Kevin’s left hand came up before the squeeze was complete and smacked the gun to one side. The bullet went off and blew the brains out of the man on Kevin’s right. The spy’s left elbow shot backwards, crushing the other guard’s throat, as his right hand blurred forward, grabbing the barrel of the gun, holding it down. The weapon discharged again, and the Senator pulled it out of Kevin’s hand, grinned and pulled the trigger. And pulled it twice, for a double tap to Kevin’s forehead.
And nothing happened.
Kevin grinned, then ripped the gun out of the Senator’s hand. “I held the barrel for the second shot.” He racked the slide, popping the next round into place. “On these older guns, the slide needs to work so the next bullet can enter the chamber. Let me show you.”
Kevin fired, kneecapping the Senator. He screamed in pain, falling over. The next bullet came at a downward angle, piercing both the kneecap and down through the femur, hollowing out the bone of marrow as well as shattering it. Friedman shrieked in pain.
Kevin grinned. “Oh, so sorry, Senator, you forgot something—you had this room soundproofed. I don’t know why, you claimed in an interview it was for meditative purposes.” He glanced at the French windows leading to the balcony. “I seriously doubt it.”
Kevin was about to stomp on the Senator’s leg when two shots slammed into him, knocking him over. Friedman could barely even think through the pain, but he could see the figure swathed in black land on his balcony, gun ahead, and watched the form slink through the window. It was almost definitely a woman, very lithe in movement, and quite deadly.
“Mandy,” Friedman squeaked. He cleared his throat. “Mandy, you’re here?”
She nodded, and crouched down to take Kevin Anderson’s pulse. Friedman’s only thought—and it was an odd one at that—was that she was such an amazingly tiny woman.
She nodded. “He’s dead.” She slid off the helmet, letting her long, inky black hair flow down her shoulders. “It’s time you paid me, Senator.”
Friedman blinked. “You’re joking. Get me an ambulance!”
The blue eyes didn’t even flicker as she pulled out a phone. “Money first, Senator. I did a job. Pay up. Then we call an ambulance.”
Friedman was about to object, but Mandy started tapping her foot, her toe came close to his leg. He quickly dialed, made the money transfer, then handed the phone back to her.
Mandy smiled, turned, and nudged the body with her toe. “You can get up now.”
Kevin opened his eyes, then made his way to his feet. “Thanks, Mandy.”
Friedman blinked. “Mandy, you little sl—”
The Mercenary cut him off with a kick to the head. “Shut up!” She graced Kevin with a smile. “I haven’t had this much fun in ages. And you were smart enough to stay down when I shot you.”
“Well, considering we’ve done this already, and you wouldn’t have made the same mistake twice, I figured you did it on purpose. I just didn’t know why. How did you find me?”
A shrug. “You’d eventually come for the committee head, and he's the only one I needed to worry about to get my payment. Anyway, I’ve been paid, so my work here is done. Good day.” She turned and made her way towards the open window.
Kevin watched her leave, and unwillingly noted that she had a nice butt. He blinked away that thought, then called out, “Mandy, wait a moment. Why didn’t you kill me?”
Mandy looked over her shoulder. “You’re complaining?”
“No, but…you could’ve gone for a headshot this time, you didn’t need to keep me alive.”
She nodded. “You’re right, I didn’t. Good day, Mr. Anderson.”
*
Later, brutalized, savaged, mutilated, and all but drawn and quartered, Friedman’s remains had been delivered to the hospital—eyeless, tongue-less, without limbs, lips, scalp, genitals, and virtually skinned. Initially, they hadn't even been certain who he was—his teeth had been drilled and pulverized, and, of course, he had no fingers. DNA testing had been necessary. It was only then they had discovered it was Senator James Friedman.
The most horrifying detail wasn't even the missing pieces and parts... It was that Friedman had still been alive when he had been delivered to the hospital. There were signs of dopamine shots to make him more sensitive to pain, as well as drugs to make certain that he had been awake for every, single, waking moment of the horror visited upon him.
