by Chris Lowry
“Ready for a lesson? Be aware of your surroundings. Always. No exceptions.”
He glared at her and struggled to his knees.
“Who sent you? You're too dumb to work for me.”
“I get the job done,” he said.
“So I hear. Who sent you?”
He climbed to his feet and checked the small of his back. His gun was still there.
“Doesn't matter. I'm here.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“As long as I am,” foster said from behind her.
He walked past her and flanked Wallace so they both were facing her. Maddie studied them both, sizing up angles and speed. She knew Foster was studying her back, and he had more experience. More years too, yes, but that didn't necessarily mean he was slow on the draw.
“Do you want us to finish the job?” he asked.
“I'm only here to make sure the job is done. I know him.”
“I know him too.”
“Well enough?” she said.
The stand off lasted for a minute longer then Maddie smiled. It lit up her face and made her look like a different person.
“Still hungry?” she asked Wallace and walked away.
The men watched her go as she headed back in the direction of the hotel.
“Careful of her,” warned Foster.
“You better believe it,” Wallace answered.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The fake flames of a faux fireplace flickered in the executive lounge at the airport terminal. Wallace and Foster sat in two plush leather chairs, their backs to the floor to ceiling windows that looked out over the tarmac. They faced a wall made of glass, tinted so they could look out on the terminal walkway at the people passing by, mirrored so those same people couldn't look in.
"The best thief in the world looks just like you or I," Foster instructed Wallace as the muscular man beside him stuffed a candy bar into his mouth. Foster sipped a demitasse of espresso and waited for him to swallow before he answered.
"But we're not thieves."
"Sure we are," Foster set the cup onto the saucer. He smiled at the attendant who fluttered by to pick it up and nodded at her offer of a second.
"We don't steal items," he said after she left. "We steal lives. Observe that gentleman."
He nodded to the row of public pay phones on the wall across the terminal. The man in question was dressed in an Armani suit, impeccably tailored. He stood at the phone banks gesturing with his hands as he shouted into the phone. They couldn't hear him, but they could see his lips moving.
"What do you think about him?"
"He's a thief?"
"You're just guessing," Foster chided. He took the proffered cup from the attendant as she returned and blew across the top of the steaming coffee.
"Study him," he instructed. What can you tell me?"
Wallace sat up in the chair and nibbled some chocolate of the tip of his thick thumb.
"He's not in a hurry. He's yelling at someone on the phone. Nice haircut, luggage must be checked because all he's got is that briefcase. I can't see his hands because he keeps moving them around-"
"No, that's good," said Foster. "Very good work. Now watch."
He tipped up the cup and emptied the espresso.
On the other side of the terminal, the businessman set his briefcase on the floor beside another briefcase belonging to a second man who hunched against the pay phones, trying to ignore his more vocal companion.
As they watched, the businessman laughed into the phone, hung it up and reached down. He picked up the other briefcase beside his and walked away.
"That was pretty good," said Wallace.
"It was excellent," said Foster. He shifted up out of his seat. "Except he robbed our mark."
Wallace scrambled up and started after the robber. Foster grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
“Slowly.”
He led Wallace out of the executive lounge and they excused themselves as they pushed through a passing throng of people. Foster tapped the second man on the shoulder. He was in his sixties, a permanent scowl scarred into his wrinkled visage.
“Excuse me Sir,” Foster said. “Someone stole your briefcase.”
The man glanced down at his feet and kicked over the businessman's briefcase.
“Damn it.”
Foster tugged on his sleeve.
“We were over there and saw it happen.”
“Why didn't you stop him then?”
“He went this way,” Foster pulled the sleeve into the opposite direction. “Maybe we can still catch him.”
He led the man down a corridor away from the direction the thief escaped. Foster tugged him into a bathroom.
“Let's check in here.”
He opened the last bathroom stall. The gentle grip on his sleeve clamped down like a vice and spun him into the tile wall. The man bounced off with a small cry and pressed back against it.
Foster glanced at Wallace by the door. He nodded. Foster pulled a pistol from a shoulder holster and shot the man twice in the head. He reached in, arranged the fallen body and positioned the wound over the toilet. There was just a spray of blood against the wall.
“Lock it,” he instructed and took up Wallace's position by the door.
The muscular man went into the stall, twisted the lock and vaulted over the top. No one would discover the body until it started to stink.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The hotel room wasn't as expensive or as opulent as she had grown accustomed to, but Maddie made due. She luxuriated under the steaming stream of scalding water in the shower, and drifted out of the bathroom in an exhale of fog. She settled on the bed next to a rucksack of her possessions, the only thing she had brought on this trip to make sure the job was done.
She rooted around and pulled out the picture of her and Brill from her office still in the frame and stared at it. She traced an elegantly manicured nail around his face.
