“I’m alive. I’m here. I’m me.”
That must have finally registered, because Reaper came over and gave me a hug. “Lorenzo! Holy shit, man!” Reaper was holding me so tight that I flinched when he hit the burn on my chest. The kid actually started to sob, but then I realized that wasn’t fair. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was a man who’d been through some awful shit. “I thought the Pale Man got you.”
“He caught me, but he couldn’t kill me.” I patted his back awkwardly. Reaper was nothing but skin and bones. Damn. He was even skinnier than I remembered. He was in worse condition than I was. We broke apart and I led him toward the kitchen table. “Hey, come on, sit down.”
Reaper wasn’t in good shape. He never had been, but now he was looking downright ragged, and it wasn’t from the sudden emotion of seeing me in one piece. He’d never been one to get out much, living off of Red Bull and junk food in front of his wall of computer screens, but his complexion was worse. I was used to Reaper often having dark circles under his eyes, but those had been his weird goth makeup style when he’d gone out. These dark circles now were from insomnia. It was obvious he’d not been eating or sleeping well. When he sat down, he rested his hands on the table in front of him, and there was an unconscious nervous tremor in his fingers.
“Dude, Lorenzo, shit . . . Man. What the fuck?” The poor guy was bewildered. “I tried. I tried to find out what happened to you, but my world, my world is like, you know, electrons, and the Pale Man . . . It’s like the stone age there. I can’t. I couldn’t get in. It’s like a different time. Different world, man.” Reaper leaned toward me, eyes wide. “He’s outside.”
I looked to Jill. She grimaced and nodded. This was what she’d been warning me about. She went over to the little fridge, got out two cans of beer and put them on the table for us. “You boys catch up. I’ve got to go check with one of my snitches downstairs to make sure nobody new has been poking around the block. I’ll be back in a bit.”
After Jill left, I got right down to business. I’d known Reaper way too long to mess around. “Damn, man. What happened to you? You look like I do, but I was in a dungeon, so I’ve got an excuse. Are you on meth?”
“Of course not! You know I don’t mess with that shit. No drugs. No pills, man. I knew I was messed up from . . .” He trailed off, not sure what to say. “I tried to get help after the Crossroads. The shrinks all gave me prescriptions, Zoloft, Paxil, Lexapro, but I chucked them in the trash.” He tapped the side of his head. “Pills slowed me down. No time for that.”
Reaper had a super genius level IQ, and apparently when the wires got crossed in a brain like that it wasn’t pretty. I shoved one of the beers toward him and opened the other. “It’s just, you look like—”
“I know. I know. I’m frazzled, man. I don’t sleep so good anymore.”
“How come?”
“Bad dreams.” Reaper grinned at me. It was a kind of crazy grin. “But you’re back, so it’ll be cool. Everything is cool now. You know what I’m saying? You being alive puts it right! But . . . But I just gotta know, when you were in there with those cavemen, did you see anything . . . weird?” He looked strangely hopeful.
“What do you mean by weird?”
“I don’t know. I can’t explain it.” Reaper looked really uncomfortable, and his lip began to tremble as badly as his fingers. “I saw some things on the drone camera, from the silo, but there’s no record. We lost Little Bird’s recordings when we ran. Ever since then, I don’t know if I imagined it, or I’m just going crazy, but I still see them in my nightmares. What happened to those Exodus guys around the Pale Man’s silo.”
I remembered our mad escape across the canyon, pursued by Jihan’s soldiers. During that, whatever Reaper had seen on those cameras had truly freaked him out. The Exodus commander Fajkus had been the only other surviving witness from the missile silo. Even though the Czech was an extremely experienced combat veteran, whatever he’d seen there had screwed with his head too.
I thought about how to proceed. It wasn’t just that I needed Reaper in one piece, but whatever he thought he saw, it was slowly killing him. “I didn’t see anything while I was there.”
He appeared absolutely dejected when I said that. “You know, Lorenzo, when I do sleep, which isn’t much, it’s with the lights on. I can’t even go to a strip club because I’m too scared of the dark. That sucks.”
