by Jon F. Merz
He smirked. “I’m the person you think I am.”
“I think you’re a terrorist asshole.”
He ignored me. “My name is Shiraz Aziz. I believe you’ve met my brothers before?”
20
The bad feeling I had about this meeting got even worse when he said his name. According to what we knew about the Aziz brothers, there were only two of them. Apparently, that was incorrect. And now I had a third one to deal with.
“Shiraz.”
He nodded. “Indeed. The youngest of the three. Perhaps the forgotten one? I don’t know.” He smiled. “Or perhaps, as they say, the best was saved for last.”
Shiraz had a slightly British accent and I wondered if he’d attended school in England. Maybe he’d even gone to Sandhurst. “Don’t flatter yourself. You come from a long line of scumbags. I highly doubt you’re the best at anything.”
He shrugged. “Well, I’m the one who lured you here. And you certainly seem to have fallen for everything without much problem. I wonder what that says about your intelligence? Or perhaps you’re too reckless to care?”
Shiraz came up to my chin and was thin and wispy and vaguely effeminate. He reminded me of a weasel. I disliked him immediately. If we’d been in the States, I had no doubt he’d be sprouting a man bun. Asshole.
“You wanted a meeting. Here it is. Say your piece.”
He smiled and spread his arms. “Look around you, Lawson. There’s no place to run. No place to turn to for help. You are trapped and so are your comrades. If I say the word, you will all be annihilated.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“Actually,” said Shiraz, “I wouldn’t. I dislike the needless waste of life.”
“Strange words from a terrorist.” I decided I wanted to punch him in the throat and watch him gag to death from a collapsed trachea.
“You’re the one we’re after. Just you.”
I frowned. “You cooked this whole thing up just to get me?”
Shiraz sighed. “Not entirely. Amir and I planned this as our family’s vengeance. We’ve waited a long time to get revenge for Khaled. What you did to him in Germany was simply…unforgivable.”
I eyeballed him and leaned closer. “Look, let me break this down for you so it’s nice and easy because you apparently don’t grasp the basic tenets of our society. We have rules. Not many, but some. You and your clown brothers went ahead and broke the rules. When that happens, I get activated by the Council to come and clean your shit up. That way, the humans don’t know about us and we can continue to live peacefully in the shadows. So, while I get that you’d love to be able to shirk your personal responsibility in this matter, the fact is: you all brought this down on yourselves.”
Shiraz shook his head. “Your pomposity is appalling. Have you no empathy for what it must be like to lose treasured family members?”
“I’ve got plenty of empathy for people who deserve it. Terrorist coward fucks like you and your family only deserve one thing: death. Preferably by my hand.”
Shiraz must have seen that his bad guy speech wasn’t going to get him anywhere with me because he waved his hand and dismissed me. “Whatever. This is pointless, so I’ll get right to the point.”
“I wish you would. My favorite TV show is on in ten minutes and I’d really like to see how they resolve the cliffhanger from last week.”
Shiraz ignored me. “You are to surrender yourself immediately to me. If you do that, your comrades will be granted their freedom.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“You expect me to believe that if I hand myself over to you that your merry little band of asshats is going to let my team go unharmed?”
Shiraz frowned again. “”I give you my word that is exactly what will happen. You need only surrender.” He shrugged. “Naturally, you will be killed, but you can die knowing that your sacrifice spared the lives of the people you cared about.”
“Or I could not surrender, kill you while you stand in front of me, and then go back to shooting.”
Shiraz smiled. “If you make even the slightest movement toward me, the sniper who has had you in his sights this entire time will put a bullet into your heart. Fixer rounds, by the way, lest you think that our bullets cannot harm you.”
As soon as it had become apparent who Shiraz was, I’d had that sneaking suspicion in the back of my head. If he and his men were equipped with rounds that could kill vampires, that just made our situation a whole lot worse. If any of those rounds even grazed one of us, we’d be in the deepest of shit. It made me wonder how Vickers and Travis were still alive if they’d been wounded. But perhaps Shiraz hadn’t armed his men with Fixer rounds until just now.
I needed time to stall while Hotel Five hopefully got their asses on the ground and helped us out. “I’ll need to discuss this with my team. They have a right to weigh in on it.”
“Of course,” said Shiraz. “I will give you five minutes to speak with your comrades. Say your good-byes and then walk out into the middle of the runway without your weapons.”
I said nothing, but turned and walked back to my team.
As I approached, Talya spoke first. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Apparently, the family that I keep trying to wipe off the face of the Earth has another brother. That’s him. I killed the first one years ago. The second came for me over Christmas. Took him out as well. Now Brother Number Three is here to settle the score for the whole damned clan. I swear they’re like herpes.” I grinned. “But, hey, he says if I surrender that he’ll release you guys. So good news there.”
Denison chuckled. “Yeah, like we’d ever believe that to be true. They’ll kill us just as soon as you give up.”
“It gets worse,” I said. “They’re armed with Fixer rounds. If any of those bullets come near us, we’re screwed.”
Travis glanced around. “Anytime Hotel Five wants to join this party would be fine with me.”