"Brill," she sighed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Brill stared into the fire. His shoulder ached and he shifted trying to relieve some of the pressure. It wasn't the first time he had been shot, and if he lived through this one, it might not be the last. Hazard of the job, he thought.
He wanted antibiotics though. The jungle was not the place to have a wound, and even though the bandages were changed back at the camp, sweat dripped off his body and soaked through the gauze. Not an ideal environment.
He loved the jungle though, the heat, the mystery. He considered the bush his home, his birthing ground, and though he had operated in every environment imaginable on the planet, there were two places that called to him. The jungle and the desert.
He shifted again and nudged the sleeping form of Ron with his foot. Her eyes popped open and she sat up with bleary eyes.
"What?"
"Someone's coming," he nodded toward the cave opening and tried to stand up.
A squad of six Federales stepped into the cave, the firelight gleaming off the oily sheen of their AK-47 rifles. They wore bandannas over their faces, camouflage colors that matched the tiger stripe pattern on their surplus uniforms.
"Damn," she said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Memories are funny things that come and go like the hint of the wind. Sparked by a smell, or sound or taste, the brain travels back in time to a place that no longer exists and a moment captured like a photograph. Brill sat in the back of the rocking military transport, the breeze on his face full of jungle smells and the only sound the roaring of the diesel engine as it puttered up the muddy road.
He remembered Bern.
The city in Switzerland was clean and industrial, modern lines shoving at the edges of history and pushing it back into the shadowed side streets. One of the skyscrapers had a penthouse office occupied by a small firm that financed arms deals to Africa.
One of those men stood in front of him in the elevator. He gave Brill the once over as he stepped in and
dismissed him as just another salesman. Plain and simple in a gray suit, white shirt and blue tie. Easily forgettable.
"Hold the door please," she called in Swiss German.
A beautiful woman rushed across the lobby floor.
The man reached out to shove the close button, but she scampered inside, catching the automatic safety feature by waving her palm between the closing doors.
She shot him a glare as he leered.
"Glad you could make it," he shrugged.
The man was dumpy, and rotund. His suit was expensive, but wrinkled and stained, as if he wore it days on end, and he smelled of cheap cologne and bad decisions.
His head wobbled as he studied her legs, moving up to her bottom and then her chest.
The elevator dinged on the sixteenth floor and the blond stepped out.
"Asshole," she muttered.
"What can I say," he called after her. "You're gorgeous."
The doors whisked closed and the man glanced over his shoulder at Brill.
"I mean, she was gorgeous."
Brill lifted a silenced pistol from under his coat and shot him in the head twice. He reached forward, pressed all of the buttons and got out on the next floor.
He walked over to the stairwell door and shoved it open. Before it closed, he could hear the screaming from one floor up as the bloody body was discovered.
CHAPTER FORTY
He had been in prisons before, worse places than this one, but not by much. The walls were stone, carved from the ground and stacked to form a hovel with bars, a simple square block construction that relied on gravity and cheap mortar to keep standing.
There were two rows of three cells along either side, a large jail for such a small little village. Brill surmised they must do a brisk trade in drunk tourists or jungle workers who frequented the bars and whorehouses on the weekends.
The smell was atrocious.
Urine and vomit lent credence to the drunk tank theory, and stains of indeterminate origin kept him from investigating too closely.
His shoulder ached.
There were no benches in the cell, so he and Ron sat on the least filth encrusted portion of the floor and leaned against the cold stone wall. They watched a brave rat move from one cell across the hall and under the bars into theirs. It showed no sign of fear. Brill knew they wouldn't get much sleep, if any at all. A rat that brave would have friends, and those friends would start eating what they could grab off sleeping prisoners.
He clinched his fist, partially to protect his fingers and suppressed a groan as he shifted.
"I would ask how you feel," Ron whispered. "But considering the circumstances."
"I feel like I've been shot," he grunted.
"You look it."
"This? I spent hours working on this casual cool blood soaked look. It's all the rage in Milan."
She nodded.
"I pegged you for a fashionista," she almost grinned.
"It was the poncho, wasn't it."
"Tourist trap couture."
One of the federales, a thin man with a mustache so thick it looked responsible for the bowing of his head that gave him the appearance of a culture, leaned around the bar and made a kissing sound at them.
"I think you have an admirer," Brill nodded.
"So long as he stays on his side of the bars," she said.
The jailer pulled a ring of keys off his belt and jangled them as he leered.
Ron scooted closer to Brill, helping to prop him up against the wall. He glared at the guard.
The federale didn't back down. After all, he had a gun and probably buddies out in the front.
But he didn't come into the cell either.
