"Nope. No time at all. Cute little thing."
"Two weeks. You promise?" Wyrick tapped the table to make Seibel turn back to him. The old man's eyes were distant, misty.
"Two weeks. He'll complete three, maybe four more assignments in Europe during that time. Invaluable." Seibel took a deep breath. "And then I'll tell him about the photo. I'll tell him he's a father."
Chapter 30
"Afghanistan is the key." He whispered to Abbie, for maybe the 17th time in the past week.
"Yep." She didn't encourage further conversation on the matter already agreed upon, 16 times.
Entry into and time spent there and returning back to the west. That is the path, the pattern to track.
Not Libya or Tunisia or Sudan. It was, and is, Afghanistan.
"Your research confirmed it, with these guys at least."
"Correct." Abbie nodded. "Each separately, and two of them together, have traveled to Afghanistan at least twice in the past three years."
"And two of the four have also flown in and out of Pakistan," Preacher added. "Which I believe borders Afghanistan."
"I believe you are correct." Abbie smiled and nodded.
Preacher met her smile with a smile and nod of his own. "Follow the plan, at least the start of the plan. But be ready for in-operation adaptation."
He pulled away from the passenger window he was leaning into and tapped the door twice as he stepped away from the vehicle. Abbie sat behind the wheel of the Chrysler LeBaron parked in the dark, away from streetlights.
Her procerus and other facial muscles fired up as Preacher walked away, causing her brow to furrow and nose to crinkle. That conversation was a little strange, even by his standards. Preacher was working around the edges a bit too much. She was getting used to his "close your eyes and look" methods. And the constant Socratic dialogue they found themselves in was too much, but definitely worked as both a teaching and learning method.
Fifteen minutes later, Preacher looked over his left shoulder. Across the street, Fuchs stood in a darkened doorway. They each had open views of the seven-story apartment building and its two entrances. Just after 11 p.m. meant the streets, the neighborhood was mostly quiet.
This was only his second time in Toronto. It was a hell of a lot colder last time. That was February. Toronto in late August is quite lovely. It would be a few minutes now. Keep an eye on the building entrances.
He drifted with eyes wide open. Moments ago he was up at 5,000 feet looking down on the scene. He knew each street and avenue and alleyway and highway entrance ramp and train station and bus stop. He found it all a bit boring.
Preacher had been here before. The hunting, the watching, the chase likely about to start. Check, check, check.
There is simply so much more he needs to get done. He'd been going about it. He was like Arafat, rarely sleeping in the same bed twice. But here he was, back in the 'track, find and take or kill the terrorist game.' He closed his eyes and swept away, to the east, high again over clouds and land and water and rising mountains and empty desert and growing cities.
He was really only here for Abbie. This operation, this project, was all for and about her. She possesses that thing. That thing that only a few humans have. Seibel, Fuchs, Wyrick, and of course, Marta, have it. Abbie just needed a little help molding, developing, unveiling her plentiful skills.
Movement at the east door.
The tune that started playing was not the synthesizer-driven 80s beats Preacher had been listening to in his head on repeat and rewind for months. No, the song was all guitar and smash and wail. Guns n' Roses. The one about the jungle.
He pushed off the wall. A quick glance left confirmed Fuchs was mobile as well.
If Lance didn't care for this kind of work anymore, Preacher was up for the job. Dual citizenship inside a single messed up brain allowed for complementary roles. And Preacher didn't mind doing the dirty work. What is a little blood splatter?
He felt it. Felt it in his movement. The 26 pounds he added over the past year weighed him down. But he was strong, powerful. Unlike the sleek 170-pound bringer of death from any and every angle, he was now something more. Much more.
He was out of practice. Aside from New York, he hadn't really set himself on prey in over two years. All the overt killing and stealth assassinations in those months after the Oklahoma City Bombing and trail of bodies from Kansas to DC to Venezuela and throughout Mexico was long past. Before New York, he virtually retired from killing while he worked on other projects.
