Daniels took a second to get his bearings, then headed for the back of the building, keeping an eye out for the rear stairs. Once he found them, he glanced down, just in time to see the mama-san handing a tray off to another female worker. The tray had food and water, and the other worker took the stairs downward. Daniels followed, stopping as long as he had to, wherever he had to, to make sure he got no undue attention.
He stepped down into the basement, which was cheaply paneled and carpeted like a wayward son’s makeshift apartment. The only difference was that the only illumination came from dark blue lights. As he moved through the murky space, the female worker who had brought the tray appeared from a door at the end of the hall, sans tray. Daniels walked quickly toward her. So fast, in fact, that she only noticed him when he was practically on top of her.
“Kamusta ka!” she blurted but then his paw was on the door latch.
He pushed inside, filling the doorway. By then his eyes had adjusted, so he could dimly see three figures huddled around a card table, upon which the tray sat. He could also just make out six watery, glistening eyes staring at him, their fingers and mouths filled with torn pieces of chicken.
Endless seconds passed and then the three figures scurried into the darkest part of the room while Daniels reached for his smartphone and vaguely felt something tugging his other arm.
“Walang pakisama!” she yelled, over and over again, screeching in his ear. “Walang pakisama!”
To him, it sounded and felt like a swam of mosquitos. As he brought up his phone, thumbing for the flashlight app, he began to realize that maybe he had drunk a little more than he thought.
“Walang pakisama! Walang pakisama! Supil! Supil!”
He thumbed on the flashlight. Suddenly a terrified Filipino girl was staring at him from within the pool of light. She ducked and dodged, but, in his muddled state, he kept following her with the light.
“What? What?” he asked as the woman who had brought the tray all but leaped on his arm. He swung her off, sending her thudding into the wall by the door.
Then they were all on him, scratching, clawing, and screaming. He lurched around the room like a man on fire, the intense flashlight beam bouncing in every direction. It fell to the floor, but, thanks to the phone case, did not break. The beam of light cut from the carpet to the ceiling like a spear.
Morton Daniels started grabbing and throwing, like a man who had stumbled into a giant web of spiders. “Get—off—me!” he thundered, stomping, sending the young women to the floor, one after another. “Get off me!”
The last one had leaped onto his back, her fingers trying to tear his face. He reached back and grabbed her by her scrawny shoulders and hurled her in front of him, fully intending to smash her into the far wall. Instead, she crashed into two more new arrivals, who collapsed under her.
Then Manuel Gonzales had pinioned his arms and Josiah Key was repeatedly slapping him in the face.
* * * *
“Why didn’t you just ask them?” Key demanded.
“Why?” Daniels replied with an implied duh. “What, did you think they were going to just tell me?”
The three men were sitting in the same room with a groggy Lailani, the mama-san, Esherida, Rahal, and Chona. The latter two had been the inadvertent backstops of the girl Daniels had tried to body-slam. The trio who Daniels had stumbled upon huddled in the darkest corner. They wouldn’t leave no matter how their mama-san pleaded with them.
The woman who had brought the chicken to the trio of exiled girls had brought coffee. Lots and lots of coffee, which was managing to cut through Daniels’s fog.
“They might have told you,” Gonzales maintained. “You never know with these people.”
“Talk is for…talkers,” Daniels grumbled before turning on Key. “I said you should have come with me!”
“And I should have,” Key agreed. “But I had to kill a kid first.”
They explained what kept them. As soon as Malik had appeared in the apartment doorway, Gonzales spotted the wires going from his backpack to his jacket, out his sleeve, and to his fist. No one who toiled in this region of the world ignored something like that. Not after the first time a suicide bomber went off in a café. Key had then quickly explained that Usa Awar had seen him in Shabhut. He had taken a good long look, so his entire network probably knew what Key looked like too.
