The instant Mr. Valadian’s thumb shifted over the button, Jack closed his eyes and slid sideways. It had to be the fastest transition to a trance state ever. Definitely a personal best.
Before Jack’s inner eyes, the overlay for the neural implant grafted to his right temporal lobe appeared. His mission parameters and reports were filed in neat rows. Under them were his health stats, delivered via a subdermal device that monitored his blood components. There was an acute inflammatory response, the biochemical markers indicative of a broken bone, likely his right wrist, and the growing white cell count of a possible infection.
While equivalent to a smart phone, all the implant had done for the past fifteen months was ping home base on a randomised schedule. No one had picked up the signal—or so he’d believed.
In the lower corner of the overlay was a red dot. A kill switch for the implant, because they couldn’t risk valuable intel falling into the wrong hands.
All this Jack surmised in the split second before Mr. Valadian’s thumb depressed the button on the jammer. There was an instant of lightning between the jammer turning on and Jack flicking the kill switch, but that was all. No crippling static burning through his head, nothing to cause his limbs to spasm or make him scream. Nothing to rip away his cover of lies.
Jack opened his eyes. Mr. Valadian was pushing the button on the jammer over and over. He kept glancing between it and Jack, clearly looking for, and not finding, a response.
“What was supposed to happen again?” Jack asked.
Mr. Valadian glared at him, then he half turned and tossed the jammer to the other man. “This thing doesn’t work. Or the information was wrong.”
Pretty Boy caught the small box and tucked it away again. “The information isn’t wrong.” His voice was surprisingly low and husky, and British.
Mr. Valadian sneered at Pretty Boy. “You said he’s military.”
Was military. Their info was six years out of date, which meant they weren’t looking at ISO or the Office for his handlers.
“I said it was highly probable, not definite,” Pretty Boy said. “We had to test it.”
Scowling, Mr. Valadian fished his phone from a pocket and tapped at it, cursing under his breath when he apparently couldn’t get a signal. The jammer was working, just not on Jack.
Jack continued to look contrite and confused. No matter what The Man thought about his supposed loyalty, Mr. Valadian couldn’t let him go now. Still, Jaidev Reed would keep insisting on his innocence.
“Come on, boss, you know I’m good. Didn’t I deal with Rindone exactly how you asked?” Executions didn’t sit well with Jack, but ridding the world of psychopaths like Link Rindone had its own brand of justification. Still, the sight of Rindone sprawled on the carpet of Mr. Valadian’s Hong Kong office, back of his head blown outwards by a bullet from Jack’s gun, took up a drawer in his mental filing cabinet. “Let me go and I’ll do anything you say, no questions.” Feeling the timing was right, Jack added in a level of desperation. “Anything you want, sir, I’m your man.”
Swinging back to face him, Mr. Valadian managed to calm his expression into a bland nothingness that could see him vanish in a crowd. “What I want, Mr. Reed, is to know what you’ve passed on to your real employer.”
“How many times can I say it? Nothing! I swear!”
And it was God’s honest truth. He hadn’t passed any intel back to the Office. They couldn’t risk anything more than a location ping. All the information Jack had gathered was in the implant. Even if something happened to him, the implant had enough independent battery life to store the data until his body could be retrieved. A comforting thought for his handler only.
The Man merely looked at him. Then he straightened his cuffs under his coat sleeves. “Someone sold out Yakim Nikonov to the Russian FSB. Two years and two million dollars is not a loss I can just write off because you’re willing to suck my dick.”
Jack sat back, unable to keep the stunned look off his face.
Yakim Nikonov was—had been—a brigadier in the Krylov bratva, looking to branch out on his own. Mr. Valadian had targeted Nikonov as a potential ally and had spent the past two years courting him. Negotiations had been slow and expensive.
Jaidev Reed, however, wasn’t supposed to know about Nikonov, and now he needed to cover that lapse. Morphing the shock into grudging acceptance, he said, “Not that I was gagging for the chance, but if that’s what it takes to convince you I didn’t sell anyone out . . .”
He had the grim satisfaction of seeing Mr. Valadian gape at him. Pretty Boy arched a dark eyebrow over the pane of his sunglasses.
“This is getting nowhere,” The Man said firmly. “You played a damn fine game this past year. I never once suspected you.” With a wave of his hand, he indicated Pretty Boy. “I’ll leave you in the capable hands of my associate. He’ll persuade you to tell him everything you know, I’m sure. Did I introduce him before? No? So sorry. Mr. Jaidev Reed, it’s my pleasure to introduce you to Mr. Ethan Blade. I’m sure you’ve heard the name. Goodbye, Mr. Reed.”
Jack didn’t even note the final dismissal or watch Mr. Valadian leave. He was focused wholly on the figure in the corner.
Not Pretty Boy. Nothing so innocent.
