Weekly: Emotion. Daily: Fair of Face
Blood & Suns
Agent Mara “Longview” Navarro
Affiliation: Monolith
Role: Field Agent / Sniper
Origin: Reich State of America
Current Assignment: Berlin, Greater German Reich
Mara Navarro has killed eleven people for Monolith and she remembers every one of them. This bothers her handlers less than she expected. During her training, Mara assumed professional killers eventually stopped remembering. She imagined experience would gradually turn human beings into measurements – windage, elevation, range, movement, obstruction, probability. Instead, she discovered the opposite.
Distance makes people clearer. Through a rifle scope she notices things she would never see standing beside someone. The nervous tapping of fingers against a tabletop. The way someone rubs an old injury when the weather changes. The momentary smile when a message arrives. The exhausted sag of shoulders when someone believes nobody is watching.
Then there are the faces. Mara remembers those too.
Monolith taught her how to control her breathing, slow her pulse, and separate emotional reaction from physical action. The Reich taught millions of people not to feel by drowning them beneath conditioning, drugs, propaganda, and routine. Mara considers the distinction important.
She still feels but she simply decides what her feelings are permitted to do. That distinction is about to become important in Berlin.
The mission should never have been approved, at least, that is Mara’s opinion. Her target is SS-Obersturmbannführer Adrian Reinhardt, an intelligence operative attached to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt whose counterinsurgency work has begun exposing Monolith networks inside central Europe. Three safe houses have already disappeared and seven resistance contacts have been arrested. Two Monolith agents are also missing. Reinhardt has begun assembling fragments that could eventually lead him somewhere much worse – directly to Monolith. So someone has to stop him.
Berlin makes the assassination extraordinarily dangerous. This isn’t occupied territory or some distant colonial possession where security can be penetrated and escape routes improvised. This is the heart of the Reich, surveillance is everywhere. Security forces can close entire districts within minutes. Transportation networks are monitored. Facial recognition systems watch major streets. Every rifle discharged inside central Berlin will produce an enormous response.
Mara understands the extraction plan but she also understands something nobody says aloud. There is an extraction plan because Monolith doesn’t send agents on missions without one. That doesn’t mean anyone actually expects it to work.
612 Meters. The room is six hundred and twelve meters from the balcony. Mara measured it twice. She lies behind the rifle inside an unfinished maintenance level of an office tower scheduled for renovation. Around her are exposed conduits, construction materials, dust, and the quiet hum of a city that has absolutely no idea she exists. The window isn’t open, that would be noticed.
A specialized subsonic round will pass through the prepared section of glass in front of her. The shot will still be detected eventually, but “eventually” is supposed to give her approximately ninety seconds, just enough time dismantle nothing. The rifle stays. Ninety seconds to leave the room, descend through a service shaft, change clothing, join pedestrian traffic, and become someone else.
Her breathing is steady, hands are still. Her heart rate is precisely where she wants it. She has been here for four hours, waiting. Muscles cramping. That is another kind of distance – between deciding to kill someone and actually doing it.
Reinhardt steps onto the balcony. Mara settles behind the optic and sees him for the first time. She is staring at a man, not the intelligence photograph or personnel dossier with surveillance images. Him.
“Oh.” The word escapes before she can stop it and she smiles despite herself. The bastard is handsome. The dossier did not adequately communicate this.
Reinhardt is younger-looking than Mara expected, although longevity treatments make apparent age increasingly meaningless among the Reich elite. His dark hair is slightly disordered by the wind. He has discarded the uniform cap visible in most official photographs. His features are sharp without being severe, and when someone inside says something to him, Reinhardt turns his head and laughs.
That wasn’t in the dossier either. Mara watches him smile. “Well, that’s inconvenient.” She adjusts the focus, bringing him impossibly close. She can see the tiny lines beside his eyes. There is something deeply unnatural about sniping, Mara thinks.
Six hundred and twelve meters of empty air separate them, he cannot see her nor hear her. He doesn’t know her name or if she exists. Yet Mara can study his face more intimately than most people who passed him on the street that morning. Distance has created disturbing intimacy.
She pushes it aside and returns to the numbers – Wind, negligiblel; elevation, correct; target movement, minimal. Her finger settles against the trigger and Reinhardt looks almost directly toward her. Not at her, that’s impossible. Toward her. Through six hundred meters of Berlin air, their eyes seem to meet and Mara stops breathing.
For approximately three seconds, Mara Navarro does something she has never done during an operation. She admires the man she is about to kill. Not romantically. Not enough to reconsider the mission. She simply allows herself to acknowledge that Adrian Reinhardt is beautiful. She acknowledges that the handsomeness of this man is likely engineered but still. The realization produces an absurd little sadness.
Here is this handsome man standing in afternoon sunlight, smiling at something she cannot hear, completely unaware that somewhere across Berlin a woman has been sent to end his life. Mara wonders what his laugh sounds like; whether someone loves him anyway. The dossier said he wasn’t married but nothing about known courtesans. Her finger remains motionless.
She could construct moral excuses for hesitation – perhaps the intelligence is wrong or another solution exists. Can Reinhardt be recruited? Have they tried? Mara knows what those thoughts would be – cowardice dressed as philosophy. She has read the reports and what Reinhardt has done.A beautiful face does not erase seven disappeared resistance contacts, and ugliness would not have made killing him more righteous.
Mara exhales slowly. “You really are lovely,” she whispers. Six hundred and twelve meters away, Lukas Reinhardt continues smiling. Mara feels something. Regret? Not for the mission but for the necessity of it. That distinction matters.
She lets herself experience the emotion completely, then she lets it pass. Her breathing stops naturally at the bottom of the cycle and the handsome face becomes geometry. And then the numbers again – distance, wind, trajectory, time.
Her finger begins taking up the trigger. For one final second, Adrian Reinhardt is not an SS officer or an intelligence target or a name in a Monolith dossier. He is simply a beautiful man standing in the sunlight.
Mara whispers “Send it.” and fires.