Requiem for an Assassin

unobserved even if someone happened along, were as good as I could hope.
    I set up next to the bridge by the construction site, keeping low and scanning the area through the binoculars. Everything was illuminated beautifully. The fanny pack was open, and the flashlight, like the binoculars, was getting wet, but the equipment was top quality and waterproof. I wasn’t concerned.
    Five minutes of waiting and scanning. And then I saw him, coming toward me on the bike path along Page Mill. I could make out his face perfectly through the night-vision magnification, all the way down to the droplets of water on his glasses. A headlight on the front of the bike showed up in the viewfinder like a glowing yellow flare.
    I felt a hot rush of adrenaline through my gut, and my heart started kicking harder. I breathed in and out deeply several times and did one last scan of the area. All clear.
    I dropped the binoculars into the fanny pack, pulled out the SureFire, and walked into the middle of the road. Without the night vision, I couldn’t see Jannick himself, but his headlight shone like a beacon a hundred fifty yards out. One hundred. Fifty.
    He slowed slightly as the bike path fed onto OPM, but he was still moving at what I guessed was close to fifteen miles an hour. More than fast enough.
    Thirty yards now. I raised the SureFire to my shoulder. I closed one eye to protect it from the glare and preserve my night vision, and squinted with the other. Twenty. Ten.
    Just before the forward edge of his headlight illumination reached my position, I pressed down on the flashlight’s tailcap switch. Five hundred lumens hit him in the face, as momentarily bright and white as a bolt of lightning. I heard a cry of pain and surprise.
    He must have instinctively hit the brakes, as I had hoped. I heard the tires skidding on the wet leaves and leaped out of the way. The headlight weaved crazily as Jannick fought to control the bike. But he was too startled, and too blinded. And the road was too wet. For an instant, the headlight gyrations grew wilder. Then the bike went over and Jannick hit the pavement.
    I dropped the SureFire into the fanny pack next to the binoculars and zipped the pouch shut. I looked around, confirming once more that we were alone.
    “Are you all right?” I asked, walking over. He was on his hands and knees, spitting out blood, trying to get up.
    He moaned, sounding as though the wind had been knocked out of him.
    I walked closer, my heart hammering. “Don’t try to move,” I said. “You might be hurt.”
    He started to say something back. I didn’t hear what. I stepped over him and sat down hard on his back. He grunted and collapsed to the ground. I planted my feet solidly along either side of his head, reached with both gloved hands under his chin, and arched savagely back. His neck snapped with the sound of a thick piece of dry firewood and his body spasmed under me.
    I stood and immediately moved back to the bridge, where I had some concealment. I took out the binoculars again and scanned the area. No one. Then I examined the tableau before me. Jannick’s bike was on its side, the headlight shining uselessly upward into the falling rain, the front wheel slowly rotating. Jannick himself remained facedown, steam rising slowly off his body, the rain continuing its indifferent patter on and around him. It looked like a freak accident: a bicyclist, going a little too fast in the dark and the wet, loses control and falls the wrong way. There was no reason to think it was anything else, and no way to prove it, either.

16
    I ZIPPED UP the binoculars and moved out to Page Mill. I waited a few minutes until there were no headlights coming from either direction, then jogged across the road and returned to the car.
    I drove back to San Francisco, to the Tenderloin district, which I knew had a large homeless population. I left everything I’d worn that night next to garbage cans on a variety of street corners off Market, knowing the garments would be efficiently scavenged, distributed, and assimilated into the shifting ranks of the homeless within hours, perhaps minutes, of my passage. The binoculars and the SureFire went over the side of the San Mateo Bridge, into the dark, trackless waters of San Francisco Bay.
    I found an Internet café called the NCK Cyber Lounge in San Mateo, where I checked the Kanezaki bulletin board. It was empty. I posted him a message: Jan Jannick, Dutch national, CEO of Deus Ex