Dead Six

I switched my mental picture, and now the bag was the Dead Six operatives. My life was growing complicated, and I didn’t like that one bit. My elbows left skin on the bag as I nearly bent it in half with the impacts. Nobody knew a thing. Reaper’s electronic digging couldn’t find them. Hosani hadn’t called me back. None of the urchins, scumbags, villains, and criminals I’d contacted had a clue who they were. They were ghosts.

They’d slip up eventually. Everyone did, and then I would take them. But what if I couldn’t find them before Eddie’s deadline? Or even worse, what if their operation finished, and they just went home? And the worst possible scenario: Adar’s box had already been shipped back to the US and was sitting in some CIA warehouse where they had no clue what they even had.

If that was the case, then I would just have to proceed without it. And that meant my odds of success went from slim to near zero. If the pace of the killings tapered off, then I was going to have to assume the worst, and then I would have to do my worst. I’d have to stick Jill out in the open and see what happened.

Here I was, perfectly willing to take an innocent woman and basically sentence her to death. What kind of monster was I?

You’re soft. Weak. I slammed the bag again and again, breath coming in ragged gasps. Even a couple of years ago, I would have handed her off in a heartbeat. The problem was that she wasn’t just a number in an equation now. She’d been living here for a couple of days. She was a decent, kind, trusting person. She was the sort of person that I had avoided all of these years, because they were exactly the type that I didn’t want to hurt. I hung out with evil for a reason. She was just a scared girl who only wanted to go home.

With that bleak thought, the last of my energy evaporated, as even I have my limits, and I just hugged the bag close to stop the swaying. Every muscle in my body was on fire, and sweat drizzled down my face and onto the bag, but the leather was cool under my skin.

“Anybody ever tell you that you’re kind of intense?”

I hadn’t heard her enter over the rhythmic pounding in my ears. Jill was standing at the base of the stairs into the apartment, watching me. I pushed away from the bag. “Yeah, I get that once in a while. . . . What’re you doing up so early?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” she said with a shrug. The bruised discoloration around her eye had subsided and she was looking better. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. You know.”

I walked around the front of the van. “Understandable. But if you’ve come to talk about it, you’ve really got the wrong guy,” I said as I picked up my shirt. My torso and limbs were crisscrossed with scars from bullets, knives, burns, and shrapnel, and most of them had not been stitched up by actual medical professionals, either. It always made me a little self-conscious.

“If I wanted somebody in touch with their emotional side, I’d talk to Carl,” she replied sarcastically. “Wow. You know, you’re pretty ripped for an old guy. . . .”

“I’m not that old.” Well, I had been in junior high the year Jill had been born.

“Easy there. I was just trying to make a joke. Seriously, though, you’re going out looking for Dead Six again today, aren’t you?”

“That’s the plan,” I answered as I pulled the shirt over my head. It was instantly drenched with sweat. My muscles ached. “I’m going to check out Al Khor today.” It was the safest, and therefore most boring, part of town. It was also the most modernized section and was where the Americans and Europeans tended to live. There was a possibility that someone over there had seen our shooters.

She was regarding me strangely. “Take me with you.”

I stopped. “Why?”

“I’ve been cooped up in here for days. I’m bored.”

As a professional liar, I’m a master of knowing when I was being lied to. I just waited. She rolled her eyes. “Fine. It’s just something I have to do. I have to feel like I’m doing something. This might just be business for you, but this is personal to me. These people killed my friends, and they tried to kill me. Then they burned them. They were good men, and they deserved better. I have to do this.”

Sighing, I studied her. I could understand that feeling. I could even kind of respect it.

“Please?”

I didn’t say anything as I pushed past her and climbed the stairs. My silence must have hit a nerve, as she immediately blew up. “Damn it, Lorenzo! I’m not some useless child. I don’t care what your stupid secret mission is! I—” She was cut off as the bundle of clothing hit her in the face.

“Get dressed,” I said from the top of the stairs.

“Is this a burka?”

“Sort of. If you’re going to be here, you might as well learn how not to be totally useless. I said get dressed. You coming or what?”

It is surprising how foggy it can get along the Persian Gulf in the mornings. A fat gray cloud hung over the city, and only the lights at the tops of the buildings in the Khor district were visible as we crossed the bridge.

“Is this really necessary?” Jill asked through the bag that was covering her head. “Can I take this off yet?”

“Think she’s lost enough?” I asked Carl. He shrugged. “It’s for your own good, Jill. If you’re captured, this way you can’t be tortured into telling them where our hideout is.”

“You mean if I run away, I can’t sell you out,” she snapped. “Well, duh. I was lost in the first couple of minutes, but that was a while ago, and now we’re on the Gamal bridge going over the ocean. I can tell. The embassy is only a couple miles from here. It’s the only big bridge in town, and it sounds like we’re on a big bridge, so unless we drove all the way to Dubai while I wasn’t paying attention, can I please take this stupid bag off now?”

Carl leaned over from the driver’s seat. “She’s got a point.”

“Next time, it’ll be a blindfold and a gag,” I muttered. “Okay. Take it off.”

Jill complied. “See? Told you.”

“Goodie for you. Now listen carefully. I’ll be talking to a lot of people. You’re going to do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you, and you are not going to talk. At all. You sound like an American and walk like an American. Hell, you’ve been eating American food, and you even smell like an American. Keep your head down, shoulders slumped, because you’re too damn tall, and stay behind me.”

“I’ve been around this part of town before,” Jill replied.

“Not like this you haven’t. There’s a lot of women around, and in Khor, most of them are dressed pretty normal. You’re not one of them. You’re invisible. You’re going to play my obedient little wifey-poo, which means you carry the shopping bags and mostly just watch. I’m going to teach you how to blend in. We’ll be in radio contact with Reaper back at base if we need him.”

“What’s Reaper do?”

“Besides play video games and watch porn?” Carl responded. “I’m not sure.”

“Reaper’s tapped into everything. Hacking, information piracy, anything complicated. In a way, he’s as good at what he does as I am at what I do. Hell, he could screw with the traffic lights here from our apartment if we need him to.” In truth, behind Reaper’s pathetic tough-guy facade lurked the soul of an uber-nerd who should have been working for NASA.

“What’s your job, Lorenzo?”

I smiled. “I’m management.” In actuality I wore a few hats, none of which Jill needed to know the specifics of. I was the master of disguise, the acrobatic second-story man, the con, the swindler, the lady’s man, certified locksmith and safecracker, a ruthless fighter with hand or blade, and wasn’t too shabby as a gunslinger. “These guys do all the work. I take the credit.”

“What’s Carl do?”

“Drive and shoot stuff,” he explained. “People are stupid, so talking to them, that’s Lorenzo’s job.”

“Carl’s always my backup when we work. He’s the getaway driver and heavy artillery.”

“How many guns do you have in here?”

“A few . . .” And an RPG and a mess of Semtex, but she didn’t need to know that.

“Can I have one?”

“No,” Carl and I responded simultaneously.