Hunting for Caracas

by Anthony Fox

  Caracas dropped the bag and removed the heavy half-metre cylindrical tube. He popped the lid, broke the seal and sprayed the military-grade expanding foam into the doorway of the second junior suite. The foam came out rapidly like giant marshmallow in a six-inch-wide line, and in ten seconds the doorway was completely blocked. Caracas removed the last items from his bag. He unclipped his tear-gas bombs and threw them into the stairwell, the emergency stairwell and the lifts. He saved one item for later.

  He moved back into the hallway and checked that his expanding foam had fully set. The shine was gone from it, and when Caracas tapped it the military foam responded with a solid, dull noise. The foam wouldn’t last for more than a few minutes, but while it did, not even an elephant would be able to move the door behind it.

  ***

  ‘RAPIDE, THEY NEED HELP.’

  ‘Not yet. Everyone holds their ground,’ ordered Djibril. ‘How many? HOW MANY?’

  He was asking the injured man.

  ‘One. ONE. I ONLY SAW ONE. A GUARD.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘THE RADIOS ARE DOWN,’ someone else informed him.

  ‘Then the guards downstairs don’t know.’

  ‘FUCK!’

  The guard who had been shot held his injured arm. Djibril tried his radio a couple of times, but after getting nothing but static he gave up. ‘They scrambled the frequency. Bang on the walls, alert the men in the suite.’

  ‘We should open the blind and the window and call for help,’ said one of the guards as he moved forward.

  ‘NO!’ shouted a few of the others all at once.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Snipers. That’s exactly what they want us to do.’

  ‘Everybody stay calm and focused,’ said Djibril. ‘They aren’t here for you or me, or even to kill all of us. Their only objective is the doctor.’

  Doctor Silva, up until that moment, had remained completely silent. More than once he counted the number of men with him in this room. Nine guards, although one was shot, plus himself and the girl, and as soon as the guards from downstairs arrived they would have dozens of men. That ought to be enough. That really ought to be enough.

  ***

  The door to the conference room was kicked open from outside and a few of the guards opened fire in a short symphony of bass sounds. The shots were tightly packed together and controlled, professional. Nothing came through the opening and once they stopped shooting no other noise could be heard. This would definitely be loud enough for the men downstairs to hear. Help would soon come.

  Nobody moved and the door just swung inwards and then remained there, open and inviting but with the invitation not accepted.

  ‘Très mauvais. What do we do?’ one of the guards asked eventually.

  ‘Where is everybody?’

  ‘We have to move,’ said Djibril.

  ‘Where’re the guards from next door? What about all the men downstairs? Where are they?’

  Djibril stepped forward. ‘This hotel is no longer safe. We can’t rely on help, and we can’t stay here.’

  He signalled for one man to go and investigate.

  The guard moved forward. Gun raised, he went out the doorway.

  All they could hear for a moment was his footsteps and the noise of the men in the suite on their left: it sounded like they were trapped in their room and couldn’t get out.

  ‘What do you see, Pierre?’ Djibril called out.

  ‘Lots of dead guards,’ the guard called back.

  Djibril paused a moment, unsure, then he sent two more men out with Pierre, including the guard who’d already been shot.

  When they went Djibril turned to address the last six men in the room about how they were going to extract the doctor.

  ‘Look out!’

  Suddenly gunfire came from outside the room.

  Shouts and shots from different areas.

  Then it went quiet again.

  Djibril and the others listened.

  They heard footsteps, and then nothing again.

  They continued to listen.

  Now no one spoke.

  There was a noise as a small black object came through the doorway and rolled into the room.

  ‘FLASH GRENADE!’ someone shouted just as it went off, and a guard fired wildly.

  The flash was partly weakened by the long conference table in the middle of the room, but almost everyone was momentarily disorientated.

  A head and a gun whipped around the corner of the door and three shots were fired into the room…

  Djibril was hit in the head and another guard in the chest, just above his bulletproof vest.

