Demon Mind (Vector Book 2)

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “Who are you people?” the man demanded.

  This time, Alex knew exactly how to answer his questions. He finally had a way to break the wall of suspicion between them. A way to actually get this seemingly confused man to lower his weapon. He still didn’t understand everything about the situation, but the answers were right there in front of him.

  “We came to Jordan to search for a missing American agent,” Alex began, talking softly. “He intercepted intel on a potential chemical weapons deal which we now think may be associated with the Ring of Solomon. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

  The man looked between him and Skylar. He never lowered the gun. Surely if this guy was who Alex thought he was, he would see that they were on the same side.

  But either this guy deserved an Oscar, or Alex’s ability to memorize mission-critical details and potential contacts was far worse than he’d thought.

  “Who are you looking for? I don’t know any American agents.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Skylar asked, shooting the guy a disbelieving look.

  This had to be some sick joke. The guy was toying with them. Alex had studied the profiles of every individual that might possibly be involved in this operation. Every file of anyone that he might run a remote chance of meeting.

  Even the ones who were supposed to be dead.

  He would’ve recognized this guy from a mile away in the middle of a sandstorm. So now that they were face-to-face, how could this guy so believably pretend to not have a damn clue?

  “You were working with Agent Ballard,” Alex said. “No use trying to fool us.”

  The guy squinted at Alex. His eyes narrowed, brow furrowed. Even beneath the cuts and bruises, Alex was certain of this guy’s identity. So why was he still playing dumb?

  “I’ve never heard the name,” he said.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Skylar asked.

  The man jabbed the gun at her. “I told you, I am the one asking questions.”

  They were getting nowhere. There was a dead man in the bedroom and now another one threatening them with a gun. Given the university had only just been attacked, he couldn’t imagine it would be long before whoever had sent the first attacker would check in to make sure Smadi’s house was taken care of.

  “Elad Luria,” Alex said, looking straight into the man’s eyes. “Stop playing dumb with us.”

  The man froze, his mouth half-open. Something in him seemed to break. “That’s my name…”

  “Of course it’s your damn name,” Skylar said.

  “Elad Luria,” he repeated as if testing the words.

  This guy was acting like he’d woken up after a night out on the town that would make Skylar wince and was only now just piecing together the drunken debauchery he’d been a part of.

  “What do I have to do with this other man, this agent you mentioned?” Elad asked.

  Skylar let out a short laugh. “You’re the Mossad agent who worked with Ballard for three years. You tell us.”

  “Mossad,” Elad said. “You are working with them?”

  “God, no,” Skylar said. “And apparently you stopped working with them too.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Alex struggled to keep up with everything this guy didn’t seem to know about himself. Unless he was a long-lost twin or someone had perfected human cloning technology, this was without a doubt Elad Luria, Ballard’s Mossad contact. But there was just one problem he couldn’t quite explain.

  “According to Mossad, you were KIA three years ago,” Alex said.

  “I am not dead,” Elad said. “Of that I can assure you.”

  For a second, he let his gun drift. Alex thought he could lunge at the man and disarm him. Skylar seemed to sense the same thing, and she tensed, ready to pounce. Alex gave a subtle shake of his head. She relaxed again.

  They had a chance of gaining this man’s trust. He could sense that he was making inroads, however difficult. After too much time spent evading enemies and watching potential contacts and assets fall apart like the cinders of a house in flames, he couldn’t afford to spook this man.

  “Obviously not,” Alex said. “Look, I’m not sure why you’re here. But maybe we can help each other out. I assume if you really wanted to kill us, you would have done that already.”

  Elad said nothing for a moment as if he was considering what Alex had said.

  “I can verify what we said if you’ll give me a chance,” Alex said. “I’ve got a phone in my jacket pocket. On it, I have a classified profile detailing exactly who you are and your prior relationship with Ballard. Can I show you?”

  Down the street came the scrape of rubber on the road and the barking rumble of a diesel engine. In a couple of hours, the world would be alive and awake again. If someone was coming to retrieve this dead intruder’s body and finish the work they’d started, they would probably want to do that in the cover of darkness. That window of time was rapidly shrinking.

  “Get your phone out,” Elad said. “But if you so much as—”

  “No weapons. No tricks.”

  Alex slowly opened his jacket and held it out so Elad could see there was no holstered weapon. Then he dipped his finger into an inner pocket and slid out the cell. He turned the device on then opened the file. Even if he was sharing classified information, nothing in this folder would be intel that Elad didn’t already know.

  Elad’s eyes were drawn to the screen. The man seemed enraptured by the words there, by his own image. Almost as if Alex had shown him the way back into the light out of a dark tunnel.

  This would be the perfect moment for Alex and Skylar to disarm him and tie him up. Interrogate him, figure out what was really happening.

  Skylar seemed ready and willing at his signal.

  But he held back, listening to the voice of calm in the back of his head. The one that told him to think of the long-term gains, the rewards of keeping this guy on their side. All good intel operations were won by patience and diligence. That was how you bred a network of operatives, assets, and contacts. Not by gunpoint but by trust, no matter how shaky those relationships started.

