Map of Sanguine Springs

  Chapter 22—A Girl's First Kill is a Thing to Remember

  "Scheisse. Scheisse!" Lukas kicked out angrily, sending the pile of guns and rubble skittering across the floor.

  Dieter winced as a steel-framed revolver spun on its cylinder, sweeping the floor with its muzzle like a deadly parody of Spin the Bottle.

  "This is taking too much time," Lukas said. He drew his sidearm and fired at the wall. The bullets cratered the sheetrock, the rounds flattening out, mushrooming against some structure inside. Whoever had built this place had made it bulletproof.

  No ricochet, but no shooting the target through the walls either.

  "We'll just have to go back the way we came," Dieter said, his voice breaking. Lukas's unhinged explosion had not inspired confidence.

  Instead of replying, Lukas bent, scooping an M1 Garand from the floor. He held it by the barrel, like a bludgeon, knuckles whitening and popping as he cinched up his grip. The Horus Overwatch commander roared, bringing the rifle up and over his head like a sledgehammer and smashing it against the vault door. Wood splintered. He swung again, cracking the rifle's stock loose. It fell to the concrete with a hollow clatter. He wasn't done. Steel rang, bell-like, as Lukas beat on the door with the barrel assembly. Dieter watched, silent, until his leader dropped the mangled steel to the ground.

  Lukas closed his eyes. Tight. He breathed hard, then went rigid. "You're right. Back into the tunnel," he said, voice neutral.

  Dieter nodded, his eyes lingering on the ruined weapon. He rolled his shotgun, racking the slide back a fraction of its path. A press check. Still loaded. In the excitement above, then the tunnel, he'd lost track. Dieter scooped a couple rounds of buckshot from the ammo loops on his plate carrier and slid them into the shell breach on the shotgun's underside.

  "I wish you'd take a rifle now," Lukas said. He ejected a partial magazine from his own and dropped it into the dump pouch on his hip, then slammed a full 28-rounder in place. He press-checked the rifle, nodded curtly at the sight of a brass casing, then knelt to scan the debris field one final time.

  His hand stopped over something round. Green. An M67 fragmentation grenade, half-buried beneath a tangle of gun slings and canvas web gear. He pulled it free, checking the pin and spoon. Intact. Lukas pocketed it, then spotted another partially visible beneath a dented ammo can. He grabbed that one too, slipping both grenades into the utility pouches on his plate carrier.

  "Find something useful?" Dieter asked.

  "Insurance," Lukas replied. He stood, brushing concrete dust from his knees, then keyed his radio.

  "Johansen, come in."

  No reply.

  "Johansen, come in. Do you copy?"

  More silence.

  It made sense. They were underground. How deep was anyone's guess. In the commotion of the chase, Lukas had lost track of what direction they were traveling. No compass. He could only guess where the gun room was in relation to the target's house. He would need to pay better attention on the way out. Like Matthias would.

  "Never mind. We'll establish contact once we re-clear that basement." Lukas eased his way through the hole in the wall back into the tunnel. Dieter followed.

  "She's resourceful," Dieter said.

  "Or whoever she partnered with is," Lukas replied. The men retraced their steps, guns at low ready. Methodical. Smooth. Silent. All the while, Lukas's mind roiled—filled with anger at their target, anger at himself, and anger at someone named H. Caine.

  The big gun fell silent. Too soon to be Brad's doing, Matthias thought. An ammo change. Had to be.

  Now's my chance.

  Shotgun held low, Matthias hobbled the distance between the houses. His back itched, right below the neck. How long did he have till the firing resumed? Was he in a sniper's crosshairs? He thought of his great-grandfather, running trench to trench in the Great War—when the fog of war came with the deadly threat of gas.

  He passed a trunk, raising a cry from an unseen form. A startled man stepped from the shadow, rifle half-raised, a pair of NODs covering his eyes. Twin tubes. No peripheral vision. Lucky. Matthias dropped to his knee, aimed the shotgun at the man's face, and pulled the trigger.