  The others opened fire and the head and pistol vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  Then four more shots came through the door in response to the guard’s fire.

  Another guard went down and a dark blur rolled low into the room and was hidden by the conference desk…

  As the final three guards fired back, there were a few more shots aimed at them and then the doctor was holding his side. Caracas appeared. Another guard went down. As the remaining guards tried to move the doctor back towards the open door, Caracas shot the last two guards.

  The doctor was crawling towards the door. As he reached it, Caracas reached him.

  Caracas ejected his ammo clip, put in a new one and fired eight shots into the doctor from three feet away. Doctor Silva went still after the second shot.

  Assia shuffled out from under the conference table. Partially blinded and deaf from the flash grenade, she crawled to the wall. Her hands were still cuffed behind her back and she couldn’t move properly. Her eyes were wide and wet and her breathing was erratic.

  Caracas smiled as he raised his pistol and his eyes gleamed in the light. ‘Don’t worry, little girl,’ he said. ‘I saved one for you.’

  Caracas aimed the gun at Assia’s prone body and then the pistol went crashing out of his hand as a boot connected with his wrist, and Matthews launched himself into the room.

  Caracas roared and caught Matthews’ own gun in his hand, twisted it and used the momentum to throw Matthews over the desk and across the room.

  Matthews’ gun bounced harmlessly away across the conference room floor as he rolled back to his feet.

  Both men turned.

  Like a pair of lions thrown together in a cage, the two lunged forward and engaged one another.

  Assia backed herself up against the wall as the two men fought.

  Matthews was always a silent fighter, which mirrored his personality, but the ferocity between the two reached maximum velocity: he began to growl and roar as he gave everything he had to ending this man’s life, to destroying the creature that had taken Rudy away from him.

  Caracas was knocked back, but as Matthews roared forward his mind was clear: he knew what Caracas would do when backed into a corner, he knew the assassin would wait until Matthews thought he had him beaten, and – just like in the hut in China – Caracas recoiled from a blow and carried his momentum into a spin as he reached for the knife at the base of his back.

  Matthews was ready this time and already moving away. The blade missed by centimetres, and Matthews caught Caracas by the hand and twisted his last two fingers until they snapped and broke.

  Caracas didn’t cry out, only gritted his teeth as his grip on the knife loosened. Matthews pried it from Caracas’s fingers and faked an attack with one hand which Caracas blocked, and then drove the knife forward and caught Caracas in his stomach, just below his ribs.

  The knife went halfway into Caracas’s stomach and Matthews finished with a powerful side kick that sent Caracas flying backwards across the conference room. Caracas landed hard on his back, the knife still embedded in his stomach.

  Assia couldn’t believe what she’d just seen. She was so tense she felt she might pass out.

  ‘You did it,’ she whispered, as if afraid to say the words too loudly.

  A sense of dream-like perception washed over Matthews.
>
  Had that just happened?

  He looked at Caracas’s body as the assassin fell hard on the floor and rolled to one side, the knife protruding from his stomach.

  He’s down. I’m still standing.

  The room was oddly calm in that moment.

  Assia came towards him as Matthews saw what she did not see. He had a split second to make a decision, a fifty-fifty choice: move forward or dive away. It was one of the few times in Matthews’ entire adult life that, when the pressure was at its highest and the cards were down, Matthews made the wrong decision.

  He leapt forward to try and stop Caracas. Caracas rolled and reached for the pistol he’d landed next to – the pistol Matthews had kicked from Caracas’s hand moments earlier. It contained only one bullet. Matthews had got within a few paces of Caracas when the assassin swivelled and fired.

  The bullet hit Matthews in the chest. He stopped as if he’d hit an invisible wall.

  Caracas dropped the gun and groaned as he gripped the knife with both hands and slowly pulled it out of his stomach. When the knife was free Caracas didn’t stand or crawl away, he just collapsed back onto the floor. His breaths were shallow and weak.

