Both gunmen mounted the stairs, rubber-soled boots silent on the polished stone surface, weapons at the ready should anyone stumble upon them as they neared their objective. The client had issued very specific instructions for the sanction, and they hoped to be in and out with a minimum of fuss, but missions could go awry quickly, and they were prepared to slaughter whomever they came across now that they were past the point of no return.
The execution could have been accomplished much more easily with a sniper round or an explosive charge beneath the owner’s sports car, but that wouldn’t have satisfied the contract, and this specialized group guaranteed satisfaction in the discharge of its duties. The direction had been very specific, right down to the weapon to be used, and it wasn’t their role to question the whys of the client’s demands. They were specialists, and they would accomplish what they’d been chartered with doing, without question – or die trying.
Not that in the group’s five-year career they’d ever had a failure. True, there had been difficult escapes and some casualties within their ranks, but when this team was hired, the job was as good as done. That’s why the men were among the highest paid of their kind in the world, and why they took their work as seriously as they did – they’d been casing the villa for a week, had tried bribing the caretaker of the adjacent property with a small fortune, and when he’d refused, killed him without hesitation before taking over that house for the final forty-eight hours before the party had gotten underway.
They made their way quietly down the long hallway, ears straining as they neared the master bedroom door. They knew the home had eleven guest suites and one master area larger than most beach houses, more an apartment than a bedroom. Its entrance lay dead ahead, its windows and balcony affording breathtaking views of the sea, the cost of construction enough to build a small town. The trailing man stopped at the light switch at the end of the hall and dimmed the overhead lamps until the corridor was nearly unlit – a sensible preparation for making a discreet exit, as well as to avoid alerting their quarry when they entered the bedroom.
At the door’s fourteen-karat gold lever, they paused and exchanged a glance before the lead man softly depressed the handle and eased the door open. A robotic techno-beat thumped from the darkened room, and they were in with the door closed behind them in seconds. In the gloom they could make out a young woman’s naked body straddling a man, bucking like a bronco as the couple neared a climax that was real for at least one of them. The lead man pushed his weapon aside and reached into his pocket as the second held his gun on the couple, eyes flat as a shark’s while his partner made his soundless way to the bed.
The girl must have sensed a presence. She gave a small yelp just before her life was ended by a suppressed subsonic round that penetrated her brain from the silenced Walther PPK. She dropped against her lover, who in his arousal hadn’t registered her death and was still moving even as the killer slid to the side of the bed.
When the bedbound man realized something was wrong, he pushed the dead girl off his naked body. The killer didn’t wait or give him time to scream. The vicious blade of the khanjar, the curved ceremonial dagger he’d been given, stabbed into the target’s throat, severing his windpipe in a single bloody swipe and silencing him. The victim clutched at his neck, and the attacker stabbed him in the abdomen, slicing upward to the base of the sternum, as directed by the client. Just before the blade could penetrate the victim’s heart, he stopped, again as instructed, so the victim would endure unimaginable pain before he died, which would take several minutes from exsanguination.
The castration and butchery was to be performed while the subject was still alive. That point had been underscored multiple times. The second man stood by, now filming the procedure with his phone, using a small penlight with gauze tape over the lens for muted illumination. When the contract terms had been carried out, he approached the dying man and focused on his face as the killer drove the dagger home, finally ending his ordeal.
The dagger was to be left in place, the man’s testicles stuffed into his mouth along with his phallus. This was apparently an important signal, a key step in the ritual, and it had been outlined in detail during the client meeting when they’d accepted the five million dollars to carry out the sanction.
When they finished, the killer placed a cell call, whispered in Russian, and listened for several moments. He hung up and turned to his companion.
“Time to get out of here. It’s still clear, but no telling for how long. Their radio protocols are beyond amateur – only one check every fifteen minutes, and we have four left until the next one. Did you get the shot?”
“All of it. The client will be pleased.”
The victim was the son of a Saudi prince, who’d raped the daughter of a rival Bedouin chieftain while the two had been getting their degrees at the Sorbonne in Paris. Five years after the horrific event, she’d confessed the violation to one of her brothers while back at home for a visit, just before she’d taken her own life. The brother had told the father, who had vowed to avenge the stain on his family’s honor. Because the father was rich in his own right, he’d been able to reach across the desert and the sea and exact his pound of flesh using the Russians. With the photographic evidence of the completion of the deed, the world would now be back in balance, and the grieving father could sleep nights knowing his daughter’s defiler had been dealt with appropriately.
They made their way back downstairs, the knife man’s arms and chest soaked with blood, and were almost to the service corridor when the front entry door swung open and one of the guards stepped inside – his last living act as the second Russian fired, nearly silent from the subsonic ammunition, and a neat row of bullet holes stitched up the guard’s chest before obliterating his face. The hapless man tumbled in a heap to the marble floor, and the two intruders now abandoned any pretext of stealth, sprinting for the service area and the door that led to the exterior, aware that the guard would be discovered at any moment.
