-data was fed by wireless and optical sensing to high-speed computers and feedback then sent down onto a big digital electronic screen splashed across one wall. The screen flashed brightly with dynamic LED graphics and was accompanied by a bleeping audio signal pulsing loudly through multiple matched, amplified speakers. Occasionally, the whole place was plunged into relative darkness by controlled metal shutters, and then strobe lights went off, beating in stark, epileptic rhythms.

Many things were highly choreographed.

Physical practice, preparation, rehearsal.

*

Contrary to common popular belief the modern Russian State did not indulge in assassination as a tactic. It did have personnel who could carry out lethal missions, just like any other nation with Special Armed Services. Unfortunately the public of the West still held fairly banal ideas about the previous Soviet regime, and similarly about Russia in the modern-era, and it was all based on gargantuan lack of knowledge of history. There was an old joke in Moscow about the naivite of the Western mind and its consequently naive and simplistic perspective on Russian and Soviet politics that could be summed up like this: 'Lenin good/Stalin bad.'

Russian politics had a moral dimension that eluded the ignorant or forgetful mindset of Western people. Today in the West, for instance, everyone wondered why Russia appeared to want to 'prop up' Assad's Syria. Yet few recalled that in fact it was the CIA and MI5 backing the interests of British Persian Oil Co., who started it all by assassinating President Mossadeq early on at a time when Syria actually had democratic elections. The Russian political leadership, possibly foolishly, clung to the idea that it thus still had moral capital left today among the ordinary people of Syria – who of course certainly knew their own history.

The Soviets had lost somewhere between twenty five and thirty million of their own citizens' and military lives fighting Hitler to a terminal standstill and cherished the belief that they, and not the West, had really brought about the ultimate destruction of Nazi Germany – and were the true 'good guys.'

All that being said though, they did have assassination squads; and they were, always squads, and not lone wolves. Tactically, to bring off such a goal, it was necessary that chance was reduced to a minimum. Because if you really were going to carry something like that out, it should at least be at a very reliable premium of success.

There was a pace, a cadence, to an assassination. This pace, almost a rhythm, minimized the drift of indisciplined thoughts, allowed no space for independent moralizing; no space for risky intellectual meandring.

Like a small swarm of hornets all closing in on the same target, three, four, five, or even more, highly-trained and mentally-prepared soldiers would move dynamically in, ready with their 'stings' to strike. One would certainly hit, and one was all that was needed.

But the problem with a quality rehearsal was that it was designed to have you at a real constant readiness though not because there necessarily was any planned event on – just so that the State always had personnel fully trained and on standby in case of the specific unforeseen, though not the general unforeseen. The rehearsal then, in a very large part did have the psychological effect of the real thing, particular entailing the subsequent risks of real psychological downsides.

After one particular segment of very high quality practice, preparation, and rehearsal, Tekla briefly found herself in the expensive, sound-proofed hotel room base, flat on her back on the bed, on the pristine, fresh-scented, new, high thread count Nile cotton sheets, fully feeling as if she had carried out a real killing. And even though the psychological teachings of the great expert on covert operatives, Marcus Wolf, called for rapid debriefing and no gap to be allowed into which moral self-recriminations might fall like a quiet, poisonous and sinister midnight rain – yet there was just a tiny gap. No more than forty-five minutes of lying with her eyes focused onto the ceiling, and the red mist just fell down all over her frontal cortex. The main idea that crept in was one to do with a feeling that some kind of personal relationship was deeply implicated between you and the dead person – if you were the one who killed them. Afterall, you were uniquely tied up with that person, with in fact, such an important thing about them, namely, their death. But what could that mean to an atheist, afterall, it should have meant nothing. The other person's sentience was snuffed out. They were no more. There was nothing there. You couldn't have 'a relationship' - even a malign, psycho-pathological one, with nothing; with emptiness. It was absurd. And yet although the case for moral justification had been exhaustively made by wise minds of the relevant State apparatus, and all Russian 'essays' like this always involved and included detailed backgrounding for the operatives so that they held positive beliefs about the correctness of their missions and their orders - there was no such thing really, as just carrying out your orders. Russian politics was complicated by its own social and political and educational history, for one thing. A crucial part of Marxist theory - the idea of the individual agent of social revolution – this is a complication.

