Vengeance Calling: An Action Thriller Novel (David Rivers Book 4)

by Jason Kasper

  She swung another kick, which I managed to block as I grabbed her calf. Before I could twist her boot sideways to break her ankle, she slipped her foot free and drove a hard downward kick into my temple.

  A deafening ring exploded in my skull, and I limply spat out a puddle of blood as I tried to suck in air, succeeding enough to clear my vision.

  I rolled onto my back, the origami treetops over my head filtering sunlight and sky into bleary specks of light scattered across my blurred vision.

  I gasped, “You were going to nuke Rocinha.”

  “A small payload!” she shouted back, indignant. “It would have been contained by the mountains, and the only people affected would be put out of their misery from the shithole slum they’re imprisoned in!”

  She let me struggle to my feet, clutching a rib throbbing painfully from her kick. Everything hurt now—head, chest, sides—and I vaguely took in the dark shape of the pistol in the grass several meters away.

  “If I were you I’d start running,” I said, staggering a few steps toward my gun. “They’ll be here any second.”

  “They’re not going to catch me, David. I will kill the Handler—but now I’m coming after Ian too. I’ll spend a week carving him up, and I will detonate that device in Rocinha. You’ve merely delayed the inevitable—”

  I lunged toward the gun.

  She intercepted me effortlessly, delivering a flurry of blows faster than I could process where they impacted. Her strength was superhuman, her reflexes beyond lightning fast. Our fight in the cabin had been a crude performance on her part, designed to let me perceive I had a fighting chance.

  Now she was delivering jabs, hooks, kicks for no reason other than to punish me. Devoid of a firearm, I wasn’t a worthy opponent; her coup had been forever derailed, and after killing me on the hilltop, she’d be on the run for what would likely be an extremely short existence.

  But first, she was going to impart her rage upon me.

  Her melee stopped as she screamed, “You want that gun? Go for it!”

  I flung myself toward the pistol, landing with my arm outstretched. My fingertips scraped across it for the briefest of moments; I felt its cool surface but she dragged me backwards before I could grasp it.

  I swung an elbow back at her, but she parried my blow and forced the side of my face to the soft ground.

  The earthy smell of pine and soil filled my nostrils as I spoke into the matted grass.

  “I’d rather die than help you kill innocent people.”

  She flipped me onto my back, both hands on my throat, crushing the air and blood away from my brain.

  “Oh, David.” She leaned in and whispered, “There’s more to serving humanity than saving lives.”

  As she squeezed her hands harder around my esophagus, the dizzying pain in my head compounded exponentially. I lacked the coherence to swing a blow, remove her hands, or do anything but lie there and let the life pass from me.

  With the last of my strength, I reached into my pocket and slipped trembling fingertips around the ballpoint pen. Pulling it out, I thumbed the cap off to expose the grip and raised it toward Sage’s muscled forearm.

  But I was losing consciousness too fast, my vision receding to a pinpoint of focus, and my hand fell to the grass, almost losing the pen. Then I thought of the girl in the favela, and with the final whisper of life within me, I blindly drove the pen toward her hands on my throat.

  The pen stopped against flesh, though whether hers or mine I couldn’t tell. The pain in my trachea was too immense to distinguish where my throat ended and her choking hands began.

  With every waning vestige of focus I had left, I pressed the pen.

  Sage’s high-pitched scream echoed in the forest. The pressure on my jugular vanished as her weight on my body lifted, though I could neither breathe nor see. I choked hollowly for air, unable to recover.

  A single dot of light appeared in my vision, growing wider until blurry forms transformed into treetops, then a weak gasp of breath filled my lungs shallowly, followed by another as I drew in air with the desperation of a dying man.

  As my sight returned I heard a horrible, wraithlike cry all around me. I lifted my head to see Sage on the ground a few meters away, crawling on her side and clutching one hand by the wrist.

