by Jon F. Merz
I heard Ava’s voice behind me. “Frederick-? My god, who is that?”
“Your would-be assassin,” I said.
And then I passed out.
“How did you know?”
My head was still aching, but I was back awake and leaning back on the sofa in Ava’s study. The fire continued to blaze and warm the room. We’d found Frederick sedated in the butler’s pantry. Since it was still storming outside, Ava put him in one of her bedrooms and let him sleep it off. I’d called Niles and let him know that Frost was dead.
“When we went to the kitchen, something felt different. But I couldn’t put my finger on it until it occurred to me that there was no good reason for Frederick to be washing dishes. You’ve got two dishwashers in the kitchen. When we were getting ready to leave the kitchen, he had his back to me and I saw something behind his right ear. Just a hint. But it bothered me enough to make me think. And I happen to trust my gut.”
“Why go through all that trouble?” asked Ava. “Someone of his supposed caliber I would have thought he would just walk in and start shooting.”
“Frost has survived as long as he has by being careful. I think he wanted to see if you had any protection. So a cheap disguise would buy him time to do that. He could have walked into an ambush otherwise, and he wasn’t the type to do that.”
“Well,” said Ava. “We’ll never know now, I suppose.”
“Would you have preferred I left him alive?”
“I guess not.” Ava stoked the fire and glanced back at me. “This doesn’t change anything about how I feel about you. You’re coarse and uncouth most times.”
“And you’re obnoxiously spoiled.”
“This won’t change how we interact at the Council.” Ava grinned. “However, you do have some talents. And you did manage to keep me safe.”
She paused.
I grinned.
“So…thank you.”
“That must have hurt.”
“More than I’ll ever admit to,” said Ava.
“I’ll take that drink now, if the offer still stands.”
Ava looked amused. “I’ll bet you will.”
I watched her make it like a pro and when she turned to hand it to me, there were a few cranberries floating with the lime. “Merry Christmas, Lawson.”
I clinked my glass with hers. “Merry Christmas, Ava.”
Do You Kill What I Kill?
December 2015
For some reason, December’s never been kind to me. Specifically Christmas. It’s kinda like every time I get just a bit excited about the Yuletide season, someone comes along and fucks it up. And then I have to get all Fixer on them and they usually end up dead. And I usually end up drinking far too much.
Alone.
Like AC/DC said: it’s criminal, there ought to be a law
I was shopping at a small boutique outside of Boston when my cell buzzed. One look told me it was Niles calling. And one twinge in my gut told me it was not going to be a fun call.
“Merry Christmas.”
“That’s not very PC,” said Niles. “I might celebrate Kwanzaa for all you know.”
“I’d pay money to see you in a dashiki,” I said with a chuckle. “I can just imagine how horrified you’d be if you had to wear one.”
“Too many colors and patterns,” said Niles. “It clashes with my love of Edwardian stainless steel.”
“Funny.” I glanced around and eased out of the store. No sense being one of those jerks who holds conference calls anywhere they feel like it. “So, what’s up?”
Niles paused. That was never a good sign. “Khaled Aziz. Remember him?”
“Only on bad days when a lot of alcohol can’t numb my brain.” I sighed. “Aziz worked as a contract stringer for every wanna-be terrorist outfit back in the 80s. Baader-Meinhof used him for some of their grunt work. Black September had him teaching bomb making courses. Hell, even the IRA invited him to play poker. He was in everyone’s pocket. He masterminded a lot of nasty shit. Bombs in baby carriages, an orphanage slaughter, hijackings, you name it. Not a nice guy.”
“And then word leaked that he was actually working for the Soviets.”
“Shouldn’t have mattered. The Soviets bankrolled most of those groups anyway.”
“But it did matter because someone took it upon themselves to wax Aziz. Head-jobbed him outside of Munich in 1987.” Niles cleared his throat.
“If I recall, they also put two into his heart.”
“Indeed.”
I glanced around the mall again. Around me, holiday shoppers swirled, oblivious to the barrage of memories floating through my skull. “Aziz was one of ours.” It wasn’t a revelation. Niles certainly knew it. “And someone took him out and made it look like the two shots to his heart were secondary, instead of the reverse. It’s not every day that a vampire decides to become a terrorist.”
“Aziz was special,” said Niles. “A wash-out from the Service. He never graduated. And once he got a taste for the action and intrigue, he decided to ply his wares to the highest bidder.”
“We cleaned up the mistake.”
“You cleaned up the mistake, my friend.”
The memory crystallized in my head. I’d picked up his trail in Switzerland and followed him into West Germany. In Munich, on the bank of the River Isar, I’d started closing the noose. In the main square of the city, Marienplatz, I’d seen Aziz duck into Frauenkirche, the Cathedral of Our Dear Lady. He must have known I was onto him. I’d had two choices: pull back and reacquire him later, or press the attack. After all, my mission wasn’t to surveil; it was to eliminate him. Once the Council had heard about his activities, they’d passed the sanction down and I’d drawn the assignment.
