Swords of Exodus

by Larry Correia

  Tourists, my ass. The door closed behind the three, plunging the room back into a nice, muted grey. I like grey. People like me just kind of fade away. I went back to my lunch, enjoying the spices and the ache in my muscles. Unable to go back to sleep this morning, I had got in a workout. I wasn’t close to my peak, but I’d still done thirty pull-ups, a hundred push-ups, and thirty minutes straight on an eighty-pound punching bag. Not bad for a gentleman of leisure on the wrong side of forty.

  The woman said something, quietly enough that I couldn’t hear, and the waitress waved them toward the bar. I noted that the woman kept scanning, always looking, dividing the room into quadrants, and giving every occupant a once-over. She made eye contact with me, but I just kept chewing my food like any other slack-jawed yokel, just an everyman, not worthy of any attention. I had developed this ability with a lifetime of practice. I was good at appearing unremarkable.

  I was also a master of reading people. It was a gift. Two seconds of eye contact told me everything that I needed to know about her. This woman was a killer, and she was hard, but I didn’t get the vibe that she was here to kill anyone in particular. She was here on business.

  The woman broke away and headed for the bar. She stopped while the tall man pulled a wicker stool out and waited for her to sit. She crossed her legs gracefully, smiled at the bartender like a lion would smile at a gazelle, and placed several folded pieces of currency onto the bar. Beckoning him closer, conspiratorially, she started asking questions. The bartender, always a sucker for a pretty girl, took the money, scratched his head, looked around the room, shrugged, and pointed right at me.

  And here we go. I sighed and took another bite.

  The woman stood, delicately adjusted her blouse, and walked toward me. Her men took up positions at the bar, still close enough to shoot me if necessary. I waited for her to approach. The weight of the compact pistol on my belt, concealed under an untucked cotton shirt, was reassuring.

  She stopped, hovering next to my table, while I nonchalantly finished my larb. Why Thai food for breakfast in a hole-in-the wall restaurant on a flyspeck island in the middle of nowhere? Because I said so.

  Of course the bartender knew me. I own most of this damned island.

  “Are you Lorenzo?” She asked politely in perfectly nuanced English. Such a mundane statement seemed vaguely threatening when she said it.

  I made her wait while I took a long drink of water. Most everything I ate was seasoned to be lethally hot. “At times,” I replied, pushing my dish away and wiping my mouth on a napkin. “Have a seat.” She did. It had been a while since anyone other than my Jill had called me that name on St. Carl.

  “My name is Song Ling.” She got right down to business. “I have need of your services.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “You must not have gotten the memo, lady. I’m retired.”

  Nonplussed, she reached into a pocket and pulled out a business-size envelope. “You will want to see this.” She held it out to me, her blood-red fingernails bright over the white paper. The nails were kept short, like those of most women more concerned about trigger control than fashion.

  I was forced into my last job, too. It too had started with a messenger giving me an envelope, though Ling was far more attractive than the psychotic Fat Man who had served Big Eddie Montalban. That particular envelope had been filled with information on my extended family and threats against their lives. I had pulled off one of the most daring heists of my career, but the costs had been far too high. Too many people, friends and enemies both, had died because of the contents of that last envelope.

  I didn’t take it.

  “Ling, was it? Look, I’m sorry that you came all this way for nothing, but I’m not interested.” I pushed back my chair and stood. I could see both of Ling’s goons tense up. “I hope you enjoy your stay on St. Carl. The rock shrimp really is good this time of year. You should try some. My treat. And then have a nice trip home.”

  “Your brother said you would react like this.” She didn’t even look at me. She placed the envelope on the table and spun it. “I didn’t pick you out of the crowd. You look nothing at all like him. I was expecting a man of greater . . . stature.”

  I paused. That would explain how she found me. Son of a bitch.