“Agreed,” said Denison. “But we can’t bank on them, apparently.” He eyed me. “What are you going to do?”
I shrugged. “About the only thing I can do: surrender.”
21
I spoke to the team and then huddled with Talya quickly before the time ran out.
She touched my arm as we spoke. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Do I ever?” I tried to smile, but I had a lot of concerns and not a lot of confidence that Hotel Five would make it before everything went to shit around me. With that said, I had to take steps to ensure our survival without the backup team.
My primary concern was the sniper Shiraz had told me about. If someone was out there in the night that could pick me off, then they were the immediate threat. We could handle small arms fire for a few minutes, but a skilled marksman was going to be a significant problem. So as I started my slow walk out to the middle of the airfield, I sincerely hoped that Talya would be able to spot the sniper.
Because Shiraz had no idea that I had someone on the team who was a very effective counter-sniper.
When I’d first met Talya all those years back in Boston, she was there to get vengeance on the person who had killed her fiance. And when my old Control ran Talya’s name through our databases and those of other intelligence services, I soon found out that she was certifiable Grade A badass. The Soviets had trained her well. So well, that when they were having troubles in Afghanistan with a certain group of Mujahadeen, Talya was sent in alone to deal with them. She stayed in place for several weeks, hunting them all down without remorse or pity. And she killed every last one of them.
When the Berlin Wall came down and Communism fell shortly thereafter, Talya had taken her impressive package of skills and missions and decided to freelance. She was about as close as you could get to someone who could quite literally do whatever you needed doing. She was a sniper, demolitions expert, close quarters assaulter, spy, commando - a mix of everything from the world of black ops. She
was the kind of woman who could walk into a room and make everyone turn their heads because she was so beautiful. Or she could walk around completely invisible.
No wonder I was completely bonkers about her.
I just hoped I lasted the next few minutes so I could be sure to spend tomorrow in her arms. Preferably having some amazing sex. Talya had a libido that matched mine, which was good, because I’m fairly off-the-charts when it comes to getting busy.
The night air in Syria blew chilly all around me as I stepped away from the cover of the small electrical box we’d been using. My M4 was with Denison. I hoped that Talya was using her M4 scope to search for the sniper. Everything counted on her being able to take him out.
Otherwise we were pretty much all dead.
I smirked as I walked. Since when was anything ever easy? I’d chosen this life, after all. Selected, as it were, by the Council to join an elite brotherhood of vampires who enforced the rules and protected the other members of our society. I’d faced death so many times, I felt like I had it on speed dial.
Maybe that’s another reason why Talya and I worked as well as we did. She’d faced death almost as much as I had. Maybe she’d even faced it more often. Who knew? What I did know was that she understood the life. She knew the risks and the danger and the adrenaline and the way you grow to love the uncertainty and the potential of death with some sort of sick passion that no one else could ever understand unless they’ve walked the same path.
And not many walk it, let me tell you.
But Talya did. Her missions numbered in the hundreds in the time she’d been operational. She’d been everywhere on assignments. She’d wiped some of the biggest scumbags off the face of the planet and hadn’t given it much thought. A stunning Eurasian beauty - the product of rape - her innocent childhood had been obliterated early on. She’d come into the care of Mother Russia and what they had produced defied all expectations.
Mine included.
I took a breath and walked further out onto the runway. I knew the sniper would have eyes on me. Especially now when it was clear that I was potentially going to surrender. That was good. That’s where I wanted the sniper focused: right on me. If his eye was focused on me, there was less chance of him spotting Talya scanning the surrounding area and readying for her own kill shot.
I could see the smile on Shiraz’s face as I moved ever closer to him. Clearly, he was enjoying this. Most likely, he was thinking about all the wonderful and awful ways he was going to slowly torture me and eventually kill me. He struck me as one of those closet psychopaths who dream of terrible ways to inflict pain upon people. Probably got his rocks off thinking about it, too.
Sick bastard.
I needed to give Talya as much time as possible for her to lock onto the sniper. I was waiting for Denison to cough. That would tell me that Talya had the sniper in her sights.
But it had to be soon, because I was running out of time. If I didn’t move fast enough, Shiraz would guess that I was up to something and he might just order his men to open fire. All those Fixer rounds coming down at me would end my life pretty damned quick.
I was fifty yards away from Shiraz. His toothy grin was already starting to annoy me. I desperately wanted to smack it clear off of his face. Obviously, I was tired and grumpy. Being out in the field all night will do that to you.
I closed the distance and Shiraz moved toward me.
Confident.
And ready to kill.
22
I stopped about twenty feet from Shiraz. No sense making it easy on him.
He approached flanked by an ISIS fighter on either side. They wore a weird assortment of battle fatigues and T-shirts with shemaghs and other accoutrements. The one closest to me had a Bart Simpson t-shirt on. Who says terrorists aren’t fashion conscious?
“So,” said Shiraz. “You’ve made your decision.”
I shrugged. “No sense letting my team get killed. Just remember that you gave me your word they wouldn’t be harmed.”
“Of course,” said Shiraz. He had a glint in his eye and a smile on his face like he’d just managed to con the casino. Something wasn’t right. But it didn’t matter. I’d never thought he was going to let the team go unmolested. I fully expected him to hose the lot of us down as soon as he could.
