Why the Devil Stalks Death

by L. J. Hayward

  “Still think it’s him?” Feitt asked.

  “Definitely.”

  Feitt opened a file and typed. “Right, Ethan Blade’s first confirmed kill was when he was . . . let’s say fifteen.”

  After dropping his knowledge bomb, Fabian hightailed it back to the fourth floor and Ex Mon. Jack and Lewis retreated to a spare operations room to talk in private.

  “We speculated the Judge was ex-army, but it’s worse. He’s fucking special forces,” Jack ground out. “SAS. We’re the only ones given the implant.”

  “In the ADF, yes.” Lewis sat on the table, feet up on a chair, elbows on his knees and hands dangling between them. “Don’t narrow your focus too soon. The tech in your head was developed here in Australia, but if we did it, don’t think other countries out there haven’t, as well.”

  Jack shook his head. “It has to be someone I knew in the SAS. It’s too coincidental. Someone’s been targeting me since Bangkok. Someone with an implant like mine. He comes back here and watches while I pretty much point to myself as the Judge, and when it looks like we might catch him before I’m accused, he buys a ticket on my head. It fits. Who else but the psycho himself would want the protection of an assassin taking me out. He’s been after me the entire time.”

  “That’s a fair assessment.” Lewis frowned at him worriedly. “But do you really want him to be someone you knew? Someone you fought side by side with?”

  “Anyone else doesn’t make as much sense. He’s ex-military, with my skills, my training—someone who is targeting me. And who else would do that but someone I know?”

  Jack had lost touch with most of the people he’d known in the service. He didn’t really know them anymore. The only guys he might still call friends were Nigel Kruger and Trent Dupont, the other survivors of the Chota Nagpur plateau. He would bet his life it wasn’t either of them.

  “All right,” Lewis conceded. “We’ll get a list of every SAS member given an implant for, say, two years on either side of your induction in the unit. Run them down and see what we find. Was there anyone who you think might want to see you dead or locked up for some reason?”

  “Nothing immediately comes to mind. There were a couple of guys I didn’t particularly get on with. The gay thing and—” Jack waved at his complexion. “—the terrorist comments, mostly, but it wasn’t anything I considered like serious hate. Those of us in the Unit were . . . elite. We didn’t socialise much with general infantry. There was some resentment on their side, but none of them would have been given an implant.”

  “Try to remember some names, all the same. Let’s not narrow the parameters just yet. What about your CO? The one who sent you into India.”

  The last time Jack had seen him, he’d been lying on the floor of his office, face bloodied and staring up at Jack with a mix of horror and rage.

  “Yeah, him, too. Though he was too old back then for an implant.”

  Lewis nodded. “How about a pissed-off lover?”

  “No one in the Unit. Couple of infantry guys before I joined the SAS. Couple of pilots when I was doing my chopper training.” Jack hesitated. Hamish definitely qualified as someone with a big enough grudge against him. God, if Ham was still that pissed at him after all this time, then Jack had hurt him more than he’d realised, and what he’d felt back then had been like open-heart surgery without anaesthesia. If it was Ham coming after him, no wonder Jack hadn’t been any good for Ethan—he was horrendous at relationships.

  Grimly, he told Lewis about Ham, as well.

  “It’s a start,” Lewis said.

  Jack ran his hands through his hair as he paced. “I have to get out of here. I need to start hunting this fucker down.”

  “Jack, you can’t leave. Garrote is probably in country by now. In Sydney. Let us take care of this.”

  “Fuck. I need Ethan.”

  Seventeen hours since he’d put in the call to him, and still nothing. Maybe he had scrambled. Maybe he was in Kuala Lumpur, holed up in his lair there, watching from a safe distance.

  Lewis, who’d been inputting information into his screen, snapped a look at Jack. “Ethan? As in Blade?”

  Wondering where the hell his command of his emotions had gone, Jack grunted sourly. “Yeah. I told you before I think he can help us on this. Well, this turn of events only makes it more pertinent.”

  “Sure.” Though Lewis didn’t sound convinced.

  Jack blamed it on too much bad news all at once.

