by Jack Quaid
The only flaw in his system was that he couldn’t be any farther than fifty feet from vehicle in order to detonate an explosion, which meant he needed to trail the SUV with his own vehicle. Russell kept two safe houses in the city just in case shit ever hit the fan and he needed to get off the street. With each apartment, he kept two clean cars. Bought and paid for. On the outside they didn’t look like much, with their rust spots and faded paint, but underneath he pumped 50k into the engines, and those sons of bitches drove like Steve McQueen on coke.
As soon as he was finished with the SUV, Russell grabbed a quick cup of coffee from the twenty-four-hour diner across the street and then sat in the front seat of his Nissan Skyline and waited.
Sometime after eight am, Russell watched as two SUVs pull out of the garage and around to the front of the hotel, FBI behind both wheels. He had a photograph that the Santa Blanca had sent him, so when Ferguson stepped out of the hotel lobby, Russell made him instantly. He walked to the SUV, opened the door, and paused. Russell leaned forward in the Skyline.
What was he waiting for?
Then out of the lobby came Ferguson’s tall brunette of a wife with their two children, both kids, both under five. The four of them climbed into the SUV, and it pulled out into the street.
The Nissan Skyline followed.
Russell pulled out his cell phone and dialled Maria Garcia. She answered on the second ring but didn’t say a word, just let the silence hang between them.
‘He’s not alone,’ Russell said. ‘The wife and kids are with him.’
‘So?’
‘So? It’s his wife and kids.’
‘I don’t care,’ Garcia said curtly. ‘You kill that motherfucker and his family, or I kill you and your family.’
And she hung up.
Russell had rules.
No women.
No children.
No good people.
Only bad sons of bitches.
That code had kept him alive, and he had never broken it. Not for money. Not for survival. Not for anyone.
That was before he had Angus and Genevieve on the line.
For six blocks Russell drove two car lengths behind the Ferguson’s SUV with his finger on the radio transmitter. All he had to do was press the two red buttons at the same time, and the job would be done. He could go home, and everything would be just the same as it was before he met Maria Garcia. Every time he tried to press those two tiny, little buttons, his fingers would freeze. He had pressed those buttons dozens of times. He had pressed them and given not so much as a second thought. He had pressed them and slept like a drunken baby. But as he drove through the streets of Chicago with the trigger in his hand, he couldn’t bring himself to press those buttons.
He pulled the Skyline over to the side of the road, and as he shut the engine down, he watched the FBI SUV drive down the road and out of sight.
The target was gone, and in two hours, he would testify in front of a jury and rat out Maria Garcia and the Santa Blanca cartel and tell all the awful shit he had done for them. As soon as the first word left his mouth, Russell’s family would be gone.
He had two hours.
Russell left his .45 in the car when he walked into the CIA field office. It was a little after nine am, and he had spent ten minutes outside of the Epson building on West Chicago Avenue watching suits walking into the building with their morning coffees and fresh faces. The field office was a fifteen-floor office building that housed private consulting firms, a couple of minor government offices, and an entire floor for Universal Exports. The shipping company had clients. They owned cargo ships. Their offices were fully staffed, and according to their tax returns, the company had been showing growth by 2 percent per annum. But it was all bullshit. Universal Exports was nothing more than a CIA front operation for National Resources.
The stay-at-home CIA team was a country club for spies. Strictly a nine-to-five gig for the lazy and burnt-out agents. They gathered intelligence from US citizens who had travelled to countries of interest like North Korea, Turkey, and Iran and spent most of their time in the safe confines of their office walls, unlike their colleagues freezing their asses off in Moscow.
Not all of Russell’s clients were criminals. Most of them were, but not all. Occasionally Uncle Sam came knocking too. His relationship with the covert arm of the CIA had dated all the way back to Vietnam when he was sent to close the eyes of NVA leaders. He was still on their books when they needed a rising dictator disappeared in Yemen, a witness silenced in Turkey, or when negotiations with a heavily guarded warlord failed and the only next logical step was a bullet in the base of his skull. Russell’s contact in the CIA was ex-field agent Roy Spector. As far as spooks went, he wasn’t the worst Russell had dealt with.
Russell waited in the lobby for his mark. Burnt-out male American spies had a certain look to them. They could be anywhere between thirty and forty-five, prematurely grey. Their suits were made in Europe or the Middle East, and they generally looked like they could handle themselves but were red around the face and carried a little weight around the middle from a poor diet and too much drinking.