Chapter 11: Bankrupt
April 10th, 2093
Kevin Anderson sat in the restaurant, his gaze focused and locked into his clam chowder. The Legal Seafood restaurant in Crystal City had been in business for more than a century with good reason—the food was good. But right now, Kevin’s attention wandered so far from thoughts of food that he might as well have been in the now-radioactive Death Valley.
He closed his eyes and tried to drown out the screams and the whimpering from James Friedman’s bout in Kevin’s personal chamber of horrors. Kevin wasn’t bothered by what he had done to the man, but by the aftermath. Kevin had had a soundproofed room, and plenty of time. He had vented all of his rage on the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Now, all he had left was the pain and the grief of Moira’s death. The terrible madness that he had let go had been his only barrier from feeling his pain pure and undiluted. He had succeeded at closing his mind to the stress and the pain, and killed until he passed the point of madness. And now, without his anger, he was open to all of it once more.
Now it was all he could do to keep himself from blubbering in public.
And found little consolation in rationalizing his feelings. He couldn’t say, “it wasn’t fair,” as another part of him said, “life ain’t fair, grow up.” He tried thinking about what could be, but his engineer’s mindset forced him into thinking only of what was. He wanted to grieve for his loss, but he was certain Moira was in Heaven, so why be selfish and mourn for she who had the riches of eternity? He forced himself to think about anything else. If he were to feel all that was in him, all he had held back, it would lead to an outburst that would be...noticeable.
Kevin wiped his eyes, and a song came to mind, unbidden from the depths of his memory. It was the song that inspired his SEAL Codename, Winterborn. No tears, be proud of the hurt, because we have people to defend.
“And I am going to kill you!” he whispered harshly, his voice barely kept from blubbering. This had gone beyond vendetta. From the first body hitting the floor, this was about the security of the nation. Security that human detritus had jettisoned and treated like a party favor. They had treated those who had protected the country for years like disposable paper cups, and now he was going to clean out the rest of the trash.
“Can anyone join this table, or is it reserved?”
Kevin’s blinked. He looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot. And for a split second, he thought he saw Moira slide into the seat across from him, wearing a conservative blouse and simple black pants—there was a blur of fair skin, black hair, and blue eyes. And then the image cleared. The fair skin was a touch paler than he recalled, the hair too straight and too long, and the eyes were too light a blue, and the breasts were a little too small. She reached out for him, and touched his hand gently. “Kevin, are you all right?”
“Is there a reason that you should care, my dear Merc?”
“No need for formality,” she smiled. “Just call me Mandy.”
“I’d rather call you long distance,” he said with forced whimsy. “I thought I’d seen the last of you. Does that mean I have to kill the entire Mercenaries’ Guild before this is over?”
Mandy shook her head. “The Guild has withdrawn its support from this endeavor. Any Mercs you run into from now on will be acting on individual contracts, not Guild assignments,” his former hunter explained. “And I’ve been paid, remember?”
“Wha’?” Kevin blinked, not certain this was real. Was she trying to tell him that the Mercenary Guild wasn’t living up to its name? “What about your bo
ttom line? Another contract on me would probably be doubled after what I did at the hospital.”
Mandy cocked her head. “Hospital?”
Kevin nearly smiled at the irony. She hadn’t even known about what he’d been up to. “You heard about the body I dropped off? If you could call it a body?”
She frowned prettily a moment, then nodded. “I had wondered what you did with Friedman. In that case, he hasn’t been identified yet. And as for my bottom line...I’ll just have to settle for a few million. If it makes you feel any better, so far they’ve spent more money trying to stop you than they made screwing your team over.”
Kevin raised a brow at that statement. He couldn’t really process it. Had he really scared them this badly, or were they just rats that knew the exterminator was after them? “And the Guild?”
“Let’s say you made an impression with our guy on Bauer's boat,” Mandy told him. “He’s very influential.”
Kevin nodded absently. Mandy squeezed his hand. “You okay?”
