By six thirty, Mercer knew everything he could about his new enemy. He’d watched their assault in his head a hundred times. Three of the shooters were harder to discern in his mind, but not the fourth, the leader. Mercer would always know that man by the way he held his head and moved. All four commandos were pros, but the leader — he was a warrior by nature more than training. Mercer had paid with a sleepless night, but in reward his target had crystallized in his mind. When their paths next crossed, Mercer planned on putting him down without so much as a warning. He was responsible for Abe’s death, not Mercer, but until Mercer killed him, he would carry that weight like a stone in his heart.
4
Marcel Roland d’Avejan’s hand tightened on the smartphone until his knuckles went white and an unconscious part of his brain realized he might crush the device.
“You did what?” he demanded in a rising shout, his normally accent-free English showing its rural French roots.
“It got out of hand,” the man in America replied. “What can I say? They’re all dead.” It sounded like he was sucking on a piece of hard candy. His speech was garbled and wet.
“You can say,” d’Avejan ranted with little-suppressed fury, “that you are a complete moron who can’t follow instructions. You were supposed to steal some goddamn rocks from a bunch of academics, not gun them down.”
The caller was a professional and knew that part of his job was calming clients when things didn’t go their way. A great deal of that process was just letting them vent. Corporate types like d’Avejan were the worst. They thought they ran in a hard and cruel world, but when the true levels of human depravity were opened up to them, they whined like frightened children. His opinion wasn’t swayed either way by the fact he’d been in d’Avejan’s exclusive employ for the better part of two years as special facilitator for his company’s global security arm.
“I will not say it was strictly necessary,” the ex-soldier replied. “However, their deaths will slow the investigation.”
“You can’t be serious,” the Frenchman scoffed.
“They are looking into a mass murder, not a theft. Totally different type of investigation. Trust me. For the first week the FBI will be turning over every rock in Minnesota looking for Al Qaeda operatives. Part of my team has already crossed into Canada with the sample and will be airborne in less than two hours. We will finish up here in the States and be out of the country no later than tomorrow at noon. The feds from D.C. won’t even have landed in St. Paul by the time we’re clear.”
Several long seconds passed. The security contractor knew exactly what was going through Roland d’Avejan’s mind. It was the same thing that had gone through his when the newest member of his team had opened fire hours earlier, without orders. The young security contractor thought one of the students had been reaching for a weapon. Of course there was no weapon. These were college kids and a couple of doddering professors. No matter the mistake, he realized even before the last victim bled out that he had no choice but to accept the circumstances and make the best of them. Accept, adapt, and overcome. It was a motto learned long ago.
He could almost feel his employer’s anger moderating as he came to understand there were some circumstances beyond his control. The quicker he recognized this, the quicker he could move on to the next phase of their operation.
“Are you sure no one followed you?” d’Avejan asked. He was once more in control. He was over the initial shock of being an accessory to a number of murders even if he hadn’t been directly complicit.
“Someone on a loader tried to ram us, meneer,” the mercenary admitted. “He missed and we left him in a ditch. We abandoned the truck two miles from the target site as planned and took to our secondary escape vehicles. No one saw them and we were well clear by the time the police were called in.”
“I don’t like the idea that a workman tried to stop you,” d’Avejan said.
“I wasn’t too keen either,” the man in America admitted. “I don’t know how he knew to come after us, but he was hell-bent to keep us from leaving.”
“Could he have seen what happened down in the mine?”
“No way.” On this point the security specialist was adamant. “Most likely he was responding to the shooting of the hoist operator and believed for a minute that he was Rambo. In the end his efforts were inconsequential. This was nothing to worry yourself about, meneer.”
Marcel Roland d’Avejan finally relaxed his grip on the smartphone. Not that it mattered if he crushed it. He treated the four-hundred-euro phones as burners, the way drug dealers used prepaids from a corner tabac. One and done. As in one call and toss the phone and its associated number.
“Call when your task is complete.” D’Avejan killed the connection and forcibly smashed the phone open to remove the battery before feeding the pieces into an industrial-style shredder behind his desk. The machine made an awful sound for just a few seconds and yet rendered the electronic marvel into so much ruined solder, copper, and plastic. The battery went into a recycling basket next to the shredder. Just because he trashed a few of these phones a week didn’t mean he wanted to trash the environment.
After all, saving the planet was what this whole mission was about.
He took a few breaths. His hands were shaky, and his stomach suddenly felt like it was filled with coiling snakes. Men were dead because of a decision he had made — not as the result of a horrible accident at one of the many industrial facilities d’Avejan controlled, but because they had been murdered. Gunned down in cold blood, for the simple fact they were witnesses and it was easier to kill them than deal with them.
One of the snakes lurched up his esophagus, forcing him to choke back a searing bolus of vomit. He ran for his office’s marble en suite bathroom and just reached the commode before his stomach heaved again and his breakfast spewed into the bowl. He gagged and spat, trying to clear his mouth as if he could also clear his conscience. His stomach heaved again, a powerful paroxysm that seemed to tear through his gut but produced nothing but a thin rope of foul liquid that he had to wipe from his mouth with a wad of tissue. He flushed away the evidence of his guilt but remained on his knees, repeatedly spitting into the bowl as his saliva seemed to have soured as much as the contents of his stomach.
Two full minutes elapsed before he hauled himself to his feet and brushed his teeth at the nearby sink. Only when he was finished rinsing with a swig of antiseptic mouthwash did he look at himself in the mirror in front of him.
D’Avejan was fifty-four, and thanks to regular tennis with two different pros, he remained in good shape. His hair, still more pepper than salt, had needed help, so he had the most expensive plugs money could buy, not that anyone could tell, and his skin remained taut thanks to subtle yet frequent bouts under a surgeon’s knife.
D’Avejan’s goal was to maintain what nature had molded him into on his forty-fifth birthday. He had read that was the peak age for many men. They had strength and masculinity, as well as the fine wrinkles and depth of expression that came with maturity and acquired wisdom. D’Avejan had set about stopping the hands of time, and had succeeded for the most part. He looked a decade younger than his actual age, and many of his friends teased him, saying that he kept a moldering portrait of himself in an attic to age for him. He would chuckle at that and also cross his mouth with a finger, entreating the person to keep his or her silence on the subject.