But here, as he powered forward through dark city streets, across an open lot and onto a sidewalk across from his targets, it all came back. Like gripping the handle of a Sig. It was the soft comfort of her arms. The bell ringing at the end of that black and white Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic. Comfortable.
A smile graced his lips for the tiniest fraction of a moment. No one saw. Maybe Lance if he is up there watching.
"Peeling off to the left with those two." Fuchs spoke into his ear.
"Got my two." He replied into the microphone next to his mouth. "Stay with me X."
X was Abbie's operation handle for this one. He jokingly told her she was the "X-factor" for all this fun.
Four men exited the 7-story apartment building. Two men went left; two went right. It looked like two sets of friends leaving their homes to go out on the town or maybe heading home after spending the evening with friends or family. Happens all the time. All around the world.
Except.
Except these were terrorists, or at least terrorist wannabes. Lance and Fuchs followed two of the four to the building three hours earlier and watched as the other two showed up minutes after the first duo. This was a meet-up, a planning session.
It was a bit strange that they left the meet as pairs instead of going four separate ways. Seemed a bit lazy. Preacher was 50-yards back and across the street from the pair he was following when something caught his eye.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the apartment building entrance these terrorists came out of a 40 seconds earlier. The door was open and an individual stepped out. Damn.
It was Moustafa al-Barwani. And he was looking right at Preacher.
In one instantaneous fluid motion, Preacher stopped, reached into his belt under his light jacket, pivoted, pulled the silenced Sig Sauer 9 mm, dropped to a knee and aimed. But al-Barwani was quick. Within that same instant, the extremely wanted Yemeni terrorist dove and rolled to his left behind a short concrete wall.
Without a hint of hesitation, Preacher pivoted on his knee back to his right. With his aim already up, he locked onto the two men now 55-yards ahead and across the street and fired eight shots, four at each. Just over 160-feet away is a tough target to hit and would have been a virtual impossibility for Preacher years earlier. But that all changed when the young CIA operative slipped on a pair of tight leather driving gloves. Sure it was all psychological, but the result was a dead aim.
Six of his eight shots fired found their target. Both men dropped. He could tell that one of them took a head shot by the way he collapsed. The other had already started flailing about on the ground. Probably hit in the back and upper thigh. Good, suffer. The other one wouldn't be long for the world. Good, die.
He was up and racing across the street toward Barwani. His gun still raised.
"Foxy." He said casually as he sprinted all out. "You here those shots fired?"
"Eight silenced rounds fired, yes." Fuchs said. "Guessing that was you."
"Number 3 on the list of ten just walked out of the building."
"Come again."
"I'm on him now. Looks like he's pretty fast. All clean shaven and wearing a ball cap."
"Jesus. The other two?"
"Down. One looks to be gone. Put your two out of our misery and see about coming to help me acquire new target."
"Number 3? Serious?" Abbie asked over the radio.
"Heart attack serious. He saw me and bolted."
Preac
her was already across the street, moving across the concrete plaza outside the apartment building and heading down a set of stairs leading down to a parking area and then off into a series of alleys. He spotted Barwani down below racing between parked cars on a surface lot. The wanted terrorist was headed toward a dark alley. He was 110-yards ahead and had multiple options to lose him in the dark.
Stop. Pivot.
Wisdom comes with age. Preacher passed 30 revolutions around the sun last year and found some of that wisdom. One doesn't always need to chase his prey on foot into that dark and foreboding night. Think.
This guy wouldn't be alone. He stopped at the top of the steps and looked around, scanning, peering into the surrounding night. He then closed his eyes and let his ears tune in, filtering out the cacophonous city noises to focus on those important to a hunter of men.
Ignition.
A car's engine fired.
He turned his head in the direction of this new contributor of sonic mayhem. A blue sedan started in a surface parking lot back across the street where he was 45 seconds ago. Preacher opened his eyes, spun and burst in that direction. Like a sprinter at the gun, rising to full stride after several explosions of every muscle in his legs, his feet dug into the concrete and then asphalt, Preacher was a rocket, a guided missile. He raced back across the plaza, into and across the street and to the parking lot before the driver could get the Chevy reversed, turned and moving toward the exit.
