-Eight Months Earlier
My group had the private backroom of the Thai restaurant to ourselves. The food had arrived, the mood was happy, and the piped in music was loud and had lots of cymbals in it. My crew was in high spirits, the job was a success, some Laotian drug lords were a lot poorer, and we were a whole lot richer.
Reaper, our techie, was proceeding to get drunk. Carl, our wheelman, was slightly less sullen than usual, beady rat eyes darting back and forth while he chain smoked. Train, the muscle, was his usual good natured self, laughing at every stupid comment. I was enjoying some nuclear-hot curry death mushroom dish and basking in the glow of another perfect score.
The beads leading into the private room parted, allowing a giant whale of a man in a three piece suit to enter the room. He was bigger than Train and probably weighed more then my entire team put together. My crew was instantly quiet. There was a slight motion to my right as Carl drew his CZ-75 and held it under the table, Han Solo style.
“Lorenzo, I presume.” The fat man pulled up a chair and sat. The chair creaked ominously under his mass. “Is that supposed to be your first name or your last?”
I finished chewing, savoring the eye watering pain. “Neither. Who the hell are you?”
“My name isn’t important, but I work for Big Eddie…” He trailed off as he said that, smiling with that strange quality of the slightly schizophrenic. “I have an assignment for you.”
I slowly put my chopsticks down. “I’m retired. Me and your boss are square.” Standing to leave, I pulled some Thai Bahts from my wallet and threw them on the table. I had no interest in anything related to Big Eddie, possibly the most brutal crime-lord in history, and all around bad person. Prior jobs I had performed for the man had left me independently wealthy, but with a lot of scars, and a trail of bodies from here to Moscow. “Come on guys, let’s go.”
“My employer insists that you are the only person who can complete this assignment. Your gift of languages and disguises, your ability to blend in with any culture, to infiltrate any group, and your gift for violence are legendary in some circles. You, Sir, are the best of the best.”
“Tell him to find somebody else.”
The fat man chuckled. “He said you would say that.” He placed a manilla folder on the table and shoved it towards me. He passed other folders to Carl, Train, and Reaper. “He said you should look at this before you make any rash decisions… Mr.—“ and then he called me by my real name. There was no way he could know that. I froze as he opened the folder.
Pictures. Lots of pictures.
My crew began to flip through the pages of their files, eyes widening in shock, mouths falling open, Carl swearing in Portuguese. Reaper stood and pulled his Glock from his waistband, letting it dangle, folder still open in his other hand.
The fat man wiped his brow as he began to read from a list. “Six siblings, oh my, I do love large families. Robert, Jill, Tom, George, Pat.” He shoved a list of addresses towards me, paper clipped to a series of photos. “Big Eddie knows where each of them lives, where they work, what they do, and how to reach them at anytime. Should you attempt to contact them, Big Eddie will find out, and he will be most displeased.”
“They know about my daughter?” Train asked in disbelief, his big hands crunching the edges of the folder.
“You bastard.” I knew he was not bluffing. Eddie was capable of anything. They must have been gathering this information on me for years.
“Three of your siblings are married. You have seven nieces and nephews.” He told me as he passed me another stack of photos. School photos. I was across the table before he knew what was happening, my knife open and pressed hard between his second and third chin. Reaper lifted his gun and pointed it at the fat man, mouth curling in a snarl as he let the file fall to the sticky floor.
He didn’t even flinch. “Your mother lives with your sister Jill now, still in your hometown. On Tuesday evenings she goes to her book club. During the week she baby sits while Jill goes to work, managing a Waffle House.”
I twisted the knife, and a small trickle of blood splattered on his white collar. His little pig eyes were hard and cold as he stared me down. “Your oldest brother, Robert, is, surprisingly enough, an FBI agent. He has a lovely home in the suburbs, and a beautiful wife, and two lovely daughters. You will take on this assignment, or Big Eddie will take care of them first. You know how he feels about cops.”
“And if I just cut your throat and disappear?” I hissed, leashed anger bubbling to the surface.
“You won’t. We’ve studied you. You will do what it takes to protect your family. Plans are in place, that if I do not return, or if you are not observed attempting to complete this assignment, then your family will pay the price. You may try to warn them, you may try to protect them, you may even attempt to locate our organization, heaven knows if any one is insane enough to try it is you, but you can’t save all of them. You know how great our employer’s reach is, and there is no place in this world where you can hide them all.”