They burst from the door just as a cry went up from the front drive. Both men ran for the rope, and the second man scrambled up as the killer freed his MTAR and switched on the laser sight. Leonid walked easily back toward him from the rear of the house, his suit unruffled, and after a whispered few words in Russian, caught the MTAR as the blood-covered killer followed the first up the wall. He was almost over it when the first shots rang out from the front corner of the house, but the range was long for the shooter, and the slugs missed by several feet. Leonid returned fire, his accuracy with the MTAR better than the guards’ pistols, and the shooter went down with a scream as several rounds tore through his chest.
Once the killer was over the wall, Leonid ran for the rope. Shots rang out from the rear deck, and he spun and fired, emptying the magazine at the two men there. One fell backward as he was hit, but the other continued to shoot, causing a problem even given the distance. Leonid was drawing his pistol as he dropped the now-empty assault rifle when more fire rained down on the surviving shooter from the top of the wall. Leonid watched as the guard’s body jerked from bullets ripping into him as he sprinted for the rope, pulling with all his might, climbing the steep face in seconds flat.
Two Toyota FJ Cruisers sat idling on the other side of the wall. He threw himself into the rear cargo area and pulled the door shut as the driver gunned the engine and made for the front gate. The barrier slid open in response to a press of the remote control, and the vehicles disappeared into the darkness. By the time the guards had rallied and piled into vehicles to give chase, the Toyotas were long gone, the bewildered limo drivers having watched them vanish into the night as screams of alarm and horror echoed off the villa’s impeccably manicured façade.
Chapter 2
Yesterday, Mendoza, Argentina
Matt dodged past an ancient Peugeot sedan double-parked on one of the downtown streets and narrowly avoided being hit by a truck hauling beer to the neighboring restaurants. He glanced over his shoulder to en
sure he wasn’t going to be flattened if he changed lanes, and gave his Vespa scooter gas as he threaded the needle between two Chevrolets moving at double any reasonable speed. After nearly four months in Mendoza, he’d grown accustomed to the insane driving, much as he had in the Far East during his twenty years on the ground there. Argentines only varied from Asian drivers in degree of suicidal risk-taking, with the edge definitely going to Asia.
He saw his target destination in the middle of the block, between a travel agency and a gelato shop, and squeezed his brakes as he pulled out of traffic. He rolled to a halt in front of a massive oak tree and eased the scooter up onto the sidewalk. The freezing snow of the summer months had relented to an early warm fall, South America’s equivalent of springtime, bringing with it blooming trees and blossoming flowers to line the stately boulevards of the city’s heart. He twisted the ignition key, and the motor sputtered off. After hanging his helmet on one of the handlebars, he made his way down the crowded street to the internet café he’d spied – one of several he used to check his various email accounts every week.
As a former CIA head of station, he was all too aware of the deficiencies of IP-masking software and knew that the NSA had the capability to track through most of the programs to the source computer. As such, he took reasonable precautions and moved around, never using the same PC twice to check an account…just in case. Since he and Jet had taken Arthur down he wasn’t worried about the cabal within the Agency finding him. Arthur’s deputies would be in disarray for some time to come as their carefully crafted drug empire crumbled around them now that he’d cut the primary head off that particular hydra. But he was methodically cautious as a way of life, and took as few unnecessary chances as possible. Experience had taught him that the only thing you could truly depend on was the evil that men were willing to do in their pursuit of power and money – and the nearly two hundred million in diamonds he still had from his confiscation of Arthur’s network’s drug pipeline was well worth some bright lad trying to hunt him down one of these days.
Then again, that trail was cold, and had ended with Arthur. Nobody knew where he had the stones stashed in Bangkok, so he – and his fortune – were safe. Not that he needed it. Jet still had virtually all of the fifty million he’d paid her, and he had the ten he’d pulled out for his living expenses – enough for the rest of his hopefully long life – in a country where he couldn’t spend fifty thousand dollars a year if he tried.
He entered the café, a large arcade with fifty computers separated from one another by blue plastic dividers, and stood in line waiting to pay for an available station. At the window, he asked for fifteen minutes of time, the minimum available, even though his trips so far had always resulted in the blinking vacant glow of an empty inbox. The young woman at the counter took his pesos and gave him a slip of paper with a numerical code, and directed him to pod number seven, adjacent to a teenage girl so enraptured by Facebook she hardly registered his presence.
He logged on and tapped in his ID and password and was shocked to find three messages, all from his bank in Thailand. He’d left this blind email address as the only way for the bank to contact him in the event of an emergency, never dreaming that the day would come when it would contain any messages, much less three.
After glancing around to confirm that nobody was paying the slightest attention to him, he opened the first message and read the polite missive with a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. It requested that he contact the bank president as soon as possible due to a regrettable incident the prior week – of course, omitting the critical information of what the incident had been. The second was dated a day later and repeated the request, the language slightly more strident.
