Natalia only recalled his first name: Dmitry. And it was Dmitry who had trained her and taught her much of her tradecraft. She spoke of him infrequently at best, and when she chose to mention her memories about him, she did so only in fragments. I did know that in order to escape her bonds with the mafia, Dmitry had been one of several men Natalia had been forced to kill, and though she’d known it had been necessary, she’d never been proud of having to do so.
Natalia was my polar opposite in so many ways, both then and now. My early development into our trade had begun as a lowly E-3 sniper retained by MARSOC, the US Marine Corps Special Ops Command.
I’ve never been one to brag, but I was pretty damn good at my job. In fact, as things turned out, I wound up ranked among the best—having been christened with the call signs ‘death adder’ and ‘overkill’ in the course of my tours in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, during the nonstop, much-acclaimed American war on terrorism. My fellow grunts labeled me a natural-born killer of men, but my skills, though considered by many to be elite and cream of the crop, had been disregarded—their spotlight shrouded by what had become my most profound character flaw.
While lying prone in my final firing position, I had a tendency to go above and beyond. Meaning, I didn’t just delete the intended target as ordered. I’d been inclined instead to acquire and destroy everything and everyone, everywhere in the vicinity, and anything else that got in the way while I was at it. I’d been disinclined to show or offer remorse for my actions, my justification being that all targets terminated and made dead had, in fact, all been enemies and, as such, deserving of their fate.
My superiors had been less than inclined to agree with me.
I supposed one could surmise that I had a lot in common with manufactured goods. I was a product of my environment. I had been orphaned when I was young, and I’d been alone for much of my life, having to fight my own battles for as long as I cared to recount. No one, failing myself, had ever come to my defense. I didn’t remember my real parents, and didn’t care to recall the halfway houses or the countless foster families I’d been handed off to on temporary loan, either. As such, I’d never had a family to back me up or a place to call home, at least until I’d found Natalia. Living an isolated existence for the majority of my life, devoid of interactions and normalcy, served to coarsen my heart over time, and I’d been content to let it remain that way. I figured maybe I’d been lucky enough to be born without a conscience, and it wasn’t until meeting my better half that I learned what a conscience even was.
My history of inequities and going full overkill had become the foundation for a court-martial and a guest appearance before a US Navy JAG Corps, followed by a less-than-honorable discharge from the Marines. My deeds hadn’t gone unnoticed and, for reasons known only to them, served to cultivate my subsequent recruitment into the Special Operations Group of the Central Intelligence Agency, though I never quite fit in there. My fellow agents were all ex-military like I was, but were far too disciplined and polished. I felt like a sledgehammer tossed into a pile of pins, needles, and fine brushes. After several successful and a few unsuccessful wet operations, some of which had been particularly bloody, I was offered a chance at becoming a non-official cover operative, and I jumped in headfirst.
In that capacity, I traveled the world, making deals and securing assets, some of whom Natalia and I utilize to this day. I made a couple of friends and a good deal of enemies, argued with overzealous ambassadors, and got into several fistfights with a few pompous CIA chiefs of station. It was a role that taught me a lot about myself and what I was capable of, but it was also one doomed for failure, and had probably been from the word go.
A few years following my conscription, my access was delimited, and I was ultimately excommunicated. An official burn notice, signed by the director himself, sealed the deal, citing my overall lack of controllability as justification for the action. It hadn’t been clear to me if I’d been deemed a legitimate enemy by the intelligence consortia, or if I’d simply been shit-canned, but I felt it best to part ways and distance myself from the agency.
Natalia’s skills had been instilled in her by a man who’d been a tenured professional—an expert in foreign intelligence, espionage, and clandestine assassination with impunity. She’d been accepted, molded, and hardened by one of the most elite trained killers in the world to become one of the same. Yet she’d always been able to exercise levels of scrutiny and fairness that I’d never cared to. Natalia was calculating, deliberate, and all business, but would never allow the killing of innocents. In fact, she hadn’t once hesitated to call off an operation when it meant eliminating a target she believed didn’t need killing or didn’t deserve to be killed.
