As the leader of a criminal enterprise growing more influential by the month, D’Marcus Rose, the High Priest, understood that most people feared death. But what people feared even more than death, he knew, was excessive, prolonged pain.
This knowledge led him to create a campaign of terror aimed directly at Detroit’s most impoverished residents. Targeting the poorest made good business sense because the down and out were the most easily victimized and the least well-protected by law enforcement. With their fear came power.
Once Detroit became the largest American city in history to declare bankruptcy, opportunities opened like flower buds in the springtime. Fewer cops. Less resources. Virtually no chance to stop the Priests.
Rose became the city’s biggest shotcaller. As the High Priest he held only one aim: own Detroit. Anyone who tried to stop him found themselves in either a wheelchair or the morgue.
McCutcheon’s mom, baby sister, and M.D. ended up being whisked away in the dead of day and put into protective custody by the U.S. Marshals’ Witness Security Program. Once the whole family was safe in Bellevue, Nebraska—like who in the world moves to Bellevue, Nebraska, from the projects of D-Town?—some black op government guys, fans of McCutcheon’s unique skill set as a cage fighter, began recruiting M.D. to a covert, anti–domestic terror unit nicknamed the Murk.
Like so many other adults in McCutcheon’s life, they too wanted him to fight. But for something more. Something bigger. Something worth fighting for.
America. Freedom. The red, white, and blue.
After all the betrayal and all the violence during his childhood years, McCutcheon hungered for something positive to latch on to. Corny as it sounds, the whole idea of being one of the good guys appealed to him. M.D. was a badass. He knew he was a badass. He’d been raised ever since the crib to be a badass. At three he was shadowboxing, at seven he was executing heel hooks, and by the age of nine he was punching the ticket of thirteen-year-olds who outweighed him by more than fifty pounds. There was never a question about McCutcheon Daniels being a great and mighty warrior; the question, as posed to M.D., was “Can McCutcheon Daniels be a great and mighty warrior who fights for a great and mighty cause?”
A gravel-voiced guy named Stanzer envisioned M.D. as a prototype for the next generation of soldier, the kind that could handle the challenges of fighting the next generation of terrorist.
“The enemy doesn’t have an age limit,” Stanzer barked. “Why should we?”
M.D. was young. He was skilled. He was the type of lone wolf that could get into places only teens could gain access to and then do some serious damage in an under-the-radar style.
All in the name of saving American lives. On the inside of Stanzer’s left forearm the colonel wore a tattoo that rationalized it all:
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Beneath these words rippled the image of an American flag. To Stanzer, his ink wasn’t just body paint; these words gave meaning to his life.
“Fact is,” Stanzer said to M.D., “sometimes good people have to do some very bad things.”
Few teens if any had ever excelled in the world of mixed martial arts to the extent that M.D. had. But his whole life he’d been programmed by his piece-of-shit father to fight for personal, self-centered reasons. Demon Daniels taught his son to dream of winning a belt. Of becoming a world champion. Of living a life of luxury and material wealth. Stanzer spoke of something more.
Duty. Honor. Service. A higher calling.
McCutcheon loved him for it.
Like legions of others who sign on the dotted line, warring for something bigger than himself rang true to McCutcheon, and M.D. decided to accept the challenge. His country, he was told, needed him.
It didn’t take long for Stanzer to recognize that McCutcheon was unlike any other recruit he’d ever seen. Yet for all M.D.’s physical skills, perhaps the most impressive quality Stanzer saw in McCutcheon was the manner in which he respected the theater of battle. To M.D., the mixed martial arts were more than just a system of fighting; being a warrior meant living by a set of principles.
Honor, strength, humility, respect. These weren’t just ideals to M.D.; these were his ethics, on display morning, noon, and night. A lot of MMA fighters worked hard to build their physical skills in a wide range of the martial arts’s fiercest of fighting styles. M.D. had, too. Yet, as Stanzer noted, Agent ZERO X1 also worked just as hard to embody the warrior’s ethos of dignity. McCutcheon approached his training with ferocity, his teachers with humility, and his foes with a combination of respect, bravery, patience, wisdom, and unrelenting aggression.
