Relentless

by Jonathan Maberry

  Colonel Ledger had a theory about that. Or, perhaps, an observation. He called it the “arrogance of power”—when the strong and abusive assume the weaker potential prey were inarguably easy targets because they were weaker. It was the assumption used by so many rapists, child abusers, muggers, and similar predatory monsters. Gangs often made the same assumptions. And, in the absence of training, natural or acquired confidence, or preparedness, they were often right. But—just as the larger male lions learn to their peril when trying to bully the lionesses with cubs—underestimation can backfire quickly.

  It also led to habits of inattention, and that’s what Top and Bunny both hoped would be at work here. This was, after all, an elite camp. Lots of testosterone, lots of predators thinking with their biceps, sidearms, and contempt.

  Bunny caught Top’s eye, and they shared a tiny, knowing smile.

  A golf cart came whisking silently up, and they climbed into the back. The driver was every bit as chatty as a potted plant. As soon as they were seated, he set off along the road. They made sure to look around at everything, partly to collect intel for themselves and partly to make sure the tiny body cams they wore picked up useful data for Bug.

  As they drove, Scott Wilson began speaking quietly in their ears, his voice as clear as if he were in the cart with them rather than on an island six thousand miles away.

  “This is rather exciting,” said Wilson. “We had no idea this camp even existed. None of the Fixers we, ah, interviewed ever mentioned or even hinted about it. Be aware, lads, that it will take a bit of time to arrange for drone flyovers, so try not to get into trouble.”

  Top casually tapped the lowest button on his shirt, signaling the affirmative.

  “Jackpot and Mother Mercy are inbound and will be on station within three hours. Jackpot has his whole bag of tricks with him, including bird drones appropriate to that region.”

  Another tap.

  “And if you’re asked to change clothes,” continued Wilson, “we can attune the drones to your RFID chips. We won’t lose you chaps.” Leaning a little on that, another of the thousand subtle ways each of them was reminded of Joe Ledger.

  Top gave another tap.

  The path through the woods was not long but was made up of deliberate switchbacks so that screens of old-growth trees foiled any chance of visual surveillance from the ground. The dense canopy of pine needles hid the road from the air. Smart and effective. A camp like this couldn’t be found by accident or even through normal flyover surveillance. You had to know it was there.

  Their silent driver passed through another checkpoint with an even sturdier gate and then entered a compound made up of many small one-story buildings draped with camouflage netting. Even the outside areas used for drills were under a canopy. No smoke from cooking fires or heaters, which meant they probably used electric or propane. And, as they got out of the cart, they saw a row of industrial generators chugging away.

  “Nice place,” Bunny said to the driver, but got no response. “You’re a regular Chatty Cathy.”

  The man stared into the middle distance, still behind the wheel. When they stepped away from the cart, he drove off. That left the two of them standing a dozen yards inside the gate. They dropped their bags and waited for the next play.

  CHAPTER 57

  HAMLET OF ARBATAX

  TORTOLÌ, PROVINCE OF NUORO

  SARDINIA, ITALY

  Bruno Melis was one hundred and three years old and still had most of his teeth, his eyesight, and a memory that stretched back to before his days as a pilot in World War II. His wife of eighty years, Maria, was fourteen months in her grave, bless the Virgin Mary. Angelo, Bruno’s youngest son, was seventy-seven and still walked with his father two miles every afternoon to split their daily bottle of wine in Enoteca Mirai, which had been in his wife’s family since the days when Catalan conquerors ruled the entire island of Sardinia. Bruno had seen a century’s worth of history.

  But he had never seen anything like what happened at the house of the banker who lived on the hill overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. Bruno’s own house—much more modest than the banker’s, though large by the standards of Arbatax—was on a promontory and offered a view over a part of the southern wall into the banker’s rear garden. On many an evening, Bruno had seen the banker—a man known only by the surname of Otranto—receive guests after banking hours. He knew they were guests and not friends because there were handshakes but no embraces, no laughter, no bottles of wine drunk as the sun set and the stars above ignited like God’s party lights.

