by Brent Towns
“He’s the President of the United States,” Thurston said. “You’ve met the man, so you know he’ll do what he wants, and he’s got enough honor in him to make the ultimate sacrifice if he truly believes it will save people.”
“It’d be a mistake.”
“I don’t disagree with you, but it won’t be our call to make. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“We being diverted to a jihadi bug hunt?” Kane asked.
“Negative,” Thurston replied. “Stay on mission. The President has people to handle terrorists. We focus on cartel assholes.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Axe cut in. “We’ve dealt with so many assholes the last few months that I’m thinking we should change our name to Team Proctologist.”
“Nah,” Cara replied. “Too many syllables.”
“If we’re gonna keep blitzing,” Kane said to Thurston, “then I need Slick to run some names.”
“Hold on, I’ll patch you through.”
A few seconds later, they were connected with Swift. “Greetings from El Paso,” the keyboard wizard said. “What can I do you for?”
“Got some names for you to run.”
Swift sighed. “You know, Reaper, I’m starting to think you’re just using me for my computer.” There was a clatter of keys as he pulled up some program.
“You can think what you want, just as long as you give me my intel.”
“Thank you for making my point,” Swift drawled. More keys got punched, and then he said, “Okay, give me the names.”
“Steve Nash and Razor.”
“Razor? As in, the shaving utensil?”
“Yeah. You’ll probably want to run it as an alias.”
“Don’t tell me how to do my job, Reaper,” Swift warned with exaggerated fierceness. “I don’t tell you how to shoot people in the face, and you don’t tell me how to run names. This Team Reaper thing doesn’t work if we don’t all stay in our lanes.”
Kane chuckled. “Fair enough, Slick.” He lowered his voice. “Thurston near you?”
“Negative. She’s in another room.”
“Okay. Listen up, Slick. If you get time, take a look at whatever intel is out there on these terrorist attacks, see what you can piece together.”
“Not our turf, Reaper. Not even the same neighborhood.”
“Yeah, well, even a good dog jumps the fence once in a while and rolls in the mud.”
“Fine, but if Thurston catches on to what I’m doing, you’re paying my bail.”
“I’ll make sure it’s my ass in the sling, not yours.”
“I’m serious, Reaper.”
“So am I.”
“Okay, then. Grab a powernap. I’ll call you when I’ve got info on Nash and Razor.”
Kane hung up to find Cara and Axe staring at him. “What’s the problem?”
“You know full well what the problem is,” Cara said. “Thurston has operational oversight, and she’ll be pissed if she finds out you’ve got Slick working the terrorist attacks.”
“How’s she gonna find out? Slick knows how to cover his tracks.” Kane’s eyes roved back and forth between his two teammates. “You guys gonna tell her?”
Cara shook her head. “I’m not here for telling.”
In the backseat, Axe crossed his arms and offered a crooked grin. “I’m good, bro. Snitches get stitches, and I don’t want you messing up my pretty face.”
“You never know,” said Cara. “Some chicks dig scars.”
“Did you just call yourself a chick?” Kane asked.
“Hell, no,” Cara retorted. “I’m a fucking lady.”
The man snarled a curse as his cell phone rang. To her credit, the whore never missed a beat as her head bobbed up and down. Not the best he’d ever had, but what she lacked in skills she compensated for with enthusiasm.
The phone trilled again, intruding on his pleasure. It was his special phone, an untraceable burner, the number known only to a select few. If it was ringing at this time of night, there was nothing but bad news waiting for him. Nobody calls at midnight to say you’ve won the Publisher’s Clearing House Sweepstakes.
All he wanted was to get his rocks off and catch a few hours of sleep before heading to work, but apparently business insisted on taking priority over sexual satisfaction. Better to just take the call and get it over with.
He shoved the hooker’s head out of his lap as he answered the phone. “Yeah, what is it?”
“Somebody hit Mason.” The voice on the other end of the line didn’t bother with an introduction. “Right in his house while he was nailing his secretary.”
