by Barry Eisler
“I want to know why you talk funny,” the tall man said.
Manus glanced from one to the other as though in fear. In fact, he was measuring distance. “What are you doing?” he said, injecting a little nervousness into his tone.
“Give me the gun in the back of your pants,” the tall man said, holding out his hand but eyeing the Berserker warily. “And put down the axe.”
They thought they had the drop on him, but still they were uncertain of themselves. Otherwise the tall man would have reached into Manus’s pants and taken the gun himself.
Manus took a step back to prevent them from surrounding him, and dangled the Berserker alongside his leg as though ambivalent about complying. “If you kill me, you get no more toys.”
The tall man’s mouth twisted into a cruel smile. It reminded Manus of some of the boys at the juvenile prison. “We’re not going to kill you. Only . . . have fun with you. Give us the gun.”
They were just a little farther away than ideal. Manus wanted one of them to step in closer.
“I’ll tell my people.”
The tall man laughed. “What man would ever tell of something like this? Even a woman wouldn’t tell.”
The man with the SIG was flushed and breathing heavily. He gestured with the muzzle toward the trunk. “Reach inside the trunk,” he said. “All the way in back.”
Manus merely looked at him.
The man’s face darkened. “I said, reach inside the trunk.”
Again, Manus said nothing. He knew the man wouldn’t just pull the trigger. He would look for one more way to threaten first.
The man pointed the muzzle at Manus’s face and stepped closer. “I said—”
Manus stepped in, swatted the SIG out of the way, and swung the Berserker underhand, arcing its five-inch razor-sharp head up into the man’s genitals. The blade sliced through cloth and flesh with equal ease, shattering the pubic bone and burying itself in the man’s sacrum with such force the impact carried the man’s feet off the ground. The man’s eyes bulged in shock and agony, but if he screamed, it wasn’t loud enough for Manus to hear.
Manus pivoted to his right, wrenched loose the Berserker as the first man crumbled to the ground, and swung it backhand toward the second man’s face. The man flinched and started to turn away, instinctively throwing a hand up for protection. The Berserker sheared off his fingers, blasted through teeth and jaw, and erupted from the left side of his head along with a geyser of blood. The man shuddered, took two spasmodic steps, and collapsed.
The tall man’s eyes were so wide it looked like they could pop out of his head. He took a step back and fumbled desperately at his waistband, presumably for a gun. Manus dropped the Berserker and instantly had the Force Pro pointed at the man’s head in a two-handed grip. The man’s arms froze where they were.
“Raise your hands,” Manus said. The man didn’t move, and Manus said, “If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead. But don’t make me tell you again.”
Slowly, warily, the man raised his hands. Manus could see he was breathing rapidly.
“Now face away from me and lace your fingers tightly behind your neck.”
The man complied.
Manus tugged one of his sleeves past his fingers, stepped forward, pulled free the man’s gun, using the sleeve to ensure he didn’t touch it, and stepped back again. He tossed the gun away, adjusted his sleeve, and retrieved the Berserker. “Now reach inside the trunk. The way you wanted me to.”
The man turned to him. “What? No.”
Manus pointed the Force Pro at his face. “Your choice.”
The man grimaced, his respiration terror-fast now. He glanced at his comrades. The first one was fetaled up and shaking—maybe crying, Manus couldn’t be sure. The second was lying still. The ground around them was saturated with blood.
Trembling now, the man approached the car. He leaned into the trunk. Manus knew that unless the man could instantly figure out how to load one of the grenade launchers, there was nothing inside he could use as a weapon. Still, he hadn’t searched the man for a knife or backup pistol, so for the moment, he maintained some distance.
“Reach further inside,” Manus said. “And spread your legs.”
The man complied. Manus had the sense the man was talking now, probably begging, but of course he couldn’t know and anyway it didn’t matter. Manus switched the Force Pro to his left hand and the Berserker to his right. He paused for an instant to watch the man, then raised his arm, swiveled his hips, and blasted the blade down directly into the man’s spine. The edge cleaved vertebrae and spinal cord and would have blown right through the man’s abdomen had Manus not pulled back at the last instant. The man’s body collapsed, his legs spasmed, and his scream echoed inside the trunk loudly enough that Manus could just hear it.
