Absorbing a glancing blow, he managed a lucky return strike that landed squarely against the intruder’s Adam’s apple. The man fell back against the wall and clutched his throat. Balagh’s eyes traced toward the corner of the room where the pistol had flown.
But before he could dive for it, the attacker whipped out a knife from a sheath on his belt. He brought the blade down in an arcing slice. Balagh threw himself backward. The knife cut through his shirt, slicing across his chest.
He ignored the pain and blossoming blood. The wound was superficial. He would survive. But not if he let the man continue swinging that blade.
Balagh sent a powerful jab into the man’s liver, then swept his leg into the back of his knee. The intruder absorbed the attacks, lashing out with the knife again and again. Just one wrong dodge, one mistake, and Balagh would be skewered.
He funneled every bit of energy and focus he had left into his attacks. The knife whipped past him. More cuts tore into his shirt. Another attack cleaved into his leg.
Balagh hoped the guy hadn’t cut an artery. Because if he had, none of this mattered anyway.
Then he saw it. An opening. A fraction of a second.
Instincts overrode thoughts. His closed fist smashed against the intruder’s wrist. Another crack. A distinct snap.
The man yowled, his fingers splaying open, the knife skittering across the floor.
Another fist smashed the man’s teeth together. Blood and spit flew across Balagh’s face.
The man let out an animalistic growl, eyes bulging. He grappled Balagh and used his body weight to slam him into the wall. Plaster exploded around him. Pain cut through the back of Balagh’s skull. Dizziness threatened to sabotage his attack, and a heavy fist connected hard with the side of his jaw.
His ears rang. Blood danced over his tongue.
The intruder slammed Balagh against the wall again. Fissures cut through to the ceiling. Dust streamed down.
He could barely think. The hot breath of the intruder, the pain, all of it washed over him.
This was how he would die. He still had no idea why this man wanted him dead.
Another blow caught him in the gut. The air whooshed out of his lungs.
The man cocked back his arm, readying a haymaker that would send Balagh’s nose into the back of his skull.
But the guy wasn’t thinking clearly. All his training had seemed to crumble like a tower of dry sand. His throat was wide open. Like a gleaming bull’s eye, a red bruise already mottling the skin where Balagh had hit him before.
This man thought he had the upper hand. Thought the battle was already won.
But he had underestimated Balagh.
In fact, Balagh had underestimated himself.
The beast inside his head, the one buried under his missing memories, had made no such mistake. It roared up through him, seizing the advantage. The heel of Balagh’s fist smashed into the man’s Adam’s apple again.
This time, he hit hard enough to cause a sickening crunch of breaking cartilage.
That meant a crushed windpipe.
Crushed windpipe meant no more breathing.
The man let Balagh go and crumpled, meaty fingers pawing at his throat. His face started to go pale. His mouth opened and closed like he’d forgotten how to talk and was trying to beg Balagh for his life.
Too late for that.
Balagh gasped to recover his own breath as his lungs screamed at him. He dropped down beside the bed and scrambled toward the gun.
He was almost certain this nameless assassin was dying already. But if Balagh had learned one thing since waking up in Petra, it was that he could take no chances.
The pistol shook in his grip. Even so, he was too close to miss.
His finger started to squeeze on the trigger. He could barely keep the gun aimed straight.
Had he ever killed a person before? Now that he knew he was going to walk away from this fight, could he take this man’s life?
The guy was already dying. And Balagh was defending himself. That was all.
Three whoomphs from the gun. Three rounds spearing through the attacker’s body.
The man sprawled forward, his body thumping against the floor. Fingers stretched one last time before going still.
Balagh drew himself up, his chest still heaving, and lurched over to the intruder. Just to be sure, he put two fingers to the man’s neck.
No pulse.
He searched the man’s pockets. Nothing. Not a cell phone. Not an ID. Not even any cash.
That meant a couple things. This guy didn’t want to be identified. And if he didn’t even have any car keys or a phone on him, there was a good chance someone else was waiting for him at a designated meetup, ready to take him away from the scene.
When this man never showed up, the guy’s partner would know something went wrong.
Balagh didn’t want to be here when backup arrived. He scooped up the man’s knife and gun.
Already, he heard voices coming from neighboring hotel rooms. No doubt they had heard the gunshots and would be alerting the authorities.
Balagh tore up his T-shirt and used it to tie rough bandages around his wounds then put on a new shirt and jeans, fingers still trembling. He stuffed his newfound weapons into his duffel bag. After slinging his backpack over his shoulders, he ran down the hall, ignoring the other guests, and then slipped out the nearest exit into the cool desert air.
Blood still swished around in his mouth. He nearly tripped, his head dizzied by the blows he’d taken. The voices from inside the hotel grew louder, and he jogged as best he could away from the scene. The entire building seemed to be awake by the time he made it around the hotel’s pool and scaled the back fence to another road.
A few sirens wailed from closer to Wadi Musa’s town center. Headed this way.
He was still in pain. He had no idea where he should go next or how he would stop these people from coming after him again. No clue why anyone wanted to kill him.
