The spider skittered into the drain of the sink, disappearing from view.
“Wouldn’t that make you more scared of spiders?” Diana asked, crossing her arms and glancing up at Taras, who was keeping his eyes purposefully away from his reflection.
“No,” Taras replied. “I knew its weakness. I knew exactly what I needed to do in order to stop its poison from spreading. Information is the deadliest weapon when used against your adversaries.”
Diana thought, pushing her fingertips against the biceps of her crossed arms. “You going to hold up a match to Zabójca and see if you can extract his venom?”
With a slight smile, Taras said, “I know his weakness.”
“Care to share?”
“We can walk and talk,” Taras said.
“Because you need our information.”
“Just as you need mine.”
Chapter 7
Cameron Snowman
Near Laredo, Texas
It was flat and gold outside the car’s window, the Texas countryside seemingly endless with its hay bales, speckled bushes and distant sandy mountains. Asher was blasting EDM, the windows all the way down, the air rushing by leaving no space for Cameron to get a goddamn thought in.
“Can you turn it down?” Cameron yelled over the music and the wind.
Asher ignored him, keeping his head still and forward, sunglasses pushed over his eyes, hat pulled down over his forehead.
At least having the windows open allowed them to air out the smells that had accumulated in the car over the last few days. The backseat was riddled with Chick-fil-A containers and Subway wrappers. Still, this many hours of driving with the near-silent Asher and his head-pounding music had made Cameron rethink taking on this part of the mission instead of going to Korea with Zabójca and David.
There was a buzz in Cameron’s pocket, and he took out his phone. The number was familiar but one he had deleted from his contacts a while ago. He flashed the ringing phone screen at Asher, and he begrudgingly touched his fingers to the volume dial, barely turning it down. Cameron slid his window up, shook his head and answered the phone.
“I’m going to say this once and only once,” Park said from the other side.
“Say it loud and say it proud,” Cameron replied, yelling.
“Since Hoagland’s out, there are two that they’re considering,” Park continued as if Cameron had said nothing at all. “Lillian Stone and Marianna Axtell.”
Snapping his fingers at Asher with one hand, his other on the phone, Cameron opened the glove box in front of him with his foot. He grabbed a napkin and a pen, settling the phone into his shoulder as he scribbled the names down.
“Lillian Stone? Marianna Axtell?” Cameron repeated.
But the line was dead.
Park had done his job and thought that meant he was safe. The dense jackass should’ve known that being part of the system in any capacity put him and his family in more and more danger every day. Tucking the phone back into his pocket, Cameron slid the napkin over to Asher.
“Know those names?” he yelled.
Asher took a cursory glance away from the long stretch of empty highway. He shook his head.
“Figures,” Cameron muttered, grabbing the napkin back and stuffing it in his pocket. These were the next targets. But for these ladies, it didn’t need to be quite as simple as recruitment or death—Cameron just needed their information. They could do this bloodlessly.
The old farmhouse was at the end of a long driveway, more fields of wheat stretching out behind it, miles and miles of emptiness. The house was in bad shape. Shutters were cracked and chipping, some of them hanging only by one hinge. The paint appeared to have once been white but years of dirt and dust had worn it into a faded brown. On the roof, several antennas drew up into the cloudy sky, some of them over ten feet tall.
Asher pointed to a collection of installed locks on the door, most electronic and way too advanced for a farmhouse like this. It was an amusing confirmation that they were in the right place.
Cameron knocked on the reinforced door that looked like it was prepared for a horde of zombies instead of solicitors and friendly farmers. Outside the car, Cameron could finally hear the cawing of crows, the buzzing of electronics inside the house and someone rustling behind the door.
“Nehemias Laird!” Cameron called.
“Fuck off,” a Texan accent called back through a speaker at the top corner of the door, a camera moving on a swivel to Cameron’s face.
“We just want to talk,” Cameron said, looking right into the lens.
“You got another UCAV stocked?” Laird’s electronic voice crackled. “You going to blow my poor mother’s farmhouse to the sky?”
“If we were going to do that,” Cameron replied, “we wouldn’t have knocked.”
There was a whirring sound as the camera moved back and forth between them, zooming in and scrutinizing both of their faces.
“I know who you are,” Laird said.
“Good,” Cameron stated.
“We have a job for you,” Asher contributed. “Pays a lot.”
There was another whirring. Then, the click of the locks, one by one. Some of them like a mechanical grinding, others quick and higher-tech, snapping back with one electric buzz. The door opened inwards, automatically and slowly.
A semicircle of sun spilled into the front entryway, lighting up the falling bits of dust and smoke from the inside of the farmhouse. Laird was sitting at the base of a set of wooden stairs. There was a shotgun in one of his hands and a joint in the other, burning with a light red glow in the darkness of the house. A leather jacket was draped over his bare shoulders, boxers over his legs but no other clothes on him. There was another gun, a hunting rifle, affixed to a tripwire along the bottom of the doorframe sitting next to him, propped up on old wooden crates and cereal boxes.
Laird cocked the shotgun and said, “I ain’t
