“I am in, then.”
“You know you are, Iyer. And damn your bloody soul.”
“Without her, it already is, Harold,” Krivi said grimly, already throwing all his belongings into the two pieces of luggage he was never without. The duffel bag and the battered backpack. “Thank you for doing this. I am in your debt.”
“It’s not a debt, Krivi. I like who you become with her.”
Krivi smiled and it was a mirthless smile. “Who do I become with her, Harold?”
“Human. Get your ass here pronto; we have a battle plan to go over.”
Krivi patted the last-wish cigarette pocket once, before hefting all his stuff out, took one last look around the room he had not spent a single night in and walked out without another glance.
Forty-Eight
The morning of January 3rd dawned bright and clear, with not a cloud in sight.
Perfect January weather.
Lhasa prefecture-city was the second most populated city in Tibet and it was at a dizzying altitude of more than three thousand meters above sea-level. It wasn’t just a tourist spot, with many Buddhist temples and fusion cuisines to tempt tourists into spending their hard-earned money. It also boasted of a primarily agrarian and industry-based economy, with many locals preferring to grow local crops on the plateau itself.
Lhasa also boasted an international airport, the Lhasa-Gonggar International Airport, touted as one of the highest altitude airports in the world.
Most of the members of the cartel arriving for the auction were all red flags (identified as a threat by airport personnel), but no airport personnel was averse to that universal tongue: money.
A lot of palms were greased for a private import warehouse right on the field of the airport to be turned over to the cartel for their use. They stored their weapons cache and their expensive aircraft there.
One of the prized possessions was a sweet Learjet that a South American Mafioso had flown in from Miami.
The hangar was a perfect spot for a bunch of paranoid dangerous narco-terrorists to convene and discuss their next big world-shattering project. Since the big Chinese police crackdown on drugs last year, the number of traffickers had decreased drastically in the area.
Access to this place was not possible by air or sea, and going in all guns blazing with sirens blaring would only make the bad guys dive for their thousand-dollars-an-hour lawyers before anyone made a move. Especially a government counterintelligence agency.
~~~~~~
So, Harold was in a bind. He had to have a legit reason for his men to surround the perimeter, and leaking intel about The Woodpecker couldn’t do it either.
The airport was exactly three kilometers away and harm to civilians was a possibility he did not want to consider, so Harold decided that they would enter the warehouse from the back. Cut a hole through the electrified airport fence through the night and make a rush for it in daylight before anyone was the wiser.
He could only hope that with the amount of money exchanging hands at the event, they would have a three-minute window to take the warehouse.
At least, that was Pedro’s part in the plan, acting purely as courier.
With Harold’s genius tech team’s help, they had set up a legit account through which a wire transfer could be made to the tune of five billion dollars which would keep on skipping accounts all over the planet, until it was wiped clean and could be used anywhere in the world.
But there was a backdoor kept open for a tiny little worm to follow the route in such a way that neither the sender nor the receiver of the account would be able to trace the worm back to the backdoor and, at a given point in time, the money would get mysteriously wiped out and dispersed into various accounts set up by the defense agencies of the free world.
Use the evil money, launder it and have it do some good.
All this was contingent on The Woodpecker showing up and Tom Jones ID-ing him.
Harold had a last debrief meeting with his own Alpha Company, which was attended by a new team member.
Krivi.
Who was going to go as Pedro Panetta’s bodyguard, complete with a Schmeisser, moustache and beard, and a dark forbidding suit that allowed plenty of room to pack heat.
Since bodyguards were not really allowed to talk to each other, or even open their mouths at all, there was not much chance of him being identified.
And even if he was, Krivi was adamantly firm about going. There was no budging him, and one look at his set, stone-carved face had Harold swallowing all his objections and just nodding when Krivi put in his inputs about the plan.
It was a very basic plan.
The six-man A-team would drive down in the middle of the night and quietly start the cutting of the three-thousand strong electric volt fence, armed with nothing but what machinery they could carry. They had about ninety minutes to do their job, then lie in wait for daybreak and the meeting to begin.
It was a tricky frontal assault, but Harold had a few cards up his sleeve he wasn’t willing to divulge right then.
All he promised them was that there would be no casualties, not if they could help it.
The assault would take place at precisely the same time as the auction would begin, thereby assuring The Woodpecker’s presence, Tom Jones positive ID of him and a quick roundup of everyone and their bodyguards.
If executed properly, and there was no reason to believe it wouldn’t be, it would all take about ten minutes and end before it ever really began.
He knew Krivi didn’t give a damn about who did what as long as he got his hands around The Woodpecker and choked Ziya’s whereabouts out of him. It was the only information he was interested in.
What remained of the night was passed in prep, outfitting the military van to the hilt and readying the teams with ammo, rations and everything else they would need.
The men spent the hours counting down the minutes on the cheerful face of the clock they had requisitioned from HQ.
~~~~~~
Pedro Panetta was a worried man.
