Free Genocidal Organ by Project Itoh

the hatchet.
    Washington would choose the target—if you kill him, the genocide is most likely to stop—and our job was to take care of things. This first layer of victims could in a sense be seen as martyrs for peace.
    Martyrs. In the two years since that incident I’d been directly involved in five more assassination ops, and on two of those I did the killing myself. In a couple of missions we entered the country covertly using the Intruder Pods; on others we entered the country in full view, as tourists or journalists on ordinary aircraft. Each mission was different, with different targets, and the tactics varied accordingly. However, there was one constant factor.
    On four out of the five missions the same name cropped up as one of our targets.
    The man who, two years ago, in a certain country in Eastern Europe, worked as the press secretary for a group of armed insurgents who were committing genocide. We realized that his name would inevitably be on our target list. It was unusual to say the least. It was almost as if this person was some sort of tourist traveling from war zone to war zone.
    Given that Washington seemed to really have it in for this guy, it was inconceivable that he was just an ordinary civilian. The target data files that came with each mission became successively more detailed. It was as if Washington wanted us to get him but at the same time would reveal as little as possible about him. “Fucking bureaucrats, just give us the information we need from the start and stop dicking us around,” Williams grumbled, and indeed it did seem an extraordinarily petty way of going about our task. Not only that, if Washington’s aim was to keep attention away from the man, then their plan was backfiring spectacularly, as the veil of secrecy only added to the diabolical—or legendary—aura that was starting to build around this figure.
    John Paul.
    The strikingly nondescript name of the man who had been slipping through our fingers these past two years.

    “So who is this elusive John Paul?” Williams spoke in an exaggerated parody of a Shakespearean actor. “The American who the American government loves to hate. The fugitive who is wanted dead, not alive. The tourist whose only interest is in viewing scenes of brutal crimes against humanity. Who can say who this John Paul really is?”
    “Just a man, like you or me,” I said.
    Williams seemed unhappy at my answer, shaking his head sadly as if to say that I just didn’t get it. “Jeez, not you too. Why’s everyone so boring? I know he’s a man , I’m talking about what else !”
    “You do that, buddy,” I said, “but he’s still a man , and that’s all we need to know. Men make mistakes. He’ll make one sooner or later, and then we’ll find him.”
    “Find him and kill him, you mean.”
    I wasn’t really sure why the happily married Williams was here at all at my bachelor pad on a rare day off, let alone why he ordered in some Domino’s without bothering to ask me and was now speculating out loud to himself. I guess Alex’s funeral yesterday must have hit him harder than he cared to admit.
    One of the living room walls was shaded from the sun so that we could watch TV and movies better. I was sitting on the couch with a can of Bud almost spilling from my hand, watching the Allies getting slaughtered over and over again at Omaha beach. I had the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan on loop. There was a reason behind this: not only were the first fifteen minutes the best part of the movie by far, it was also free to preview on the pay-per-view channel I was now watching.
    Were we really thirty years old? There didn’t seem anything particularly grown up about this college lifestyle. I guess that was all part of the American Dream—work and consume, work and consume, get sucked into the cycle, and then you never really had to worry about that sort of thing.
    “I guess he had some shit on his mind, huh,” Williams said out of