by Joe Goldberg
“No signals at all. We are clear.”
Imp, a twenty-something with bloodshot eyes behind thick tortoise shell-framed glasses, sat at a corner table near a window of a 7-Eleven two blocks away. He was looking at a series of colored boxes on his laptop screen. With modified commercial software and several micro antennas, Imp was able to monitor police and emergency communications. Another antenna scanned for static in the encrypted frequency bands. Imp made sure the two security cameras screwed to the ceiling of Bridger’s 7-Eleven were not functioning this morning.
The two MSS officers, which they had identified as Bai and Peng, were getting closer. Bridger read them like the receipt from last night’s noodle dinner.
Bai was just that—at least a foot taller than his colleague. Powerful, with a barrel chest and a confident demeanor. Large and in charge. The more senior intelligence officer. His partner, Peng, was the opposite. Unpretentious. Wimpy. A follower in every respect and not helped by the ill-fitting tan suit that hung off his body like melting skin.
They had yet to kill any of the Dragon Fire team. They did that themselves. Killing violated his Spy Devil Rule Number One: No killing unless there is no other option. Also, there was a small chance he would violate Spy Devils Team Rule Number Two: No mistakes.
Bridger hated mistakes. Treating any operation as routine would get them killed. He sniffed for anything that smelled of routine. Predictability was a death sentence in espionage. It was what she had taught him—year after year after year.
“They are coming in,” Bridger informed the team. He expected the assassins to make one last surveillance detection stop on the way to the garage—and they were.
As they approached, Bridger sipped his tea and read his paper. Three other morning loiterers were at the counter. For now, he was simply a businessman enjoying the morning.
Bridger had the kind of looks that allowed him to morph into invisibility. Even at thirty-nine-years-old, he was still Brad Pitt handsome. Five feet eleven. Toned, lean, muscular body. Sandy brownish hair that appeared to alter its tint with the sun, or the angle of his head. His eyes took on the nearest color. Hazel. Not brown. Not green. His complexion was just a permanent shade below a light summer tan. No moles, scars, dimples, or unusual features. His voice was neutral American Midwest, but accents of any kind were not an issue.
He was a clean canvas for disguise kits.
This morning, it was reddish curly hair with thin-rim glasses. An average blue business suit. White shirt. Solid blue tie. The blank jet-lagged stare of an ordinary forty-something American traveler staying in a congested area of Taipei’s business district. Boring. Common. Invisible.
Bridger took one glance in their direction. Their strides were a few inches too long and paced too quickly for the small space. Peng was glancing around too much. Bai’s neck muscles were tight. Their arms and hands were tense. Tension around their eyes. Their wiggling hands were unnatural. Their rate of breathing was too quick by a few breaths.
Peng will come in first, scan the store, and take a tactical position in the far corner pretending to choose some snacks. Bai will follow in a few seconds. He will go to the coffee station and fill a to-go cup. When he is done, they will rotate positions so Peng can get his beverage.
They did exactly what he predicted.
A bulge in jacket near the small of their backs. Probably a Taiwan manufactured T75. Not a problem.
Bridger knew Chinese Ministry of State Security intelligence officers would typically carry a variant of the Chinese built QSZ-92 semi-automatic pistol. But when on an operation, they would acquire a handgun from the local market.
The MSS men paid the clerk at the bright white counter, exited the store, descended a few small steps, then turned right and right again down Wenchang Street.
Bridger clicked the sensor in his hand, sending the signal to his team that Bai and Peng were on their way. Bridger waited until the men had passed the side window. He stood, folded his paper under his arm, and left the 7-Eleven.
The assassins quickened their pace once they turned down Wenchang Street, now a claustrophobic narrow one-way maze of urban density. Dull apartment buildings were stacked above stores protected by corrugated metal pull-down security doors. Cars and scooters fought to occupy every inch of open sidewalk and road. Red advertising signs and green plants hanging off every apartment's balcony were the only colors besides dirty brown.
The Dragon Fire men turned left onto an arterial lane lined with more balconied apartments, cars, scooters, and trees. Under a square blue “P” parking sign, Bai and Peng stood at a door leading to a parking garage beneath the apartment complex.
