Kevin didn’t pay attention as his wife died in his arms. She smiled at him, giving him a familiar look that was both loving and amused, usually before she said, “What would you do without me?”
Despite the fact that she didn’t say one syllable, Kevin whispered, “I don’t know.”
Her smiled flickered. “Live,” she answered. She coughed, hacking up an ounce of blood that spilled down one side of her face. “Ass…grab…” she gasped.
Kevin, confused, deranged, distracted by the Frenchmen slowly surrounding him, instinctively wrapped his arms around her in a protective cocoon. One arm slid round her upper back, and the other hand went lower. At the small of her back, as usual, were two pistols.
Kevin finally understood. Moira was dying, and she dedicated her last breath to making sure he stayed alive. “I always follow the orders of my superiors,” he said softly, kissing her lightly on the lips.
Her lips twitched slightly in what might have been a smile, before her eyes became dilated and fixed on his face. The trace of a smile was still there.
“Monsieur,” came the voice of a soldier. The voice was closer now, and Kevin knew exactly where he was, that the man was hovering closely behind him. “It is time to go.”
“I love you,” he told Moira.
The Frenchman leaned over him. “Mons—”
With a roar, Kevin’s hands dropped to Moira’s guns and both hands came up with them. They were small, subcompact Glocks barely bigger than his hands. Both were on automatic, and as Kevin depressed the trigger on his left pistol, he swept it along the line of French troops. He rammed the other gun up and under the body armor of the soldier directly behind him. The gun released a torrent of bullets that tore the man up inside and out, gutting him.
Before it could run out of bullets, Kevin let go of the gun, leaving it caught in the soldier’s armor, and then grabbed the man’s FAMAS laser assault rifle. Kevin twisted around, keeping the body of the falling soldier between him and the surviving French as he blasted them with the full force of the laser. He kept firing, slicing through them like a scalpel. The barrel overheated in Kevin’s hand as he rose and kept firing, pursuing the French troops who had barely escaped with wounds. They crawled, they screamed, and they couldn’t run as the laser blasts burned through them.
Kevin turned at the sound of a car coming onto the street. It was a truck filled with more troops. He turned and kept firing, blowing out the two front tires. The truck sped to one side of the road, crashing into a building. He blasted at the back of the truck, hoping to hit the hydrogen fuel tank. He only flicked away for the occasional trooper who attempted to climb out of the truck. After three had been cut down, he blinked, a sensation cutting through the rage.
His hands hurt. Not only had the barrel of the laser overheated, the handle had started to scorch him. “Crap.”
He hurled the overheated rifle at the truck moments before it exploded, taking all the troops with it.
Kevin spun around, growling, breathing heavily. He glanced over the area with frantic eyes, eager to kill someone else. “Is that all you have?” he roared. “I’m still here!” He swallowed back his rage and his pain, his breath coming out in a sob. “Come back here and fight me! I’m going to kill all of you bastards!”
The street chose not to answer. He looked around for a fresh victim, wondering why he was still alive. They had tried to capture him, probably for propaganda purposes. He had taught them the error of that particular mercy. But he wanted to kill more of them. It might not fill the festering wound in his soul, but it would make him feel better – he could feel something other than pain, he could put off the hurt for just a little bit longer. He could feel rage.
But right now all he could feel was pain.
Kevin moved to Moira, when he paused, hearing something over the roar of the fire and the crackling of burnt bodies. Whimpering.
The spy turned towards the remains of the French commander, and smiled, kneeling next to the man. “Hi, there.”
The Frenchman was in his late thirties, with deep, tanned skin and a long beard that was common among the religious police of France. “Don’t kill me.”
Kevin laughed. “I’ll think about it. Question though: who sold me out? That missile strike was so precise, it looks like you got my room number. So, how did you know?”
The commander stayed silent, and Kevin took the time to look over the injuries. The man had sustained superficial damage to arms and legs. If the medics got there fast enough, his feet and forearms could probably be reattached with no difficulty whatsoever.
