by Jeff Gunhus
Scott finished the last of his food, sopping up the delicious red sauce that had drenched his patatas bravas with the heel of the bread. “Has nothing to do with Rick?”
“I told you, he wants me to stay in. Thinks I’ll go crazy teaching at the Farm. Being near the action without really being in it.”
Scott had to grudgingly admit he was starting to like this guy. Sounded like he was trying to look out for what was best for Mara and not just what would give them more time together.
“You really like this one, don’t you?” he said.
Usually she’d make some kind of joke, a sarcastic remark about the failings of his own love life, or the complete lack of one. But she didn’t. She just smiled.
“Yeah, I do.”
Scott raised his glass of water and Mara did the same. “Then I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks,” she said, giving him a wink. “Now let’s go take out a Russian safehouse.”
“Now you’re talking my language,” he said.
CHAPTER 11
Scarvan watched from across the street as Scott Roberts and his daughter paid their bill and left the tavern. It would have been so simple to eliminate them both right there. Or just the daughter. That was how it was going to go down eventually. Making Scott suffer the loss of his child before he was allowed the mercy of his own death.
But not yet.
As much as seeing the man in person made him tremble with twenty years of pent-up rage, Scarvan had a role for the Roberts family to play first.
Old wounds ached as if sensing the man who’d fired the bullets into his body was nearby. This only added to Scarvan’s anger. Even at seventy-one, his body had the strength and agility of a far younger man, but nothing compared to the physicality he once enjoyed. The pain that racked his body was a constant reminder of that fact.
Time had wrinkled his face, atrophied his muscles, and made his bones more brittle. Still, he was able to do his daily routine of one hundred push-ups, two hundred sit-ups, and a five-mile run. Even though the workout took longer than it used to, he was still able to complete it. His reflexes had slowed, but not much. He felt confident he could go toe-to-toe with anyone in a fight. But in the old days, he could have taken on five adversaries at a time.
Still, Scarvan’s strength and endurance were unusual for a man his age.
Another sign that Father Spiros was right.
God was on his side.
It’d taken Scarvan years to accept this simple fact. Early on, he’d gone along with the old monk’s wild ideas and bizarre prophecies. It was part of surviving any new environment. Adapt. Assimilate. Blend in.
But over time, Father Spiros’s certainty had rubbed off on him. Slowly at first. Small, tentative steps. A small sign, something innocuous like a finch landing on his shoulder while he was praying. Or a premonition of when one of the brothers was about to arrive from the monastery with supplies. A rainbow over the ocean when there was no rain that he could see from the high cliffs.
All of these things the man Scarvan had been before being left for dead would have discounted. No, he would have never even acknowledged them to begin with. But something in him had changed. Father Spiros told him it was because he’d died and returned back to the world, like Lazarus or Christ himself. That in doing so, he’d been touched by divinity. Been held in the grace of God’s light. And God had sent him back to do his great purpose.
Father Spiros knew with certainty what that great purpose was.
In fact, he’d known of it for years before he found Scarvan washed up on his beach, riddled with bullets. A damaged man both physically and spiritually.
It was a full year before the old man had told him the truth of what the purpose was. Years more before he’d shared the details of the visions sent to him by God. For all that time, Scarvan planned his departure from the community of monks, plotted his return to the world where he would exact his revenge on the people who’d betrayed him. No one tried to stop him, especially not Father Spiros. But as time went on and his injuries healed, the unexpected thing happened.
His soul began to heal as well. God became a possibility, an idea he’d abandoned as a child when the travesty of man’s inhumanity made it clear to him that God did not exist. And if God did not exist, then what was the point of worrying about a soul? This conclusion, and the certainty with which he’d reached it early in life, had given him the license he needed to become the world’s foremost killer. Ruthless. Heartless. Cruel. Completely without any moral compunction about the tasks he deemed necessary to achieve a goal.
Only a man without a care for his soul could burn children alive one by one in front of their father just to exact punishment.
But Father Spiros somehow showed him the soul did exist and, in the process, slowly led Scarvan to faith in God.
Not the New Testament God, the one Constantine had given the world with his New Testament curated to appeal to the masses. Not the God of light with the love and forgiveness that blessed the meek and the downtrodden. His was the true God, the Old Testament God that loved discipline and obedience, that exacted vengeance on those who violated his commands.
Time went on and on, Scarvan always planning to leave the next week, and then the next month, and then the next year. But each day he stayed, he fell deeper and deeper into his new monastic life. He became first a believer, then a disciple, and then an instrument of God’s will as revealed to Father Spiros in his visions.
When Scarvan received a vision of his own, he fought against the idea of it. It was a simple thing, not the torrent of images and ideas Father Spiros received, just a clear instruction not to leave Father Spiros’s side until his death.
No, it had been more than instruction.
It had been a commandment from God Himself.
Father Spiros had gently questioned whether Scarvan had understood correctly. Or whether he could have mistaken a dream for a vision. Father Spiros wanted desperately to see the transformation of the world predicted to him and that would be made manifest by Scarvan’s actions. And he needed Scarvan to leave Mt. Athos for that to happen.
