Rising Phoenix

by Kyle Mills

  Swenson began moving along the front of the house. He would have been in full view of the man at the door, had the man’s attention not been focused in the other direction. Swenson moved smoothly, trying to keep out of the waterfall coming off the roof.

  It would have been impossible to hear Swenson’s approach. Hobart later theorized that the cartel enforcer had been alerted by the water splashing off his partner’s body. Whatever it was, he spun to his right just as Swenson moved within three feet of him.

  The struggle was short. Swenson was able to block the gun arcing toward his face and charge the man, lifting him off his feet and landing him hard on the brick porch. As his back impacted, the gun went off. Hobart tensed, inadvertently pressing the pistol harder into his captive’s ear. To his surprise, the pathetic whimper floating up from beneath him was more noticeable than the gunshot, which had blended seamlessly with the crash of the storm.

  Hobart grabbed his captive by the back of the hair and dragged him to his feet. They marched toward the door. A scared-looking Robert Swenson was standing over the man’s companion, gun shaking slightly.

  “You all right, Bob?”

  Swenson swallowed hard and nodded, stepping back and inviting his prisoner to stand.

  As they descended the basement stairs, Hobart came to the realization that he would never live in that house again. Nor would he ever be able to exist under the name John Hobart. The drug cartels had a nasty way of holding a grudge. In essence, the thing he prized most—his privacy—had been stripped away. The price of fame in this case would be a bullet in the head.

  “Gentlemen. I always like to know who I’m talking to. What are your names?”

  The two men sat under a bare bulb, wrapped in an almost comical amount of rope. Coils of white nylon twisted and turned across their bodies, pinning their arms painfully behind their backs. Swenson had gone back to the warehouse after he had finished tying them.

  The basement was typical of Baltimore’s older homes. Rotting overhead beams dripped water on the dirt floor. The cement walls were pockmarked and stained by a dark line running horizontally about three feet from the floor, suggesting that the basement at one time had been under water.

  Hobart rarely used it, and with the exception of the large, well-equipped tool bench, most of the junk in it belonged to prior owners. Old bicycles, golf clubs, a bathtub. He had been meaning to clean it out for years, but had never received the proper inspiration.

  “Fuck you, man,” spat the one who had grappled with Swenson. Hobart looked at his deeply lined face for a moment. The man’s stare glowed with hatred and sadism. Hobart moved his eyes to the man’s partner, who didn’t meet his gaze. There was weakness there. It could be seen in the curve of the mouth. The slightly flared nostrils.

  Hobart stood and walked past the men toward the work bench.

  “What if we just start yelling, man. Your neighbors won’t like that too much,” the angry one said in thickly accented English.

  Hobart shouted for him. “Help! I’m being murdered!” He lowered his voice to a conversational tone. “You’re in the basement of a house sitting on an acre of land in a rainstorm. Who the hell’s gonna hear you?”

  He selected a scratch awl from the tool bench. The angry one was straining his neck, trying to see what Hobart was doing. The quiet one was dead still, head drooped forward.

  The angry one gave up trying to see what was going on, shouting an idle threat instead. “You’re dead, man. Dead.” The sentence had a practiced finality to it.

  “Maybe,” Hobart answered, “but you first.” He clamped his hand over the man’s mouth and nose, and pressed the awl into the base of his skull. The bone resisted at first, but gave way with a sickening crunching sound when Hobart put his full weight behind the tool. Once inserted to the handle, he rotated it in a slow circular motion.

  Hobart felt the muscles in the man’s jaw go slack, and he released him.

  The surviving man, who had appeared dead before, jumped as if someone had run an electric current through him. His head snapped up and every fiber in his body tried to move away from Hobart, who was busy wrapping duct tape around the corpse’s neck, sealing the small, oozing wound. Despite the man’s valiant effort, the chair only teetered slightly. A tribute to Swenson’s overzealous rope work.

  Hobart walked around the chair-bound corpse and took his seat. The quiet one stared at him, wild-eyed.