He turned to the ISIS fighters and nodded at me. “Take Lawson away.”
Both of the ISIS fighters looked Syrian. I glanced at Shiraz. “Are all of your men…you know…?”
“Vampires? Of course. But don’t go telling any of the other militant groups around Palmyra that. They leave us alone and we leave them alone. It’s a tentative truce, but they know we have a lot of firepower.”
“Interesting. How’d you carve out your own niche?”
Shiraz smiled. “We train their fighters in demolitions. We helped them destroy some of the archaeological dig sites around this area. That was when Amir and I came up with the idea to lure you here with our warning in Taluk on that video we released. We knew it couldn’t be so out in the open that any fool would see it and guess it was a trap. So we just let it lay there in the hope that the Council would grow worried and send a team in. They did. We scooped them up and now you’re here at long last.”
I frowned. “I didn’t even know we had anything of historical importance over here.”
Shiraz nodded. “Most definitely. The Sanctuary of Bel has a small antechamber located underneath it that houses a tomb for what was one of the first communities of our kind here in the Middle East. It’s very plain but there are some ancient Taluk script passages engraved on the walls that had confounded scientists for quite some time. Needless to say, that was the first thing we destroyed.”
A thought occurred to me, one that I did not like. “Seems like you were doing the Council a favor then. There’s no way they’d want that antechamber to ever get scrutinized by humans.”
Shiraz just grinned. “Indeed. Maybe I’m in the habit of doing favors for the most unlikeliest of people.”
I looked him in the eyes and could tell he was busting at the gut to jump for joy or otherwise parade around like a silly goon. He knew something about this entire op that he wasn’t telling me. Worse, I felt like I’d been set up from the beginning. A favor for a favor. The Council got a potentially explosive discovery hidden forever from the eyes of humans and in exchange, Shiraz got me.
“Who sold me out?” I asked then.
Shiraz burst out laughing. “Oh, I wondered if you’d figure it out eventually. I’ve got to hand it to you, it didn’t take you as long as I thought it would.”
“I’ve dealt with traitors before,” I said. “They seem to pop up like weeds from time to time. All you can do is terminate them every time they rear their ugly heads. Sorta like useless terrorists.”
“Yes, well, the only terminating that will be going on around here is with regards to you, my friend,” said Shiraz. “You’re going to be a star on video, Lawson. Isn’t that exciting? We’ve been longing to broadcast another execution for some time now. You’re going to be just what we needed to help us obtain more recruits to our cause.”
“What cause is that? You’re vampires dressed up as terrorists.”
Shiraz shook his head. “We are warriors on a quest to spread our vision of ancient vampiric religion to the masses who have turned their backs on their gods.”
“And which god do you owe allegiance?”
“The Sargoth.”
That stopped me cold. I hadn’t heard that name for years. Not since a long time ago. Way back in Boston. Like a fresh nightmare, images flooded my mind of Cosgrove - perhaps one of the worst enemies I’d ever faced. And Zero, my old mentor who had died in our battle with Cosgrove. It seemed like so long ago, but the memories that I’d locked away back in the corner of my mind were as vivid as they’d ever been.
“You’re all insane,” I said. “Even if you do have an agreement with some traitor on the Council, there’s no way the rest of them will sit idl
y by while you promote your psychotic zealotry. You’ll all be hunted down and killed. Even if you take me out and my team, others will come for you. And they won’t stop until you’re dead.”
Shiraz smiled. “Only if they act quickly. But they won’t. Once we kill you, they will sit on their hands and be ineffectual. As they always are. By the time they decide to act, it will be too late. We will make a sacrifice to the Sargoth and he will bestow upon us the powers that will make us invincible.”
It seemed like a bad time to tell them about my own run-in with the Sargoth. Then again, Shiraz might have already known. If I’d been sold out by someone on the Council, then he might have had access to all of my personal records. Back around Christmas, Niles had told me that someone had gotten my personal information. I thought they were just interested in tracking me down, but my file had details of all of my operations in it. Maybe they were interested in more than just finding me. Maybe they needed information.
Whatever the case, I knew that I had to make sure Shiraz didn’t live to see the approaching dawn.
23
Shiraz was done with me and nodded again to his two goons. “Take him away.”
I started heading off with Shiraz’s men when I heard Denison cough and then Talya finally took her shot. The suppressed M4 coughed twice and then all hell broke loose. Shiraz’s men stationed on the perimeter of the airfield opened up. As they did so, I tackled the one goon closest to me, driving him back down and hard into the ground. We collapsed together, rounds kicking up all around us, and we rolled across the tarmac. He tried to head butt me, but I avoided the strike and elbowed him hard in the solar plexus. He grunted and I followed up with another series of elbows to his midsection. As he tried to fend me off, my hands came down and ripped the pistol he wore out of its holster. He caught the movement and did his best to jam my hands. I jerked them free, put the pistol point blank to his heart and squeezed two rounds off. In close, the shots exploded in my ears. His head reeled back and his incisors extended and then retracted as he died.
