Lex Talionis

by Peter Nealen

  “True enough,” I grumbled. “Just not looking forward to spending the next six hours following his pudgy ass around to every bar and nightclub he decides to visit tonight.”

  “You’re getting impatient in your old age,” he replied, his faint grin audible in his voice. “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?”

  I gave him a half-hearted glare. He just chuckled.

  I sighed. It was going to be a long night.

  It actually wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Maybe he’d gotten bored. It had to be kind of samey, really, as decadent as his lifestyle was. Or maybe there weren’t any chicks out that night who were willing to overlook how pathetic he looked for the sake of money.

  Whatever the case, he came out of his chosen bar, in Arlington, before midnight. Bar hopping didn’t fit his pattern of life, so it was a good bet that he was heading home. I called ahead, letting the overwatch on his apartment know, and getting acknowledgements along with status reports that confirmed that the place was quiet, and there wasn’t any law enforcement nearby. We’d still have to do this as quickly and quietly as possible.

  We’d briefly considered drugging him in the bar and transporting him to a secluded spot for interrogation, but if he had intel materials in his apartment, we didn’t want to have to go back for them.

  Chu was clearly a little drunk as he walked out to his car. He wasn’t staggering, falling down, or puking on himself, but he was moving more slowly than usual and appeared to be completely oblivious to his surroundings. Not that that was something new; we hadn’t seen much in his behavior that suggested he was the most aware of people. He was confident in his cyber security, and thus figured that no one knew exactly who he was.

  Either that, or he was confident that he had enough blackmail material on enough people in high places that he was untouchable. Frankly, from what I’d seen of the guy for the last three days, my money was on Option B.

  He was about to have a very rude awakening.

  He got the car unlocked and slid in behind the wheel. Even as he opened the door, I was already heading across the street.

  I reached in before he could close the driver’s side door, and made sure the back door was unlocked. He hadn’t noticed me until I reached in past his head, and he started rather badly, even as I pulled the back door open and slid into the seat behind him.

  “What the fuck?” he started to say, then stopped abruptly as I placed the cold metal of my Gemtech suppressor behind his ear. He was just sober enough to realize what that was.

  “Close the door, shut your mouth, and drive,” I told him. I’d thought about doing this differently, letting him get home and settle in, then breaking in and taking things from there. Either course of action had the potential to go badly. This way seemed to present a better chance of keeping control of the situation.

  Chu’s hands were shaking, but he did what he was told. I think the shock kept him from doing or saying anything else. If I’d read him right, and after three days of near-continuous surveillance, I should have, he’d always been well-insulated from any potential consequences of his actions. The idea that somebody might come after him had been essentially unthinkable. He probably hadn’t ever gamed this situation through in his head, or if he had, he hadn’t exactly lived up to his idea of how he’d deal with it. Shortly after he shut the door, I started to smell piss. I wrinkled my nose but didn’t roll down the window. It wasn’t my car, I’d smelled far worse in my day, and I didn’t need anyone happening to peer through an open window and seeing a suppressed .45 pressed to the back of Damien’s fat head.

  We’d already gone a block before he realized that I hadn’t specified where to drive to. “Where are we going?” he asked. He sounded like he was about to be sick.

  “Your place,” I told him calmly. “Don’t worry, as long as you stay calm and cooperative, nothing’s going to happen to you.” Yet. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, Damien.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, his voice getting shakier. “I’ve seen your face. Doesn’t that mean…”

  I couldn’t resist. “Where you’re going after tonight,” I told him, “I’m not that worried about it.”

  I probably should have restrained myself, since he started shaking even more violently, and puked all over himself. The stink drowned out the urine smell, and I just about gagged. Fortunately, I’m not a sympathetic puker.

  “Calm down,” I told him. “Like I said, cooperate and there’s no reason to be afraid. You’re far more useful alive than dead.”

