He heard the crash of metal on metal, saw a flash of something across the window in his mind. The men turned, startled, and then Breece was up and the ceramic blade was whistling through the air between them, thrown with superhuman force. The knife turned end over end, then lodged itself in the neck of the closest one with a meaty thunk. By then Breece was hot on its trail, sprinting at breakneck speed.
The one he’d hit staggered and fell into his colleague. The second man struggled to shake off the body and pull the gun from his pocket. Then Breece was on him. He grabbed the assassin’s wrist, stepped inside the man’s reach, and punched him in the solar plexus. The man dropped and Breece wrenched the gun from his hand.
Something bit into his arm and he dropped to one knee on instinct, thinking he’d been hit. An instant later the sound registered – a bullet shattering stone. It came again and again. Someone was shooting in his direction, hitting gravestones, sending stone chips flying.
He closed his eyes and looked out of the Lexus’s cams again. The third man was pinned, his lower body crushed between the Lexus and the SUV, but somehow the man had a silenced rifle in his hands and was shooting up the hill. Breece felt a flash of admiration for the man. A real trooper. True grit.
Breece grabbed the mental shifter of the car, threw the Lexus into reverse, tapped the accelerator. On screen, the man collapsed to his hands and knees as the Lexus backed away from the SUV. Breece braked, shifted gears, then jammed the Lexus forward again. The man’s face snapped up, loomed in the cameras, eyes wide in shock and horror, and then all went black as the Lexus crushed what remained of the would-be assassin against the SUV.
Breece opened his eyes again, still down on one knee. The world was quiet suddenly. Breece’s breath came fast and his heart was trying to pound its way out of his chest. He was drenched in sweat and burning hot. Were there any others out there?
The man he’d punched stirred on the ground next to him, and Breece grabbed him by the hair, and held the man’s own silenced pistol to his face.
“How many of you?”
The man coughed. “Three.”
“Who sent you? What was your mission?”
The man said nothing.
“Who sent you?” Breece raised his voice.
The man shook his head. “They’ll kill me.”
Breece clamped his hand over the man’s mouth, lowered the gun, and obliterated the man’s knee cap with a single shot.
The man screamed into his hand.
“I’m going to kill you,” Breece whispered to him. “The only question is whether you want to die fast or slow.”
He waited for the man’s muffled screams to subside, then put the tip of the silencer against his other knee.
“Ready to talk?”
The man nodded miserably, tears flowing down his face.
“Who sent you?” Breece asked again, pulling his hand off the man’s mouth.
The man closed his eyes and panted for a moment, and Breece thought he’d have to shoot the other knee. Then the assassin opened his eyes. “Zarathustra,” he said. “I’m PLF.”
Well, well, well. He hadn’t thought the old man had it in him.
He got the rest of the assassin’s story, and then it was time to go.
He put the silencer tip against the downed man’s forehead. “Any last message you want me to deliver?” he asked his would-be killer.
“Please,” the man pleaded, eyes locking with Breece’s in fear. “I’m PLF, like you. Let me live. You’ll never see me again. Please, man. I wanna live forever!”
Breece thought of his parents, their bodies decomposing just yards from here. “We don’t all get what we want,” he told the man. And then he pulled the trigger.
26
ASIAN TRAVELS
Wednesday October 24th
It took Kevin Nakamura twenty-eight hours to reach Saigon disguised as a civilian. He could have come faster via military transport, but that would risk DOD finding out about his mission. Which CIA was adamant could not happen. He pondered this as the cab took him towards the nicer end of town, to his apartment. He paid the taxi fare, took his entirely innocuous luggage, and rode the elevator to his floor.
At the door hidden biometric sensors identified him. Anyone who failed that identification would soon find themselves in for some very rude questions.
Inside the apartment he found the gear, cunningly hidden, all there. He found himself smiling, whistling as he inspected it, found everything ready and top notch.
And out there, in the countryside, and under the waters off the coast. Resources the DOD and DHS and Congress didn’t know CIA had. Resources that even the White House might not know about. Resources he’d never known existed, and that he had access to now.
That alone told him how important this task was.
Will the White House know when I’ve snatched Lane out from under the ERD? he wondered.
Doubtful.
What did that say about his mission?
Nakamura pulled the small Toyota four-wheeler out of the garage an hour later, loaded with fuel, food, cash, and hidden weapons. This would be his mobile command center, taking him wherever he needed to go to find Sam. To find Lane, he corrected himself.
The wind blew through his hair as he drove into the early evening traffic. Saigon was alive in the way that only developing world cities ever were. The traffic was complete chaos, cars going to and fro, scooters and tuk-tuks racing between them, pedestrians playing a deadly game of Frogger with the vehicular traffic.
Sidewalk vendors had their fires going, offering noodle soups, roasted corn, spicy sandwiches, whole birds cooked on spits. Music blared from a dozen directions. Lights were coming on in shops. Brilliant signs over storefronts were starting to glow in a riot of colors. Sidewalk entrepreneurs sold watches, slates, phones, belts, shoes, drugs, all shouting out their offers, competing with one another for the attention of the crowd.
Nakamura smiled. He felt alive in the field. He didn’t belong in DC, taking briefings or writing reports. Out here, where chaos rules, where his wits and his skill were all that stood between life and death, that’s where he was meant to be.
Six hours later, well after midnight, he was in the hills above Ayun Pa.
Three monasteries attacked. Two of them burned to the ground.
And this one, Ayun Pa. Local police reports – cracked by CIA – showed nine dead, four assailants and five monks. No women dead. Not in any of the three monasteries.
Nakamura left the four-wheeler, activated his chameleonware suit, and hiked up in the darkness to look down onto the monastery. His pupils dilated in the moonlight. Enhanced rod and cone density sucked up every available photon. The scene was leached of color, but as bright as day to his eyes. That thrill of the mission, of being on the edge of danger, of discovery, of action, tickled up his spine again.
The monastery complex was walled, roughly oval, with a handful of buildings, a wide open courtyard, two entrances large enough for vehicles to come through.
The autopsies revealed that one man had died from bone fragments driven into his brain. Two had died from broken necks. The last from a crushed larynx.
Sam could have done that, Nakamura thought. She always liked to go for the throat.
He pulled up orbital reconnaissance photos of the site in his mind’s eye. Retinal implants superimposed them on his vision. Remote Vietnam was not a high priority target for the National Reconnaissance Office, but with more than three hundred recon birds circling in low earth orbit, now, and most of them taking frames five hundred miles square, every patch of the planet was photographed at least once an hour.