“At the door,” Bridger announced.
Bai pulled the handle on the dirty white door, shooting sunlight into the darkness and exposing particles of dust swirling thick in the air. They tossed their coffee cups to the ground as they descended five steps. Peng entered first. Bai followed.
Rows of fluorescent lights spaced across the low ceiling illuminated a fifty-by-fifty-square-foot space. Concrete ran from wall to wall. Floor to ceiling. Wide support pillars were spread across the garage. Small cars, scooters, and motorcycles of every kind crowded the rest of the floor. Narrow aisles allowed just enough of a gap for the cars to squeeze their way to the ramp leading to the rusty door and the outside.
The space smelled like mildew, gasoline, and rubber tires.
Bai and Peng’s steps echoed as they moved toward a white Toyota passenger van backed against the far wall. A beep from the key fob and click from the van pinged through the air when Bai remotely unlocked the vehicle.
Reaching for the van doors' handles was the last clear thought each would have for many hours. They made the mistake of not seeing Demon and Beast rise from the shadows and extend telescopic batons into the unsuspecting faces.
An enhanced capsaicin neurotoxin concoction simultaneously sprayed from the end of a two-foot-long carbon fiber baton into the men’s faces. Momentary gasps and muted gagging followed. The sensory nerve endings in their corneas immediately inflamed, resulting in total blindness. Tear ducts exploded. The automatic reflex to rub stinging eyeballs only worked to spread the chemical and make the pain worse. Their nasal passages and throats became inflamed, as their larynxes became completely paralyzed.
Both men attempted to gulp clean oxygen into their now aggravated lungs but managed only to fill them with more capsaicin-saturated air.
The homemade paralyzing agent overrode their central nervous systems, forcing the muscles in their extremities to spasm. They collapsed to the cold concrete like a rock in free fall. A sickening hollow thud echoed off the walls as scalp and skull dribbled like basketballs against the floor. A few drops of blood mixed with the grime on the dirty garage floor.
Their teammate Milton—a tinkering genius—created the weapon. The Stick was a telescoping multi-threat baton that contained an intensity-controlled electroshock weapon—a stun gun—similar to a cattle prod used by farmers. Depending upon the dial setting, it could cause temporary “neuromuscular incapacitation,” as Milton called it. At higher levels, it delivered excruciating pain.
It was also a Taser capable of firing two small dart electrodes attached to wires to shock a person up to a distance of thirty feet. The most potent weapon was the jets that dispersed an array of dial-controlled toxin mixtures. Some settings pacified the victim. Some knocked the victim out. Some caused paralysis. If set at maximum dosage levels, it could cause the heart to stop beating.
Demon stood over Bai, a scowl on his seventy-year-old stubble-covered face. Demon’s hair was a short, tangled nest of gray. Deep creases snaked across his face, but there was still a youthful look in his eyes. They also contained the look that told people, “don’t fuck with me if you know what is good for you.”
Turning the black rubber handle on his baton, he jammed it behind the defenseless assassin’s ear. For three seconds, thirty thousand volts convulsed Bai into a violent wiggle. The uncontroll
able muscle contractions shocked the drug-impaired body like an earthquake. Demon sauntered around the body and repeated his treatment on Peng.
“Shit, you are a badass, Demon,” Beast said.
He looked up with a smile. “It’s the amps, not the volts.”
“Demon. Really?” Bridger said as he came through an interior door to the garage. He had walked down Guangfu Road around to the other side of the building. He slipped into a gap between the structures, then entered through an unlocked, unguarded service entrance hidden between some trash bins.
“You said after Hong Kong I could do what I wanted to the last group,” Demon said.
“No. I didn’t. Finish the job.”
Beast took out rolls of duct tape and rolled it around the unconscious men’s feet and arms. Beast was less than half Demon's age, broad-shouldered and tall at a few inches over six feet. His bushy beard needed a trim in contrast to his head of dirty brown hair that was short and neatly combed over. The visible parts of his face wore the tanned skin of a man who spent a life outside. His movements were quick, precise, and surgical. He had the straight-backed posture of someone who got things done.