  “…BURNS! IT BURNS! IT BURN—”

  I dropped the pen, flipped to my stomach, and pulled myself forward along the ground with one hand, sweeping the other across the grass until I felt the polymer grip of the Glock. Clutching it like it was the sole life raft in an endless stormy ocean, I rolled onto my back. I spread my legs, holding the pistol over my crotch in a two-handed grip as I aimed at Sage.

  Despite my best attempts to steady the gun, the white orb of its front sight post waved in wide, lazy circles around Sage’s once beautiful face. She was silent now, her features frozen in a horrid death shroud, mouth agape like a grinning skull.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The tousled red hair at the corner of her scalp fluttered as a chunk of the skull beneath it blew outward, spilling a puff of brain matter. She didn’t move.

  I tried to steady the sights, firing again.

  A neat, circular glimmer of light flickered through her open mouth as sunlight appeared through the hole now bored at the back of her throat. My third shot struck her through the right eye, a pile of salmon-colored flesh falling forward but her head remaining immobile.

  I struggled to my knees, leaning back on my heels to gain as much stability as I could in my weakened state. Even in death I feared her, what she had become, what she had been all along unbeknownst to me. Even in her death, I was horrified by what she was going to do to Rocinha.

  Leveling the pistol at her, I fired over and over until the slide locked back to the rear and there was nothing left of her face to shoot.

  16

  The Outfit team that recovered me first cleared the cabin, then detained me and moved uphill to recover Sage’s body at my direction. Behind them came a cleanup crew—men and women who scoured the cabin with evidence bags, inventorying the contents and filing them for analysis by the Intelligence Directorate. A biohazard team moved in with black lights and industrial cleaning equipment—by the time they were done, not a trace of forensic evidence would remain. The cabin would be left to lapse back into a dusty state of disrepair.

  My last glance of the cabin revealed a single man in a biohazard suit entering the doorway with a folded body bag in each hand. Then the scene was gone in a flash, replaced by the forest as an ATV whisked me off down the trail and back to the Mist Palace.

  I returned to the Mist Palace as a prisoner.

  I wore handcuffs, leg irons, and blacked-out goggles as I was led through a building to places unknown. The men transporting me had been forceful but not overly so, and I didn’t resist them—after all, the thwarted coup attempt was less than two hours old and I’d told the Handler to lock down everything until I could speak to him personally. He entrusted his security to professionals, and they weren’t about to let me waltz through on reputation alone. Hell, I’d been a part of the assassination plot until I decided that Sage was worse than the Handler, so I wasn’t entitled to any special treatment. That much was fine by me—as long as Ian was freed.

  I was finally seated and my goggles removed.

  The first person I saw was Ishway.

  He stood imperially to my left, dwarfing a podium holding his leather-bound ledger. Ishway was attired as I’d always seen him—suit and dress shirt, pocket square and tie, each of different patterns that nonetheless combined to some unified whole of fashionable splendor. His black hair was pulled into a low bun as usual, but this time his severe eyebrows seemed relaxed, as though he was confident about the game that was about to ensue.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Rivers.”

  My chair was situated at the center of a scarlet carpet extending to a long wooden panel that rose to chest height of the three figures seated behind it—the three chief vi
cars I’d met at the Executive Karoga. Omari, the portly, mustached chef; Watts, the silver-haired movie star with streaks of facial scarring; and Yosef, the dwarf in a black yarmulke, all looking fairly tense about the current situation. Only two bodyguards were present, both holding slung submachine guns. It seemed abnormally light security; no doubt the Handler was limiting witnesses to whatever proceedings were about to occur.

  “Where’s the Handler?” I asked, shifting to observe my surroundings as the chains between my wrists and ankles clanked.

  Ishway replied, “The One will join us momentarily, upon which time we will begin our open assembly.”

  An elevated seating area held several empty chairs, with one desk raised above the rest—the Handler’s throne, waiting for its sole occupant.

  I glanced irritably at the vicars, all watching me.

  “And an open assembly is…what, exactly?”

  At first glance, we could have been in a chapel of sorts. But as the positioning of the seats and the status of those present began to sink in, I realized the truth was something far worse.