“You’re going to live for a while, you know,” Kevin cheerfully proclaimed. “If your friends get here in time, you’ll probably be fine. However, you want to tell me what happened.” Kevin reached over and picked up a fallen pistol from the ground nearby, then dragged it over, laying it on the man’s crotch. “Or else.”
The man smiled. “Your intelligence committee,” he spat. “You sold yourself out, as the Great Satan will always defile and betray its own.”
He shifted the angle of the pistol and blew a hole in the man’s left kneecap. The Frenchman howled. “You want to try that again?”
With a growl, the officer screamed, “Torture me all you like, American, it changes nothing. Your whore is dead, your men are dead, and their blood will water our gardens!”
Kevin felt a calm settle into the center of his being, the world around him coming to a halt. He couldn’t hear the sirens in the background, nor could he hear the approaching helicopter. But he could hear the gentle breeze going past his ear.
Kevin thought about letting the creature before him live. He could live with the shame of being castrated and crippled, and maybe then he could begin to feel the start of Kevin’s pain.
The officer changed his tone, perhaps because the feebleness of his position was apparent. “I’m sorry for your men.”
Kevin's eyes flashed. “You’re sorry?” He smiled out of a shocked reflex. “Really? You don’t mean to say that you’re sorry I got the better of you?” The spy coughed, or maybe it was a sob. “You know, I'm Catholic. I believe that a Merciful God would accept a genuine apology from any sinner, and accept the repentant soul into the gates of paradise. And if I let you live to suffer a long and painful existence—I believe that you might consider the wounds and scars of your life, and you would have the luxury of being truly sorry, truly asking for forgiveness.”
He calmly reached into his pocket, pulling out his breakfast napkin, with the leftovers that Moira cooked for him that morning. He unfolded the napkin and took out two strips of bacon, then jammed them down the officer’s throat with one hand, rising with the pistol.
The soldier coughed, spitting out the bacon. He knew that he had just touched a pig animal. His immortal soul was in peril, and there was a gun leveled at his head.
“But I don't just want to kill you. I want to send you to Hell!” Kevin’s eyes were flat as he fired the laser, starting at the man’s crotch, and slowly going up his body. The officer screamed like a girl, literally. The beam traveled up his belly a centimeter at a time.
“And when you get to Hell,” Kevin yelled over the cries of torment, “tell them to get fourteen seats ready, because you’re going to have company.”
Kevin cut through the man’s solar plexus, and he could no longer scream, or breathe. Kevin dropped the pistol, content to let the man suffocate.
Kevin Anderson scooped up his bag, and Moira’s body.
When the French army arrived, all they found were bodies of French troops, and no other bodies—especially no Americans that they could see.
However, one thing they couldn’t see was a little black device called an M22 chlorine isotope charge. It was a powerful subatomic explosive that vaporized everything within a 200-meter diameter—essentially, an anti-material nuclear bomb. This fact became unfortunate when one realized that approximately half of the French police force and a quarter of the French National Guard had driven
straight into the area.
It was even more unfortunate when one realized that Kevin had set a timer to the device.
*
Kevin had always hated films where one saw a deceased loved one being held by the living. What could the dead get out of it? Intellectually, he had always understood that the process was supposed to be for the survivors rather than for the decedent, but he could never picture it quite the way they had in the movies.
And yet, here he was, with the woman he loved lying dead on the bed of his safe house. It wasn’t anyone else’s. It was his. Moira had wanted to visit Paris on a vacation, and he had secured the location, just in case he could get use out of it later on, for the two of them. It was a harmless little expense, doubling as personal and as work product.
And right now all Kevin wanted to do was set the building on fire.
He held Moira’s hand. “You woke me up inside, Mo. You did it every day you looked at me. Only you could do it. Now I can’t wake up. You were always there for me, and now… I feel like I’m without a soul. Moira. I’m about to… I’m not quite sure where to start. I have the supplies, and you’re such a stickler for backups that I have enough weaponry to level a small third world country … and coincidentally, I’m in France, so that works out nicely.