  Shotguns can fire a variety of ammunition, from solid lead slugs to a fine mist of birdshot. Tony's gun held the latter. Hundreds of Lilliputian lead spheres. Infamously underpowered, the rounds have been known to bounce off leather jackets at the wrong distance.

  But from ten feet away?

  Effective enough.

  And messy.

  The operative fell, several ounces lighter, and unrecognizable.

  One down. Two, if Brad delivered. How many remained? Matthias crouched, knee protesting, as he ran a zigzag path toward Allison and the unknown threat.

  As he moved, a thought repeated. He'd seemed familiar. Not the man himself—he had obliterated his face before any recognition could have set in—but his movement, his kit, even the rifle he carried, seemed familiar. Very familiar.

  A private contractor. Like me.

  Matthias shook his head. Not like him anymore. He'd left that world behind, trading Martel for Neumann. A "new man."

  One with a limp, no backup, and no plan.

  He reached the porch, crouching in the shadow to the side of the three wooden steps. He broke open the duck gun, pulling the empty shell from its chamber, while leaving the full round inside. Matthias rummaged through the pockets of his workout shorts, found a fresh shell, and slid it home. He brought stock and barrel together with a click. Matthias clambered up onto the deck.

  Allison. Brad said get to Allison. He took a breath, pushing the thought of former deeds and sins behind him, and raised the shotgun. I have blundered with this girl every time I talked to her. I must protect her, if only as a way of making amends.

  Pistol in his belt, gunstock to his shoulder. Matthias cut the pie, checking the corners of the darkened room for hostiles. Clear. He stepped in, disappearing from the moon's glow and into a world of broken glass and shadows.

  Allison stayed low, pressed against the wall, her heart hammering. The figure outlined in moonlight reached for a doorknob.

  She heard the rattle of brass and internal mechanisms in the darkness. The door opened, and the figure stepped inside.

  Her gun rose. Its barrel pointed toward the center of the silhouette. The hammer clicked, cocked back by a prosthetic thumb.

  The figure stopped. "Whoa, who's there?" A man's voice, thick and familiar.

  Allison lowered the revolver.

  "Mr. Tony?"

  Her recent dinner host stepped closer. He looked terrible. His face a peppered mask of sawdust, dirt, and blood. He stood barefoot, bathrobe flapping open, a chained ring bouncing incongruously on his chest atop a dirty ribbed cotton undershirt. His chest rose and fell while he searched the room with a wild, glazed expression. He held a short rifle, looking like a prop from The Godfather, at his hip, barrel pointed upward.

  "I'm here." Allison rose, left hand up, still clutching the ballistic helmet she'd scrounged below.

  "You? Where's Brad?"

  "I don't know. I don't know what's going on."

  Tony stepped closer, still breathing heavy. "I do," he said, finality in his voice. "They came for me. After all these years. That's what I get for flying too close to the sun."

  "Who came for you? You flew what? What are you talking about?" Allison asked.

  "Cut the crap, kid. I know you're in on this." Tony's grip tightened on the rifle, then relaxed. His head bowed, voice changed. "They sent you to find me."

  "'In on this?'" Allison's voice cracked. Fear fell away, replaced by a bewildered anger.

  Her voice radiated disbelief. What was this guy's problem? "I just got here, asshole. You know that."

  "Right. Albany. Was it Al Fusco? Jimmy Scrambles? Or Matilda?"

  Allison just looked at the man. "You're an idiot. We're being hunted by assassins and you want to cosplay as the Sopranos? This is serious, Tony."

  Tony reared to his full height, causing his undershirt-clad potbelly to protrude through the open bathrobe. His jaw jutted out, defiant. He opened his mouth to reply—

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Crunch.

  A broken branch. An approaching footstep. Tony's head swiveled to the still-open door.

