My father contacts me late, as he always does when the message is too urgent for daylight. His voice, clipped and businesslike, is only slightly softened by the thousand miles of static between us. He says, "You will need to clean up a situation for me in Europe. I can't trust anyone else." No names, no pleasantries, not even a location. Only the grim certainty that the situation is a someone, and that someone has committed an unforgivable error.
He has always been a master at communicating the minimum and expecting the maximum. It was the way he taught me how to deliver pain with precision, how to send warnings with a single missing finger or a ruined smile. He trusts me to extrapolate the rest: that the problem is not merely logistical, but existential. That a single weak point, left untreated, could metastasize into a threat to the entire operation. That the family reputation rests on the certainty that betrayal is not just punished, but eradicated.
In the dim light of my study, I pour a drink and stare at the map tacked to my wall: pins and threads and scribbled notes charting the arteries of the empire that has been my inheritance and my curse. Europe has always been the most fickle limb, restive and ambitious, the place where old enemies and new money converge in uneasy truce. It makes sense that the cancer would start there, in a city where loyalty is sold by the hour and desperation is the lingua franca.
I have never questioned my father's methods, but tonight, with the assignment heavy in my mind, I see the pattern more clearly than ever: each act of violence is not just retribution but theater. He needs the story to travel farther than the bullet, to linger in the imagination of anyone who might dream of desertion. The man I am to eliminate is a minor player, a courier with delusions of grandeur, but what matters is the spectacle of his demise.
Details arrive in a coded message twenty minutes later. My father's handwriting is as precise as ever, a relic of the Jesuit schooling he subjected me to: "Target is in Prague. He believes he has friends. He believes he is invisible. He believes many things." I smile despite myself. The pathos of small men is always the same, whether in Mexico City or Milan or the snow-slicked alleys of Eastern Europe.
Before dawn, I have packed a small bag, arranged a plausible cover story, and called in a favor from an old acquaintance who runs a logistics firm with a taste for gray-market shipments. It is all routine, and yet the gravity of the task presses in as I calibrate each lie and contingency. I know that the true danger lies not in the act itself, but in the echo it sends through the system. The informant must disappear, yes, but he must do so in such a way that no one else is tempted to follow.
As the jet climbs out of the city, I rehearse the moves in my mind: how to locate him, how to surveil without being seen, how to make the final approach when he is most alone and least afraid. I imagine his face when he realizes the mistake he has made, and I wonder if he will beg or bargain or simply accept. There is a strange camaraderie in disposing of traitors; at the last moment, you glimpse their humanity, stripped bare by terror and regret.
I land in Prague on a freezing gray morning. The city is a maze of contradictions: brutalist tower blocks and gilded cathedrals, street markets selling cigarettes by the carton, and discreet men exchanging envelopes in empty cafés. My contact is waiting at the arrivals lounge, a polite man in a cheap suit who hands me a burner phone and a packet of photos. The target has grown a beard, dyed his hair, but his eyes are unmistakable—always darting, always calculating angles of escape.
I shadow him for three days, learning his rhythms. He spends his afternoons in a casino, exchanging small chips for large ones, playing at being anonymous while watching the door. His nights are spent in a rented flat above a butcher shop, curtains drawn, the television tuned to American sitcoms dubbed in German. He has the sad ingenuity of men who know their time is short.
On the fourth day, I make my move. I intercept him on his way home, a quiet side street lined with cars sleeping under a crust of filthy snow. I am careful, as my father taught me, and quick. It is done in under a minute. I leave the scene looking like a robbery gone wrong, nothing to connect it to the Cassilas family, nothing to suggest that justice rather than chance has found him.
By the time the police find him, I am already on a train out of the city. I sit by the window and watch the landscape blur by, snow and smoke and the ever-present crows. I think of my father, waiting for my call, and of the countless others who will hear the story of the courier who tried to cross the line and vanished without a trace.
The work is never finished, but the message will travel faster than the next traitor's courage.
The weapon I favored for this assignment was not the ordinary pistol or knife, but an antique samurai sword I had acquired during an earlier job in the port city of Kobe. There was something poetic in its violent elegance, the way it gleamed beneath the sickly fluorescent lights of rented apartments and back-alley stairwells, how it demanded proximity, respect, and a kind of careful choreography that separated the artist from the amateur. It was not a tool for expedience, but for message—clean, precise, yet so undeniably personal that even those who only heard rumors would feel the ghostly brush of steel at their own necks.
I carried it wrapped in canvas, slung discreetly inside a violin case, and every time I drew it I felt not just the weight of centuries but the pressing certainty that I was becoming what my father always intended: not just a soldier, but a legend. Each cut was a signature. Each kill, a parable. My hands remembered moves before my mind did, and after months of disciplined practice—hours spent slicing wet tatami mats, hours spent tracing invisible enemies through the air—I had become something even my own teachers would have feared.
The traitor hardly saw it coming. The initial contact was almost gentle, the edge of the blade sliding through his winter coat and into his ribs as if the layers of fabric and flesh were nothing. There was a moment, right before the collapse, when his eyes met mine and all the calculations vanished, replaced by a terrible clarity. He tried to speak, but all that came was a bubbling gasp, the words lost in a red froth. I finished the job quickly, a second strike to the neck—merciful, efficient, unmistakable in its intent.
Blood steamed on the icy pavement. The sword sang as I cleaned it, the steel returning to its quiet, latent state. I left him slumped between two dumpsters, the city already swallowing the evidence, and walked away without looking back. That was the part my father emphasized most: never linger, never indulge in the spectacle, let the myth ferment on its own.
By the time I reached the tram stop, my heart rate had already slowed, the adrenaline replaced by a certain cold satisfaction. I stashed the sword and slipped into the anonymity of the crowd, surrounded by commuters whose greatest concern was the lateness of the next train. There was a beauty to this invisibility—how I could erase myself, become vapor, while the consequences of my actions radiated outward, warping the lives of people who would never know my name.
Once I was done with the traitor and had left him in the alleyway, I returned to my hotel room and resumed the pattern of my cover life with methodical precision.