by S A Gardner
In two heartbeats Worthington dropped the gun. He dropped in a few more. The combo of Damian’s baton impacting his hand with bullet-force and my sedative dart lodging into his neck.
We swooped on him. Damian produced a flashlight and a plastic sheet from his backpack, rolled Worthington over it as I produced my prepared kit from my backpack of tricks. I snatched out a scalpel and suture materials then injected him with another dose of benzodiazepine. Damian turned his head for me and I sliced the skin in the depth of the groove behind his auricle.
I dissected the skin away from the mastoid bone with Damian blotting blood for me all the time. Once I raised a flap, he handed me the one-by-one centimeter, wafer-thin transceiver with a forceps, the latest in implantable nanotechnology espionage devices, courtesy of TOP’s research labs and Rafael’s upgrade. Of all people, Worthington should appreciate the irony of being implanted with one against his will.
I slipped the transceiver into the skin pocket, sutured the skin over it, leaving a nearly imperceptible line in the depth of his auricular crease. I cleaned everything then we removed the blood-soiled plastic sheet and carried him back to bed. Damian put the gun back beneath his pillow then left me to go scout for the return of the guards as I moved to the last step, injecting him with our special cocktail of drugs.
And no, I wasn’t worried that he’d remember our short-lived confrontation on waking up. It wasn’t an issue.
I felt Damian radiating tension. A guard must have returned to his post, right in our path of retreat.
I beeped Ayesha. “We need a distraction. Just for one more minute. Right under Worthington’s window.”
“You’re on your own, Cali,” she hissed back. “We have to go pick up the guys. The guards are about to call the real cops.”
Just as she cut me off, I heard the siren of the pseudo police cars she and Matt were riding. I rushed to take a look at the cause of our dilemma through the curtain.
Damian opened the window, just a crack, showing me the guard. “Kill him.” I shot him an aggravated look and he shrugged. “I’d kill him, but it would ruin our stealth objective. Your methods are more untraceable. Steroid-pumped men like him die of heart attacks all the time. Do it.”
Just like that? Yeah, I guess that was how he did it.
I gritted my teeth, reached into my bag for another dissolving dart. This one was loaded in mega-dose sodium nitroprusside and bradykinin, the most potent vasodilators on record. Once it hit his blood stream, all his peripheral vessels would dilate, pooling blood into his limbs, draining it from his heart, cutting circulation to his brain.
He’d faint, remain out for at least half an hour. Being a healthy brute, I had every hope he’d survive it without ill effects. No bets if he’d survive what we’d just set in motion, though.
I directed my blowdart through the crack, waited for him to turn to a convenient angle.
C’mon, c’mon, show me your neck.
Damian’s hand squeezed my arm at the last moment before I blew.
I snapped my eyes around. What was wrong now?
There was nothing. Nothing but a rock and a catapult in his hand. Was he going to knock the guy out, after all? Next moment the rock hurtled across the yard, crashing into the top of the greenhouse, sending the jumpy guard running to investigate.
“He’ll think a big bird dropped it.” Damian explained as he jumped ahead on the ledge.
I followed, waited as he maneuvered the lock back in place. All through the next minute as we belayed our climbing down the wall, touched ground and dashed to clear the house’s fence, I kept wondering why he’d stopped me.
Had he thought I’d succumbed to his demands, was going to kill the guy and risked a less than a hundred percent solution to spare me?
Seemed so.
Seemed he didn’t know me well enough, though, if he thought I’d kill if there were any other way. I was all about finding other ways. Still, it was so sweet of him.
Really. My man showing his TLC by doing all he could to reduce my body count.
In under another minute, we were walking down the pavement outside Worthington’s house, looking like two tourists taking in the boulevard with our backpacks and unhurried strides. We headed towards our getaway car.
Rafael at the wheel would have reinstated Worthington’s security measures as soon as he’d seen us hit ground. Just as we entered the car, Matt, Lucia, Ayesha and Ishmael، disguised as cops and riding two fake police cruisers passed us by, sandwiching the other four’s two cars, on a supposed visit to LAPD station to settle their dispute. We were all safe. It was all done.