“Shit, really sorry I missed that,” Daniels said. He turned back to Gonzales. “I wouldn’t have understood them anyway. I couldn’t even understand what they were yelling at me when I came in here.”
“They were saying, ‘no please’ and ‘stop,’” Chona told him.
Daniels just shook his head miserably at the floor. “How do you know if a hooker is lying?” he muttered. “Her eyes are open.”
“All right, Morty, let’s just move on,” Key suggested, patting him on the back. “Have some more coffee.”
“Sure,” Daniels replied glumly. “It’ll perk me up and shut me up.”
All the while, Rahal had been in intense conversation with the mama-san. They waited until she was finished.
“What’ve you got?” Key asked.
“They started getting sick after sleeping with a particular client,” the assistant professor said when she rejoined them at the table.
“Chona”—Key asked, “could you get the name of that client?”
“I already have,” Rahal said. “It’s Fulan Alfulani.”
Gonzales snorted. The other men looked at him.
“The Arabic equivalent of John Doe,” he explained.
“Should have known.” Key sighed. “Go on, Professor.”
“Call me Eshe,” Rahal replied. Despite being a witness to an execution, and complicit in a brothel near disaster, she was committed to Key’s cause, and had said so in the car coming over.
“All right, Eshe,” Key said.
“The symptoms quickly worsened. Fever, seizures, even black blood seeping from the nose when one of them tried to tough it out.”
“So nobody went boom?” Daniels wondered until a sharp look from Key sent his attention back to the coffee and floor.
“No,” Rahal answered. “The one with the nosebleed seemed to recover when she rested in a dark room. In fact, all three quickly realized that the symptoms worsened whenever the light increased.”
The mechanic and marines shared a look, all remembering how Ayman was close to the skylight before he died. Key tried to remember if Goodman had come out of the shadows before he went off, but could come to no definitive conclusion.
“So light or warmth might intensify the condition, but how do they get it in the first place?” Key had already told Rahal about the specimens in the morgue freezer.
“And what is it?” Rahal added. “I’ve asked the—what do you call her?”
“Madame,” Key suggested at the same moment Daniels said, “Mama-san.”
“I asked the woman,” Rahal continued, “if I could have blood samples of the three to test.” She smiled at Gonzales’s girlfriend. “Chona was very helpful in that endeavor.”
The Filipino maid shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult. Naturally, Club Blue is not exactly friendly with the local police or hospitals. Any report of a sick girl, especially with a possible STD, would quickly result in considerable jail time.”
“But what about the kid with the hole in his head?” Daniels asked. “Local law is unlikely to smile on that either.”
“Oman has no indigenous terrorist groups,” Rahal informed him, “and the authorities work diligently to prevent terrorism within these borders.” She looked at Key with concern. “They must want you dead very badly if they were willing to risk—”
The walls, and even the ceiling, started to implode, and intense, all-encompassing, light flooded the room.
Chapter 12
In the aftermath
of the blinding, deafening event, Eshe Rahal couldn’t see or hear, but she could still feel, and she felt a hand immediately grip her wrist, and pull. She didn’t fight it, instantly believing that the fingers belonged to Key, and, since she had no plan of her own, went with him. She hadn’t been at Chona’s apartment for Daniels’ little speech about Key’s powers of observation, but she started finding out for herself amidst the sensory chaos of the imploding room.
She heard muffled shouting in Arabic, Spanish, the Filipino language Tagalong, and furious swearing in English above the din of shattering glass, shredding wood, and smashing concrete. But there was not a sound from Key as he pulled her like a banner behind him. Then, after only a few steps, she felt herself being lifted, and suddenly she could see as Key tossed her bodily through a hole made by the makeshift battering ram that had smashed into the front of the club. She landed with her face right beside the huge right front tire of the vehicle that had been weaponized. That, in turn, sat on the edge of the hole it had made with a gigantic pyramid-shaped lance welded to the front. Her head was just below the line of intense forty-five million candlepower spotlights attached to, and powered by, the 360-cubic-inch V8 engine within the snout of the mechanical beast.
