by S. A. Beck
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All Books by S.A. Beck
The Atlantis Saga (7-book series)
Book 1: The Atlantis Girl
Book 2: The Atlantis Allegiance
Book 3: The Atlantis Gene
Book 4: The Atlantis Secret
Book 5: The Atlantis Origins
Book 6: The Atlantis Guard
Book 7: The Atlantis Ascent
* * *
The Mage’s Daughter Trilogy
Book 1: Blood Magic
Book 2: Angel Magic
Book 3: Demon Magic
Excerpt from “The Atlantis Guard”
AUGUST 12, 2016, MARRAKECH, MOROCCO
2:30 P.M.
* * *
Brice Dawson, alias Billy Conrad, alias Bill Carson, alias Malcolm Dryden, alias Grunt had been in a lot of bad situations before, but this one looked like it was going to be in the top ten.
He’d been prowling the backstreets of Marrakech, trying to sniff out what had happened to Edward, the computer hacker for the Atlantis Allegiance, and what he had found scared him. All his contacts in the underground—arms dealers, people smugglers, forgers, fences of stolen merchandise—all of them were afraid. In fact, most were so afraid that they wouldn’t talk to him.
The only thing he had learned was that Edward had been snatched. The hotel/safe house Edward had found for them here had been attacked a few days before. The owner, Mohammad el Aoufi, had been gunned down, as had his son and several of the guests. The guests had included an important Italian businessman and a minor prince from the Saudi royal family.
El Aoufi’s house was an underground institution, a supposedly safe refuge for all types of people who needed anonymity, and its destruction had made every criminal this side of the Atlas Mountains paranoid.
Everything had been hushed up. Nothing about the attack had made it into the local press, but no doubt the Moroccan secret police were scouring the medina looking for the culprits.
Grunt hadn’t dared go near the hotel. The entire neighborhood would be filled with prying eyes. Instead, he’d heard all of this from the few people he could get to talk to him, quick whispered conversations at cafés while the contact looked the other way and hid his face behind a newspaper.
The underworld was in an uproar. One of their secrets, one of their safe spaces, had been taken out. The underworld was scared.
That made Grunt scared too.
All his instincts told him to get the hell out of Marrakech and preferably get the hell out of Morocco. Ideally he should get the hell out of Africa.
But he wasn’t going anywhere. He had a duty to find Edward. He wouldn’t leave a fellow soldier behind.
Grunt had one more hope, he thought as he looked at himself in the bathroom mirror of the tiny hotel room he’d rented for himself. The arms dealer, Ahmad Chukri, an old contact from his Special Forces days, had sent him a message through a go-between that he’d see him. For a price, of course. Nothing from that guy ever came for free.
First, Grunt had to get ready. He needed a disguise.
Checking into this hotel had been easy enough. This was the kind of place that didn’t require a passport or even a peek behind the kaffiyeh he’d wrapped around his face. All he had to do was fork over some money and, to answer the question of why a foreigner would stay in this dump, buy some heroin from the guy at the front desk. The heroin had gone down the toilet as soon as he had gotten into his room, and the desk clerk had gone onto Grunt’s Official List of People Who Needed Their Asses Kicked.
But that would have to wait for another day. He couldn’t walk these streets without a disguise. Luckily he had that covered.
Grunt unzipped his toiletry bag and took out a tin of what looked like skin moisturizer. In fact it was a special chemical compound he’d learned to brew up.
Stripping to the waist, he dabbed the corner of a towel into the cream and began to rub it on the tribal tattoos that covered his face and neck.
A bit of rubbing and they came right off. Within a few minutes, the tribal tattoos had vanished, and the only ink he had left on him was his one real tattoo—the Special Forces tattoo on his bicep, a relic from an earlier part of his life. At least that was normally hidden by his shirt and couldn’t be used to identify him.
Grunt examined himself in the mirror and smiled. The tribal tattoos were an improved version of the temporary tattoos he used to get in cereal boxes as a kid. While those faded after the first shower, his tattoos were drawn with a special ink that took weeks to fade under normal circumstances. But with his special cleaner, they came off like a charm.
He flexed his muscles and admired his reflection. The wrong side of thirty but still looking good. A faint scar underneath his Special Forces tattoo made him frown. That had been his only other real tattoo. He thought it would be there forever until he stopped being stupid and woke up to reality. Then he’d gotten laser surgery to rid himself of it. The tattoo had been only one word, once the sweetest word in the world and now something he couldn’t say without spitting.
Isadore.
Grunt hurriedly put his shirt back on, so he didn’t have to see the scar. Then he examined his reflection again, turning his head from one side to the other, making sure all trace of his tribal tattoos had vanished.
It was the perfect disguise. If someone has a tattoo on his face, everyone sees the tattoo, not the face. He’d been going around Marrakech with that facial tattoo the last time he was here. He’d bet a thousand bucks that the café idlers and the secret police and the street punks were still talking about the muscular American with the weird marks on his bald head, neck, and one-half of his face. Now he was just a muscular American. They wouldn’t dream that he was the same person.
And that suited him just fine.
He slipped a Bowie knife into his boot and a smaller knife into a belt holster in the small of his back, wishing he’d had time to get a gun. If it looked like he needed to stay in town a while, he’d buy one from Ahmad Chukri.
Grunt closed the rickety door to his hotel room behind him, locked it for all the good that would do, and made his way down the dingy hallway, lit by a single bare bulb on which several dead flies were stuck. A cadaverous young Moroccan passed him in the hall, his hollow eyes barely registering Grunt’s presence. It made the mercenary wince. He’d seen a lot of death and doled out plenty of it himself, but drug addicts had always given him the creeps. How someone could slowly kill themselves like that was something he’d never understand.