He stood out as a once-every-decade type of soldier so the colonel fast-tracked him and covertly schooled McCutcheon in the art of modern-day urban assault. Weapons, lock picking, phone hacking, disappearing like a ghost—McCutcheon proved to be a remarkable student, and it wasn’t long before the military had a teenage warrior on their hands who could slide into house parties, hip-hop shows, high schools, and hookah bars without anyone batting an eye.
The fight against domestic terror had a new weapon: an underage war machine, perhaps the first of its kind. And Stanzer believed that before McCutcheon’s time was over his impact on those that would seek to do America harm would become legendary. As far as the colonel could tell there was only one weakness—the memory of the girl. McCutcheon carried it around like an overpacked suitcase.
“You gotta slay that dragon,” Stanzer would say. “Cut its fucking head off and leave its carcass for the flies and rats.”
“My dragon died a long time ago,” M.D. responded.
“Being wounded and being a corpse are two different things.”
“I’ll try to remember that,” M.D. said. “Then again, you know how I feel about murder.”
No matter what Stanzer tried to explain to McCutcheon about the true, dark nature of the job, M.D. still continued to hold on to two nonnegotiable rules for himself when it came to his participation in the Murk.
Number one: no killing. Yes, M.D. was an expert in the art of hurt, but he refused to take another person’s life. Capturing them with a bit of stank on it? No problem.
Number two—and this was the big one for M.D.: come summer, he planned to break cover, ditch the false Wit Sec identity that had been created for him—as a new-to-Nebraska homeschooled student from Pittsburgh named Jarrett Jenkins—and go back to his true hometown, Detroit.
Why?
To see his girl.
McCutcheon had been forced to leave her at a moment’s notice in order to make sure his mom and sister were safe, but Kaitlyn Cummings had never left M.D.’s heart. Sure, ladies had been throwing themselves at “Bam Bam” ever since he was twelve years old—that’s what happens when you’re a hard-bodied underground celebrity cage warrior with long, thick eyelashes and a six-pack of ripped, granite abs. But when it came to Kaitlyn, things were different.
M.D. was sprung for her. Totally and completely. Kaitlyn was the girl of his dreams—smart, beautiful, took no shit—and he wanted her back. Desperately. The first month without her was hard. The second torturous. By the end of month seven, not seeing her, not smelling her, not feeling the soft, tenderness of her skin burned in M.D.’s heart and grew into a rage.
Time had not healed this wound.
To their credit, the Witness Security Program owned an unblemished track record when it came to keeping those in their custody safe from harm. Literally, never once in the history of Wit Sec had someone who’d come under federal protection ever been harmed or killed while under the active protection of the U.S. Marshal’s Service. Of course Wit Sec’s first and foremost rule for achieving this was that a person could never return home; and while M.D.’s head might have said yes to his current arrangement on a moment’s notice in a high-pressure, no-time-to-really-think-about-it situation, now that McCutcheon was actually having to live out the terms of the deal, he was dead set
on breaking the contract. In fact, it had gotten to the point where M.D. missed Kaitlyn so badly that he’d begun taking chances. Chances he hadn’t told Stanzer about. Chances that could have had immensely negative consequences.
But these were prices M.D. was willing to pay. For the opportunity to be with Kaitlyn, no cost felt too high.
Four times during the previous three months McCutcheon secretly slipped out of Nebraska and drove ten hours into Michigan to do some intelligence gathering on his girl. Essentially, he stalked Kaitlyn. Not with any ill will, of course. Adding fuel to the fire, he still felt awful about the way he’d been forced to leave her as she stood less than twenty yards away crying, “McCutcheon, McCutcheon!” as he coldly climbed into a white government van and disappeared forever.
He hadn’t turned around. He hadn’t said good-bye. He hadn’t explained the circumstances or anything. He just left—that abruptly, that unresolved, that icy and heartless.