Horrible noises arose from behind and below her. She spun her head in that direction, seeing the three Filipino girls—the girls she had so recently scheduled blood samples from—jerking in the light like marionettes controlled by a malicious child throwing a tantrum. She saw the nearest one’s bulging eyeballs begin to shear and spit black, lumpy, liquid when she felt herself being lifted again.
Then Rahal found herself standing beside Key, one arm wrapped around her waist, while the other held up his SIG Sauer. She wanted to say, “No, I have to observe what’s going on there,” but stopped herself. Key was calling the shots and he didn’t need to see anything. He had already seen it—twice too often as far as he was concerned. But he knew what she now knew. What was happening here was more than an attack; it was an assassination. The lights were there to make sure she didn’t get to draw the victim’s blood.
Rahal squinted past the lights and saw cowled figures darting this way and that, all waving AK-47s, seemingly searching for something to shoot. She didn’t know how many were out there, but Key did. He had counted four. He also recognized the battering ram. It was a modified Cadillac Gage Commando, which had been supplied to the Saudi Arabians during the Persian Gulf War. He even recognized the spotlights, but their specifics didn’t matter at this point.
Key didn’t say come on, or anything equally needless. He simply ran for Chona’s 2011 Nissan Tiida, pulling Rahal with him. She wanted to shout, “But what about the others?” but once again checked herself. She was certain that Key was not making any decision based on selfishness, or even selflessness. Pragmatic energy came off him like sweat.
At that moment Eshe heard the tearing, cracking, bursting splatter of a human being ripping open from inside from her skull to her toes. Then she heard it again, and again, so quickly the last one sounded like an echo of the second.
Key didn’t pause. He kept running, hoping the assassins were too intent on witnessing the deaths they instigated to worry about strays. He was wrong about that. As soon as he heard a shout that came directly at his ears, rather than toward the Club, he twisted his torso and pointed directly at the open mouth the shout came from. In that pointing hand he had his SIG Sauer, with his normally pointing finger wrapping the trigger.
One pull and the shouter folded down to the parking lot, the back of his head a messy crater.
Key knew that wouldn’t be it. Still running, he twisted in each direction, and when he couldn’t find, or get a clear shot, at the remaining trio, he snapped the automatic back in his shoulder holster, once again grabbed Rahal around the waist but now with both hands, and threw her over the hood of the Nissan.
Rahal couldn’t prevent a small shriek of surprise, but then she settled into the slide across the metal, and rolled as expertly as she could to the ground on the other side. She immediately scrambled to the relative safety of the passenger door, staying low, while waiting for Key to continue firing.
He didn’t. Rather than risk attracting the divided attention of the other three killers, he ran, crouching, around the trunk of the car, and bumped shoulders with Rahal just in time for her to grab his arm and point away from the Club entrance. Key’s eyes darted toward four more cowled figures, holding AK-47s, coming in that direction.
“Shit,” he said. They’re not taking any chances, he thought.
He had ten rounds in his SIG, but doubted he could bring them all down before they unleashed a hail of bullets on them from both directions. The four new assailants were already beginning to trot while raising their weapons, but Key still took a second to look under the Nissan, as well as across the street, before he nudged Rahal.
“Follow me fast,” he whispered, then crouched toward the open trunk like a panther sizing distance between himself and his prey. It was the trunk with Malik’s corpse, complete with backpack.
“Neik,” she swore in Arabic, then got ready, knowing what he was going to do.
“Now,” he said quickly but calmly, already racing past her across the long, narrow parking lot.
She ran right behind him, seeing him sprint for a small, concrete park wedged between a narrow roadway and a muddy, rundown basin lined with a few cheap motorboats.