The man suddenly paid more attention. “Is he alive?”
“Yeah, he’s alive. Took a bullet in the ass, though. Nearly got himself a nine-millimeter enema.”
“Who did it?” The man’s hard-on started to become not so hard. Seeing the onset of flaccidity, the whore reached for him with practiced fingers, but he slapped her hand away like an annoying fly. She crawled out of bed and disappeared into the bathroom with an exaggerated pout. Probably looking for some mouthwash.
“If I knew who did it,” the voice replied, “I wouldn’t have said ‘somebody.’ Truth is, we’re not sure who the new player is. But somebody has been shaking up the streets, kicking in doors, asking about our arrangement. Odds are this door-kicker is the one who hit Mason.”
“Mason is a desk jockey who barely knows anything,” the man said. “He was paid off to overlook some paperwork discrepancies, that’s it. But the fact that our mysterious ‘somebody’ found out about him at all proves that people are talking a whole lot more than they should be and that pisses me off.”
“Whoever this guy is, he must be a real scary son of a bitch to make people squeal on us.”
“Then we need to be even scarier. Prove that we are not to be messed with. Time to send a message.”
“You want Reardon’s kid killed? Razor would be more than happy to cut his throat.”
“Not yet. That kid is leverage. We kill his son, and Reardon’s got nothing left to lose. But I want the players to know that flapping their gums has serious consequences.”
“Hell, man, we just whacked Reardon’s wife last night. She’s not even in the ground yet. Think he’s dumb enough to keep running his mouth?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” the man said, “but we’ll send the message anyway, just to be sure. If it’s him, maybe this will finally shut him up. If it’s not him, maybe others will see what happens to him and think twice about crossing us.”
“Want me to handle it?”
“No,” the man said. “I’ll have Omega take care of it. This is the kind of situation we pay him for.”
“Omega? Your pet assassin? That man gives me the creeps. Something wrong with him.”
“He’s a highly-trained killing machine,” the man replied. “Lethal to the extreme and probably borderline psychotic, if we’re being honest. He’s not supposed to sing you lullabies.”
“You’re the boss,” the voice said and hung up.
The whore crawled back onto the bed, licking her lips with lascivious promise, but the man’s lust had gone limper than a dead eel. He didn’t even bother trying to coax it back to life. He threw a handful of cash at the girl and said, “Get lost. I’ve got some calls to make.”
Lake George, New York
Omega sighted through the Armasight Drone Pro 10X Digital Night Vision rifle scope mounted on his M4 carbine and settled the cross-hairs on the scruffy tomcat stalking a three-legged rat. The whiskered rodent had pulled a chicken bone from a garbage bag and now perched on a cardboard box, oblivious to the cat sneaking in for the kill, just as the cat was oblivious to the gunman preparing to end his life. Prey and predator, locked in a savage cycle, with man at the top of the food chain.
As he thumbed the selector switch to single shot mode, Omega thought of his favorite quote, courtesy of Ernest Hemingway.
There is no hunting like the hunting of men, and tho
se who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
True story, no doubt about it. Nothing compared to the narcotic-like rush of running a man to the ground and spilling his blood… but killing cats was a close second. He despised the furry little bastards.
Cats were the assholes of the animal world. At least once a week, under cover of darkness, he would sneak into some randomly-chosen landfill with his NVS-equipped M4. Rats came to eat the garbage, cats came to eat the rats, and Omega, in turn, hunted the cats, expressing his hatred with sound-suppressed 5.56mm bullets. It was a great stress reliever.
Technically he worked for a CIA black ops team under one of those ultra-covert programs that only a handful of high-ranking government officials knew about (and Omega seriously doubted even they knew the full extent of the dirty work the teams engaged in). Official classified documents showed Omega had been assigned two years ago to a DEA-CIA joint taskforce cobbled together to combat the influx of drugs entering the country by way of New York City’s ports.
