by Tom Abrahams
Zeke lowered his bandana, finding no use in hiding his identity now. He raised the rifle’s aim to her forehead. She gagged again. Her cheeks ballooned and bile leaked from the corners of her mouth. Mascara-stained tears streaked her face. Bright red lipstick was smudged at her chin.
“Don’t kill me,” she pleaded. “Please don’t kill me.”
Zeke stood there silently watching the blubbering mess of a woman in front of him. The tsunami of anger that had crashed through him subsided as his adrenaline waned. Sympathy replaced wrath.
“I’m not going to kill you,” he said, his voice barbed with hints of aggression. “Clean off your face.”
The waitress lowered her shaking hands and bent at her waist. Clutching the bottom edges of the apron, she pulled it up to her face and cleaned off the remnants of her makeup and vomit.
When she finished, Zeke lowered the weapon but kept the muzzle aimed at her. The woman looked upon his face, then covered her mouth. Her eyes were swollen from the tears that welled there and threatened to spill down her cheeks.
“You’re the dead man,” she said through her fingers, her head shaking with disbelief. “Markus said you killed Mogilevich, and the Overseers killed you.”
Zeke knew from his experience delivering illicit goods to bad people that the less he said, the more likely it was the other person would talk. People were uncomfortable with empty silence. They’d say anything to fill it, especially in tense situations.
“I saw your body,” she said, her voice warbling with emotion. “It hung there next to Rose’s. You know Rose?”
Rose’s final moments flooded his memory. She’d been the one to tell the Tic he killed Mogilevich. After he’d saved her from the lecherous misogynist, the Tic’s enforcers leaned on her. Graham, the head of the expansive enforcement team under Tic control, knew they could break her. Sometimes Zeke wondered if all the Tic ever did was seek retribution on those it perceived as having wronged the cartel. It was as much a part of Tic culture as was trafficking in water and other hard-to-find things.
After the Tic used her and extracted what she knew under threat of violence, or violence itself, it had turned her over to the Overseers for hanging. Murder was illegal in the protectorate. The Tic didn’t need the Overseers’ TMF breathing down its neck over the death of a bar owner. They’d readily sacrifice their own to keep the bought-and-paid-for peace that existed between the government and its black-market purveyor.
Rose had confessed to Zeke as they awaited their hangings; she’d told the Tic what they wanted to know and asked his forgiveness. Zeke told her he understood. He didn’t blame her. If they’d done to her what he’d seen done to others, and had experienced himself, he couldn’t blame her.
He learned from his time with the Tic that the threat of violence was often more coercive than the violence itself. Seeing the instruments of pain in a torturer’s hands was worse than absorbing their bite.
Now he stood in front of this new waitress, Rose’s replacement. He held his gaze and his breath and waited for her to keep talking.
“I know you knew Rose,” she said. “You had to know her. She was there when you killed Mogilevich. People talk about it. They talk about seeing your bodies hanging next to one another in front of the Fascio.”
Uriel cursed, drawing the woman’s attention over Zeke’s shoulder. The M27 was heavy in his hands now, straining the muscles in his neck and shoulders. Adrenaline was like a sugar rush. The burst of energy was powerful, but when it faded, it left him weaker than he’d been before.
“Why shouldn’t I kill you?” he asked the waitress. “You started this mess by saying something to Markus.”
Her eyes shifted back to his. “You said you weren’t going to kill me. I don’t understand. Is this real? How are you here?”
“What did you tell Markus?”
“I said I thought you were the man who killed Mogilevich,” she said. “I said I didn’t recognize the people at your table. None of them looked like Tic.”
Uriel stood behind him now. The waitress’s focus darted between them.
“You okay?” Zeke asked his companion without unlocking his stare on the waitress.
“I’ll be fine,” Uriel said. She didn’t sound fine.
Those three words were a stew that conveyed a mixture of things Zeke hadn’t thought possible in such a brief declaration. In them, he heard anger, resignation, sadness, vengeance.
