by David Archer
Emergency mission. We are going out with Camelot again, woo hoo. Briefing room at one o’clock.
Jim Marino was the first one to call her, as she pulled out of the underground garage. “Jenny? What gives?”
“I told you, emergency mission,” she replied. “Something big, but I don’t know any details yet. Boss lady says she wants us and Noah on this one, so it must be pretty serious. Why? You got some kind of vacation plans?”
“Nah,” he said, “but I was hoping for at least a little bit of a break. They don’t usually send us out again so soon after a mission. You're right, it must be something pretty hot.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Gotta go, Randy’s beeping in.” She hit the flash button and smiled into the phone. “Randy, baby! Ready to get back in the saddle?”
“I guess so,” Randy said. “Any idea where we’re headed?”
“You know the old lady won’t give me any advance details. I’ll find out when you do, at the briefing. One o’clock, you got that?”
“Yeah, I got it,” he said. “Okay, I’ll be there.”
“See you then, stud.” She ended the call and waited, but it didn’t ring again. Instead, she got a text back from Dave saying he’d be at the briefing on time.
Jenny drove straight to her house on McKinley Street and pulled the Mustang into her garage. She hit the button to close the garage door, then sat in the car until it was down and the inside lights came on. It was an old habit she had gotten into, never getting out of the car until the door was closed. It lowered the risk of being targeted if a sniper was watching for her return.
When the lights came on, she got out and walked into the house through the steel door she had installed between it and the garage, then turned immediately to the right and went down the stairs into the basement. Jenny had a room set up down there as a home theater, with a projection TV set that put the picture on a ten-foot-wide screen. Sometimes she invited friends over for movie parties, and it was a lot like having her own theater all to herself. She even had a popcorn machine and soda fountain installed, so it would be even more like the real movie-house experience.
She dropped into one of the couches that were set up as seating, picked up the remote and started scanning through movies. There was an incredible selection, all saved digitally on a massive Seagate hard drive. All she had to do was choose, and the movie would be on the screen before she could put down the remote.
She chose one of her favorite horror films. When the rage started to build up inside her, watching extremely realistic scenes of cruelty and murder was the only thing that could damp it down and put her back in a good mood. That was usually enough for a short while, and then she’d get to go out on another mission.
Sure was a good thing they didn’t deduct points for when she went overboard, but Allison had told her point blank that she could indulge herself all she wanted, as long as she only killed the target and any necessary collaterals. That was fine with Jenny; she only really got off when she knew her victim really deserved it, anyway.
THREE
Noah Wolf was a logical strategist. He examined every detail he could learn about a mission before it began and developed a mission plan that allowed him to take every possible advantage of advance knowledge. He made every effort to deduce and include factors that might go wrong, so that he could simply take them in stride and continue.
Jenny Lance, on the other hand, preferred to go into a mission and evaluate it from the inside. Since the vast majority of her targets were totally and viciously male, her petite, athletic figure and angelic face were almost always enough to let her get close to them. Once she accomplished that, determining how, where and when to make the kill was easy for her.
Jenny was classified as a high-functioning sociopath. She had always been manipulative, and with an IQ of nearly 140, she had always been the girl who could get whatever she wanted. Unfortunately, her relationships had suffered because she had a tendency to use people like pawns and then discard them when she was finished. She could be a charmer when she wanted, and could instantly adapt herself to any social situation. With those abilities, it was easy for her to get just about anyone to do whatever she wanted at the time.
The only person she had ever felt truly close to had been her sister, Leanne. Jenny was the elder by four years, and while she had occasionally used Leanne as she did others, she spent more time protecting her baby sister from their abusive father and apathetic mother. When she graduated high school and left for college in Florida, she spent at least an hour every night on the phone with Leanne.
Then, just after beginning her sophomore year at FSU, Jenny got the phone call that would change her life forever. Leanne had been found dead during a trip with her mother to New York City, the victim of rape and strangulation. The police suspected a sixteen-year-old boy of the crime, but more than a dozen of his friends smugly swore that he had been with them when it happened. They were all members of the same gang, and the suspect became a full member immediately after Leanne’s death. Investigators were convinced that the rape and murder had been part of his initiation, but without conclusive evidence there was nothing they could do.
Jenny dropped out of college and went to New York. Her name at the time had been Genevieve Spears, and her search for a job led her to audition for a part in a soap opera, which she got. It was a small part, but her innate acting ability got her noticed by TV critics and magazines. Had she chosen, she probably could have worked her way into some form of stardom.
It was all part of her camouflage, however. Jenny had decided that her sister’s death would be avenged, at first only planning to try to bring the killer to justice. When she found out that her sister’s life had been the price of admission to a gang, however, she decided that a more permanent solution was needed.
Jenny had once seen a movie that left an impression on her. Val Kilmer played a prison inmate who was serving multiple life sentences because he murdered sixteen people. His reasoning was that one of them had murdered his wife and daughter in cold blood, and so he killed that individual along with his entire family, in order to remove their seed from the gene pool.