He knew the enormous risk he was taking, bringing in government agents, however ex, they were. Once a spook, always a spook.
But, his daughter was safe, forever out of the reach of animals like the ones he did business with and their bosses and the spooks, no matter what scum they were, had ensured that. She had a new life, a new identity, and she would never know of her papa, the money launderer to mass murderers.
So, he wore his cast and his Tom Ford shades with the same nonchalance and smiled at the consortium of murdering pals and backstabbers who were all making their way into the warehouse.
The sun was shining brightly, even though it was barely past nine, and sweat was pouring down Pedro’s face. Both, because of the itch in his cast and the fear that was thudding his heart right into his temple.
Behind him, his bodyguard walked with a more assured gait, his gun swinging freely, confidently from his right hand, his business hand, it was called. But, the very casualness with which the tall, forbidding-looking man with the heavy beard and moustache handled the gun inspired confidence and a certain attitude that this was not a man you wanted to fuck with.
He would shoot and shoot to kill.
The other guards gave him a wide berth, as he stomped confidently behind his boss, Panetta, a diminutive man with an elbow cast.
They’d ridden in an armored shuttle which had the logo of an international airline and it had dropped them right at the entrance of the warehouse. The others had also arrived in similar vehicles, armed to the teeth, one of them coming with an entourage of gun-toting guards.
But, only Panetta’s bodyguard got entry because he was the only one who looked like a serious badass. It didn’t have anything to do with the face or the gun, it was just a readiness, a fighter’s awareness he exuded.
No one stopped him and he didn’t ask for permission and Pedro didn’t spare him a backward glance as he re-hefted the briefcase that contained the hardware he need
ed to broker today’s deal.
They entered the five thousand square feet space, where all the members were gathered in a small circle in hard-backed chairs.
Somewhere among these men in their five-figure suits and pinky diamonds was Tom Jones… who would give Harold Wozniacki the signal which would ensure that the team would burst in at exactly the right moment and help Krivi apprehend The Woodpecker.
Harold himself was in Krivi’s ear and, if word was to be believed, Tom Jones’s ear. Krivi had every reason to believe Harold and more reason not to.
So he just kept his own counsel, gripped the gun a little tighter and tried to figure out who Tom Jones was.
He couldn’t.
Pedro beckoned him forward to a sort of raised platform and murmured, “Stay here, behind me at all times. Cover me if shit goes south. Comprende?”
Krivi shrugged; his face dark and set as his heart thumped in double time with fear and worry over what had been done to his Ziya.
~~~~~~
Hannah dressed very carefully for the meeting with her future investors and business partners. She wore a man’s black suit with a silk lemon yellow shirt that had no buttons and sort of slipped onto your torso and hung there beautifully. It was called a silk shell according to the fashion mags.
She wanted to be a little pretty today, because she wanted all the men to know exactly who they were dealing with.
Not The Woodpecker. A nameless, faceless entity who executed jobs with chilling efficiency.
But Hannah Jones, daughter of Tom Jones. Daughter and not son. And, soon to be world famous for pulling off the most audacious heist of all time.
For once, Hannah wanted to be womanly, a feat she could never achieve to her complete satisfaction.
Not like her sister, she reflected with a little pout. Ziya was effortlessly feminine and had the grace and beauty to go with it.
Hannah had the almost mannish features of her papa, that man who loved to drink and then beat on his family for the hell of it. What a difference, one half of genes could make.
Hannah spritzed on perfume, slipped into her combat boots which had a throwing star concealed inside each heel, incredibly effective in certain close shave circumstances. She walked out of her room in the hideout Tom had found for her… close to the auction venue without being too conspicuous.
Tom would not be happy with her appearance today but that could not be helped.
But Tom wasn’t in his room when she knocked on it, which led her to believe he must be with Ziya.
Tom had given her strict instructions to leave the woman alone under pain of death and since Tom never gave her strict instructions, she was inclined to follow them for now. Killing Ziya for sport could always wait.
The auction wouldn’t.
Hannah’s steps quickened as she ran to the concealed Jeep and dragged off all the camouflage that covered it. She then checked under the driver’s seat for what she wanted and found it all present.
Hannah smiled and pressed the horn on the steering. Twice.
A signal for dear Dad to hurry up already.
Forty-Nine
Krivi could barely stand still, so great was his urgency. He imagined taking down the marijuana baron and the guy who owned the supply of pure cocaine in North America to the largest extent. He could pop them between the eyes right now and the world would only be a better place.
But, in impulse lay madness and one mistake now could cost Ziya her life. A chance he was patently unwilling to take.
So, Krivi just stood and watched the the huge digital clock…felt the minutes trickle by like grains of sand. In a never-ending rush and slow, so slow it felt like molasses stretched his muscles.
His gun finger twitched and he wondered when Harold would give him the goddamn signal.
Harold did.
“Eagle’s here. Grey eyes, grey suit and a muted blue tie. With a woman, probably, his secretary. I repeat, Eagle’s here.”
