That was unexpected. “Me, either.”
“But . . .” Jill was closer now. She stopped, so close that I could just barely feel the soft curves of her body against me. It was electric. It had been a long time. “You’re also the man that saved my life.”
Her fingers were soft on my cheek. Then I was pulling her tight. Against all reason, I kissed her. She responded, quickly, aggressively. She felt so very good. “You don’t have to do this,” I said, and I meant it.
She whispered in my ear. “I know.”
Wide awake, I stared at the dark ceiling, listening to the night sounds of Zubara coming from the open window and Jill’s rhythmic breathing next to me. Her head was resting on my shoulder, and she had fallen asleep with one hand caressing the mottled scars on my chest.
Man, I needed that.
I moved the hair from her face, and she shifted slightly tighter against me in response.
What the hell was I doing? Men like me weren’t allowed to have relationships. It wasn’t that I wasn’t attracted to her. . . . Are you kidding? She was beautiful and had an unbelievable body. No problem there. I’m only human. There was nothing I’d rather do, but I actually . . . hell. I don’t know. It wasn’t like I was used to feelings.
Jill was different than the others.
But I couldn’t afford affection. Affection was weakness. I’d only ever had one serious relationship, and that had ended really badly. In the terrible world I inhabited, sex was business and love was for suckers. Loyalty was just something that could be used against you by anybody more ambitious than you were, my current predicament being a perfect example.
On the one hand, I felt like the biggest jerk in the world, like I was somehow taking advantage of this poor scared girl who had looked to me for protection, though it wasn’t exactly like I had initiated this. On the other hand, I was thinking about how stupid I was. The cold, calculating part of my brain was warning me that Jill was probably just doing this to cement her chances of me not selling her out, that somehow she was better at emotional manipulation than I was. Maybe the con was getting conned.
Then again, I was at least a decade older than her, probably more. Since I spent my days murdering scumbags, it seemed odd that I would have some sort of moral hang up about that, but I did feel like a dirty old man. On a strictly practical note, it made me really glad that at forty I had the physical conditioning of an Olympic athlete. Holy crap, the girl is energetic. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
So I lay there, beating myself up, yet somehow feeling strangely happy. It was kind of weird.
Jill stirred. “You awake?” she asked softly.
“Just thinking is all.”
I could see the whiteness of her smile in the dark. “Don’t worry. We will find them.” That hadn’t been what I was thinking about at all. In fact, this was the first time in weeks that every one of my thoughts hadn’t been driven by revenge. And for some reason, I liked how she said we would find them.
“You know, Jill, you’re really pretty when you’re homicidal.”
She giggled. “You think too much. Wanna go again?”
Maybe life doesn’t have to totally suck.
Chapter 15:
Pancakes
LORENZO
May 4
For some reason, despite massive setbacks, Dead Six boning me at every turn, being half a million dollars poorer, getting shot the day before, and still unable to get Adar’s box, I felt better today than I had in quite a while. I had gone out onto the balcony and was staring at the sun just beginning to light the morning fog. Carl joined me a few minutes later, leaned on the balcony, and regarded me suspiciously. As usual, we were the first up. “You kids get that out of the way finally? Been sniffing around each other like horny teenagers since she got here.”
The call to prayer began to resonate across the city. “Why, Carl, my good man. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
He grunted. “Sure. So, what now, genius?”
I had been thinking about that. “You’ve seen the e-mails to Al Falah. The big meeting is on for June eighteenth. So we’ve got just over a month to get ready for the Phase Three.”
“So we go in, but without Adar’s box, we just die? Good plan.”
“I might be able to pick it.”
Carl nodded. “It’s like a thousand years old and has something like two hundred tumblers, and if Reaper’s numbers are right, you’ve got ten minutes maybe to get through before a couple hundred pissed off Saudis start shooting at you.”
We had been through all this before, but it never hurt to go over the options again. “Explosives.”
