Anamika Part V - The Final Hit Written by: Amrevis

She had no trouble in recognizing the hit when he stepped out of the elevator surrounded by a dozen bodyguards. She could see that the bodyguards were not club bouncers, but highly trained professionals. Their eyes camouflaged under dark sunglasses could see everywhere at the same time, and the bulges in their immaculate suits denoted not just muscles, though there was plenty of beef out there, but also guns and knifes, the quintessential tools of defense and offense. These men were killers, trained to use their weapons at the slightest provocation. In the few hours that she had been at the hotel she had finished the preliminary survey, to find out the best area to assassinate her target. The prospects of making a clean hit seemed bleak; she would have to unleash a bloody fight to complete the job. The major problem was that for security reasons the entire top floor of the hotel was reserved for the businessman and his team of bodyguards.

It was midnight when she emerged from her room on the 15th floor, with heavy makeup on her face and clad only in a skimpy dress. She took the elevator to the top floor. Three bodyguards were waiting for her as soon as the door opened. “What do you want?” one of them asked.

“I am here to entertain your boss,” she said with a suggestive wink.

But the wink failed to impress the guards, who continued to remain edgy by her presence. “Both of you check her out,” a guard said to his two companions, “I will go and inquire if they ordered a prostitute.”

As that guard walked away, his two companions got ready to frisk her. In name of frisking all they did was fondle her breasts and caress her bottom. Suddenly the first guard returned. “No one has asked for this slut,” He screeched, “she is a decoy.”

The warning came too late for by then a second elevator had reached the top floor. As its door slid open there was a loud explosion and thick smoke poured into the corridor making it impossible for anyone to see anything. The explosion was her handiwork, before taking her elevator to the top floor she had rigged another elevator with a bomb and timed it to reach the top floor two minutes after her.

Concealed by the veil of smoke Rose worked at her murderous best. Her sword was slashing away at the bodyguards, cutting them up before they had time to realize what was happening. A door burst open and a hail of machine gun fire burst into the corridor.

She slipped on the floor and escaped being riddled by the bullets. A bodyguard whose throat she had slit minutes ago lay dead beside her; she pulled out the revolver from the holster around his waist and fired many shots at machine gunner. Her bullets caught him on his forehead and nose and he was dead before he touched the ground.

She sashayed on her feet and lunged towards the open door holding a gun in one hand and a bloodstained sword in other. The smoke had dissipated by now and dead bodies

lying on the floor were a testimony to the carnage that had taken place. She marched into the room. Two men came running towards her, without breaking her stride she shot one in the chest, and her sword slashed through the air at the second hitting him at the nape of his neck, slicing his head off from rest of his body.

At the other end of the room, was an ornately carved door in front of which stood a muscular Chinese man with a gleaming sword in his hand. She knew that her target was hiding behind the door. To get him she must fight and destroy the Chinese swordsman. She marched forward, the Chinese stayed put, but when she reached the middle of the room, he jumped straight in the air and with two summersaults landed in front of her.

His sword arm cut through the air like the whirring blades of an electric fan, it was difficult to visualize where the sword was at any given moment. Forced on the defensive by his swordsmanship, she concentrated on avoiding the strokes that he threw at her. But being who she was, a lethal killing machine, it was not possible for her remain on defensive for long.

She found an opening to throw her sword when he was trying to plunge his sword into her eye sockets. In the nick of time she ducked and before he could realize what was happening her sword plunged into his crotch, severing and crushing his appendages. The sword slipped from his hand and he shuffled backwards, shock and pain were the dominant characteristics on his face.

“Your balls are gone,” she said, and with another fluent sweep of her sword she slit his throat. All the bodyguards were now dead and there was only one more person left to kill. She pushed at the door, but it was locked from inside. An explosive was needed to break a door this heavy. She was prepared for this eventuality. The heels of her shoes, hollow from inside, were packed with plastic explosives. She removed the explosive from her right shoe and fixed it to the door, which a second later blew apart.

Even before the dust and debris from the explosion could settle, she jumped into the room. The businessman was hiding behind the bed; she could make out his silhouette on the wall behind him. With the bloodstained sword in her hand, she marched towards him. But he had a revolver in her hand. He popped up his head and shot at her before ducking down again. She tilted backwards to avoid the bullet and in an instant she was on the bed. He surfaced to fire again, but her sword was faster. In one flash his gun-toting arm was severed from rest of his body.

With a dazed look on his face he gazed stupidly at the bleeding stump that had once been his hand. “You will not be in pain for much longer,” she laughed. He raised his head to look at her. With the bloody sword in her hands she towered over him like an angel of death. “Please, please spare my life,” he pleaded.

A cruel smile flitted across her face and she said, “Abu wants you dead.” The next instant the sword struck and in a flurry of blood and gore, Abu’s command was done. The businessman had been executed in a brutal fashion. Now it was the time for her to execute the second part of her mission. This time she would kill herself.

She ran out of the room into the corridor. From down the staircase came shouts of many footsteps running frantically upstairs. She knew that police were on their way and she probably had less than a minute to finish her work. But a minute was more than enough for her, more than enough time to stage her own death. She searched the bodies of the fallen bodyguards and found what she was looking for- grenades. It took her barely ten seconds to hitch up the area with the grenades and then the top floor exploded in a flurry of flying debris, fire and smoke.

