Dead Six (24 page)

Eyes wide, she slowly raised her hands in surrender. I slugged her hard in the stomach, knocking the wind out her and sending her to the floor. Violence against women doesn’t count when they start it, and I wasn’t going to trust her as far as I could throw her. Somebody banged on the other side of the living-room wall. Our neighbors were probably cursing us.

“You got her, chief?” Carl asked with a grin. “I’m gonna turn this garbage down. Kids today, Reaper, how can you listen to such noise?” Our techie moaned on the floor in response.

“Reaper, you okay?” I asked. The girl had gotten to her hands and knees, gasping. Flicking open my Benchmade, I placed the knife against her neck. She felt the steel there and froze, knowing that this fight was over. Reaper grunted, indicating that he would live. “Good. Grab some rope.”

The three of us and our captive were in the living room. The music was turned off, and everyone was a whole lot calmer. The girl was sitting on the loveseat, hands tied behind her back and, just to be safe, ankles tied together, too. I had my suppressed pistol in my hand, Carl had a beer, and Reaper was holding an ice pack against his head. “No wonder they drugged her,” he muttered.

“Okay, let’s try this again, without all the hitting and shooting and stuff. Who are you, and why were you being held by Adar’s men?”

“What’s an Adar?” she asked.

“Evil, crazy guy, planned on doing really bad things to you and then selling the video to demented freaks to masturbate to, but sadly he’s on an express train to hell right now. That’s an Adar,” I said patiently. “And your name?”

She answered sullenly, realizing that she might as well cooperate. “My name’s Jill . . . Jill Del Toro. I used to work at the American embassy.”

“Used to? Who were you with? State Department? CIA? NSA?”

“Um . . . the Department of Agriculture.”

I raised one eyebrow. “Okay, then. Please tell me that was some sort of cover, and you’re some sort of super spy or something?” I didn’t want to think that somebody from the Department of Cows and Plows had almost been the death of my team of professional killers.

“No, that’s Rob Clancy stuff. I was temporarily on loan to the State Department, but I was basically a receptionist . . . well . . . I was an intern.”

“Tom Clancy,” Reaper corrected. “Wait . . . intern? What the hell?”

“You got beat up by an intern,” Carl laughed. “Oh, man. That’s good.”

“I’m working on my master’s degree, political science, and was doing a tour of US aid programs around the Middle East. Did you know they actually have dairy farms in Saudi Arabia?”

“Fascinating. Stick to the subject,” I ordered, gesturing with my 9mm for emphasis.

“I found out about something that I wasn’t supposed to. I saw them kill the assistant-ambassador. The Dead Six guys tried to shoot me, but I ran. I got lost in town, and that’s when those crazy guys grabbed me and stuck a needle in my arm. I woke up here.” She sighed. “I swear, I don’t know much about Dead Six, but I know you plan to kill me, so let’s get this over with. I’m not going to beg.”

“Tell me what you do know about Dead Six first.”

“I know you’re some sort of secret death squad. The ambassador was told not to talk about it by your boss, that Gordon guy. You guys killed Jim Fiore for asking too many questions, and I was just in the wrong place. I don’t know anything!” The girl looked like she could cry, but was too mad. “Screw it. So let’s do this, you
pinche pendejo
cowards.”

“Did she just call us what I think she called us?” Reaper asked.

“I think so.” Carl chuckled approvingly.

The girl was tough, and pretty, too. Even tired, dirty, with one blackened eye, and being generally disheveled, I could tell that she was probably normally very attractive in an athletic kind of way. Her hair was long and extremely dark. On the other hand, I was probably old enough to be her dad, or at least her dad’s younger brother. “Calm down. We’re not Black Flag, or Dead Six, or Ninja Force Alpha, or whatever, and we’re not going to kill you,” I said.

“Really? Who are you then?” There was a sudden hope in her voice. She studied the pictures and maps on the walls, the piles of weapons and equipment, and the model building on the table. “Wait a second . . . What the hell are you?”

“Well, we aren’t the good guys,” Carl grunted, “if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

“We’re criminals,” I stated. “You got a problem with that?”

“But . . . you’re not going to kill me?”

