Perhaps the Beast and Giyab were connected. Or derived their power from the same source.
How, or why, he didn’t know. And in the end, didn’t care. Their bond, if there was one, was out of out his reach. What mattered was the living thing before him, breathing, heart beating, blood flowing, a thing that couldn’t, shouldn’t be.
He’d heard the same thing said about him.
He had a doctor come in to perform autopsies after repeating a few of his failed executions. The reports indicated no signs of decomposition in Giyab’s body, no matter how long after death the body was examined. Blood stopped circulating, but the major organs, the muscles and bones, even the blood itself remained viable, suspended between life and death. Broken down by fire or radiation, the parts always remained bonded, drawn to reassemble and regenerate no matter how violently they’d been dispersed, or how far they were kept apart.
The nature of those bonds escaped detection. The doctor could not explain how Giyab came back, no matter the condition of his corpse. The doctor appeared mildly bored, eager to be done with the work.
Max read the signs, understood he’d been sent down a road well-traveled by others. He couldn’t decide which enraged him more: his target’s survival, or his handler’s manipulation.
Giyab’s pity did not help. “I am sorry,” he told Max, as if he’d offended a lover.
Out of habit, Max put bullet in Giyab’s brain ever day.
Mr. Jung slipped a note under the warehouse door: Your assignments are backing up. Resolve the crisis before it consumes you.
Max stared into the dark places where cameras might have been hidden. Screamed into the microphones he’d discovered until his throat was raw and blood sprayed from his mouth.
He took apart the machineries of death, venting his rage on metal and wire and circuits, and when he was surrounded by ruin he went to the source of the problem.
“I’ll never die,” Giyab said, sitting cross-legged and naked in the cage, lit by the only lamp left in the warehouse.
Max sat across from him, outside, on a chair, studying his target. “Why?”
“That’s how I was born. Like you were born to die.”
“I was born to kill.”
“Yes, I believe that. But you will still die. And I won’t.”
“Do you want me to kill you?”
Giyab frowned, opened his mouth to answer, stopped. “Why would I want that?”
“To stop the suffering.”
Giyab slammed his fingers, knuckles first, into the nearest cage bar. He winced, then smiled. “Pain is sensation. An affirmation of life. Like pleasure. There’s no difference. If you accept life, or even death, you accept all that comes with it.” He cocked his head to the side, whispered, “You know this.”
“I’ll keep trying.”
Giyab shut his eyes. “I’ll outlast you.”
“At least you’ll be out of circulation.”
“You’ll keep me here until you die, killing me over and over?” Giyab asked, waving the injured hand at the ceiling, lost in darkness, above. “You’re not a monk. And in the end, I’ll still be alive when you’re gone.”
“I’ll lock you away. Someplace no one knows about. Just as good as death.”
“I’ve been in prison, before,” Giyab said, bowing his head slightly, as if bored. “Lost in far corners. Buried. With pharaohs. With nuclear waste. At the bottom of the ocean. But someone always finds me, needing a man who can’t die.”
Max slammed into the logic wrapped around the Giyab’s situation. “They sent me to deal with you. That means you’re not needed, anymore.”
Giyab looked up, laughed. “Oh, yes I am.”
The Beast, at last, shuddered at the challenge. It lurked in the darkness of Max’s heart, like a wolf prowling at the borders of a campfire’s light.
“Why?”
“Anybody can kill. No one else does what I can do.”
“Nobody is like me.”
Giyab’s gaze probed the darkness but couldn’t settle on Max. “Not quite, you’re right. But you’re enough like the people who sent you, the ones who need me. All your kind has is death.”
“It works.”
“Yes. I’m sure you scare everyone.”
Max thought of Mr. Jung and his snipers in the desert. He smiled. “Yes.”
“But your employers are more frightened of me than they are of you.”
Max laughed, in a short, sharp burst that startled him. “I’m the one they fear.”
“They control you.”