“She wants to know how I’m here,” he said. “If this is real.”
Uriel chuckled. The guttural, spine-chilling sound echoed through the bar. Then, without warning, and from her position on the floor, she jumped into the air and lunged toward the waitress. Her body glowed, the tattoos coming to life in a bluish hue that appeared ethereal. Her right leg shot forward, straight in front of her. Uriel’s boot landed on the waitress’s chin, forcing it to her chest. The waitress jerked backward, her body hitting the wall with an electric spasm.
The after-echo of Uriel’s chuckle hadn’t finished before she was back on two feet and the waitress lay unconscious on the floor. Zeke didn’t know what had happened until it was over. He lowered the M27.
“Did you kill her?” he asked, incredulous.
“No, but when she wakes up, she won’t question whether this was real. It’ll feel real with every heartbeat.”
Zeke hung his head. “I’m sorry about Phil and Gabe,” he said. “It’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. This is what we do. This is all we do.”
“Still, I can’t repay the debt. Whether or not it’s my fault.”
The strain of the day was clear. Her tattoos weren’t glowing anymore. “Maybe not,” Uriel said, “but can you do me a favor before we go find that girlfriend of yours?”
Zeke adjusted the Stetson, moving the front of the brim up and down to find the comfortable resting spot on his forehead. “What? Anything.”
“Leave a tip for the waitress,” said Uriel. “Twenty percent for the service and another five for the trouble.”
Chapter Nineteen
Brina was on one knee, looking out the window of a building across the street from the entrance to the Tic’s hidden compound in a crappy part of the city the Overseers neglected more than most.
It was late afternoon. The sun dipped behind the taller buildings in the city, casting long shadows across the streets and onto the crumbling facades that lined them. The nearest watering queue was two blocks away. This street was devoid of life, but the various structures that surrounded the entrance to the underground lair teemed with Tic enforcers and their assigned muscle.
They were at the end of the street. The entrance, hidden from those who wouldn’t know to look for it, was inside what appeared to be a four-foot, square power transformer. In reality, it was a pale green shell for the transformer and, when unlocked, provided access to a set of stairs that led to the compound.
The transformer box was between a pair of three-story apartment buildings, which were in poor condition, even by the standards of the city-state. The buildings had housed no one for years. Instead, they served as surveillance posts and drop points for the Tic, their informants, and the Overseer elite on the Tic’s payroll.
Brina knew that should Li return with an army, they’d expect to find armed guards in those two buildings. They might even attack those buildings first before attempting entry into the compound.
She had stationed no one in those buildings, but had laced them with explosive charges set to detonate on command. Brina had placed her assets farther up the street and on adjacent, parallel streets.
That way, when the TMF converged on the compound entrance, the armed legion at her disposal would surround the intruders, ambushing them before they could do any real damage.
The plan wasn’t only Brina’s. She hadn’t studied warfare or counterinsurgency, as had her superior, Graham. When she suggested trapping the coming army, he’d helped her flesh out the details.
They’d worked f
ast to mobilize the needed cadre of armed personnel. Now they had three dozen men and women positioned and ready to strike.
Brina’s eyes were still swollen thanks to Li, and it was hard to breathe through her nose. Her mouth stayed open to offer the requisite air to keep her conscious. The backs of her arms and her chest ached from the bruising she’d sustained. Remnants of a headache flared with every beat of her heart. Blood pumped through her arteries, to her organs, into her veins. It was as though she could feel it coursing through her as she knelt before the window.
She was far enough back from the dingy panes of glass that darkness hid her from anyone who might happen along the street. Such was the case, she imagined, with everyone awaiting the coming storm.
Brina was hungry and, more than that, thirsty. Reaching for the canteen at her side, she licked her swollen lips, feeling the bulge of a wound with her tongue. Her fingers worked the cap, unscrewing it. The water was warm. It had the aftertaste of its metal container, but it quenched her thirst enough to help her refocus.