“Two in the bag,” Demon announced thirty seconds later as he and Beast stood over the two men—their wrists and feet now bound with tape.
Beast opened the rear cargo doors of a Mitsubishi SUV parked a few spaces away, then picked up Peng and tossed him inside. Demon looked at Beast and then picked up the limp body of Bai and threw him through the opening like he was stacking wood. The assassin hit the floor with a hard thud.
Beast got behind the steering wheel of the SUV. Bridger took the passenger seat. Bridger liked having Beast in the driver’s seat. Besides being the best at offensive and defensive driving, Beast was cool under pressure, reliable, loyal, and deadly.
Demon jumped in back, closed the door with a bang, and jammed his baton into Bai’s groin. The man lurched like a fish taken off the hook and tossed into the bottom of a boat.
“Oops, my mistake.” He looked at Bridger, who just shook his head.
When Imp gave the all-clear signal, Beast started the SUV.
No Mistakes. So far. So good, Bridger thought.
The man on the roof across Wenchang Street had expected the garage door to open. He was just amazed at how swift it must have happened. He checked his watch. Three minutes.
These Spy Devils are quite impressive. I have to admire their efficiency.
He smiled when the garage door opened and the Mitsubishi SUV pulled out. When his men had gone to check on their van yesterday, he told them to look for any large vehicles in the garage. His men reported that among the scooters and small passenger vehicles, there was one Toyota truck and a Mitsubishi SUV. They had placed tracking sensors on each.
He felt bad about using two of his men as bait. He was getting short of men, but Bai and Peng had stepped up when he asked. Whatever it took to get his revenge against the Spy Devils, he would do. If that meant offering up two of them as bait, wáng yáng bǔ láo. Better late than never.
He looked at his phone. The tracking application was working perfectly. When he knew the exact location of the Spy Devils safe house, then bào chóu xuě chǐ. He would get his revenge and erase the humiliation he had suffered at the hands of the Spy Devils and their leader.
The one called Bridger.
3
The Hard Way
Taipei, Taiwan
“Helloooo?” Bridger gently tapped his palm on the side of one man’s face, then the other. “Wakey, wakey,” he said like he was trying to get a child up in the morning on a school day.
Bai and Peng were sitting slumped in barely functional folding chairs. The eyelids of the two drugged Dragon Fire men slowly opened, revealing glassy eyeballs. The tissue surrounding their eyes and under their noses were red with the irritation from the spray and subsequent rubbing. Beast had cut the tape off their wrists and feet. Bridger wanted to allow them the belief they were not prisoners.
They wouldn’t run—they couldn’t if they wanted to. The gas would not wear off for at least thirty minutes, maybe more. Just in case, Beast stood by the door, dressed in khakis and a polo shirt. He held his Devil Stick in one hand. His preferred weapon of choice, a Sig Sauer P226, was in the other.
Beast was the hairiest guy Bridger had ever met. If he shaved in the morning, he had a full beard by lunch. So he gave up and grew the beard all the time.
Beast wouldn’t talk about it, but Bridger had read his military file. As much as Bridger could tell, Beast was a Special Forces Intel NCO for a combat battalion—Iraq area of operations, who somehow stepped into a shitshow involving an undercover operation involving terrorists, tribal leaders, Syrians, and smuggling routes. Whatever happened, Beast found himself on the shelf, then out of the service.
Bridger found him working security on a construction site in Indiana, of all places.
He was a perfect fit for the Spy Devils.
The SUV carrying the three Spy Devils and two unconscious Dragon Fire men arrived after a two-hour surveillance detection route, SDR, through the busy Taipei streets and surrounding area. When Beast was certain they were clean, he drove to a small one-story, seemingly forgotten utility building he had scouted days before. Surrounded by farmland and buried behind fences and deep foliage, the structure was hidden off a one-lane auxiliary road. The road connected on both ends to Xidong Road, Sanxia District, New Taipei City. An irrigation river ran behind it.