  It was a lesson he had adhered to his entire life. One Skylar still hadn’t bought into.

  But this was his territory. He knew the moves to make here.

  Finally, Elad backed away. Alex put his phone away.

  “When I was in Petra… I wasn’t saying Balagh… Attayak must’ve heard Balagh, but I was looking for Ballard. This actually makes sense.”

  Skylar shot Alex a look as if she was wondering if this guy was about to go crazy.

  “I’m Alex. This is Skylar. It’s nice to finally meet you, Elad.”

  He hoped that would help. No longer were they just strangers with weapons.

  “You are with the CIA?” he asked, seeming to snap right out of his trance.

  “Not exactly,” Alex said. “But we work in parallel with them.”

  Elad seemed surprisingly satisfied with that. “You want Ballard. Not me.”

  “That’s right,” Alex said. “Honestly, we didn’t think you were alive. If you can help us, we would really appreciate it. Even more than finding Ballard, we need to find out what’s going on with this Ring of Solomon. We want to stop it from getting into the wrong hands.”

  “Which it seems like it already has,” Skylar muttered.

  Finally, Elad lowered his weapon. Just enough to show he was beginning to believe them. “Fine. I’m tired of running. I’m tired of not knowing who is trying to kill me and why. If you can help me answer those questions, then I can try to help you.”

  It was working. Alex was actually breaking this man down.

  “That’s a deal,” Alex said. “What else can I tell you?”

  “Who is after me? Why are they trying to kill me?”

  The gaps in his memory were puzzling. Alex wondered if this guy had suffered a recent concussion. Maybe took a blow to the head in one of those confrontations
he’d mentioned. Soon as he had a chance, he wanted to delve into Elad’s story. He imagined the guy had a good one.

  “Your guess is as good as ours,” Skylar said. “When we were trying to track down Ballard, we ran into people in Amman who tried to kill us. Then someone set fire to Smadi’s lab. You didn’t have anything to do with that, did you?”

  Elad shook his head. “I came here as soon as I found out I had a connection with Smadi.”

  “What connection is that?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t yet know. That’s what I was here to find out. But it has to do with the Ring of Solomon you mentioned. And while I was waiting, this man”—he used his gun to indicate the dead body against the wall—“entered the place. All I knew was that he wasn’t Smadi, and when I confronted him, he tried to kill me.”

  “Can you tell us what this Ring of Solomon is?” Alex asked. “Maybe that will help us both figure out what’s going on.”

  “I am not sure myself,” Elad said. “I have something in my bag that I believe has to do with the Ring. Maybe it will help you.”

  He kept his gun in one hand even as he slipped his backpack off. Then he unzipped the hard-shell pack with one hand and pulled out a small vial about the size of Alex’s thumb. The moonlight that came in through the window reflected off the vial’s contents.

  Elad tilted the vial. The silvery, sparkling liquid inside undulated slowly.

  “Do you recognize this?” he asked.

  “No,” Alex said. “But maybe if we—”

  Suddenly, the man crumpled, his grip on the pistol loosening. He fell to his knees, dropping the vial.

  “What…?” he began to ask, pressing both hands against his temple. “Oh, God!”

  Alex looked at Skylar. She leaned against the wall, using one hand to pinch the bridge of her nose. But she held herself upright, even as her eyes watered.

  She locked her gaze with Alex’s. “It’s happening again.”

  -19-

  Skylar knew this pain. She knew the anger flooding through her. It was weaker than in Amman. Even a little weaker than at the university.

  Maybe she had learned to tame this fiery beast.

  But if she didn’t act soon, she feared it would grow. Her body would become subject to whatever terrible chemical agents she’d been infected with.

  She might kill Elad. She might kill Alex. And in doing so, she would be the cause of this mission failure.

  No way was she letting that happen.

  She had to fight past the anger.

  Alex peered out the back window of the house. “I see movement. At least two contacts.”

  Skylar lunged over Elad, who was still on the floor. The man was bent over as if he was about to vomit. She retrieved her pistol from the hall just as the windows of both bedrooms exploded in a noisy spray of glass.

  The unmistakable pop of a flash-bang sounded from downstairs. A violent flash of light burst from each bedroom, followed by two more bangs that rang through Skylar’s eardrums.

  She’d been lucky she was out in the hall. But Alex and Elad were not so fortunate.

  She started back toward the bedroom when a man with a rifle surged up the stairs. Before the man could even swing his barrel around toward her, she let loose three shots that lanced into his chest. Then a fourth through his head, just in case he was wearing body armor.

  There was no doubt in her mind now. These people were responsible for the unbridled fury erupting inside her skull. They must control this Ring of Solomon weapon and were using it to try to subdue her.

  Little did they know that they had fucked with the wrong Marine.

  She heard footsteps and more voices. At a crouch, she approached the stairs, pressing herself against the wall. Footsteps from the first floor. Or at least she thought so. Hard to tell with her throbbing eardrums.

  Another man bounded up the stairs with a rifle. Skylar waited for him to reach the top of the stairs then pounced. She collided with his body and twisted him around, disarming him with several powerful blows to his arms and neck.