  People spoke in whispers about those guests because they nearly always arrived by boat around twilight and left in the dead of night. Few ever stayed the night at Otranto’s house, and none ever stayed in the town. They came quietly and left quietly, and no one ever knew their names. They were unusual visitors. Most were clearly not Sardinian or even Italian. There were Asian and African visitors, and others dressed in clothes more like what people wore on TV shows from England or America. Or Russia.

  To Bruno and his small circle of friends, it was clear these visitors were there to do business, and business of a kind not conducted at the bank offices or in bistros or enoteche like normal and respectable people did.

  But Otranto never caused a problem, nor did his guests. They came, they did whatever business they did, and they left. Always quiet, always discreet. And life went on.

  Then the man arrived on a small boat. A man dressed all in black and accompanied by a very large white dog. Bruno saw the boat come motoring to a deserted section of beach just as the last of the day’s light was dying like embers on the wave tops. Despite his age, Bruno saw very well, and besides, his great-great-grandson had sent him a very fine telescope four Christmases ago. For bird-watching and stargazing, the boy had said; though everyone in the family knew that Bruno was a little bit of a snoop. That was not how he saw himself, of course. He considered himself a people-watcher, a perpetual student of human activity. Otranto was merely one of the people he watched, because Bruno was intrigued by the clandestine nature of those secret backyard meetings.

  He spotted the man nearly by accident, and had he gone inside a few minutes sooner to use the bathroom, he would not have seen him at all. However, one of the benefits of being very old was that he didn’t need to use the bathroom with any real urgency anymore. When he got there, it would be time enough.

  So, he saw the big man and the big dog get out of the black boat. Bruno watched him through his Kowa spotting scope as the man unzipped a duffel bag and removed a kind of suit of armor that looked like what the Nucleo Operativo Centrale di Sicurezza wore on news stories about dangerous police raids. Body armor. The man also put on a helmet and a strange pair of oversize goggles. Then he removed weapons from the bag. Handguns and a rifle, but Bruno did not know modern makes and models. After the war—his war of more than seventy-five years ago—Bruno had only ever used a shotgun, and that was for rabbits. He could not remember the last time he’d even held a firearm—1970, perhaps, or a few years later. The guns he saw through his telescope looked like something from TV or one of those movies about Special Forces. Ugly things, lacking any aesthetics.

  Bruno watched him attach some of the armor around the dog’s body and even a kind of skullcap over the dog’s head, but which left the animal’s eyes, ears, and snout free. It was a strange thing to watch. Very much like television. And nearly as entertaining, though it also filled him with a growing sense of unease. There were no movie cameras down there on the beach.

  His unease grew as the man left the beach and hiked, with his dog, up a sheep path into the hills toward Otranto’s compound. For nearly five full minutes, Bruno argued with himself about whether to call the police. But a voice—very much that of his late wife—spoke in his head and told him not to get involved.

  “Ad Arbatax è arrivata l’oscurità,” the ghost of his wife seemed to whisper.

  A darkness has come to Arbatax.

  He thought abou
t that for a long time as the man and dog climbed the steep hill.

  A darkness.

  The echo of those words through his mind seemed to pull the lingering heat of the day out of his world, leaving Bruno Melis cold and frightened.

  So he watched and made no call. Not even to his son, who lived not half a kilometer from where he sat.

  The shadows of night swallowed the man entirely, and for nearly twenty minutes, there was nothing to see. Bruno even began wondering if senility was finally, after all these years, catching up with him. He was the fifth-oldest person currently living in Arbatax, a town known for centenarians, and there were seventeen people over a hundred who were younger than he was. Some had lost their faculties, but he had not. A fact he ascribed to his daily walks, his daily crossword puzzles, and the wine he shared with his son.

