Dead Six (21 page)

It was over in seconds. They never knew what hit them. We both quickly changed magazines and moved into the living room, doing our best to cover all angles. The men on the couch had been thoroughly ventilated. A few stray rounds had gone into the far wall, but the television was still blaring pornography at an unpleasantly high volume. A cloud of smoke hung in the room, and the air smelled like burnt powder.

This is too easy,
I thought, but I wasn’t about to get complacent. Complacency is what had gotten these assholes killed. We still hadn’t found Adar, and we knew from the surveillance that three more individuals were in the house.

“Control, Xbox,” Tailor whispered. “Main floor clear. Four more tangos down. Sweeping the building now.” I could barely hear Sarah’s voice. She was drowned in static. Tailor tried again, but he got the same result. Something in the area was interfering with our transmissions.

Tailor pointed up. He proceeded to an ornate staircase, weapon shouldered and at the ready. I followed, constantly swiveling my head around to make sure no one was coming up behind. The top of the stairs revealed a wide hallway, with a few doors on either side. Strange music resonated through the upper level, and it included people chanting in some language that wasn’t Arabic. At the end of the hall was a closed door that probably led to the master bedroom.

Tailor started down the hallway, and I followed. Most of the doors on either side were open, and we carefully checked each one before proceeding past. One was locked, so we kept going.

A toilet flushed. Tailor and I froze and swung our weapons toward the bathroom door just as it opened. The man inside was buttoning his shirt back up when he saw us. He had a pistol in a shoulder holster. His eyes grew wide, and he reached for it, but he wasn’t nearly fast enough. His white shirt splashed red as we both hit him with a two-round burst. He fell over backward, hitting the hardwood floor with a thud.

Tailor immediately swung his weapon toward the door at the end of the hall. I swung mine back toward the stairs. Back to back, we waited for a long moment. Nothing happened. The strange music was the only sound that could be heard. The upstairs of the house must have been sound-dampened or something. Sweat trickled down Tailor’s blackened face. He nodded at the door at the end of the hall and started toward it. All of the rooms in the upstairs hallway were now empty. If Adar was in the house, he was through that door.

The bizarre chanting music grew louder as we drew closer, but it was muffled enough that I still couldn’t tell what language it was. As we approached the end of the hall, I felt strange. Apprehension grew in me. My heart rate sped up.
The Calm
was wavering. Something was wrong.

I put a hand on Tailor’s shoulder. He stopped and looked a question back at me. My mouth opened, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. Looking irritated, Tailor just jerked his head at the door and reached for the handle. He signaled me to go right while he’d go straight. It’s hard to properly cover the angles in a room when there’re only two of you. We’d have to be quick. He hesitated for a long second, hand hovering over the handle, then grabbed it and slammed the door open. Together, we rushed into the room.

The bedroom was huge. Directly opposite the door was a large four-poster bed, with some kind of big painting hung above it. Against the far wall was a mirrored dresser, a desk, and what looked like a vanity.

Adar stood in the middle of the room. He was taller than I thought he’d be. He was also completely naked and splattered with blood. He clutched some kind of curved dagger in his hand.

In front of him, hanging from the ceiling, was a woman. Her hands were bound over her head. Her hair, matted and wet, hung down in her face. Blood dripped from her ravaged body onto plastic sheets spread across the floor. She’d been utterly mutilated. Adar had split her open like he was cleaning a game animal. Bloody lumps that appeared to be internal organs had been neatly arranged on the dresser. Behind them was an iPod and a set of speakers, the source of the strange music.

My stomach lurched. My mouth fell open. It felt like my balls were trying to crawl up into my stomach. It took me a moment to process what I was actually seeing. I could hear a strange buzzing in my ears over the bizarre rhythms of Adar’s music.

“Jesus Christ,” Tailor said, turning toward Adar. I don’t know why neither of us fired. The whole thing was surreal.

Adar, as if noticing our presence for the first time, turned toward us. His face was a mask. If he was surprised or afraid, he didn’t show it. My heart was racing now. My knees were weak, and I thought I was going to fall. I wanted to turn and run out of the room. Adar spoke to us then. He said something in Arabic that I didn’t understand. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth as he talked. I looked over at the dead girl again, then back at Adar. I felt numb. Adar smiled. I closed my eyes . . .