The third chilled his blood. It announced in precise, legalistic language that the bank had been robbed, and that his safe deposit box had been one of several that had been broken into. Matt typed in a carefully worded response and pressed send, and then opened a browser to see what, if any, information on the robbery appeared online. A quick search brought him to the site of one of Bangkok’s largest newspapers, and he read the sensationalistic account of the daring robbery and getaway with trepidation.
Stunned at how quickly his entire world had changed, he digested the news that his diamonds were gone, stolen by parties unknown. The only robbers apprehended had been killed during the escape – about which the Thai police weren’t divulging any information, in the customary tradition of the secretive authorities who refused to cooperate with the media on most occasions, and rightly viewed the press as their enemy, given the massive corruption that was endemic to the system and that the papers delighted in heralding.
His time expired and he stared dully at the screen, his brain working furiously to process the ramifications. Someone had tunneled into the vault, and it had been his bad luck to be one of the handful of boxes robbed.
He didn’t believe that for an instant.
In his line of work there were no coincidences. The only question in his mind was how they had tracked him to the bank, and how they’d known which box was his.
He had no doubt that it was Arthur’s henchmen behind the scheme. Nobody else would have had the balls to pull it off, much less the resources. The paper had described the rental of the vacant building, the collapsed tunnel, the use of thermite to cut through the reinforced concrete slab floor…as well as the death of one of the top bank officers the day before, with all the attendant speculation in the best tradition of the yellow journalism on which Thailand seemed to thrive.
A thought flitted through his awareness and he stood, again studying his fellow computer users, now on full alert. He wiped down the mouse and the keyboard with his sleeve, drawing a bemused glance from the teen, and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Doing the internet search from the same computer had been a mistake – likely an inconsequential one, but still, a mistake. Matt mentally kicked himself for his carelessness and vowed not to make any more. If he’d gotten soft in his time out of the field, it was a weakness he couldn’t afford, especially if Arthur’s network was back in the game.
Matt slowed his breathing as he strolled unhurriedly to the entrance, not wanting to make an impression on anyone who might later be questioned, no matter how slim the likelihood. Once outside he paused, taking in the street: several businessmen walking with the urgency of those for whom time was money; a handful of students loitering in front of a market; a pair of women in knee-high boots and too-tight jeans that were all the rage in Argentina, taking their time about making it down the sidewalk, pausing at every other display window to consider and comment on the wares for sale. To his left, a pensioner shambling along in a navy blue dinner jacket and gray slacks, colorful cravat in place, his thin strands of hair slicked back like a tango dancer and a cigarette clutched in his hand like a smoking rosary. No obvious threats, just the citizenry going about its business in a city where wine and tourism were the main economic drivers, and the intrigue of the CIA’s drug trafficking cabal was a million miles away.
He walked to his Vespa and straddled it. The realization hit that not only had ninety-five percent of his holdings been wiped out, but he was now back on the radar. He’d traveled the world to find a place where he would be safe to pursue happiness with the woman of his dreams, and reality had intruded with a harsh reminder that his enemies were out there, alive and well, and obviously active.
Matt had underestimated their drive to reclaim the riches, and now he was the poorer for it – to be sure, still rich, his life unchanged in any material way, other than to be awakened from his dream only to find that nothing was safe…just as it had never been at any point in his career. Why he’d convinced himself that this time was different seemed childishly naive in light of this newest development: because he’d fallen in love and wanted to believe that the world could be a good place, and not the snake pit he’d inhabited professionally for decades.
A harmless change of perspective that had made thin
gs seem safer.
And a conceit that he now understood carried a high price indeed.
Chapter 3
Yesterday, Miami Beach, Florida
Tara gazed out over the water. Miami’s beaches stretched to the horizon as devout sun worshipers of all shapes and sizes got in their last rays of the day. She stood on the terrace of her high-rise condo, in one of the swankiest buildings in a town consumed with status, and breathed in the sweet salt air. The light breeze from the east stirred her hair, seeming to carry on it the faint scent of palm trees and coconut and frangipani from the distant islands.
Far below, a line of cars crawled along the beach road, the afternoon drawing to a close as dusk approached. A line of white thunderheads brooded in the distance as a front developed, gathering strength before making landfall, as if to remind the privileged denizens of that stretch of coast that nature was always to be respected: an unpredictable force to be reckoned with.
She inspected a shapely, well-toned leg, her skin the color of café-au-lait, bronzed and sun-kissed with a light sheen of oil, and wondered at the odd track of her life. Only a week before, she’d been a fugitive in a country she’d sworn never to return to, with a fortune in stolen diamonds strapped to her back, running from the law after masterminding the most daring bank robbery in the nation’s history. She contrasted that to her present, as she contemplated the beauty of the azure sea, her biggest concern which of the countless trendy restaurants in town to grace with her cash – of which she had a seemingly endless supply, thanks to the generosity of her employers and her proficiency at her job.
Justice Page 3