Krivi straightened from his post at the podium and trained his eyes at the entrance.
A tall man with spearing grey eyes and a calm, soldierly manner walked in, followed by a woman of indeterminate age and features. She had blunt eyebrows that were very visible at first glance, and wore a ridiculous yellow shirt under her men’s small suit, size thirty-six, US.
Pedro stiffened too and lightly blotted excess sweat off his temples.
The grey-eyed, cool customer in his Brooks Brothers suit made his way to the center, nodded at Panetta and barely spared the bodyguard a look. “Hello, everyone. I hope we haven’t kept you waiting for a long time.”
A chorus of yeses and nos rent the air.
Tom grabbed a champagne glass and raised it high. “To the future.”
“To the future,” every member echoed.
Tom drank sparingly of his drink and continued; the faintest edge of remorse tingeing his face but never really reaching his eyes.
“And I am very sorry to report some extremely bad news, gentlemen. The prototype of the manhandled MOAB, has been found defunct. The costs were too high and the thing broke down during multiple tests of prototype manufacturing. My apologies, for all of those of you who had hopes of acquiring it for your particular purposes.”
He raised his glass once more before bottoming it.
A glass dropped in the stunned silence that followed.
Finally, someone spoke.
“No.”
~~~~~
Tom cocked his head and looked at the face of his beloved Hannah, belligerent and intractable, headed toward serious danger. Freak levels of danger.
“Sweetheart…”
“No.” The woman shook her head and pulled off her jacket.
It wasn’t lined with explosives, like a demented Joker. But she dropped it on the floor anyway and came out with a couple of grenades.
“No,” she repeated a third time. As she thumbed off the pins off both grenades and started running back.
“EVERYBODY DUCK!” Krivi yelled as he chased her out.
The woman threw the grenades on the floor and took off in the resultant flash and explosion. The grenades were smoke bombs, and not the garden-variety grenade that detonated on impact and killed everyone in the vicinity.
By the time people came to, Krivi was already out the door, and watching in horrified fascination as the woman gunned down all the bodyguards by wresting the gun away from the first one she came across and firing it with such speed and precision as to be almost balletic.
Then she lobbed a couple of things into the two armored shuttles and they started exploding, one after the other. Going up in awful noise and flames and smoke.
A hand touched him on the shoulder just as the most fantastic notion struck him.
What if The Woodpecker was a woman?
~~~~~
He whirled around, trigger finger itching to do some damage and found himself face to face with Tom Jones…and his weirdly familiar eyes.
“The Woodpecker is a woman,” he said.
Tom nodded. “It was a sister. They are both sisters.”
Tom nodded again just as the screams of utter panic began to rend the air.
“Ziya…”
“We have to go now if you want to find her. She’s very quick and merciless.”
“And you know this because?” Krivi asked idly, quietly.
Although in the last fifteen seconds, almost every piece of this puzzle fell into place with a quick, audible snick.
“Because I taught her how to be,” Tom replied simply.
“I should kill you.” Krivi’s trigger finger twitched again.
“You can’t. Not until you have her… Ziya. I am the only one who can help you.”
Krivi pointed at the vehicles now burned and ruined beyond repair. “After you.”
They took off, just as a fireball of the shuttle exploded into tiny shards right over their heads and rocked them thirty feet off their feet, right into the warehouse.
And then, as
if in concert with the fire, a tremendous explosion rocked the warehouse itself.
Fifty
Hannah was filled with the kind of rage she had only previously imagined herself to be in. The rage would come upon her suddenly and inexplicably, in the middle of whatever she was doing at the time. The littlest things could trigger off one of these episodes of black rage.
Like the time the pizza boy had delivered the wrong pizza.
Nothing wrong with it; it happened all the time, but she couldn’t handle it. It hurt too much and she …exploded.
Like a well-lit bomb, she went to pieces over the simplest thing.
When she was younger, Tom had made her take meds to calm these strange moods but they had to be weaned off because they interfered with her training as she grew older. Tom hadn’t wanted anything to interfere with her becoming the perfect killing machine.
The perfect terrorist.
And all her life, she had worked towards being everything Tom, her dad, wanted.
And all her life, he knew, he fucking knew, the only thing she had ever wanted back was a monument to her skill. The stage to display her talent in. The quill with which to write her epic.
This MOAB was supposed to be that stage.
It was hers.
Tom had promised it to her and Tom never lied about anything. Tom was her father in every way that counted except name, and they shared the same last name anyway. Hannah Burrell had died a long time ago, in the middle of the night in the woods in Maryland.
Hannah Jones was who she was.
And Hannah Jones always got what she wanted.
Tom Jones had made sure she had.
So, why was this time any different?
Why did she feel so…betrayed? So very ultimately betrayed? Was it because Tom had made the announcement of the failed prototype in such a casual, callous manner? Or did it go deeper than that? Had she been realizing how this whole year had been different from the get go?
How Tom had been curbing her and trying to restrain all her wild ways under the guise of this great big bomb that never came?
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