  Silhouettes approached, just beyond the reach of the light. Two men? Three?

  Tony grunted. He whirled, dropping to a knee, raising the Thompson machine gun. He pulled the gun's butt tight to his shoulder, squinted down the sights, and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened.

  "What the heck?" Tony muttered, smacking the receiver again and again with the flat of his hand. "Come on, you cazzata."

  "Uh, you've got a casing sticking out of that…thingy," Allison said, pointing awkwardly with her right finger.

  Tony turned the weapon over. She was right. A casing was sticking out of the thingy. He yanked at a knob on top of the gun, racking it back and forth. Even with her limited weapons knowledge, Allison could tell the action was futile. Tony swore, then made the sign of the cross on himself, resigning his fate to providence.

  A man entered, stepping sideways. Dark-clad, dressed in body armor like a SWAT team member or Navy SEAL. He faced the far corner of the open great room, sweeping inward with his rifle. Not a jammed museum piece, but a real modern assault rifle, at home in Iraq or Ukraine. It was all she could take in. The intruder moved smoothly; smooth and fast. But not as fast as her prosthesis rose.

  Forearm, fist, fingers, all in perfect alignment. The revolver's barrel centered on the man's chest. With a will of its own, her finger squeezed. Three times. The barrel waggled, her prosthesis negating the weapon's kick.

  The sweeper dropped, courtesy of the final shot. A headshot. Allison hadn't even thought about it—her arm had just done it.

  A second figure appeared in the doorway, silhouetted against the moonlight filtering through the broken windows behind him. The prosthesis swung toward him with mechanical precision, the revolver's barrel tracking his center mass.

  The fourth round went off before Allison could even think to stop it. The figure jerked sideways, stumbling back through the doorway. A grunt of pain, then the sound of boots scrambling away into the darkness.

  Tony scrambled to his feet, Thompson still clutched uselessly in his hands. He stared at the body by the door, then at Allison, then at the revolver still held perfectly level in her prosthetic hand.

  "That was a perfect Mozambique," he said reverently. "Where the hell did you learn to shoot like that?"

  "I didn't," she said. The words came out flat. Mechanical. Like her arm.

  Allison's breath caught. She'd killed someone. The thought hit her like a fist to the gut, and her stomach lurched. She wanted to look away from the body by the door—the unnatural angle of the limbs, the dark pool spreading beneath—but couldn't.

  Her heart hammered. But underneath the horror, underneath the nausea that clawed at her throat, something else pulsed. The electric thrill of survival. The razor-sharp clarity that came from knowing more were out there. That this wasn't over.

  She was terrified. Sick. Her hands should be shaking.

  But they weren't.

  Her prosthetic arm held steady. The revolver's barrel remained perfectly level, unwavering.

  That scared her more than anything else.

  Allison looked down at the arm. The prosthesis was back under conscious control. Hers, but definitely NOT her. She stared at the embedded LED. It wasn't flashing or pulsing anymore. Instead it glowed a solid red.

  Tony's eyes went wide. "Your arm just... did that by itself?"

  Allison couldn't answer. She couldn't stop staring at the steady red light on her forearm, bright and angry in the darkness.

  Jael's lungs burned. Short breaths. Her vision narrowed, dimming the moon against the black Adirondack sky.

  The machine gunner held the ammo can lid to her neck, crushing her windpipe. She clawed at it. Each bloody swipe weaker than the last. His blood? Hers? It didn't matter. She was dying.

  She was unarmed. Her last knife lay somewhere in the moonlit gravel. Lost, like air, and her hope of survival.

  The man's weight crushed down on her chest. She felt his other hand shift. Heard the scrape as he drew a knife of his own. Caught the glint of moonlight on a blade—bigger than her Rada steak knives. Curved, like a bull's horn. A Nepalese kukri.

  This is it. This is where I pay for my sins.

  Years and miles faded as she remembered.

  Damascus. Ancient city of commerce, beauty, and death.

