The Watchers by Mark Andrew Olsen Page A

he might have recruited such a man for one of his shock troops. He now looked like a man who could mow down an entire family without flinching. Sadly, he’d often told himself, soldiers like that had grown scarce in this world of weak wills and soft allegiances.
    The man’s voice spoke close in his ear—very close. And now there was expression, a smile in the words.
    â€œMladov, by the time I finish this sentence you will be incapable of crying out for help, or for that matter, of any speech at all. You are experiencing the onset of total paralysis from a lethal dose of parathion I’ve just rubbed into your back. You will be immobilized for approximately a half hour, during which you will endure the most intense pain the human nervous system can inflict. Doctors could stop the poison with a high dose of atropine or even soothe your pain with a nerve block. But they will think you are merely suffering a stroke, and will not suspect the truth because you will be unable to tell them. Before the hour is up you will choke to death on your own bile—fully conscious. Then I pray there truly is a hell, for you will certainly go there.”
    Even as he spoke, the man continued to knead the general’s now twitching back as though nothing had happened. The guard behind the window had not moved; he could not hear but only see what took place in the chamber.
    â€œI am not accustomed to telling my packages what is happening to them,” the man continued, “but in your case I saw footage of what you did to those civilians back in Mitrovica. And they knew what was going to happen. Even the children. Now you know too. I wish I could make your death more painful, but that is not neurologically possible. Rest in hell, Herr General.”
    This time he not only used the hard g but rolled the r ’s in Herr .
    It was the last bit of speech Mladov’s brain would clearly process.
    At once, just as the general’s eyes rolled back in their sockets and a tremor began to seize his arms and hands, the massage operator whirled back toward the mirror and shouted with the appropriate level of alarm in his voice and face.
    â€œAlert! Alert! This man is suffering some kind of seizure!”
    Doors flew open and the guard rushed in with a handheld radio at his mouth while muttering furiously in Flemish. Twenty seconds later, three more men ran in, clad in white just like the massage therapist.
    The assassin had flattened himself against the wall, watching closely but letting the emergency team do their work. He waited until the ambulance gurney arrived and met the inmate’s pleading eyes as he was carted away.
    Yet by the time the prison warden arrived to debrief the staff, he had vanished.

CHAPTER
_ 8
    Five minutes later, Dylan Hatfield, originally of Billings, Montana—a.k.a. Jonathan Peruggia, Marcus Bryce, and Joseph Stevens of various North American passports and mailing addresses—was clad in street clothes and walking amiably down a tree-shaded sidewalk of Scheveningen, a pleasant suburb barely two miles from The Hague.
    Hatfield hummed “La Marseillaise” under his breath and smiled at his feet with the blurry grin of a departing lover. He had reason to be pleased. The uniform was discarded in a hospital dumpster. The job was over—executed flawlessly, as near as he could tell. A fatal stroke would emerge as official cause of death. Who could deny that entering prison was a stressful event?
    A gust of October wind blew into him, misty with suspended rain and the threat of winter. The cold wetness across his face and hair made him briefly picture himself as a fleeting, shadowy angel of death—an inexorable dispenser of righteous vengeance. He smiled even wider at the thought. With beasts like Mladov roaming the earth, he didn’t mind the analogy one bit.
    He was particularly pleased with himself over the poison he had employed. Acquiring the right concentration of