“
Val
!” Tailor yelled, startling me.

I blinked, realizing then that my revolver was in my hands. Confused, I slowly reholstered it.

“
Nightcrawler, Nightcrawler, Control, what’s your status
?” Sarah asked, the concern in her voice obvious. I tried to speak but couldn’t.

That’s when I saw Adar. He was lying on the floor, on his stomach, in a huge pool of blood. Some of it was his, some of it was the girl’s. A gory wound protruded from the center of his lower back. There was another exit wound on the back of his neck; hebeen nearly decapitated.

“Get it together, goddamn it!” Tailor yelled, grabbing my body armor and shaking me.

“I’m . . . what happened?” I asked. “I think I blacked out.”

“You fucked him
up
is what happened!” Tailor said, letting me go. He walked across the room, stepping over Adar’s corpse, and smashed the iPod. The horrid music silenced, Tailor keyed his microphone. “Control, Xbox, radio check.”

“
Loud and clear, Xbox
,” Sarah replied, relief obvious in her voice. “
What’s your status?”

“The target’s dead,” Tailor said. “We’re fine. Stand by.” He looked up at me. “Why didn’t you just shoot him with your submachine gun?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t remember shooting Adar. “Why didn’t
you
just shoot him?”

Tailor hesitated. “I don’t know, either,” he said. “Fuck it, it’s
done
. Let’s check for intel and get the hell out of here. This place is freaking me out.”

Nodding, I looked around Adar’s room. The mirror behind him had shattered, presumably from my bullets passing through him. The painting above the bed depicted a horrific monster, a mass of tentacles and teeth, devouring a girl. I looked back over at Adar’s victim. I felt dizzy, turned, and threw up on the floor.

“You alright, Val?” Tailor asked, calmer now.

“No,” I replied. “We can’t leave her like that!”

“What? Val, we gotta go, man, we don’t have time to —”

“
We can’t leave her like that!
” I shouted, standing back up.

“Listen, goddamn it!” Tailor said. “She’s dead! You can’t—”

“Tailor,
please
,” I said, much more quietly this time.

He mouthed another curse word. “Fine. Let’s hurry this up. We have to get out of here.” I closed my eyes as I held the girl’s feet. Tailor stood up on a chair and snapped out his automatic knife. He used it to cut the ropes that she’d been hung with and grabbed her shoulders. He helped me gently lower her body.

“Oh,
God,
” Tailor said, making himself look up at the ceiling. The girl’s head had flopped back as we carried her; her eyes were gone. Empty red sockets stared up at my partner. “This is fucked up. This is
fucked up,
” he said. Doing our best to ignore it, we carried her to Adar’s bed and wrapped her in the sheets. Tailor quickly looked away, sweat trickling down his face.

“Hey look,” I said, noticing for the first time a small safe. It was mounted in the wall next to the bed, and was open.

“Let’s . . . let’s check it out,” Tailor said, regaining his composure.

Inside was a stack of American hundred-dollar bills. “Wow.”

“There has to be fifty thousand dollars here,” Tailor said. He began stuffing the money into his assault pack.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to report that,” I said as I rummaged through the safe, stuffing documents into my pockets. At the very back of the safe, my hand touched something solid.

“What’s that?” Tailor asked as I pulled it out.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was a small wooden box wrapped in a plastic bag.

“Take it. Grab everything else you can find. We’ve gotta bounce, man. We been here too long.” We took one last look around the room but didn’t find anything else. As we turned to leave, I pulled an Ace of Spades out of my pocket and dropped it onto Adarback.

He hadn’t stopped smiling, even in death.

Chapter 8:
The Intern

LORENZO

April 16

The house was too quiet.

I should have known something was wrong as soon as I saw the compound’s front gate left open. After doing a quick pass by, we had modified the plan. Carl had parked a klick down the road, and I had snuck up on the isolated compound, consisting of a single large house surrounded by a ten-foot brick wall, on foot. It had been purchased by Al Falah as a safe house for his associates.

