Moving down the plane’s airstair onto the tarmac, I counted on confusion over my identity long enough to allow me to move behind a set of luggage carriers to avoid a sniper shot. Walking alongside it with my exposed side to the open sky, I used my tablet to check the CCTV of the airport. I saw, not at all to my surprise, that they had set up a sniper atop Logan Airport’s roof, overlooking my position. They had airport security covering all the exits, with their men supervising. It was a clever tactic, even if it wasn’t going to work out well for them should airport security balk at my summary execution. Then again, they might decide to kill me and claim they had justifiable cause.
Locating Hugo Alvez with the CCTV system, I saw the six-foot-seven Venezuelan man dressed in a black suit with an earpiece. He had long black hair tied in a ponytail and a Fu Manchu mustache which gave him more than a passing resemblance to Danny Trejo. The giant assassin was surveying the baggage handling area, frequently stopping to check individual pieces of baggage.
The Zombie’s record was a nightmare of murders for cartels, syndicates, dictators, and fun. He had survived stabbings, shootings, beatings, and even an alligator attack, if his file was to be believed. I could tell by the way his suit bulged that he was armed with an Uzi in addition to a Glock 9mm. He was surrounded by a dozen workers sorting through hundreds of pieces of luggage next to a conveyor belt.
Any frontal attack would be suicide and any attempt to sneak up on the Zombie would be a dicey proposition. I might be able to fool the junior members into believing I was just another pilot, but a seasoned assassin of the Carnevale would see through it in a second. I needed to get rid of this guy as well as provide myself an escape route. Thankfully, I had brought my briefcase. The one rigged to explode if I needed to dispose of any incriminating evidence after a mission.
Turning the combination to 666 on both sides, I opened it up and removed the spare cellphone, pen, and iPod which were disguised components for assembling a six-shot pistol. I hid my gun in my right pocket and set the bomb hidden in the briefcase’s lining to go off in about forty seconds, just the right time for it to reach the Zombie.
Walking around the side of the building and watching everything on my tablet, I saw the Zombie’s right arm blown off along with half his face. The explosion triggered alarms all around the airport, which I took advantage of, sneaking in before adopting a panicked look to fit in with the rest of the now-terrified crowds. According to the security cameras, all of the Carnevale’s agents, even the sniper on the roof, were going for the spot where they’d heard the explosion, providing me the perfect opportunity to reach the main terminal.
The front doors were visible. Deftly avoiding the airport’s cameras, I strode out to join all the other airport customers trying to get away or call the police. That was another benefit of my impromptu bomb scare; it meant the Carnevale’s people would be overwhelmed trying to capture all of the calls coming out.
I smirked, heading out into the nearest parking lot to hotwire a car. “This is why you don’t fuck with the master.”
That was when my cellphone buzzed with a text. Picking it up, I looked at the message from S: Meet me in the women’s bathroom in front of the gate at Terminal A.
I texted back, I’m kind of busy escaping. Can’t this wait?
S texted back, No.
“Fuck,” I said aloud, immediately turning around to slip back through the doors before security sealed them shut tight.
As big a sonofabitch as I was, I owed S and wasn’t about to abandon my wife, fake marriage or not. As I walked through the crowded airport terminal, alarms rang and instructions to remain calm came over the intercom. I saw the A Gate women’s restroom had an “Out of Order” sign tied in front of it. Keeping my eyes on the cameras, I headed into the restroom and found myself surrounded by a horror show.
The restroom was completely destroyed: two sinks smashed and leaking water onto the ground, a collapsed stall, holes in the tiling from where someone had punched them in, a shattered mirror, and the body of a blonde, business-suit-wearing woman on the ground. The woman had arms full of porcelain shards, three bullet holes in her chest, one through the side of her jaw, and a broken leg. The actual wound that had killed her was a broken neck, though, done by someone with superhuman strength.
S had killed the Yellow Spider.
“Took you long enough.” S’s voice drifted out from behind one of the still-intact stalls, and then my wife stumbled out.
S was a five-foot-six woman with long dark hair, sculpted cheekbones, a firm muscular frame, and an English accent. She was a striking woman, which had its advantages in the intelligence game but tended to make her identities things like professional swimmers or tennis players.
Right now, S was wearing a bloody white sweater and a pair of blue jeans. She was nursing her right shoulder and had a bullet wound in her right leg that wasn’t bleeding nearly as badly as it should be. Her knuckles were bloody and several bruises were rapidly disappearing on her body, the result of the enhancements she’d received.
More than me.
“Trouble at the office?” I asked, looking her up and down.
“Less than I thought I’d have,” S said, reluctantly sliding up against one of the sinks and sitting on it. “She came at me with a gun, but I managed to get it away from her. She’s got the nano-enhanced bone structure we’ve been working on. I don’t think any of the bullets even reached her organs.”
“I hate this sci-fi bullshit so much,” I said.
“Says the cyborg,” S said.
I looked away. “This is serious.”
“No shit.”
“Do you need me to sneak you out?” I asked.
S rolled her eyes. “The day I need your help escaping from the airport is the day I’ll go back to being a meter maid or whatever I was before.”