  I was in a courtroom.

  Ishway shifted behind the podium. “The high leadership will advise the One about your circumstances, and after hearing all their counsel he shall determine his final ruling.”

  “What do you mean, his final ruling? The Handler already gave me his word of honor. Is that worth nothing here?”

  Watts’s Boston drawl was delivered with a tilt of his silver head. “Preliminary word, yes. But no agreement is sacred if it is detrimental to the Organization. That determination is made in an open assembly. The Organization”—he grinned slightly—“comes first in all things.”

  I laughed incredulously, looking from the vicars to Ishway and back again. My gaze settled on the nearest bodyguard, objectively watching me with his submachine gun in hand.

  Shaking my head, I replied, “Be that as it may, I alone know the identity of the remaining conspirator—to say nothing of the means of assassination, which is, I regret to inform you, still very much in play.”

  Omari spoke up at this, his stern tone contrasting with the jovial nature I’d encountered as he cooked for the karoga. “We have other means of extracting that information from you, Mr. Rivers. Do you doubt this?”

  Shit. “No, that ah…that pretty much all checks out.”

  What had I expected? The Handler had told me whatever it took to bring me back, but honor meant nothing to him unless it could be neatly situated amid the strategic landscape he’d crafted around himself. If I couldn’t define some overarching importance to my stated terms after furthering Sage’s scheme, I was dead, and so was Ian.

  Around the world and back again, only to be stuck at square one—a prisoner who’d escaped and now slipped back into his cell in the hopes of escaping again, and Ian no more free than he was at the outset of my journey.

  A door opened and a new procession filed in: the Handler, followed by his personal bodyguard, Racegun. Then Parvaneh, followed by her personal bodyguard, Micah.

  The Handler and Parvaneh took seats in the open chairs, with Racegun and Micah standing beside their respective charges.

  Parvaneh enraptured me. She was stunning—tall and lean, her electric green eyes floating across the room without looking at me. Her shining dark hair, much longer than I had last seen it, descended across her neck and down one shoulder.

  The sight of her disarmed me completely—I’d entered that room feeling brash, bold, vindicated in finally having some negotiating power with the Handler. Finding that I still had to plead my case despite stopping Sage’s plot was like a sucker punch to the gut. But the sight of Parvaneh took the life out of me.

  After everything I’d done to her, manipulating her affections to get closer to assassinating her father, I wanted to collapse at her feet and beg for forgiveness.

  She didn’t meet my gaze, instead staring resolutely ahead. Micah, by contrast, watched me with the same contempt he always had.

  Ishway announced, “This open assembly begins with a statement by the One. Sir, the floor is yours.”

  The Handler leaned forward from his vantage point at the highest desk in the room. With his slanted Roman nose jutting out from his gaunt face, he looked like a vulture scanning the desert as he addressed his court.

  “This January, David attempted to kill me at the Executive Karoga. He was detained and transferred to Sage for interrogation and summary execution. Those of you here today knew as much, but there is one detail kept secret by design. This entire sequence of events was carefully scripted, and David was sent into play as a deep-cover agent to confirm or deny Sage’s loyalty to this Organization.

  “Sage took David for execution. But she must have held advance knowledge of my plan, for the biometric confirmation of the corpse’s remains was clearly mistaken. And so, on January 31 of this year, David was declared dead, Sage’s loyalty was earnestly confirmed, and Avner Ian Greenberg joined the ranks of the Intelligence Directorate.

  “Thus imagine my surprise this morning when I received a call from a dead man: David Rivers, demanding a new arrangement to stop an assassination attempt that had progressed too far for me to stop it. In exchange for his terms being agreed to, David has assured me that he will unveil the identity of a remaining conspirator among our ranks.”

  I felt a pang of relief at the Handler publicly admitting our deal—maybe he would hold up his end after all. The assemblage looked considerably less relieved, seeming pensive about the proceedings. Bizarrely, the guilty party appeared the most composed short of the Handler himself. No fear of being exposed, or else knowing it was too late to stop it.