Phase one was over.
“Wake up, you fool.”
I shivered at the alien voice. Worthington’s.
I’d never understand how Damian did it. How he duplicated someone else’s voice, the timbre, the modulation, down to the last inflection that made a voice unique, a speech pattern inimitable. I bet he’d fool the most sophisticated voice-recognition software.
He’d done me many times. Hearing myself replayed on his lips had always knocked me for a loop, made me mad, spooked and horny as hell. And not a little sheepish, too, since he always parroted me when I’d just said something moronic.
I looked at him across the car’s backseat. We were parked half a mile from Worthington’s house, putting in effect phase two of Matt’s plan, the reason why we’d needed recordings of Worthington’s voice.
Damian was now reproducing it, whispering it in his ear through our implanted transceiver. Matt’s original plan was that anyone would do it. He didn’t know of Damian’s ability.
But there was no doubt Damian would be far more effective. If he disturbed me, he would freak Worthington out. Even if we hadn’t supplied him with a one-way-access shortcut to freakoutland, that slow-release cocktail I’d pumped him full of two hours ago.
Each ingredient on its own was enough to send him over the edge. But Matt and I were in overkill mode.
We’d concocted a mix to boost his paranoid-obsessive tendencies to explosive levels while taking him onto a psychedelic ride to the hell he’d been earning his ticket to for the past thirty five years. It was our most cruel combination to date; MDMA or Ecstasy, LSD, Methamphetamine and the anabolic steroid Anadrol, each in its own specific-speed release vehicle and all interacting to put him in an ultimate suggestible/hallucinogenic/paranoid state.
Now we sat there in the car, with Damian pushing his buttons with proddings and fears and insecurities culled from our analysis of his history and psych profile. Rafael had his laptop screen displaying the surveillance satellite image of Worthington’s house so we’d get first tow seats to developments.
“What are you? A victim?” Damian went on, in Worthington’s voice. “Sleeping in broad daylight as they conspire against you? You getting old? Soft? Think your son wants anything but your place as the family’s patriarch? That your loving wife and daughter want anything but your money and influence, and you gone? They’re all out there, plotting to bring you down. They won’t even kill you. They’ll strip you of everything, throw you naked and pulped to the people you’ve tortured and abused and maimed. They’ll inherit all you’ve ever betrayed and killed for, what only they live to enjoy, when you never could.”
Damian fell silent as the receiver part of the transceiver started transmitting. Worthington’s reaction. The frothing of a cornered serpent, the snorting of a wounded bull.
He was awake, and the drugs were hitting his bloodstream, his brain centers, hard. Now if only he’d play to type.
Damian twisted the knife. “Jillian and Jada are with your guards now, fucking them. That’s how they’ll get them to brave their fear of you. But you can beat them to it. Kill them all. Kill them all now!”
The noises issuing from Worthington morphed into something blood-curdling. Had to be the demon inhabiting his body dislodging from its flesh prison, erupting loose.
For minutes we listened to mayhem. Slamming and crashing and gunf
ire and cut-short shrieks, all intermingled with his butchered babbling. The image on the screen exploded into life as all sentries stormed inside to the source of chaos. More roars and gunfire. Then suddenly his babbling ended.
The last we heard before Rafael turned everything off was a screeching rasp. That had to be an evil spirit being exorcised.
Worthington was dead. They’d shot him to stop him killing them all. As we’d planned. We’d later find out how many he’d injured and killed. It would be all over the news.
His partners would no doubt think the paranoid bastard had finally lost it. Would sigh in relief. He’d been too valuable to kill but too dangerous to live, having tons of dirt and blood on each.
After a few minutes, when the knowledge that we’d done it had sunk in, Damian reached forward, patted Matt’s shoulder. Without a word, Matt put the car in gear.
Damian sat back and looked at me, traces of the persona he’d just been projecting licking cruel flames in his eyes. Or was those his black ops side on display?