“Would the French care about the nuclear missiles? Are there any missiles this time? Was this a trap from the minute Henry set foot in my office? Was he in on it? Was there a mission, or are there fourteen senators who thought they could get more political capital out of killing us than protecting their country?” He squeezed her hand. “But that's a problem, isn’t it? We didn’t think anything strange about the oversight committee wanting this much detail. We didn’t think…”
Kevin blinked away his tears as he looked aimlessly around the apartment. It was bare of anything but white carpet, the bed, and the chair he sat on. “We didn’t think the men and women entrusted with our welfare would stab us in the back.”
He stood and walked away, moving to the windows, staring out at the city of lights. He would have to find out if there were missiles. He wanted to fly to the States and kill politicians, but he refused to put his personal urge for revenge above the safety of his country.
He wondered how to do that when a figure in black appeared at the window, hanging upside down from a rope, and shot Kevin three times in the chest with a silenced pistol.
He fell to the ground, still and lifeless.
“Mandy to Cortez, repeat, Mandy to Cortez, I dropped the target,” the black figure said into her helmet microphone, “target is neutralized. Repeat, target is neutralized.”
“This is Cortez,” came the reply of Major Antonio Rohaz of the Mercenary’s Guild. “Good work, Mandy. Get IDs from both, secure the equipment, then return.”
The Mercenary didn’t enter the room so much as she slinked in, like a lithe cat. Her black memory cloth armor fit her perfectly, and anyone who looked could tell she had a nice figure for someone who was only 5'3” tall and petite. Her legs were slender, but were graced with sleek muscle.
She stepped around Kevin Anderson’s legs, her gun trained on him the entire time. She raised the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.
He was faster, rolling and sweeping his legs under her an instant before she fired. She came down on her back, and she was about to readjust her aim when Kevin rolled forward, jamming his knee down on her neck, a pistol in his hand and the barrel of his gun in her mouth.
“Don’t move,” he whispered harshly. “I’m not in a good mood. Who are you, Miss Mandy, and why didn’t you think it was likely I had body armor?”
Behind the lowered goggles of the helmet, all she could do was frown—which was hard to do with a gun in her mouth. She twisted her mouth to one side, so the gun pressed into her cheek. “I couldn’t be certain of your location, a body shot was a more likely hit.”
“Actually, a headshot would’ve been better with a sniper rifle from across the street.”
She sighed. “So sue me, I’m not an Assassin, they’re all kinda dead.”
He reached down and pulled off her helmet. Her face was beautiful, the bones gracefully sculpted, a button nose placed perfectly between two bejeweled blue eyes. There were faint freckles that Kevin could see only because her skin was pristine, framed by a length of raven black hair. “So, Mandy, you have any partners?”
She snickered. “For you? Alone? No. More money for me that way.”
“Your mission was to simplify me?”
A mischievous smile lit up her face. “As my grandfather used to say, duh.”
“On whose orders?”
Mandy rolled her eyes at the insult. “You’ll never guess.”
“I didn’t intend to guess, which is why I asked you, smartass.” He smiled, despite himself. “How about this—the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
She cocked her head. “You are good. What now?”
Kevin himself didn’t know, so he asked, “What were you supposed to do with…her?” he said with a nod to the corpse on the bed.
Mandy sighed. “Bring both of you back, claim you died in the mission, bravely defending your country, blah, blah, blah.”
He thought for a moment, and said, “Okay, then, you can have her.”
The mercenary blinked. “Why?”
Kevin sighed this time. “If I let you up, you won’t kill me?”
Mandy nodded. “For the moment. You still have the gun.”
“Fair enough.”
They got up and moved to respective corners. “What’s your deal?” Mandy asked him.
“I want her buried. The others won’t have a body, so if it’s publicly concluded I’m ‘vaporized,’ like them, that won’t inconvenience the people who hired you. I walk out of here, and the Mercs stay out of my way.”