  With the new information, Lydia whipped the team into a fresh fervour as they hit the thirty-hour mark of the current investigation. Tired people swapped out for fresher ones, but Lydia and Lewis kept going. Jack spent hours with Lewis listing people he remembered from the Unit, and around midday, information started feeding back to them. They began eliminating names immediately—the deceased; the infirm; those still in the military and their location confirmed as overseas. The list whittled down further throughout the afternoon until they had a much smaller suspect group.

  One of whom was Nigel Kruger.

  “It’s not him,” Jack said firmly.

  Lewis, who’d caught another couple of hours of sleep, eyed him tiredly. “We can’t rule him out just because you said so.”

  “I know it isn’t him. Or Trent Dupont. We went through hell, the three of us. That . . . bonds you. I couldn’t hurt either of them; they couldn’t hurt me.”

  “Sorry, Jack, we can’t discount them. Not yet.”

  Jack stalked away. He kept thinking they would find the vital bit of information in the next minute, ten minutes, half hour, and the longer it went, the worse his mood got.

  Then McIntosh appeared with a list of new names to add to the suspect pool.

  “Who are they?” Lewis skimmed it quickly. “They’re not military.”

  “No,” their director said. “But they have neural implants. Private citizens who paid very handsomely for them, either personally or their employer did.”

  Lewis very carefully didn’t say “told you so” to Jack, just handed the list over to Lydia to assign to a couple of techs.

  “So much for restricted technology,” Jack muttered.

  “Even restricted has price tag, Jack,” McIntosh said kindly. “All of us here are well aware of that.” Then she left.

  As everyone got back to work, Jack felt useless. All this fuss and activity because someone wanted him either dead or locked up. And he had no idea why.

  Jack really couldn’t imagine someone from the Unit doing this. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe one of them could snap and go totally bonkers—he’d had enough close calls himself to understand just how easy it would be—but that this wasn’t what he would expect from one of his fellow soldiers. Jack knew that if he did cross that final line, he wouldn’t fuck around staging murders or leaving clues. He would just grab his gun and hunt his prey directly. Fast. Efficient. Effective. Of course, McIntosh had just opened them to a whole new world of potential suspects.

  He got a copy of the new list and returned to his desk in the corner to read through the names, personal stats, and work histories, trying to find something that leaped out at him. Nothing did and the more nothing he found, the more distracted he got.

  It was coming up on twenty hours since he’d put the call in to Ethan. His silence, though warranted, hurt. Ethan hadn’t let one of Jack’s calls go through to his answering system in nearly a year. Had one bad decision really broken that sort of trust? No. It hadn’t been a conscious choice. Jack hadn’t been thinking. He’d been reacting. Reeling from Ethan’s words, hurt, angry, and confused. And Adam had been nothing but honest with Jack the entire time.

  Fuck. Jack needed to know where Ethan was. What he was doing. Why he’d lied. Was he killing again?

  Before Jack could torture himself with that path of thought, the door to the operations room slammed open and Lewis stuck his head in.

  “Jack,” he called across the general chatter, clacking keyboards, and crunching of snacks. “Come
on. Something else has come up.”

  Oh God. What now?

  Jack slowly stood, not sure he wanted to know what could make Lewis look so bloody serious. Surely things were already as bad as they could be.

  Feeling like a man walking to his execution, Jack followed Lewis into the empty room they’d talked in earlier. Lewis had obviously appropriated it for his own tangent investigation into the chance the ticket was about the Judge, not the Messiah. He had a couple of laptops set up side by side, three coffee cups in various states of fullness and warmth, and a bowl of jelly beans, a few bright coloured escapees scattered across the tabletop.

  “What’s going on?” Jack’s stomach had knotted itself up, and it got worse when Lewis silently pulled a chair out and indicated for Jack to sit. “What the hell, Lewis?” he demanded at the gesture.

  “Just fucking sit, Jack.”

  Jack sat. He was about two seconds away from shouting at Lewis to just tell him what was going on.

  Taking his own seat, Lewis leaned on his elbows and let out a long, slow breath. “We’ve found out why Ethan Blade hasn’t contacted you.”

