At five o'clock in the morning, the Roman sky was just beginning to lighten, casting a pale, cold blue hue across the city.
John stood up slowly and picked up his ruined black suit jacket from the back of the armchair.
"It is time to move."
He picked up the final spare magazine for his Glock 26 from the desk and slammed it into the grip with a sharp click.
"I am taking you back to New York."
Anthony quickly folded his tactical map, gave the MP7A1's magazine one last tactile check, and securely snapped it into his chest rig.
The complex spatial model he had painstakingly built over the last few hours fully rendered in his mind. The layout of every street, alleyway, and chokepoint within a two-hundred-meter radius was permanently burned into his memory.
"Outside the hotel, I've mapped over a dozen hotspots," Anthony briefed him, adjusting his gear. "Hostiles sitting idle in parked cars or pretending to be vagrants next to the alley dumpsters."
"Remember the division of labor, John. You cripple them, I execute them."
John didn't entirely understand the strange, video-game logic behind Anthony's obsession with landing the killing blow, but he didn't argue. He just offered two silent, acknowledging nods.
They pushed open the heavy bronze doors of the Continental Hotel. The crisp, cool morning air of Rome immediately filled their lungs.
The rising sun had not yet completely dispelled the deep shadows clinging to the street corners. The famous Fontana della Barcaccia—the Fountain of the Leaky Boat—in the Piazza di Spagna was still softly babbling in the distance.
What should have been a tranquil, picturesque Italian morning was instead suffocating beneath a crushing, palpable aura of imminent violence.
The two men had barely stepped off the hotel's marble steps, entering the relatively open kill box of the piazza.
"Three o'clock. Black SUV. Two tangos," Anthony's voice was a low, clinical whisper. "Flankers moving in. Four approaching from the east street, eight from the west."
Suddenly, thick white smoke began billowing violently from a storm drain on the street corner, expanding like a massive beast opening its jaws to devour the square.
The exact second the smoke grenade deployed, the deafening roar of a massive V8 engine shattered the morning silence.
A heavy, reinforced off-road vehicle tore out from a side street like a steel beast escaping hell, its tires screeching violently against the cobblestones.
Without slowing down a fraction of an inch, the SUV came barreling directly toward the two men shrouded in the smoke, carrying enough ferocious momentum to crush them both against the hotel steps.
Through the windshield, the driver's grotesquely twisted, feral face was clearly visible!
In the microsecond the white smoke plumed, Anthony relied entirely on his hyper-reflexes and spatial awareness. His body uncoiled like a compressed spring.
Instead of jumping away, he launched a lightning-fast tactical dive directly toward the incoming vehicle!
The massive steel grill whistled past his head, missing him by mere inches. The sheer aerodynamic force of the two-ton vehicle passing at high speed violently whipped the hem of his tactical jacket and completely dispersed the smoke screen.
Simultaneously, John ghosted sideways with supernatural speed, rolling flawlessly out of the vehicle's path.
The moment the SUV missed its mark, the driver's side window of a parked Fiat across the street rolled down, revealing the matte-black barrel of an HK UMP submachine gun.
The assassin in the Fiat had perfectly predicted John's evasion path and was aiming directly at the spot where John was about to land.
Anthony's eyes turned to ice. His draw was blindingly fast.
Before the assassin in the Fiat could even pull his trigger, the SIG Sauer P320 X-Five in Anthony's hand roared.
Bang! Bang!
Two impossibly accurate shots.
The terrifying terminal ballistics of the overpressured 9mm hollow-point rounds were fully unleashed at close range.
The first shot cleanly severed the assassin's wrist. The sickening crunch of shattering bone was clearly audible over the idling engines as the UMP flew entirely out of the man's grasp.
With almost zero delay, Anthony's second shot punched straight through the assassin's screaming, gaping mouth.
A blinding spray of red and grey matter exploded from the back of the man's skull, painting the inside of the Fiat's dirty windshield.