But Scarvan was sure of the message so they both accepted it. At that time, neither of them could have guessed it would have meant too long of a wait. But Father Spiros had not only been given the gift of visions of the future from his Creator, but the gift of longevity as well. Satisfying his obedience to God, waiting for Father Spiros to die, had meant Scarvan was now an old man.
But, like the God he served, he’d not lost his desire for vengeance.
As he watched Scott and Mara walk down the narrow street back to their vantage point across from Belchik’s apartment, he felt the old version of himself flex against his self-imposed rules. He wanted their blood now. Could so easily have it. But they were part of a larger plan, so he would have to wait.
Just as he was about to move position, he saw another figure step from a doorway farther down the street. Instinctively, he drew back deeper into the shadow and watched. There was something immediately familiar about the way the person walked. But it wasn’t until he passed by a streetlight that he could confirm his suspicion. The man turned his head away from the CTV camera that watched the road, a move that gave Scarvan a clear view of his face.
He frowned at what he saw. This complicated matters a bit. He knew this man, knew how dangerous he could be. And that reputation was from when the man had been only a boy. Twenty or twenty-one. Surely his skills and lethality had only increased over the last two decades. He wondered if he was there to shadow Scott and Mara Roberts, or to kill them.
If the former, he would need to be careful to work around him.
If the latter, then that was just unacceptable.
They were Scarvan’s to kill, no one else’s.
CHAPTER 12
A second-floor studio apartment in the building next to their base of operations was the drop point for the courier. Scott and Mara stopped outside the building, as close to the room as p
ossible. Mara pulled out her phone and activated an app that opened the camera she’d placed in the studio. She panned it back and forth, knowing the tiny camera’s movements would be barely noticeable from the light fixture where she’d hidden it.
The room was empty except for three duffel bags in the middle of the hardwood floor. They were laid in perfect order, one right next to the other, each bag’s handles tented together. Someone was a little OCD, Mara thought.
She slid her finger across the screen and the image flickered as she sped back in time. There was a split second of motion and then the bags disappeared. Mara stopped and rolled the image forward until the door to the studio apartment opened. A man in a hat and long coat walked in carrying a bag in each hand and one strapped to his back. She knew what was in them and knew they had to be heavy, but the man moved like the weight didn’t bother him at all. He placed the bags on the floor, then stood back and looked at them. He nudged the bags forward until they were in a perfect line, then leaned down and lifted the handles to tent them together. Once he was done, he pulled his hat down low over his eyes and walked to the door. At the last second, he pointed directly at the camera Mara had gone to great lengths to conceal and gave them a little wave.
“That’s no usual courier,” Scott said.
“An operator, by the way he handles himself,” Mara said. “Hawthorn’s taking no chances.”
“Considering what’s in the bags, I’m surprised he didn’t send a tank to deliver them.”
Mara turned her phone off. Together they entered the building, retrieved the bags, and returned to their apartment with the line-of-sight view of Belchik’s place. Carefully, they unpacked the silver canisters, hoses, and other equipment and took inventory.
“They sent extra for good measure. That’s going to be a pain to dispose of when we’re done,” Scott said. “But that will be someone else’s problem.”
“Maybe we should just use it up.”
“Too much could be dangerous.”
Mara nodded. They’d agreed this was to be nonlethal. The bodyguards weren’t combatants. They were just men and women doing their jobs.
“If we’re wrong about Belchik’s setup, we’re going to be in trouble,” Mara said.
“I talked to the medical team stateside, they agree with our assessment of how he’ll be hooked up overnight,” Scott said.
Mara opened the laptop on the single table in the apartment. The image of the front of the Belchik townhome filled the screen with a timestamp on the bottom-left corner. Just as she’d done with the video of the studio apartment, she scrolled through time, checking over the last hour they’d been gone.
“No arrivals or departures,” she said. “Looks like they’re buttoned down for the night.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
They repacked the supplies, this time fitting the items they needed into two bags, leaving the excess in the third. Scott tried to pick up both bags, but Mara stopped him.
“Oh please,” she said, grabbing one of the bags. “That’s all we need is you throwing your back out.”
“Hey, be nice to your elders,” he said.
They both knew he could easily carry the bags, just like they knew Mara wouldn’t ever do less than carry her own weight on a mission. But the easy joking released the pre-mission tension.
“Right, off we go,” Scott said. “Just father-daughter backpackers carrying chemical weapons through a major European town. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Everything and anything,” she said, smiling as she double-checked her Sig Sauer P226 and her Sig Sauer P365 micro-compact backup weapon in her ankle holster. “Just like always.”
They left the apartment and began the walk toward the bridge. The crowds were sparse compared to the tourist high season. Unlike the scorching heat of the midsummer, September turned cooler and more forgiving. Even well after midnight, there were still plenty of people out enjoying the night air and working off the heavy dinners and drinks that typically didn’t start until ten o’clock at night.