“What do you need then?”
“We have a problem. A big one.”
I double checked the CCTV scanners on my tablet. They were all down now.
Shit.
“Aside from the Carnevale knowing my identity?” I said, half-suspecting the Society would consider me a lost cause and terminate me.
“They know it because they have one of our own here to kill you.”
I took a second to process that. They hadn’t been sent by the Society, since they would have just waited for me to come back to the home office to terminate me. Likewise, S wouldn’t be here to help. She liked me a great deal but didn’t like me that much. It meant we had a defector. “Who the hell is stupid enough to turn traitor?”
“Delphi doesn’t know.”
“That’s a first.”
“I wish. The traitor is the reason we’ve been summoned back.”
So that was why we’d lost two of our own.
And I was to be the third.
“He, or she, is here,” S added. “Somewhere in the terminal.”
“That’s a big coincidence.”
“Yes, all of the agents recalled to the home office in Boston end up in Boston’s largest airport.”
“Point taken. Why expose himself now?”
“I think this is a test of loyalty, one I suspect we may have made difficult for them.”
It didn’t explain why the Carnevale was targeting us in the first place, though. As crazy as their antics were, tonight’s escapades in point, they were a business. It wasn’t very savvy of them to start a war with one of the few organizations entirely capable of bringing the fight directly to them. Then again, people did stupid shit all the time.
“We have to stop them,” I muttered. “You need my help to do it.”
“Yes.”
I smiled.
“You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?” S asked, sighing.
“Nope.”
That was when my cellphone rang again. It was Marissa. Clicking the send button, I put it to my ear. “Hey, how’s your situation?”
A deep, throat, Spanish-accented voice greeted
me on the other end. “I’m afraid it’s not good, at least for your little girlfriend.”
“Alvez.”
A strange sensation filled me, causing my throat to constrict and my breath to become labored. A chill went up and down my spine, making my entire body feel clammy and cold. I had never experienced anything quite like it. Not that I could remember, at least. It was fear—an emotion I only rarely felt, and even then, only in the abstract. But here, it was raw and undiminished. Fear that Marissa was no longer going to be in my life, save as a memory. Was she dead? I wasn’t sure I could deal with that. I’d never experienced anything like it.
“You cost me an arm. It will take my people very long to replace it.”
“World’s smallest violin here. How are you still alive?” I tried to be glib, but I couldn’t. I wanted to reach into the phone and rip his throat out with my bare hands.
“They call me the Zombie for a reason.”
“Your breath?” I joked, trying to hide my unease.
There was a cry of pain in the background followed by much Spanish profanity. Marissa was very colorful in what she wanted to do to the Carnevale’s killers.
“That was me breaking your girlfriend’s finger. Care to test me again?”
I didn’t. I closed my eyes. “What do you want?”
How did they know about my relationship with her? Only Marissa, myself, and S knew.
“You.” The Zombie’s voice chuckled. “You come to us and the girl goes free.”
“That’s not a very fair bargain.” I was trained to act like it wouldn’t matter. Hostages didn’t matter. Not normally.
“We’re not going to kill you, Mister G. Though I’m sincerely reconsidering that position. The Carnevale wishes to make you an offer.”
I didn’t believe him for a second.
“Where?” I asked.
“The tarmac, ten minutes.”
“All right.” I turned off the cellphone.
“So what are you going to do?” S asked.
“What do you think? Kill all of them.” My heart settled back to a steady rhythm as I focused on the new emotion welling in my breast. I believe it was hatred. “Care to help?”
S smiled.
Chapter Five
“You realize the intelligent thing to do would be to abandon your Assistant, right?” S said, looking down at the corpse of the Yellow Spider. She gave it a light kick for good measure.
“Some of us haven’t quite abandoned our morality completely.” It was a false statement. Morality had nothing to do with this. I wanted Marissa to continue to be in my life and I would kill anyone who stood in the way of that happening.
I wondered—was that love? I had no context for that emotion.
“Would you be saying that if you weren’t fucking her?” S asked.
“Probably not, no.” That let some of the emotion out. It was true, if nothing else.
“I need to focus on finding the renegade Letter.”
“Any ideas which one it might be?” Honestly, I couldn’t give a shit right now. Persephone and the others could go to hell and be poked with a pitchfork.
S glared at me. “Well, clearly it’s an amoral mercenary who has reason to hate the Society.”
“So, no.” I was already focusing on ways to rescue Marissa. Even, God help me, turning myself over.
As unlikely as that was to end in anything other than a bullet in both our heads.
S nodded. “I’ll try and help if I can, but my priority is the traitor.”
“Do what you have to do.”
S nodded. “Need a weapon?”
“I’m good.” I still had my “assembly kit” gun.
S pulled out a grenade from her pocket and tossed it to me. “Take this anyway.”
I caught it, and then stared at her in shock. “Low profile is not your strong suit, is it?”
“Says the man who just set off a bomb in an airport.”
She had me there. “Touché. Watch out, they’ve cut the feed to the CCTV systems, which means the Renegade is probably advising them now.”
“Renegade? I don’t like it. Sounds too classy.”