Kevin shook his head. “I’m just tired. It’s all taken a lot out of me. Right now, I just want to go home, see my family, talk with them. Be with them a while.”
“You can’t,” she told him. “They’ve been under surveillance since I 'killed' you. Again.”
Kevin winced, his hand reflectively squeezing hers for a brief instant. His pain flashed across his face so clear and plain that she couldn’t bear to look at him. She looked away a moment, then reconsidered, and slid out of the booth on her side, and back in next to Anderson. She wrapped her arms around him in a hug, and he reflexively hugged her back, holding onto her like a life raft. And finally he let the tears start to come, and she felt herself tear up in sympathy.
“I miss her,” he whispered. “I miss them all so much.”
“I know,” she answered. And she did. He had lost everyone, and in this darkest hour, the only person that he had to hold onto was a stranger who had tried to kill him. The life of Kevin Anderson, as he knew it, was over. It was over before he had even left for Paris. Fight or flight, nothing could be the same anymore. He could disappear, and live “normally,” let the remaining senators sweat with fear, look over their shoulders forever, and deal with them when he chose to. Maybe he could even see his family after the surveillance teams got tired of waiting for him...
But who would die in the meantime? How many more men and women sacrificed to greed? No. He couldn’t. He could not run, this was his place to stand.
“Thank you,” he whispered. “This will have to end.”
“I know,” Mandy said. “And I’d like to help you end it.”
He smiled into her hair, and slowly drew himself back. He stared at her long and hard for a moment, as though trying to get into her brain. The fog of emotional clutter cleared away as he focused on the new problem at hand—the hand of someone volunteering to be his partner. Her conversion from his own personal assassin to sidekick was...disconcerting. “Why?”
“As I said, I like your style. And, if I keep following you, I’ll get to kill something sooner or later. I won't be bored. Maybe dead and mutilated, but not bored.”
“Amusing, but it doesn’t quite mesh. You’re holding something back.”
Mandy nodded, careful not to accidentally head butt him by accident. “I’ve learned things about the people I work with. The Mercs never had an emphasis on honor. We’ve got ex-army, but also thugs who like to hurt people. Those thugs will be guarding your targets.” She smiled slightly. “We’ll be cleaning house at the same time.”
Kevin had to smile. “But I’m not cleaning the House, I’m cleaning out the Senate.”
She punched him in the arm and grinned. “You know what I mean. Smart ass.”
“If I were a dumbass, I’d be a Lib-Prog. I prefer Conservative anarchist. Give me liberty, or give me death, and if you try it, you’ll also need to take my machine gun.” Kevin smiled. “In which case, let’s get down to eating. We have work to do, and it would be good to get something into you.” His arms still around her, he gave her a brief squeeze. “You’re too skinny.”
She arched a brow. “I'll have you know that I'm solid muscle, good sir.”
“Oh, definitely. Having bullets bounce off your abs is an advantage, but please, you must draw the line somewhere.”
She rolled her eyes with a smirk. “This how you treated your wife?”
For the first time, he didn’t even blink at the reference. “Oh yeah. Then again, she had curves in addition to muscles.”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “Tell me again why I didn’t kill you?”
“Because I was able to avoid you armed only with my charms?”
“True...you were unarmed.”
He grinned at the zing. “We’re going to get along so very well.”
“If we don’t kill each other first.”
“Funny, that’s pretty much what Moira said. Come on, let’s order an entrée or two, and prepare for war.”
“How about we order to go? I want to see where you’ve been hiding all of this time.”
*
Mandy arched a brow as she looked around the hotel floor. “Your base of operations has been a frelling first-class penthouse suite?”
“Yup. Well, not this one, I had to change for when I disappeared for a few weekends.”
They stepped directly into the room, which was not a hotel room but a magnificent excursion into another world. Without taking a step further she saw, past the tall marble entry hall, a massive open space that threatened to dwarf its own elegant furnishings: four couches, two coffee tables, and several armchairs and end tables, not to mention a chess board with elaborate Lord of the Rings figures as chess pieces.