Mandy frowned thoughtfully. “Not possible… I already said I shot you…” she blinked. “But that was before I took your girl’s body downstairs. When I came back, you were gone.”
Kevin grinned. “That’s the general idea…but will your people stop coming after me?”
She waved it off. “Hell no, Anderson. You’re a wanted man. I don’t mind being taken in a fair fight, and I don’t particularly like my clients … and now that I think of it, I get paid for this mission no matter what. You probably increased my bottom line. Thanks.”
Kevin nodded. “Always happy to aid the free market economy.”
Mandy smirked, and reached up to her helmet to her radio. “Mandy to Cortez, I have the secondary, but the primary is gone.”
He smiled at her, and she signed off with her superior. “Thanks, miss.”
She shook her head. “I’m Mandy, not miss. I never miss.”
Kevin grinned. “I’ll take your word for it.” He looked at Mandy with a gaze she couldn’t read, and he suggested, “Can I help you take her downstairs?”
“No thanks. I don’t need help.”
Kevin nodded, and leaned back into the corner, making certain Mandy didn’t try anything, though he didn’t expect her to. She took Moira’s body in a fireman’s carry, and went for the door.
“Do you know why?” he asked.
Mandy stopped halfway there. She looked back. “No, I don’t. But I know someone wants you dead. I’m going to see it happens. Later.”
Kevin gave her a bemused smile. “I’ll be sure to send a lot of business your way.”
She gave him a small smile. “I’m sure you will, Mr. Anderson.”
Kevin sighed, and blinked. A thought had occurred to him, one that made little sense, but he might as well give it a shot. “Before you go, do you know where the missiles are based?”
“You’d never believe me if I told you they were under the Eiffel Tower, would you?”
“Actually, yes.”
“In that case, I never told you, did I?” Mandy winked at him before she left.
*
Mandy deftly, carefully, slung the body down into the back of her jeep. She looked
back to the safe house. There wasn't even a moment's hesitation on her part—neither when she shot the spy, nor when she decided to agree to his compromise.
When she shot Anderson, death looked like it would be pure mercy on her part. Any will to live had been carefully hidden. He looked downright pitiful. It was as though killing his wife had killed him. It was undeniably sad. Then Mandy actually tried to kill him. When he struck back, he appeared to be a different person, motivated to stay alive. There was certainly fight in Anderson, she couldn't deny that. And he understood it wasn't personal. She wasn't the one who wanted him dead. He didn't blow her brains out. He saved his anger for those who truly deserved it.
Granted, he would certainly regret that little mercy when she hunted him down and killed him, but he'll most likely have killed those he wanted to. It would be a waste. Anderson was quick to catch on, sensitive enough to loss to let his wife's death affect him, but he certainly hadn't been crippled by it. He was bright, thoughtful, and skilled … not bad looking either.
What files the Mercenaries had on Kevin showed him to be resourceful, creative, and professional to the core, even if his mischievous nature was reflected in his work.
This was going to be an interesting challenge.
*
Kevin looked at himself in the mirror now that Moira and Mandy were gone. He looked awful. The main issue, of course, was the line of blood along his jaw. The razor blade had bit deep into his flesh, maybe even to the bone. The blood had dripped down the length of his neck, and into his clothing. He definitely would not be wearing that shirt again anytime soon.
He reached for a travel kit. It wasn't anything special as far as spy tech was concerned. It wasn't magic or high-tech, just a clothing repair kit. It had a sewing needle, a bit of dark thread, and two buttons. With skilled ease he had the needle threaded, and sterilized with alcohol. After pouring enough hydrogen peroxide to sterilize moldy bread, he thoroughly irrigated the wound. He stabbed into his skin with the needle, and restrained himself from wincing. He pushed the needle all the way through one side of the loose skin, and then the opposite end, and threaded it like a shoelace.
Codename: Winterborn (The Last Survivors Book 1) Page 3