His brain was nothing but bad hummus.
But he knew enough to know that he couldn’t stay here.
-5-
Frederick, Maryland
Day had turned to night. The only reason Kasim knew this was because of the digital clocks on the wall at the back of Vector’s HQ showing the time in New York, London, Paris, Moscow, and a dozen other cities around the world.
Daylight, moonlight, or something in between—Kasim couldn’t see what was going on in the outside world from Vector’s windowless operations center. The whole world might be a raging dumpster fire on the Fourth of July in Chernobyl, and he wouldn’t have any idea.
Then again, he felt like that was exactly the state of the world. At least, the state of his world. He had told Commander Liang that Vector would take on this assignment. And what was the very first thing they did?
Lost Ballard’s asset.
He wanted to pull out his beard, one whisker at a time.
Kasim wasn’t leaving this place for so much as a piss break until Alex made contact with Ballard’s asset. He had to know that this mission was still under their control, however tenuous.
Morris, too, had remained glued to his station. Kasim had urged the analyst to grab some shut-eye. But Morris refused. Kasim wasn’t the only one upset by their setback.
The analyst stared at his computer with bloodshot eyes, his fingers scrunching his knit cap.
“This all better be worth it,” Morris said. “I’m giving up my weekend at Otakon for this.”
“What’s Otakon? Some kind of comic-con?”
Morris scrolled through a file on his computer. “You serious?”
Kasim shrugged.
“It’s an anime convention.”
“Is that code for something?”
“You know, Akira? Naruto? Japanese animation.”
Again, Kasim shrugged.
“Someday, when we’re not trying to save the world, I’ll sit you down, and we’ll watch some Studio Ghibli.”
> “Are you still speaking English?”
Morris rolled his eyes.
Over and over, the analyst continued poring through the files he’d pulled up on his computer. The poor guy looked like he was waiting for God himself to reach through the screen and tell him everything was going to be all right.
Morris crumpled a neon-green can of energy drink and tossed it at the bin beside his desk. The can missed and clanged across the floor, coming to a stop next to another smashed can.
Kasim sighed and picked them both up. When he threw them away, Morris didn’t so much as glance away from his monitor.
“This guy is a ghost,” Morris said, pushing back from the desk. “Man, I cannot find a damn thing on Ballard or whoever this dude is that Alex is meeting. Ballard might as well never have existed.”
“I’m sure the CIA would be happy to hear you say that.”
Typical of the admin team there. Scrub all traces of their involvement in an illegal op then ask someone else to clean up the rest of the mess, conveniently forgetting they’d already gotten rid of all the most helpful intel.
Morris reached toward a minifridge next to his desk and pulled out another energy drink. He popped the tab.
“That crap is going to burn a hole straight through your stomach,” Kasim said.
“It’s the only way I’m keeping my brain juiced right now.” Morris yawned, jabbing a finger at his computer. “It’s not just the CIA’s records that are missing. It’s like the guy never stepped out in public. No personal email addresses, no family. No breadcrumbs in cyberspace. Can’t even find evidence he ever had a Social Security number, much less a single credit report.”
“They were thorough, then. The guy’s been missing for three weeks or so. Plenty of time to clean things up.”
“But this is too clean,” Morris said. He pulled his cap off and ran a hand over his bald head. “I’ve never had a case where I couldn’t at least find a birth certificate or even an old yearbook photo at some Podunk elementary school. That’s a lot of data to erase, and it’s not easy to do.”
“You don’t think the CIA could do this?” Kasim dropped into a chair next to Morris. “Or are you trying to tell me someone else might be involved in cleaning Ballard’s public image?”
Morris tipped his energy drink can toward Kasim. “A little of this, a little of that. Put on your tinfoil hat with me for a second. It’s almost like someone in the CIA knew in advance that this guy was going to go missing. Like when he first started working for them, they were already wiping out his virtual existence.”
“Maybe they were.”
“That’s not the typical protocol,” Morris said.
“The kind of work Ballard was doing wasn’t typical, either.”
“Or there’s another option. Gregory Ballard isn’t a real person.”
“So we’re back to chasing ghosts,” Kasim said.
“Not exactly. Maybe Ballard is a fake identity.”
“According to the CIA, he’s real. Mossad said that Ballard was working with their agent, Luria, too.”
“Can you confirm it? I can’t. Maybe the Agency passed Liang a fake identity. Mossad might be helping cover it up.”
Kasim stared at the image of Ballard on the computer screen. “That wouldn’t be particularly helpful.”
“It wouldn’t.” Morris took a sip of his drink. “But they aren’t really trying to find him anyway. They just want the trail that leads to the weapons he was tracking.”
“True. The fake ID would be, theoretically, all we need if it gets us his asset.”
“Yeah,” Morris said. “Then again, the simplest answer is often the right one. They really did just scrub him out of existence. They’re getting better than me at the cyber stuff. And I don’t like it when people are better than me.”
“That—”
There was a knock at the door.
Dr. Freya Weber entered before Kasim could answer. She had a laptop under her arm. The tall, curly-haired epidemiologist marched in, her face set. She took her laptop straight to the conference table and opened it.