  He steadied a little bit, took a deep breath, gagged on his own vomit fumes, and barfed again. I kept my teeth together, as much as I wanted to start cussing him out. Weak little shit. Shouldn’t have gotten involved in shit that gets people like me interested in you, fucker.

  To my relief, the ride was a short one; the bar was less than eight miles from his apartment. He parked in the little carport behind the small, gray row-house. Behind us, Eric parked our car on the street. The rest of the team was already spread out on overwatch throughout the neighborhood.

  “Just try to keep things nice and calm and casual, Damien,” I told him. “You had a bit too much to drink, and I drove you home. That’s all this is, and that’s why you’ve got puke all over your front. Got it?”

  He nodded, and I noted that the nod was somewhat steadier than it had been before. Either he was taking my advice to heart, or he had had time to think on the drive, and was now trying to calculate how he could get out of this. I hoped it was the former; the latter could mean more trouble than we wanted to deal with.

  He opened the door and led the way inside. The row-house was apparently divided up into four or five apartments, with a short hallway through the center, which was fortuitously empty. Chu led the way toward his door, unlocked it, and stepped inside.

  I was close behind him, still holding my suppressed 1911 under my jacket. It was awkward, but as long as I didn’t let him get the door between him and me, I could still shoot him if I had to.

  Of course, so could Eddie, who was standing in the kitchen with a black duffel bag on the counter and one of Logan’s scratchbuilt subguns in his hands.

  Now that we were inside, I shut the door behind us and locked it, then pointed toward an empty chair in the little living room with my pistol. “Have a seat, Damien.”

  He complied, though he was somewhat more composed now. He looked back and forth between us. “Do you two fuckwits have any idea who you’re fucking with?” he demanded. “Do you have any idea the world of shit you just jumped into?”

  Before he could get going, blustering about his friends—or blackmail victims—in high places, I cut him off. “Oh, we know full well who you are and what you do, Damien. That’s why we’re here. And don’t bother threatening us with your client list. They’re the entire reason we came in the first place.”

  He looked like he was about to say something, when Eddie’s phone buzzed. He looked down at it. “We’ve got company,” he said, frowning.

  Even as he spoke, the door, that I’d just locked, started to open. I turned, pivoting away from Chu but never turning my back on him, my 1911 coming up in both hands and centering on the door.

  The Broker, apparently utterly unconcerned that Eddie and I were each about a pound of trigger pressure short of spattering his brains all over the hallway, stepped inside, closed and locked the door behind him, and took off his hat.

  He completely ignored the two men with guns and turned his vague, cold-eyed smile on Chu. “Hello, Damien,” he said. “It’s been such a long time.”

  I spared a glance from The Broker to Chu, who was staring at him with wide eyes behind his glasses, his face gone a particularly yellowish shade of green. I flicked my eyes back to The Broker, who was still watching Chu, that dangerous little smile on his face.

  Chu swallowed. “What—what are you doing here, Tailor?” he asked hoarsely.

  He’d gone from arrogant and abusive to even more terrified than he
had been when I’d first put a gun to his head in the space of about thirty seconds. He knew who The Broker was, or at least who The Broker wanted him to think he was, and he was scared shitless of him.

  “I’m here to back these gentlemen up,” The Broker said. “I assume you’ve tried threatening them with the things and people you know. I’m afraid that your blackmail files will not intimidate these two men in the slightest, but I thought you really needed to hear that from someone you know would not lie to you about it. And you know I would not lie about such things, don’t you, Damien?”

  Chu nodded jerkily, but couldn’t seem to find his voice again.

  “Where are the files, Damien?” The Broker asked, almost gently. “You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones that you were oh, so confident you could keep hidden even from these men with guns.”

  Chu swallowed again. “Those files are my insurance,” he said. “If I give them up…”

  “If you don’t, then certain people who may or may not have already granted you legal favors because of the contents of those files will be provided with your exact location and general pattern of life,” The Broker said, still in that strange, gentle tone of voice. “You may trust that these are the sorts of people who will find a way to take advantage of that information, and do so far more brutally than the generally honorable men who presently have you at gunpoint. I think you know exactly who I have in mind.”

