Rage Of The Assassin by Russell Blake Page B

to.”
    “Just don’t drop them. Tilting them is fine until they’re activated. Once they are, though…”
    “I remember. The slightest movement. Got it.” He turned to his men. “Let’s get busy. Slide this first one onto the hand truck and we’ll work it down the stairs.” He gave El Maquino a look. “Gently, of course.”
    Half an hour later the boxes were gone, along with their transporters, and El Maquino was left in peace. His heavy boots clumped on the hardwood floor as he traced and retraced his steps as though trying to psychically expunge the damage the intruders had done to his home’s aura. He wished he had more food, but wouldn’t touch the breakfast portion of his delivery that was waiting in the nearly empty refrigerator. Instead he contented himself with chugging two liters of water to kill the hunger pangs.
    “Everything will be okay. It will all be fine. They’re gone now. All locked up,” he muttered. “All locked up. Gone.”
    The project had engaged him more than most, and he would miss the technical challenge it had presented. But he still had his hobby, at which he was an expert: drones. The concept of remote-controlled flight had fired his imagination from an early age, and he’d used most of his spare financial resources buying components and designing and building ever more elaborate examples. His one frustration was battery life, and he’d been toying with innovations that, if successful, could revolutionize the remote flight industry.
    Not that he cared. He just hated limitations, and batteries were inherently limited. He viewed inefficiency as his mortal enemy, offensive to his sensibility. True, he might only bathe once a week when immersed in a project, and cut his own hair with a vacuum attachment that left it looking like he’d fallen against a fan, but El Maquino had a highly refined sense of the elegance of order – which was why, outside his projects, he spent most of his time reading physics textbooks. He loved the concept of discovering the underlying organizational principles of the universe, and theoretical physics allowed his mind to roam free, unfettered by the boundaries of the Newtonian. Had he wished to engage with others, he could have amazed them with his insights, but interacting with humans was difficult for him, so he avoided doing so. He still remembered how he had been treated during his formative years, and he wasn’t about to repeat that as an adult – although the concept of time, like aging, was foreign to him, not because he was oblivious but simply because each day was like the last, with no differentiation other than the end of one project and the beginning of another.
    Two hours after beginning his pacing, he finally slowed and moved back to his workbench. He had things to do. His projects weren’t going to build themselves, after all.
    “Idle hands. No rest for the wicked. A busy man is a happy man,” he whispered as he reached for a small motor bought for a steal online in need of rebuilding; its rotor shaft was beginning to wobble from worn bearings. “Got things to do. Yes, I do. Things to do,” he repeated, and began to hum as he dismantled the hub with a set of tiny wrenches.
     
    “Tell me that wasn’t frigging weird,” the largest mover said as the SUV they’d loaded the boxes into made its way through town. “He may be a genius or whatever, but that was a ten on the creepy scale.”
    The driver nodded. “He’s absolutely out of his mind.”
    “Yes, he is.” The large man craned his neck as he looked toward the rear of the big vehicle. “Let’s just hope that he’s as good as they say. Otherwise we’re going to be in a world of hurt.”
    Nobody had a glib response for that. They knew the stakes. And they were now all relying on the handiwork of a character who belonged in a padded room.
    “A world of hurt,” the man repeated, and returned to watching the lights streak by as they traversed the still-teeming streets,