Asp

by Kris Michaels

  Asp

  Guardian Shadow World, Book Two

  Kris Michaels

  Copyright © 2018 by Kris Michaels

  Krismichaelsauthor.com

  Cover Art: Digitally Imagined

  www.digitallyimagined.com

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Licensed material is being used for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted in the licensed material is a model. This book is fiction. Names, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locations are entirely coincidental.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Epilogue

  Also by Kris Michaels

  Chapter 1

  Asp meandered up the gravel trail from the cafeteria at Guardian’s South Dakota training complex to the temporary Shadow Headquarters. The core of the Guardian hierarchy had flown out to attend a wedding, leaving an unnatural hush over the normally bustling area. Anubis, or rather Kaeden, had been left in charge. Asp popped one of the half-dozen peanut butter cookies he’d carried out of the cafeteria into his mouth. They were good, but not as good as Mrs. Henshaw's. He'd grown attached to that old lady and not just for her cooking. She lived in the heart of D.C. in a cruddy little apartment she could barely afford. She was lonely, and she was a sweetheart. Asp longed to pay her kids a visit and teach them to value their mom, but he figured most of Guardian would have a problem if he did. Dammit.

  He trudged up to the door and went through the gyrations necessary to enter the facility, all while trying to keep his cookies from crumbling into a scattered pile on the fingerprint scanner. The damn thing red-lighted him...again. He punched the intercom and waited.

  "Seriously?"

  Asp flipped his middle finger in front of the camera. His fellow assassin laughed before the buzzer sounded, and he was permitted into the entrapment area. Asp waited for Anubis to make it from his office to the holding cell. Well, that was what he called it. Sooner or later the Shadows would have a permanent building, the majority of which would be underground. Literally. A set of twins had been working to get the facility built.

  Asp popped another peanut butter cookie into his mouth and munched on it. All things considered, the idea of a base where the Shadows could come to rehab, train and just fucking relax—hell, that was an awesome idea. Asp loved the South Dakota ranch. He could wander down to watch the horses, which were cool as shit, or he could go sit on a high hill overlooking thousands of acres of ranchland. The peacefulness recharged him each time he came back, and he'd chosen to return more and more lately. This time, however, the choice to return had not been his. He’d been recalled. He was to report directly to Anubis as soon as he stepped off the plane. Asp smiled and bit a cookie in half. Not likely. If he had to go through a briefing after forty hours of non-stop travel, he was going to do it with something in his stomach. The door in front of him buzzed, clicked and then swung open.

  "I see that, once again, you followed reporting instructions."

  With a snort, Asp elbowed the door open and followed Anubis down the short, vacant hall.

  "I did. Without sounding weird, you're looking good." Asp marveled at the change in his friend since he'd stopped working the field. Anubis had a major issue with food which Asp wholeheartedly understood. Hell, when your primary weapon of assassination is poison, Asp could see how a phobia could develop. But, obviously Anubis's wife Sky had convinced him to eat her cooking because the guy actually looked healthy.

  "Between Sky, Keelee, and Amanda, I've been forced to stretch my boundaries on my food issues." Anubis flashed his card in front of a lock, hit a six-digit number, and lowered his eye to a retinal scanner. Asp followed him into his office. "Hit the comm shield." Anubis threw the order over his shoulder.

  Asp reached up and hit it. The thing flashed yellow for about ten seconds before it turned a solid green. Whatever they were going to talk about, nobody else on the planet would be able to hear it.

  "I thought you'd be at Bengal's wedding." Asp planted his ass in the big, comfy chair in front of Anubis's desk.

  "Can't. Someone has to stay and man the fortress. Besides, they'll all be back this afternoon. Well, except for Zane and Jewell. They are doing the honeymoon thing." His friend took out a key and unlocked his desk.

  Asp leaned over to see what he was pulling out and laughed when a can of nuts and a sealed bottle of water appeared. "Dude, you're still locking up your food?"

  "Old habits." Anubis shrugged and popped the top off both containers. He grabbed a handful of pecans and leaned back in his chair. "I’ve got some news to relay."

  Asp brushed his hands together getting rid of the crumbs the last cookie left in his palm. "Good news or bad?"

  Anubis swallowed his mouthful of pecans and grabbed the bottle of water. He shook his head and took a long swig. "I don't know. I guess that depends on you."

  Asp felt an unpleasant clutch in his gut, and it wasn't because of the dozen or so cookies he'd eaten. He leaned back and started raising his mental barriers. He recognized that tone in his friend's voice. There was something screwy with a new assignment or an assignment he'd completed. His mind scrolled through the year. He'd been injured while executing a kill and had roamed playing tourist while he recuperated. He'd had exactly one assignment since he'd been reinstated—the “Italian job” vetted by the Council.