Brill chalked it up as a win.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The waves crashed in from the Pacific in long rolling swells that climbed up to five feet and washed up onto the sand. The beach was mostly private, except for a few surfers carving the water, and several small groups scattered in small clumps.
Foster and Wallace stood on the dune and watched the people. They had driven straight through to the small beach side community where the safe house was hidden, and checked into a hotel on the edge of town.
He wasn't here, they knew, not yet. It was only a matter of time and with such a small population, he would be easy to find.
Foster snorted.
"See him?"
He nodded and Wallace followed the start to a corpulent man wallowing in the shallows.
"How could I miss?"
"Study him," Foster advised.
"Study what? He's a small whale."
"A man in our line of work must guard against that."
"Anyone ever tell you that you're obsessed with size?"
"His reflexes are slow. His breathing is labored. He stands out where you always want to blend in and be forgettable."
"I don't think your accent is that forgettable."
"Like this?" Foster switched to a plain middle American accent.
"Or maybe this one," he shifted to a Southern drawl.
"Neat trick," Wallace raised an eyebrow.
"You need a few more tricks in your toolbox."
"I get the job done."
"It's more than a job. It's an art form. That's the difference between you and him. He was an artist."
"What happened?"
Foster sighed.
"She did."
"Who?"
"Our employer."
"She happened?"
"She distracted him. The distraction made him slow and it cost him."
"What did it cost?"
"His life," said Foster.
He turned around and stared across the street.
Maddie leaned against the wall of a building, half hidden in the shadows and waved with one hand.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The federale was back. This time he brought a friend. The second guard was twice his size in the waist but only had mustache half as thick. There was a rule somewhere, maybe in the third world country regulation handbook that all authority figures must have a mustache. Why else would so many grow them?
Ron huddled against Brill as half Stache took the keys from the first Federale and unlocked the door.
He motioned to his companion, who lifted a rifle, chambered a round and pointed it through the bars.
Half Stache approached with a grin. He grabbed Ron and jerked her off the floor and pressed her against the wall.
Brill reached up, grabbed his wrist and twisted.
Bones popped and the man screamed.
Brill leveraged half Stache between the rifle and Ron as he scrambled up. The Federale outside shouted and yelled, but couldn't get a clear shot.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The front door to the jail slipped open and Johnson eased his bulk through just as the screaming started. The two guards dozing behind the desk jumped, skittered between the shouts from the hall and the new visitor at the door.
Timing was a bitch.
"Howdy partners," Johnson waved with his left hand.
One of the young guards pulled his pistol and wavered back and forth, hall, door, hall door.
Johnson reached his left hand into his pocket and pulled out a thick roll of one hundred dollar bills.
Both guards stopped skittering, transfixed by more money than they would see in their lifetime.
Johnson held out the money roll. The second guard took a step toward him.
He pulled a silenced pistol in his right hand from behind his back and shot the guards in the head with two muted pops.
"Surprise," Johnson grinned.
He shoved the roll back into his pocket and went down the hall to investigate.
Johnson saw the backside of the Federale wiggling against the bar as the man reached the tip of the rifle barrel around, searching for a clear shot.
He never turned around as Johnson slid down the hall and eased up next to him to press the end of the pistol to his temple.
"Little pig, little pig," Johnson chuckled and pulled the trigger.
The Federale dropped like a puppet with the strings cut. The rifle clattered to the floor.
Brill slammed half stache into the bars and bounced his head off the metal. He shoved him through the open door and Johnson finished him off.
The giant man peered through the bars and grinned.
"Ready for a rematch?"
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The truck rumbled through the jungle heading East. It was another military transport which seemed to be the second most preferred mode of transportation after the VW in this part of Mexico.
Brill and Ron sat in the back, unbound but bunched together. Two balaclava wearing commandos in all black BDU’s were seated at posts on either side of the back gate, watching the dirt road slide by underneath them.
Johnson sat by the one on the right, facing Brill and smiling.
“I knew it was you as soon as his goons busted in. I tell you that was some piece of work. Beautiful,” he made a gun with his finger and his thumb and clicked it twice.
“Through the window. I couldn't believe it,” he continued. “You know, I was sent to stop you. I kept waiting for some gringo to come waltzing in with a violin case in hand, ready to mow down every breathing thing that got in the way. I should have known.”
Johnson reached down to a duffel bag between his feet under the seat and rooted around without looking. He grinned even bigger when he found what he wanted and pulled out a half empty bottle of mescal.
“Join me?”
He unscrewed the top and tipped it back for two large swallows, then held the bottle out toward them. Ron shook her head no, but Brill grimaced as he sat up and took a swig before passing it back.
The smooth liquor burned a little going down, but the warm feeling it created in his stomach spread slowly and eased the ache in his shoulder.