  Assia’s eyes grew wide and she shuffled forward, but then stopped as if unsure what to do. ‘No,’ she breathed.

  Matthews turned to her and fell to one knee. He looked straight at Assia, but it was as if he didn’t recognise her. For the first time Assia heard the tick of a clock that hung on one wall, the noise of each second imitating the beat of a heart.

  Then Matthews’ heart stopped beating and he collapsed face-first on to the floor.

  ‘No,’ said Assia.

  The conflicting emotions were too much for her to bear. Matthews had used her to get to Caracas. He’d brought her here, throwing her into mortal danger yet again. And yet again he’d saved her. He’d come back to her.

  She shuffled across the floor to Matthews’ dead body. ‘No, no, no, no, no,’ she said desperately.

  She reached him now and was shouting at him, but Matthews didn’t respond.

  Then two things happened in a blur.

  Firstly Caracas moved from his prone position, initially slow as if wading through deep water and then rapidly increasing as if breaking through the surface. He sat up on one arm, and with the other hurled the knife through the air. It hit Assia high in the chest. She barely had time to scream. She collapsed and lay still, gazing up at the ceiling.

  The second thing that happened was that guards burst into the room and one immediately put a bullet between Caracas’s eyes. More guards flooded the room. One desperately checked Doctor Silva’s neck for a pulse and then swore as other guards looked on in disbelief. Another guard checked Matthews’ pulse and shook his head. Assia’s body lay in the middle of it all, her pulse fading, her eyes closing.

  The Final Chapter

  When Clayton came to inside Jill’s apartment, he told Nina to leave before the police got there. Officially, she was an unknown woman who had fled the scene.

  The clean-up of the incident required a little intervention from some particularly powerful people. The woman known only as Jill was dead, her position within the US government so secret that even Clayton’s boss’s enquiries hit nothing but silence. Luque was dead. His death was not seen as a great loss. The US government spun it into their success, where all other governments had failed. Not quite medals all round, but if the icing on the cake made everyone happy then no one was pressing to cut into the layers beneath, too fearful of finding a rotten core.

  Still, Clayton and co. had scared the shit out of the neighbours, and the whole incident at Jill’s apartment in downtown DC took a lot of explaining.

  His boss was firmer than usual, Clayton thought as he left the office. He decided there must be pressure coming from elsewhere. The end result was surprising, because Roger Clayton’s job was changing.

  ‘Most people have come to understand the need for inter-agency liaisons. Still, perhaps you’ve been given a little too much rope,’ his old colonel told him.

  So Clayton was moving sideways, out of the NSA and into one of the affiliated agencies. Basically the same job but working for different initials, he was told. The old colonel was getting Clayton out of the firing line. All NSA movements were scrutinised because the NSA weren’t supposed to make any movements as far as the suits on the Hill were concerned. Moving meant Clayton would have to actively carry out work in the field, officially, which could mean less sneaking around.

  They offered him counselling and told him to take a few days to recuperate. Waking from his nap now, Clayton sat up in bed and positioned the pillow against his back. The two broken ribs, patched up at the hospital, ached, but now they only really hurt when he coughed. Strangely, his mind drifted to what he was going to get Nicholas for his birthday as she pulled the bed covers over herself next to him. Alice had suggested a bike, the boy himself wanted a smartphone, and even though Clayton looked down on other parents who let their young children use such devices as mobile phones, tablets and computers instead of playing outside, if truth be told, he didn’t care either way.

  She gave a contented moan next to him, then went silent. Looking back, Clayton knew he’d pushed his extra-curricular activities too far, as if wanting to test their limits before the bubble burst. His thoughts shifted to Phil Connelly, his half-brother, who had been his inspiration for joining the army. Luque was Clayton’s link to finding his brother’s murderer. It could’ve been Luque himself of course, but Clayton still had his mind focused on the man known only as Matthews. Clayton believed he was still out there somewhere, and he knew the truth. Now there was only one man left who linked it all together: the puppeteer hiding in the background, pulling all the strings – the White Wolf. A man Clayton shared secrets with, a man whose bidding Clayton had done, a man whose money Clayton had taken. Now Roger Clayton began to think how best to start uncovering his identity.