  According to rumors, the Council consisted of a permanent member of each of the FBI, CIA, Homeland, Guardian, Mossad, MI6, Interpol and three rotating members of other international security agencies. The Council examined the requests for “termination” on a case-by-case basis. If a unanimous vote was cast, the person indicted in the case was coded. The unanimous vote was mandated so that no country or entity would shoulder the responsibility of the action any more than any other country. It also worked as a failsafe in case a Shadow or an asset from another organization or country were ever captured, tortured and broken.

  He slid his gaze up to meet Anubis'. "Am I going to have to play twenty questions?"

  Anubis pursed his lips and shook his head. "No, I'm afraid that's my job today."

  "What the fuck are you talking about?" Every nerve in Asp's body stood ready for fight or flight. His usually straight-shooting friend had keyed his biological response tighter with his hedging.

  "There is a case currently in front of the Council." Anubis dropped his eyes to a folder on his desk.

  Asp waited for a full three minutes. "Again, am I going to have to guess?" Asp uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. "Spit it out, man."

  “The subject in this file is the individual being reviewed."

  Asp lifted an eyebrow and reached for the folder. He leaned back in his chair and gave Anubis a hard stare. "Why do I get the feeling if I open this folder, my life will never be the same?"

/>   "Because you have some of the best instincts in the business." Anubis nodded toward the file. "Archangel and Alpha cleared me to approach you. If this case is coded, and that is a big if, it is yours."

  Asp cocked his head. He glanced at the folder and then back at Anubis. "Why are you telling me this?"

  “Open it and see for yourself.”

  Asp studied the folder on his lap. The standard red cardboard gave no hint of its contents. He drew a breath and flipped the folder open. Male, Caucasian, late forties/early fifties. He appeared to be in shape, not overweight. The guy glared at the camera with cold, hard eyes. He didn't recognize the picture. He glanced up to find Anubis staring at him like he was a bug under a microscope. Asp flipped the page and noted the name. Jarvis Cavanaugh. Huh…still didn’t mean anything. The man's address and work information were also listed. Asp stopped reading, flipped closed the cover of the file and threw it on Anubis’ desk. "He's CIA, Shadows don't work on American soil and we don’t do friendlies. I won't violate those directives.” Never again. Not for anyone.

  "Right. This guy is ex-CIA, a real notorious son of a bitch. He is currently somewhere in Colombia. His whereabouts vary whenever the wind changes direction, but according to what our friends in the CIA are telling us, his current nest is the area formerly controlled by the Fuerza Alternativa Revolutionaria del Comun.”

  "We have friends in the CIA?” He’d rather Guardian and the CIA never communicated. He harbored a deep distrust of the Central Intelligence Agency. In his experience, the agency operatives worked harder at political grandstanding and ruthless backstabbing to gain power within the agency than they did gathering intelligence. The CIA was the antithesis of Guardian. Guardian had strict rules of conduct, ethics, and integrity. In his experience, the hallowed halls of the CIA lacked all three.

  “We don’t have any friends.” Anubis flicked his fingers between himself and Asp. “But our liaison, also known as Alpha’s wife, has numerous contacts embedded throughout the agency, and as far as I know, they’ve never fed her any bullshit.”

  “You know I hate the CIA, and you have an idea why.”

  “I do.” Anubis stared at him from across the desk trying to do that silent ninja, mind-meld thing again as if Asp had ever been able to read anything in the assassin’s blank stare. Asp shook his head and lifted his hands in defeat. “I give. I can’t read your mind. Why am I getting advance intel on this guy?" To be honest, he felt pretty fucking stupid at the moment. He wasn't following whatever conversation Anubis thought they were having.

  Anubis reached for the folder, flipped it open and turned over the last piece of paper. Printed on a label affixed to the back of the folder was a call sign Asp would never forget. Equal measures of hatred, guilt, and shame had seared it into his brain. Halo One-One.

  Asp leaned back in his chair and stared not really seeing his friend. Halo One-One. His former CIA handler. The motherfucker who’d sent him to stalk and kill an innocuous university professor. Asp shook his head as his mind slammed him back in time to the briefing Halo had given him on his target.

  The man had a wife and two sons. He was no more a threat to national security than baseball and apple pie, but Halo had cooked the dossier and forged the authentications needed for a hit. When the professor traveled overseas for a conference, Asp followed. A simple mission on an unsuspecting and blameless man.

  As soon as Asp had been given the folio, the guy was as good as dead, but the days of surveillance had made Asp wary. The professor’s behavior didn’t support the accusation alleged in the dossier—that he was accessing or selling national secrets. Asp had been so doubtful, he had broken procedure and questioned Halo, his handler. He could remember staring at Halo’s email. He could still see the cursor blinking after the words “terminate as directed.”