The shock of amusement quickly dissipated. “No, they don’t.”
“You need their protection, don’t you? Yes, a wild animal like you, I can tell. And they can kill you. Even you.”
Max opened his mouth in denial, but hesitated. “I’m needed, too. I hunt and kill, better than anyone.”
Giyab spread his arms, held his palms up. “Your employers, they war against each other, against the people and powers of the world, using the tools of death to control what they can. You may well be their sharpest tool. But death only threatens those who love others and fear losing them, or are afraid of losing the only life they hold precious. They can’t reach me with either of those threats, so they can’t control me.”
Max raised the gun in his hand, put his finger on the trigger. Every part of him wanted to shoot. Even the Beast, cocooned against the unknown, twitched reflexively with rage to make the task easier.
Max felt the tug of strings tied to the Beast, Mr. Jung, the powers that he and Max’s other handlers answered to, even Giyab. But he fought off the impulse. Lowered the weapon. Waited.
“What do you do with your freedom?” Max asked, at last. Giyab winced. Shrugged his shoulders. “Whatever I want.”
“What do you want?”
“To be needed.” Giyab chuckled, let his chin drop to his chest. Max sat back, feeling as if he were trying to grab hold of the wind. “Why would anyone need you?”
“Those with appetites want what’s out of their reach. You’re a hunter. You understand.”
Max studied his prey. Giyab was not what he hungered for. He was a job. But not the usual kind. This was another one of those assignments with a target that was more shadow than real. Missions were simpler when he stalked another killer, or a player openly engaged in the game of power. Subtleties frustrated him. He tried to imagine what kind of threat Giyab might pose to his employers, and couldn’t. Maybe the blind spot was enough to keep him from finding the vulnerability necessary for finishing off the prey.
Max grunted. A hunter who couldn’t kill prey was weak. The Beast hissed from its depths at the insult, but there was no escaping the truth. Certainly for his employers, Giyab’s existence was proof that power was not absolute, and that prey could dare hope.
“There’s more,” Max said, trapped in a horrific moment of recognition that Giyab might truly be beyond his reach. “What else can you do, besides come back from the dead?”
“You don’t see?” Giyab shook his head. “So blinded by hunger, you can’t even recognize your own power or its potential, much less mine?” He tapped his arm, his chest, and said, “What flows in me, what makes my heart beat, is a source for a power they can’t tap, though they keep trying. Someone comes along with a new technique or idea, someone else sets me free or tries to get rid of me before what I am is discovered. They’re afraid,” Giyab said, putting his hands out to Max as if pleading for understanding. “They’ve always been afraid. They can’t trust each other not to find and use my power, sooner or later.”
Giyab stared at Max, pity nearly winning out over contempt in the lines around his eyes. Max let a round go into the warehouse floor.
With the shot still reverberating, Giyab said, “Imagine if you couldn’t die. If you were free to kill, to satisfy whatever drives you, without fear of any consequence.”
The Beast keened, faint and remote, feeling the empty place in itself that Giyab might have fulfilled, if only the power no
t to die could have been as easily taken as blood and flesh, pleasure and pain. “Of course,” Giyab said, “such power is destined for unusual men like you and I, and the ones who employ you and track me. Simple men, with simple appetites, who don’t let bonds and allegiances get in the way of those appetites, who live and rule by the law of kill or be killed.”
Max shifted, uneasy with the discovery of a new need. Yes, he wanted what Giyab had. The world would be open for him, and the Beast and he could run without adapting or changing or holding back, without compromising any parts of the their true and savage natures.
He sank deep into the hunter’s mind, imagining himself and Giyab as two halves of a perfect whole. Life, and death.
The Beast shuddered, and Max caught a glimpse of its terror. “Have you ever killed?” he asked Giyab.
“Ah, you’re not as stupid as I thought,” Giyab said. “Maybe there’s hope for you, yet.”
“Have you?”
“Yes.”