He was not bluffing. Eddie was more powerful than most governments, a shadowy figure involved in every criminal enterprise on the planet. I withdrew the Benchmade, wiped the blood on the fat man’s shirt, folded the blade and put it back in my pocket. I hadn’t even spoken to my family in years. They thought I was some sort of international businessman. I knew that if I tried to warn them, even if they believed me, there was no way I could protect them all. Sitting back down, I nodded at Reaper, and he stuck his Glock back into his waistband.
“That’s better. Here is the mission. There are three phases. You have one year.”
I opened the proffered folder, read a few lines, and then laughed out loud. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is impossible.”
“One year, Mr. Lorenzo. Or we will kill everyone you have ever loved.” He gestured at the mushroom dish. “Are you going to finish that?”
####################
Train had disappeared during the night, having crawled out his hotel room window. No doubt deciding it was safer to disobey Big Eddie and attempt to hide his family, rather than take on this obvious suicide mission in Qatar.
One week later, someone shoved an envelope under my door. Inside was a newspaper clipping that told the story of a family of three that had been killed in Lincoln, Nebraska, apparently of a gas leak explosion. Train’s picture was underneath the headline.
#####################
Back to the present.
The van slalomed around the corner. I bounced painfully against the wall. The girl I had rescued was sitting next to me, head back on the seat, totally out. Apparently she had been drugged by the bad guys.
“Easy, Carl, don’t get us killed.”
“Don’t you tell me easy. Plan, Lorenzo, we had a plan. Who the hell is the chick?” He swung us around a truck full of sheep, and when I say full of sheep, I mean that literally, like it was piled full with legs sticking out the top. “The chick was not part of the plan. I would have remembered that.”
“They were going to torture her. I couldn’t just leave her. She sounded like an American before she passed out. We can just drop her at the embassy gates and take off.”
“Easier said that done,” he gestured out the window at Qatari army vehicles streaking in the direction we had come from. “Cops crawling everywhere. They probably have checkpoints around the embassy. We’ll never make it.”
To accentuate his point, I saw a man on the sidewalk getting the hell kicked out of him by some of the Qatari secret police. “Okay, our place is closer. Get us off the streets.” Doha had gone insane.
“I’m not taking her to our place. We can’t let anybody see what we’re working on.”
“Do it, Carl.” I ordered. My crew was loyal, and I seldom had to pull rank, but this was my crew, and it wasn’t a democracy. The driver swore, his beady eyes glaring at me in the rear view mirror. We reached the compound in minutes. Our apartment was in the rear, and luckily had an attached garage so no one would see us carry the girl in.
Reaper met us at the door. He was a tall, skinny kid, with black stringy hair, and a penchant for Marylin Manson t-shirts. He had a Glock shoved in the front of his pants. “What happened out there? Police bands are screaming about some massacre. Did you get the box and the book? Who’s the babe?”
“Lorenzo’s decided he’s Robin Hood or some ****,” Carl spat. I ignored him, and carried the girl up the stairs and into the apartment. I laid her gently on the couch. She was still out.
I handed Reaper the box. His face lit up. “Dude, this is awesome.”
“Don’t throw a party just yet. Somebody beat us to the code book and whacked Adar.” I put the DVD in his hand. “The shooters are hopefully on this, and we need to figure out who they are. We need that book or the box is worthless.”
“On it, chief.” He ran for his computer.
I flopped onto the couch next to the girl. My hands were starting to do the post-action shake. No matter how many times I did something like this, that part never changed. Carl sighed, leaned his AUG on the coffee table, and sat on the loveseat.
“So I guess it was pretty bad in there?” he asked slowly. We had been working together for ten years now, and sometimes it still took a moment to get through the Portuguese accent. He was a small man, balding, with a dark complexion, and arm hair that looked like a rug. We had met in Angola, where he had been working as a mercenary. Working with me had apparently been more interesting.
“I shot three of them. Took out some more with a grenade.” I shrugged. “The guys before me made a real mess. Got at least seven that I saw.”
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.” He gestured at the girl. “And what do we do with her now?”
I studied her for the first time. She was young. Probably in her twenties. I had thought that she was from the Philippines when I had first seen her, as most of the servant girls in Qatar were from there or Indonesia. Now I wasn’t so sure. She was tall, and didn’t look quite like most of the servant girls I had seen here. She was snoring peacefully in a drug addled haze. One eye was badly bruised, and it made me glad that I had shot those men.
“I couldn’t leave her. You should have seen the girl upstairs,” I said. Carl didn’t respond. Acts of mercy were few and far between in his life. I patted her down, no documents, no passport. Something caught my eye. “Check this out.” I held up her wrist. She had a gold ring on one finger.