Ten minutes passed as Russell waited in the lobby and watched as people filed into the building and headed toward the elevators. Not one fit his description, and he was about to come up with a plan B when he spotted a white American male with salt-and-pepper hair, a leather satchel from London, shoes from Paris, and a faint scar around his neck that poked out above his collar.
Russell had found his guy. He stepped off toward the old spy, and as they both neared the elevator, they bumped into each other. Russell mumbled some sort of apology and kept on moving out the front door, with a wallet and security pass in his hand. The old spy had gotten lazy. Ten years ago, in a hostile country, Russell would never had been able to pick his pocket. Chicago and complicity had made him carless.
Russell walked around the block, made his way back into the building, and rode the elevator up to the ninth floor. The doors opened, and Russell stepped out onto the office floor. Besides the security checkpoint and metal detector, the office looked the same as any other government department. The security checkpoint had one disinterested guard and not much more.
The key to walking into a covert CIA office in the middle of downtown Chicago was to look like he belonged in that covert CIA office. He left his weapons in the car, and besides his stolen wallet, his keys, and his cell phone, his pockets were empty. He cleared the metal detector and used the pass to get through the security door, and he was in.
The middle of the floor was an open-plan office full of cubicles, while along the windows were offices, secure meeting rooms, and what looked to be a small kitchen room.
Russell scanned the room and found Spector in an office on the far side, sitting at his desk, coffee in hand, eyes on a copy of the Washington Post. Russell didn’t knock. He walked through the open door, closed it behind him, and placed the Nokia 5210 cell phone on the desk.
‘I need a call from that cell phone traced.’
No hello. No good morning. No shake of the hand.
Spector placed the coffee cup on the newspaper and leaned back in his chair. Back then he would have been around thirty-five, maybe thirty-six. He had sandy blond hair that he wore longer than his peers and a casual confidence about him. He didn’t even flinch when his blue eyes looked up at the assassin in his office.
Over the years Russell had found that if he needed to convince somebody to do something that they didn’t necessarily want do, he generally got a little bit further if he had a .45 in his hand. Russell didn’t have his .45, so the letter opener on Spector’s desk would have to do.
If he got any static, he would take out an eye.
If he got the runaround, he would take out an eye.
If he didn’t walk out of that office with a location, he would take out an eye.
‘I need that location,’ Russell said. ‘And I need it now.’
Spector looked up at
him. ‘Sure,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Give me fifteen minutes.’
And that’s just what happened. Russell took a seat across from Spector as he called some technicians in who plugged the phone into a laptop and hammered away at the keys without saying a word, and when they finally stopped, they had an address.
Spector thanked them. They took their gear and left. When they were gone, Spector handed the address and phone back to Russell.
Russell took them and looked to the floor. He felt embarrassed he had come in so heavy, but he was confused. ‘Why?’ he asked.
Spector half-sat, half-leaned back on his desk and crossed his arms. ‘One day I’m going to need something. That day I may call you.’
Nine rounds and a .45 were all Russell had. The way he figured it, unless there were more than nine guys, he’d be just fine.
The address pulled from the cell phone sent him to a worn-down-looking house that sat on the corner of a worn-down-looking corner in the worn down suburb of Cicero. Russell parked the Skyline two houses down and walked along the sidewalk until he reached the yard. There were two cars parked on the curb and a shitbox Ford up on blocks. Russell slid in behind it, peeked over the hood. Tattered yellow curtains that were once white hung in the windows and blocked any way of seeing in.
He only had ten minutes.
Ten minutes until Joseph Ferguson testified.
Ten minutes until a phone call was made.
Ten minutes to save his family.
He moved closer. Snow crunched under his feet as he crept between the house and the fence. The windows were painted black, and beyond that, at the rear of the property, lay burnt grass and a makeshift fireplace surrounded by empty beer bottles and cigarette butts.
He pushed against the back wall of the house and waited.
He heard movement inside.
Russell knelt down beside the basement trapdoor and pulled it open. A moment later he was in the darkness and under the house. The basement was filled with rotting old furniture stacked deep against the walls, leaving only a narrow path to the staircase that led up and into the house.
He heard voices.
Russell pushed open the door and passed through the kitchen. Voices grew louder as he neared the doorframe and waited, the nightmare only inches away on the other side of the flimsy wall. Sweat ran down his face. His palms were wet. He wiped them on his jeans, took a breath… then his heart stopped.
The barrel of a revolver pushed into the side of his skull.