  He sat on his little stool and peered into the scope and tried to calculate the rate of climb for the man and where he might reappear among the rocks and shrubs.

  Bruno’s estimate was correct nearly to the minute. The dog emerged from the broom shrubs forty meters from Otranto’s garden wall. By now, it was full dark, and the patio lights were burning behind the big house. Otranto himself was smoking a cigar as he strolled along the flagstones in his yard, speaking on a cell phone while two of his men—Bruno assumed they were bodyguards of some kind—stood watching, silent as statues.

  The flash of gunfire sparked through the night, but Bruno did not hear the echo of shots. Through the excellent lens of his scope, he saw that the pistol the big man held had some kind of silencer on it. Fire spat from the barrel, but even as the two bodyguards fell, Otranto—looking the other way as he talked on his phone—did not appear to hear.

  Then the dog rushed past the man and dragged Otranto down, savaging his arm. Not trying to kill him, though, that much was clear. The big man went into the house while the dog stood guard like Cerberus over the bleeding Otranto. There were many flashes inside the house, and the reports of guns—not silenced ones—bounced up the hills toward Bruno. Then a window exploded outward, and another burly man went flying out and landed badly on the flagstones. After a while—was it thirty seconds or a full minute?—silence and stillness fell over the house of Otranto.

  Soon the big man came back out of the house carrying an armful of computer laptops, which he placed on the patio. He waved his dog away and knelt by the banker. Bruno was not sure whether he wished he could have heard the conversation that followed or not. Maybe not. He watched, though, riveted to his seat, unable to look away.

  Until the knife came out.

  After that, Bruno turned away, appalled, sickened. He pressed one hand to his chest, sure that his old heart was going to burst. With the other, he crossed himself and said a prayer to the Madonna. Over and over again, as sweat beaded his face and the world seemed to swim around him.

  Then, finally, he summoned the courage to turn back to his telescope and look down at the patio.

  And this time, his heart nearly did freeze.

  The big man stood above a red ruin of a thing that had once been Otranto. The man was not looking at the dead banker. Nor at the fallen guards or even the house. No … the big man was looking up the hill, toward the promontory on which Bruno Melis sat. The goggles were off and the balaclava, too. The big man had blond hair that was soaked with sweat and plastered to his scalp. He was unshaven and hollow-eyed.

  But he was looking directly at Bruno.

  There was no way he could see that far without at least binoculars, and Bruno sat in the utter blackness of his unlighted backyard. He had not even gone inside to turn on the kitchen light.

  The man, though, seemed to see him anyway.

  There was something wrong about the way he stood, about the way he looked. It was as if Bruno were seeing a cutout of a man pasted badly onto the moment. Shadows seemed to cling to the man, though he was not near enough to the house or the garden wall for any shadow to fall across him.

  The man looked at Bruno and gave a single, slow nod.

  And then he turned, picked up the stack of laptops, stuffed them into an empty backpack, slung the pack, gestured to his dog, and left.

  Bruno did not watch them go back down the hill.

  No. By then, he was in his house, the doors locked and windows closed. Bruno sat by the cold hearth clutching his wife’s crucifix to his chest. Praying.

  What surprised him, though, was that he was not praying for his own immortal soul, nor the souls of the people he had just watched die.

  For some reason he could never thereafter explain to himself, his son, his friends, or the police, he prayed for the soul of that stranger. He prayed far into that night.

  INTERLUDE 12

  THE PAVILION

  BLUE DIAMOND ELITE TRAINING CENTER

  STEVENS COUNTY, WASHINGTON

  FOUR MONTHS AGO

  “This is the target,” said Eve.

  The twelve Fixers—known around the Pavilion as the Righteous—stood in a loose half circle around Eve. Behind where she stood was a trifold set of portable monitors, each seven feet high and capable of 4096 × 2160 pixel density, giving the images incredible clarity. The images being shown were also manipulated by a program that made sure that the central figure on each screen remained exactly the same height—actual height for the star of those video files. At first, watching that was a bit jarring, but the eye and the mind adjusted quickly.