“Only if you give me a pressing reason,” I responded, deep in thought. This Dead Six, whatever the hell that meant, was who had Adar’s box, and, if this Jill was telling the truth, which my gut told me she was, then I now held something that
they
wanted.

I had a witness to their black op. I wasn’t adverse to the idea of arranging a trade. Worst case scenario, I could use her as bait. Sucked for her, but that wasn’t my problem. I jerked my head at Reaper. “Check her out.” He looked at me in confusion. I sighed. He really didn’t get to spend much time around women that weren’t being paid to pole dance. “On the
computer
.”

“Oh, gotcha,” Reaper replied as he left the room, returning a moment later with his laptop. He started doing his thing while Jill glanced between us suspiciously. It only took him a few seconds. “You’re dead,” he said without looking up. “Officially at least.”

“That was quick.” I said.

“It wasn’t like I had to look hard.” He flipped the screen around so I could see it.

It was on the
Drudge Report
. The headline said Four US Embassy Staff Killed in Zubara. It took me a second to scan the article. Apparently during the evacuation, an embassy car had been struck by gunfire then firebombed. It was a terrible tragedy, killing the assistant to the ambassador, two US Marines, and an intern. This was sure to cause even more strain in the already tense relations, blah blah blah. I turned the screen so Jill could see it. “That’s a nice picture they got of you,” I said.

“Oh my God.” Jill turned almost as white as Reaper. “I can’t believe this.”

“I hate to break it to you, but some very powerful people have decided that you being alive is inconvenient,” I replied, wheels turning. Dead Six had marked her for death. I could use her.
Which meant that she needed to trust me.
“Believe it. You’ve got nowhere to run.” I pulled out my knife and flicked it open. “If you promise to quit hitting us and taking my people hostage, I’ll let you loose. But if you try to run off, I’m going to have to shoot you, okay?”

“I promise.”

“What are you doing?” Reaper asked, suddenly wary at the idea of turning this particular firecracker loose. “You sure this is . . . ?” He trailed off as I glared at him. “Never mind.”

“Jill, is it?” She nodded. I proceeded to cut the rope around her wrists. “The way I see it, you have a problem. You’ve been declared dead by some sort of black operations guys. Official channels will only hurt you, not help you. This country has gone crazy. There’s a war going on, and you’re now in the middle of it. If the government finds you, then you’re dead. If the secret police find you, then you’re dead. And if you get picked up by the kind of people I saved you from tonight, you’re worse than dead. You will need the assistance of, shall we say, a criminal element to get out of this country alive. Preferably honest, and dare I say, charming criminals, versus the standard underachievers who gravitate toward that career field.”

She rubbed her wrists. “And you know where I can find some people like this, I assume?”

“Perhaps. We have a very difficult job to do, and I think that you might be helpful. You don’t have any moral qualms about helping us out, in exchange for us getting you out of the country, do you? Considering that the kind of people I rob are the kind of people who want you dead.”

“Okay,” Jill answered after a long pause. “This . . . this is a lot to process. Can you really help me?”

“I can, but you have to help us first.”

“You can’t be serious, chief,” Reaper stated. The side of his head was turning a nasty shade of purple.

Jill nervously looked around the room, obviously unsure of what to do. “Well, you saved my life. What is it you need from me? How can I possibly help you guys?”

“We’ll worry about that later,” I said, sounding as reassuring as I could. I’m really good at sounding reassuring when I need to. “For now, welcome aboard.”

Carl began to laugh, a deep, rumbling belly laugh. The mercenary did not laugh much.

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“We got us an intern. Haw!”

While Carl was busy changing the license plates on the van and Reaper was tending to his bruised face and ego, I showed the video of the two shooters to Jill. I made sure to back it up far enough for her to see what I had saved her from. She visibly cringed and had to look away when she saw the mutilated girl.

“That would have been you,” I said patiently. “Now I need you to keep watching.” If anything should make her thankful for me coming along, that had to be it. Watching Adar get blasted seemed to cheer her up. Unfortunately she didn’t recognize either of the Dead Six operatives.

“The only ones I ever saw was a really normal-looking white guy, probably forty-five or so, named Gordon. The other two I didn’t get as good a look at, well . . . because they were trying to kill me. One had real short hair, looked like a former soldier, the other I didn’t see hardly at all, but he was this really big, muscled blond guy. All of them wore suits. Gordon did all the talking,” she explained. “Sorry. I don’t even know if Gordon was his first name or last.”

