Star Whacker-10

I started scoping out the hotel and the concert venue, finding plenty of excuses to do so by way of taking up a celebrity-related slant on sports and civic engagement. (Oh, how self-important charity functions are when celebrities and star fuckers get involved.) Dovetailing my assassination work with my day job’s hyping of the upcoming three-night stand proved to be efficient and lucrative; I cashed a lot of fat paychecks from overtime as well as increased ad revenue from my blog traffic. Fortunately, I found plenty of places to stash useful things and learned what the security details will be when the target is on site in both places.

I also got on the list of trusted local media people, which took some use of my network of colleagues to go to bat for me. (Not as hard as it seems, as I am the only celebrity journalist with international reach and name recognition to match; being the big fish in a small pond is not that bad, now that the Internet lets me dig for dirt everywhere from anywhere.) This meant that I had the way to get to my target. With sufficiently free access to the space and the target, all I needed to do was to find some way to deal with the rival assassin- and I decided to make him work for me.

This ex-IRA guy is a bomber. He’s not going to attempt a long-range rifle shot. He’s not going to attempt a close-range handgun or knife attack. He’s not going to attempt to ram the target’s vehicle, or some other common insurgent method. He’s going to arrive ahead of the target, scout the territory, and then attempt to place a bomb. If he’s still at-large after all this time, then he’s been in the United States for a while; he’s ditched his accent, and he’s taken a cover identity that easily allows access to a target’s likely spaces—home, office, etc.—and that cuts things down considerably.

Using euphemisms, I’ve discussed this with my FBI funtoy. (She’s safe enough once I get a glass of wine in her.) By liberally lacing in asides full of popular culture references, and talking about the stuff that Mariska Hargitay gets up to, I keep her fantasies of using my ascension to the Law & Order: SVU writing staff to “…get her out of these shit cities and back to Civilization…” so I can pick her brain about my problem.

To her credit, she solved it rather quick: “Your bad guy’s most likely to be part of the team that your diva victim sends in advance to secure the location. Your Not-Benson heroine’s got to finger him, and that means getting a DNA sample somehow. If he’s this good, then he’ll always keep his hands covered and be very careful about contact.” I rewarded her with empty promises of getting her a TV shot as I fucked her silly.