Hugo sneered at me as if I were an insect. “Is that a threat?”
I sighed. “I came here hoping to strengthen our relationship, but if it’s not to be, I can always just snap your necks.”
Hugo still hadn’t blinked, but he turned to face Victor. “May I approach?” he asked. Victor nodded. Hugo unzipped Victor’s jacket. Victor’s entire torso was covered with explosives.
I tried to act unaffected, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. But I don’t think I fooled anyone. Still, I pressed on. “Where’s the detonator?”
Hugo looked down at the table. At first I didn’t understand. Then I said, “You’re joking.” I slid my chair back a couple of feet and slowly lifted the tablecloth. There were two midgets under the table. One had a .38 pointed directly into my crotch. The other had a detonator taped to his left hand. His right index finger hovered just above a large red button. I took a deep breath and nodded to the two midgets under the table. “Relax, okay?” I said. Then I put the tablecloth back the way I’d found it.
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t care how you hijacked the satellite. I just want to be able to tell my boss why it won’t happen again.”
“He already knows. They installed a patch to block us.”
“Does it work?”
“It does,” Hugo said. He smiled and added, “For now.”
Victor said, “We … won’t … breach it. I pro … mise.”
I studied my vertically challenged employer a moment. He had a boyish face, made puffy from what I assumed to be years of drug use. I was about to say something when he suddenly flashed a smile. Not just any smile, or a creepy one, but a full, genuine, winning smile. Encountering it this way, in such an unexpected manner, startled me more than seeing the explosives on his body or the midgets under the table. Victor scrunched up his face in a way that reminded me of kids on a playground, him being the last kid hoping to be chosen for a team, the kid no one wants to pick. Then, in a small, vulnerable voice, he said, “Can we … just … be friends?”
It was an amazing moment to witness, an instant transformation from deadly to helpless. At that moment, he seemed sweet, almost adorable. If Kathleen had been there, I’m sure she would have said, “Aw, how cute.” But Kathleen wasn’t there, and she didn’t have a gun aimed at her crotch.
“Good enough,” I said. “I’ll try to keep my people off your backs. So what happened to Monica?”
Hugo said, “You know Fathi, the diplomat?”
“Father or son?”
“Both. But the father, the UAE diplomat, we sold Monica to him.”
Victor and Hugo were full of surprises, so why should I have been shocked? But I was. In fact, I was so stunned, I couldn’t think of a sensible question. So instead I said, “Was she alive at the time?”
Hugo laughed. “He wouldn’t have much use for a dead sex slave.”
I tried to wrap my brain around it. “Is she still in the country?”
“Her body is.”
So she was dead after all. Darwin would be pleased. But something still didn’t compute. “You hired me to kill Monica, and I did. Then you tracked me on spy satellite, grabbed her body, brought her back to life, and sold her as a sex slave. Now she’s dead again, right? Well pardon the pun, but that seems like overkill. Why didn’t you just hire me to kidnap her?”
Hugo said there were two reasons. First, it would have been a conflict of interest, since they planned to sell her to terrorists and I’m a counter-terrorist. Second, they wanted to see if they could bring her back to life after a trained assassin had done his best to kill her.
“So I was what, part of a medical experiment?”
“Yes.”
Hugo reminded me that their army of little people included scientists, microbiologists, and specialists in almost every field of research. One of their people had developed a revolutionary antidote to botulinum toxin, and since they had targeted Monica anyway, she would be their first test. They figured I’d give her the most potent injection possible, which I did. If she survived, they’d sell Monica to Fathi. If not, they’d keep working on the antidote.
“And it worked,” I said.
“That is correct. We intend to make one hundred million dollars selling the antidote to the military.”
“Our military?”
“Ours, theirs, whoever.”
“Back to the conflict of interest,” I said. “I’m not comfortable working with you if you’re also working with terrorists.”
Hugo sneered. “That is absurd. Your government works with terrorists every day. They call it infiltration. We do the same. We infi trate them for our own purposes, which shall not be revealed to you.”
Though my head was swimming, I managed to ask him about the two other targets they wanted me to kill. Hugo said they were part of a social experiment.
“First a medical experiment, now a social experiment.”
Hugo said, “That is correct.”
“Can you give me the Cliff s Notes on that?” I asked. Hugo looked at Victor before answering. Victor nodded. Hugo turned back to me and said, “Victor wishes to understand the true nature of evil. Before you injected Monica, we gave her a chance to name two people who caused her pain in her life. You will kill those two people and get two names from each. Victor believes we all have at least two people who have caused irreparable harm in our
