Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 12
Raqqa, Syria, November 2013
The cover identity was a journalist named Park Ji-Yeon.
South Korean. Freelance photojournalist working for a Seoul based news agency that existed on paper and on a website that had been live for three years and had published enough real content that nobody would look twice. She had press credentials, a camera bag, a fixer named Tariq who was not actually named Tariq and was not actually a fixer but knew Raqqa well enough to move through it without drawing attention.
The target was Abu Walid al-Hamawi. ISIS administrative commander for Raqqa Province. Not a fighter — a bureaucrat of violence, the man who coordinated the machinery of the caliphate’s daily operations. Supply chains. Personnel. The paperwork of atrocity.
The unremarkable man who briefed her in a safe house on the Turkish border was the most unremarkable she’d encountered yet — medium everything, forgettable face, the voice of someone reading from a document they hadn’t written.
“Al-Hamawi does a press conference every two weeks,” he said. “For ISIS media. He likes the camera. Believes in the message.” A pause. “Tomorrow is a press conference day. Your credentials will get you in. After the conference he walks to a coffee shop on the same street — same routine every time. He’s a bureaucrat. Bureaucrats have routines.”
She looked at the photograph.
Al-Hamawi was slight, bearded, wearing the ISIS administrative dress that functioned as a uniform for men who managed the caliphate rather than fought for it. He had the eyes of someone who had decided a long time ago that what he was doing was correct and had stopped examining the decision.
“Distance at the coffee shop?”
The unremarkable man looked at her. “Fifty feet. Maximum.”
She stared at him.
“Did you say fifty feet?”
“Yes. You are a gold medalist with a pistol, correct?”
She sat with that for a moment. Fifty feet. She could read a man’s expression at fifty feet. Could see what he’d ordered. Could watch his hand reach for the cup.
Sge thought to herself I’m not a sniper anymore. I’m a fucking assassin!
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
“No problem then.”
“No problem.”
The unremarkable man continued as though the exchange hadn’t happened.
“The weapon is a suppressed Sig Sauer P210 nine-millimeter. Already in country. Tariq will have it for you before the press conference.” Another pause. “You’ll need to be close. The suppressor reduces the sound signature but it doesn’t eliminate it. You want to be moving before anyone understands what happened.”
“Exit route.”
“The street will empty. People in Raqqa know the sound of violence and they move away from it. You move with them, not against them. Tariq picks you up two blocks east in a vehicle. From there to the Turkish border is four hours.”
She looked at the photograph again.
Fifty feet.
“ROE,” she said.
“Positive ID. Your discretion.” He paused. “There will be people on the street. Civilians. The suppressor and the chaos give you cover but you need a clean shot — head, immediate incapacitation. No second chances in Raqqa.”
She nodded.
“One more thing,” he said. “You’re Asian. That works in your favor here — less immediately associated with Western intelligence than a European face. But ISIS has people who watch the press pool. Stay in character from the moment you enter the city until the moment you’re in Tariq’s vehicle. You are Park Ji-Yeon. You are chasing a story. You believe in the work.”
She picked up the press credentials and looked at her own photograph on the laminate.
Park Ji-Yeon. Freelance photojournalist.
She’d been a lot of things since she was eighteen years old. This was the first time she’d been asked to be a version of herself.
The press conference was in a building that had been a municipal office before the caliphate repurposed everything. Forty minutes of a man at a podium speaking Arabic she followed well enough to understand and a room full of ISIS media operatives with cameras and the fervor of people who believed the lens was a weapon.
She shot photographs. Asked one question through Tariq that established her presence without drawing attention. Kept the camera up and her face behind it and watched Abu Walid al-Hamawi at the podium with the same eyes she used on a ridgeline.
He was smaller in person than the photograph suggested. The beard was longer. The eyes were the same — decided, closed, the examination finished years ago.
When the conference ended he spoke briefly to two men, shook hands, and walked out of the building onto the street.
She followed at the distance a journalist would follow. Camera up. Shooting the street, the buildings, the ordinary texture of a city that had been turned into something else. Tariq walked beside her and said nothing.
Al-Hamawi walked three blocks and stopped at a coffee shop and spoke to the man behind the counter and waited on the sidewalk with his hands clasped behind his back looking at the street.
She was already moving.
Not fast. Not slow. The pace of a journalist who had spotted something worth photographing and was closing the distance to get the shot. Camera up. The pistol in her right hand below the camera bag, suppressor already threaded, the bag open.
Thirty feet.
Twenty.
She could see the gray in his beard. The texture of his coat. The slight movement of his lips as he said something to himself or to no one.
Ten feet from two parked trucks. Shexset up in between the trucks, leaning against thst back.
The coffee arrived.
He reached for it.
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