It was a quiet weekday evening with most of Toronto at home and sleeping. The few clouds in the sky masked pinpointed stars amid the forever black beyond. Quite peaceful, except for Guns n' Roses blasting away. Axl wailing and Slash ripping into a guitar solo.
"X, you see the vehicle that started and backing up in the lot?"
Abbie, from a block down away, peered into the parking lot through binoculars. "It's a blue vehicle. Just started backing up."
"Got it." Preacher honed in.
Took a whole 14 seconds for him to make it from the stairs across the street to standing beside the blue Chevy sedan. He extended his right arm and placed the end of the silencer against the glass of the driver side window. The guy slung in the driver seat behind that glass had one of those looks on his face. The look of shocked wonder. That 'how did you do that?' look combined with a little 'please don't kill me' mixed in.
Preacher was used to it; seen it on countless faces from childhood through today. Along with destruction and a perfect symphony of chaos, he brought with him the constant elements of stealth and surprise. Evidence shown on the faces of those amazed by his performance, his unique abilities. He knew the facial muscles flexing under the skin creating that look of astonishment. It required four sets of muscles. Preacher could see those structures at work, the arteries and veins feeding them, the bone, teeth, organs, the spinal column supporting it all. Preacher, even more than Lance, sees the parts, the pieces that make everything up. He is constantly constructing, de-constructing and re-constructing what he sees. Happens within the micro-seconds inside the flashes of moments.
The closest thing he can liken his inside-out view to is a CT scan. Like the marvelous machine, he sees the slices that join to comprise the whole. The stacked layers that make up the resulting human, from sole to crown. He specializes in tearing these layers apart; the outcome being a deceased or at least significantly deteriorated human.
Fun stuff going on inside that brain.
And funny that Lance sees it as a completely different brain from his own. Maybe that's funny. Mostly insane.
Of course, none of this crossed his mind as he squeezed his right index finger and pulled the trigger of the silenced 9mm in his hand. Before he pulled the trigger, he moved his aim to the left and down. The glass window shattered into thousands of shards as the slug traveled through it, then through this gent's right thigh, the rectus femoris muscle. Preacher moved his aim slightly and put a bullet through shattered glass and the guy's left thigh. That was just mean.
One might think this behavior both cruel and unusual, but then one might not see the world Preacher sees. This world is flash and instant and recognition and process and action bringing about reaction. Two bullets through two legs for this particular human were directly related to the two items resting on the passenger seat in the blue Chevy sedan.
A pistol and a cell phone were right there in plain site. Now, a phone and gun by themselves are not incriminating. But a car starting up right as Barwani leaves the building, the driver of Arabic descent, the gun and phone all combined to tell the highly skilled terrorist hunter more than he needs to know.
Preacher shoved the still-smoking end of the silencer into the guy's neck. Skin singed and sizzled under the heat and applied pressure. A perfect little painful circle. He spoke calmly, casually in Arabic. "You probably think you are not going to help me brother, but I'll give a choice. Do you want to answer a couple of questions and go to jail or remain silent and go to hell right now like your friends across the street?"
1, 2, 3. Nothing but winces, painful winces and gritted teeth. Hell it is.
Preacher ripped the door open, grabbed the fella by his jacket and pulled him out and to the ground. He kicked him over onto his stomach and that's where the tough as nails terrorist gave way to scared human facing immediate death.
"No please, I will help. Please." He pleaded in English as the silencer barrel was placed to the back of his head.
"Now?"
"Yes, what do you want to know?" The guy's face turned back to the ground.
Preacher is mean, really mean. A piece of crap helping Moustafa al-Barwani in any manner is aiding an abetting one of the world's cruelest mass murderers. One of the worst. Preacher paid this idiot for his sins by jamming the silencer like a jackhammer violently into the back of his head which resulted in the poor fella's face being smashed into the asphalt below. Broken nose and teeth. Mean.