  I was a foster kid. I said as I sat back down. The envelope sat between us. Ling didn’t speak. I had been correct in my earlier assessment, she was a hard one. “How do you know Bob?” I asked, because of course, of all my brothers, it had to have been him. For some reason she didn’t strike me as the type of person that ran in the same social circles as my straitlaced, honorable, FBI Agent older brother.

  She opened the envelope and pulled out a torn paper napkin. It had been scribbled on with black ink. She shoved it toward me. “He gave this to me, right before he was chased down, beaten unconscious, and taken away. That was . . . ” she theatrically looked at her watch. “. . . seventy-two hours ago. I do not know if he is alive or dead.”

  “What?” I snatched the napkin from her. I recognized Bob’s blocky handwriting.

  HECTOR—NEED HELP. REMEMBER Q?

  THEY KNOW.

  DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME.

  HE IS IN NORTH GAP.

  HE IS THE KEY.

  YOU MUST SAVE HIM.

  The bottom half of the napkin was missing, torn off.

  Q? Quagmire. Quagmire, Nevada. They know? Eddie’s dead. His organization is destroyed. Gordon . . . The shadow government types. They must have found out about Bob helping us in Quagmire.

  The Quagmire Incident had made national headlines the year before. Everybody knew about how a civilian jet, owned by billionaire philanthropist Eduard Montalban, had allegedly been shot down by a surface-to-air missile. That part was actually true. I knew because I was the one who had fired the missile. The rest of the story had never made it to the news, nothing about the gun battle with a bunch of secret government agents in an abandoned prison work camp ever made it beyond the usual conspiracy-theory sites. Except all of that was true as well. Bob had been there for every bit of it.

  “Who’s in North Gap? What does that mean?”

  “North Gap is a decommissioned US Air Force radar station in the State of Montana. It is now used by a covert organization within the United States government. It serves as a secret prison and interrogation center for high-value, high-risk subjects. I’m here to offer you a trade, Mr. Lorenzo. You help me rescue someone from this facility, and I’ll give you all of the information I can to help you find your brother. We will lend you our full assistance and allow you to use our intelligence network for this end.”

  “What happened to my brother? Where was he when he was taken? Why was he with you?”

  Ling folded her hands neatly on the table. “Do we have a deal or not, Mr. Lorenzo? I do not have much time.”

  I could feel the anger bubbling to the surface, the same killing anger that I had used as a tool for so long, the same evil that I had thrown into the deepest, darkest well of my mind to be locked up safely for the last six months. “How about you tell me where my brother is right now or I cut your eyes out?” Her men sensed the change, and started to rise from the bar, hands moving under their shirts.

  Ling didn’t flinch. She casually raised her hand, and her goons grudgingly lowered themselves. The rest of the patrons kept eating, unaware that for a split second the room had teetered on the edge of a gunfight.

  “Read your brother’s words. That isn’t what he wants. This is bigger than your brother. Greater than you, than me, than all of us.” She spoke with the sincerity of a true believer, and those were the most dangerous kind. Ling produced a smartphone, tapped the screen a couple of times, then laid it on the table so I could see it.

  “Do you know this man, Mr. Lorenzo?”

  I looked at the picture on the screen. My eyes narrowed. “Yeah . . . I know him.”

  Ling leaned forward. “One life for another. Your brother is an honorable man, Mr. Lorenzo. I want no har
m to come to him. Right now, my people are doing everything they can to locate him. But your brother insisted that finding this man was more important than his own safety. Please. We need your help.”

  I glanced down at the image again. A young man, with a young face, but hard eyes. His hair had been shaved off, and his face was crisscrossed with scars. As a matter of fact, I’d given him one of those scars.

  Valentine.

  VALENTINE

  Location Unknown

  Date/Time Unknown

  You’re a natural-born killer, boy.

  Hawk had said that. I found myself thinking about his words and that day I first met him in Afghanistan. It had been a bad day but it changed me, set me on the path that I’d walked ever since . . . a long, winding, bloody path that ended with me in a small, windowless cell.