  All three monitors featured the same person. A bit over six feet tall, blond-haired, and blue-eyed. Very fit and, as the file display speed was not in any way adjusted, clearly very fast. Whether fighting with a blade, a gun, or his hands, he seemed to blur at times.

  One of the Fixers raised a hand.

  “Miss Eve,” he said, “is that Mr. Stafford?”

  Michael Augustus Stafford had been a lecturer briefly there at the Pavilion a few months back.

  Eve blinked in surprise and turned to look at the image.

  “Huh,” she said, “you know, I never noticed the similarities before but … damn, you’re right. They could almost be brothers. But Stafford’s better-looking.”

  A few of the men chuckled, the rest did not.

  “No, campers,” she continued, stabbing a finger toward the center screen, “this is Colonel Joe Ledger. Some of you know him, but mostly by reputation. Or going to funerals of friends of yours he killed.”

  That got a few nods and some glares.

  “He is the number-one pain in the ass of Kuga and Daddy … I mean, Rafael Santoro. He and his team have been fucking with them since long before they put this new organization together.”

  She rattled off what amounted to Joe Ledger’s greatest hits, giving them the official case code names lifted a couple of years ago during a hack of the DMS records. Patient Zero and the Seif al Din pathogen. The Jakobys and the Dragon Factory. The Seven Kings and the Sea of Hope. The Assassin’s Code and the Red Knights.

  On and on.

  “And then last year, they barged into our Rage operation and nearly spoiled everything.”

  One of the Fixers said, “I heard that he messed up Mr. Santoro pretty bad.”

  Eve turned toward him very slowly, and the look in her eyes was so venomous that he actually recoiled a step.

  “Daddy won that fight,” she snarled.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean nothing; I was just—”

  “You were just sticking your dick in your own mouth is what you were doing.” But then Eve caught sight of HK across the room, watching the session. It was like a cup of cold water on a burn. Eve took a breath and made herself focus. As Daddy so often said, When emotions rule your thoughts and words and actions, then you are their slave.

  She forced a smile onto her face. Cold, and fragile, but it held.

  “Do you want to know what else Ledger did?” she asked, impressed at how reasonable her voice now sounded. She reached down and tapped the knee brace she wore. “He put his gun to my knee while I was helpless and shot me. I’m goi
ng to have the entire knee replaced, and at my age, that means it’ll wear out in maybe ten years and I’ll have to get another, and another, another. So it’ll be like him shooting me over and over again.”

  One of the men—Spiro—breathed, “Damn.”

  The Fixer who’d made the comment about Santoro straightened. “Tell you what, Miss Eve, you point me in his direction, and I’ll cut his balls off and have them put in one of those acrylic paperweights and give that to you gift wrapped. How’s that?”

  She walked over to him. The man was easily eleven inches taller than she was, so she had to reach up to pat his cheek. One pat, another, and then a sharp crack of a slap. But she smiled as she slapped him, and he understood. He grinned down at her.

  Eve turned to look at them all.

  “We have a lot of footage of Joe Ledger in combat. We know what kinds of martial arts he’s studied. We know he prefers a Wilson Rapid Release folding knife, and we know he’s a much better shot with a handgun than a long gun. We know that one of his most dangerous skills is a rare and complete lack of hesitation. We know he isn’t fancy, no moves that are there for style rather than effect. That makes him an apex predator in our line of work.” She paused. “You twelve were picked because you have similar backgrounds and skill sets. However, you need to up the game and tilt the odds in your favor by becoming completely familiar with him. His body, his movements, his speed and power. Know him. Become him so that if you ever meet him, he’ll be facing his own skill set and yours. That, boys, is the edge.”

  They nodded. One or two looked mildly apprehensive or skeptical, and Eve took note of that. The rest looked merely ready to learn.