Free Rage Of The Assassin by Russell Blake Page A

Off.”
     

Chapter 14
    After navigating the busy streets of downtown Mexico City, El Rey jettisoned the thermos in a dumpster and ducked into a gym where he’d purchased a one-week trial membership that morning. After drawing some of the purported antidote for testing, he secreted the vial in one of the lockers, withdrew a light gray windbreaker and blue baseball hat and exchanged them for the black hat and jacket he had on, closed the padlock, and pocketed the sample. That the thermos had a tracking device was a given – he would have done the same, and he didn’t even question that it was chipped.
    Fifteen minutes later El Rey circled the block where the laboratory was located, and once satisfied that he wasn’t being tailed, swiftly moved to the front door and pulled it wide. Inside was as he remembered, as though it had been only yesterday that he’d made his last visit and not six months earlier.
    The front desk clerk was the same woman as on his prior trip, and he had a sense of déjà vu. He shrugged it off and continued to the counter, where he placed a small plastic vial of antidote and asked the clerk to run a spectrum analysis on it.
    In his back pocket he had the results from the prior test, so he could quickly compare the two once the lab had performed its magic. His internal alarms had been clamoring ever since meeting with Rodriguez, and he’d taken special precautions this time around – the final shot that was supposed to fix everything was also the perfect opportunity for the ultimate betrayal.
    He, more than most, knew the temptation there would be to renege on the deal. He was a student of human nature, and it would have actually surprised him if CISEN had behaved honorably.
    The assassin took a seat in the waiting area while the woman carried his sample into the rear of the laboratory, where some faceless technician would analyze it and print out the chemical breakdown.
    The woman returned and smiled. “Can I offer you anything while you wait? Water? A soda?”
    “No, thanks. I’m good.”
    The last visit she hadn’t offered anything. It was just a small detail. Probably inconsequential, he told himself, wanting badly to believe it even though his operational instincts argued that nothing was ever meaningless – everything contained information to a man whose job it was to correctly read the signs.
    That was paranoid talk, he thought, one of the side effects of not receiving the shot in time. Like the tremors, it didn’t mean anything beyond what it signaled – that he was overdue and in trouble.
    The test took forty-five minutes, and he didn’t bother looking at the results until he’d paid and gotten well clear of the building. He found a small taqueria that was teeming with a late afternoon crowd, took a seat in the back, and then carefully unfolded the old results and compared them to the new ones.
    The antidote was genuine. The chemical composition matched.
    El Rey glanced at his watch and moved to the back of the restaurant, where the bathrooms were located. He continued past the stalls to a wrought-iron rear gate and slipped through it into a reeking alley filled with refuse and noxious pools of suspect fluid. At the intersection he flagged down a taxi and gave the driver an address a few kilometers away, and then settled back into the seat to watch the city blur by.
    The second lab was as modern as the first, and was one of several El Rey had located that could also run a spectrum analysis. He’d used the other laboratory too often, and he didn’t trust CISEN to be so incompetent that they couldn’t locate the place and jigger the results. But this one was virgin territory, and as such would serve as a reasonable confirmation stop before he gave himself the shot.
    An hour later he emerged with a grim look of determination. His worst suspicions had been confirmed – what was in the second tiny vial he’d drawn was nothing like the antidote. The technician had warned him that