  Sitting against the wall, I stared blankly into space. Footsteps would occasionally echo from the hallway outside my door. Every so often an ancient industrial heater would come on, filling the hall with a dull roar while it ran and kicking up small clouds of dust from the vents. Fluorescent lights buzzed unendingly; they never turned them off. I didn’t know if it was night or day. I could sometimes hear voices from outside, but I was never directly spoken to while I was in this room. I wasn’t allowed to speak. If I made noise, they came in and sedated me, or worse. So I sat quietly, back to the wall, and lost myself in thought.

  I didn’t know where I was, exactly. It was cold, and there were thick pine forests in every direction. I had been outside a few times. It may have been on a mountaintop somewhere, or up in Alaska. I had no real way of keeping track of time. This had to be intentional. I didn’t know how many days, or weeks or months, I’d been in this place, but I grew increasingly certain that I would never leave. I knew that there was more snow on the ground the last time I’d been outside than there was the first time they’d let me out, so it was probably winter.

  Of course, they hadn’t let me out in a while, as part of my punishment for stabbing one of the guards in the knee with a pen.

  Despite ending up in prison, I didn’t regret knowing Hawk. The man was like a father to me, and I hadn’t even known I’d been lost before I met him. I joined the military because I just didn’t know what else to do with myself, volunteered for Afghanistan for the same reason.

  My time with Vanguard Strategic Services International was something of a blur now, even though my career had lasted nearly five years. The deployments were all different, but they were all the same, too. We fought for the people who could afford to pay us in wars the rest of the world generally didn’t care about. Others fought for duty, honor, and country. We fought because it was our job.

  I was good at it. It’s what I’m best at. A natural-born killer. Deep down, I’d always known. I killed my first man as a teenager. I grew up that day. I changed. And I knew I was different. I began to look at the people around me the way a wolf looks at a herd of deer.

  Somehow I held on. My teammates kept me sane. We went through a lot of bad days and a lot of good ones. We fought together, partied together, and mourned our dead together. I traveled all over the world, and was paid a lot of money for what I did.

  It all came crashing down in Mexico. Only three of us survived that mission, and our employer was forced out of business. My entire life was gone in the span of a couple of days.

  I tried. I tried to return home, to the US, and get a regular job. I tried to live my life as a respectable citizen. I did that for almost a year, and I was completely miserable. Restless, disconnected from the people around me. When my former teammate Tailor showed up on my doorstep with a job offer, the deal was sealed.

  Project Heartbreaker, they called it. We did good work, at first. I met the first woman I ever really loved. Her name was Sarah, and she made me a better man.

  She died in a little country called Zubara. Most of us did, betrayed by the same shadowy organization that had brought us there. They were just cleaning up loose ends. Some of us managed to escape with our lives, and those who did went into hiding.

  Not me. I was done running. I tracked down Gordon Willis, the man behind the entire operation, and shot him through the heart.

  Then they caught me. So there I was, some time later, in a windowless cell, wondering when they were going to get around to killing me. I wondered if anyone had any idea what happened to me. Did anyone even care?

  My eyes snapped into focus as the tromp of combat boots echoed down the hall. Three people, it sounded like. It didn’t seem like it was mealtime, and they never sent three men just to slide my tray of slop through the door. I took a deep breath, and tried to steady myself as I stood up. I knew what was coming next.

  A key hit the lock. The door swung inward. Three men in black uniforms strode in. I recognized all of them. I’d seen them all before. Reilly, Smoot, and Davis. They didn’t speak as they shoved me against the wall and cuffed my hands together and shackled my feet. They jabbed me in the side to get me going, hard enough to leave a throbbing pain. I shuffled up the hallway, chains clinking like an inmate at the county jail.

