The Assassinator Narratives - chapter 2

Gabriel O'Brien

Assassinators come in all different shapes and sizes. There were towering giants like Sean Andrews (but no other assassinator was as towering as Sean – not even thin-as-a-beanpole Donald Richardson, who due to his excessive thinness was theoretically taller than Sean, but only theoretically – because he was the tallest of them all), tiny fellows like Justin Theroux (whose sense of personal dignity was as tiny as his body), and Mr. English’s administrative assistant Gabriel O’Brien in between them. There was also Martin Demme in between Sean and Gabriel, ex-assassinator Dudley Smith in between Sean and Martin, Pablo Escobar in between ex-assassinator Dudley and Martin, and further comparisons.

If all the assassinators at the time of Narrator’s arrival were to be lined up based on height, at the lower end of the line was where Rufus Sewell would be found. Rufus, in actuality, was slightly taller than Justin by the way he combed his straight black hair – long by a male’s standard – so it jutted upward, and this hair, reinforced by a little touch of gel, did not flutter at a strong wind like Stephen Lang’s hair does, but Stephen never bothered with gel anyways.
Although polar opposites in terms of their appearance and personality, Rufus and Edmund Clark were partners-in-assassinations, along with Stephen, who they both considered a genius on the same level as whoever invented the video game joystick and who they often booked to be on their team a week in advance prior to missions, as their technical assistant, solving problems such as jammed sniper rifles and eye-balling a curve-shot angle they should make with their arm to let a bullet turn a corner to hit their target. Stephen was very good at eye-balling curve-shots, considering that he fires a shot only one in five missions.
Edmund Clark, in the spectrum of assassinators by height, would be in the higher end, somewhere between Pablo and Sara Healy (she herself would fall between Edmund and Alec Wagner, who – although he never admits it – was forever Robert Benton’s sidekick, even though Robert was shorter than Alec by a whole inch, but height doesn’t mean anything really). Edmund’s brown hair was also straight and long, like Rufus’, and he kept it without gel, matted against his skull under a red and white baseball cap just short of his eye brows at the front. There’s the difference between them already. Another difference between Rufus and Edmund was that Edmund liked to playfully and menacingly at the same time insult people who are shorter than he (that definitely included Rufus, perhaps most of all, because Rufus was so accessible to him) and are perceived by him to be inferior in all other ways too, while Rufus was obligated to be on the receiving end of Edmund’s insults. However, the most memorable insult given to Rufus – there were quite a few, all of which complimenting his insufferable quality of being annoying as hell (in actuality, Justin was much more annoying during missions, if given Stephen’s opinion, or that of Drake Murphy, who vocally discussed his opinion of each assassinator with his closest circle of friends – especially Sam Shepherd, and later, after Narrator’s arrival to the assassinators, Howard Fast, who in a few months had been accepted to at least one of the cliques in the fraction – and occasionally by accident with members he don’t know very well at all) – by Alan Holmes, who one afternoon after a missions briefing was finally fed up with Rufus incessantly poking him in the side, he turned around and said loudly to Rufus seated behind him holding the ball-point pen in stab motion that was the source of Alan’s discomfort, and said loudly in his intellectual-worthy voice, stop touching me, you tiny human!
Rufus grinned and replied, but I wasn’t touching you.
Well stop touching me indirectly then, you tiny human!
The others around them that included Stephen, Gabriel, Martin and Edmund all heard Alan and the phrase you tiny human stayed in their minds from that moment onwards. It was decided that Rufus was indeed the shortest of the assassinators - whether directly or indirectly due to Alan's remark, nobody had thought about yet - when in fact Justin was shorter.