"You can stay alive if you tell me where I can find him." Preacher bent down to a knee, but just then the cell phone in the car rang. Preacher shook his head. "Nevermind." He removed the wallet from the guy's back pocket, stood and moved his aim to the man's left shoulder and fired. He did the same to the right shoulder. Mean. The terrorist wannabe yelped then began crying. "Amir, not your real name, your trip to hell is going to have to wait. You need to suffer here on Earth with the rest of us mortals a little longer. You'll bleed out in about 30 minutes from those four wounds."
"Location?" It was Fuchs in Preacher's ear.
"Still at building, across the street. You?"
"Be at your location in 45 seconds."
"Your targets?"
"Down. Both." Fuchs did to his two targets what Preacher had done two minutes earlier.
"Your new target?" Fuchs asked, breathing hard. He was running.
"Lost him for the moment but found an acquaintance of his." Preacher stepped to the side and kicked the terrorist driver on the ground hard in the right temple. Knocked him out cold. He then slid into the Chevy and picked up the ringing cell phone. "I think this is my new friend calling now."
He put the Chevy in gear and slammed the gas pedal to the floor. Wheels screamed as the car rocketed forward then left then right out onto the street where he went right again. He shot across the four lanes and pulled up to the curb next to the two men he had shot a whole three minutes earlier. A nice woman had stopped to offer assistance to the man still alive and writhing in pain on the bloodstained concrete. The other fella was indeed already dead from a headshot.
Preacher switched the gun to his left hand and extended it outside the car.
"Miss, please step back." He used a deep French accent.
"Oh my god," she shrieked when she saw the gun. She got up and stepped back a dozen steps.
The guy whining and moaning on the ground saw Preacher and rose to an elbow. "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" The bleeding terrorist smiled as he spat the words.
Preacher replied with three bullets that burst through the guy's forehead
and out the back with a cloud of cranial matter and pinkish mist. And he turned and hit the gas again. He set the gun in his lap and dialed 9-1-1 on the terrorist's cell phone. It was nice that Canada followed suit with the US on emergency services communications.
"9-1-1 what is your emergency?" A weary female voice asked.
"Please listen carefully." Preacher spoke English with a heavy German accent. "A man has been shot in the parking lot across from 716 Wyckham. This man is an accomplice to a known terrorist. Please notify the Royal Canadian Mounted Police about this man. The two men lying dead on the sidewalk just across the street are known individuals on the Interpol terrorist list. Thank you." He hung up and spoke into the radio microphone.
"Foxy, X, I just notified emergency services and the mounted police about the guy left back in front of the building."
"Where are you now?" Fuchs asked.
"Driving west on Wyckham. About to go north. You?"
"Back at the apartment building. People are running around pretty good here. Think I hear some sirens."
"I've got Y." Abbie pulled up next to Fuchs. The senior operative nodded at her.
"Location of your new friend?" Fuchs asked.
"I'll take his call when he calls back in a few seconds. I have a feeling about where he is headed. He's on foot so I have a distinct advantage for the moment." Preacher whipped the car to the left onto a street two blocks over. He then slowed and moved to the curb. He shut the car off.
"Need my help?"
"Thought I did. But now I think it best if you two stay back a bit."
"Got it. Out."
"Out."
Preacher looked back over his left shoulder and saw an individual come up a set of stairs to street level between two tight buildings. The figure turned left. He would be across the street from Preacher's position in about 15 seconds.
He took this huge allotment of time and thought about Fuchs. The guy was 21 years older than Lance, than Preacher. That made him 50 or 51. Up there. He'd been with or around or near Fuchs dozens of times over the previous decade in and out of the CIA. Some of their time together stretched into weeks. Most were brief missions. Foxy was the proverbial man/machine. He just kept going. Never stopped.
The Perfect Teacher Page 14