Right from the start of this bloody op, Jack had feared it would go tits up. There hadn’t been enough planning, nowhere near enough background information gathered on Valadian. They’d dropped Jack into this too fast and underprepared. He’d landed on his feet, though, and done the best he could, the best anyone could have done, given the lack of resources and intelligence on the subject. All that to the side, nothing could have prepared him for this.
Ethan Blade. Jack fought the urge to panic.
The somewhat ironically named John Smith List, updated by every intelligence agency around the world, catalogued all known assassins. The superstars of the paid-killer ranks held the top four or five positions, the wannabes filling out the lowest ones. It was, however, the mid-listers Jack feared the most. Those who calmly and methodically picked up tickets on targets, killed, and got paid. No flash, no glory. Ruthless and precise.
Ethan Blade, the seventh-ranked assassin in the world, didn’t move or say anything. Just stood there and regarded Jack through the opaque veil of his sunglasses. A riddle wrapped in a mystery behind dark shades.
Whatever happened now, be it a miraculous escape or certain death, Jack’s cover was shredded. He dropped the Jaidev Reed persona, squared his shoulders, and looked right back at those black lenses.
“Ethan Blade, huh? I guess there weren’t too many professions you could go into with a name like that. International assassin or circus performer, really, they’re your only options.”
Blade didn’t respond.
Jack dredged up one of Blade’s most notorious jobs. “Those Marines in Colombia, found dead by poison inside their LAV. They never did discover how it was delivered. The men hadn’t eaten together. There was no trace of gas, no injection marks. Come on, tell me how you did it. One professional to another.”
Nothing.
“Okay, we’ll come back to that one. How about the team of Afghani special ops forces walking into the Dashti Margo and never being seen again. They were tracked right into a salt flat, where their footprints just stopped. Midstride, then gone. I’d love to know how that one was pulled off.”
“It wasn’t me.”
The reply was so unexpected it took Jack several seconds to process it, and even then all he could manage was, “What?”
“The Dashti Margo. It wasn’t me.” The corners of Blade’s mouth turned up in a chilling little sardonic smile. “If you ever find out how it was done, let me know. One professional to another.”
Before Jack’s shock-dulled brain could catch up, Blade retrieved the jammer from his pocket, cracked open the case, and fiddled inside for a moment. He closed it and tossed it at Jack. It landed in his lap.
“When I say ‘now,’ hit the button.”
“What?” Jack stared dumbly from the grey box to the man and back again. “What’s going on?”
Blade reached under his coat and drew his handguns. They were Desert Eagles, visually impressive, but as a combat weapon, Jack had always thought them a bit too cumbersome. One had a laser sight attached under the barrel, and the small red dot danced across Jack’s chest for a moment. Thankfully, it moved off him when Blade strode past him, coming to lean against the wall, head tilted towards the door, listening.
“Yell.”
Straining his neck to look over his shoulder, Jack gaped at him. “What?” It was starting to sound like the only word he knew.
“Yell, as if I were torturing you.”
“No,” Jack snapped, tired and cold and too confused to care. “I’m not going to yell until you tell me—”
The laser-sighted pistol aimed at his head. Jack blinked as the red dot skittered over his face, following him unerringly as he tried to dodge.
“Yell.”
So Jack yelled. He screamed and yelled, adding a few whimpers for good measure. Whatever Blade was waiting for happened a minute or so into the show. Waving for Jack to keep it up, he tucked one gun under his arm, took off his sunglasses, and folded them into an inner pocket of his suit jacket. Blinking rapidly, he grabbed the gun again and squared off against the door.
“Now,” he said calmly and kicked open the door.
Startled, Jack coughed on a pretend scream and jerked his head around, trying to see what was going on. Blade was through the doorway the moment it opened. The Desert Eagles boomed, aimed in opposite directions, followed by the dull thuds of bodies hitting the ground. Two more shots and a cry of pain. Whatever else might have resulted from it was drowned out by the sudden whine of the chopper firing up.
Cutting through the drone of the chopper engine were the sharp retorts of return gunfire. The assassin dove to the ground and rolled out of sight, the Eagles answering in their deep, deadly voices. The door shut behind him, closing Jack off from the sudden combat.
Holy shit. More than Jimmy and Robbo out there, then. However many there were, they couldn’t have all come in the chopper, which meant they’d been here all along.
Jack wished him luck against the unquantified enemy. The Ethan Blade legend suggested he would actually win. Which was a positive for Jack. Not a great one but better than the current situation. With Mr. Valadian’s troops out of the equation, Jack would only have to deal with one man—Blade.
It even sounded as if it was working, the frequency of exchanges lessening, the screams of dying men coming further apart. Still, the jumbled cacophony was enough to start memories of nightmare combat flashing on the edges of Jack’s perception.
Before Jack was lost to the memories, the door slammed open and a calm and affable British voice called, “I said ‘now,’ Jack, if you please.”
Oh. Yeah. The jammer.
Spreading his thighs as much as he could, he let the box slide down between them, jiggling his legs so it landed on its side. Jack squeezed them together, depressing the button.
Outside, the night exploded.