  The café. Just off the sun-warmed streets. A clay brick affair, with mirrors along the wall like wallpaper border. The walls, inset with blue tiles, and potted ferns in every corner.

  Jael sat at a scarred, high-top café table, clad in a dark violet burqa. She hated the garment. Found it repressive. But, in Damascus? Useful to her needs.

  Her seat butted up against one of the glassless arched windows, a rare afternoon breeze stirring the faded blue curtains, their edges just tickling her cheek. She ignored the sensation, stirred her coffee, and waited for her target.

  Tariq al-Hassan. The Syrian. A barber, and leader in the Damascus community. The Mossad intel linked him to the sale of rockets and bombs to enemies of the Israeli people.

  Bombs like the one that killed her family.

  Officially, al-Hassan was innocent. Circumstantial evidence, with plausible deniability.

  Unofficially? Well, that's why Jael was here, waiting.

  She didn't have to wait long. As forecast, Tariq arrived at 2 p.m., ordered his coffee, and chose a seat across the room. Jael studied the man in her peripheral vision as he read one newspaper after another, barely touching the small Turkish coffee on his table.

  After twenty minutes, he rose, leaving the stack of papers on the table. Jael tensed, wondering if her window of opportunity had passed. But al-Hassan did not leave. Instead, he headed toward the rear of the café, and entered a short darkened hall.

  Jael glanced up at the mirrors that ringed the room. Saw al-Hassan knock, then enter the men's room. She paused, did a quick perimeter check, then rose. Clutching her handbag, she minced toward the hallway.

  In the shadows, Jael reached into her purse. She withdrew a brown wedge of rubber. A doorstop. She knelt, placing it beneath the kitchen door, then gave it a kick with one of her steel-toe boots. She retrieved a thin knife from her clutch, letting the empty purse fall to the floor. Jael rose, turned to the restroom door, and listened.

  A toilet flushed. Jael laid her hand on the knob, gripped the knife, and held her breath. Inside, al-Hassan turned the faucet on with a tell-tale squeak.

  Jael knew it would squeak. Knew the sink drained slow, the pipes thickened by lime, rust, and age. Details. She'd noted them last night, during her pre-hit reconnaissance.

  Which was also when she'd removed the locking catch from the restroom's latch.

  The knob turned, door opening inward on freshly greased hinges. Jael swept in, catching her quarry unawares. Al-Hassan looked up into the mirror, catching sight of angry eyes in a field of violet. Then she had him by the scalp, gripping him firmly by the hair. She jerked the man's head back. Saw the faint blue vein beneath his skin. Al-Hassan's pulse quickened. Jael pressed the knife to his throat.

  "What is this?" asked al-Hassan, voice cracking. His eyes in the mirror wide, perfect circles of surprise.

  "This is your fate," Jael answered, spitting the words into his ear, before dragging the blade across and down.

  Blood splattered the mirror, the wall, the white porcelain sink. The water inside the sink turned crimson, foaming under the flow of the still-open spigot. Red as the Nile, under plague. A judgment from on high.

  Al-Hassan turned, a hand at his severed artery. His eyes, still wide. Questioning. They bore into her. And then, he fell to the filthy floor.

  Jael turned, slipping from the café before anyone noticed the commotion. Head down, she walked several blocks before ducking into an alley and changing her clothes.

  Twelve hours later, she was back in Israel, just in time for the bomb to drop at her debrief.

  "Just a barber." She repeated the director's words. They slipped from her tongue. Unfamiliar, clumsy things.

  "Yes. Most unfortunate," the director replied, spreading his thick fingers wide. "But such is the cost of defending our people. It is a shame, but it is a harsh world. We all make mistakes sooner or later."

  "Mistakes." Her stomach lurched. "That was no mistake. I stalked that man. Hunted him. I still have his blood on my hands."

  "Jael, my friend, take a breath. Get some rest after you take a shower. The blood will wash off."