Back in Varga’s old club, for just a moment, I thought I’d seen the Pale Man watching, and it had been enough to paralyze me with fear. I understood what he was going through, I just dealt with it differently. As much as I’d tried to compartmentalize and forget it, I had to tell him the truth. “I said I didn’t see anything. They kept me in the dark. But, I heard things.”
“Like what?”
“Things that weren’t there, couldn’t be there.”
Reaper was suddenly curious and strangely hopeful. “And?”
“I’m only going to talk about this once, and then I’m never going to say it again. Jill doesn’t need to know what I went through. No one else does, because that shit can stay in the Crossroads where it belongs. Yeah, Reaper, I heard things in the walls, in the floor, in my head, things that couldn’t be. There were voices, whispers, even when there weren’t people there, and maybe things that weren’t people. It never stopped. I could feel it, just burning little holes in my sanity. Like fire ants in my head.” Surprisingly, it felt good to tell someone about this.
“But you didn’t lose!” Reaper exclaimed. “You never lose, Lorenzo.”
“Hell no. I knew that place wanted me to go crazy, to give up, to fall apart. I saw what it did to the other prisoners, it strips away who you are and leaves nothing but an animal behind. You remember Precious?”
“Eddie’s dog you shot?”
“Yeah. I used to wake up because something in my cell was growling at me. I just knew it was that fucking poodle. I could feel it there, but I wouldn’t reach out to touch it, because I was afraid of what I’d actually feel. I knew it wasn’t going to be soft and fluffy, you get what I mean?”
Reaper nodded vigorously.
“It was too dark to see most of the time. I guess I was lucky for that. Was it haunted? Something else? Hell if I know, but it wasn’t right. Whatever you saw come out of that silo, wasn’t right.”
“So I’m not crazy?” Reaper asked with complete sincerity.
I shook my head. “No. You’re not. It was a bad op in a bad place, and we messed with something that we shouldn’t have. Some of us caught a piece of it. The rest were lucky. Let them stay that way.”
“I knew it.” He slammed one skinny fist down on the table hard enough to knock over his beer. Reaper’s whole body had begun to shake. Relief, exhaustion, beats me. I bet the psychology types would call it catharsis. I let him have his moment. This emotional stuff was more Jill’s area, but I could tell he needed it.
“You okay?”
“I couldn’t tell anybody else, Lorenzo, you know, because they’d think I was nuts. I tried to talk to Fajkus in Mongolia. Only he wouldn’t talk about it. He lied and said he couldn’t remember what happened at the silo.”
“He didn’t want to remember. Big difference.”
Reaper wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Last I heard, Fajkus left Exodus to become some kind of priest.”
“You could have tried that. Father Reaper has a ring to it.” We both laughed at the absurdity of the idea.
“Dude, I’m a stallion that needs to roam free.” Reaper gestured at his skinny, geeky self. “You can’t cage this.”
“No kidding. Who is going to put all those strippers’ kids through college? Look man, whoever, whatever, Sala Jihan is, it doesn’t matter now, because we’re done there. You understand me, Reaper? That’s in the past. That world? We never have to go back. I know it and you know, and it dies with us, because nobody else needs that burden. This world?” I gestured around the ratty little French apartment. “This world is real, and
we can still make a difference in it.”
“Since when do you give a shit about the world?”
“Maybe I’m just tired of sharing it with a couple specific assholes. The people we’re after are just flesh and blood, like you and me. They’re flesh and blood scumbags who only want to kill a million people. I need your help to take them out. Can you handle that?”
“That, I can handle.” Reaper picked up his knocked over beer, popped the top, and held it out toward me. “The crew is back together. To kicking ass like old times!”
We hit the beer cans together. “To old times.” It was a good toast.
“And murdering your ex-girlfriend. You know I never could stand her.” Reaper drank a bit, coughed, then read the label. “What’s this cheap shit? Who buys American beer imported to Europe? Okay, if we’re working together again, Jill is not allowed to buy supplies. Period.”