I gave her a mock salute and headed out from the ladies’ restroom into the terminal, which was already on lockdown. Say what you will about the response by security; they were doing an excellent job sorting everyone in the massive facility into groups to be checked. There were contraband-sniffing dogs, police sirens in the distance, and other signs they weren’t going to let their would-be bomber escape.
Which is why I knocked out one of the security guards, tied him up with duct tape in a janitor’s closet, stole his outfit, and used his walkie talkie to give false orders to the teams in the area. This gave me a free pathway to the rooftop just above the section of tarmac where I had started my little odyssey.
The cold air was intense and a freezing rain was pouring down, uncommon for Boston during the summertime. The rooftop was covered in commercial air conditioners, vent stacks, and other things that made it very hard to get a good look at the place. A CCTV camera was overlooking it from a nearby pole, but that wouldn’t give me any tactical information about what, or who, was still up here. I could, however, see the plane.
The rooftop was conspicuously absent of any security and then I saw why when I passed over the bodies of two officers. They’d had their throats crushed and there was a vague handprint as if someone had grabbed them by the throats and then smashed them like a Styrofoam cup.
“Shit,” I muttered, pulling out my gun and crouching before slowly shutting the door behind me.
Somewhere down there on the tarmac were Marissa and her captors. I didn’t have any doubt in my mind that they were being covered by a sniper, nor that the moment I came out, they would kill us both. The Carnevale’s transparent lie was just a last-ditch attempt to salvage their botched plan. The thing I didn’t understand was, why me? Why were they trying to kill the Society’s agents at all? There were too many unknown factors and what I needed to focus on was getting Marissa to safety.
Moving around one of the air stacks, I saw that the sniper I’d seen earlier in the airport’s CCTV feed had returned to her position overlooking my plane. I recognized the assassin as Michelle Thompson, an ex-member of the Canadian Armed Forces, per her file. She’d been kicked out for reasons related to substance abuse and for assaulting a superior officer. Thompson was built like a weight-lifter on heavy steroids and had a burn scar under her left eye.
Right now, she didn’t see me, but I didn’t want to risk a pistol shot. All good snipers had friendlies monitor their position, and even with my gun’s suppressor, it was possible they’d hear it. Worse, as I approached, I saw she had an earpiece communicator, which meant they’d definitely hear everything that transpired. Dammit. I guess I was doing this the old-fashioned way.
“Any sign of the target?” I heard a voice on her earpiece ask.
“No,” Michelle said, growling as she surveyed her surroundings one more time. “You know he’s not going to come, right?”
I crouched and crept up behind her. A single misstep could alert her and her fellows, resulting in Marissa’s death.
“He’ll come.”
The voice she was talking to sounded familiar. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female from this distance, though. Was it the Renegade? Either way, I pulled out a garrote wire from my cellphone and wrapped it around my hands.
“We should just kill or take the girl,” Michelle said. “I know people who’ll pay top dollar for someone her age and build.”
“She’s worth far more for her insights into the Society’s computer systems. Now shut up and keep a watch out for him.”
“No need to worry about that,” Michelle said, looking positively eager to pull the trigger. “No one sneaks up on me.”
I waited for her to finish her sentence before wrapping the garrote around her neck and pulling. The razor-wire in my grip was so that it cut her throat as I pulled. Michelle struggled
and thrashed, biting at my hands and moving to get at my arms. She wasn’t cybernetically enhanced around the neck, though, and there was a reason the garrote continued to be a preferred weapon of assassins since the Renaissance. After twenty seconds, she was dead, and I let her collapse on the ground. It was one of the few times I’d ever taken pleasure in a kill.
I felt shame as well.
And didn’t understand why.
“Focus on the objective,” I muttered. I picked up her earpiece and slipped it on before picking up the rifle to assume her position. The weapon was a K2015 sniper rifle with a color night-vision modified scope, auto-targeting system, and an option to enhance the sound from a target’s position. The K2015 had a suppressor of a kind I hadn’t seen before, as well as a larger-than-normal clip. It was a magnificent weapon and just what I needed to protect Marissa, if that was even possible.
Unfortunately, what the nightvision-enhanced scope revealed wasn’t reassuring. Carlos Mendez, John Chambers, and Joshua Harland were standing with Marissa between them. She was held at gunpoint by the airstair, looking decidedly pissed off. Glancing up to the plane’s door, I saw the hand of one of the flight attendants lying limply over the side. It seemed the Carnevale had taken my Assistant by killing everyone nearby.
Crude but effective.
And all the more reason to kill them.
The Zombie and Renegade weren’t present, but the majority of the Carnevale’s killers were gathered in one place, telling me they were ready to ditch their Homeland Security disguises and make a break for it.
The arrival of the real authorities meant this already complicated situation was about to get much, much worse. Soon the U.S. government’s operatives would arrive on scene, and that would be game over for everyone, myself included. Federal attention was like a drunken hippopotamus. It was slow to make an appearance, but when it did, it made its presence unambiguously known.
“Michelle, are you there? You haven’t responded,” Carlos said into his earpiece.
Agent G: Infiltrator Page 4