  “The Outfit team sent to recover David also discovered Sage’s body, along with two others. The latter two were killed with an ax. So here we are, not to determine the exact details of David’s absence—that much will be made startlingly clear during an extended debrief in the coming days—nor to uncover the remaining traitor in our midst. That traitor”—a crooked grin spread across the Handler’s face—“will be found regardless.

  “Instead we are here to inform my ruling on David Clayton Rivers and his two requested terms: that he rejoin the Outfit as a team leader in the ongoing war, and that Avner Ian Greenberg be released from his service to the Organization. Let us begin.”

  The Handler leaned back in his chair, cutting his eyes to the vicars as Ishway spoke.

  “The assembly will begin with the counsel of the Chief Vicar of Finance. Vicar Omari, speak the truth.”

  Omari pushed back his chair and stood, thoughtfully stroking his mustache for a pregnant pause. Then his Kenyan accent filled the room.

  “Now that the One’s plan is revealed after being brilliantly withheld from us until now, I can be certain of only one thing.”

  Omari’s eyes turned to mine, his expression so far removed from the chef I’d met in January that I barely recognized him.

  “David is not to be trusted. By admission of facts, he was an assassin before being conscripted by the One. When Sage’s opportunity arose, David veritably leapt at the chance to become an assassin once again. His return to us occurred only when it suited his whims.

  “This Organization was not built upon extending benevolence to traitors, particularly those who very nearly assassinate its leader. My judgment is that the remaining conspirator be revealed through the ample means available to us, and once known, that David meets the same fate. Traitors earn traitors’ justice, and that justice does not carry with it the nuances of mitigating circumstances. I have withheld nothing from the assembly.”

  Omari had barely finished seating himself before Ishway spoke again.

  “The assembly will now hear the counsel of the Chief Vicar of Intelligence. Vicar Yosef, speak the truth.”

  The short man in the yarmulke stood, black eyes darting furtively behind his glasses. I tilted my head to him, having never heard him speak.

  When he did, it was with a quick, raspy beat, his accent Israeli.


  “My counsel begins not with David but with his friend Ian.” He looked at the Handler and flashed an eerily predatory smile. “Ian proved most useful in targeting the South American network. I soon transferred him to the cell responsible for locating high-value individuals, including the highest leader, Ribeiro. I do not support the release of Ian, for his contributions to the Intelligence Directorate are just beginning.

  “As for David Rivers, he has proven that subversion, manipulation, and acts of incredible violence are as natural to him as breathing. Rather than let these virtues atrophy at the Outfit, assign him to the Intelligence Directorate, where I have a variety of assignments more suited to his singularities.

  “Finally, David and Ian are not two but one. When employed with the knowledge that the other’s life depends on their effectiveness in a given capacity, both are invaluable. Let us engage both accordingly, not release one and send the other to toil in common labor. Your Grace, I have withheld nothing from the assembly.”

  Yosef took his seat with a satisfied expression. For his diminutive size, this man was a monster among monsters—and in the company of the Handler, that title was no small feat.

  Ishway boomed, “The Chief Vicar of Defense will provide his counsel. Vicar Watts, speak the truth.”

  Watts brushed a lock of silver hair from his brow, slid his chair backward, and pushed himself up by the armrests to a standing posture as casually as if he were at a backyard barbeque.

  “I’ll keep this short and sweet. As far as David being a previous threat to the Organization, I believe that’s mitigated by keeping him very far from the Mist Palace and, more importantly, from the One himself. Other than that? David has proven that he’s damn fine with a gun, excels under pressure, and is able to hold his own in combat. I fully support a return to the Outfit.”

  I cracked a slight smile at Watts. He didn’t return the expression.

  “Now as for my thoughts on this kid commanding a team in South America? Not a chance. David hasn’t got the experience, and frankly, he’s not built for that kind of responsibility. I’ve read his psychological evaluation, and he’s not even in control of his own mind. You put him in charge of Outfit shooters, he’s going to get our people killed. I have withheld nothing from the assembly, sir.”