There was a little nagging part of me that was angry, like these moral human beings were going to somehow hold me back from my path of righteous vengeance, but right then it mostly felt really good to be back with my people. It felt normal. Ling had been right to call Jill. I’d been prepared to lose my soul to get this done, but maybe I didn’t have to. “We’ve both been living in fear for too long. Now it’s time to make Kat afraid.”
“You’re one scary bastard when you’re on a mission, Lorenzo, but we both know there’s stuff in the dark way worse than you.”
I could drink to that.
VALENTINE
Paris
September 15th
The drive from Wels, Austria to Paris was long, more than twelve hours, and it was also lovely. We drove across southern Germany in a two-vehicle convoy, before cutting to the north. Ling, Ariel, and I rode in front in the little Hyundai; Shen, Antoine, and Skunky followed in the van. We drove carefully, adhering to posted speed limits and staying off the main highways, which were full of traffic cameras. We had enough to worry about already without getting pulled over, especially since the van was full of guns, ammunition, and gear, most of it very illegal.
As it was, we’d had to go out of our way to avoid checkpoints, especially as we got closer to the big cities. The security situation in Europe was deteriorating and national governments were responding in kind. We had to sneak across the border into northern France on a narrow two-lane road close to the border of Luxemburg, where there weren’t any checkpoints. The major routes, including all the bridges across the Rhine, had police stops on them.
I had crammed myself into the back of the diminutive car so that Ling could drive and Ariel could sit in the passenger’s seat. She snapped hundreds of pictures with her phone, and despite the severity of the situation seemed to be having the time of her life. It made me smile to see her so happy, just enjoying something as simple as a road trip without the weight of the world on her shoulders. She even got Ling to sing along with her when some catchy American pop song came on the radio. I’d never seen her like this, just acting like a normal girl without a care in the world.
God only knew how this would end, but I resolved to find a way to make sure Ariel didn’t go back to Exodus. Sequestered away in a castle, cut off from the whole world is no way for a girl to grow up.
Exodus had had, at one point, a safe house or two in the seedier parts of Paris, but with the near collapse of that organization, they had been liquidated. Lorenzo thought it was a bad idea for all of us to pile into the same accommodations, and I think he was correct. A safe house is safe by virtue of it not drawing attention. Having a bunch of suspicious foreigners coming and going at all hours is how you draw attention to your safe house.
Tailor had taken care of us, though, and made available to us a place to stay, courtesy of his employers. Following the GPS, we eventually arrived at a nice stucco house with a red slate roof in the Parisian suburbs. The house and its small yard were surrounded by a high fence and a carport big enough for the van. With the car parked in the drive and the gate closed, no one on the street would be the wiser.
It had been nice to see Tailor alive and well, but I hadn’t been lying when I told Ling I didn’t trust him. With various electronic bug detectors and RF locators in hand, we scoured the house from top to bottom for listening devices. I was honestly surprised when we didn’t find any. Still, we remained cautious, just in case there was anything we missed.
As excited as she was, Ariel got right to business once we arrived. She opened up her laptop, pulled out some notebooks, and set up a little command center in the study. Tailor had come through with a bunch of information on Katarina Montalban’s operation, and we had been given a lot of leads to chase down. He explained over the phone that his boss kind of liked having us doing the poking around for him. It gave him plausible deniability. The Illuminati bigwigs were insistent on playing their stupid cloak and dagger games. I could tell it frustrated Tailor, too, even if he wouldn’t admit to it over the phone. He swore up and down that Romefeller didn’t actually know where Katarina was hiding. I didn’t trust the old billionaire, but I didn’t think he was lying about that. Kat was a hard mark to track, and she was paranoid as hell. Even with the leads, finding her would take a lot of leg work, a lot of luck, and maybe a goddamn miracle.