The twin towers of Frauenkirche shoot upwards almost three hundred feet. As the home of the Archdiocese of Munich, the place was lousy with priests and church workers. Aziz and I didn’t exactly blend in and he spotted me as I entered. He raced for the closest tower and I ran after him. Eventually, I’d cornered him at the top of the tower. Around us, the city sprawled. High as they were, you could pretty much see every point in Munich from that vantage point.
Aziz had smiled at me. “Your bullets won’t work on me.”
He must have thought I was human. His day got a lot worse when I told him who I was.
“How did they find out about me?”
I shrugged. The Council had Ferrets all over the world. Their job was intelligence collection and they were really good at it. Aziz must have screwed up somewhere. Maybe he just got too well known. And any threat to the vampire society - any risk of exposure to human - meant a sanction. “Does it matter?”
Aziz turned toward one of the windows. “The view is magnificent here.”
I held my pistol. The suppressor on the barrel would mask most of the noise. I was also using subsonic ammo at the time. “Turn around.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I won’t shoot you in the back. Turn around and accept it, Aziz.”
When he did, there were tears in his eyes. “I could have been a comrade of yours.”
I didn’t know why he’d failed training. He could have been a psychopath and the shrinks at the Fixer training facility in Vermont had decided he was a liability. Who knew? “In another time and place, maybe you could have been.”
I’d ended the conversation then by shooting him twice in the chest. The muffled sound of the Fixer bullets - wooden-tipped rounds that fragmented on impact - sounded like someone gasped for air twice. Aziz slumped to the ground and I watched his incisors lengthen into fangs and then retract to normal size. Once his death spiral was over, I pulled a separate magazine from my pocket with non-Fixer rounds and fired two more rounds into his head. The .22 caliber bullets didn’t exit the skull and for all intents and purposes, he might have been capped by the Israeli Mossad. They favored Beretta .22’s in those days.
“Lawson.”
I snapped back to reality. Overhead, the mall speakers wer
e starting to play “Do You Hear What I Hear?”
“I’m here.”
“Not for a long second you weren’t.” Niles sounded perturbed. But he wasn’t carrying the sort of memories I was.
“So, what’s the big deal about Aziz? He’s dead and gone and has been for almost thirty years.”
“Turns out Aziz had a brother.”
I frowned. “How did we miss that?”
“No idea. The Ferrets are pretty good at what they do, but even they aren’t perfect. We missed it and now it’s come back to bite us on the ass.”
“How so?”
“Amir Aziz decided to follow in his brother’s footsteps.”
“He tried to become a Fixer?”
Niles sniffed. “Nah, he skipped that part entirely. In fact, one of the reasons we missed him is because - near as we can tell - he went to ground soon after you wrapped things up over in Munich. Vanished. And since there wasn’t much point in tracking him down, we backburnered him.”
“More likely the Service completely forgot about him.”
“That’s another way of putting it, yeah.”
I sighed. A lot of times, intelligence services come down with a bad case of tunnel vision. They stay so focused only on what is in front of them that they fail to completely miss the other threats brewing outside their narrow scope. “And now Amir has suddenly resurfaced?”
“With the Islamic State.”
“Oh, fucking great.”
A suburban mother decked out in Lululemon scowled at me as she nudged her kid away. I scowled back because it was obvious she had no idea how to squat given how flat her ass was, and as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t doing the pants justice. And second, her kid probably used worse language than I did. Whatever.
“Amir is mobile. You get my drift?”
“Yeah, you guys lost him again.”
Niles cleared his throat. “The only reason he came to our attention in the first place is the latest ISIS propaganda video had a bit of graffiti in Taluk in the background. It was almost unnoticeable, but our people picked up on it.”
“Why would he draw attention to himself at this moment? He’s gotta know we’d come after him.”
Niles paused. “I think that’s what he wants, Lawson.”
“What did the graffiti say?”
“It’s not really germane to our conversation, but let’s just say that it contained a threat to a specific target in the Middle East.”
“When do I leave?”
“Uh uh, you’re not going anywhere. That matter is being discussed on a whole other level. I’ll let you know if it requires your involvement or not. For the time being, you only have to worry about Amir.”
“Lucky me.” I took a breath. “You said he’s mobile. Where’d you lose him?”
Niles paused again and I was beginning to think there wasn’t anything good coming out of this conversation. “Truthfully, we have no idea where he is. And we have no idea where he was. Just that once we saw the Taluk in the video and saw that he had signed his name after it, we backtracked and ran it down. I’m not denying there’s been a massive screw-up.”
“Clusterfuck.”
“Agreed, but we have to focus on the fact that Amir is out there. And I think the chances are good that he’ll be coming for you.”
“Why? For all he knows, I could be dead by this point.”
“Yeah…” Niles’ voice trailed off.
“Oh for crying out loud, now what?”
“Someone accessed your personnel records yesterday. The break in our system came from an internet cafe in Brussels. But it was probably rerouted to a thousand different IP addresses before that. He could be anywhere, but it’s clear he’s looking for you.”
“Just how much information is in my record?”
“I wouldn’t go home,” said Niles.