For more than two months, Jenny carefully stalked then-seventeen-year-old Shaundel Sanders. Watching him carefully, never exposing herself, she saw his sadistic and cavalier attitude toward girls, which convinced her that the police had been correct. Once, she overheard him joking with his brothers about “that little white bitch I wasted.” It was at that moment that Jenny decided to emulate Kilmer’s character. She would eliminate things like Shaundel from the gene pool of the human race, by killing not only him but his entire family.
Four more months passed as Jenny, in various disguises, carefully studied Shaundel’s family, which seemed to consist only of himself, his three brothers and their parents. She observed each of them, determined to figure out the best way to get close enough to kill them all. She had watched their movements throughout the day, knew their habits and even those of their neighbors. The little four-flat building they lived in had only two other tenants, a couple who owned a bakery and always left for work at three o’clock in the morning. The two flats on the ground floor were empty, and the windows and doors boarded over.
She struck just after dawn. One of the brothers, Michael, had a habit of coming in as the sun came up, and Jenny was on the street where she knew he would see her. The sight of a pretty little white girl was all it took to catch Michael’s attention, and as she’d expected, he instantly began to flirt. Jenny batted her eyes and blushed, pretending to be flattered, and then accepted when he told her he was an artist and wanted to paint a picture of her.
As he took her arm and walked her toward his apartment building, he told her about his brothers and how he was sure they would all love to meet her. Still smiling, she told him she thought that would be great, so when they made it up the stairs to his apartment, he told her to have a seat on the sofa while he woke them up and got his easel and paints.
It took almost 20 minutes for him to get all three of his brothers, including Shaundel, to roll out of bed and come meet “his new ho,” and Jenny sat patiently as she was introduced to first one, then another and finally the youngest. Their parents, Michael told her, were still sleeping but would be up soon. She could meet them then.
Jenny had smiled sweetly at all three of the boys, then asked if they would mind if she smoked. When they laughed and told her to go ahead, she opened her big purse and reached inside. Instead of cigarettes, however, she pulled out a nine-millimeter pistol.
Three months of almost daily practice at a gun club in Jersey paid off. Jenny didn’t need to aim; each bullet went where she pointed the gun, and she saved Shaundel for last. He had watched in shock as she fired three times in less than two seconds, blowing the brains out of all three of his brothers before turning the gun to him.
“Remember the ‘little white bitch?’ The one you raped and murdered so you could join the Purple Bloods? That was my little sister.”
Shaundel had fallen off of the sofa onto the floor and was crying as he tried to crawl backward away from her. “I din do shit to no white girl, bitch, why you doin’ this? Who da hell is you?”
The terror in his face and voice sent a thrill down Jenny’s spine, and she suddenly broke into a huge smile. “Who is I?” she asked. “I am death, you asshole,” she said, the last words he ever heard. Her single bullet wiped him out of existence as it pushed his brain out the back of his skull, leaving his face with what almost looked like a third eye.
Provided you didn’t look too closely.
She turned toward the door Michael had pointed to when he said his parents were sleeping. It was time to make sure there couldn’t be any more like these, but suddenly she heard shouting from the apartment next door.
“Police comin’,” she heard a man call out, “I done call nine one one, they comin’!” She cursed softly, frustrated that the neighbors had apparently not left for work at their usual time. For a brief moment she considered adding them to her list, but then she chided herself. They’d had nothing to do with her sister’s death, she knew, and she was only here for vengeance.
The bedroom door opened and a woman looked out, saw Jenny and slammed it shut. An instant later she heard hysterical screaming from inside that room, so she raised the gun and emptied its clip through the door, then turned and left the apartment. She ran down the stairs, shoving the empty gun back into her purse as she did so, and emerged onto the sidewalk just as a squad car slid to a stop in front of her.
Two officers leapt out with guns drawn and ordered her to freeze. She looked at them and began to sob, crying about someone going crazy upstairs with a gun, but one of the officers pushed her against the wall and yanked her purse away. When he dropped it on the sidewalk it fell over, and the pistol spilled out.
More police arrived and Jenny was arrested on three counts of murder and two of attempted murder. Neither of the parents had been hit, and when Jenny learned that fact during her interrogation, she looked at the detective across from her and said, “I should have waited until they woke up, I guess.”
Everyone who knew her was shocked, and the tabloids and TV magazines spread the story around the world. Jenny was convicted on all counts and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, which she later referred to as “a long-term death sentence.”
Two months after her sentencing, it was reported that Genevieve Spears had committed suicide in her prison cell. Two days later, Jennifer Lance arrived at Neverland.
Every recruit Allison came up with had to pass an interview with Doctor Parker before entering training. If the candidate failed, the note that Parker gave them at the end of the interview would simply say, “Pass.” When that note was shown to one of the senior officers of the organization, that single word would be a death sentence. The candidate would be taken out to a remote location behind the training facility, where a single shot to the head would bring their short Second Life to an end.
“Allison said you were a fox,” Parker said to her as she entered his office. “Nice of her to send me something to look at once in a while.”