This wasn’t how Brina imagined her life: an enforcer whose sole purpose was to glean information through violence. There was a dichotomy in her line of work. There was power. There was subservience.
Brina was like most of the Tic, recruited into the cartel from the fringes of society. The Tic preyed on those who had nothing to lose. Its membership was heavy with people who didn’t know their parents or siblings, who stood off to the sides of ration queues, hoping for morsels or drops of charity.
Someone of authority within the gang had seen her begging. She was thirteen or fourteen, but looked older. Her size and strength gave her the appearance of a woman in her early twenties.
The gang member, thinking she was an adult, took her to Mogilevich to work as a waitress. That was always the entry-level job for a woman new to the Tic. Sometimes it was the only job.
Brina confided her age to Mogilevich. She told him she was orphaned and didn’t even know who her parents had been. For as long as her memory served, she’d lived on the streets.
Mogilevich took her in, gave her a place to stay, and taught her to hide her emotions and to take out her frustrations on those who didn’t serve her best interests. He trained her as a bouncer. Her size was obvious to anyone who saw her, but her raw strength was surprising to anyone who tested it.
For years, Brina learned the intricacies of the Tic under the tutelage of Mogilevich. The man was more than a bartender or the owner of a Tic dive. He was the Tic’s most powerful man in the protectorate. That was why he got away with as much as he did without repercussions.
Few people under his command knew Mogilevich was at the top of the food chain. That was how the Tic worked; who somebody was and what authority they held was on a need-to-know basis. A bootlegger like Ezekiel Watson only knew who his immediate superiors were. Should he ever fall into the wrong hands, that kept him from revealing too much information about the organization’s structure.
Typically, Brina wouldn’t have been in a position to know how powerful Mogilevich was. She knew only because she’d lived with him, learned from him, and in her own weird way, loved him as a father.
She was seventeen when Mogilevich introduced her to Graham. He told the head of the Tic’s enforcement team she had outgrown her job at the bar and that she was destined for something more important.
“Treat her like your own,” Mogilevich had said at the first meeting. “Teach her everything you know.”
Graham did exactly that. He taught her about surveillance, interrogation, persuasion. Brina absorbed it like a sponge. More than anything, she wanted to please Mogilevich, to make him proud of her. She was a natural at dissociating emotion from her job and performing the task at hand dispassionately and expertly.
“You enjoy this,” Graham had said to her during a gory interrogation of a low-level Tic supplier who’d conspired to steal from the cartel. It was the first time he’d let her lead what he liked to call “fact-finding missions.”
“If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you were smiling.”
Brina was smiling and couldn’t hide it. Graham’s observation made the hint of it broaden across her face. It stayed there, the muscles in her face tiring even as she broke the subject of his will. It wasn’t so much that she was happy with inducing terror or inflicting pain. Her joy came from being good at something, from having an unrivaled skill.
Coming from the dregs of the city-state, a nobody from nowhere, she never dreamed of a job that wielded such influence. By the time she was twenty, she was Graham’s top enforcer. Better than the men. Her patience propelled her to superstardom amongst the growing force of Tic muscle.
People whispered as she passed them. Their eyes followed her. They knew her. They feared her. She owed it all to Mogilevich.
Then Ezekiel Watson took Mogilevich from her. So what if Mogilevich thrust himself upon women? They owed him. Acquiescing to his whims was the least they could do for the security he provided. Brina had, many times. It was her duty.
Now, she’d never touch him again. If Brina were capable of feeling loss, it was what might have consumed her. Instead, anger boiled inside her as she hid in the shadow beyond the window.
Ezekiel had paid his penance for what he’d done, and so had Rose. If it weren’t for Graham wanting Adaliah alive, she’d be dead too.
She was about to be. The woman would pay for what she’d done.
