Free Consent to Kill by Vince Flynn

Europe. Lately the man had been spending a lot of time in London, and the assassin had a pretty good idea why. There was barely a street corner left in the increasingly Orwellian city that wasn’t monitored by a camera. In the world of contract killers, a business where your anonymity was your currency, London was a town that was bad for business.
    This particular part of London had an unusually high concentration of surveillance cameras. The Hampshire Hotel was situated on Leicester Square just a short hop from a cluster of government buildings with serious security needs. They included the National Gallery, the Ministry of Defense, Parliament, and Westminster Abbey. He reasoned the Turk had picked this hotel for that very reason. The area was saturated with police and other security types. The assassin, however, was not deterred for even a second. The men and women charged with securing these sites were worried about terrorists, not businessmen. All he had to do was look the part, don the urban camouflage, and he could come and go unnoticed.
    His partner didn’t quite see things his way. She wanted to turn down the job, but he had been insistent. Virtually every city of note in the world was adding security cameras by the droves. To survive in the industry they had to adapt. She preferred retirement to adaptation, but they were too young for that. Harry was thirty-two and Amanda was just thirty. Amanda was not her real name, but for the sake of operational security it was the only name he’d used for the last week. The key to longevity in their line of work was the details, little things like high-quality forgeries, dummy credit card accounts, and the discipline to stay in character whether you were alone or not.
    At the current pace of business it would take another five years before they reached the financial level he deemed appropriate for retirement. They already had several million, but he was not interested in merely getting by. He got into this line of work because he was drawn to it, because he could be his own boss, and because, if he played it smart, he would make a lot of money. He had the talent, but talent alone was never enough. When the stakes were this high, skill had to be accompanied by an ardent drive—a need for perfection.
    He was not only drawn to this work, he enjoyed it. Yes, he enjoyed it, and he had never admitted that to anyone, not even her. When talk turned to getting out of the business, he always stressed that they needed to make more money first, but he knew a big part of it was that he wasn’t willing to let go. His greatest fear was not of getting caught. He was too confident in his talents for that. His greatest fear was of losing her because he wouldn’t be able to walk away. Like a gambler drawn to the craps table, he had become a slave to the thrill of the hunt.
    Excluding the current job there was normally an exhilaration to stalking a man that was unmatched. The sheer level of training and expertise it took to even enter the arena at this level was mind-boggling. He was an expert marksman with both the short and long barrel. He knew exactly where to stick the blade of a knife to obtain the desired result, which was usually death, but occasionally his contract called for maiming the person and nothing more. He knew how to use his fists, elbows, knees, feet, and even forehead to incapacitate or kill. He could fly both fixed-wing and rotary aircraft, and he was a predatory genius when it came to surveillance and countersurveillance.
    Now here he was standing across the square from the Hampshire Hotel, bored out of his mind. A $200,000 contract was on the table that he was an hour or less from fulfilling and he was yawning. He looked at the front entrance of the opulent hotel, stifled yet another yawn, and said, “Come on, fucker. Let’s get this over with.”
    He spoke with a British accent, even though he wasn’t a subject. The “fucker” he was referring to traveled