I couldn’t blame him. It wasn’t everyday monsters died at each other’s hands. It felt good being part of such a purge.
Then his eyes hardened even more with renewed purpose.
It was in his own spine-tingling voice that he said, “Next.”
Twenty
Next morning at 1 pm, we landed in Heathrow Airport.
Even in the private jet, which had turned out to be Damian’s arrangement not Desideria’s, a bigger one this time for the uninterrupted transcontinental-transatlantic haul, the five thousand five hundred miles flight from L.A. to London had consumed twelve hours. Add to that the time for the preparations of our mission, and we’d used up almost another day of our week.
Four days left and ticking.
“You should have stayed in L.A., amor.”
I blinked up at Damian. We’d just stepped out of the airport into the hot August day. He was framed against a rare clear London sky, the sun beating severe shadows down his face. I blinked again at his disguise. Then again at his words.
“Nice to know that my presence resembles my absence.”
He took my elbow as we strode across the wide pavement to the waiting line of airport taxis. He signaled to one while José, Shad, Pierro and Rafael headed for the next taxi in line.
“You know Sheikh Gasser doesn’t warrant your presence. He’s a straightforward mark. You won’t even be in on the hit. So why did you come? You don’t want me out of your sight again?”
Which wasn’t so ridiculous if you thought about it.
Every female eye from every direction, no matter its owner’s race, age or marital status, was checking him out.
Even though the unflattering disguise, he exuded command and distinction. And floods of maleness. And then he hadn’t disguised his body. In a business suit he was in-who-needs-to-breathe-credible.
“Didn’t I explain this about eighty four times?”
“Not to me, you didn’t. I came back from setting up this trip and making arrangements for the hit and retreat and you told me you and Rafael were coming, disappeared to arrange your stuff, came back just as we drove to the airport, slept all the way there, staggered on board the jet then zonked out on me for the whole flight. Am I supposed to be reading your mind now?”
“ I told you Rafael thinks it’s a not-to-be-missed chance to communicate with the enemy from the other side of the globe, make it even more impossible for them to trace him.”
“And he’s right. So again, why are you here? To hold his hand? Or is it mine you think you have to hold?”
My glare could have been blown kisses for all the good it did deterring him from stressing his point and some of my last viable nerves. “If you think you discussed this with me, you’re starting to confuse me with Matt and Ayesha and are in worse shape that I thought…”
He broke off as the cabbie drew his attention. And it dawned on me. He was right. It had been Matt and Ayesha I’d discussed this with into the ground.
Weird. I could have sworn I’d talked to him, too. But I hadn’t. Boy, I must have been more wiped out than I thought. But after the coma time I’d had on the ultra-plush jet, I was up to snuff again.
I watched him coming back, let him hand me into the taxi. Once we were moving he carried on without missing a beat.
“So how did you explain to your seconds-in-command why you were leaving at such a crucial time, putting our leader eggs in one basket, and not using the next twenty-four hours perfecting our next hit with them, the one where your expertise comes into play? This hit is a one-bullet-to-the-head child’s play.”
My glare could have burned his beard right off this time. The cabbie was all ears. And fears. His sallow complexion turned a green hue, his dark blue eyes darting around. No doubt trying to figure out a pretext to stop by one of the hundreds of aviation security and Metropolitan police officers dotting the airport to alert them to our danger. With the constant terrorist threat in one of the world’s busiest airports, there were even armored vehicles of the Household Cavalry around, and I’d rather not find myself facing one.
OK. One way out of this.
I caught the man’s frantic eyes in the front mirror, raised on eyebrow. “Yeah, we’re assassins. He comes from black-ops and I’m a rogue. Massive body-count to each of our names.” The man’s greenish tinge turned puce. Quite the chameleon, huh? Time to defuse him before we had an accident. I made a good attempt at a laugh. “Got you going there, didn’t I? Man, you’re really jumpy around here, aren’t you?”