No one in any of the rooms on the floor or the corridor could have escaped the blast. No one, except Rose. She had contrived the explosion only to give Abu the impression that she had died.

Two seconds before the blast, she had jumped out of a window with a bungee rope tied to her legs. Twice or thrice she bounced on the bungee rope and as the top floor exploded into smithereens she pushed her way into the balcony of a room on the 25th floor. This was the room that she had booked under a fictitious name. It took her barely a couple of minutes to change her attire and transmogrify herself into a normal society woman. She came out of her room and joined the hordes of frightened guests emerging from other rooms. In the general confusion she had no problem in getting out of the hotel.

   She reached the railway station and caught the first train that arrived. It was a train to Bhopal. Here she found a job as a call center professional.

   Jayant Mehta came into her life when they met at a local discothèque. She liked what she saw and decided that he was the right person to be her husband.

With her wiles it was not difficult for her to win Jayant’s heart. They married within three months of meeting each other. She left her job and devoted herself to achieving her long cherished ambition of being a happy housewife. A year later when their son was born, she was struck by the thought that for so long she had taken lives but at last she was having the opportunity of creating one.

But the humdrum of domesticity, could not excise the fear of Abu from her mind. She knew that he would try to kill her the moment he came to know that she was alive. Now six years had passed since she changed into Mrs. Shalini Mehta, the happy housewife, but she might have to revert back to Rose, a killing machine, at a very short notice. She prayed that the notice would be long enough for her to make arrangements for saving her husband and son.



Passing from the dining room, where her son and husband were having their breakfast, Mrs. Shalini Mehta came into the drawing room and stood at the window, gazing wistfully at the colorful ambience of her front garden. Myriad varieties of rainbow hued flowers, shimmering under the morning sun, were an absolute feast to the eye. The green grass carpeting the lawns only added to the gaiety of the landscape.

A flock of birds soared into the sky, their merry caw cawing sounded like paeans to the sheer joy of being able to fly. This was the happy life she had always dreamt of. A loving family, an abundance of flowers, birds and the sun shining brightly on her beautiful house - the relishing elements that configured the panorama of her life. Shalini Mehta laughed a happy laughter of satisfaction.

Where the lawn ended there was a bougainvillea hedge, beyond which lay the street running across the colony. A colorful bus, full of clamoring kids, trundled through the street and stopped in front of the house’s gate. “Mahesh,” said Shalini from the window, “Have you finished your breakfast. Your school bus is here.”

“Yeah, I have,” said the boy from the dining room, and a moment later he came running into the drawing room. “Where is my bag?”

“Right, where you kept it,” Shalini smiled, as she pointed towards the school bag and a water bottle lying on the sofa. The boy snatched the bag and the water bottle and ran out of the house. “Don’t forget to wash your hands before you have your lunch at noon,” Shalini said after him. The conductor helped the boy get on board and the bus trundled past the house.

Shalini turned away from the window to find her husband, dressed in his usual office dress, standing behind her. “Now it is my turn to leave,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I won’t tell you to wash your hands while having your lunch at noon.”

“I won’t mind even if you did,” he said sportingly and bent forward to kiss lightly on her mouth.

“That was a typical banker’s kiss.”

“Why?”

“It was too tentative.”

“You never cease to surprise me.”

“The real surprise is yet to come.”

“Somehow I believe that.”

In another five minutes he was out of the house, on his way to the bank, where he worked as the manager. Shalini Mehta retired into the bedroom.

There was a large bed in the center of the room and around it the usual bric-a-brac of tables, shelves and closets fitted into the walls. She opened one closet, it had rows of dresses, her husband’s and hers hanging neatly from hangers. She pushed the dresses aside. On the lower end of the closet’s back wall there was small hole, too small to be discerned, unless someone was looking for it particularly. She pulled out the hair clip she was wearing and inserting it into the hole gave two twists towards the right followed by three towards the left, and then pushed. The wall slid aside, revealing a secret chamber.

The chamber’s walls were lined with a kind of lethal paraphernalia that one no one could ever expect any normal housewife to possess - automatic rifles, revolvers, hunting knifes, bulletproof vests, grenades, pipe bombs and detonators. She sat down on a chair and started checking the guns one after the other. Only she knew how imperative it was that the weapons always be in a state of readiness. Her life depended on the efficiency of her weapons.

The peaceful humdrum of her life could be shattered any day, who knows today might be the day when Abu might find her. Abu was out there somewhere, someday he would come to know that she was still alive and then he would lose no time in trying to hunt her down. To make his revenge complete he would kill his family as well. She shivered at the thought of danger to her family- her son and her husband.

Her hand gripped at the gun tightly as her mind soared six years into the past, when she had feigned her own death to escape Abu, her nemesis….

As Mrs. Shalini Mehta put the weapons into the closet she murmured to herself, “When Abu comes to get me, he will find me prepared for his every onslaught. I will not give up my world without a fight…”

Though she was Mrs. Shalini Mehta for everyone, deep inside her Rose still remained alive. She could turn into a lethal assassin at a moment’s notice….

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