Carl knew his bombs better than I did. “That much reinforced material.” He held up a stubby finger. “First, too loud. Pissed Saudis, remember?” Then another. “Second, you won’t be able to smuggle enough in to make a shaped charge that can punch through.”
“What if I were to find explosives inside the palace?”
“Ten minutes,” Carl said. “Good luck. It’s true what they say.” He took a swig of his beer, breakfast of champions. “Getting laid makes you dumb.”
“There are four other keys in existence. Adar only had one. We’ve got a month. We could steal one of the others,” I suggested. Carl started to count on his fingers again. “I know, I know. One’s been missing since the Third Crusade. The others are well guarded, and any attempt to take them would cause the vault’s security to triple and probably get the meeting canceled.” Adar, the exiled heir, had been our only hope.
“Maybe we try something different,” Carl said.
“Find Big Eddie and kill him before he kills us? I’d love to. Since nobody knows who he really is, if he’s really even one man at all, and he works through layer after of layer of anonymous intermediaries, how do you suggest we do that?” I had been Big Eddie’s single most effective thief for years, and I had never met the man. The intermediaries I had worked for had never met the man, either, and the second I started looking, he’d somehow know. “It’d be like catching the devil.”
“I was just sayin’. I suppose I could just lay around in my underwear, get drunk, and watch TV until we run out of time.”
“That’s always an option. I’ll keep working the streets. Dead Six will screw up. They’re only human,” I said. My phone buzzed. “Unknown number,” I said suspiciously as I opened it. “Yeah?”
“Hello, Mr. Lorenzo.” It was the Fat Man, sounding as ominously vacant as usual. “Our employer was wondering if you had made any progress in retrieving his box.”
Oh, now it was his box. “Not yet. Dead Six is slippery.”
“I understand. Disappointing, but I do understand. Big Eddie believes in fully supporting his employees with all of our organization’s resources. His eyes are everywhere. Be ready on the eleventh. I will be in contact at exactly seven-fifteen in the morning, Zubaran time. I will give you the exact location of Dead Six. You will need to act quickly. There will be no second chance.”
I was so shocked that I almost said thank-you.
“And as your immediate supervisor, I need to warn you. Big Eddie is concerned that you are not showing proper motivation. Motivation is very important, Mr. Lorenzo.” His voice was urgent. “Fear and pain, these are good motivators, but loss . . . loss is the finest of them all. Please don’t make me have to motivate you further. If I do not get a favorable report from you on the eleventh, I will be forced to use extreme motivation. Do you understand me, Mr. Lorenzo?”
“I hear you.” Psycho. “Just get me the location and I’ll handle the rest.”
“I like pancakes.” Then he hung up.
What the hell? Carl was looking at me strangely. My face must have betrayed my confusion. “The Fat Man’s going to give us Dead Six next week.”
My burly companion was actually shocked. “That’s like a miracle.”
“And he said he likes pancakes.”
“Huh?”
My phone buzzed again a moment later. I h
ad received a video message. There was no sound. It was the Fat Man, the bloated monstrosity, wearing a giant white suit, almost filling my phone’s screen. His bulk was squeezed impossibly into a restaurant booth, plate after empty plate stacked before him. He was shoveling pancakes into his mouth like some sort of industrial harvesting machine, barely pausing to breathe. He made a show of seeing the camera, stopped mid-mouthful, and made a big fake smile. His dark, empty eyes didn’t smile with his mouth. His face was stained with whipped cream and syrup. The lettering on the window behind him was backward, but read IHOP.
The camera angle changed, moving over his shoulder, and sitting at the table directly behind him were my mother and my younger sister, Jenny, still in her uniform, probably taking a break from work, having an animated conversation, oblivious to the sociopath stuffing himself a few feet away. The camera panned back to the Fat Man, and he waved at me.
The son of a bitch was in Texas, personally keeping tabs on my mom.