The man stared at me for one more second, then he burst into a flustered giggle. The very sound of embarrassed relief. “Aren’t ye, Yankees, back in the United States of A? And then, can ye blame a bloke? Ye can only have so many terrorist attack alerts ‘fore ye start seein’em everywhere.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” I winked at him. “Sorry, mate. The look on your face was priceless. I couldn’t resist pulling your leg.”
The man laughed again, the last of his tension seeping out. “Cor, thas right. Ye come from the land that invented candid camera. And reality TV. Sure I’m not on one of those gigs now?”
Damian shook his head, joined in. “Wouldn’t we all love to be. Fame and fortune for being one’s moron self on camera. Nah. We actually work. And we’re in the boring business of regulating cutthroat business. We’re here to put a gaping hole in an evil empire’s head—a very deserved hole, rest assured. At least I am. I was contesting my associate’s presence since her area of expertise is giving evil fatal poisoning and heart attacks.”
And I bet he had that ready to explain away the assassin lingo he’d made me think he’d spouted unawares.
The creep!
The cabbie fell in with his manipulation as if by magic. “Blimey—makes sodding sense now ye explain it. S’funny how regulators’ speak and assassins’ can sound so much alike.”
Damian flashed him a smile, charm and friendliness pouring by the bucket now. “Not so funny really. Our roles are almost identical. Ending threats to the public good by shedding blood, literal or figurative.”
And for the rest of our fifty-minute drive to the heart of London, we chatted a storm with the cabbie, progressed from social commentary to world-state dissection to business advice. At one point we moved to poring over his family photos on his phone and Damian kept making comments that sent the man in a flutter of pride and joy.
I had to admit, he sounded sincere. And he had reason. The man’s kids had cases of severe cuteness.
Still—would they ever stop freaking me out, Damian’s different faces? Especially the one that emerged when kids were around, or even mentioned?
At some point the cabbie turned off the meter and offered us a flat fee. I had to scoop my jaw off the floor at hearing the amount. Since I never Uber, I’d ouched at London taxi fares enough times to know what he offered was negligible. He must really like us. At least Damian. By the time he brought the taxi to a halt, Bart treated him like a long-lost
confidante.
I then noticed where we’d stopped. Piccadilly Street across Green Park.
You gotta be kidding me. This was our destination?
Since the cabbie had hurried down, was putting out our luggage, it had to be.
Damian was lodging us at The Ritz!
I sat staring until he came around to hand me out. I glared up at him. “Aren’t your and your mother’s cars and houses and jets enough? Now it’s a grand per day hotel room?”
“Actually it’s a ten grand per day Prince of Wales suite.”
He left me gaping, my internal calculator crashing, and turned to the cabbie. The way he blocked my view of the man with his expansive back, I sensed he was doing something he didn’t want me to witness.
I craned my neck, curiosity roiling, couldn’t make out his murmurings but I could the tip of what looked like a thick wad of crisp bills exchanging hands.
What I had full view of was the man’s reaction, the riot of mental back flips and somersaults. In the physical plane, he pounced on me, shook my hand as if to dislodge my arm for a souvenir then he half-hugged Damian, took a step back, lunged again for an all-out hug, as if he never wanted to let him go. Damian accepted his demonstration with you-could-have-knocked-me-over-with-a-whisper geniality.
The man finally had to run back to his taxi. At his door he waved. “Best o’ luck cuttin’ throats and blowin’ brains.”
The bellman who was handling our luggage started, froze.
I sighed. “Long story.”
The man clearly didn’t want to hear it, hurried away as the cabbie pulled out of the double yellow line lane with a smile spanning his whole head.
I whistled. “Man. How much did you give him?”
Damian took my elbow, escorted me inside, giving no answer. For minutes I didn’t care as I looked around the 100-plus-year old hotel whose name alone had long conjured up images of grand entertainment, high-society gatherings and sublime cuisine.
The whole place exuded the glamor that had made it a world-famous hotel while still retaining the feel of a French country house. Yeah, even I knew enough to recognize the architectural style. And then I’d been here before. On a mission, granted, and fleetingly, but such a place leaves a lasting impression.