by Jason Kasper
The last man stopped suddenly, rotating sideways as if he’d detected something out of place.
My heart rate rocketed as I watched him through the crack between the doors, strangely expecting his face to be the Handler’s. Time suspended its march forward as the man stood completely motionless, half-looking in my direction as he detected something he couldn’t explain. The terror of the moment was amplified as I gained a clear view of his profile and indisputably recognized him.
It was Agustin, the bearded man who had gazed across the Rio landscape with me as he contemplated the statue of Christ the Redeemer.
I could have gotten the jump on him, I knew—could have sent a load of buckshot his way as my shotgun blast beat the response of any return fire. But with four other teammates, it would be the last thing I’d ever do.
And the girl in my grasp would certainly be caught in the crossfire.
I waited in silence as Agustin swiftly turned and slipped out the back door, following the first four into the alleyway. I remained still, waiting to be sure they were gone.
A long minute passed before the girl’s body tensed and she threw my hands off her, tumbling out of the cabinet.
I unfolded myself behind her as she turned to boldly face me.
Then I peeled a yellow bill from my remaining roll of currency and handed it to her, the gesture appallingly insignificant as a means of honoring her part in the passing drama that threatened her life and would surely be seared deep into her psyche long into adulthood. She was the victim of the systematically calculated violence of her environment, a sentence imposed upon her by the circumstances of her birth. For all I knew, her brother was one of the kids brandishing a pistol at me minutes earlier.
She took the bill from me without words, her eyes free of gratitude, and rightfully so. They told me I was one of them, the same as the tribes of youth who wandered her poverty-scorched landscape with pistols in search of some hollow god, whether money or power or adrenaline. I was a combat vet armed with a submachine gun and a shotgun, had a growing list of kills under my belt, and yet I found myself unable to maintain the stare of a little girl.
Tears stung at my eyes, and I blinked them away. Pulling my jacket over the weapons, I passed through the open doorway without looking back at her.
As I walked uphill through the sweltering tropical heat, I crossed a street that opened into an expansive view that nearly stopped me in my tracks. I looked down a cascading waterfall of shantytown between vivid green mountains, converging in a focal point of clean, orderly skyscrapers silhouetted against the South Atlantic Ocean. It was the same ocean that now separated me from the Dark Continent I’d returned from a mere week ago.
After quickly taking in the sight, I forced myself to continue moving.
To stage another close-range ambush for the chance of slaying our hunters, I’d have to move deeper into the heart of the favela, where the building density was the greatest. I needed only the slightest amount of open space to thin the kill team’s ranks. If I could whittle a man or two from their number before the close fight began, my odds of survival went up exponentially.
I hated the favela more with every step I took.
The entire geography was a steep uphill slope, uninhabitable by those who could afford life on flatter ground. My hip flexors were still fatigued after the long march through the African desert, a fact I hadn’t paid much mind to until forced to weave my way along buildings clinging for purchase among the hills.
I passed the inverted hulk of a burned-out car, its charred exterior the only surface in sight devoid of the illegible scrawl of spray paint. The soundtrack in the favela’s inner depths was one of feral dogs and screaming children, the smells an ever-shifting tirade of food, garbage, and raw sewage. While the streets and alleyways I’d traversed before were narrow, as I moved deeper they became claustrophobically tight. The ground beneath my feet turned to dirt littered with so many trampled pieces of wood, cardboard, trash, and unidentifiable debris that the collective mass formed a carpet of decay.
And through it all, even as I walked beside a deep gulley hosting a stagnant river of human waste, and faced grave physical danger against men I couldn’t be expected to defeat, I somehow found myself thinking of the little girl.
With it came a deep and undeniable regret and shame that I was pursuing a path to revenge that seemed, in the wake of my current circumstances, utterly meaningless.
Perhaps it was just a passing thought that would vanish when and if we emerged alive. There was no other explanation for my feelings of vengeance waning before Karma’s body was cold. Before it was cold? She’d been dead five months—five times longer than I’d known her. Yet still I plodded forth on a march to revenge—against what? Boss, Matz, and Ophie would have killed me themselves if I couldn’t serve their purposes. In their service I had inadvertently killed Remy, my best friend from the Army. Should I avenge him too by killing myself?
I was no longer a complete stranger to revenge fulfilled. I’d gotten my taste when gunning down Caspian for betraying the team. And that, I reminded myself, had been no Hollywood sunset ending. I’d spent twenty hours in a transcontinental cargo plane beside his body bag, not daring to look inside. What had his death accomplished? It didn’t bring back Boss’s team or Karma. I wasn’t sleeping any better.
My own situation had changed so rapidly—from the Rangers, to West Point, to Boss’s team, to fighting for the Outfit first in Somalia and now Brazil, and I’d experienced so much violence along the way, that I’d never stopped to evaluate what truly mattered to me anymore. What would happen if I did?
The truth was, even after waking up in his electric chair, my motivation to kill the Handler was beginning to wane.
If I could live a life free of descent into the omnipresent ether of depression, I would. The team had been gone so long. I’d spent longer trying to avenge them than I’d known them, Karma most of all.