Yet he knew it had to be that way. For Kaitlyn’s safety. So she didn’t get mixed up into any trouble with the Priests and they didn’t target her. But now that things had settled and everyone was safe, McCutcheon hungered to see her again. He wanted to set the record straight, to fix what had been broken, to go see a movie, hold her hand, and then, like any other red-blooded American boy, find a nice quiet place to cuddle up and go turn out the lights.
M.D. knew that if he didn’t see Kaitlyn again soon he’d explode.
Of course Agent ZERO X1 was trained to know better than to allow Kaitlyn to catch sight of him on these secret sojourns, but each time M.D. snuck away he felt more and more tempted to initiate contact and reappear in her life like a long lost ghost.
Their reunion, he imagined, would be like the final scenes of a great romance movie. Passionate. Filled with joy and happiness. And never again, once reunited, would McCutcheon ever let her go. That was a promise he’d made to himself.
His hunger to be with Kaitlyn turned the logical side of M.D.’s brain to mush. M.D. had come to learn, over long periods of isolation and deep stretches of loneliness, the heart wants what the heart wants, and it rarely gives a shit what the mind has to say about it. Were these secretive trips to see Kaitlyn logical? Not at all. Were they essential? Absolutely, he felt.
It was just like Demon said: “Love, it’ll fuck a fighter up.”
Now that M.D. was about to deliver on his fifth successful mission he felt he deserved official permission from Stanzer to go meet up with Kaitlyn face-to-face. That was the deal. Or at least, that was the deal as M.D. understood it to be, even though Stanzer had never agreed. Once McCutcheon bagged tonight’s target, however, he planned to cash in his chips and make rendezvousing with Kaitlyn a reality. McCutcheon gazed down at the pools of blood forming around each of his two fallen opponents lying on the hookah bar’s floor, but he didn’t allow himself to feel good about the victory. Taking pleasure from hurting people was what bullies and tyrants did. Martial artists who conducted themselves with honor sought to avoid conflict. To win without fighting, as the ancient texts said, was the highest form of triumph, and McCutcheon knew if he started taking pleasure from violently devastating his adversaries it would open a vault of blackness that had been buried deep inside of him.
M.D. owned a dark side. And it scared him. It was as if he possessed an inner beast, one capable of very grim and savage deeds. He kept the creature shackled, hidden and locked away from the rest of the world, but deep in his soul McCutcheon knew he had to contain this monster because if it got out, well…he feared no man, but as his skills advanced, M.D. had come to fear his own capabilties.
Being with Kaitlyn had always quieted the inner howls. But now Kaitlyn was gone.
M.D. inhaled a long, slow, deep breath, centered himself, and resolved on the spot to return to his core principles. Ibrahim Ali Farah’s cyber commander Massir El-Alhou would come with McCutcheon in the minivan, but his apprehension would be all business: no emotion, no pleasure, and no physical altercations if possible. If conflict could be avoided, M.D. vowed he would take the path of not causing his enemy any harm. And if there was to be a battle, M.D. would only use the minimum amount of force necessary to properly execute his mission.
“Don’t make me shoot you,” the Somalian warned from behind the counter.
“Hand me the gun,” M.D. said.
The North African looked at his bloodied friends lying motionless on the floor.
“Stay back,” Massir said as McCutcheon moved to within three feet. “I’ll shoot.” M.D. took note of the details: the unsteady look in his adversary’s eyes, the trembling barrel of the revolver being pointed at his face, the white of his enemy’s knuckles that were not quite white enough considering the caliber size of the weapon in his hand.
“I’ll give you one more chance,” M.D. offered.
“You’re giving me a chance?” the Somalian said. “I’m the one who has the…”
Then it happened, quick as a flash.
Before the next three weeks were over the only two rules McCutcheon had set for himself—no killing; reunite with Kaitlyn—would be violently and viciously broken.
“I told you it had leather seats.”
As the white minivan sailed through the night, Massir made eye contact with McCutcheon through the rectangular rearview mirror from his belted-up position in the backseat. His retina could have been detached. Blood could have been leaking from gashes on his face. He could have been missing his incisors, the ability to grip a pencil, or a functioning windpipe.