I’d always been equipped to move forward as planned—ready, willing, and able to do whatever was needed to achieve the objective, regardless of the outcome. But my wife was wired differently. Natalia had told me on several occasions, if we had followed through to the consummation of some of our more questionable ops, she wouldn’t have been able to live with herself.
Sometimes, I wished I knew what she meant by that, but maybe I wasn’t meant to. Maybe that was why we were together, or at least, one of the reasons we found each other. Because we offset each other and helped one another find a semblance of balance. Who knew? I was convinced that she and I both lucked out. We were made for one another, and we were made to do the things we do. And now, we just did them together as a team—as husband and wife.
In a few hours, my bride and I would be boarding a train en route to Munich for a weekend of diversion before we hitched a flight to the US to tend to our latest business venture. I didn’t mind the work—I never had, but I’d be grateful when there was enough money in the bank and we wouldn’t have to do this anymore. I wanted to see Natalia’s smile free of the façade she’d obscured it with for so long. I wanted to see it become genuine and unfabricated someday. I thought she’d earned the right to be happy and live an ordinary life far away from the death we triggered off whenever we got the call, especially after all she’d been through.
And it was reassuring knowing when that time came, neither of us would have to live that life alone.
Two
Olympia shopping mall, Munich, Germany
Friday, 21 March, 1335 CET
Nihayat al’ayam minus 6 days, 10 hours, 25 minutes
The train ride to Munich involved a quick swap in Salzburg, Austria, and was scheduled to last just a little over three hours. I remembered Natalia telling me before that the trip was usually much shorter, but typically took more time the closer it got to the weekends.
While the wife spent much of her time preoccupying herself with geopolitical concerns, such as her country’s overpopulation and how it served to affect ride times, I remained enthralled with the majestic views outside my window, unable to concentrate on much of anything else. It couldn’t be helped. The ecological scenery in Bavaria is nothing short of extraordinary, even from this lowly train passenger’s point of view.
The trip’s duration wasn’t a bother to me, though Natalia was right, the cars were jam-packed today, as in up to the elbows with fares. With an acute eye and a sharp tenor denoting her frustration, she explained that at one time, a train ride in her country hadn’t been unlike any conventional airliner flight. Tickets were purchased in advance, purchasers reserved, and were therefore assigned seating. Standing passengers had never been permitted, for safety’s sake.
While that might have been the case in the past, today it appeared those rules had been tossed aside. The seats had all been taken, forcing groups of travelers to stand uncomfortably in the walkways and utilize the train car’s grab rails as their only means of support. At the speed we were travelling, somewhere around three hundred kilometers an hour, equivalent to one hundred eighty six miles per hour imperial, I didn’t envy them.
To add to that, the multitude of faces wasn’t made up of a preponderance of the train’s standard occupan
ts. At least, insofar as I could discern. Many of the passengers seemed as though they didn’t belong on board the train…or within the country, for that matter. They acted unfriendly to those standing anywhere close to them, and gave off the impression they were either unable or unwilling to blend in. To me, they appeared as outsiders or unwelcome foreign guests, though not exactly tourists. And by the looks plastered on the faces of adjoining natives, it was easy to tell I wasn’t the only one making that determination.
The outsider types had brownish complexions and wore well-used, mismatched clothing: the types oftentimes seen at swap meets or found in thrift stores. The language they spoke wasn’t the usual mixture of Bavarian German and broken English I had grown accustomed to hearing since living here. Most notably, they were brash, uncivilized and lacked manners, something seldom experienced on high-speed Intercity Express trains, even when riding in second class.
On the final hour of our trip, and several minutes into a daydream of watching the landscape roll and cascade past the window, a man slid by me aggressively, lifted the armrest and plopped himself into the narrow space between Natalia and me. At first, I thought he had lost his balance and taken a fall, but the frenzied expression mounting on his face told me otherwise.