Maybe fatigue was taking over my mind as I passed through a day without sleep and little in the way of food and water to stave off exhaustion. Regardless, Ian’s life depended on my actions. If I didn’t kill the Handler, Ian would never stop; he’d pursue assassination attempts to the point of self-destruction. He was the last surviving member of the team—it was now about saving him as much as avenging the others. Besides, I reminded myself, I was now in too deep. There was no walking away from my situation, no place on earth I could hide from the Handler.
The little girl’s face continued to haunt me. At my core, I knew why: because she made me feel.
I was a killer who had become an actor—flitting among the living, pretending to experience the normal range of human sensation. But emotionally I had gone numb except for rage and despair, the former cultivated in my battles against other men and the latter, myself. A young girl from the favela had sliced through the shroud; whether knowingly or unknowingly to her, I couldn’t tell.
And as I knew, anything that allowed me to feel beneath the inner isolation was a prize to behold. Booze, adrenaline, and women had previously occupied the throne in alternating succession. But fundamental human connection and compassion had never played a role until now, and that sudden shift left me walking onward, armed and bewildered, wondering what I had become—and worse yet, what I was becoming still—as my successive fights for survival continued without end.
The sight of the building in front of me stopped me in my tracks.
Its construction was similar to others in the favela: an unstable red clay brick structure only two stories high, with stems of rebar sprouting from a corrugated iron roof. The sole distinguishing factors were its short height and its solitude, but given what I was about to attempt, the combination of both within the favela made it a boon from the god of war. A few meters of open ground separated it from taller adjacent buildings in all directions, and at first glimpse I knew on some instinctive level that I would either die in its confines or leave it victorious with the key to Parvaneh’s rescue.
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When I entered the unlocked door, I found out why the building stood alone.
A single man in a sweat-soaked shirt spoke loudly behind a wooden lectern, his eyes pinched shut behind wide-rim glasses, wisps of gray hair combed back from his forehead. Two dozen congregants were packed into rows of foldout chairs, where they nodded and muttered chants of reverence.
His eyes opened at the conclusion of a sentence, and he looked directly at me before continuing his sermon without a second’s hesitation. I pulled my jacket open, exposing the MP5 and breacher shotgun slung against my side. Even then the preacher cautiously finished his sentence, waiting until the next chant of hallelujahs from the audience had fallen silent before addressing me.
“Você pode se juntar à congregação ou sair.”
The creaking of metal chairs heralded every occupant in the church turning in their seats to look at me.
I waved a hand over the crowd, and then swung it to the door behind me. “Get out. Vamos, ahora. Everyone.”
The preacher replied with a heavily accented voice, though his English was crystal. “I said, ‘You may join the congregation or leave.’ So you may choose to stay, or ‘vamos.’ But this is a house of God, and no place for weapons.”
“I bring weapons everywhere. And you need to get everyone out of here before you find out why that policy makes perfect sense today, Father.”
“Pastor,” he corrected me. “And we will finish our sermon with or without you.”
“If I had any other choice, I wouldn’t be here. The sermon’s over, Pastor. You don’t understand what’s coming.”
Behind the glasses, his eyes crinkled in a contemptuous grin. “Without judging by appearances, brother, I think the failure to understand is yours. Anyone with business in the hills would not disturb this church.”
“If I had a choice, I wouldn’t be here.”
“Whoever is after you, I can reason with them.”
“No, you can’t.”
“My counsel reaches young men from every gang. Members from the newest recruit to the highest leadership receive my blessing without judgment. Who have you offended—ADA?”
“No, you don’t—”
“Red Command? TCP?”
“Senhor Ribeiro.”
These two words caused him to stop abruptly, squinting as if to make sure he’d heard me correctly. When he spoke again, it was to direct expeditious Portuguese at his congregation.
Their reaction made the import of his words clear enough.
The congregation rose at once, filing out between the rows of foldout chairs and streaming past me on their way out the door—more women than men, more old than young. There was no fear among them and very little surprise. A man with guns had shown up, and they would return once he left. No strangers to violence, their eyes held a disdain for me exceeded only by the girl I’d left behind in her kitchen.
I watched the final elderly congregants shuffle out the door, leaving only the preacher.
“You need to leave too, Pastor. Ribeiro’s got a kill team in the favela, and believe me when I tell you that I’m very popular with them right now.”
He ignored me, passing down the vacated rows and straightening the foldout chairs as if the service had come to a routine conclusion.
Continuing his task without looking up, he replied, “If the man you speak of has a kill team looking for you, brother, you should not be standing still, but running.”
I thought of the imminent Outfit invasion, the catastrophic effects on an already violence-ravaged population.
I shot back, “If I run, a lot of innocent people here will die before the sun rises. Members of your church among them, Pastor. There are violent men coming for me now, but what follows if I don’t face them will be worse.”
“Men of violence are one thing I do understand. Before I turned my life over to Jesus, I was one of them. The violence, easy money, the clothes, the guns, the”—he hesitated, his hands frozen on the last chair he’d touched—“the women. I knew it all.”