Approaching as quietly as possible, I had paused and scanned the gate repeatedly. The plan had been for both of us to sneak in, kill Adar and anybody else there as quickly as possible, grab the box, and get the hell out, but now that situation looked fishy. So I’d snuck in to take a quick peek. I was wearing body armor, covered with ammo and explosives, and had a short AR-15 carbine, and even weighed down that much I was far stealthier than most. Not trying to brag, but I would have made a damn good ninja.

The compound had appeared utterly dead, so I had sprinted right up to the door. Lights were on but nobody was home. Sweeping inside, I paused as I saw the first perforated corpse. “Somebody beat us to it,” I said into the radio as I surveyed the destruction in the living room. Brass casings rolled underfoot and the room stank of the recently dead.

“
What do you mean
?” Carl’s voice said in my ear.

“I mean that the guards are dead and the place is shot to hell. Somebody’s been here already.”

“
Did they get the box? If those no-good thieves got the box, I swear I’m gonna
—“

“Dude, we are no-good thieves. Chill.” I moved quickly through the room, careful not to step in any of the spreading puddles. Empty extended Glock magazines were on the carpet. Could this be the work of the same hitters that had screwed up Phase One?

I kept my rifle up as I moved through the house. It was dead silent, but there could still be somebody here.

“I bet it was those guys that almost botched the Falah job.” There was a single body half in the bathroom with a cloverleaf of bullet holes in his chest. I approached the bedroom door quietly, my suppressed 5.56 carbine at the ready, the red dot of the Aimpoint sight floating just under my vision, though I had a sneaky feeling that Adar wasn’t going to be a problem. The bedroom door slowly swung open. Adar was obviously dead. There was a second form under a blood-drenched sheet. I lifted it slowly.

I must have made some sort of strange noise into the radio.

“
Lorenzo? What is it? Are you okay?
”

“Better than the residents. It’s a bloodbath in here.” I hadn’t seen anything like this since Chechnya. That girl had been mutilated, dissected. Somebody had shot the hell out of Adar, too. I did a quick once over of the room, discovering that the stories about the Butcher of Zubara hadn’t been exaggerated. “Carl, Adar cut this girl . . . like . . . I don’t know what.”

“
No time for that. Find that box. Hurry before somebody else shows up
.”

Blood was
everywhere.
Adar hadn’t just been dropped, he’d been methodically taken apart. There was a blood-stained Ace of Spades playing card left on the perforated corpse.
What the hell?
Then I noticed a discarded revolver speed loader, five spent cases, and a single live .44 magnum cartridge. I picked up the round and examined it.

“Clint Eastwood was here.”

“
Huh?
” Carl responded. “
Quit screwing around.
”

Shoving the cartridge into my pocket, I kept searching. The safe had been cleaned out, Adar’s belongings had been rifled through, and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut that what we had come for was already gone.

The shooters had missed something.

“One second.” Having years of experience looking for bugs and planting them, I knew that most people would have missed Adar’s hidden camera. Apparently he liked to record his torture sessions. I followed the wire back behind the bed and found the recorder. It was still running. Maybe this would tell me who our mystery shooters were. I took the DVD out of the machine and hurried back down the stairs.

“I can’t find the damn box.”

Carl swore over the radio again. “
Someone took it already, you think?
”

“I think so. I’m leaving the duplicate anyway. Odds are whoever took it doesn’t know what it’s for, but the prince’s people have to think it’s been destroyed.” I took a small box from a pouch in my armor. It had been carved to very exacting specifications from some very specific pieces of wood. Pressure on some hidden indentations caused the intricate box to slide open, revealing the delicate key inside. I pulled the duplicate out and held it up to the light. This part had been trickier, since there were no recorded measurements for the actual device, but I was about to melt it into slag anyway, so it didn’t really matter. I twisted the base of the key, and dozens of tiny pins moved freely down the sides of the shaft. I placed it in the safe and started setting the bomb.

The incendiary device would immolate the entire room, burning a hole through the floor in seconds. This whole house would be nothing but ash and bones in a matter of minutes, and it was all so Adar’s extended family would think his box was toast. I set the timer for five minutes. Plenty of time to be down the road.