Devlin's Defiance: Book Two of the Devlin Quatrology (20 page)

“
Target secured,”
she spoke into her collar microphone.

“
Ten seconds
out,” she heard the Stringer reply.

As the Stringer
arrived, wearing a pair of latex gloves, he reached into his pocket
and pulled out a small knife and a short coil of piano wire with a
small wooden dowel on each end. Then he roughly turned the target
over so he was lying with his bound hands under his back.

Looking into the
target's eyes, wide with a combination of terror and alcohol, the
Stringer whispered, “You have less than two minutes to live,
scumbag, and sad for you, you won't enjoy either of them.”

He then reached down,
unzipped the target's fly, and carried out the literal but limited
dismemberment the client had requested, then waggled the severed
object in front of the target's face; it looked rather like a
wrinkled little Vienna sausage.

“
No wonder you
did what you did,” the Stringer said, smirking at the target
and chuckling. Then he stuck it under the twine next to the tennis
ball gag.

The blonde took a
minute's worth of video as the target struggled, glared and screamed,
but nothing more than a slight gurgling sound escaped through the
gag.

The Stringer then
threw the offending organ onto the grass on the other side of the
Track, where it was picked up and turned into a quick midnight snack
by a winged nocturnal scavenger.

The Stringer wiped the
knife on the target's shirt and then slowly uncoiled the garrote,
making certain that the target could see it. The target's eyes
widened even further and he began shaking his head from side to side,
screaming and gurgling even more frantically.

The Stringer turned him
over, more roughly than before, and wound the garrote around the
target's neck. As he did so, he was viscerally excited by the
impending death, and he felt an erection coming on, all in spite of
the stench of the victim's loosened bladder and bowels.

“
Hey, wait, wait
a minute!!! That's not right. I'm not feeling any 'visceral
excitement' and I sure don't have an erection.”

Are you talking to me?

“
Bet your ass I
am. You're giving me emotions and sensations I just don't feel. I'm
way beyond those when I'm doing a job; it's just a job. Now fuck off
and let me finish this one.”

The Stringer pulled and
twisted the garrote tightly around the victim's throat and pushed his
knee into his back, laughing with glee as he heard the spine crack
and the gurgle of blood spurting from –

“
Hey, hey, hey!
You hear me laughing? You hear any glee? No, you don't. Now quit
fuckin' around with what you want to think is going on in my head.
I've got a job to finish here.”

Okay, okay.

“
Good.”

Once the Stringer had
ensured that the target was dead, he cut the ties away, coiled up the
garrote, removed the gag, stripped off his gloves and stuck
everything in a plastic bag, which he put in his pocket, then turned
the corpse back over, propping it up against one of the stone
pillars. The blonde took more video of the body and closeups of its
bloodied, torn-apart throat and groin, and they walked casually out
of the hut and back west along the Track, crossing the Parade about a
hundred meters from the hut, weaving swiftly through the heavy
traffic.

“
Hey, hey!
There's no goddamn traffic! Zero! We're clear.”

Oh, sorry; I wasn't
watching. Rosemary's tickling me.

“
Well, if you're
gonna write it, at least write it right.”

Okay, okay.

“
Hey, Ro, just
give me a minute, okay?”

The Stringer then
pulled out a sat phone and dialed.

“
Authentication
0000001. Yeah, all set here; no problems. We'll send the proof of
death when we get back to the hotel. And I think we're gonna take a
day or two in Melbourne and then a few more in Sydney. There's an
opera and a sculpture exhibit we'd like to see. Everything okay on
the yacht? No more attacks? Ah, good. Okay, give the captain our
regards, let him know we'll be back in a week or two. Thanks, Amber.”

The Stringer and the
blonde walked to their stolen car, which they parked a few blocks
from their obscure hotel, and walked into the lobby, where the
strung-out desk clerk barely noticed them, then upstairs to their
second-floor room, where the blonde removed her wig, revealing her
long red hair, and they prepared to spend the rest of the night
satisfying the visceral excitement that both of them finally allowed
themselves to feel.

“
Well, at least
you got that part right. And there will be erections involved.”

Thanks.

“
Okay, Ro, I'm
ready now – oops; one more minute.”

The grisly death of one
of Australia's most vicious serial rapists and murderers, who had
made the mistake of randomly choosing the daughter of one of the
country's richest and most powerful (and vengeful) industrialists as
one of his victims, was never solved, nor was his passing mourned.

“
Okay, Ro, once
more and then we'll get to the beach. But just one, okay?”