Suddenly, Tekla had a stunningly disturbing and singular thought: she did not want to have a theoretical socio-psychological relationship with a truly evil or morally ugly person. That was an invasion of her own equanimity, she felt. She wasn't meant to feel so, but that was nevertheless, the state of it. She could kill, if it was merely a question of the mechanics and the physicality – the technique, so to speak. And she could kill to prevent some worse alternative. But she did not want any persisting psycho-spiritual responsibility entangled in the recalling of the evil and the ugliness of the villain who was so bad that there was actually a moral justification for killing them. Suddenly, whether she chose it to be or not, the vision of a slain enemy being forever subtly tied to her, awoke in her consciousness. It was the actual ugliness of someone so bad they had to be killed, that she objected to. Strangely, she did not want to be involved with them at all; not even in their destruction. They were a disease that infected and could dangerously pull you into that dark spiral of their vampiric malignance. Thinking these thoughts was like an enlightenment. A mystic experience.

*

My own role was basically very simple. I was there to provide sexual relief and a release valve from the psychological energy tension that built up like a thermodynamic reactor inside this kind of liveware form of 'instrument of State.' The circulation of human blood, even at a constant 60 beats per minute, picking up metabolites of suppressed adrenalin, became like an ultra low frequency transformer – very very dangerous if you stuck your hands onto two metaphorical live ends of its exposed nerve-wires...

I have some training in sports and biological performance physiology – I'm actually not what you would call, let's say, 'a street amateur.' Okay, yes my I.Q. is also on the high side. In fact I'm very much a real person with a parallel real 'ordinary' life during most hours of the week. And I have a profile, both an academic faceted one as well as commercial-professional, and if I said too much about those things it would not be impossible to uncover my identity, if you were relatively experienced at doing that kind of thing. I am, what some people term a 'polymath/polyhistor.' In a sense - at least to my own romantic mind - I am indeed a modern Renaissance Man. But I had great teachers, of course. Well-known people too, some of them...

The strategy I had for this evening was to get her out, running the pavements with me for a good long while, maybe an hour or so.

She was in any case already attired in her IonX compression sweat top and figure-hugging dark blue tights. Mizuno sneakers. She never carried water bottles, no matter how small, how light. She had a low-profile hydration belt with a neoprene line nozzle integrated into that, that she could pull out to take sips of water from.

I had a pass-key to the door and slipped myself inside quietly although she certainly had heard me at the handle and was observing me expressionlessly now as I stood with my back against the re-closed door.

I had a small wireless biometric sensor device that showed me all her vital signs. She was cool and calm.

"Habibi." I joked. "Habibi, are you warm yet, Habibi?" She totally got the sick reference I was making to the Lashka murderers being marionetted at the Mumbai Oberoi hotel.

It snapped her out of what appeared to be a kind of reverie. I noticed her heart rate step up a notch.

I handed her a set of Oakley optics with integrated audio player and orthotic ear inserts extending from the insides of the stems.

"Let's go, Habibi. I want you to come with me for a run round the park downstairs. I want you nice and warm in your panties, dear. Sweaty, even. If that's all right with you."

She took the specs and fitted them over her forehead, and then pushed them down over her eyes.

Lithely, if somewhat languidly, she got up off the bed and then stood on the balls of her feet.

"I'm ready, dick-whacker. Let's go."

*

I'm afraid I can't say that I sometimes even approve of myself and what my stratagems are – sometimes...

She was silent in the elevator, behind the optically-dynamic tinted and polarised shades. She was very neutral-smelling. Just the mercerised high-tech cotton-blend fabric, the synthetic dye, slightly minty breath.

Falling Star by Trance Chill was playing in the stereo ear-pieces. It was an hour and forty-five minute long music program. Just like massage music let the massuer know when to wake the client, it would tell me when the course was completed.

So much inside that tiny little piece of technology was pre-arranged. So much.

We walked out through the lobby, where there was a small group of official-looking people milling around near a sign which read: British American Tobacco New Cuba business development seminar.

Tekla's normal minders sat on a lounge near the lobby and watched us go outside. People like her were never really allowed to be fully alone as such. But then, neither were those rogue British semi-government, mostly mega-corporate provocateurs ever alone, who wandered around the largely unsuspecting world almost everywhere these days. The Mark Thatchers, all the nameless mercantile intermediary bridges who leaked stuff to the US Republicans about people like Valerie Plame, the Brett Kebble-killing hunter-sharks with military-spec Desert Eagle handguns – largely these people emanated from London, not Tel Aviv. MI5's Eliza Manningham-Buller opened the door to this tribe of idiot and miscreant, and the Right-leaning governments of the U.K. since Thatcher turned more than just a blind eye to it, and the combined total effect was stuff like Rupert Murdoch's lurid accessing of intelligence telecommunications, rampaging business espionage everywhere by spoilt rich sons of the establishment, corrupt equipment sales, and sealed court cases about official fraud left and right around the globe, and all wheel-barrowed by English lawyers whose funding came from no one knew where exactly.