I walked down the center aisle, evaluating the tiny windows, looking for ways in and out. Then I walked behind the pulpit, finding no cover from ballistic trauma and no route to the second floor besides a single stairwell. I stopped at the bottom of the steps, seeing the preacher watching me closely.
Looking upward, I counted twelve steps rising to the second floor. “Scrap everything but the violence and guns, and you just summed up most of my adult life.”
“It is not life that should concern you, brother, but the afterlife.”
For a moment I was trapped inside the steel drum, sinking into the icy waters of the New Jersey harbor where the Outfit had first tested me. My chest on fire as I held my breath to stave off drowning, hypothermia taking hold as the pressure in my ears became unbearable. Through the holes of my steel tomb, I watched helplessly as the blue glow of the harbor above faded to blackness until, finally, I let the freezing water fill my lungs.
Then my memory turned to the ancient, frail psychologist interviewing me after my resuscitation.
What do you remember from being dead?
I said, “There’s no afterlife, Pastor.”
“None of us will know until we have crossed over.”
“I have crossed over.”
He set down the chair and faced me. Then he unfastened the top three buttons of his shirt, pulling the collar to one side to reveal a discolored, oblong bullet scar. “You may have caught a glimpse, yes. But you are still with the living.”
“I’m a gunslinger, Pastor.” My voice trembled. “If I have a soul, then it’s not worth saving anymore.”
He buttoned his shirt back up to the collar, smiling to himself. “You want to talk about violence and death? If we were to compare notes, I’d bet I have you beat. But all saints are former sinners. I was once where you are, and if Jesus can do what he’s done for me, he can certainly do it for you.”
My neck was burning with anticipation. Ribeiro’s kill team was drawing closer by the second. I thought of Agustin and said, “The last person to tell me something like that is on his way here now. And you’re going to like him a whole lot less than you like me. Now please, go.”
He approached me slowly, his stare unwavering, and stopped a few feet away. “Allow me to pray a blessing over you. If there is anyone you need on your side right now, it is a man of God.”
“Whatever gets you out of here quicker.”
He closed the final gap between us with two quick steps. My grip clamped instinctively on the MP5, but his hands were already clasped on my shoulders, his head bowed inches from my face.
“God, this man is holding onto the power he came from, the power to pull the trigger. Show him that there’s a power even greater than that.”
I bowed my head with him, looking down to find my hand loosened on the submachine gun as he continued, “I’ve been there, Lord, I’ve done that. You’ve done something radical in my life, and I believe you can do that in this man’s life too. May you deliver him from sin and find him worthy to conquer a greater evil.”
He looked up, lowering his hands.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “find me worthy?”
“He has a plan for us all, and that doesn’t always match what we intend for ourselves. I’m sorry, brother”—he shrugged and gestured helplessly toward the ceiling—“but in the end, it’s up to the Lord.”
I stepped back and regained my grip on the MP5, feeling my jaw settle. “There’s going to be a lot of shooting. Wait a few hours before you come back. There will be bodies. If mine isn’t one of them, you’ll know your blessing worked.”
He nodded to me. “I hope I see you again and feel the difference God’s hand has worked in your life. If not here, then when all the great warriors of eternity are gathered around the fire of heaven. From one gunslinger who renounced the life of bloodshed to another that hopefully shall one day, Godspeed.”
I turned from him and trotted up the stairs, inspe
cting the tight living quarters of the second floor for cover and concealment, and more specifically, to examine the row of stairs leading to a hatch in the roof. Emerging onto the rooftop, I inspected the surrounding buildings before reentering the church, leaving the hatch ajar.
Descending back to the first floor, I found the pastor gone.
I locked the front door from the inside, then trashed his careful arrangement of foldout chairs as quickly as I could, using them to barricade the door in a pile so large that a professional lineman would have to spend considerable time forcing his way through them. Then I moved to a window in the back of the church that was barely wide enough for me to slip past, shimmied through the space with my weapons and backpack, and left.
They came within the hour.
The first indication of their presence was the same as last night, when my vigil over the signal fires ended in a desperate bid to evacuate Parvaneh, certain that death had arrived to overtake us. And the difference between the arrival of danger and death itself was in the noise—most people responded to danger with the noisy anxiety of panicked masses. But the arrival of death manifested in a different form altogether: silence.
Or as close as one could get in the favela.
The streets suddenly grew as deserted as they had earlier, a shared continuity with Afghanistan and Iraq, when the disappearance of first children and then everyone else preceded gunplay. But the silence within the favela was another phenomenon altogether, when even the irrepressible squalling of infants was more or less muted, with terrified mothers providing comfort in unison.
And only after the deathly silence had descended and maintained its hold for a full minute did the first man from Ribeiro’s kill team come into view.
He moved quickly along the street, his suppressed M4 carried at the low ready. From my hidden vantage point on the second story and twenty-five meters distant, his speed indicated an extreme confidence in his own skills and reaction time. A perfect point man, I thought: first into the line of fire, and by all appearances quite happy to be there.