Manus grabbed the back of the man’s waistband, hauled him out of the trunk, and dumped him on the ground. The man flopped on his back like a fish on the deck, his hands groping at the gaping wound, his legs motionless. He was saying something, but Manus couldn’t read his lips—either the man had reverted to Turkish, or in his terror and agony he was no longer able to form words clearly enough for Manus to make out.
“You want to know why I talk funny?” Manus said. He scanned the area quickly for danger, saw none, and returned his gaze to the man. “It’s because I can’t hear anything. Even screams.” He raised a leg and smashed his foot down into the man’s throat, obliterating his trachea.
He walked over to the first man, who was the only one who might still be a threat. But no, he was still fetaled up and shuddering. Even if he had been carrying a weapon, he was obviously too overcome by his injuries to do anything with it. Manus stomped the man’s neck into the dirt.
He went over to the second man, who was lying still. Manus saw brains amid the blood and knew there was no need to do anything further. He wiped the blade of the Berserker on the man’s shirt, then set it down on the passenger seat of his car.
He paused for a moment, watching the van. He doubted there was anyone inside, but better to be sure. He circled quickly, the Force Pro in a two-handed grip, darting in and out for a peek through the passenger-side window, then the windshield, then the driver-side window. He saw nothing.
He gripped the side-door handle through the tail of his shirt, threw it open, and leaped to the right, ready to lay down fire if he needed to. But again, there was nothing.
No, not nothing. There was someone inside, curled up on the floor. Manus blinked, checked his surroundings, and looked again. He saw a frilly dress, a pair of hairy arms emerging from its sleeves, a glint of metal—handcuffs, the wrists secured behind the back.
He moved in, the Force Pro up, scanning the interior of the van. There was nothing else. Just a man, a small man, handcuffed, in a dress. The man seemed to be shivering.
Keeping the Force Pro just below his chin with his right hand, Manus reached out with his left and shook the man’s leg. The man flinched, but that was all. Maybe he said something or made some sound, but Manus couldn’t know.
Manus shook him again, harder this time. The man brought his shoulders up as though in anticipation of a blow and looked back over his shoulder. It took Manus a moment because the man’s face was so damaged—the eyes bruised and puffed, nearly closed; the lips swollen and split. There were cigarette burns on his cheeks and all along his arms and shoulders.
It was Hamilton.
Manus was so stunned that for nearly a second he forgot to check his surroundings. Then instinct honed by experience kicked in, and he did a quick sweep of the area. Nothing. When he came back to Hamilton, he saw the man was saying, “Please. Please help me. Please.”
Manus tried to process it. What had happened? He’d seen the news reports, the video, of Hamilton being held in Syria by some ISIS splinter group, and had assumed the director had used the Turks as a cutout to deliver Hamilton. Well, that seemed to have been the plan, anyway. But what had happened instead? Had the Tur
ks made their own video, hiring an Arabic speaker for the role of knife-wielding terrorist? Had they delivered someone else to the Syrian group? If so, who? And why? Maybe to keep the man so they could use him until they grew bored, then resell him?
He glanced out at the bodies and wished he hadn’t finished the men so quickly. Wished he could go to work on them again.
He looked back at Hamilton. “Please,” the man was still saying. “Please, help me.”
Manus considered. What would the director want? Probably for the man to die. Why else have him kidnapped in the first place, if not to have him killed, ostensibly at the hands of some jihadists?
And the truth was, it would be a mercy. The man was fucked up, fucked up in a way Manus knew he might never recover from. Step into the van, pull the door closed to muffle the sound, a single quick shot to the back of the head. End the man’s pain, end his horror.
“Please,” the man said again, and tears spilled from his puffed-shut eyes. “I want to go home. I just want to go home.”
Manus looked around again. The area was still quiet.
Just do it, he thought. Make it quick. He won’t feel anything.