Is it still considered a miracle if it comes from the devil?
VALENTINE
Fort Saradia National Historical Site
May 4
1205
Sarah was anxiously waiting for me in her room when I returned. My trip outside the compound had taken longer than I’d expected. The real trick had been convincing the guys at the motor pool to not log that Tailor and I took one of the vehicles for two hours. That hadn’t been a problem, either. Things were getting bad enough that few of us that were still alive gave a crap about the rules anymore.
Sarah opened the door quickly when I knocked, and kissed me as I stepped inside. “I was worried,” she said. The situation in the Zoob had been steadily deteriorating, and our shootout with that Lorenzo guy at the Hasa Market hadn’t helped. It was getting difficult for us to move around the city quickly, as we had to spend a lot of time going around checkpoints.
“Sorry it took so long,” I said. “Traffic. We had to go way the hell out of our way to avoid being stopped.”
“I know,” Sarah replied. “I’m just glad you’re back. How did it go?”
“We’re on,” I said. I retrieved a piece of paper from my pocket. “She’ll be here soon. She wants us to meet her in person. If she’s satisfied that we’re legit, she’ll arrange to pick us up shortly after that.”
“Wow,” Sarah said. “Wait, she wants to meet all four of us? In person?”
“I’m afraid so. We’re going to have to find a way to get you, me, Hudson, and Tailor out in town, together, without raising any suspicions.”
“Shit,” Sarah said. “I could talk to the other controllers. They could cover for us.”
“Can you trust them?”
Sarah’s expression sank. “I don’t know. I can’t believe we’re just going to leave them. I mean, Anita is my friend.”
I put my arms on Sarah’s shoulders and looked down into her eyes. “Listen to me. I know this is hard. I don’t like the idea of leaving Byrne, Frank, Cromwell, or Holbrook behind, either. I’ve been through a lot of shit with those guys. But it took a lot of doing just to get the four of us out. The more people I try to bring in, the greater the risk of compromise.”
“I know, I know,” Sarah said, sounding exasperated. “I get it. We need to be secretive about this, otherwise your friends will get pissed and leave us.”
“I’m not worried about that,” I said. “Sarah, if Ling thinks I’m screwing with her she’ll have us all killed. These are dangerous people.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it, either,” I said honestly. “But it’s the best I could do. Look . . . if you’re having second thoughts, we don’t have to go. Tailor and Hudson can go by themselves.”
“Mike, you don’t have—”
I interrupted her. “Yes I do, damn it. If you stay I’m staying. I’m not leaving without you.”
Sarah’s eyes widened slightly as what I’d just said sunk in. She shook her head slightly and gently put a hand on my cheek. “You’re so stupid,” she said. She then leaned in and kissed me, deeply and for a long time.
“What do you mean, ‘stupid’?” I asked. We leaned in close together, so that my forehead was touching hers. I looked down into her eyes.
Sarah smiled. “I mean you say ridiculously sweet things like that and you’re not being ironic. You’re completely sincere, and you have no clue how rare that is. You’re like a character in a bad romance novel.”
“Well, it’s your own fault, you know. You jumped me, remember?”
“I know,” Sarah said. “Crazytown, remember? I warned you.”
“You did. But listen,” I said, seriousness edging back into my voice, “I’m asking you. Please, leave with me. This whole thing is going to hell in a ham sandwich. We have to get out while the getting’s good. So let’s go! Run away together.”
“Go where?” Sarah asked. “I mean, really, Mike, where can we go?”
“Anywhere we want,” I said, trying to sound more confident than I really was. “We can travel the world for a while until this whole thing blows over. I don’t think Project Heartbreaker is going to be around much longer. This country is falling apart. After things calm down, we can go home.”
“Can I at least leave a note for my friends, warning them to get out?”
“Why not? They’ll assume we bugged out on them anyway. It’s not like I was planning to fake our deaths or anything. Tailor will be pissed, though.”