Jenny’s eyebrows went up at his comment. “I’ll bet you say that to all the girls,” she said.
“Only the pretty ones,” Parker said. “Sit down and shut up. You don’t say a word unless I ask you a question.”
Jenny sat in the chair in front of his desk. “Okay,” she said.
“Bzzzzzzzzzzzt!” Parker spat out. “I hadn’t asked a question. Mess up again and I’ll reject you.”
Jenny said nothing, but the ghost of a smile appeared on her lips. Parker looked at her for a couple of seconds, then slipped on a pair of reading glasses and glanced down at some notes on his desk.
“Says here you murdered four people in revenge for the killing of your sister,” he said. He took off the glasses and looked up at her. “How did it make you feel afterward?”
“Horny as hell,” Jenny said. When Parker just stared at her for a moment, she shrugged. “Well, you asked.”
“And later? After you were arrested and locked up?”
Jenny pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “I kept going over it and over it, again and again in my mind. I was a little bit nervous before I pulled the trigger on the first one, but then all of a sudden I felt like—I felt this wave of pleasure go through me, and when I shot the second one it got more intense. The third one took it up a couple more notches, but that last one, the one who actually killed my sister? I had a freaking orgasm. When I was reliving it in my cell, I realized that this was something I really, really enjoyed and wanted to do again.”
“Hmpf,” Parker said. “Psychiatrist at the jail talked to you several times and decided you’re a sociopath.”
“High-functioning sociopath, actually,” Jenny said. “Oh, I’m sorry, wasn’t that a question?”
“Close enough for that time.” He put on the glasses again and glanced at his desk, then looked over them at Jenny. “According to the psychiatrist, you also display tendencies of sadistic psychopathy. That would refer to your becoming aroused and gratified by violence. However, he notes that you display a well-developed sense of right and wrong. How would you respond to that?”
Jenny’s face displayed a brief expression that Parker took as a form of shrug. “Well, I think it was wrong of that bastard to kill my sister just so he could join a gang, and while it may have been legally wrong to blow his brains out, it felt right to me at the time.” She winked at him. “On the other hand, I didn’t kill the neighbor who called the cops on me, so I guess that should count for something.”
“We compiled a history on you,” Parker said, “going back all the way through elementary school. There are notations in your school records indicating that you had a tendency to be disrespectful of others, but there are no recorded instances of violence. Did you ever become violent as a child?”
“I got into a couple of minor fights,” Jenny said, “but I never actually set out to hurt anyone. Is that what you’re asking?”
“Close enough. What about in your adolescence, were you ever aroused by scenes of violence in movies or books, or by witnessing someone being hurt or injured?”
Jenny smiled. “Yeah. I can remember, I was probably, oh, maybe fifteen or sixteen when I saw this movie where this family of crazy people were all into being killers. There was some pretty graphic death scenes in it, and it got me really turned on. But I never thought about it like, I wanted to be doing the killing, that never occurred to me until this happened. That’s kind of interesting, now that I think about it; I wonder why it didn’t?”
“Yes, I wonder,” Parker said. He sat forward and took off his glasses, folded his hands on his desk, then looked Jenny in the eye. “How do you feel about what we do?”
“I guess—from what I was told, this outfit kills people who need to be killed. Considering my own situation, that strikes me as making a lot of sense. Som
e people just don’t deserve to live, and if it makes the world a better place to take them out of it then somebody needs to do it. That lady who came to see me said she thought this might be the best place for me, and if it means I get to have a life again and get my rocks off, I’m all for it.”
The conversation went on a while longer, but in the end, Parker approved Jenny for training as an assassin. Her training program had been a few months longer and much more intense than Noah’s, since she didn’t have his military background, but she finally went on her first mission only two months after Genevieve Spears’s twentieth birthday.
FOUR
Three days. It’s been three days since they loaded me onto the boat. Three days, don’t forget that.
Of course, it was hard to tell for sure. Sarah was counting days by the number of times she’d been fed, because there were no windows in the room she was held in. The boat had run at high speed once they got away from the shoreline some distance, and the ride had been rather rough as it bounced over the choppy waves, but it hadn’t been a long one. A couple of hours out, the boat came to a stop and it wasn’t long after that before Sarah heard the whomp-whomp of a large helicopter. It had settled onto a platform on the topmost deck and two men had come and dragged Sarah out of the room and up the stairs.
She was shoved into a rear seat and strapped in, and the helicopter lifted off. Two men sat facing her, and both of them were not only armed, they had the look of men who hoped that the person they were guarding would be stupid enough to try to escape.
Sarah wasn’t stupid. A couple of hours later it landed on a beach and she was dragged out again, then hustled into an amphibious airplane that had been run up onto the beach and strapped into a seat once more. Tweedledum and Tweedledee took their seats around her, and then the two huge engines high overhead started up. The big seaplane moved backward until it was afloat, then turned and bounced faster and faster across the waves until it managed to catch the air and rise into flight.