“Did you like it?” Max waited on the answer like a cat crouched to pounce on passing prey. Perhaps the Beast could be comforted by something it understood. Another killer. All Max wanted was its company.
“Yes.”
The Beast didn’t rise. It didn’t want to test itself, again.
Giyab crawled to the front of his cage, held on to the bars, stared at Max as if trying to reach a part of him he’d lost long ago, or the Beast had already ripped away. “But I don’t need to kill, like you or your kind. The act doesn’t drive or satisfy me. I’m no competitor in your world. But I am a mountain you cannot conquer. A transgression against the power and certainty of death.
“And a threat. Imagine if I wanted to kill you. Or, the one who gave you your orders? Or, the one who set this operation in motion? How would anyone stop me? I don’t need your skills. I can sacrifice myself. Sooner or later, I can reach anyone I want to.
“Not as efficiently as you, granted. It might take years. But kill me, and I’ll come back. Imprison me, and someone else who wants you dead will free me. And there’s always someone else. I’ve played that game, for my own reasons. Put a weapon on the table, and someone will want to use it, eventually.
“We’re brothers, in a way. I don’t know your name, where you come from, why you do what you do. But I know you’re special, like me. And like me, you’re only a pawn. But unlike you, I’m also the prize. I am both a need and a threat, a promise of life, and of death.”
Giyab’s words surrounded him like crossfire. He couldn’t think, couldn’t move, without the certainty of death. He heard himself ask a question he realized he did, and did not, want answered: “If you can’t die, if you really are all that you say you are, then why was I sent to kill you?”
Giyab sagged and leaned away from the bars, dropped his gaze to the floor. “That would be the only question that matters for you.”
The Beast shuddered, crawled deeper into the empty spaces inside Max.
Max charged the cage. Giyab sat up, and for the first time put his hands up, as if to resist. Max thrust his gun hand through the bars. Giyab grabbed his hand and wrist, but didn’t resist. The touch was gentle. Nearly a caress. “Do you love what you do?” he asked.
Max shot Giyab in the forehead. Screamed at the cameras: “What do you want me to do?” No answers came. He’d lost the battle of flesh and of words to Giyab. His employers, and even the Beast, had abandoned him. He had nothing left except what he felt.
He tore through the wreckage of failed execution devices, breaking them down further to the bone of chips and wires. Hunted down and destroyed every last surveillance device in the warehouse. Went out into the city, into the night’s darkest corners, and picked off guards and holy men, families in their homes, sinners and blasphemers in the vaults of their wickedness. He found comfort in slaughter, and in the Beast’s company as it rode him, drawn by the celebration of annihilation and Max’s free-flowing rage. But it would not take him over, knowing the only safe haven they had still held Giyab.
Alarms tried to follow him back to his den, but Max escaped, careful to clear his blood trail. He collapsed, exhausted, and, with Giyab recovered and singing a lullaby in the darkness, fled to a sleep rich with dream memories of all the pain he’d inflicted.
He slept until three men broke into the warehouse at night. The Beast roused to the bait of new flesh as Max’s raw senses caught the trace of their approach and kicked him back into a hunter’s state, awake and alert. They were both eager for something constructive to do.
Max made the men last for a week. He entertained himself and the Beast in front of Giyab’s cage, feeding and giving water to his prisoner so he wouldn’t miss any of the atrocities that were committed. He questioned the men. They confessed they’d only been sent to rescue Giyab. Max didn’t care. The questions were meant only to give the torture an illusion of purpose. The hope for mercy was another instrument of pain. The men couldn’t tell him anything meaningful about why he’d been sent to kill the man they’d tried to retrieve.
Giyab spoke once: “You’re going to die. I’ll be dragged off, somewhere. And then, when the game’s become too costly, I’ll be set free so everybody can watch me, and nobody has to pay the price of holding me. How many times do you think I’ve played this game?”