  He was just about to get out of bed when she rolled over towards him. She wiped the sleep from her face and propped her head up on one elbow. Clayton looked over and felt himself being seduced all over again. Her pale skin looked good enough to drink and her auburn hair seemed to draw in all the colour from the room as it shone in the afternoon light coming through the curtains.

  ‘Morning,’ she said, looking up at him with disarming calm.

  Clayton shook his head.

  ‘Afternoon?’

  He smiled despite his guilt.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ she purred.

  Then, even though he had no energy left to give her right now, his eyes were forced to do another tour of her body.

  Rolling away to the edge of the bed, Nina reached down to gather her clothes.

  ‘I have to go, more work to do,’ Clayton told her as he finally got to his feet.

  ‘No problem,’ replied Nina as she slipped a t-shirt over her head. ‘Just give me ten minutes in the bathroom.’ She seemed about to say something else, but stopped herself.

  ‘No, I have to go. I’m already late back. But don’t rush, just let yourself out.’

  ‘OK,’ Nina said awkwardly

  ‘You need to go back to the hotel until I can think of the best way to keep you hidden.’ Clayton was already heading out of the room and down the stairs.

  ***

  Nina sighed. Men. They never grow up. Why can they never cope when their duty and desire collide?

  Later, when Clayton had gone and she’d finished in the bathroom, Nina padded downstairs in search of her jeans, which Clayton had removed and tossed somewhere by the staircase the previous evening. At the foot of the stairs, she froze with fright. There was a stranger standing in the dining room. Her heart jumped into her throat.

  The stranger was casually looking at Clayton’s family photographs, and didn’t appear to be paying Nina any attention. Even though he wasn’t looking at her, Nina had an overwhelming desire to cover her legs, which suddenly felt cold, despite the warm room. She loo
ked around anxiously for her jeans.

  ‘Hello, Nina Arrow,’ said the man, putting back the picture he was looking at on the shelf and fully turning to her. He had a gentle voice.

  All the hairs on the back of Nina’s neck stood up.

  ‘Who are you? How do you know my name?’

  The man was tall and thick without being muscularly defined. His height was somewhat disguised by hunched shoulders and a forward lean to his body, as though all his muscles were drawing his body in on itself.

  ‘Are you a friend of Roger’s?’ Nina asked.

  No response. The man had long arms, and something about the way he held himself reminded Nina of a gorilla. A small patch of curly brown hair sat atop his head and he had a full, trimmed beard. His soft voice suited his gentle yet powerful appearance. There was something vaguely menacing about him. Nina couldn’t gauge whether the man wanted to hug her or attack her.

  ‘I was just leaving,’ she said as she continued looking for her jeans and stepping forward. Whoever this man was, no doubt he knew Clayton’s wife and would tell her of Nina’s presence. She tried to keep a level of bravado in her voice. She tried to hide her shame. How had Clayton been so careless as to let this man in while Nina was still here?

  ‘My name is Stam,’ said the man softly.

  Nina stopped and looked at him, resisting the urge to cover herself with her arms, lest that be seen as a sign of weakness.

  ‘My employer would like to meet you,’ Stam added.

  ‘Who are you?’ Nina asked again, now worried that maybe this was something other than an uncovering of her transgression with Clayton.

  ‘You used to be part of a group that collected valuable information and then sold it to the highest bidder.’ Stam’s face was expressionless.

  Nina’s eyes grew wide. ‘How do you know that? Do you know where they are? I need to find them.’

  ‘Your friends came to me because they thought my employer would be interested in the information they had.’