But in reality, that was all just a smokescreen designed to hide the truth. Because the truth was, he answered to just one man in the DEA and nothing he did helped stop the cocaine hemorrhaging into the city. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Bottom line, he was the hired muscle, the troubleshooter for the DEA bigshot pulling the strings on the alliance with the Colombian cartels.
The same DEA bigshot was now calling him on his cell phone. The ringtone was set to a Faster Pussycat song, his idea of a little joke.
He kept his eye locked to the scope as he pressed the encrypted phone to his ear. Eighty yards away, the cat crouched, tail twitching, evil eyes fixed on the rat. The rodent remained unaware that he was being hunted. Omega kept his voice low as he answered. “Yeah?” Through the scope, he watched as the rat’s oversized incisors gnawed some gristle off the chicken bone.
“Where are you?” the man asked.
“Lake George.”
“Isn’t that up past Albany?”
“About an hour north.”
“What are you doing way up there?”
“I suggest you don’t ask questions you don’t want answered,” Omega replied.
“Are you shooting cats again, you sick freak?”
“We all have our hobbies.”
“I need you back down here ASAP. I’ve got an assignment for you.”
“Copy that. Name?”
“Reardon.”
“I thought you had him under control,” Omega said. “You snatched his kid and killed his wife, for god’s sake.”
“Apparently he’s not getting the message yet,” the man replied. “So you need to send him another one. Make it hurt.”
“Just bury the brat and be done with it.”
“You want to kill a kid?”
“Not my thing, but that Razor fella Sanchez has working for him is twisted enough to peel the skin off a baby.”
“We kill his son, and we lose our only leverage to get that UC list.”
Omega laughed softly and with just a hint of derision. “Yeah, because that’s worked out so well for you. Cut off a couple of the boy’s fingers, mail them to daddy in a box, and see how fast you get your list.”
“Thanks for the advice,” the man drawled sarcastically. “Now how about you let me handle the logistics of the situation, and you just do what I tell you. Last time I checked, that was the nature of our relationship.”
“Got it. You’re the boss.” Omega hung up and just managed to get his finger back on the trigger as the tomcat pounced. He snap-fired, and the bullet caught the cat in midair. It hit the ground in a pile of bloody fur, thrashing like only a newly-dead cat can. Once the twitching subsided, the rat slithered in, gave it all a good sniff, and began to feast on the fresh feline meat.
Omega smirked as the rodent started chewing. Life can be savage, and sometimes the prey eats the predator. Too few people in this world understood that. He silently bid the rat happy eating and headed back to his vehicle. Killing cats was fun, but now it was time for some real blood-sport.
As Hemingway had said, nothing compared to hunting man.
Ten-year-old Jeremy Reardon was scared. Not a little scared like when he watched creepy movies—really scared.
He had no idea where he was. All he knew was that some very bad men were holding him prisoner. He didn’t even know why, though he had overheard a couple of the kidnappers say it had to do with his father. Something about a list they wanted.
He’d been grabbed on his way home from school by a man he now knew was called Razor. They had put him on a plane, and even though he was afraid, the jet’s vibrations had managed to lull him to sleep. He’d dreamed of going to the Great New York State Fair in Syracuse and eating cotton candy with his mom. The thump of the plane’s wheels hitting the ground as it landed woke him up, his heartbeat starting to race again when he realized the dream was gone and he was still living in a nightmare.
Razor had shoved him into a Jeep and driven him deep into the jungle—even scared, Jeremy had looked for monkeys, but no luck—until they came to a large camp, or compound, as everyone had called it. Jeremy had been locked in this shed ever since. He was fed twice a day and taken to the outhouse to use the bathroom. It smelled really bad in there, but it wasn’t like he had much choice. He used it as quickly as he could and got out of there.
Razor visited him in the shed every once in a while, but he usually didn’t say much; just smiled and played with the big, shiny razor he carried. Jeremy guessed that was why they called him Razor because he couldn’t imagine his parents had actually named him that. Then again, his own mom had almost named him Ichabod, so who knew what parents were thinking sometimes?