“I think this dwarfs my living room,” she muttered.
The elevator appeared to sit in the center of the penthouse, which covered at least 2,000 square feet of the hotel's roof. No doors or walls separated those interior spaces directly within view, creating one single loft apartment built in tiers and levels. The marble entry hall opened to both sides, leading to a kitchen on the left and, to the right, an enclosed sundeck with wide skylight windows. The suite was huge, with round walls curving all the way around; indents created the illusion of room breaks, like a large, three-dimensional shamrock, with the elevator as the center.
She glanced at the kitchen, classically done with tasteful granites and stainless steel. “I've basically lived in a bloody closet for the past four months, and you've been holed up here!”
“Again, not here,” Kevin corrected. “But the business suite I had wasn't bad either.”
The folding doors opened into the master bedroom, a luxurious affair colored in dark greens and matching earth tones. The rug felt thick and soft beneath Mandy's feet. Another couch pit faced another fireplace, this one braced against a corner. Mandy looked at the oversized, four-poster bed. “If that has a mirror above it, I'll have to kill you.”
Kevin shrugged. “I haven't noticed.”
The Mercenary smiled and shook her head. “Well, I don't think there's any question about sleeping accommodations. We could bring in an entire barracks.” She sighed and shook her head. “Why?”
“Well, would you have looked for me here?”
Mandy opened her mouth a moment, and then shook her head. “No, I wouldn't have, but then again, I'm not sure where you would have gotten the funding.”
“No one thought about looking for the use of Moira's credit cards.”
Mandy blinked. “I did... I started too late, didn't I?”
Kevin nodded. “Sorry about that. I made certain to get a lot of use out of as many credit cards as possible before I even left Paris. And I'm a spook, fer God's sake; I always had a little something put away, just in case I wound up being left out in the cold.” He sighed, then sat on the edge of the bed. His eyes were closed, and he rubbed at both temples. “Granted, I never thought I would be sent to freaking Siberia, but what the Hell, right?”
Mandy shook her head. �
�This isn't Siberia. That’s San Francisco.”
Kevin looked at Mandy as though she had three heads. “What San Francisco? Big nuclear war … well, small nuclear war … real big about three years ago, 2090? You might have noticed it? Made all the headlines?”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “San Francisco is still there, but... think of every dystopian cliché you can think of without throwing in the supernatural or killer robots, and it’s there.”
Kevin opened his mouth, then paused, and closed it. He was about to ask why it would still be there and no one would have noticed by now. But, obviously, Mandy had known. And governments had satellites, so they had to know. But why wouldn't they be rescued?
Mandy had called it Siberia—instead of having a Gulag to disappear inconvenient political enemies, the U.S.A. had its own city of the disappeared. Which also meant... “How many other countries know about it?”
“All of them,” she answered. “The city is a dumping ground for all manner of refuse. Unfortunately, the people who most belong there are the ones who seem to thrive.”
Kevin arched a brow and leaned forward slightly. “I recall the Mercs had a base around there. A major one, in fact.”
Mandy shrugged. “It’s still there.”
Kevin nodded slowly, pondering what it must have been like. San Francisco had been a city on the edge of utter ruin before the war. The last mayor had not only driven the city into utter bankruptcy, but had mortgaged it to some major corporations. They literally owned it. Some people had initially thought it would be potentially good for the simple reason that private industry could run the city better than the mayor had. Corporations had run several other cities without a problem. For example, Seattle had been taken over in 2070 by a joint Starbucks-Microsoft venture, and there were no problems until it was nuked. Seattle had worked so well, it inspired others.
But San Francisco had not been handed over to the “let's make things better to make better profits” type of businessmen. They were all multinational corporations that had other interests in other parts of the world, and San Francisco looked like a great place to drain resources and funding from. Bleed the city dry, chop it up into areas of influence like some type of British colony, and walk away.
Codename: Winterborn (The Last Survivors Book 1) Page 13