Russell sighed, closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he tilted his head to see the shooter. He must have been the single biggest Mexican Russell had ever seen.
The Mexican pushed the revolver a little harder into his temple. ‘On your knees.’
Now, a .357 Magnum revolver looked cool. It was tough, it was mean, and the very sight of it was enough to scare the hell out of anyone who was staring down the barrel of it. But Russell knew that it was a big, heavy son of a bitch of a weapon. If you wore it on your hip, it was enough to throw your back out, and if you had to move quickly, forget about it. It was like bringing a dump truck to a gunfight. Squeezing the trigger on that big bastard was a workout in itself unless the hammer was back.
And Russell noticed that the hammer was indeed not back.
It would buy him one second, if he was lucky and the prick was slow.
Given the current situation, Russell figured he was shit out of options.
‘On your…’ but they were all the words he could get out.
Russell punched him in the throat.
The prick hit the deck, his windpipe crushed. He coughed and sputtered and thrashed around on the floor for air.
Russell had the .357 in his hand, hammer back, and aimed directly at the prick. Then he pulled the trigger and painted the floor with blood and brains.
There was movement in the other room.
It was on.
The assassin cut the corner and shifted his head to get an angle on the graffiti-stained walls of the living room.
He took in the scene: two sons of bitches with Glocks stood behind Genevieve and Angus, both on mismatched kitchen chairs, with gaffer tape around their chests and ankles—they weren’t going anywhere. The pair of them had been slapped around. Cuts, bruises, blood, and sweat covered their faces. Angus had Russell’s eyes, blue and cold, and despite everything this fifteen-year-old boy had gone through in the past twelve hours, Russell could see in his eyes, which peered out through the strands of his greasy blond hair, that he didn’t break so easily. For a split second, the fear broke, and a glimpse of pride shone through.
Two shooters. One behind Genevieve. One behind Angus.
Russell stepped in, .357 in his hand. He took aim at the son of a bitch behind Genevieve.
‘You can’t shoot us both,’ he said. ‘You only have one gun.’
Russell reached into his waistband, pulled the .45, and took aim at the other son of a bitch. ‘Says who?’
Russell could take out a target at two miles in high winds after lying in the jungle for two days with no food and water. Taking out two targets four feet away: piece of cake.
He drew a breath.
Gripped both weapons a little tighter.
Fingers around triggers.
He shifted his eyes from one target to the next.
Let the air leak out of his lungs and…
… pulled the triggers.
A round exploded out of the .45 and painted the wall with the blood and brains of the shooter behind Angus.
The .357, the weapon aimed at Genevieve’s captor—the only sound to come out of that was CLICK.
The son of a bitch was out of rounds.
Russell had fucked up.
Too much of a rush.
He swung the .45 to the final shooter.
Too late.
That final shooter pulled the trigger, and with the pistol buried into the back of Genevieve’s head, there was nothing anybody could do.
He squeezed the trigger, and she was gone.
The last look on her face was fear. That was the way Russell remembered his wife. It wasn’t the first time he saw her in a Paris cafe. It wasn’t her smile that he saw every morning or the laughter she shared with their son. All those memories would stay with him, but they would always be in the shadow of that fear.
And then she was gone.
Russell put three rounds into the final shooter, and when the room went quiet and the echoes of gunfire faded off into the Chicago morning, he let the .45 slip from his finger tips to the floor.
The house was full of people he didn’t know. They had come for the funeral, and now that the funeral was over, they had come back to the house for food and drinks. Everybody assumed it was a home invasion, and Russell let them make that assumption. They would move through the house with curious looks on their faces.
Was this where it happened?
Is that where it happened?
Angus kept to himself. He made nice just as his mother would have wanted. He greeted everybody as they came in and played host with food and drinks. He was on his best behaviour, but it was just an act. He was on autopilot. Angus’s injuries hadn’t fully healed, and the bruises that were still evident were all on his left side, a side he tried to face away from people.
Angus and Russell did what was expected of them. Angus played the part of the good son while Russell played the part of the grieving suburban father and husband in the wake of a terrible tragedy.
For his entire life, Angus thought his old man was a machine parts salesman. Thinking back, on the surface that seemed plausible. They had a typical middle-class existence, with a typical middle-class house and typical middle-class friends. His parents would host dinner parties with the neighbours, and on weekends, his father would take him to the movies, and he could see whatever he wanted. Yes, on the surface there was nothing remarkable about their lives, but he had never bothered to look any deeper.