I killed my first one when I was twenty-two. He was half my age, a tall Brazilian kid with a serious face who had walked over the waters in front of Rio to save a drowning man. Since then the man had been following the kid everywhere, even sleeping on the floor next to his bed at night.
To be precise, the man was my first kill. To this day I feel sorry about doing it, but he had sworn to protect the kid with his own life, and he jumped at me when I broke into the kid’s bedroom. My first bullet went into the man’s brain, and the second one went into the kid’s. I threw up then, because killing the man had shook me, but even as I was heaving the last of my late lunch over the bedroom’s floor I kept pointing my gun at the kid’s corpse.
He didn’t rise, or laugh, or shine with an otherworldy light, and after minutes that felt like hours I set his bed on fire and left the place as quickly as I could.
I’m making this look simpler than it was, of course. It took planning, and a team, and resources you don’t want to think about, but in the end it had come to that, a sickened, scared person waiting to see if the shot had been enough.
There were others. Other targets, and other killers. Not all of the targets were children, although most of them were, and not all of them were killed by a gun. Laura, for example, the scary ex-Marine who had taught me to shoot, used when she could a narcotic followed by a painless lethal injection. “I’ve seen too much violence,” she told me once, looking neither at me nor at the gun she was stripping down with flawless speed. “We kill when we need to, but that’s it.”
We needed to kill, that was for sure, and we were mostly sure we had the right to. If saving the world from being capital-S Saved didn’t justify the death of innocents, then nothing did. Perhaps nothing did, and that was the flawed premise of our argument, but, as everybody else, we began from our conclusion and worked backwards as best as we could.
They had to die, and we could kill them, and therefore we did. I said there were other killers, but it was mostly Laura and me. Laura was the best. I was the luckiest.
When a seemingly infinite number of crows attacked us in a lonely wood in Finland, she was the one who would pick them off the air as they streamed against us, but I fired the shot that somehow went through the flying river of feathers and flesh and killed the blind woman that had sent them against us in self-defense.
It was I who killed the girl who made weapons malfunction with her tears. Laura’s spotless guns had all jammed, and her insanely high-tech knife had somehow broken to pieces inside its holster, and I could see that Laura was wondering what would happen if she threw a killing punch at the girl (as a point of fact, there was very little in, of, or on Laura that wasn’t a weapon). But I threw a kitchen lighter to the girl’s feet, and perhaps because it wasn’t a weapon, it worked well enough to burn down the house with the girl inside.
But Laura was the keystone of the team. When the old man who sold used books by mail pleaded with us not to kill him, I thought we should let him live. He was an agoraphobic shut-in, the unlikeliest person to drive masses to a worldwide conflagration, the end of the world, or even worse, some sort of heavenly kingdom on Earth. We could afford not to kill him, I thought.
It was Laura who shot him, and when I protested, it was Laura who pointed silently to his handwritten diaries, rows of books that, I instinctly realized, contained as much wisdom and truth (perhaps Wisdom and Truth) as any other sacred work. And wars and death, too, unless a pattern of five or six thousand years failed to apply just this once. That was a risk we felt we had no right to take.
We burned the diaries, of course, and every book we could find, wary as we were of marginalia. We used fire a lot in our line of work, together with guns, money, plans, planes, and everything else, although in the end it was always down to Laura and me, or one of us alone, or someone else in our small team, face to face with someone both human and more, someone with their hands on the levers of history. Someone we killed, and then moved on.
Were we always sure? No, we weren’t as evil as that. But it only took one messiah to screw the world for a thousand years or for ever, and once you figure out that killing a messiah is justifiable, even necessary, then killing a potential messiah is almost equally so. Not because they wanted to do harm to anyone — they seldom did — but beacuse harm would follow them anyway.
As I said, I was always the lucky one, and Laura was always the competent one. When one of our targets turned out to have an specially good and vengeful bodyguard, who do you think the bodyguard shot?
I saw Laura fold over herself and drop to the ground, her face not really surprised or in pain, just pissed off, I would guess, with herself. I shot the bodyguard almost without noticing, my eyes falling to the ground with Laura, the world stuttering down with her heart.
I had always loved her, you know, without fully realizing it until her eyes closed and her body went still. I didn’t attempt CPR. Her wound was obviously fatal. But when she died I put my hand over her chest (not knowing why, not wanting to know why) and I let myself know how much I loved her.
One second later, she was alive again. Three seconds later, she had her gun against my forehead. She had always been the best.
“You know I have to kill you,” she said. That she had spoken before pulling the trigger was her way of saying I love you too, a way more meaningful than anything else could have been. I smiled, because being loved by her was the best thing in the world. And I wanted her to kill me, too. The last few seconds —and what I had learned about myself— hadn’t changed what I knew to be true: a messiah was too dangerous a thing to be left alive. I closed my eyes and nodded.
She pulled the trigger without hesitation. She was the best.
But I had always been the lucky one.
.finis.
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