Brina checked the magazine in her M27 for a third time. It was fully loaded, as was the magazine she kept in a vest pocket. She touched the pocket and ran her fingers along the silhouette of the curved magazine. She touched the other pocket, feeling for the hand-forged Damascus steel knife that once belonged to Mogilevich. She’d found it on the floor of his bar after he disappeared.
It was the perfect instrument for revenge.
Chapter Twenty
Li stepped from the transport, her new boots crunching against the layer of grit on the main artery leading to the part of the city under Tic control. The truck idled loudly, its heavy engine rumbling such that she felt it in her chest as she moved past the hood to survey the path ahead.
These neighborhoods, which had served as her home turf for the years she spent undercover, were enemy territory now. The air hung thick, dry as it was, with the tense anticipation of what Li knew would be a bloody incursion.
A TMF Marine named Davis walked up behind her. He was clad in all black, his tactical helmet strapped onto his head.
“Ma’am,” he said, “I know Lieutenant Archibald has given you authority on this mission, but may I make a suggestion?”
Li nodded at the Marine, and he pulled a palm-sized tablet from the Velcro pocket on his chest. He tapped it with a haptic-enabled glove, held it up to his eye, and the screen glowed to life. He stepped even with Li and held out his Com to show her a real-time map of the area that lay ahead of them.
“We’re here,” he said. “This spot is our position. It’s noted by the green dot.”
“I see it,” said Li.
The Marine swiped his finger downward and then touched it with his thumb and forefinger, spreading them apart to zoom in on the display’s graphic image. There was a red dot at the center of the screen. “This is our target location. Note the series of buildings on either side. They’re multistory in some cases and essentially form a wall along this stretch of the approach. I call it a valley.”
“Okay,” said Li. “Your point? Davis, is it?”
“Stephen Davis, ma’am,” said the Marine. “My point is that I’m concerned about what looks like a chokepoint. We could be walking into an ambush. They have the high ground, essentially, if they put snipers atop those structures.”
“Okay,” she said. “Though it’s not like there’s only one way in and one way out. We’ve got multiple access points. Here. Here. And here.”
“You’re correct. That doesn’t change their inherent advantage as we begin the approach march. The Tic knows this par
t of the city better than we do. There is a good possibility that spotters have already identified us and alerted anyone who is bent on protecting the target asset.”
“That’s based on the assumption they know we’re coming,” Li countered. “You patrol the city. For all any of these people know, you’re on patrol and nothing more. It’s a leap to assume they not only expect us, but they’ve had time to plan some sort of ambush.”
“With all due respect,” said Davis, “my job is to assume the enemy knows everything. Only then can we anticipate and counter with what they don’t expect. Either way, we have to be prepared for the enemy to engage here and here.”
Davis pointed to two intersections that fed into what he’d effectively identified as a valley leading to their target destination. When he touched the points on the real-time graphic map, yellow dots appeared on the display to mark the locations.
Li put her hands on her hips and scanned the road ahead of them. The Marine knew better than she did. A spy had a certain set of enviable skills, but battle planning wasn’t one.
“When we came to rescue you, ma’am, we drove straight up the gut,” he said. “No waiting, no planning, just a cut-and-dry rescue. We had four men. We were in and out.”
Li studied the display and folded her arms across her chest and glanced up at Davis.
“They weren’t expecting us,” he said, “so we weren’t at risk of an ambush. It would have been a straight-up urban firefight. We deal with that all the time. This is different.”
“So what do you suggest?” she asked.
“We have twelve men,” said Davis, “and you, ma’am. That’s stealth. It’s agile, and good for a quick insertion, assessment, acquisition, and departure. It’s not ideal for a street fight with an unidentified number of combatants. We don’t have actionable intelligence on the ground. We don’t know the force size, assuming there is one.”
“Assuming,” said Li.
“Yes, ma’am. Like I said, we have to prepare for the worst-case scenario.”
