Swords of Exodus [Dead Six 02] (4 page)

I dove behind a stack of boxes. Bullets zipped right through. Glass bottles shattered, splashing me with wine older than I was. There was only one more pirate on my side of the truck, and he was firing wildly, trying to retreat, to get away from us. He disappeared around the rear of the truck . . . only to reappear a moment later, falling head-first onto the pavement. The crack of a .223 echoed through the alley.

The radio crackled. It was Carl.
“Got him! Now hurry up. There’s more coming. It’s like a fucking pirate convention out here.”

“Clear right!” Katarina shouted. I pulled the last mag and reloaded without thinking.

“Clear left. Let’s go.” The worker who had been shot was still moving, but he wouldn’t be for long. Blood was welling from his chest in great violent gouts. He was lying on his back, hands twisted into claws, blood flowing from his mouth as he coughed. His dark eyes were open, staring at the buzzing fluorescents, seeing Allah, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or who knew what in this country.

Standing over him, gun dangling loose in my hand, I froze. I had seen this hundreds of times, and didn’t know why this hit me. He looked right at me, and extended a hand, probably wondering why I wouldn’t help him, wondering why he hurt so bad, why his heart was pumping blood out of his chest instead of to his brain . . .

“Lorenzo! Let’s go!” Katarina shouted.

The old lady with the headscarf pushed past, oblivious to danger, oblivious to the stranger with the gun. She fell at the young man’s side, cradled his head in her hands, and began to scream. He was already dead.

“Murderer!” she shrieked in Malay.

“But I didn’t kill him,” I said in English, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was trying to stop the bleeding that had already stopped forever.

“Lorenzo!” Katarina shrieked. I snapped out of it and ran for the exit.

The next hour was a blur. There were more of Keng’s men in the alley. And I killed them as I had killed so many before. The cops arrived, and Carl eluded them by driving like a madman through the streets of KL. Nobody could catch Carl, nobody.

All I could think of was that old woman with the headscarf.
Murderer . . .

Dawn found us at a safe house in the Malaysian countryside. We pushed the van with bullet holes into the lake. Datuk Keng was dead. Big Eddie’s work was done.

The new guy, Reaper, may have been young, but he’d done well. Carl had cracked open a beer and was sitting on the couch, surly as usual. Train was his usual jovial, goofball self. A nerdy computer kid, my best friend the angry mercenary, and a mountain of muscle with a teddy bear’s heart. This was my crew, this was my family. They did this for me. They were watching the news coverage about what the local authorities were calling the Independence Day Massacre.

I left the room, wanting to be by myself. Carl studied me as I walked away. He knew me better than anybody, and I had no doubt he knew what I was about to do. I watched Katarina through the window as she paced back and forth on the lawn. She was on her cell phone, giving details to Big Eddie’s representatives. She was dressed down now, just wearing normal clothing, not made up at all, and even then I had to admit that she was probably the most beautiful woman I had ever known, and fun, and amazingly smart, talented, pretty much everything I could ever want.

Too bad she was evil.

I overheard Reaper whisper to Train. “A massacre? Man, that was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that before . . . How many people have you guys killed?”

“That’s a stupid question, kid.” Carl muttered. “Really stupid.”

“Sorry.”

“I can understand you asking,” Train said. “Me, I’ve had to do it a few times. Carl here, if you had to get all of the people he’s killed together, you would probably fill a bus. A big Greyhound bus. He and Lorenzo were mercenaries in Africa for a few years.”

“Dude . . .”

“Shut it, Train,” Carl growled.

“What about Lorenzo?” Reaper asked with a reverent tone.

“Lorenzo, well . . .” Train hesitated.

Carl responded. “If I need a bus, then Lorenzo needs a football stadium. Now both of you shut up.”

I sighed, and banged my head against the window.

I intercepted Katarina on the lawn as she hung up her phone. She got right to business. “Big Eddie is not happy.” Her accent was Swiss. She was half Spanish, half Swiss, and sometimes when she wasn’t playing at being something else, her accent was very obvious. It sounded like “
Big Eddie eez not happy.”

“And why’s that?”

“Too much attention. Too much collateral damage. He says that next time—”

I cut her off. “There is no next time. You tell him I’m
done
.”

“Lorenzo . . .” she spoke calmly. “Think this through. Nobody is ever
done
with Eddie.”

“I am. Sorry, Kat, it’s over.”

“Are you talking about our employer, or are you talking about us too?” She looked sad, and even bit her lower lip, but I knew that was an act. A year ago I would have believed she was capable of sadness but now I knew that it was fake. Any normal human emotions Katarina had, had long since been expunged.

“Both.”

“I thought you loved me . . .” she said, voice cracking, and this time, I almost could believe her.
Almost
. I turned my back on her and walked away.

Chapter 1: Paradise Lost

LORENZO

St. Carl Island

The Bahamas

February 6th

Seven years ago. Why was I dreaming about seven years ago
?
The clock by the bed told me that it was three in the morning. I was having a hard time sleeping again, just too restless.

Jill grunted in her sleep. Trying not to wake her, I got up carefully and went to the bathroom. The nondescript face in the mirror stared at me.
What’s your problem, Lorenzo
?
It was weird to think about Kuala Lumpur again. It had been a turning point for me. Of course, Eddie had come back to haunt me, dragging me into the mess in Zubara, but he was dead now and I was still alive. So what had I become? I was a free man. I was my
own
man. I was a retired thief. I was wealthy. I was in a relationship with a wonderful woman, even though I didn’t deserve her.

But at what cost?
A football stadium
. The face in the mirror scowled. That’s what Carl had described. So what was I now? For some reason, the words of my foster father were on my mind that morning. I could hear his deep voice, fading on his death bed. Warning me about good and evil . . .

I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep tonight.

“Welcome to St. Carl!” the waitress said with extra cheer. Those simple words got my attention. St. Carl was a small enough island that anyone who wasn’t a regular got that greeting, especially during the off season when tourists were few and the staff was hungry for tips. The room was kept dark, in sharp contrast to the bright Caribbean sunshine trying to force its way through the now-open entrance. The lunch patrons were sitting in a few tight clusters, mostly workers from the nearby docks, and a handful of others, all of whom I recognized, but I didn’t know the three newcomers standing in the doorway.

The lead was a striking woman of Chinese descent, dressed casually, but not casually enough to pass for a St. Carl resident. Her black eyes were scanning across the room, looking for something, or someone. She was flanked by two men, one short Asian guy built like a cage fighter, and the other, a black man so tall he almost had to duck to get through the door, with a shaved head and more muscle than a side of beef.

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 harm 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.