He started to step into the van, then hesitated.
He realized he didn’t want to kill the man.
He tried to persuade himself again it would be a mercy. He couldn’t. Instead, it felt like an extension of the cruelty he had already delivered the man into.
Fuck.
This was taking too long. He had to focus on what he had come for. Hamilton wasn’t his problem.
He walked over to the bodies and found a mobile phone in the pants pocket of each. He removed the batteries, tossed them all into the trunk of his car, retrieved the SIG, popped in a full magazine, charged it, and placed it on the passenger seat. He glanced at himself in the visor mirror, and was unsurprised to see a fair amount of blood splatter on his face. He walked around to the trunk, grabbed a wet towel he had placed there for this very eventuality, and cleaned off. There was some blood spray on the car, as well. He wiped it down, threw the towel inside, and closed the trunk.
He paused for a moment, watching the van, wishing he had never looked inside it. Then he thought, Well, maybe you didn’t.
There was something to that. Because even if Hamilton made it out of here, who would he tell? Manus doubted the man could even see through those blackened eyes. The fact that he’d begged, Please help me, rather than, say, Please don’t hurt me, suggested he didn’t recognize Manus as his abductor. And even if he could see, what would he describe? Manus had been wearing his light disguise of beard, glasses, and hat the first time, and he was wearing it now. He supposed Hamilton might have picked up on the strangeness of Manus’s voice and on his deafness the first time, but this time Manus had said nothing.
Besides, the man was badly fucked up, that was clear. He would probably die here, alone, weak, helpless in the van.
Just kill him, then. You’d be doing him a favor.
Maybe. Yeah, maybe that was right. But it didn’t feel right.
Or . . . you could just take off the handcuffs. After that, it’s up to him.
That felt a little better. Because if Hamilton were smart enough to figure out that one of the dead Turks would have the keys to the van, and that they probably had money he could take, too, and if he were tough enough to drive himself out of here, and resourceful enough to find a place to recover, then didn’t he deserve a chance? And if he wanted to lie down and die, then that was what he deserved, instead. Either way, it would be on him.
Manus went to the bodies and dug around in their pockets until he found a handcuff key. He got back in the van and stepped behind Hamilton. The man began to struggle feebly—a reflex, Manus knew, from the things he’d endured. Manus also knew the man wouldn’t listen to words, no matter how reassuring. So he simply pushed him down firmly, put a knee in his back, and removed the cuffs. He wiped them with the tail of his shirt and let them drop to the floor of the van. He looked around. There were some work clothes in back—a dirty tee shirt and coveralls. That was good. The clothes the Turks were wearing were soaked in blood, and Hamilton wouldn’t make it far in that dress without getting a lot of attention. Assuming he could make it at all.
He stepped out of the van, took one last look around, got in his car, and drove off. When he was safely away, he’d get rid of the towel and bleach down the Berserker. But first, distance.
He drove and considered. He was sorry for what the Turks had done to Hamilton. He was glad he’d killed them, and hoped the man would find some solace in the sight of their broken bodies.
He wondered what he should tell the director, and decided he would tell him nothing. After all, was he even sure the director would want Hamilton dead? The director was smart, and playing at a level Manus probably couldn’t really understand. Maybe there were other plans for Hamilton. Maybe there were other factors Manus wasn’t aware of. What had they taught him in the CIA course? “You don’t know, you don’t go.” Well, the maxim certainly applied here.
All right. He had killed the men and taken their phones and left, and that was all. That’s all he had been sent to do, so it made sense. A van? Yes, there had been a van, but he had never looked inside it. Why would he?
And probably there would be nothing to tell, anyway. Hamilton would die in the van, or the director would find him again and he would die that way. That Manus had encountered him again would, in the end, make no difference. And wasn’t that the same as if Manus hadn’t encountered him again?
He put Hamilton out of his mind—because there was no Hamilton—and thought of the phones in the trunk, instead. The director would be happy. Then he thought of the woman and her son. He wondered if the director had someone watching them while Manus was away. The thought made him uneasy, though he didn’t know why.