He heard footsteps outside his door and then the sound of someone sticking a key into the lock. A few seconds later Razor stepped into the shed and shut the door behind him. Jeremy’s heart started beating fast, and he shivered a little bit.
“Hello, kid.” Razor was dark-skinned and bald, with a soft, smooth voice that sounded dangerous at the same time. Jeremy was old enough to know that just because someone smiled and talked nicely didn’t necessarily mean they were friendly. His father had once told him that just because a dog wagged its tail didn’t mean it wouldn’t bite you.
When Jeremy didn’t respond to his greeting, Razor raised his straight-edge razor and let light from the overhead bulb gleam on the well-honed edge. It flashed into Jeremy’s eyes like a silver starburst, making him squint. “What’s the matter, kid? Cat got your tongue?”
Jeremy just stared at him. He was so scared that he felt like peeing his pants, but he tried not to let it show.
Razor chuckled. “You got mucho cojones, kid, you know that?” His hand suddenly shot out and grabbed Jeremy by the back of the neck. He pulled the boy close, thrust the razor between his legs, and snarled, “But next time I ask you a question, and you don’t answer, I’ll cut those cojones off and feed them to the dogs. You got that?”
Jeremy didn’t know what kahonees were, but he was pretty sure he didn’t want them cut off, so he said, “Yes, sir.”
“You’d better.” Razor shoved him away. “Unless you want to be a eunuch.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Disrespect me again, and you’ll find out.” Razor turned to leave.
Jeremy blurted out, “What do you want with me, mister?”
Razor swung back around and fastened his reptilian eyes on the young boy. “It’s nothing personal, kid. You’re just insurance to make sure your daddy gives us what we need. Once he does that, you’ll be on your way back home.”
That sounded like a lie to Jeremy’s ears, but he didn’t say that out loud because he was afraid Razor would start chopping off his kahonees—whatever they were—if he did. Instead, he asked, “What happens if he doesn’t give it to you?”
The devil’s own black heart could not have been any colder than Razor’s smile. “Then you’re d
ead, kid.” He mimicked a slashing motion across his throat and exited the shed in a burst of evil laughter.
Team Reaper Headquarters
Swift’s fingers flew across the keyboard as he accessed the DEA’s database, punching in the code to run the software program that would conceal his digital presence, cover his tracks, and scrub his virtual fingerprints. The DEA watchdogs would never even know he’d been in their system. Yeah, he probably could have Thurston call Jones and get him authorized access but going in the back door was more challenging. And therefore, more fun.
Swift was a bona fide keyboard warrior, and he wore that badge proudly. Sure, he could hit the field when called upon to do so, but he was no Reaper. Pretty much every other member of the team surpassed him at the run-and-gun stuff. But give him a computer, and he could set the world on fire. He had once boasted that he could hack the Pentagon using only a Commodore 64 with half the keys missing. That had been the last time he drank tequila.
He loved working for Team Reaper and remained grateful for the opportunity. The team accepted him as one of their own, respected him for his keyboard skills just as much as they respected Axe or Cara’s ability to drill a bulls-eye from a thousand yards out. Nobody looked down on him as “just the computer geek.” He’d suffered a bunch of sneers and ridicule over the course of his life, but he got none of that here.
With the scrubbing software activated, he typed in Steve Nash’s name. Less than two seconds later, big red letters flashed across his monitor like neon beer signs in a barroom window, warning him that he did not possess the required security clearance to access the file.
“I’ve got your security clearance swinging right here,” Swift muttered, fingers striking the keys with dizzying speed and extra force as if the flashing red letters were a personal affront. It took him less than a minute to sidestep the DEA’s computerized cock-block and discover that Steve Nash worked for the DEA’s Special Operations Division. Given the secretive and controversial nature of the SOD—in addition to their tactical component, the SOD allegedly engaged in illegal wiretapping, unconstitutional searches, and evidence tampering in the everlasting war on drugs—it was no wonder the file was red-flagged.