“Fuck him,” Sarah said dismissively. “He’s the one that got you into this mess, isn’t he? If he gives you any shit, I’ll break his stupid face.” She smiled again, and a surge of triumphant relief washed over me. I knew she was hesitant to just disappear and leave the others behind. I’d been terrified that she’d want to stay behind.
“I have something for you,” Sarah said. She handed me a brown envelope. It contained all of my personal identification documents, including my passport, that had been taken from me before we left the States.
“How did you get these?” I asked.
“I have access to the safe,” she said, eyes twinkling mischievously. “It’s not like anyone goes in and checks to make sure your papers are still there.”
I shook my head slightly. “You’re amazing, you know that?”
“So tell me,” Sarah said after a moment. “Who is this Ling woman? You haven’t exactly been forthcoming about your history with her. Is she like an ex-girlfriend or something? You need to tell me the whole story.”
Sarah was right. I owed her that much. I had avoided talking about Mexico the entire time I’d been in Zubara. As time went on, the parallels between our doomed mission in Mexico and Project Heartbreaker had made me increasingly uncomfortable.
“No, nothing like that,” I said honestly. “I met Ling in Mexico last year when the situation had already gone to shit for Vanguard. We’d been contracted by the Mexican Nationalist Government to help secure some trouble areas in the southern part of the country. Some drug lords turned warlords had cut out little empires, so the government hired Vanguard to do a lot of high-risk operations.”
“High-risk operations?” Sarah asked suspiciously.
“VIP protection, search-and-destroy missions, things like that. It was our biggest contract ever. Decker, my old boss, hired a ton of extra guys and brought in every team in the company.”
“Including yours,” Sarah said.
“Switchblade Four. We got the most critical assignments, raids on the bad guys, ambushing militia convoys, stuff like that. We were making progress until the UN moved in. Thirty thousand peacekeepers came in and unilaterally cut a cease-fire with the warlord in Cancun.”
“Where does Ling come in?”
“We’d been sitting on our asses for days when she approached Decker with a business proposal. She said that there was a Cuban-flagged freighter docked in Cancun that was full of weapons going to the warlords, but she doesn’t give a crap about the weapons. She says there’s something else on the freight
er, something her group, real secretive bunch, really wants. A girl.”
“A girl?”
“Fourteen years old. A prisoner. Ling told Decker, that her organization was willing to pay a crazy sum of money if we’d provide airlift and help get this girl back.”
“Why did they bring you guys in?”
“I’m not sure. I never really asked her, and she didn’t volunteer a lot of information. Anyway, Decker asks for volunteers, says there’ll be a huge operational bonus to the team that goes. We volunteered.”
“What happened?”
“Well, we got the girl,” I said, my voice softening just a bit. “Stirred up a hornet’s nest. Our chopper got hit on the way out. We went down at this abandoned resort hotel, landed right in an empty pool. Then the UN showed up and started shooting at us. Once the government collapsed, Vanguard was declared war criminals.”
Sarah was suspicious. “This group that Ling works for, who are they?”
“Exodus.” The look on Sarah’s face told me she’d heard of them.
“Are you sure?” Sarah asked.
“That’s what she told me.”
“I thought they were a myth. Wow.”
“I know, right? The whole thing was crazy. But it was so much money.”
“Mike, tell me what happened,” Sarah said, looking into my eyes.
I took a deep breath, glanced away for a second, then met Sarah’s gaze again. I hadn’t told anyone aside from Hawk the full story of what happened in Mexico. “Exodus thinks I’m some kind of hero.”
VALENTINE
Umm Shamal District
May 5
0200
It took us over two hours to get to Ling’s designated meeting spot. As was the usual case now, we had to go way out of our way to avoid downtown areas, major intersections, and other places where there were likely to be military or police checkpoints. The tiny Emirate of Zubara was holding its breath, waiting for the civil war to start.
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