  But in a very real way, it never did.

  The machine gunner's arm rose, blade reaching the apex of its killing arc. Jael's temples pounded. Her hands went slack. She closed her eyes and whispered a single word.

  The knife descended.

  And heaven spoke—a single peal of thunder. A raindrop landed, warm and fat, on her cheek. The weight against Jael's neck went slack as her antagonist groaned, then slipped limply off her, collapsing in the gravel.

  Jael gasped, inhaling the unexpected breath of life. Her throat throbbed, swollen with bruises. It didn't stop her from swallowing greedy lungfuls of mountain air. It tasted like copper. No—blood.

  The machine gunner coughed. Alert, Jael rolled to the side and craned her aching neck. What she saw wasn't pretty.

  Her opponent was no longer a threat. The man was not long for this world. He had taken a round to the head, turning his face into an unrecognizable mess. Jael vomited. She wiped her mouth, then looked up at the sky.

  Clear. Moonlit. Cloudless.

  No thunder, then. She owed her life not to divine intervention, but to another kind of guardian angel—the shot with marksman training.

  A figure broke from the trees. A man with a rifle. Like the invaders, he wore a plate carrier, but moved with a different bearing. Familiar.

  She sat up, wrapping arms around her suddenly chilled body. The rifleman approached, his steps audible as he crossed from grass to gravel. Closer now, she could make out details of her rescuer. He dripped, water and sweat trickling from his clothes. The man smelled of pond water, a mixture of milfoil, algae, and bacteria-laden mud. He breathed in oxygen-starved gulps of his own. Out of shape.

  He stopped at her feet, bent, and held out a hand. "Sorry," he said, between breaths. "I cut that a little close."

  Jael reached up, taking the offered hand, and clambered to her feet. "Thank you, Brad," she said, then winced. It burned like fire to talk.

  "Right place, right time," he replied. "Looks like we both had the same idea."

  Jael nodded. She glanced at the machine gunner. He lay still, frame already bent in the awkward posture of the dead.

  "He almost killed me." Her voice carried no resentment. Just a simple statement of fact. Then, she squinted at her neighbor. "You put up all the cameras, didn't you?"

  "You saw those?"

  "Some."

  "Yeah." Brad admitted. "That was me."

  "When this is through, we're going to need to have a talk."

  "Agreed." He knelt, rummaging through the dead man's pouches.

  "What are you doing?"

  "Looking for a reload." Brad pulled a magazine from the machine gunner's chest rig and popped out the top round. He squinted at the caliber stamp on the casing's bottom, frowned, and tossed the round away. "Three hundred Blackout." He stood and rummaged through his own vest.

  "You're shooting 223?" Jael asked. She drew a pistol from the dead man's waist, pulled the slide back to verify its condition, then slid it into her pants.

  "Eh. 5.56." Brad replied. "Sorta the same, sort of not." He ejected his partial magazine, swapping it for a fresh 28-rounder from his plate carrier.

  "Very American, to major in minors like that." Jael smiled faintly, then stopped in her tracks. "Where is your niece?"

  "Down there." Brad gestured toward his late brother's house. "Which is why I'm heading back in."

  "I'm with you," Jael said. "Two can succeed where one fails."

  Brad shook his head, ready to disagree, when the night turned to day. Both neighbors whipped around to see a fireball spreading across the sky, its light drowning out the moon and motion sensors. For a fraction of a second, all was silent. Then a gust of scorching wind hit the hilltop, followed by an eardrum-rattling roar.

  "What the hell was that?" Jael asked, as below them flaming debris rained down through the trees.

  Brad's face went pale in the orange glow. "One of the houses." His voice came out tight. Pinched. "Allison's down there somewhere."

  Below, the gunfire started again. Different cadences, from multiple locations. Jael reached out, putting her hand on Brad's shoulder. "Then we move. Now." She started to jog downhill, angling for the trees. "We'll pray while we run."