- 52 -

November
26, 2012
7:43
a.m. local time

Prien am Chiemsee,
Germany

Helmut Stambergheim had
just opened his ferry business, which took tourists out to
Herrenchiemsee, King Ludwig the Second's unfinished copy of the
Palace of Louis XIV, the French Sun King, at Versailles, when his
bellowing brought the local polizei to the dock, who immediately
called his superiors to investigate the bloated and partially
decomposed body that had floated to the surface of the lake and
triggered Helmut's fairly accurate impression of the Mad King's
screaming when in one of his violently abusive paranoid fits.

The discovery of the
body confirmed for the investigators the reports they had received
five days earlier about a winged creature dropping something into the
lake from a great height at about noon, which had led to three days
of futile searching of the lake and its shoreline. It also was
consistent with a report from a local skydiving school that two of
its clients had gone missing on that day.

The autopsy revealed
compound fractures of nearly all the bones in the body, consistent
with impact on water from a height of at least 900 meters, except for
the broken neck, which had a spiral break consistent with a sharp
manual twist made by an unknown second party. The death was ruled a
homicide.

The contents of the
victim's wallet identified him as the owner of a large import-export
business in New Jersey in the United States, specializing in
furniture and electronics, but which Interpol and the FBI had long
suspected of trafficking in drugs, weapons and Eastern European
teenagers, both male and female.

A desultory
investigation led to no arrests, and only a vague description of a
short-haired brunette female who had accompanied the victim, claiming
to be his personal assistant, who had shown what appeared to be a
valid skydiver certification card and then taken the man on a tandem
dive. The school had not made a copy of the card, only recorded the
name and number, but those both turned out to be false.

The investigators never
contacted one man who had observed and recorded on his cell phone a
wingsuited figure opening a chute roughly a kilometer south of the
lake. His video, however, ended when the chutist passed below the
treeline.

Interpol and the FBI
kept the case open, but in a file they both labeled as “Who
gives a shit.” The German police, being much more meticulous
and obsessive-compulsive, kept the case in their open cold case
files. But no suspects were ever found, nor was any arrest ever
made.

- 53 -

December
8, 2012
11:38
a.m. local time

Bonita Beach, Florida

“
She's late.”

“
Hey, Gordy, we
all run on beach time. And we've got all day.”

“
Yeah, I know.
But something's off. I woke up kinda tense, a sort of sinking
feeling in my stomach.”

“
Maybe 'cause you
slept at your house last night?”

“
Maybe. But I
needed to get some writing done. I'm sorry.”

“
No, no, that's
fine. I understood.”

“
I hope nothing's
happened to her.”

“
'C'mon; she's
only seven or eight minutes late.”

“
Yeah, okay,
okay. Maybe I'm just nervous.”

“
Nervous? You?”

“
Yeah; feels like
I'm outa my depth with all this.”

“
But that's why
we're meeting with her.”

“
Yeah; you're
right, Ro, you're right.”

“
And you know
you've got an idea for what you want, right?”

“
Yeah, roughly.
And you've given me some ideas, too.”

“
I have?”

“
Yup.”

“
Well, I probably
got some of those thanks to her.”

“
I sorta guessed
that.”

“
What? You
didn't think they were original?”

“
Oh, no, no, no,
no, no; they were very, very original. But a little out of character
for how I thought of you … in the past.”

“
You still think
of me that way?”

“
Oh, no, for sure
not.”

“
I'm glad.”

“
Well, I” –

“
Hi, Ro; hi,
Gordy.”

“
Hi, Dallas. You
made it,” Rosemary said, glancing at Gordy.

“
Yeah. But the
lot was full, so I had to wait for a space to open.”

“
Yeah, season's
here, and it's only gonna get worse.”

“
Gordy, you
okay?”

“
Yeah; sorry.
Hi, Dallas.”

“
Hi. You looked
a little out of sorts there for a second.”

Gordy glanced at
Rosemary as he said, “Sorry; maybe something I ate.”

“
Okay. You sure
you want to do this now?”

“
Yup; don't mind
me, I'll be fine. So how do you want to start?”

“
Let's see. You
said you'd make up some notes when you called me. Have you got
those?”

“
Yup, right
here.” He reached into his bag and withdrew a sheet of paper
and gave it to Dallas.

“
Thanks. Let's
see. Okay. One guy, 67 or 68; two girls, twins, 50, gorgeous …
ah, ex-CIA?”

“
Yup.”

“
Honey-trappers
in the Cold War, sometimes worked as a team, not lesbos” –

“
Did I write
'lesbos'? I meant lesbians.”

“
No, you wrote
'lesbians.' 'Lesbos' is our jargon.”

“
Oh, okay.”

“
Hmm. Luxurious
suite, shower scene, blah-blah-blah, graphic but not obscene,
euphemisms, not – okay; I can do that. But you do want people
turned on when they read it, right?”

Gordy glanced at
Rosemary, who nodded.

“
Yup.”

“
Both men and
women?”

“
Yup.”