Been editing and doing my day job so not much time for Flash Fiction until today. This weeks' prompt was a spy and a beggar with a 200 word limit.
Pocket Change
What he had been asked to do by his new employer was no longer spying. It was terrorism. Byron stood in the crowded market and rattled the change in his pocket. The metal-on-metal sounded muted in the lead-lined jacket and gloves.
The nearby beggar’s cup was an ideal starting point for his polonium-210 infused coins to enter the currency system. The capitalist machine would take over from there and the poisoned money would enter circulation across the country. The ensuing panic would unbalance the nation enough for his new employer to make their move.
Spying was deception as an art form. When he’d become disillusioned by his own country’s evolved tactics, the Kremlin sold him on a pure form of spy game. Now they were asking him to conduct this microscopic nuclear strike on soft targets in his own home.
Byron collapsed before he recognized he’d been shot in the throat. He looked up to see the beggar standing above him, pulling off his false beard with the hand that wasn’t holding the silenced pistol.
“Dammit Byron, why did you have to turn?”
Byron considered warning his once partner about the coins that had fallen from his pocket and into the gathering crowd, but he forgot which side he was on.
Finding the macabre in the mundane
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