  Before the man could so much as yell out in pain, she shoved him down the stairs, holding onto her newly acquired rifle. The guy went tumbling down right into his partner, and they crashed together at the bottom.

  Skylar unleashed a hailstorm of lead to make sure neither got back up. Others yelled out from below. She counted maybe four, five distinct voices. Might be even more people downstairs. Hard to tell. They likely wouldn’t make the same mistake their buddies had.

  The second floor of this house was about to be besieged. Skylar could easily hold them off at the stairwell for now. But she had a feeling that these guys weren’t the patient type. If something didn’t happen soon, this house was likely to share the same fate as Smadi’s lab.

  “Alex, you good?” she tried over her throat mic, still leaning down the stairs with the rifle, ready to fire on the first person who dared show themselves.

  “I’m okay.” His voice still sounded a little muddled in her ears. “We got two contacts outside in the back, watching the bedroom window.”

  “Four or five downstairs,” she said. The voices below went quiet. They were definitely preparing for something. “Going to be hard to get Elad out alive through there.”

  “Then we go out back,” Alex said. “Straight to the car.”

  Another man leaned around the bottom of the stairs with a rifle in hand. He fired. Bullets chiseled against the wall. She fired back, but the guy was quick, retreating around the corner. He called out to his buddies. Skylar let loose another burst to hold them back then retreated to the bedroom and shut the door. With a heave, she threw the mattress from the bed in front of it. Might be enough to buy them an extra second or two.

  “We’ve got to get out that window,” she said, pointing to the broken window.

  Elad was groaning, his hands over his head, barely able to keep himself upright.

  “There are at least two contacts out there with a bead on it,” Alex said. “If I peek out again, that’s lights out.”

  “Lights out for us, maybe,” she said. “But I know at least one guy who wouldn’t mind getting shot.”

  She threw the rifle over her shoulder, letting it fall on its strap. Then she started to pick up the big man that Elad had killed earlier.

  Leaning the body up against the wall beside the window, she asked Alex, “Where did you last see those contacts?”

  “One in the northwest corner of the lot. Second closer to the house, by the wall.”

  “Got it.” She hoisted the dead guy toward Alex. “At my signal, send our friend out the window.”

  She shouldered the rifle then gave Alex a nod. Alex heaved the dead man up toward the window and pushed him out. As soon as he did, gunfire exploded. The corpse slipped through the window, and as it fell headfirst, Skylar popped up.

  She used Alex’s guidance and the flash of her contacts’ muzzles. In quick succession, she brought down the two men guarding the backyard.

  “Clear,” she said.

  Already, someone was pounding against the bedroom door. Bullets cut through the mattress. Foam puffed out with each blast, and the rounds carved through the drywall on the other side of the room.

  “Go,” Alex said, yanking Elad up.

  Skylar slipped out the window first with the stolen rifle over her back. She grabbed the windowsill and swung herself down toward the patio furniture, landing on the cushions. The back door on the patio had been broken open, glass shards everywhere. Inside, she saw three more contacts, all headed toward the stairs.

  Not today.

  She fired. Once. Twice. Three times. Each of those men was down before they could so much as scream a warning to their comrades.

  “Living room clear,” she called to Alex.

  She kept her weapon trained on the interior of the house, waiting for movement. A few voices screamed from upstairs. More gunfire and the splitting of wood. Sounded like they were breaking into the bedroom right about now
.

  Alex jumped out of the window with Elad in tow. They landed together with a solid thump on the patio sofa. The legs of the sofa cracked, and Alex rolled, breaking some of the momentum from the fall. Elad let out a pained yell.

  “We need to move,” Alex said, hoisting Elad up to his feet. He offered the Mossad agent his shoulder. Elad took it, his face painted in agony.

  Still dealing with the tentacles of pain squeezing her own brain, Skylar could only imagine how he felt. It was a wonder the man could control himself at all. The look on his face made it seem like a gorilla was squeezing his balls.

  Another loud crack of breaking wood sounded, and a man appeared at the bedroom window.

  A burst of gunfire, and she made sure he would never look down on her again.

  Alex was already hobbling toward the street with Elad. He had his pistol in one hand. But with his other holding Elad upright, he was going to have a hard time fighting back against any gunmen they ran into on their way to their car.

  No problem. Alex had earned Elad’s trust using his CIA mind tricks, but they had now firmly entered Skylar’s realm of expertise.

  She rushed ahead, working like a machine. Other houses down the street were turning their lights on. Wouldn’t be long before the police or military were here. Speed was crucial.

  Three unmarked vans were parked down the street. Just like they had seen in Amman.

  A few men leapt out of the vehicles with weapons, opening fire.

  Skylar unleashed hell on them.

  Rounds punched through the metal panels on the vans. One of the men went down immediately. The others jumped back into the vans, screaming and shooting. Bullets sparked against the pavement or thudded into nearby houses.

  The pain in her head grew worse, her vision going red.

  Return fire screeched toward them, and all they could do was duck behind other vehicles parked along the street, running at a hunch toward their own. She turned back occasionally to send a burst of fire into their enemies, desperate to hold them off long enough so she and Alex could make it to their car.

  But after another blast, her rifle bolt locked back. The magazine was spent.