They made short work of the distance to the Puente de San Telmo, a nondescript bridge connecting Triana with the old section of Seville. The Guadalquivir rolled casually beneath them, dark and silent, heading toward the port of Cadiz over fifty miles away. The narrow river was surprisingly deep and was the reason Seville had once been one of the richest cities in all of Spain. The trade ships from the New World, often carrying the spoils of the conquistadores, sailed the length of the river after making their long journey across the ocean. The port deep inland proved to be an effective protection from pirates and countries jealous of Spain’s gold. Mara wondered if Belchik’s affinity for the city was somehow driven by this idea of safe haven. She knew from his dossier that he was not only one of the greatest spy handlers of all time, but a serious historian as well. He would have known the history of this place as well as anyone.
On the bridge, she took notice of the hundreds of padlocks attached to the railings. It was a trend in nearly every European city now. Lovers would bring their own or purchase a padlock from one of the many stores around the bridge, write their names on it, then lock it onto the railing. After doing so, the key would be ceremoniously thrown into the river below. The idea was to show the permanence of the love. Although, like most relationships, permanence was more an abstract idea than a reality. Mara had read that the locks on the famous Pont Neuf in Paris had been removed when engineers realized that the padlocks were adding forty-five tons of weight to the bridge. All that love came at a cost. But Mara couldn’t help but imagine being on the bridge with Rick, maybe drunk on good wine and each other’s company, attaching a padlock and sending the key into the water below. The thought filled her with a warmth that made her smile.
“Head in the game,” Scott said next to her.
She didn’t bother objecting because he was right. She’d slowed down considerably without noticing it, looking at the padlocks. There was a balance between relaxing her mind to fight the tension and being complacent. She pushed Rick from her thoughts and focused on the matter at hand.
They left the bridge and turned left, keeping to the lower level of the pedestrian walkway along the river. The Torre del Oro rose up on their right, beautifully lit, showing off its eight-hundred-year-old stonework. They walked another two hundred yards before using a staircase to climb up to the Paseo de Cristóbal Colón, directly across from their target. They scanned for any protective detail positioned on the street but saw none.
They went right, skirting away from the entrance door, then crossed to the Calle dos de Mayo, the small street after the block of apartment buildings. Just behind the buildings was the small alley Calle Velarde. Deserted at this hour as they assumed it would be.
They paused at the corner and Mara pulled what looked like a small pen flashlight from her pocket. She took aim at the camera positioned above them and pressed a button. A powerful laser hit the wall next to the camera. She adjusted and shined the light directly into the camera lens for only a few seconds. That was enough. The lens would never work again.
They moved with precision, all business. Scott found the wires leading to the security system near the rear door and attached a clamp, bypassing the circuit before cutting the main feed. It was a low-quality system and easily fooled. Much easier than the system on Belchik’s apartment would have been three units down from where they stood.
Once the wires were cut, Mara picked the lock and went in, Scott right behind her. This last unit of the building was a travel agency, making it the perfect entry point.
“Stairs are over here,” Scott said.
They passed the desks and the walls covered with posters of exotic beaches and world capitals and headed up the staircase. From their long-range optics, they knew the upper levels were executive offices and storage areas so they didn’t expect to run into anyone.
So, it was a shock when they saw two bodies sprawled on an air mattress in the middle of the first office on
the second floor.
Two very naked bodies.
A quick look around the room told the story. An older man and a younger woman. Two bottles of wine. Clothes thrown around the room. A half-dozen unlit candles, which they’d at least had the presence of mind to extinguish before passing out.
Mara pulled a thin hood down over her face and saw Scott do the same. They couldn’t leave them here, but they of course couldn’t hurt them, either. She pulled zip-tie cuffs from her pocket and Scott pulled off two strips of duct tape.
“Hey, wake up,” he said.
The man stirred first, groggy and disoriented. Mara shined a flashlight in his eyes, and he got clear in a hurry.
“Wh-what is this? Who are you?” he stammered in Spanish.
“Your wife sent us,” Mara replied, noticing his wedding band. “She’s not very happy with the hours you’re keeping at the office.”
Scott grabbed the man and shoved a piece of cloth into his mouth and then duct-taped it shut. Mara threw him a zip tie and he secured the man’s arms behind his back. The man whimpered pathetically, hanging his head.
Mara kneeled on the floor next to the girl. She was pretty, mid-twenties, and certainly could do better than an overweight guy in his mid-forties. Just to check her bias, she confirmed there wasn’t a wedding ring on the girl’s finger.
“Hey sweetie, time to wake up,” she said.
The girl smiled but kept her eyes closed. She reached out like she might kiss Mara. But when she felt the mask covering Mara’s face, her eyes bolted open.
“Hi,” Mara said.
The girl drew in a deep breath and Mara knew a scream was coming next unless she hurried. A bit more forcefully than she wanted, she slapped a hand over her mouth, using her other hand to hold her down.
“Shhh . . .” she said. “No one’s going to hurt you. Just relax, okay? We’re here to teach him a lesson, not you.”