That thought made him briefly worry about Otto. How was the pyro doing, anyhow? He needed someone watching over him, and the eggheads weren’t qualified. Vivian could handle the task, but she was too busy watching over Jaxon, which was more than a full-time job. That left Otto unsupervised most of the day, and that could lead to trouble.
The kid was an addict, plain and simple. Just as much of an addict as that junkie who had stopped in the hallway and stared at a couple of doors, obviously having forgotten which room was his. Otto was addicted to setting fires. Grunt reminded him of that every chance he could get in the hope that he could shame Otto into stopping. Otto cared way too much about what people thought of him, so that just might work. But without someone watching over him, it would be easy for the kid to slip back into his old ways or even worse ways. Addicts could change addictions easily enough, and North Africa offered no shortage of temptations.
Grunt passed down the creaky stairs, nodded to the guy at the front desk who recognized Grunt by his bulk rather than his face, which he now saw for the first time, and walked out into a narrow alley deep in Marrakech’s medina—the medieval city that had stood almost unchanged for centuries.
Grunt took a long, winding route to get to Ahmad’s place of business—visible from the alley only as a
blank metal door identical to thousands of other blank metal doors in this private culture. Moroccans did not have windows open to the outside and never left their doors open for a second longer than it took to pass through them. Grunt knocked twice, then three times, then twice again.
A little window opened up in the door, covered on the inside by mesh so someone couldn’t stick the muzzle of a gun through.
“I think you have the wrong place, tourist,” a suspicious voice said in English. It was Muhammad, one of Ahmad’s gunmen.
“Four sixteen,” Grunt replied in Arabic. That was this week’s code word.
Muhammad stared at him for a moment longer, obviously not recognizing him, then opened the door. He kept one hand hidden behind the door, no doubt with a gun in it, glanced each way down the alley, and let Grunt inside. When the door closed, Muhammad leveled a 9mm automatic at Grunt’s stomach.
“Who are you?” Muhammad asked.
“An old friend of Ahmad’s. He told you to expect someone at this time, didn’t he?”
The suspicious look on Muhammad’s face showed he still didn’t recognize him.
“Go ahead,” Muhammad said, gesturing with his pistol down a dark, narrow hallway.
Grunt sauntered down the hall, Muhammad following several steps behind to get a good shot and stay out of reach. Grunt smiled. Ahmad ran a tight ship.
Taking a right, they passed down another short hall and entered a large, brightly lit room with a couple of old couches.
Leaning on the couches and lined up on the tattered rugs on the floor were dozens of guns. Grunt eyed them appreciatively. Besides the usual AK-47 assault rifles, there were a variety of pistols, including tiny hideaway models that could fit in the palm of a hand, plus heavy machine guns from China and Russia.
A voice from the doorway opposite made him look up.
“Malcolm, my friend, how good of you to come visit!”
Ahmad Chukri the arms dealer came sweeping into the room, arms flung wide to make his white djellaba flow around him like some saint in a medieval painting. He paused for just a second when he saw Grunt’s face free of any tattoos then smiled. He didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Ahmad had risen up from a street punk to one of North Africa’s leading arms dealers and had seen a countless variety of tricks, scams, and cons. Nothing surprised him anymore, not even a trick he’d never thought of. He nodded with the appreciation of one professional for another.
“It is good to see you again so soon. Come, let us have some tea.”
Another assistant appeared from the doorway and set down a tray with an elaborate brass teapot and two little colored glasses. After the assistant left and Muhammad returned to his post at the front door, they drank their tea and got down to business.
“Thanks for letting me come over, Ahmad,” Grunt said. “Most of my contacts are acting like I have the bubonic plague.”
Ahmad made a face and shook his head. “Everyone is scared because of the attack on the secret hotel. We were all taken by surprise. Few people know of the place, and those who do appreciate its existence. I myself have put up many of my guests there. We all agreed it was neutral territory. We all benefitted from it, so we all honored its safety.”
“You saying outsiders did this?” Grunt asked. Actually he already knew who did it—the hit had Isadore’s fingerprints all over it—but he wanted local confirmation.
“Witnesses say the leader was a Western woman, but she had local help.”
“What did she look like?”
Ahmad gave a vague but fairly accurate description of Isadore. Grunt nodded.
“And the local help? I thought you said people honored the place.”
“Honored by professional people like you and me, my friend. Not street scum like the boys who did this.”
Grunt reached into his pocket. “I don’t have much time, so let’s cut to the chase. How much for telling me where they are?”
Ahmad smiled. “Nothing, my friend.”
Grunt stared. With Ahmad, everything cost, and cost a lot. The arms dealer chuckled.
“Are you surprised, Malcolm? We need to make an example of them. Come with us while we do this. You can question them and then go after their leader while we take care of the local boys. We cannot have such people ruining business like this.”
“Let me handle the questioning,” Grunt said. What people like Ahmad rarely understood was that torture was a poor way of getting information. The subject ended up telling their captors whatever they wanted to hear.
Ahmad spread out his hands and smiled. “Whatever you think best, my friend. You are a professional. But we get them when you are done. You know they killed a princeling of the Saudi royal family?”
“And you want the reward the Saudis will give.”
Ahmad nodded. The smile on his lips belied by the hard glint in his eyes.
Grunt shifted in his seat. He didn’t want to think what the Saudis would do to those street punks. Maybe he could find a way to save them, if they deserved saving.
“When do we move in?” Grunt asked.
“Right now,” Ahmad said, picking up a pistol from the sofa and handing it to him.
The Atlantis Guard is available everywhere