At Kasim’s direction, she had been monitoring the syndromic surveillance databases around the Middle East. He worried that if Ballard had gone missing weeks ago, whatever weapons sale he’d been watching for had already taken place.
And worse, those weapons might have already been deployed.
“I have something you might want to see,” she said with a slight German accent. The accent spoke of her birth to a US Army soldier and his local Bavarian sweetheart.
Kasim left his seat beside Morris and joined her at the table. Judging by the wild look in Weber’s eyes, he worried his worst fears about the weapon had come true.
Her computer screen showed a map of the Middle East centered on Syria and Lebanon.
“Was there an attack?” Kasim asked.
“Not exactly,” Weber said.
Her expression didn’t soften, and the knot in Kasim’s gut twisted tighter.
“There were multiple incidents,” Weber said.
“What was it? A nerve agent? Pathogen?”
“To be honest, I’m not sure.”
Weber tapped a key. Several red dots appeared in Damascus and the surrounding area. She clicked on one of those dots. A video played. It was slightly grainy and pixelated, the work of a cheap cell phone. The video centered on a young girl playing on a balcony. She couldn’t be older than three or four. She was making faces at whoever was filming.
“Ignore the girl,” Weber said. “Focus on the street beyond the balcony.”
Slightly out of focus, a narrow marketplace lined the street with tables full of clothes, food, and other goods. A few awnings stretched over the stands. People lingered at some tables. Others meandered between the stalls in groups, talking.
Weber pointed at a group of six individuals walking through the market. “Watch these people right here.”
It was hard to tell from the poor quality, but all six seemed to be adults. Three men. Three women. They each wore black clothes.
Kasim expected a bomb to go off or for them to pull out concealed handguns.
But they simply strolled down the crowded street as the video stayed centered on the babbling toddler.
“Now,” Weber said.
As if a switch had been flipped, the six men and women erupted in a fit of violence. They flipped over tables and threw rocks, tools, clothes, everything they could get their hands on. They pummeled anyone within their reach, chasing the shoppers and shopkeepers alike. Men, women, children. It didn’t matter. They even whaled on each other, tearing at each other’s limbs and hair.
The person filming the little girl turned the camera away from the toddler and focused on the ensuing chaos.
People ran from the six crazed individuals. A woman fell, disappearing beneath the trampling crowd.
One of the violent men grabbed another woman dressed in black by the shoulders. He slammed her into a stone wall. Her head smacked against it with a thud that even the cell phone picked up. Blood sprayed over the wall where her head had hit. It was a blow that should’ve made the woman crumple.
Instead, she lashed out at him, screaming and clawing at his face.
The woman holding the cell phone began shouting at the people below. One portly man picked up a chair and threw it toward her. The chair smashed against the balcony railing.
Sirens wailed from down the street.
The camera swiveled. Syrian police in drab olive-green fatigues rushed toward the commotion with rifles drawn. The view flipped back toward the six violent individuals.
Without warning, all six suddenly stopped their attacks. Two froze in place as if in shock. Another grasped her forehead, looking around as if dazed. The other three stumbled around as if they were going home after a long night of vodka shots.
Whatever had fueled their violent outburst was suddenly spent.
No more gasoline on the fire, and the flames went right out.
That didn’t seem to be enough for the police. The staccato pop of gunshots erupted. All six temporarily crazed individuals dropped into the refuse now littering the street.
The video ended.
“What was that?” Kasim asked.
“I’m not sure, but I’ve got others,” she said.
One by one, she played more videos. One showed a man going crazy in the middle of a crowd, biting and slashing at everyone who approached him. Then, like the other six in the last video, he suddenly stopped.
Another video showed four young men fighting each other in the middle of a park. They tore into each other with a rabid fury, one slamming the head of another into the ground. People lingered around the edge of the park, screaming at the unbridled violence.
And just like the other two videos, all four ceased their attacks as if listening to a command only they could hear. One even reached down to help his comrade up, a guy he’d just been smashing his elbow into. They both stared around at their surroundings as if looking for an explanation for what had just happened.
The next video showed security footage of a small congregation during prayer in a mosque. Kasim counted maybe twenty men. They knelt on their prayer rugs then bowed, their heads touching their rugs. They rose to standing positions.
Kasim waited for these men, too, to devolve into violence.
Instead, when they reached the standing position, they froze. He expected them to lower themselves to the floor again in ritual prayer, but they never did. They stood completely still.
“Is the video—” he began.
“No, it’s still going,” Weber said. “They stopped moving.”
She fast-forwarded. The men stood that way for a good fifteen or so minutes. Then shards of glass exploded from a window. A small package the size of a thermos and wrapped in wires landed amid the men. They made no move to run away, didn’t show any shock.
No, Kasim said. He wanted them to run. He knew what was coming. That object was a bomb. When it went off in a fiery orange bloom, several of the men were knocked off their feet by the blast. Shrapnel sprayed through their numbers.
The camera view flashed white for a moment.
Demon Mind (Vector Book 2) Page 5