  There was a time when I’d tried to resist, tried to make myself a pain in the ass, hoping for rescue or escape. In my confinement, I’d worked out, doing push-ups and sit-ups in my cell to stay somewhat fit. As time went on, that hope faded. I gave up exercising. What as the point? I was going to die in this place. I was too much of a liability for them to ever let me go.

  I hung my head slightly, but said nothing, as I clattered along in chains.

  LORENZO

  I studied the image for a time. “I don’t know what happened to him. Once he popped that guy in Virginia, he just dropped off the grid. I figured the secret government types murdered him.” I slid the phone back to Ling.

  “From what your brother has told me, you owe him a great deal.” Ling’s dark eyes almost bored holes into me. Of course she was right. Jill would be dead if it hadn’t been for Valentine, but that wasn’t the sort of thing Bob should be sharing. How much had my brother told this woman?

  “No disagreement there, but the way I see it, the way he saw it, we’re even. No offense, lady, and in normal circumstances, I’d love to go take on the entire US government to rescue somebody who shot me with a .44 magnum, but it sounds like my brother’s in trouble. Family comes first.”

  “How noble of you,” Ling said flatly. “My organization is searching for your brother as we speak, and as soon as we have information on his whereabouts, we will act. I understand your frustration. But until we are able to locate Bob, there is little that can be done.”

  “You might be surprised,” I muttered.

  “Perhaps not. I know exactly what you can do. You are one of most accomplished thieves in modern history. The Vladivostok gold train robbery, the Bahrain Museum of Antiquity heist, the South African Diamond Exchange, and rumors of many others. You are a master of disguise, stealth, and various intrigues.” She smiled as she saw my reaction. Yep, the old poker face was out of practice. Island living makes a man soft.

  “You missed a few of my greatest hits, but apparently you know me. So who the hell are you supposed to be?”

  “I am a strike team commander for the organization called Exodus. I assume you are familiar with our work?”

  I nodded slowly. Of course I knew about them. Anyone who worked in the circles I did had heard of Exodus. “You kill people. Slave traders mostly. Criminals, terrorists, drug lords . . .” Mostly I knew about them from their reputation, and it was a grisly one. They were a bunch of pseudo-holy-warrior kooks who never took prisoners and rarely left witnesses. “You pop anybody you decide is evil enough.”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that, but you are fundamentally correct. This does not bother you, I trust.”

  I smiled. “I’m morally ambivalent.”

  “So your brother implied. Given your reputation, I’m surprised you haven’t crossed paths with our organization before.”

  “I try not to take si
des. And, no offense, I’m too good at what I do to be snared by a bunch of vigilante fanatics with automatic weapons. Please continue, Miss Ling.”

  Ignoring the slight, Ling glanced around the restaurant to make sure no one was listening before continuing. “My organization was working on a matter of some significance. We were planning a mission against a very high-profile target. Have you heard of Sala Jihan?”

  “The Pale Man?” I snorted. Every professional criminal who had ever worked in the Eastern hemisphere had heard of him, but it was all legend and nonsense from the superstitious or crazy. He was central Asia’s cross between the boogieman and Jack the Ripper. Villagers had been telling scary stories around campfires about him for hundreds of years. “I don’t have time for fairy tales.”

  “He is quite real, I assure you.” Her flash of anger was very convincing. “Or at least some slave-trading warlord wants people to think he is real, and that he has returned. Someone calling himself Sala Jihan appeared a few years ago, and during that time, he’s amassed an army and now controls the trade of slaves, illicit arms, and drugs across south and central Eurasia.”

  “That part of the world was Big Eddie’s territory,” I stated.

  “Eduard Montalban was not in the same league as Sala Jihan.”

  “Then you didn’t know much about Big Eddie.”

  “He was a bored rich man’s son. A sociopath, of course, and dangerous, but in the end all of his power came from his family. His older brother is dead now, of course, and so is he. Thanks to you. That was well done, Mr. Lorenzo.”

  I happened to agree, but I was growing impatient. “What does any of this have to do with Bob?”