Hamish sat quietly in the chair letting the cold winter wind prickle his skin with a stark reminder that he was human. He smoked a cigarette and recalled a time when he they had been thicker and rolled with pure tobacco. They didn’t taste dirty like the modern processed brands. Interestingly, he could not recall when he started smoking. Too often it seemed he had someone else’s memories and his dreams so vivid of another time and place just on the outer edges of his grasping consciousness. He wouldn’t sleep for a while yet, if at all, so he decided to get some work done. The night was dark and the shadows his playground.<br/><br/>He dressed casually, placed a knife in the sheath inside the knee length winter coat and another in his boot before mixing the small pile of pictures together. He withdrew one of the pictures and stared at the face of one of Hitler’s cronies. As much as starting at the top would be nice, he would only get one shot at Hitler. He had been around long enough to know the man was completely incompetent as a leader and was incredibly insecure and paranoid. If his attempt failed, Hitler would run and that would make things far more difficult.<br/><br/>So Hamish would start with the outer circle of the group; the accountants and gestapo leaders who didn’t have the smarts or guts to claim the positions on their own. They hired me to clear the way for them then felt the power of the Nazi establishment would protect them. Not all of them had neglected payment, which would make the pattern seem random and harder to trace. The biggest obstacle now was to not spook the upper section of the list. The kills would need to be clean and quiet, which would call for special equipment. He would need to get to Stuttgart for this but it was not a pressing matter.<br/><br/>Hamish wandered the streets, keeping his tweed cap pulled low and seeming to take in the surroundings. In fact, he was counting the steps from the hotel to several hit points along the main road through the town. He would automatically catalogue each potential point as primary, secondary, or emergency and by the time his plan was in motion he would know exactly how the hit would take place, where he would be, where he could go, and where the body would be disposed. His mind instantly calculated the distance and amount of time it would take to get from one point to the next.<br/><br/>Hamish ended his walk staring at the better than average house of one Karsten Adler. He was a mid-ranked financier of the Nazi party and the one who had made the initial negotiations for the assignments. His house sat on the southern end of the city and while it was nice, Hamish had operated in nicer. He just couldn’t remember where or why. Hamish let that distraction go and focused on the doors and windows.<br/><br/>It would be too easy. The Nazi’s had grown confident in their consolidated power and greed. Hamish could tell the doors would not be locked and the family would be in bed early. After years of seeing places, he just understood the pattern of things and people. This was a truth Hamish had learned over the years, the biggest folly of the greedy and the vain. Any door in the poorer section of town would be locked securely, while here they believed their wealth and power made them immune. Not that a locked door would mean any more than an unlocked door for someone like Hamish but the folly of bad men gave Hamish hope that this was something good.<br/><br/>As he turned to walk back to the hotel, something deeply buried inside him tried to spark. A long dead whisper of a dusty, cobwebbed soul was hinting that something bigger was taking place. The signs were there, a passing look from one person to another in the streets or hallways, or the hurried steps of the individual refusing eye contact. It gave him pause at the wonder of where that had come from. He hoped it would happen again. It had made him feel…something.<br/><br/>A genuine smile creased his lips as Hamish whistled a quiet tune on his way back to the hotel.