Yassen was used to blending in by dressing the part. It had been one of the many lessons that John had taught him.
In the summer of 1986, he and John had been assigned a job that required them to frequent a gay dance club in Paris for several days. Their target was a forty-five-year-old businessman who had been embezzling from his employer. The man apparently hadn’t cared that his employer was one of the most powerful drug lords in France and wouldn’t take kindly to someone stealing from him.
Yassen had been nineteen at the time and had had no trouble blending into the crowd, but John had been thirty. The businessman liked his partners young and willing for a threesome, so John had magically taken ten years off his looks just by wearing the right type of clothes. He had been taller than Yassen, well-built but on the lean side, with wavy blond hair and deep brown eyes. In the dim lighting of the club, he had easily passed for nineteen or twenty. They’d made a beautiful couple – the perfect bait to reel in their catch. Yassen had found himself once again wishing desperately that John wasn’t straight – and married.
Back then, the job dress had required tight-fitting leather pants, muscle shirts and gold chains. Today, Yassen was the forty-year-old businessman, dressing to make himself appear older than his thirty-four years. He wore a black Armani wool suit, a pale pink shirt, and a maroon, raw-silk tie. He’d darkened his hair and peppered it with grey along his temples, and hidden his eyes behind black-rimmed reading glasses.
He currently was sitting at a small table in the back corner of a coffee shop, sipping his coffee, a newspaper resting on his lap. The newspaper was an excellent prop, easily hiding the tools of his profession. It was another trick he’d learned from John.
The reading glasses were his own creation. He’d specially designed them himself, although the optics were handcrafted by someone else. He could use them to see his target from the viewpoint of the scope that was in his lap, under the newspaper. He could easily look away from his target, yet maintain his aim via the image that only he could see displayed on the inside of the glass.
Christmas carols played softly in the background over speakers, reminding him of the time he’d watched the singers with John from their hotel room window. Yassen found himself humming to the tunes as he studied the variety of customers coming in and out of the shop. His target was in line, waiting to pay for his daily coffee and cake. Why Alan Blunt came here to buy plain coffee was a mystery to Yassen, but he wasn’t going to waste time pondering it.
The man probably didn’t realize how predictable he was. Yassen had been watching the Royal and General, the fake bank which served as the front for MI6 headquarters, from this vantage point for the past week, and although Alan Blunt varied the time he came in, it was always between nine and ten every morning. He completed his purchase, then sat, as was his custom, at one of the empty tables against the back part of the wall, apparently wishing for privacy. He always brought a book to read while he drank his coffee and ate, never bothering to pick up any of the newspapers that were left strewn about by previous patrons.
Yassen glanced out the window, pretending to watch the pedestrians as they walked by. He could see Alan Blunt clearly in his glasses. He adjusted his hand under the newspaper so that he had Blunt directly in the cross hairs of his scope.
Perfectly focused in on Blunt’s chest, he made ready to take his shot.