Death to be prolonged and painful? No problem.

The man without a name raised the phone to his ear and listened carefully. He took no notes. In his particular trade, nothing was ever written down. The cell-phone he was holding was reserved for this caller alone and would be destroyed after the call ended. The caller would have a similar arrangement in place. Standard practice.
The man listened without speaking and committed the information to memory. Age, physical description, last known address. Everything he needed to do the job. When the caller stopped speaking, the man without a name spoke for the first time. A number. His price for the job. He didn’t wait for his price to be agreed, but depressed the off button on his phone. He flicked it apart and removed the SIM card, bent it over until it snapped and placed the two halves on a side table. Together with the carcass of the cell phone, they would be disposed of later in different locations. Nothing would ever be traced back to him.
He knew the caller would pay his price. It was fair recompense for his unique skills and the client would know that. Half the fee was always paid in advance. Complex arrangements were in place to ensure that money would be transferred to a specific bank account in the Cayman Islands from where it would be transferred to different accounts around the world. No one person knew all the details of these subsequent transfers and the various links in the transaction acted entirely separately.
When the man without a name confirmed that the deposit had been made, he would carry out the job. The clients knew they were dealing with a man who had never failed to carry out an assignment. They also knew the consequence of their failure to pay the balance of the fee on completion of the job would be to become a target themselves. Nobody had ever failed to carry out the second stage of the agreed payment.
The man without a name had a reputation to uphold. When he accepted a job, he completed it. His clients knew this. They wanted the best and were prepared to pay for it.
Nobody knew his real name. The name he was using today was different from the name he had used on the previous day. For a man with unlimited funds, evidence of identity was a minor detail. Money would buy a passport, a driving licence, and credit cards, everything that was necessary to operate freely in any country of the world without attracting the attention of the authorities. Neither his fingerprints nor his DNA were held in any police database and only the bodies he left behind could confirm he had ever existed.
The job he had just accepted was routine. He had a name, a description and some background details. The reason for the job was not his concern and he never asked. All he had to do was to find the man the caller had described. Find him and kill him.
The method was his concern and his alone. The only stipulation made by the client was that the death should be prolonged and painful. Very painful. That would rule out the easy options, but the price had been adjusted to take this into account. The man with no name had no preference. It was just a job. A simple ‘accident’ or a prolonged period of agony with the victim begging for death right up to his last breath, it was all in a day’s work.