“What’s that say?” he asked, squinting his beady eyes.
“California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo. Class of 2002.”
“Think she stole it off a tourist I hope?”
“I’m thinking that we’re going to need to come up with a pretty good cover story for when she wakes up.” I gestured around the room. Hundreds of pictures were tacked on the walls. Posters of Al-Falal, Adar, building schematics, road maps, and miscellaneous paper littered every corner of the room. A scale model of the Phase III target was on the coffee table, and there were at least ten visible guns, and that wasn’t counting the RPGs in the corner.
“You’re the one with the imagination. I just drive good and shoot people.”
“Guys, come check this out,” Reaper called from the other room. “I’ve got your shooters.”
We entered the makeshift computer room, and hovered over Reaper’s shoulder. He was playing some Finnish Goth metal on his Ipod. “I’m skipping past the torture stuff, this Adar was one ****** up *******. And here is where your shooters come in.”
“Slow it down.” Two men, dressed all in black, faces smeared with black greasepaint, armed with UMPs. One a few inches over six feet, kind of stocky, and left handed, wearing stupid fingerless gloves. The other thin, and probably 5’9 or 5’10 with a real short military hair cut. The bigger one booted Adar down, bellowed at him, obviously shocked and angry, the execution, and then the quick ransacking of the bedroom. So these were the men who had plunged Doha into chaos.
“Who are these *******?” Carl said. “What is this, ninja dress up hour? What’s with the makeup? How were they going to explain that if they got picked up by the cops?”
“Play back when the tall one yells at Adar.” Reaper complied. I listened. The shooter was young, wearing what looked to be prescription type goggles. His face didn’t look like the face of a killer, but there was no hesitation when he put a bullet in Adar’s brain pan. “He’s an American. Judging by his accent, he’s from the north end of the country. Great lakes. Michigan, Wisconsin maybe.”
“How in the hell can you tell that, from one little shouted thing?” Reaper asked incredulously.
“Kid, I speak eight languages fluently, and can get by in fifteen others.” That much was true, it was a gift that came naturally to me. “I’ve pretended to be a hundred different people over the last twenty years. I can do accents better than anybody in Hollywood. He’s from some place with a lot of Scandinavians and Lutherans.”
“Well, when you were pretending to be Khalid, I couldn’t tell you weren’t Qatari, down to the man dress and the perfume. You say he’s from Minnesota or whatever, I believe you.”
“Go back a bit.” Carl frowned. “I’ve seen this guy. He was at the mall in Doha. Remember ‘cause he’s tall, and he bumped into me. He was with this really beautiful girl.”
“You sure?”
“She was really hot, Lorenzo. I’m not kidding with you. I remember thinking what was she doing with somebody like him.”
“It’s a lead. We’ve got to find this guy, so we can try there. Reaper, do me a favor, and grab my notepad from the living room. When I was playing Khalid, I made friends with some of the shop keepers at the mall. I’m going to give them a call.”
Reaper nodded, adjusted his Glock, and moved for the living room.
“Kid’s gonna shoot himself in the crotch, carrying his gun like that.” Carl said. Reaper flipped him the bird on his way out.
“We don’t have very good health insurance in this business either,” I muttered, studying the face of my new adversary. These men were standing in the way of me completing phase three. Until I had that code book, the box was worthless. Without that box, our families belonged to Big Eddie. I did not know who these mystery shooters were, but my new mission in life was to find them, and kill them if I had to. I blew up the picture until it became grainy. The shooter had a killer’s eyes. This was going to be a challenge.
There was a sudden crash from the living room. Carl and I both drew our guns, and moved apart. I disengaged the safety on my 1911 and pointed it at the doorway. Carl took up position behind the desk, CZ extended in front of him.
“Reaper?” I shouted. “You okay.”
Our guest had awoken. Reaper stumbled into the doorway, his arms raised in a surrender position. The girl stood behind him with his Glock 17 pressed into the base of his neck. I didn’t have a shot.
“Sorry, chief,” he said slowly.
The girl glared over Reaper’s shoulder. The drugs must have worn off, and she was obviously angry and confused. Her eyes darted about between us. “Nobody move! I’ll shoot this guy right in the head,” she ordered. I had been right, she was an American, and she apparently knew how to use that Glock. “Who are you people? And what am I doing here?”
“Well... that’s kind of complicated.”
She tightened her grip on the Glock. I could imagine a 9mm exploding through Reaper’s head. “Give me the short version, *******!”
“Okay, well, there I was...”
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To be continued...