“Won’t be his real name anyway,” I responded. “Start from the beginning.”

She sighed as she pulled up a seat. I could tell that she was exhausted and emotionally fried. “Originally I was working out of the embassy in Doha, Qatar. It’s a lot bigger. But they were short clerical staff here, so I got volunteered. At the time everybody told me how
boring
Zubara was supposed to be. I had never even heard of the place before. It wasn’t supposed to be anything big, just catching up on basic paperwork so the ambassador could go around shaking hands. This was supposed to have been my last week, then I was going home.”

“Bummer,” I said, shoving her a bottle of water and a couple of pills. She looked at the pills suspiciously. “Ibuprofen,” I explained. “Sorry about punching you, but you brought it on yourself. Then what happened?”

“Well, there really aren’t that many Americans here, and those that do live here are pretty self-contained, oil or natural-gas guys, with their own compounds, so it wasn’t like they ever needed us. There really wasn’t much for us to do. It isn’t like this is an important assignment. The ambassador’s this old guy, used to be the mayor of some town in Kentucky, got the job because he worked on the president’s political campaign. He just drank and slept all day.” She actually smiled at the thought. “That’s your tax dollars at work.”

I just nodded. I hadn’t paid taxes in, well,
ever
.

“Then it started getting crazy.”

“I was here for that part.” I didn’t add that I had probably contributed to that state of affairs.

“Some men had been killed while trying to murder some of the locals. They appeared to be Americans. The Zubaran security forces freaked out at us, but the ambassador assured them that it wasn’t us. Then more and more bad things started happening, and we got the word to pack. It was the assistant to the ambassador, a guy named Jim Fiore, real nice guy, who took care of all the day-to-day stuff. He kept calling people in Washington, trying to figure out what was going on.”

“Like who?” I asked. If I could narrow down what kind of operation Dead Six was, it might help me track them down.

She shrugged. “It wasn’t like I got to hear the calls. That’s way over my piddly clearance. I just know that he was in his office on the phone non-stop for two days. He used to talk to this old army buddy of his all the time, I think he’s an FBI agent now, but other than that, I don’t know. There were three of us left to help Jim at that point. We were mostly just shredding papers, and it wasn’t like there was anything important in there, it was just standard procedure. There was a mob outside the gates, protesting, burning flags, and it was pretty scary, but they hadn’t turned violent yet other than throwing some rocks at the gate.”

“When did this Gordon show up?”

“It was the last day of the evacuation. Everybody else had left except for us and some of the Marines, but they were all manning the gate. I had been assigned to be Mr. Fiore’s secretary. His regular one had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer last month and had to fly home . . . uh, never mind, doesn’t matter. So I was working for Jim, and he was still making phone calls. I was in back shredding papers when Gordon came barging in.” Jill’s voice grew quieter. “He started yelling, telling Jim that he needed to shut up, and quit asking questions, that none of this was his business. Jim got all angry and said that Dead Six was destroying the country. That was the first time I had heard the name.”

“So they shot him?”

“Oh, no, not then. The Marines would have torn them apart, I don’t care who they were. No, when Jim said Dead Six, Gordon got all quiet, like he was surprised at the name, and said that they were done here. Then he left. It wasn’t until later . . .” Jill paused to wipe under her eyes. It almost made me feel bad for using her. “About twenty minutes later we left for the airport with an escort, two Marines, both really cool guys that I knew. We were almost there when the Marines got a call that that there was another riot on the route that we were on, and we were supposed to take a different way. We pulled off onto this quiet street and there was another government car there waiting to meet us.”

I nodded. That’s probably how I would have done it.

“Two guys, the Marines acted like they recognized them, they walked right up to the windows like they were friendly as could be and just started . . . started shooting . . .” Jill paused for a really long time. “I’m sorry . . .”

Brutal.
“How’d you get out?”

“They shot the guards in the front seat first, probably because they were more scared of them. They just shot
forever.
Mr. Fiore was hit, blood was going everywhere, but he opened the door and managed to get out while they were reloading.”