by Chase Austin
Stan slyly observed the rest of the room. Six people in total, including the Ambassador. All carrying Glocks except Carpio. Two twelve-gauge pump action shotguns lay on the bed. The man with the scar stood tall among them. Joaquin Thomas.
“Who are you?” Joaquin demanded.
“I am from the cleaning crew,” Stan spoke with a fake Austrian accent. The longer he could continue with his act, the more time he could gain for Wick and Jessica.
“From when did the cleaning crew come to work with a gun and a listening device?” Joaquin laughed hard and then bent to grab Stan’s throat. “Listen, shithead, if I have to ask this question one more time, I’ll pump so much lead into your skull that your bosses will not even recognize you. You understand me?” He brought his face close to Stan’s and uttered each syllable, “Do you understand me?”
The man wasn’t bluffing, Stan knew that. He contemplated his position. He had to decide and had to decide quickly. Joaquin’s stare turned murkier. He could see that Stan was thinking of something. He raised Stan’s SIG and before Stan could even react, squeezed the trigger. The 9mm lead tore into his thigh muscle and Stan screamed his guts out.
“Who. Are. You?” Joaquin asked again.
“I…” Stan’s breathing was heavy.
He tried to keep a brave face, but it was tough. Especially when, for the first time in his life, he was certain he was going to die.
BAM. BAM. The second floor was rocked by two gunshots.
Chapter 33
Joaquin gave his men a confused look but then his expression transformed into rage. “Damn you?” he yelled at Stan before shooting him twice on his leg. Stan screamed hard. Joaquin then swung a kick. With no strength to block the move, Stan lay in his crosshairs; only closing his eyes seconds before the boot crashed into his chest. An explosion of violent pain rose in his body and his cries reverberated in the room. The force sent him skidding a few feet across the floor. Blood loss and the pain had squeezed every grain of his strength. His mind faded into darkness. Dazed. Disoriented.
“I told you. I bloody told you.” Carpio was in panic.
Joaquin ignored him. He was rubbing his head with both hands, panting hard, thinking through this mess. His last job was turning out to be a damn disaster. “Find them. Whoever they are, I want all of them dead,” He roared at Felipe who swung into action.
Gunshots in the consulate had not only brought an urgency on the fourth floor, but they also woke up the sleepy main street. The passersby started to retreat to safety. Someone dialed the police emergency number.
Away from all this chaos, on the second floor, Jessica and Wick were hard at work. They had brought the ammo bag from the janitor room on the first floor. Wick positioned himself at the south flank while Jessica manned the opposite wing. Elevators, the main stairs, and the fire escape - all within their view.
Jessica heard it first. Multiple footsteps rumbled in the fire exit stairs. Another set of footsteps were coming down heavily on the main stairs, closer to the south flank - Wick’s location.
“Now!” Jessica hissed in her earpiece and three smoke grenades hit the floor in unison.
Inside the minivan, Mac and Jakob stared at each other. Their hearts, pumping blood at thrice the normal speed. The air was charged by police sirens rushing to the consulate.
“We should move from here,” Jakob suggested.
“I cannot risk the connection being broken now. Go outside. Open the hood. Look busy,” Mac said.
Jakob considered it for a second longer but then got out.
Felipe stopped at the edge of the main stairs. The hallway was drowned in darkness and smoke.
“Johan, you in position?” He spoke on the sat phone to the other team waiting at the fire exit stairs. The fire exit was at a bend so the teams could not see each other either.
“Yes.” Johan looked at his two teammates. From the sliver of the fire exit door, they could see that the lobby was dark, deserted and hazy.
“How’s the visibility at your side?” Felipe asked.
“Not good.”
“Can you see any movement?” Felipe asked.
“No.”
A second later, both teams heard someone running away from the main stairs and towards the fire exit. A shadow was moving.
Felipe and his men leveled their SMGs and started to spray bullets at the shadow from behind. Johan and his men saw the shadow approaching them. Their guns blazed at the silhouette but the target opened a door and vanished inside, shutting it with a bang.
“He is boxed in a room. We are closing in. Back us up,” Johan whispered in his sat phone. He and his men took positions outside the room. Felipe and his team sprinted towards the room.
Inside the room, Jessica checked the street outside the window. Unlike the main street, the side alley was still deserted. A few parked cars on the side but no one was lurking. It would not remain so for long. She could hear the police loudspeakers. They must be cordoning off the main street. This alley was, possibly, next in line. She tucked her gun in the holster, slid the window pane open and climbed out onto the ledge, balancing herself against the wall. She slowly made her way to the adjacent room’s window, in the direction of the fire exit. The window pane of that room was already up. She climbed inside and took her position, waiting for Wick’s signal.