  He had the look of a flunky. No doubt he had hung on his companion’s every word, convinced that he was the ultimate killer. Lean, mean, fighting machine. What little strength he had, had drained from him with the blood and brains of his companion.

  “So what was it you said your name was?” Hobart played with the bloody awl suggestively.

  “Jesus, my name is Jesus.” He barely spoke English. Hobart switched to Spanish.

  “Pleased to meet you, Jesus. Now why don’t you tell me who sent you here?”

  The young man thought for a moment, weighing his options.

  “Look, Jesus. In an hour you’ll be dead—no matter what. The question is how comfortable you are during that hour.”

  It was a psychological trick that Hobart had always been fond of, but had found little opportunity to use. In the face of certain death, earthly loyalties and conventions held little meaning.

  A brief look of despair crossed Jesus’s face and he drooped as far forward in the chair as the ropes would allow. Hobart waited quietly. Finally Jesus’s head rose. The expression of despair had been replaced with one of resignation.

  “Luis Colombar,” he said in a breathy voice that Hobart had to strain to hear.

  “And his orders?”

  “To kill you.”

  “Why?”

  “He did not say.”

  Hobart walked back to the work bench. His captive craned his neck, as his companion had, with similar futility.

  As he passed Jesus on his way back to his chair, Hobart swung a heavy hammer into the man’s immobilized knee. Jesus howled in surprise and pain, eyes rolling back in his head.

  “Why?” Hobart repeated, settling back in his chair and placing the hammer next to the awl on the floor.

  Jesus coughed violently, turning his head to the side as though he was going to vomit. Blood soaked through his pants where the shards of what had once been his kneecap had sliced through the skin.

  “I swear, he didn’t tell me!” There were tears in the corners of his eyes. “Why would he?”

  Hobart had believed him the first time, but it never hurt to be thorough. Satisfied that he had the information he needed, he grabbed the awl and walked behind the young man.

  Jesus jerked his head side to side and back and forth violently, grunting with every move, trying to delay the inevitable. Hobart grabbed a handful of his hair and forced his head forward, exposing the base of his neck.

  Hobart eased Robert Swenson’s Cadillac over the steep hill leading to his cabin. The bottom scraped loudly, as though it was intentionally reminding him that it had been made for the highway and not weed-choked dirt roads. The tires spun a bit, but he made it over the rise and began down the steep slope to the cabin.

  Pulling up next to the house, he killed the engine and the lights, letting the dark quiet wrestle its way into the car. He sat for a few minutes with the door half-open, letting his eyes adjust and listening for any sign of life in the dense woods that surrounded him. He heard nothing but the wind.

  Despite the cold dampness of the night, Hobart was sweating profusely. He had one hand on the collar of Jesus’s jacket and the other wrapped around the handle of a rusted shovel. It never ceased to amaze him how heavy corpses felt. Unconsciousness added a few pounds to be sure, but death …

  He had to stop every ten feet or so to catch his breath and regain his bearings—a flashlight seemed ill advised. The work gloves weren’t helping matters, either. The loose leather made gripping the rain and blood-dampened wool of Jesus’s jacket nearly impossible.

 
; A half hour’s walk brought him to the edge of a small clearing less than a quarter of a mile from the cabin. He stopped a few feet from it, positioning himself where he could make the most of the moonlight while still staying under the cover of the trees. Finding a piece of ground relatively free of rocks and roots, he began to dig.

  It was an hour before dawn when Hobart dropped Jesus’s nameless companion in the hole on top of him. Despite the moonlight, it was inky-black in the four-foot-deep grave—something he hadn’t entirely counted on. He jumped in, landing on the bodies with a muffled thud. He reached down and ran his hand up one of the men’s chests until he felt the smooth duct tape wrapped around his neck. He removed his hand and replaced it with the blade of the shovel. He worked it back and forth with his heel, feeling it slowly bite into flesh and finally into bone. One last push severed the man’s head. Hobart reached into the darkness and retrieved it. He stuffed it into a thick Hefty bag and tied off the top. As he walked back to the cabin, the head bounced playfully against his knee. It too seemed heavier than it should be.