  Suddenly, Jack’s guts weren’t tied up anymore. Everything inside him had gone liquid, sloshing around in a sickening wave. Had the Judge gone after Ethan? He killed Adam and then decided to really rip Jack’s chest apart and get Ethan, too. Knowing now why Lewis had insisted he sit didn’t stop Jack from surging to his feet and grabbing his friend’s shirtfront and hauling him close.

  “Tell me,” Jack whispered hoarsely.

  Lewis, so close he had to lean his head right back to focus on him, looked between his eyes. He obviously saw the mania close to the surface, because he gripped Jack’s arms, gentle but firm. “Calm down. We’ll sort this out, like the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “The other ticket.”

  Jack let Lewis go and stared at him. “What do you mean, other ticket?”

  “A second ticket came up on you fifteen minutes ago. We have no idea what for, but, Jack, it’s been picked up already.”

  Shaking his head, Jack denied what he knew was coming.

  “By Ethan Blade.”

  “Do we know who bought the ticket on Moraitis?” Jack asked.

  Feitt looked up. “There was no ticket.”

  “That was clearly a planned hit. Everything was staged.” It explained why they never saw the kid’s face. He knew the camera was there, and he’d kept the subject front and centre for the whole ordeal, making sure there was no doubt about who the man was and what he was doing.

  “It was. The footage was used to destroy Moraitis’s reputation and gutted his entire campaign to separate church and state. But there was no ticket, and the Greek authorities didn’t investigate past what the video showed. Moraitis was murdered by one of his tricks. They barely searched for the killer.” Feitt flashed a half-hearted smile. “Anyway, that’s all I needed. Sorry for the nightmare material.”

  Jack took his time going down to the garage, but by the time he reached his bike, he wasn’t ready to go home. There were too many thoughts, too many images chasing around his mind. When he came out of the garage, he turned north and headed across the Harbour Bridge. Within twenty minutes he’d reached Middle Head. The park was closed for the day, but after leaving the bike in the carpark, Jack walked out to the old fortifications.

  The Australian military had had a presence at Middle Head for over a hundred years, from the first gun battery in the 1870s to the current Royal Australian Navy base. Well before Jack had made his grief-stricken decision to join the army, Middle Head had been one of his favourite places. His father used to bring him and Meera out here on weekends and school holidays, to get them and their constant bickering out of their mother’s hair. Jack had loved roaming through the ruins, imagining those long-gone soldiers manning their guns, watching the wide expanse of the harbour for sign of the enemy or racing through the underground tunnels. Meera, uninspired by the ruins, would sit on the very edge of the peninsula with her sketch book and ignore her stupid little brother. Chris Reardon had enjoyed it for the history, for the palpable sense of the depth of time, for the lessons he tried to impart to his warring children about how fighting never solved anything.

  Jack hadn’t been back in years. Not since he’d brought Dad out in a desperate bid to awaken his memories, to revive the man Jack had grown up worshipping. His father had grumbled the entire time, wanting to know why some stranger was making him walk around a bunch of pointless old ruins. Sad and defeated, Jack had turned them around and started back to the car. Just as they were passing the tiger cages, where soldiers had been trained to resist torture, Dad had stopped and stared at it for several minutes.

  “That’s where I imagined you were,” he’d whispered, talking not to Jack, but to some memory of the son he believed to be dead. “They said it was some training exercise that went wrong. Faulty equipment or something. But I knew. I saw it in their eyes. You were captured by some enemy somewhere. Being held prisoner. Being tortured, or already dead. I thought . . . I thought, I hope he’s with Usha. I hope she told him not to feel guilty anymore.”

  The sun was still up when Jack reached the outer ruins. He bypassed the tiger cages his father had fixated on and went to the old gun emplacement. It was quiet. No tourists, no guided tours going on around him, no families out to enjoy the summer day. A breeze came off the water, cool with a hint of salt. The only disturbance on the bay was a slowly expanding wake of a passing boat. Seated on a smooth cement wall, Jack let himself think.