No, those agents were not alone either; their m.o. was that they were the male of a husband-and-wife team in which the wife was either embassy staff or a legal secretary at a law firm. The male side was either an apparent doctor, or small investment bank executive. But the best scam was 'IVF doctor.' That was a really low blow. Very sarcastic. Having a look at the pussies of prominent people's wives. Now what did that kind of thing deserve?

Unfortunately, the ordinary public still thought of British Secret Service agents in terms of chilled martinis. Nowadays those underhanded high octane concoctions were muddled though, rather than shaken, and very very very dirty indeed.

Me, I had Snow Queen vodka ice-welded to a crack-freezing block of purified water waiting for me upstairs in the Sub-Zero vodka fridge. Clean, pure, Arctic blue ice-mist cold.

The words at the beginning of the music program were: "in a perfect moment, I want to annihilate the guard and surrender, but I couldn't be that tender, I am so twisted..." I handed her two pairs of black-dyed vinyl surgical gloves. I told her it helped in building up body temperature, being double-gloved when you ran.

We ran, she ran, she built up sweat, we built up sweat, until I could taste a little salt on my own skin, and sense a certain relaxation start to be evident in her actions and movements.

We headed back to the hotel and I monitored the biometrics still. I knew the music program was on automatic pilot, volume creeping up, beat-pattern inducing a particular brain-wave pattern. I knew that just about now, she wasn't thinking anything at all; not the future, not the past, not even anything in the moment. It was like modified pre-sleep spindles were blocking immediate frontal consciousness somehow while you were still physically awake. Things were on automatic pilot.

Were turned into the hotel driveway, and padded up the steps, into the lobby again.

Modern high-tech running gear is fascinating. My pants had a velcro-attached small navy-blue handtowel pack against one outside leg.

There he was. The target. How did she know? What allowed her to recognize him? He changed his looks in official photographs so often, and also in the standard image captures taken from where he was regularly coming and going. But knowledge of that particular advanced human recognition metric that can be implanted into someone, is something of a true, genuinely closely-guarded technical secret.

There was a slowing of the pace of the music program. Tekla suddenly stopped moving forward; she just stopped and stood still. Right beside her was a pillar, and a potted plant, while walking towards us both was a large dark-skinned man in a pulled-down grey twill homburg that obscured much of his face. Wearing a stained and creased, old-looking shirt with an equivalently creased and badly discoloured collar, certainly did not make this character look pure and innocent as driven snow. As he approached, a waft of stale sweat and cigarettes and beer braved the way before him. He held a tightly wrapped newspaper in one hand and a thick woollen knit cardigan over his arms. He looked obviously like a bad egg. It made for a highly suspicious look that he tried so hard to cover his face.

I handed her the PSM IZH-78-9T miniature pistol designed to accommodate the latest so-called less-lethal, 'travmatik ammunition.' It was hidden inside the small handtowel. This pistol is so small you can't really see it inside a balled hand and extended forefinger. Even less so when your hand is wrapped in a fluffy navy-blue handtowel. She wiped her brow with the small bunched-up handtowel deliberately. Exactly at 55.05 on the audio track, and right on cue, there was a sudden distinct change in the orientation of the music – snapping to a new direction, developing, as it were, a kind of musical angular momentum. ...Just like a very forceful musical dance cue. Her right hand snuck behind her left armpit and with a sudden swift combination of pivot and raised left arm she shot the target with the tiny pistol held behind her extended left upper arm acting as a visual shield from the front, and as her right hand snaked forward along the back of her left arm, in the one same fluid movement she dropped the handtowel-wrapped pistol into the potted plant, and then her right hand, now empty, appeared at the conclusion of the move innocently at the front end of her left arm. It was all a kind of magic. No one saw anything at all. Cameras would have been as inconclusive. And the fat old gentleman was prominently in the frame, of course. That was the idea. She retracted only the handtowel from the potted-plant box leaving the gun behind.

She moved smoothly and calmly toward the elevators, doors held open by another accomplice. I followed her closely behind and the elevator doors shut behind us. And only when the thing had started to move upwards, did people look around properly following the relatively loud unusual noise, and realize the target had actually staggered and fallen to the ground. He had been hit in the head and was unconscious.

The fat man didn't pick up the small gun. He would watch over it from a short distance. Someone would come in from outside in a minute and retrieve it and take it away.

*

Sometimes you read in the newspapers about a whole bunch of people from foreign embassies being expelled all at the same time. This is not an espionage team being 'asked to leave' or sent home; it is an assassination squad, or a test team practicing. But then too sometimes, these things are simply set up in order that certain people 'get a message.' Visas are cancelled not because in fact, the team was actually 'discovered,' 'uncovered,' or otherwise 'found out.' They were meant to be 'found out.' You will never interdict, no one would, a genuine State-ordered hit.