I wasn’t particularly pleased that my personnel record had been accessed. The Council claimed their systems and networks were impenetrable, but that was bullshit. Spend enough time lurking around the Dark Web and you could find a teen ager who could probably hack what you needed for the right amount of money. Either that or you could just subcontract the job out to the Chinese. They had a whole department in their intelligence service dedicated to cyber warfare. Once again, the West was far behind the curve on that. So were vampires, for that matter.
The Fixer Service had its own safeguards in place that were supposed to prevent a breach, but they clearly hadn’t worked. Which left yours truly dangling out in the wind like a goddamned piece of bait.
I was used to it.
Sadly.
I knew Niles would run things down from his end. We’d worked together enough for me to trust him. To a point. Put too much trust in anyone in this business and you’d have a bad day eventually. I’d learned that lesson ages ago. Still a sucker for a pretty face, though. Some things never change. Even for a Fixer.
I looked around the mall and took stock. I was armed. I had plenty of cash on me. I needed a bolt-hole, because if Amir had my record then he also had all the addresses I currently used. I had to assume they were all blown.
The big problem facing me was that I couldn’t go proactive. I had no idea what Amir looked like, no idea where he was, and no idea if he was coming after me alone or with a team. Running around looking for him would be a foolish waste of time and energy. I had to make it look like I was in hiding otherwise he’d suspect I was laying an ambush for him.
Off-the-grid would work. It would make finding me enough of a challenge that it seemed to not be a set-up.
I activated an invisible app on my phone and then called Niles back.
“That was quick.”
“Can you see where I am right now?”
I heard Niles typing on his keyboard. “Give me a second.”
“Don’t say the location, just let me know when you have it.” My phone had a homing application embedded on it that I could activate or disable if need be.
After a moment, Niles came back on. “All right, I’ve got you.”
“Call the establishment and ask them to page me to a courtesy phone.”
“They still have those things?”
“We’ll find out.” I hung up and waited. After three minutes, I heard my name being paged over the intercom and wandered over to a security desk. He pointed me to a phone and I picked it up.
“Lawson.”
“Okay, what’s the deal?”
“While you and your wonder boys work the circuits, I need to find a place to lay low.”
“You’re hiding?”
“No, but I need to make it hard for Amir to find me so he doesn’t suspect what I’m doing.”
“Bringing him to you.”
“Yeah. I don’t want to have to keep looking over my shoulder. It’s bad for my back.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Loyalist. Preferably with no one home.”
“Got it. I’ll check the network and call you back.”
I handed the phone back. Loyalists were humans that helped vampires from time-to-time. In exchange for a stipend, they agreed not to reveal what they knew about us, gave us help if we needed it, and even opened up their homes in case of emergency.
It took Niles five minutes to call me back. The security guard looked annoyed, but the hell with him.
“What have you got?”
Niles cleared his throat again. “Family’s away. Local to you. You know Medfield at all?”
I thought back to when I was there for a showdown at the State Hospital. “Uh, yeah, I think I can find my way there.”
Niles gave me the address. “Keypad entry. 9169. Got it?”
“What’s the place like?”
“No idea. But they’ve got a long driveway which I would assume means it’s somewhat secluded. I didn’t think you’d mind that.”
“Less chance of nosey neighbors,” I nodded. “Yeah that’ll work. Thanks.”
“I’ll let you know
if we pick up his trail.”
“Honestly, the first we’ll hear of him is when he comes for me.”
Niles paused. “If that’s true, then be careful old friend.”
“Your mouth to god’s ear.”
Medfield looked much the same I remembered it from the last time I was here. About twenty miles outside of Boston, the town had a rural feel to it and the roughly twelve thousand people who lived there. A couple of main roads and a lot of side streets populated by an upper middle class bunch of folks who sent their kids to one of the best school systems in the state.
I took a left off of route 27 and found my way to the street address Niles had given me. True to his word, the long driveway was set back from the street and sloped upward at a gentle angle. I nosed the Audi into a space at the top and got out of the car.
The house couldn’t have been any more than a dozen years old. The updated colonial design was sleek and even though it didn’t look like a McMansion, I could tell it was roomy and must have cost a small fortune. Especially with all the land that surrounded it.
I walked across the crushed gravel that surrounded the house on every side with a smile. Gravel was a cheap burglar alarm. And while I doubted it would stop Amir, it might let me know if anyone else showed up to help him finish me off.
The house had a wraparound porch and a small keypad to the side of the front door beckoned. I punched the code in and waited until it beeped and the door unlocked.
Inside, the house underlined the fact that the owners had money. I spotted furniture by Mitchell Gold and several paintings that looked like they’d come out of a Sotheby’s catalog.
The first thing I had to do was get a feel for the house. Any combat that happened inside would necessitate me knowing my way around. I spent the next two hours doing exactly that. As the sun started its descent, Christmas lights came on automatically on the bushes and trees around the house. As much as I hated that from a tactical standpoint, I had to admit they looked awesome. Plus, it might put Amir off-balance if he thought I was inside. His assumption would be that I would have turned them all off instead of bathing myself in light.
The refrigerator held a couple packages of deli meat so I made a ham and cheese and sat down with a can of Pepsi, my pistol on the counter nearby.