  Chu must have already emptied his guts and his bladder, because he just pointed with a shaking finger toward a cupboard above the sink. “In the sugar jar,” he sobbed. “There’s a false bottom…”

  I glanced at Eddie, who nodded. He placed the submachine gun on the counter, well outside The Broker’s reach, and opened the cupboard.

  He took down the indicated jar, a heavy stoneware job, and dumped the contents into the sink. When he looked in after the cascade of sugar had finished going into the sink, he reached inside and pulled.

  A rubber circle came out, and he dumped a dozen flash drives on the counter.

  “I believe that you will find all the intel you came here for on those, gentlemen,” The Broker said. “Though his computer should be available to double-check.”

  Eddie took the handful of flash drives and went to Chu’s computer. When he logged in without difficulty, Chu went even greener. He was watching his entire world fall apart around his ears.

  “Holy fuck,” Eddie said after a moment of going through the first drive. “There’s a fucking cornucopia of fucked up shit on here. All with names and dates attached, too.”

  He yanked that drive and plugged in the next one. Even Eddie, who had once described himself as a borderline functioning sociopath, was looking a little green around the gills after the second one. “I really don’t want to look at any more of this,” he said, pulling the drive and turning away from the computer. “I think it’s a safe bet that we’ve found our treasure trove.”

  “Is that it, Damien?” The Broker asked quietly. “I know you know better than to lie to me.”

  Chu nodded frantically, as he started to cry. “That’s all, I swear, that’s all the files, please…”

  “Good.” Before he could blubber anything else, The Broker drew a shortened Maxim 9 from beneath his coat and shot Chu twice in the head.

  The twin claps probably weren’t audible far outside of the apartment, but they were startling in their abruptness. Before the brass had hit the carpet, I had my own pistol centered on The Broker’s head.

  “What the fuck?” I demanded. I was surprisingly calm, considering that he’d just murdered the asset we’d gone in to grab.

  “Trust me, Mr. Stone,” The Broker said as he lowered the integrally suppressed pistol, “it’s better this way. Regardless of what you found on those drives, regardless of the crimes he has been a direct accessory to, someone would make the case that Chu was more useful alive than dead. Then he would be useful in other ways, and eventually, he would be plying his old trade the same as ever.” He turned to me, cool and composed, as if we were having a conversation over coffee, instead of over the barrel of a .45.

  “As extensive as those files undoubtedly are,” he said gravely, “they constitute only a fraction of the human misery that Damien Chu has helped to facilitate. I simply ensured that he wouldn’t be turned into an instrument of even more of it. He was a weasel who would have walked away from this scot free. Now he won’t. And you still have all the intel that you came for; probably more than you can even possibly use.”

  As much as he’d pissed me off, I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. Anything that made Eddie green around the gills had to be bad. I glanced at Damien, who was presently leaking blood and brain matter all over his plush chair. The Broker had probably been merciful, relatively speaking.

  “How did you know we’d be here?” I asked as I lowered my gun. That was the other part that bothered me. We’d kept even Renton in the dark on the specifics of this op.

  “I haven’t been monitoring you, at least not closely, if that’s what you’re asking,” he said with a chuckle. The man was fucking unflappable. “No, this was simply a matter of some analysis of my own intel and knowing how both you and Renton think. I had Damien Chu pretty high on my own target list, and deduced that he’d be the same on the Cicero Group’s, and, therefore, yours. After that, it was simply a matter of timing.”

  I didn’t know that I believed him all the way; it was suspiciously good timing. We hadn’t seen any sign of anyone else surveilling Chu, not in three days. But I let it go. “We should probably get the hell out of here,” I said.