"That's one!"
Anthony coldly tallied the kill, his body already in constant motion.
Executing a smooth, gliding sidestep, Anthony instantly tracked his SIG back toward the heavy SUV, which was aggressively braking and preparing to reverse for a second ramming attempt.
The SUV driver clearly hadn't expected his overwatch to be neutralized instantly, and he certainly hadn't expected Anthony to aggressively push the offensive line.
The driver violently jerked the steering wheel, attempting to swing the massive vehicle sideways to use the engine block as cover.
But Anthony was significantly faster.
The P320 roared again the exact millisecond the SUV clumsily swerved and exposed the driver's side window.
Bang-bang-bang!
A highly disciplined, rhythmic three-round burst.
The first shot struck the edge of the driver's side window, instantly shattering the tempered glass into a blinding, spiderweb-like fracture that completely obstructed the driver's vision.
The second and third rounds seemed possessed by radar. They punched cleanly through the weakened glass, plunging directly into the driver's right shoulder and jugular vein.
A massive arterial spray coated the interior of the cab. The driver let out a shrill, gurgling scream as his body violently convulsed, his dead weight slamming heavily against the steering wheel.
The out-of-control SUV jumped the curb and crashed brutally into a stone pillar on the edge of the piazza, its hood instantly crumpling and billowing thick black smoke.
As John came out of his evasive roll, he used his own momentum to smoothly transition into a half-crouch, rising from the cobblestones like a hunting cheetah.
As he came up, his TTI Glock 34 immediately locked onto a shadowy figure lurking at the edge of the smoke screen, desperately trying to raise a rifle.
Bang! Bang!
Bang!
A flawless Mozambique Drill.
The first two shots struck dead center in the assassin's chest. The sheer kinetic impact dropped the man backward as if he had been struck by a sledgehammer.
The third shot followed just a fraction of a second later, the 9mm round effortlessly penetrating the underside of the falling man's jaw, instantly severing his brainstem.
John's movements were terrifyingly fluid and utterly efficient. Not a single wasted micro-movement.
The fragile tranquility of the Roman square was entirely shattered.
Gunshots, echoing like the frantic drumbeats of death, violently awakened the ancient city.
From beneath the awnings of closed cafes, from behind the vibrant displays of flower shops, and from the shadowy recesses of the Barcaccia fountain, the disguises were instantly stripped away.
Dozens of contract killers—previously disguised as sleepy tourists, street sweepers, and early-morning vendors—bared their fangs. Muzzle flashes erupted from every conceivable angle.
A merciless hail of bullets rained down upon the two black-clad figures standing in the center of the kill box.
"Nine o'clock! Two tangos utilizing the flower shop awning for concealment!"
Anthony's tactical callout cut sharply through John's earpiece over the deafening roar of the crossfire.
Acting as a flawless, organic radar system, Anthony's Compensatory Perception mapped the deadly threats. The MP7A1 in his hands roared to life, sounding like the scythe of the Grim Reaper.
The 4.6x30mm armor-piercing rounds, cycling at a terrifying rate of fire, unleashed an inescapable storm of specialized metal.
Anthony held the compact PDW with absolute rigidity. His masterful recoil control ensured his extended bursts were surgically precise.
The flower shop's cheap canvas awning was shredded like wet paper. The two assassins who had just peeked out from behind the vibrant flower stands were instantly riddled with high-velocity rounds. A gruesome mist of blood mixed with torn canvas and shattered flower petals sprayed across the cobblestones.
"Three o'clock. Behind the Roman column. Heavy shield," John's unnervingly calm voice reported back.
As if playfully challenging Anthony's tactical awareness, John called out the heavily armored assassin creeping up on Anthony's blind spot.
John executed a rapid, low-profile serpentine advance, keeping his torso perfectly stabilized while his legs drove him forward in quick, alternating glides. He flawlessly threaded the needle, dodging a furious burst of submachine gun fire tearing across the fountain.