The fifteen-by-fifteen-foot interior was a mess. Stacked in a corner like pancakes were large coils of thick red hose. Bags of what looked and smelled like fertilizer fanned out from along the walls at ninety-degree angles. Pipes, broken buckets, and an assortment of ancient tools Bridger thought were last used to build the Great Wall lined the rest of the cinder block walls. The air smelled like a compost pile.
It was an ideal place to talk to the Chinese MSS officers unobserved and uninterrupted.
“Wake up, damn it!” Bridger shook his head in disappointment and nodded to Demon, who stood behind the MSS men. Demon wore his usual blue jeans and a black pullover jacket. He also had his Devil Stick. Prominently tucked into his belt was his faithful Springfield Armory Colt M1911.
“Hey!” Demon shouted. When they still didn’t move, he flipped his thumb over his Devil Stick to “cattle prod” mode and tapped each man on the shoulder.
Crackles sounded as they jolted off their chairs and fell onto the dirty concrete floor.
“Sorry about that, guys,” Bridger told them in perfect Mandarin—letting the men know he spoke their language—which warned them he understood anything they would say. Bridger knew from previous interrogations of their colleagues that Dragon Fire members all spoke perfect English.
Bridger had morphed during the surveillance route from businessman to punk—blonde spiked hair, red-tinted glasses, jeans, a faded green “Free Ferris” t-shirt, and small fake tattoos on his forearms. Hell-raiser on the left. Mother on the right. He didn’t have to; he just liked to.
On closer inspection, Bridger knew Bai was not only a mountain compared to Peng, but he thoroughly wore the skin of the senior man in charge. Experienced. Bone tough. Peng was much younger. Green. It seemed to Bridger that Peng was just one step above bagger at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store.
A rookie. They are so short-handed they are using guys fresh out of the water.
During the year, his Spy Devils had captured, interrogated, and exposed nineteen of them. Twice in Hong Kong and Australia. Once each in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. A blow to Chinese covert operations in the South China Sea area, and he hoped, a crippling blow to the Dragon Fire program.
Bridger helped them back into their seats and pulled a knee-high bamboo table toward them. On it was a platter of fresh melon and cookies. A pot of tea was warm and ready. Fans hummed in the background, forcing some movement in the dusty, damp air but did little to cool the confined space. A low-light video camera on a tripod pointed
at them at an angle to their left. It was on.
“It is the thought that counts, right?” He poured some steaming tea into two small cups and held them out to the men. Neither reached out to take it. “No?” He set the cups down and nodded at Demon again.
The jolt sent the men to the floor. Bridger helped them to their chairs again. He took a piece of melon off the tray and ate it. He smiled a satisfying smile and licked his fingers.
“You ever heard of Major Sherwood Moran? The United States Marine who wrote a seminal paper on interrogation techniques based on his research during World War II?” Bridger looked at them for an answer. Glazed red eyes stared back. Then he picked up and ate another piece of melon.
“I’m trying to lose a few pounds.” He smiled a mischievous smile. “Never heard of him. No? Well, his analysis revealed that Japanese prisoners of war who were treated nicely by their interrogators—with respect and understanding—were much more successful than those who used physical threats and torture.”
Bridger picked up the tray.
“So, pals, would you like some cookies? Fruit?” Peng slowly raised his watering eyes to look at Bai, who only stared back with an unreceptive blotchy-red face. “No, again?” He set the tray down and slid the table to the side.
Come on, assholes. Take my offer. Have a cookie. Let’s be pals. You don’t want me to be your enemy.
“The immediate success using torture is the stuff of fiction novels and Hollywood movies. Hey, and it is better than letting Demon here pull your fingernails out with a rusty pair of pliers. Right?” Bridger laughed.
“No, it isn’t.” Demon’s voice was a low growl, like a dog ready to be unleashed.
A look of fear crossed Peng’s face, which he tried to hide when he saw Bai sitting as still as death.
“Listen, you have spent months away from home and family. So have we.”
Well, I don’t have much of a family, but maybe you do, Bridger thought.