Violet went for a hike only to get caught in a downpour. And as if her day wasn’t bad enough already, she lost her phone after it slipped from her grip and skittered down a seaside cliff.
This was more than just an inconvenience: that phone contained the face of her target and his updated coordinates from satellite surveillance. She could remember the first, but without the latter her GPS was useless. She shifted the suppressed Beretta 93R in her hand, trying to keep it dry. and yet still ready for action.
It had been ages since she had handled a firearm. She cast her memory back twenty…thirty…yes, thirty-seven years since she had last felt the burning-cold touch of a trigger beneath her finger. But she was–had been–the best, and everybody knew it, even at seventy-three; her last operation, in 1978, was still required reading at the Academy after all.
The Sailor was a shifty bastard, she owed the Agency a favor, and so it was that Violet and her creaky joints were standing out in the rain. “Nothing quite like hunting down a notorious crime boss without any functioning technology,” Violet sighed to herself. “It’s like fishing without a hook. Underwater.”
They called him the Sailor because he had a habit of drowning people he didn’t like, and because his fleet of drug boats was the seventh-largest in the world by gross tonnage. He enjoyed the unofficial protection of the Republic of Valverde, and his base in the Todos los Santos cove was well-fortified. That was why Violet was approaching it on foot, from the north, as wet as the Sailor’s most reviled victims.
Watching the bright lights of the harbor between the trees as she approached, Violet knew from her briefing that the Sailor would be meeting with one of his largest buyers in one of the harbor warehouses. But without the proper coordinates to feed into her GPS, she would have to do the necessary reconnaissance herself.
Moving stealthily past one of the outbuildings after cutting her way through the perimeter fence, Violet heard a loud crack. She registered the sound before she registered the intense pain in her shoulder–not arthritis this time, but a gunshot. The Sailor had posted snipers on the rooftops, most likely with night-vision equipment.
More shots rang out as Violet scrambled into cover in an alleyway.
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