  The theory was simple. When Colombar found that his men had disappeared, he would get impatient. And if he got impatient, he would probably end up calling the Bureau. Hobart couldn’t allow that to happen.

  His years in the DEA had taught him a few things about the minds of these men. He would FedEx the head to Colombar. Boxed up nicely—possibly with a bow. More important, he would include a note, preferably with something attacking Colombar’s manhood in some way. The drug lord’s reaction was absurdly easy to predict. He would fly into a rage. He would send more men, ordering them to capture Hobart and bring him back to Colombia. Hobart smiled and tossed the bag over his shoulder. Some things were constant in the universe. Pi, gravity, time, and the fact that drug dealers thought with their balls and not their brains.

  27

  New York City,

  March 5

  Bill Karns pulled himself from the cab with some difficulty and hurried down the sidewalk.

  The New York streets were relatively quiet. It was three o’clock—the late lunchers had all finished their martinis and returned to work, and the people contemplating sneaking home early were going to give it another hour or so.

  When John Hobart had called about the strychnine poisoning in D.C., Karns had thought he was out. He had never heard Johnny like that. Hobart’s calm composure under stress was a big part of his personality. Hell, it was his personality. The screaming, swearing person on the other end of the phone had taken Karns off guard. And scared him.

  He had moved out that day and headed for Oklahoma City. Not exactly a hotbed of high-dollar narcotic traffickers, but it looked like it was where he would stay. Missionless for the rest of the operation.

  The call last week had been a shock. Hobart was flying to Oklahoma City and they were to meet. Hobart said that he had a critical mission and needed someone he could trust. One of the CDFS’s men had been caught and, according to CNN, was going to talk. He hadn’t yet, but unnamed FBI officials were confident that their negotiations were headed in the right direction.

  Hobart had arrived the next day and charged Karns with taking care of the problem. The hit was already completely planned, right down to scale models and carefully drawn diagrams. Karns had listened silently, struggling not to let his face reveal his relief at being reinstated as one of Hobart’s top men.

  And now it had begun.

  Karns approached the doors of the building across from the jailhouse where Phil Nelson, as his name had turned out to be, was being held. On the other side of the street, the inevitable crush of reporters and protesters ebbed and flowed across the sidewalk, barely contained by wooden barriers and police. Some had spilled into the road, and the combination of their bodies, and the interest of passing drivers, had caused a near standstill in traffic. The cars sat helpless, horns blaring, and drivers shouting inane obscenities.

  He pushed through the glass doors and turned left. The entrance to the stairwell was right where Hobart said it would be. He paused, looking up at the seemingly endless flights of concrete and metal stairs as they rose into the gloom above his head. Finally he took a deep breath and started up.

  Under his dirt-streaked coveralls, one hundred and fifty feet of nylon rope was coiled around his torso. A climbing harness clung to his ample waist, and a rifle hung under his right arm. On the outside of his work clothes, an overflowing tool belt hung lifelessly, full of oddly new-looking tools. The weight of these items, combined with years of inactivity, made it necessary for him to stop on each landing for increasingly long periods. The farther he ascended, the harder it was to catch his breath and clear his swimming head.

  Almost there.

  He could hear the unmistakable sound of power tools and hammering coming from above. Hobart had told him that the last two floors were undergoing a major renovation. No one would notice one more worker making his way up the stairs.

  One more flight.

  He was bent over as low as the tightly coiled rope would allow. It felt like someone was twisting a knife in his side. He ignored the pain and continued on, finally arriving at the door leading to the roof.

  The old hinges had been recently oiled, and the heavy wooden door opened easily. Karns slipped through and pushed it shut behind him. He walked nonchalantly to a pile of debris stacked over eight feet high on the west side of the roof and began picking through it. Typical construction debris—pieces of drywall, insulation, and lumber, mixed with old furniture that couldn’t handle the onset of the information age, and the computers that came with it.