We had help, though. Romefeller’s private intelligence company, RMI, was doing a lot of the digging for us. Tailor was coordinating, and would feed the intel to Ariel. One of the barren walls of the study soon became plastered with pictures, snippets of printed-out documents, and sticky notes. She’d even put lines of colored string up between them, like something out of a cop show. It was fascinating to watch her work, her brilliant mind moving at Mach 2, connecting the dots, finding the patterns in the deluge of information she was being fed. I could see why Exodus considered her such an asset, even if calling her an oracle was a little dramatic. It took a few days, but we finally got our first break.
“Who’s she?” Tailor asked. We were video chatting over what he insisted was a secure connection while Ariel laid it all out for us. The rest of my team stood around the study, listening without saying much. Since they weren’t big on the idea of allying with the Illuminati, most of them stayed away from the camera. Since Ariel was giving the briefing, she didn’t have that luxury.
“Don’t worry about who she is,” I said. Tailor had been there in Mexico when we rescued her, but he didn’t seem to recognize her all grown up. He didn’t need to know about Ariel. More importantly, his employers didn’t need to know about her. “The girl works for me.”
Tailor frowned. “I know that, dumbass, I’m talking about the lady your little friend is showing us right now.” Ariel had printed out a picture, taken from afar with a zoom lens, of a woman in a slinky black dress and red high-heeled shoes. She had night-black hair, long legs, olive skin, and a figure most women would kill for. “Who is she?”
“I was getting to that,” Ariel said impatiently.
“She’s how we are going to get close to one of Kat’s men without tipping her off,” I said.
“She goes by the name Eloise. She’s a prostitute. Word is she’s very exclusive and costs about a thousand Euros an hour,” Ariel explained. “Is that a lot for a prostitute, Michael?”
Ling folded her arms and shot me a half-smile. “Yes, Michael, is that a lot for a prostitute?”
“What makes you think . . . how the hell should I know how much a high-end French hooker costs?”
“He’s got a point,” Tailor said, over the video chat. “The whores didn’t cost that much in the places we used to work.”
Ariel frowned. “Gross.”
“Indeed,” Ling agreed.
“Look, can we stay on topic here? Keep going. Tell everyone why she’s important.”
Ariel took a deep breath. “She works for a local, uh, courtesan service that usually serves the rich and famous, businessmen, politicians, people like that. She came to our attention . . .” Jill DelToro had taken that picture. Ariel was having to tread carefully here, because Tail
or didn’t know about Jill and Lorenzo. They were another thing the Illuminati didn’t need to know about. “One of the men our source has been following is a frequent customer.”
“One of Katarina Montalban’s men?” Antoine asked.
“She has a lot of hired muscle for a billionaire philanthropist. It makes her harder to get to, but a little easier to track, since she has this big entourage everywhere she goes.” She pointed to a different picture, connected to the photo of Eloise a length of red yarn. “RMI has identified him for us. His name is Georges Mertens, a Belgian national who was on the international bodyguard market right up until last year, when he dropped off the radar. His career has been spent working for organized crime, he’s been implicated in several murders, but he’s never been convicted.”
“The types Mertens works for hire good lawyers,” I said.
“Our source has seen him as part of Katarina’s security detail,” Ariel finished.
Tailor’s brown wrinkled up in thought. “So, you want to use the hooker, to find the bodyguard, to find the target.”
“It is possible he confides in this prostitute,” Antoine suggested. “We could bug her.”
“Now hang on,” Tailor said. “It may not matter what she does or doesn’t know. Someone like Katarina Montalban isn’t going to hire guys that can’t keep their mouths shut. But we can use her to get to him, roll him up and bring him in.”
“That’s pretty ambitious. Might tip Kat off, too if her men start disappearing.” Not that Lorenzo’s reappearance had been particularly helpful in that respect.
“It might,” Tailor agreed, “but our only other option is to follow this asshole around hoping he leads us to our target.”
“We may not have that much time,” I said. “Who knows what their schedule is like? This guy might just be working in the city, and might not get anywhere near Kat again. I don’t think following him around and hoping for a break is a good way to go. I think we need to talk to him.”
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 16