CHAPTER . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . 20
Thomas Delgado emerged from the Washington, DC Metro at Farragut West and headed south on Seventeenth Street NW, the area a kaleidoscope of streetlamps and office windows and car headlights. The worst of rush hour was past, but there were still plenty of cabs jockeying for position as they trolled for evening fares; office workers heading off for a bite with their cronies or a drink by themselves; Metro buses hissing and squealing as they absorbed and disgorged the nightly worker-bee effluent. More pedestrians would have been a plus, but daylight would have made for clearer footage on surveillance cameras. This was the right compromise.
He turned left on H Street, pulling the wheeled carry-on bag behind him, just another cubicle denizen returning to the office after arriving at Washington National or Union Station, still casually dressed in jeans and a button-down shirt, comfortable travel attire. A pair of nonprescription horn-rimmed glasses fit the overall office geek vibe, and though his Orioles cap might have been a little out of keeping, well, who in DC would begrudge a fan for flying the team’s colors? The main thing was to look enough like a local not to be noticed, while obscuring the features enough not to be recognized. The glasses and cap weren’t much, but in the low light, he was confident they would do.
He passed Lafayette Square, where a few lonely protestors stood facing the White House, holding vigil amid the buzz of insects in the trees and the surrounding sounds of traffic. Stop the war, stop the fracking, stop killing black men, stop, stop, stop. Perennial shit. He wondered why these losers bothered, why they didn’t just give up and get a life.
He powered up one of the phones the director had given him and used it to call the cell phones of a few members of a local mosque, along with the numbers of the two other phones the director had provided him. Then he powered down the unit and kept moving.
A few blocks from the White House, he saw what he was looking for: a catering truck, parked in front of one of the area’s innumerable monolithic office buildings, its driver doubtless delivering dinner inside to keep late-working drones nourished and productive into the night. He unzipped the carry
-on bag and checked his surroundings, then ducked down, removed the device, and attached it via its magnetic fastenings to the truck’s undercarriage, no more obtrusive than a man tying his shoe. Seconds later, he was on his way.
He zigzagged over to Pennsylvania Avenue and headed southeast, losing the carry-on in a Dumpster along the way after wiping down the handles and zippers. Maybe someone would find and appropriate it; maybe it would molder in a landfill. Either way, there would be no way to connect it with him.
He paused in front of the Capitol Reflecting Pool, where he repeated the phone operation with the second of the units the director had given him and another set of numbers. Finally, he looped around the Capitol grounds to the Supreme Court, where he went through the procedure once more with the last of the three phones. Then he continued southeast until he reached the Seventeenth Street SE side of the Congressional Cemetery. He slipped over the low brick wall, into the comforting gloom, and padded across the soft grass toward the interior, the light growing dimmer and the sounds of traffic more muted with each step.
He came to a row of mausoleums, faintly outlined against the glow of the adjacent Anacostia River. He paused with his back to one, letting his eyes adjust, listening. The director had warned him there would be intense coverage of the cell phones he was carrying, and that he needed to begin and end his route in what the director called “cataracts”—blind spots in NSA’s pervasive coverage. The Congressional Cemetery was one such. No cameras, no sensors, no IMSI-catcher phone trackers. Going in one end of a cataract and coming out the other was akin to crossing a river to throw off pursuit. Not a perfect solution, but with enough such crossings, a pretty effective way of ensuring no one would be able to follow your tracks.
He unbuttoned his shirt, exposing a tee shirt and belly bag beneath. Into the belly bag went the outer shirt, the glasses, the baseball cap, and the phones; out came a bandana, which he wrapped around his head. An office worker had entered the cemetery; a hipster in a do-rag would leave it.
He had zipped up the bag and was about to move out when he saw a pair of faintly glowing eyes looking up at him from the ground—eyes and a human figure. He leaped back, one hand going up in a protective gesture, the other clearing and opening the Zero Tolerance 0300 folding knife he kept clipped to his front pocket. “What the fuck?” he said in a loud whisper.