  After about twenty minutes of seemingly aimless scrounging, Karns straightened out and stretched his back. He looked around, casually scanning the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Then he bent again, squeezing himself into the insulation-lined hole that he had made for himself. He worked his body back and forth, trying to flatten out the sharp edges caused by the haphazardly stacked debris. The rope coiled around his torso was a blessing now, keeping nails and glass from cutting into him.

  Satisfied that his comfort had been provided for about as much as it was going to be, he pulled a large piece of drywall in front of him. That, combined with his dull gray coveralls, would make him invisible. Unless of course someone needed something from the pile. That didn’t seem likely, though. It was four-thirty, and construction was winding down for the day.

  He shifted his position one last time—something was sticking into his neck. The weather was getting noticeably colder, too, cooling the sweat that had begun to soak through his coveralls. It was going to be a long night.

  The last two hours had seemed as long as all the others combined. Bill Karns twisted his wrist painfully and looked at his watch for the hundredth time. Nine-thirty. Just a few more minutes.

  The rubble that surrounded him like a cocoon had provided surprisingly little insulation over the last seventeen hours. The climbing rope that was such a burden on the way up the stairs had been his savior—keeping the cold night air from penetrating his torso, but not doing much for his extremities. His hands were stiff, and his legs felt completely lifeless. He could feel the warmth of the sun in the few places that it filtered through the debris.

  Nine thirty-five. Hobart’s plan had Karns waiting as long as possible before emerging from his hiding place, lessening the chances of him being spotted from one of the surrounding buildings. He decided to revise the plan slightly. The shot wasn’t going to be particularly difficult by his standards, but it would help if he could actually make his finger squeeze the trigger.

  He began pushing the large piece of drywall lying on top of him to the side. The noise startled him a bit after spending the entire night on the quiet roof, with only the drifting sound of traffic to keep him company.

  His legs were in even worse shape than he had thought. He had to literally drag himself from the hole, scooting on his belly to the northwest and nestling himself in the crook of the four-foot wall that surrounded the roof. H
e stretched his legs out painfully and began balling and unballing his fists. When his fingers loosened up, he tucked them under his armpits to warm.

  Nine forty-five. Time to move.

  Karns dropped his tool belt and pulled out a hammer and two six-inch nails. Crawling quickly, he made his way to the only door opening onto the roof and drove the nails through the door and into the doorjamb. Hobart had really done his homework. He had told Karns that the large air-conditioning unit would obscure him from prying eyes as he sealed the door. And there it was, right where it had been on Hobart’s elaborate cardboard model.

  Karns crawled back to his corner and began unwinding the rope from his body, stacking it next to him. Pulling the covers off the scope on his rifle, he sighted carefully across the roof at a flag just visible on the top of the building next to him. Other than a small amount of condensation on the scope’s optics, everything looked good. He chambered a round.

  Hobart had definitely been on the roof. Karns had suggested that he bring a mirror or something to set on the wall so that he could watch for his target. But Hobart told him that he would be able to hear the commotion when they brought Nelson out. Karns had been doubtful during their conversation, but had to admit now that Hobart had been right. Some kind of acoustic anomaly seemed to quiet the traffic noise and amplify the sound of protesters and reporters. He could hear their excitement growing as he continued to flex and stretch his legs.

  As he had for the last three days, Mark Beamon stopped ten feet from the glass doors leading to the steps of the building. From where he stood, he could see six or seven agents holding back the reporters and interested bystanders, cutting a twenty-five-foot-wide swath in the crowd. He couldn’t see the dark blue LTD waiting for him on the street, or the one hundred and fifty other agents stationed on roofs, sitting in cars, and casually strolling through the neighborhood. A nervous sweat trickled down the back of his neck and behind his bullet-proof vest.

  He had thought that the first day would be the worst. He had been dead wrong. The tension seemed to grow every day, like the crescendo at the end of a symphony.