Simultaneously, John tracked his Glock 34 toward the massive decorative pillar on the eastern edge of the square.
A hulking brute of an assassin stepped out from behind the stone column, hiding entirely behind a massive, Level IV ballistic entry shield. His heavy boots thudded against the cobblestones, and the barrel of a tactical shotgun was already resting firmly in the shield's firing port.
John's eyes narrowed.
Standard 9mm pistol rounds were entirely useless against that kind of tortoise shell.
Moving in perfect synchronization, John and Anthony pivoted toward the juggernaut almost simultaneously.
Anthony instantly locked his MP7A1 onto the target and fired a continuous, concentrated burst directly at the viewport.
Brrrrrrt!
The armor-piercing 4.6mm rounds violently hammered the ballistic glass. The concentrated kinetic energy completely shattered the viewport, allowing the final few rounds to punch through and expand violently inside the brute's skull.
The massive assassin collapsed to the ground with a sickening thud, folding like a puppet with its strings cut. His heavy shield crashed loudly onto the cobblestones beside him.
"Beautiful," John praised coldly. Without pausing for breath, John relentlessly tracked his barrel toward the next gunman breaking cover.
A desperate assassin, wielding a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, lunged out from behind a cafe table and viciously pulled the trigger.
John anticipated the microscopic contraction of the man's shoulder muscles a fraction of a second before the gun actually fired. He executed a sharp, aggressive outward roll, instantly transitioning his momentum into a devastating judo throw.
With his left hand, John violently seized the assassin's gun-hand, ripping the sawed-off barrel away from his own center mass. Simultaneously, his right arm shot out like an iron vise, wrapping brutally around the man's neck.
Utilizing an explosive burst of core strength, John violently slammed the assassin face-first into the unforgiving granite pavement, using his own body weight as the fulcrum!
CRACK!
A sickening, wet snapping sound echoed across the plaza as the man's neck broke.
As the sawed-off shotgun clattered uselessly away, John drove his knee brutally into the paralyzed man's spine and pressed the scorching hot muzzle of his Glock 34 directly against the back of his head.
Bang!
"That is seven," John muttered, rising smoothly to his feet. His eyes were as sharp as a hunting hawk's, sweeping the perimeter for the next viable target.
Several fresh bullet holes and scorching burn marks scored the Kevlar weave of his tactical suit, but he seemed entirely oblivious to the blunt-force trauma.
Slowly, the deafening roar of gunfire began to subside.
Over a dozen bleeding corpses lay violently scattered across the beautiful Renaissance square. The metallic stench of fresh blood, mixed heavily with the acrid smell of burnt cordite, was strong enough to induce nausea.
The few surviving assassins were completely mentally broken. Absolutely terrified by the inhuman killing efficiency of the two men, their courage entirely evaporated. They broke ranks and scrambled desperately away, vanishing into the labyrinth of dark Roman alleyways.
Anthony smoothly dropped the magazine from his MP7A1, letting it hit the ground, and slapped a fresh one home.
He walked casually over to John, pulling a spare Glock magazine from his rig and tossing it to the older assassin.
"How are you holding up, old man?" Anthony asked, a smirk playing on his lips. "The morning warm-up is officially over. The main course is likely waiting for us at the train station or the airport."
John caught the magazine out of the air, cleanly slapped it into his Glock 34, and racked the slide to chamber a fresh round.
He reached up, wiping a smear of an assassin's blood from his cheek. His cold, grey-blue eyes swept methodically across the ruined, corpse-strewn piazza before finally settling on the road leading toward the Tiber River.
"Walk," John commanded softly.
He began marching forward, his low, gravelly voice carrying a faint, almost imperceptible hint of physical exhaustion.
"We are going back to New York."
Anthony grinned, revealing a flash of gleaming white teeth. He hoisted his heavy tactical bag over his shoulder and followed the Baba Yaga into the sunrise.
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