Alec Fincham had been waiting for two days for his target to show.
His room was on an upper floor of an abandoned hotel in Cairo and it smelled of his sweat. He’d be glad when all of this was over and he could have a shower and wash off the stink of the place.
This wasn’t the task his Government usually had him pencilled in for. A straightforward assassination was usually not his kind of thing, but he went where he was ordered to go, and did what he was told to do.
His target was a middle-aged Russian businessman, Dmitri Alapin. That’s what Alapin wanted the rest of the world to think he was. More accurately, he was a bagman for one of the nastier terrorist organisations. That was why Fincham was here looking down the sight of a Russian made VSS, or Vintovka Snayperskaya Spetsialnaya. In English, it became special sniper rifle. It was special because it had been designed to be silent. More importantly, it was selected to penetrate the body armour Alapin always wore, should Fincham not be able to get a head shot.
He sat well back from the partially open, filth-laden window. The barrel of the VSS and its PSO-1-1 telescopic sight pointed out of the window. He was supremely confident of a first round hit. His training, and the fact that he had zeroed in the weapon in the desert outside Cairo two days before, would ensure the kill shot.
Taking his eye from the sight for a moment, he looked beyond the white cement building facing him. To an outsider Cairo looked, in part, like a construction site. In truth, it was a tax dodge. Developers didn’t pay tax for incomplete buildings, so upper floors had walls missing and steel structural supports pointing to the sky where the roofs should have been.
Fincham’s attention was brought back to the building opposite as a black limousine pulled up outside.
It would only be seconds now.
Settling his breathing, he moved his gloved finger over the trigger. Fincham’s laser blue eyes looked through the sight and placed the reticule on the doors.
The doors burst outward into the street and as Fincham focused, the noise of the busy traffic faded from his consciousness.
Two bodyguards came into the street first, and then came Alapin. His bulbous body and head came into view through the sight. Slowly Fincham squeezed the trigger. There was a muffled thrum as the 9x39mm SP-5 cartridge fired. The noise was amplified in the hollow room, but would not be heard in the street. The smell of cordite filled his nostrils.
Fincham watched the bullet strike Alapin in the forehead, catapulting the man backwards and spraying his bodyguards with blood. Guns appeared in the bodyguard’s hands, but they would never find him.
His job had been done efficiently, all he had to do now was dump the weapon in the Nile and go for that shower he so desperately wanted.
Copyright (c) 2009 by Roger Cave