Rahal wasn’t sure what she heard first; the chatter of small arms fire or the thumping, shattering boom of Malik’s suicide knapsack bomb finally going off. The thumping was the actual detonation. The shattering were the nails and broken glass spreading. She may have heard some surprised and pained screams afterwards, but couldn’t be sure.
Key was sure he heard them and was content enough that Daniels, Gonzales, and even Chona wouldn’t sound that way. Then he heard the leaves of the acacia, palm, ghaf, and mangrove trees rustle with seeming annoyance as a rain of shrapnel doused them.
By then he was across the small, crescent-moon-shaped park. He turned, walking backwards, onto the roadway, one hand bringing the SIG back out, and the other maneuvering Rahal behind him.
Damn it, he thought. The attackers are not all dead. At least three of the newer quartet were down and motionless, but the fourth was MIA, while at least two of the original bastards were coming out from the hole they had made in the club.
Of course, he chastised himself, trying to set up a sure shot at either of them. They had to make sure there were no witnesses.
At that point he was certain that at least Daniels had gotten away. Two wouldn’t have survived if they tried to take down Daniels. And Daniels wouldn’t have cared less about having the added distraction of protecting Rahal.
Key immediately judged the odds. Bastards were sure to have body armor, so a head shot was required. Nailing a head shot at this distance on moving targets was tough, especially with the shadowy halo the floodlights were making. He could target the flash of their AKs, but then he chanced one of their rounds hitting him or Rahal before he could return fire. By the looks of their scythe-like magazines, they had a minimum of thirty rounds to his now eight, and both their muzzle velocity and effective range were better than his.
He glanced behind him, studiously ignoring Rahal’s fear-stricken, what-now face. The road was empty save for one old, nondescript van some ways in the distance. He and the woman might make a break for the boat basin, but the chance of finding an unlocked, fueled motorboat they could steal before being riddled with 7.62 x 39 mm cartridges was slim.
Okay, Key thought. Showdown time.
He kept walking backwards, keeping himself between the AKs and the woman, and waited. His gun rose at the same time the others did. The one to his right got off the first burst. Key returned fire with two quick shots, thinking of the rounds more as fists than bullets. If he couldn’t kill him, he could at least throw off his aim with
some punches to the chest and shoulder. Which is exactly what he did.
He didn’t even feel the heat or hear the whine of the AK-47 ammo.
Assholes, he thought. They think automatic weapons compensate for target practice.
Then, several things happened at once. The bloodied mamma-san suddenly appeared behind the cowled man to Key’s left and rammed a kitchen knife all the way through his neck. It emerged under his chin with a vigorous spray of blood. The man to Key’s right recovered from Key’s nine-millimeter “punches” and opened up on the woman, making her shriek and twitch violently, spastically, in a collapsing death-throe. Key straightened his aim and pointed directly at the man’s face with his gun barrel. But before he could pull the trigger, he heard a screech behind him.
The van was no longer far away. It was right beside Rahal. The side door slammed open and two hands grabbed the assistant professor. Her own two hands reflexively shot out and grabbed Key’s hair and jacket. All four arms yanked, and the two beleaguered pedestrians were hauled into the van.
The tires burned noxiously and the van leapt away from what was left of Club Blue and the men who had attacked it.
Chapter 13
Morty Daniels learned a long time ago not to use his instincts in a fight. If he used his instincts, he would just head-butt everybody. And that would do as much damage to his head as to his opponent.
No, he used his training in a fight. Training from his drill sergeant, Key, and even Lieutenant Colonel Goodman. From his drill sergeant he learned Marine hand-to-hand and close quarters combat with knife and fist. From Key he tried to learn how to use his brain as well as his fists. And from Goodman he learned how not to blow up in somebody’s face.
But habits die hard. Good or bad.
From Daniels’s point of view, it looked like God was grabbing the top of Club Blue’s far wall, where it met the center of the ceiling, then made a fist. Following that came a long, crunching, crash—like Satan was eating concrete, glass, and balsawood chili.
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