  “Agreed,” The Broker replied. “And we should probably leave by different routes. Keep your comms open; I’ll be in touch.” He turned, unlocked the door, and vanished out into the hall.

  I looked at Eddie. “We need to have a talk about that guy,” he said. “He’s a bit too sharp for my comfort, if you know what I mean. But I’d rather do it somewhere else.”

  In five minutes, Damien was assuming room temperature alone, and none of us were within three blocks of the scene.

  Chapter 21

  When we got to the rendezvous with Renton, two states away in the woods outside of Southpoint, Ohio, he didn’t look happy. Given that Damien Chu’s murder had been on the nightly news in Alexandria the night before, doubtless followed by a flurry of panic among the well-connected, unconvicted felon set, he had to know why we didn’t have a zip-tied, bagged detainee in tow. There was no way the Cicero Group had missed that swarming anthill.

  He was leaning against the blank-sided utility van he’d come in, his arms crossed and a frown on his face as Eddie and I got out of the rental Jeep and walked toward him. We weren’t likely to be observed; we were surrounded by woods and the local cops had no reason to consider us suspicious.

  “I can’t help but notice,” he said as we approached, “the absence of the very scumbag I asked you to retrieve.”

  “That would be because he’s the centerpiece of a crime scene investigation right now,” Eddie said easily.

  “I know,” Renton said, sounding as close to monumentally pissed off as I’d ever heard him. “Somehow, that killing made it past all the chaos and havoc in DC and the Beltway to make the nightly news, probably because the station manager had been one of Chu’s clients, or was friends with one of them. So, yeah. It was kind of hard to miss that part.” He straightened and glared at us. “You were supposed to snatch Chu, not kill him.”

  “And we didn’t kill him,” I snapped. “The Broker crashed the party and double-tapped him.”

  That stopped his rant cold. He froze for a moment, then swallowed. “Wait a minute. Back up. Who killed him?”

  “The Broker,” I replied. “The same guy I asked you about in Mexico, whether he was El Duque or not, the same guy who enlightened us about the scam going on down there.”

  “He was there?” There was a new light in Renton’s eyes, Chu’s death momentarily lost in the fact that the underworld shadow faci
litator had surfaced. “He was actually in the room?” He paused, and his eyes narrowed. “How can you be sure it was him?”

  “I’m sure because this isn’t the first time we’ve met him,” I said.

  I’d kept our interactions with The Broker pretty hush-hush; I knew that Renton’s organization was leaky, and I’d wanted to keep that hole card up my sleeve for when I needed it. He’d saved our asses a couple of times now.

  But I didn’t know what his agenda was, and he’d just put me in one hell of a bind by murdering a “capture” target. No matter what I owed him, I wasn’t taking the fall for a killing he’d dropped in my lap.

  So, I told Renton about how he’d snapped up Serena Olivarez ahead of our hit in Honduras, then told us to meet him in Panama City. I told him about the meet where The Broker had laid out the facts behind the illusion of El Duque, the number one High Value Target in the Western Hemisphere, an imaginary bogeyman designed from the get-go as a lure to send the hitters chasing after ghosts. I told him how all of The Broker’s intel, most of which had to have come from one hell of an extensive network of underworld contacts, had panned out, leading us to bad actor after bad actor, as we’d systematically taken Los Hijos de la Muerte and the Fusang Group apart.

  “A couple of us wondered how you were hitting every target perfectly,” Renton admitted, “but you’d gone so dark that we couldn’t be sure what was going on until after the fact. Not that I blame you; having every heavy hitter in Latin America gunning for you can’t have made anything easier.”

  “He beat you to the punch on the latest unpleasantness, too,” Eddie said. “He warned us about the Task Force’s intel, and provided a fair bit of material support, including transpo, explosives, and comms.”

  “Do you realize what this means?” Renton asked, finally focusing on me directly. “You sons of bitches are the only ones to have laid eyes on this guy and known it. You’re the only ones with a single verifiable clue as to who he is.”