  The name Ethan Blade had been around for seventeen years, and Jack believed the man he knew had been a killer that long. To have it so viscerally proven left him breathless, though. Horrified and angry and disgusted. Not at Ethan, but at the world that allowed such things to happen. At the monsters who put a boy into that position. Moraitis, the man who’d delivered the boy, whoever had trained a kid to take that much drink and drugs, to let himself be so terribly abused, and to then get up and so easily kill.

  The whole thing put Ethan’s words of the other night into stark relief. Jack had assumed a troubled, abusive childhood had led a young Paul St. Clair to those who would then shape him into the assassin Ethan Blade. But what Jack had just seen wasn’t a kid forced to defend himself in the worst way possible. It had been calm, methodical. Cold. That boy had walked into the room knowing the required outcome and exactly how to get it. Fifteen and already a trained and proficient killer. Nearly two years before the name Ethan Blade had been entered onto the John Smith List.

  Then there were the scars. Healed in the video, but only just. Ethan had claimed the whipping had been “discipline.” For what indiscretion, he’d never confessed. Could this be it? Was that how they—whoever they were—made a kid walk into that room?

  Did the fact Ethan was a Sugar Baby have anything to do with it? Eighteen years ago wasn’t so long after the common myth about Sugar Babies being born sociopaths had been disproven. Someone out there might have wanted to . . .

  No. Jack couldn’t go there. Not right now. He couldn’t think of the wider range of implications, not when he was so concerned with the immediate. Namely the man he’d invited so intimately into his life.

  There were elements about Ethan Jack chose to ignore, as most people did with those they cared about. Being an assassin wasn’t quite akin to snoring or eating noisily or starting every sentence with “I was just going to say,” but Jack was no innocent in that department, either. There was also no doubt in Jack’s mind about Ethan not being a sociopath. He had, understandably, some compulsions and obsessions, and Jack had learned, and still was learning, how to deal with them. Which Jack was more than willing to do because those things didn’t entirely define Ethan. They didn’t account for his love of all animals, or his passion for fast cars, or explain why he read the books he did. Ethan’s past didn’t matter when it was just them, talking or touching or simply being together.

  What Jack had seen this
evening didn’t change how he felt about Ethan. It just explained a few things.

  Feeling more settled than he had when he arrived, Jack stood and stretched. The sun was disappearing over the horizon behind him, blazing across the city in a final wave of orange and red and dark cobalt blue. The buildings were starting to light up as he made his way back to his bike, and by the time he cruised through the CBD on the way to Leichhardt, Sydney was alight with all the colours of the spectrum, a constellation of rainbow stars that were as much a guiding force as the Southern Cross.

  When he got home, he was pleased to find Victoria in the garage and Ethan in the apartment. The lights were off and the blinds drawn on the sliding door to the balcony. The brown leather couch had been moved back and the coffee table set to the side. In the middle of the room, dressed in a pair of gi pants and socks, Ethan moved through a stately, elegant tai chi sequence. The shadows were by turns both concealing and revealing, sliding around his lean torso and strong arms like a lover’s caress. A flash of a tight six-pack, shifting into darkness to expose the taut planes of his back. The almost dainty flex of a wrist, extending a firm arm, the motion followed by his shaded face.

  “Hello, Jack,” Ethan said, not missing a beat, his voice low and breathy.

  “Hey,” Jack managed around a suddenly dry mouth.

  This, too, Jack realised as he watched Ethan’s precise moves, was why seeing that video didn’t change the big picture. Ethan had learned to deal with his past and come through it as well as anyone could expect to. He had his mechanisms, his rituals, his needs. Somehow, in the midst of all that, he’d made a special space for Jack. And fuck if he didn’t look sexy doing it, too.

  “Join me?”

  It was no great dilemma, and Jack was out of his suit almost faster than if he’d been offered sex. In a pair of track pants, he stepped up beside Ethan, leaving enough room for them both to move. Ethan had turned a lamp on to give Jack some light, but not enough he had to put on his glasses. Smiling at him, Ethan returned to the starting position, and Jack mimicked him.