Dead Six

“What? Val, we gotta go, man, we don’t have time to —”

“We can’t leave her like that!” I shouted, standing back up.

“Listen, goddamn it!” Tailor said. “She’s dead! You can’t—”

“Tailor, please,” I said, much more quietly this time.

He mouthed another curse word. “Fine. Let’s hurry this up. We have to get out of here.” I closed my eyes as I held the girl’s feet. Tailor stood up on a chair and snapped out his automatic knife. He used it to cut the ropes that she’d been hung with and grabbed her shoulders. He helped me gently lower her body.

“Oh, God,” Tailor said, making himself look up at the ceiling. The girl’s head had flopped back as we carried her; her eyes were gone. Empty red sockets stared up at my partner. “This is fucked up. This is fucked up,” he said. Doing our best to ignore it, we carried her to Adar’s bed and wrapped her in the sheets. Tailor quickly looked away, sweat trickling down his face.

“Hey look,” I said, noticing for the first time a small safe. It was mounted in the wall next to the bed, and was open.

“Let’s . . . let’s check it out,” Tailor said, regaining his composure.

Inside was a stack of American hundred-dollar bills. “Wow.”

“There has to be fifty thousand dollars here,” Tailor said. He began stuffing the money into his assault pack.

“I don’t suppose you’re going to report that,” I said as I rummaged through the safe, stuffing documents into my pockets. At the very back of the safe, my hand touched something solid.

“What’s that?” Tailor asked as I pulled it out.

“I don’t know,” I said. It was a small wooden box wrapped in a plastic bag.

“Take it. Grab everything else you can find. We’ve gotta bounce, man. We been here too long.” We took one last look around the room but didn’t find anything else. As we turned to leave, I pulled an Ace of Spades out of my pocket and dropped it onto Adarback.

He hadn’t stopped smiling, even in death.

Chapter 8:

The Intern

LORENZO

April 16

The house was too quiet.

I should have known something was wrong as soon as I saw the compound’s front gate left open. After doing a quick pass by, we had modified the plan. Carl had parked a klick down the road, and I had snuck up on the isolated compound, consisting of a single large house surrounded by a ten-foot brick wall, on foot. It had been purchased by Al Falah as a safe house for his associates.

Approaching as quietly as possible, I had paused and scanned the gate repeatedly. The plan had been for both of us to sneak in, kill Adar and anybody else there as quickly as possible, grab the box, and get the hell out, but now that situation looked fishy. So I’d snuck in to take a quick peek. I was wearing body armor, covered with ammo and explosives, and had a short AR-15 carbine, and even weighed down that much I was far stealthier than most. Not trying to brag, but I would have made a damn good ninja.

The compound had appeared utterly dead, so I had sprinted right up to the door. Lights were on but nobody was home. Sweeping inside, I paused as I saw the first perforated corpse. “Somebody beat us to it,” I said into the radio as I surveyed the destruction in the living room. Brass casings rolled underfoot and the room stank of the recently dead.

“What do you mean?” Carl’s voice said in my ear.

“I mean that the guards are dead and the place is shot to hell. Somebody’s been here already.”

“Did they get the box? If those no-good thieves got the box, I swear I’m gonna —“

“Dude, we are no-good thieves. Chill.” I moved quickly through the room, careful not to step in any of the spreading puddles. Empty extended Glock magazines were on the carpet. Could this be the work of the same hitters that had screwed up Phase One?

I kept my rifle up as I moved through the house. It was dead silent, but there could still be somebody here.

“I bet it was those guys that almost botched the Falah job.” There was a single body half in the bathroom with a cloverleaf of bullet holes in his chest. I approached the bedroom door quietly, my suppressed 5.56 carbine at the ready, the red dot of the Aimpoint sight floating just under my vision, though I had a sneaky feeling that Adar wasn’t going to be a problem. The bedroom door slowly swung open. Adar was obviously dead. There was a second form under a blood-drenched sheet. I lifted it slowly.

I must have made some sort of strange noise into the radio.

“Lorenzo? What is it? Are you okay?”

“Better than the residents. It’s a bloodbath in here.” I hadn’t seen anything like this since Chechnya. That girl had been mutilated, dissected. Somebody had shot the hell out of Adar, too. I did a quick once over of the room, discovering that the stories about the Butcher of Zubara hadn’t been exaggerated. “Carl, Adar cut this girl . . . like . . . I don’t know what.”

“No time for that. Find that box. Hurry before somebody else shows up.”

Blood was everywhere. Adar hadn’t just been dropped, he’d been methodically taken apart. There was a blood-stained Ace of Spades playing card left on the perforated corpse. What the hell? Then I noticed a discarded revolver speed loader, five spent cases, and a single live .44 magnum cartridge. I picked up the round and examined it.

“Clint Eastwood was here.”

“Huh?” Carl responded. “Quit screwing around.”

Shoving the cartridge into my pocket, I kept searching. The safe had been cleaned out, Adar’s belongings had been rifled through, and I felt a sinking feeling in my gut that what we had come for was already gone.

The shooters had missed something.

“One second.” Having years of experience looking for bugs and planting them, I knew that most people would have missed Adar’s hidden camera. Apparently he liked to record his torture sessions. I followed the wire back behind the bed and found the recorder. It was still running. Maybe this would tell me who our mystery shooters were. I took the DVD out of the machine and hurried back down the stairs.

“I can’t find the damn box.”

Carl swore over the radio again. “Someone took it already, you think?”

“I think so. I’m leaving the duplicate anyway. Odds are whoever took it doesn’t know what it’s for, but the prince’s people have to think it’s been destroyed.” I took a small box from a pouch in my armor. It had been carved