  Before that case, Asp had never violated agency protocol. Before that night, he’d never made a copy of a dossier or of an email dead drop communication. But his gut told him the man wasn’t what Halo suspected. He’d emailed Halo’s superior with a coded request to have the mission reviewed, and for days afterward, there was no response. Asp dragged his feet until he received the one sentence response from Halo’s superior. It simply read, “proceed with mission.”

  The next morning Asp killed a fifty-four-year-old, American, professor of economics. He returned to the states and went to CIA headquarters, an act that violated every cannon he’d agreed to when he signed on with the agency. When Asp scanned his credentials, every alarm and warning system in the building activated. He got everyone’s attention, and that was exactly what he needed. He demanded to speak to his department section chief and refused to buy into their stall and mitigation tactics. When he finally met face-to-face with the deputy director, his superior accessed the dossier and the dead-drop email communications. The man was livid. But not at Halo One-One. No, the man was steamed at him, for breaching protocol. After the director tore him a new one, the man took the information Asp provided and left. He gave no indication why Halo wanted the professor dead or if the man had been a legitimate target. If he was wrong and the professor was a traitor selling information to the enemy, Asp would be washed up and would probably end up dead. But he didn’t care. His gut told him the man was innocent. He should have fucking listened to his gut. The man was innocent. He'd found that out from a contact within the CIA. Without a word, he walked away from the agency.

  “Yo, man. You still with me?”

  The question from Anubis snapped Asp out of his memories but did little to quell the sickness of his soul awakened by ghosts of the past. He shot a look across the desk and nodded. Once. “When will I know?"

  "The Council will reconvene next week." Anubis nodded at the folder. "You know his background up until the time you left the agency." Anubis pulled out another folder. "This is the information being presented to the Council. Archangel doesn't know which way this will go. The likelihood of him being able to accomplish what he's attempting is slim, but if Cavanaugh gets the remnants of the FARC stirred up in Colombia, it will be impossible to calculate the cost in human lives."

  The FARC was a militant entity. From what Asp recalled, the United States, using the tried and true process of having the CIA 'train' local civilians, had successfully crushed the civil disobedience. "I thought the FARC disbanded last year. They are a legitimate political party now." Asp tossed that softball at Anubis. He needed information, and it was obvious Anubis knew more than he was sharing.

  "They did, and they are, but if Cavanaugh stirs up the malcontents and rallies the members who didn't agree to the cease-fire and peace accord, well then he's the fuse in a powder keg. The FARC were, and quite possibly still are, recruiting from local villages. They aren't asking nicely. They take able-bodied men and young boys anywhere from twelve on up.”

  "I thought that practice had been abandoned." In an effort to get a solid understanding of what he'd be diving into, Asp stirred what information he had around his brain for a moment..

  "Why change something that works?" Anubis dropped another folder on the desk. "The latest intel on the FARC movements according to Guardian."

  He grabbed the file and read words that spelled out the ugly, undisguised truth of both the government of Colombia's abuse of its citizens and the FARC's deadly grab for power.

  Anubis shook a few pecans into his hand. "We want to know why he's down there."

  Asp slowly lifted one eyebrow at his friend. "There isn't a question as to why he's down there. The FARC was making money hand over fist by guarding illegal drug channels and charging a tax to the growers and manufacturers to keep their shipments safe. If that revenue source is lying dormant, then my money is on that bastard trying to set up his own system."

  "Drugs?" Anubis rubbed his chin and gazed off into space.

  "Money, power, and yes, drugs. You know he was excommunicated from the agency after I exposed what he did, right?" Asp wasn't sure how far Anubis's knowledge of the situation went.

>   "I know he was arrested, but he wasn't prosecuted. The file doesn't indicate why."

  Asp leaned forward and placed his elbows on his knees, linked his fingers together and fixed his friend with an intent stare. "He had dirt on everyone in that organization. If they had tried him, he would have exposed them. It was how he operated. I didn't fear any repercussions when I exposed him because my parents died earlier that year."

  Anubis cocked his head and stared at Asp. "I don't understand."

  "I know, in my gut, the man would have gone after me by targeting my folks, somehow he would have hurt them, or worse. Believe me, it is extremely simple and completely convoluted at the same time. Did you know I was recruited into the agency out of the Marines?”

  The assassin across the desk shook his head. "I have access to the information, but I didn't feel it was necessary for me to look into your past. Whatever happened back then was what made you who you are today. I trust today's version to let me know anything that is pertinent."

  Asp internalized the gratitude he felt. Anubis could know every detail of his life, but he chose to respect his privacy. He cleared his throat to block the sudden rise of emotion and leaned forward as he spoke, "I was a sniper. My spotter and I were in country after leave before we returned to our duties. We'd just processed back into Iraq and were bunking down in the Green Zone until we had transport out toward our new forward operating base. That was August 2010. There were twenty-three rocket attacks on the Green Zone that month. One of those motherfuckers brought our barracks down around our ears. My spotter died of his injuries, I was evacuated to Landstuhl Army Hospital in Germany."