Max dove into the cage, this time with a machete. Giyab took a cut to the chest so he could get close enough to embrace him, whisper in his ear, “What could we have been together, your hunger, my nourishment?” He kissed Max, gently, on the neck, before Max pushed him away and hacked his head off.
The man had gone insane. Max could derive at least that much satisfaction from everything he’d inflicted on his victim. But he knew, as well, that Giyab was right about one thing. He didn’t need any more notes from Mr. Jung to tell him his time was up.
He needed another weapon.
In his search, most of the contacts he tried first never got back to him. The rest told him to stay away and broke off communication. Lee, at least, gave him a conversation.
“What kind of shit are you in, now?” Lee asked. “Man, the word’s out to stay clear of you. Even these back channels are being monitored.”
“What have you heard?”
“I just told you. Why don’t you ask the guys listening?”
“I think I need technical help.”
“Shit, you’ve always needed that. A little late for fucking brain surgery, if you ask me.”
“Scientific technical help. Weapons. The advanced kind. Experimental.”
“Screw that. You’ve tried all the sanctioned sources, already?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s time to try the amateurs. The pros, they take all this shit too seriously. They got computers, equations, calculations, tests, studies, for what? You got to understand the problem before you find the solution, and these guys obviously don’t understand whatever problem you’re having.
“Go back to the jungle, brother, where they do what you do for the love of it. Where they don’t have to understand what they kill and eat, they just kill and eat.”
“Is that all you have for me?”
“It’s a shitload better than what you got right now, my friend.” Max watched Giyab die once more of dehydration. His target went gently, without a fight. He’d never screamed, Max realized. Never truly fought against what was coming, never begged for mercy. No matter what had been done to him. His body and mind truly were beyond fear’s reach. What Giyab did, with his long stares and delicate touches as the killing blow came down, and asked with his final breath—did Max love what he did—was an expression of something Max could not understand. Whatever was going on in his prey’s mind was not helping Max.
Fear had always been Max’s ally. The end, with its overwhelming flood of sensations on the one hand and darkness on the other, had always possessed his prey with terror. Fear weakened his targets, provoked the Beast into frenzy. It made victims believe in the illusion of a choice between pain and death, e
ven as he’d guided them to the truth that pain and darkness were only different bends of the same road.
How many times had Giyab been down that path? Max couldn’t tell. Many lifetimes, it seemed. Longer than Max had been in the world.
He’d practiced dying as Max had killing. Pain flowed through Giyab, like pleasure, like everything else that belonged to the living world, without touching who and what he really was. Just as the pain and suffering of others meant nothing to Max.
Max had the Beast, and his own nature, to free him from the feelings of others. Giyab had found release from his body’s betrayals, and from the darkness that always loomed but never fell, in the certainty that he’d always come back.
Max understood why the Beast hid from this creature. There was nothing to be done with it. He wished he could also find a safe place. He was left with Lee’s advice. Empty. Useless.
There were amateurs he could contact. They’d left him the means. He didn’t want to. Couldn’t see how they’d help. But he was at his end, and they were the only resource left.
As expected, what he was told didn’t make sense. Couldn’t lead to what needed to be done. Still, he saw no other chance at survival.
He already had one ticket. All he needed was another. And a clear path.
Max landed in New York with his sedated, wheelchair-bound prisoner. The NSA clearance on the tickets passed him easily through customs.
There were eyes on him. He’d expected curiosity. He usually came through alone, sometimes with Lee. He had a reputation. The pity aggravated him. He was desperate, yes. But his watchers didn’t know the plan.
If they had, pity would have turned to laughter.
The medical van picked them up. They went straight to the club. He’d last been inside it maybe twenty years ago. Same name, different location.
A trio of contacts from the Blood of Killers waited outside to greet him, their lips quivering with joy as they watched him unload Giyab from the ambulette and approach, pushing the wheelchair. The gun he’d stuck into the back of his jeans was cold against his spine.
Repulsed by their adulation, Max wanted only to snap their necks.
A Blood of Killers Page 51