Felipe signaled to Johan to enter the room with his men; he and the man accompanying him decided to wait outside. Johan nodded and rotated the knob anticlockwise; throwing the door wide open. Inside, there was a foyer opening into a larger space. The room was dark but the visibility was better than the hallway. Johan entered first, knees slightly bent. Two of his colleagues followed him. With his left hand, he flicked the light switch. The room was vacant.
On the opposite side of the lobby a door opened, and Wick stepped out. In his right hand, he held an Uzi. He could see two shadows closer to his side of the wall. He brought the Uzi to chest height and pulled the trigger.
The bullets raced at seven hundred meters per minute to penetrate their targets. The barrel suppressed the report, but it was only effective in noisy areas, not in the eerie quiet of the consulate. The SMG had been noisy, but he didn’t care anymore. Johan and his men inside the room heard the noise and ducked instinctively. The sound came from the lobby. Johan turned, lying on the floor, in time to see Felipe falling to the ground.
The shots stopped as soon as Wick knew the job was done. Felipe’s sat phone crackled. Johan knew who it would be, but he didn’t dare go out of the room to pick it up.
The next call was on his sat phone. “What happened?” Joaquin’s voice betrayed no worry.
“Felipe is dead.”
“Two down.” Jessica heard Wick over the earpiece. “Lobby clear,” Wick confirmed. His Uzi was still pointed at the door. There wasn’t any movement outside. She knew that the men in the room wouldn’t dare venture out, knowing someone would be aiming for their heads. As soon as she received Wick’s confirmation, she opened her room’s door and slid out towards the fire exit in a squat position. Once the handle was within Jessica’s reach, she did two things in quick succession. One, she tossed two grenades into the open room where Johan and his men were holed up. Two, she opened the fire escape door and got out, shutting it hard behind her.
Johan was thinking of his next steps when he saw the first grenade rolling into the room. His men saw it too.
As soon as the door touched the frame, the grenade blew up.
Johan wasted no time in getting up. His men followed suit, leaping out the window. Still, the twin explosion caught them in mid-air and the three bodies crashed on the street. Their backs burned, but the falling debris from the blast gave them no chance.
Behind the police line, TV crews had gathered at the edge of the police line when the Uzi stopped roaring. Every lens zoomed to the second floor. The grenade blasts came two minutes later with three bodies flying out of the second floor. Five officers ran towards the side alley to assess the damage.
“Medics! NOW!” one of them shouted to the ambulance parked near the building. The attendants grabbed their supplies and sprinted to the location. Lenses followed them. Police quickly cordoned off the alley to stop them. Police radios were chattering incessantly taking stock of the situation. Guns were blazing and bombs were going off on the most peaceful street of Vienna, and no one knew why.
Chapter 34
Despite being soundproofed, the fourth-floor suite felt the reverberations from the twin blasts. The sat- phone in Joaquin’s hand went blank. Joaquin grasped that he had just lost his men to the unidentified assailants. He saw fear on the faces of his men in the room; none relished the prospect of fighting an enemy they knew nothing about.
“What now?” Carpio spoke in a quivering voice. He was standing near the bed, shaking badly. This was nothing like he’d planned for. “The police are outside. The consulate is ruined, and you still have no clue who you’re dealing with.”
“Shut up, you bloody idiot.” Joaquin chewed his lips.
“How dare you? I thought you were a mastermind but…” Carpio was yelling and at the same time shuddering with fear and anger. “Everything is a mess. Your men are dead, and you cannot wrap your head around the situation.” With every word he spewed, he was regaining his confidence. In his anger he grabbed the shotgun lying on the bed, waving it dangerously at Joaquin. “You killed Ana, you will kill Carlos and this man too, but this will not stop. The president will throw you to the dogs. You are d...” A bullet hissed through the air and before Carpio could finish his sentence, he was dead. His body pushed back in the air and landed on the middle of the bed, the shotgun flew away from his lifeless hand and landed behind the bed’s steel headboard.
“Anyone else has anything to add?” Joaquin asked around the room. None of his men responded. He glanced at Carlos who was shuddering with fear while Stan was still unconscious. “It’s all because of you. Should’ve killed you the moment I saw you.” Joaquin yelled at Carlos.
Axel, any ideas?” Joaquin was getting desperate. Axel nodded his head.
“Gael? Jorge?” They shook their heads too.
“Shit. Shit. Shit,” Joaquin yelled helplessly.
The three men had never seen Joaquin cornered like this. They all agreed that he had anger issues, but he was never short of ideas. Till today. Today, he had killed the one man he should not have killed—Carpio and had kept one man alive whom he shouldn’t have - Carlos. If nothing else - Carpio would have been the key to get them out of here unscathed. Not anymore.
“Joaquin.” a voice burst out from the sat phone in Joaquin’s palm. He jerked, staring at the receiver in surprise. The three men and Carlos too were taken aback.
“I didn’t want to kill you or your men, but I had to,” the voice continued. “You can still live. Give me Carlos and the other guy and I will leave.”
