“You don’t recognize me, do you, Mahjub?” the figure asked, almost with amusement. “How fitting, to lie here in pain, your death awaiting you, and not know the first thing about your tormenter.”
Mahjub felt the panic well within him again. “Sir, please, don’t kill me. Whatever we have done wrong, we can fix. We will not speak. We will disappear. Please, not like this.”
Mahjub’s eyes widened at the sound he heard. The man with the gun laughed. Laughed at him! “Mahjub, how do you live outside this place?” The Syrian only looked at the gunman in distress.
“I mean, when you buy fruit at the market, mixing with decent people, or entertain your mother-in-law, do you think about breaking men’s fingers? Sodomizing them? Do you think of blood and vomit when you stir her coffee? =Do their screams, their pleas for mercy keep you awake at night?”
“Sir, no, please, I don’t know…”
“You know,” said the man, his blue eyes seemingly glazed over, frosted, utterly cold. The shadowed form whispered ominously, “See, I know what you do, what you are.” Mahjub felt his blood run cold.
“These poor men here,” said the pale man, gesturing toward the hallway, “they don’t know who you are, but they know what you are.” The man spoke with such venom, a snake’s hiss. “It took some time to track you down.”
Mahjub began to cry, clutching his blasted shoulder, grime and blood on his hands and face. A man with such power over others, now powerless, weeping like a child. “Please….”
There was no pity in the cold blue eyes before him. “Consider me more merciful than you ever were.”
The man stood up and aimed the weapon.
“No!” Mahjub began to scream, but a final gunshot ripped through his throat, silencing his cry as he fell against the wall. He gasped vainly for breath, his healthy arm at the gurgling wound, his eyes swimming, his feet kicking madly as he drowned in his own blood. It was over in less than a minute.
The assassin spat on the dead man, turned, and carried a set of keys from the room. One by one, he unlocked the doors along the hallway as he walked toward the stairs. He spoke loudly. “They’re all dead! Leave now, if you can. God soon brings fire to this place!”
Soft sounds of bodies stirring could be heard within the cells. The hinges of one door ground behind him. When he reached the first step, he dropped the large keychain and ascended to the upper floors.
The truck made a startling sound in the desert night as he turned the key. Twenty minutes. That was enough. If they had not escaped yet, they were as good as dead anyway. He stared down at a small radio transmitter on the seat next to him. A red light blinked at the upper-right corner. He pressed the button underneath, and a bright orange glow flashed before him in the darkness. Several seconds later, the sound arrived, the rumbling blast from an explosion as the compound was blown into the sky, rubble and embers raining down on the dark sands.
The last shall be first, and the first shall be last.
He doubted Jesus had meant it that way. He shifted gears and raced away from the inferno.
It had begun.
2
“Are we online?”
The voice was impatient, clipped, and embedded in the background white noise escaping from the small speaker. A young, athletic man was hunched over a monitor, the screen showing as much visual static as emanated from the incorporeal voice. He was seated in the cramped interior of a van, the windows covered with thick, polarized glass that rendered the stale space as dark as early evening.
“I want to have visuals on this,” came an impatient voice over the speakers.
The young man suppressed a sigh and glanced to his right at the woman seated in front of the other monitor. She shook her head and gestured to her shadowed clothes.
“Almost there, Nexus. Mantis getting dressed and the camera’s on her broach.”
“The old bastard’s not done yet? Didn’t know he could keep it up that long. Mantis should get overtime for this job.”
A status window appeared on the monitor, a blue bar marching across the screen. “She’s activated the camera. Connection’s coming up.”
Lights and numbers flashed across the monitor, and suddenly there was a poor color image of the inside of an expensive-looking hotel room. Centered on the screen was a tall, thin man with a crown of full, white hair like a lamp atop his dark business attire. He was straightening his red tie in front of a mirror, his words just discernible through the transmission.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay longer, darling,” he said, turning towards the camera, smiling. “This is an important meeting and then I’m off to LA.”
The camera approached the figure, and two slender, tanned arms reached outward and hung around his neck. A feminine voice lilted coyly.
“Yes, George, first an important meeting, and then your other mistress in LA. I think we’re competing more with each other than with Mrs. Sapos.”
At the mention of his wife, the man’s face tensed. “That wouldn’t be a lie,” he said, stepping backward, running a hand through his hair. His hand shook slightly. “I need a cigarette. Where are those damn patches the bitch makes me wear?”
“I’ll get them,” came the warm voice. The camera turned abruptly away from the figure and entered the bathroom. The hourglass figure of a long-haired brunette appeared in the mirror, a ruby broach affixed to her tight black dress. Her hand reached up to a box labeled “NicoDerm” and pulled out a packet, somewhat larger in size than the others.
Nexus spoke over the transmission. “She has the right one?”
“Yes, that’s it,” said the woman in the van. “It’s as close in appearance to the real thing as we could manage, but it had to be modified for the desired dosage, which—”
“Yes! Quiet!” barked Nexus over their speakers. “Let it play.”
The camera view had by now re-entered the room, and the white-haired man opened the plastic around the dermal patch, his eyes hungry. “Couldn’t find the stupid box last night.” He yanked his shirt over his upper arm and applied the white circle. Seconds later, he had rolled down the sleeve, slipped on his coat, and was at the door with his briefcase. He paused in the frame. “I’ve got to run. Think about Paris next month, Roberta. I know some special hotels. There’s no one quite like you.” The door closed behind him.
The young man at the terminal spoke. “The meeting is on the third floor of the hotel. He’s late already. We’ll switch to the monitors we have set up.”
“This crazy idea better work. I told you I want to see this.”
The young man wiped beads of sweat from his brow. “Yes, sir. It should work. It’s a modified version of FLAME with the surveillance modules installed. We infected his laptop as well as the smartphone of the lawyer from the ACLU.”
“What damn good will the phone do?”
“We can at least get audio if we can’t commandeer the laptop. But the laptop should be ours. FLAME reported back; it’s there. The hardware is nothing weird, so we should be able to control the camera and microphone. Should be easier than what they were able to do in the Iranian enrichment plants.”
“Should, should, should is all I hear! This bastard has done nothing but work to ruin everything we’ve struggled for. There are too many variables in this operation!”
“Lophius wanted it that way!”
There was a short period of static over the speakers. The woman gazed straight ahead with a shocked expression. Nexus finally spoke. “Careful using that name at any time, Sentry. He gets it his way, of course. He wanted this to be an accident, so it will be. Nothing to trace back to us. Especially not with what we’ve been hearing about recently.”