Valkyrie's Last Warrior

Chapter 3

A waiter approached Valkyrie's table and asked, "Will there be anything else?"

"No. I'm good. Thanks."

She sat at an outdoor table of a café sipping her coffee. It's been two weeks since she started her preparatory work for her most recent job and this was the first in-person reconnaissance. Valkyrie sat three tables away from her current subject and observed him. He was sitting across from a man that looked a bit younger and less brooding than her mark, but large doe eyes may have made him appear to be more innocent.

They discussed mundane details that, on the surface, seemed to have no significant importance. She picked up a sense of ease between the two men, as if they've known each other for years. This was also the first time that she had seen Agust smiling genuinely. The overheard conversation mentioned phrases like, "Family gathering," and "brothers' businesses."

Valkyrie filed away everything she heard; all the while seemingly engrossed in a book as she sipped her coffee. Since her mark seemed relatively solitary, she was hoping that his meeting with this young man would bear some useful fruit in the form of additional information about the man, but frustratingly enough, it gave her nothing of any substance. Even though she was a little disappointed, the fact that this man continued to be shrouded in mystery wasn't a surprise to her.

The prior two weeks were spent digging up whatever information that she'd find necessary to get a plan together. However, most of the tactics that had yielded plenty of valuable information on all of her previous targets, were nearly worthless. When she wasn't all that successful in finding digital records for this mysterious Agust, she put her analog skills to the test and found some public records at the municipal office of the town his residence was in.

The one hundred and eighty acres of land that the man's house – no, a fucking mansion, more like it – sat on was purchased back in 1913 by a man named Rufus Hitchcock. Since then, the property changed hands a couple of times but was currently owned by a shell corporation which was a subsidiary of an offshore company.

When Valkyrie dug in deeper to find out more about the said parent company, she was met with dead end after dead end. The company wasn't a publicly traded entity and almost all information she found was obfuscated. In fact, she wasn't even sure how old the man was. The closest official record that Mercutio could provide said he was thirty-four years old, but the man looked much younger than that. If she had to venture a guess, just from the few photographs she had, she would have said the man was, at most, in his early- to mid-twenties.

Normally, she was given several months of prep time before she felt comfortable enough to carry out the task. But she didn't have that luxury with this job, which was unfortunate, because there was almost no information about this man that was available through her normal means. Even Mercutio's network couldn't unearth anything that she'd deem useful. After spending a frustrating week and a half, digging up the man's cloak-and-dagger history, she knew the only other choice left to her was to learn the habits of the man from straight up observation. She moved the timeline of surveillance up several weeks.

Finding the man's residence was an interesting challenge. Her subject's home was hidden away in the middle of overgrown woods well outside of the city limits. She had thought about going on a nighttime hike to survey the property, but when she found out that his property line stretched over almost two hundred acres of dense woods, she thought better of it. Instead, she had tapped into satellite access for a live feed of the man's property.

His home was in the middle of his vast property. The enormous mansion sat on a rolling five-acre lot. The land surrounding his residence was well manicured and immaculately kept. When Valkyrie saw a real-life, honest-to-God labyrinth made of yew trees that were more than seven feet tall, she audibly gasped. The first time seeing the live feed of the garden maze, she had thought, "Who the fuck is this man?"