“Who do you think you are talking to?”
“I know who I am talking to. You want Carlos dead. I want him to breathe, but now we both have a problem. Police are outside; the building is surrounded. There is no way for any of us to get out of here alive unless we help each other.” Wick spoke into Felipe’s sat phone.
“I’m not scared of death and I don’t give a damn what you say. Carlos has to die and along with him your friend will too.”
“You can kill Carlos a week later or a month later but not today. Today is not your day. Talk to your men. Ask them what they want. I’ll call you in five minutes.” Wick disconnected the call.
“What’s your plan?” Jessica looked at Wick.
“I am going in. I want to meet this man before killing him.”
“You sure?” Jessica looked worried.
“Go to the ambassador’s office and do what we discussed. I will be there soon.”
“Okay.” Jessica took the main stairs.
Wick then hissed into his earpiece. “Mac when I say NOW, cut the electricity to the fourth floor.”
“Done.”
Wick reconnected Joaquin’s line. “You asked your men?”
“Why should I trust you?”
“You have a better option?” Wick responded to his question with a question.
“You killed eleven of my men.”
“If I hadn’t, they would have killed me.”
“I still don’t see a reason to trust you.”
“One way or the other, the Police will be in the building soon. You and I both do not have enough firepower to fight with a battalion. Our survival depends on teaming up.”
“Why Carlos?”
“I took a contract to keep him safe. I don’t give a fuck if you kill him tomorrow. Once I’m out of here, he is not my problem. He is the passport to my payment. Dead Carlos is of no use to me.”
“I can kill him and your friend right now.”
“I think you shouldn’t because then I will kill you and your men,” Wick said it in a matter of fact tone.
“How dare you threaten me?” Joaquin yelled. His men glanced nervously at each other. The man on the other side was either a psycho or out of his mind.
“I’ve killed eleven men today and I am still in one piece talking to you. So, if it comes to that, don’t harbor any illusion that I won’t do it.”
Wick’s tone made Joaquin pause. The man on the other side was his enemy, but he was also right. Joaquin himself was a remorseless killer, and he could feel in his gut that his opponent wasn’t bluffing. The scary thing was that the man spoke all this in an unusually calm tone. Even after killing so many of Joaquin’s men, he could still think straight. At least straighter than Joaquin himself. There was no harm in hearing him out, if for nothing other than to take stock of the man. And within this room, Joaquin had the advantage of numbers.
“Who else is with you?” Joaquin responded, calmer this time.
“No one.”
“Come to the fourth floor. Unarmed. One of my men will meet you outside and bring you in. If you try anything funny, I will shoot you and everyone else you care about in this building.”
Wick thought for a moment. “Okay.” And then disconnected the call.
Chapter 35
Axel patted Wick down and took his Beretta before bringing him into the suite. Joaquin stood ten feet away from the door. His men - Gael was to Wick’s left, Jorge stood diagonally behind Joaquin, and Axel took position behind Wick, manning the suite’s entrance. Axel pushed Wick from behind and he stumbled forward, stopping closer to Joaquin than he would have wanted. But once he steadied, he quickly took stock of the room. It was almost two thousand square feet. A large king size metallic bed rested at the center. Carpio’s dead body was on the bed, coloring the sheets red. The suite’s large windows were covered with thick dark drapes. The walls looked thicker than usual. Wick expected a couple of rows of stud placements, one along each interior side, to soundproof the room, a perfect setting for murder without letting the world know about it.
In a corner, Carlos was tied to a chair, staring at him. His face was a mess, his clothes bloodied. Stan was on the floor in the opposite corner, bleeding, but breathing. He wasn’t moving, though, which was a bad sign, but Wick decided to worry about him later.
“Ah!” Joaquin exclaimed, looking Wick up and down. “Good to meet the man who killed so many of mine.” He was back in his element now that his enemy was unarmed.
Joaquin waited for Wick to respond while checking him up close. The man who’d decimated his entire plan and killed his eleven men single-handedly.
Wick said nothing, instead keeping his focus on Joaquin. He wanted to gauge his adversary before going further. Knowing his background, Wick understood why he was the one leading this group of mercenaries. Hovering somewhere around six foot, Joaquin was strong, with a muscle-packed tall frame. His bald head shone under the fluorescent lamp. A Glock in his left hand. Just from the expressions in his eyes, Wick knew he would have no qualms killing all three of them—Carlos, Stan, and Wick—without a second thought. But he wouldn’t,
at least for the time being.
“American?” Joaquin asked.
Wick gestured at Carlos and Stan, sidestepping the question. “These are mine.”
Joaquin’s expressions hardened. ‘I don’t think so. You should have stayed out of my business.’ He growled and moved dangerously towards Wick.
“NOW,” Wick barked taking a step back.
Mac pressed the keypad, and the timer started.