He appeared of Middle Eastern or North African descent and had a set of jet-black eyes, which were nearly as dark and glossy as the curly, greasy hair on his head. While eyeballing me, he rubbed his stubbly beard and smiled tauntingly, as if begging me to say something to him about his impulsiveness. And I would have, had I not seen Natalia’s confident, restful smile, along with the slightest rotation of her head. She was signaling me to remain put.
The man squirmed and wriggled and, while pushing me farther away, closed what little gap had existed between himself and Natalia. Seconds after, his impetuosity crossed the border into flat-out disrespect. With a shit-eating grin on his face, he placed his left hand on my wife’s right leg and squeezed it. Then he slid it forward ever so slowly to the edge of her knee.
He turned his head fully away from me and whispered something to her. Natalia’s only response was to cast a stare straight ahead and continue smiling as though nothing were amiss. As his lips came within one precarious inch of her ear, he turned his body toward her, taking hold of her leg with his right hand so he could slide his left hand backward.
My blood went from lukewarm to a boil in a matter of seconds, and as the notion hit me to separate this invading insect’s thorax from his abdomen, I felt something poke my neck. I turned to look and see what it was, finding myself locking eyes with a second man, one possessing an almost identical complexion as Natalia’s visitor, along with the same jet-black eyes and similarly slimy hair. He slowly parted his lips and shot a grin my way, displaying a set of deteriorated teeth, then pushed whatever he had in his hand into my neck with more force.
I adjusted my posture enough to take a peek at what he was using to imperil me. It was one of those el cheapo, spring-assisted knives any Joe Schmoe could order off the internet in kit form and put together himself. They were junk, the edges only good for about one or two uses, but nonetheless, couldn’t be discounted. Even the tawdriest blades this close to a jugular vein or carotid artery were plenty lethal. All it would take would be the slightest flick of his flaccid thumb for the blade to spring out of the handle. Then, game over.
I nodded my recognition to him, then turned away to mind his partner’s hand while it caressed Natalia’s leg. She hadn’t made so much as a move and was still bidding me to hold back, meaning she had already decided on a course of action and was awaiting a suitable moment to execute.
This country was her home territory. We lived here now, and it was therefore preferable that we not perform as we would if accosted anywhere else in the world in the same manner. I understood that, but watching this uncultured mongrel touch her the way he was wasn’t exactly making it easy to accept.
At the point my wife’s molester whispered something else into her ear, this time with added volume to the point most others in proximity could hear, Natalia placed her right hand onto his left, stopping him before he made it to within an inch of the crease in her thigh. He responded immediately, lurching away at first. But, feeling the gentleness of her touch, his posture relaxed, and he sat back again, allowing her to rub his hand. Poor sucker. If he only knew how many times the hand holding his own had killed. Most men had never made it this close to mortality in their lives without actually dying.
That was when I heard it, and I had no doubt I wasn’t the only one. A sudden, unmistakable, stomach-churning SNAP. Natalia had latched on to his pinky finger with her index and ring fingers and pulled back on it—all the way to the point where his fingernail contacted the skin of his forearm.
When the man cried out from the pain of a single hyperextended, broken and dislocated finger, Natalia silenced him with a hand over his mouth. She’d even arranged herself closer to him and pretended to kiss him to cause the situation to appear relatively normal to onlookers. She curled her fingers against his cheek and toyed with him with her nails while he writhed in pain, then let loose of his pinky, only to take hold of the rest of his fingers. She said something to him in his language, then constricted her grip with every bit of strength she possessed.
I cringed at the sound of crunching and snapping phalanges.
The man yelped aloud in agony, but Natalia only pushed into his mouth with more firmness, both muffling his cries and preventing his escape.