But he wasn’t. Massir El-Alhou was as healthy as he had been when the evening first began.
Aside from the small bit of discomfort he experienced from the black flexicuff twist tie locks keeping his wrists bound behind his back, there wasn’t a scratch on him. Disarming a computer geek, who thought that merely raising a gun was the same thing as attacking someone with a gun, required very little skill from M.D. A strike, a step, a slash, and the revolver went skittering, unfired, across the hookah bar’s floor. McCutcheon’s biggest challenge had come from showing restraint instead of aggression.
“Let me know if you want me to turn on the air,” M.D. said. “We probably won’t be there for another thirty minutes.”
Massir replied with a grunt. Of course if the North African had been thinking clearly he probably would have shown a bit more appreciation to McCutcheon, because the next destination on his journey was sure to be filled with people who weren’t going to be nearly as considerate of his comfort. Captured domestic terror suspects were more likely to have their testicles electrified than they were to be offered leather seats and climate control.
The white minivan cruised down the highway, maintaining an average speed of sixty-seven. Going two miles per hour over the speed limit enabled McCutcheon to keep up with the light flow of traffic, but it wasn’t too fast to draw the attention of any state troopers. Though he was on a mission for the U.S. government it wasn’t like M.D. owned a badge, and being pulled over for driving too fast would have been amateurish.
McCutcheon always worked hard to pay attention to the small details. Though he’d never been introduced to any of his peers in the world of covert ops—because Stanzer always kept M.D. isolated and independent—he’d been told he was the youngest member on any of the underground teams. To M.D. this meant that he’d get cut the least amount of slack when it came to youthful mistakes. It was a world where a kid was not allowed to be a kid, but for McCutcheon this was not that big of a deal. Ever since he took on the role of being the breadwinner for his family at age eleven, it had always been this way. He’d been fighting in gloveless cage wars for years knowing that suffering a loss didn’t just mean a chink on his record and a busted body; it meant his baby sister didn’t eat.
Pressure breaks many fighters. Others it lifts to unprecedented heights.
M.D. also understood that good reasons existed for Stanzer to keep him separated from everyone else. That’s because everything about McCutcheon’s wor
k was illegal. More than just illegal; entirely unconstitutional. Putting the lives of teens at risk in order to hunt domestic enemies might have made sense on the battlefield, but it would never wash on the halls of the Senate floor. If word got out about Agent ZERO X1, heads would roll. First among them, Stanzer’s.
“You are an experiment, a disposable trial, which, if Uncle Sam has to cut loose, he will. Any problems with that, son?”
“If you’re gonna be able to sleep at night, Colonel, so am I,” M.D. replied.
Stanzer smiled. “You like playing in the big leagues, don’t ya?”
“I don’t know if like is the right word. A part of me feels as if, well...I was born to do this. Like I’m fulfilling my destiny.”
Stanzer nodded. Partly out of admiration for his protégé, partly because he felt exactly the same way.
Thirty-three minutes after the white minivan departed the parking lot of Mystic Wonders, McCutcheon approached the clandestine command center where he’d been instructed to deliver his prey. He noted the details of the building: an optometrist’s office, a box-and-ship store, a nail salon, and two office spaces still for lease, each and every business not yet open for the day. M.D. had been sent to a very specific location that was noteworthy only for how commonplace it appeared. It was exactly the type of unremarkable, forgettable destination black op officers loved to use when they ended people’s existence and wiped them entirely off the map.
But this was Massir’s karma, M.D. thought, not his. McCutcheon had completed his assignment, prevailed without serious injury, and through the apprehension of Massir El-Alhou, probably just saved scores of American lives.
Kids who never even knew they were in danger had just been made more safe. This, M.D. felt, was work worth doing. If the mission wasn’t honorable, he refused to take it on.
M.D. parked the minivan in an underground parking garage, grabbed the laptop he’d confiscated, and led Massir to the service elevator. As the doors opened on the third floor, Stanzer appeared, his ice-blue eyes processing data even before McCutcheon had escorted his target completely out of the elevator car.
Noble Warrior Page 2