The one with the knife at my neck had finally caught on to what was happening to his friend. I could feel him stiffen up, readying himself to strike, and that left me with less than a second to make a move.
I whipped my right arm in a backward circular motion overtop of his, disarming him and sending his toy knife skipping across the train car’s epoxy-coated steel floor. Then I went for the only location on a man’s body proven to produce immediate, staggeringly effective results. It wasn’t my most preferred way of dispatching a male adversary, but I’d become agitated after watching his colleague fondle my wife’s leg, and very much desired for this impromptu encounter to end straightaway. The sound that followed was nearly in tune with the one Natalia’s accoster’s fingers had made when she’d crushed them.
Standing as I allowed my attacker’s limp body to fall into my seat, I snapped the seatbelt in place over him just as Natalia made a motion for us to relocate. The threat eliminated, and with no onlookers having yet been aroused, I followed her to the rear of the train, where we switched cars before the crowd caught on to our misgivings.
Upon finding a spot to stand amidst another group of grinning, nodding, happy-go-lucky German passengers, I asked, “What was that all about?”
Natalia’s pleasant grin flatlined. While looking at nothing and no one in particular, she shrugged her shoulders gracefully. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
She hesitated before responding, placing a finger over her simpering lips as a reminder for me to mind the level of my voice. “Just a despicable pair of miscreants who’ve no business being in my country.”
After working our way through several shops with names I couldn’t pronounce if I tried, Natalia led the way through the mall’s exit and on to Hanauer Straße. We took a left-hand turn and began our search for the café she’d given glorious reviews of, regarding their lunch menu. While she chatted away about things like fresh homemade breads, pastries, and Butterkäse, my mind wandered in pure, unadulterated interest of what varieties of beer they might serve.
If Bavaria had become a friend to me for any reason of my choosing, it had undeniably been the beer. The choices were endless—from medium-bodied pilsners and yeasty, sometimes fruity Hefeweizens to traditional lagers, Dunkels, and bocks. This place was heaven on earth for any beer lover, making it damn close to Valhalla for me.
When Natalia pointed to a painted wooden sign that hung over a café just ahead, all I noticed were the unmistakably identifiable brewery logos
just below it for Hofbräu, Hacker-Pschorr, and Franziskaner, among others.
“Is this the place?” I asked, very much hoping that it was.
Natalia nodded enthusiastically. “I haven’t been here in years. So much has changed, though…I hope they still have the same menu.”
“Well, even if they don’t, it looks like they serve some great beer.”
She shot her eyes at me playfully. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Don’t expect that to change anytime soon.”
“Oh, I don’t. I expect it will get worse.”
I pushed the door inward and followed Natalia into the café, where we were immediately greeted by a very young, very blonde hostess by the name of Ingrid, whose smile, though gleaming and unpretentious, was missing a few teeth.
“Willkommen! Tisch für zwei?” she graciously asked.
Natalia nodded her head and spoke to Ingrid in her native dialect for a moment while our light-blue-dirndl-garbed hostess seated us at a quaint table in the corner. I went to take the seat that faced outward toward the entrance—but so did Natalia. I smiled and yielded to her this time, though. This was her territory, and if anything off-kilter was afoot, her eye would be much keener than mine. Her understanding of the language and culture here also gave her the edge. Advantages aside though, I always hated sitting with my back to the entrance.
When I took my seat and noticed the mirror on the wall in the back of the café offered a perfect reproduction of what was behind me, I felt consoled. It offered almost as much solace as the feeling of the suppressed Glock 19 on my lower vertebrae when I leaned into my solid-backed chair.
Ingrid handed us each a thin menu printed on hemp paper before bidding us a few more toothy-grinned declarations and strolling off. I opened the menu and, of course, everything inside was written in German, and there weren’t any helpful photographic illustrations to go along.
Until Nothing Remains: A Hybrid Post-Apocalyptic Espionage Adventure (A Gun Play Novel: Volume 1) Page 2
