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  He started to respond, she smashed him in the head with the butt of the gun. “In English!” This was the part of negotiation that Katarina excelled at.

  “Yes, yes! Whatever you say, please don’t kill me!”

  Kat called over to me. “Status?”

  I had taken up position behind a wooden column and had the gun trained on the door. There was no traffic on the radio. I was really glad that the party was so blaringly loud. “They probably thought it was fireworks.”

  “Good.” Katarina turned her attention back toward Keng’s assistant. “We’ll be in touch.” She hit him in the head with the pistol again, hard enough the sound of the blow made me cringe. The assistant flopped onto the floor unconscious.

  “Let’s go,” I said as I changed the radio to a predetermined channel and hit transmit. “We’re on the way down. Prepare for pickup.”

  “On the way,” Carl, my partner in crime, responded over the airwaves. I knew that the car was already in motion and he would be waiting at the service entrance in exactly two minutes. Carl was reliable. I stuffed the Browning into my waistband and made sure my tuxedo covered it. The radio went into a pocket.

  “Damn it!” Katarina hissed as she lifted the cloth of the cart. “The soup spilled. I can’t ride in there. You know what this dress cost me?”

  “Just go,” I grunted. She had just murdered a pirate, but she was worried about her outfit. My girlfriend was psychotic. “You got a better way to walk out of here past twenty security guards?”

  “You are handsome when you’re stern, Lorenzo,” she replied as she ducked under the cloth, slipped out of her high heels, and folded herself into an almost impossible position. “And you look like a Bollywood James Bond in that outfit. Very handsome.”

  “Shut up,” I grumbled as I flipped the cloth down to conceal her, then pushed the cart to the door. It was heavier now. Katarina was taller than I was and extremely athletic, so she added a lot of weight to the cart. Not that I would ever guess her weight out loud, since she made her living killing people for an organized crime syndicate.

  And I was what? Her helper?

  It was a pretty shitty job when you thought about it that way.

  We walked right out. I kept my head down, eyes averted. The guards at the door grunted at me as I passed. From observing them, I knew that they had approximately two to three minutes before another radio check, plenty of time to get out of here.

  The crowd was thicker now, more people accumulating around the railing. The fireworks show was reaching its climax and the city was beautiful in the smoky light. Weaving the cart between socialites, I kept my head down and kept moving, not paying any attention to the sparkles or explosions. I risked one last glance back toward the private area as I reached the kitchen. One of the guards was pulling out his radio, checking in prematurely.

  As soon as I was into the kitchen I was moving fast, the doors swinging wildly behind me. I nearly ran over one of the chefs, and collided with another waiter. The kitchen smelled of exotic meats and curry, lots of curry. Flames were leaping from a grill under a row of neatly carved chickens. We had to get out of here, now.

  “Pard? What’s going on? Is Mr. Keng not happy with his food?” the chef asked nervously.

  “He’s really not happy,” I responded as I threw back the cover. “We’ve got to move.”

  “Which way?” Katarina asked, sliding out of the cart. I took off running. She carried her five-inch heels in her hand so she could keep up with me as she followed.

  “Pard? What’s going on?” the chef shouted after us, totally unaware that the man he thought he was speaking to was on a boat to India with a ten-thousand-dollar bribe in his pocket. I shoved past more kitchen staff, leaving them confused with what an Anglo woman in a party dress was doing running through their work space. I went right to the freight elevator and mashed the button furiously.

  “What about the security check on the first level?” Katarina asked as the elevator started down.

  I pulled out the stolen radio. “Carl, put the kid on.”

  “This is Reaper.”

  “Reaper . . .” Katarina hissed, rolling her eyes. “Such a terrible nickname.”

  “I need you to jam Keng’s channel. Then I need to know what’s going on at the first floor checkpoint. And tell Carl and Train we’ve been spotted. This might get hot.”

  “Okay,” Reaper responded, sounding slightly distorted as the radio waves passed through layers of concrete and steel. “Their channel is now filled with crap.”

  “You know, if he’s over sixteen I would be stunned.” She bent over and put her shoes back on.

  “He told me he’s twenty-one, and he’s a technical wizard. And since our last tech guy got blown up in Singapore . . .”

  Reaper came back. “I don’t think they were able to contact security, but they may try the courtesy phones. I’ll kill those.”

  “Do it.”

  “On it,” he responded enthusiastically. “Reaper out.”

  “What kind of name is that supposed to be?” Katarina snorted.

  “I told him he couldn’t go by his real name. Too dangerous.” The floor numbers changed rapidly, but I didn’t know if we would be fast enough.

  “Yes, real names are dangerous in this business . . .” She put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me slowly back against the elevator wall. “Hector.”

  “Business, Katarina. Stick to business,” I grunted as I pushed her away. She was the first person I had told my real name to in years. It was stupid, and weak, but infatuation does that to a man. She did that fake pout that I had found cute at first, though now it was just annoying.

  “Whatever you say, Lorenzo, darling.” She was beautiful, lethal, and I had been lonely. I had let her suck me into working for Big Eddie, and what a mistake that had been. Bad guy. Villain. Robber. Thief. Look up the definition and there was my picture. It was what I was good at. I was probably one of the best in the world. It was all that I knew, and all that I could do. And honestly, I loved it. I was a predator, through and through. But since everything had fallen apart back in back in Africa, I had tried to only prey on other bad guys. They had more to take, and I could always console myself that when I had to off one of them, I left the world a better place. According to my twisted moral code, they were fair game. Normal people were off limits, but working for Big Eddie, those lines often blurred. I had seen how real evil operated, and I was employee of the month.

  I hate what I’ve become.

  Concentrate on escaping. Be bitter later. I yanked the waiter’s sash, opened my coat, undid my tie, and tried to look casual, sloppy. Just a guy wrapping up a night on the town and taking home a professional girl. I grabbed Katarina around the waist—her abdominal muscles were hard as rock—and held her close. “Look like we’re guests leaving the party.” She held out the other 9mm.

  “Take this.”

  “Why?”

  “Where am I supposed to conceal a full-size pistol in this thing?” she growled, gesturing at her dress.

  True enough. She couldn’t hide most of herself in it. I took the gun and shoved it into the front of my pants and made sure the cummerbund hid it. I didn’t like carrying a cocked and locked handgun over my manhood, but didn’t have time to think of a better spot.

  First floor. The elevator clanked to a stop and the doors hissed open. Katarina giggled loudly and snuggled up; she was a superb actress. I did the half-drunk wobble out onto the linoleum. This was the service entrance, and guests shouldn’t be coming down this way, but it was a heck of a party upstairs, and what happens in Kuala Lumpur, stays in Kuala Lumpur.

  A few workers noticed us, but the place was swamped tonight. What was another drunk and his harlot? An older woman behind some sort of registration desk was wearing a traditional headscarf, and she shook her head sadly at the sight. She was old enough to have watched her traditional backwater country super-modernize, and all of the ancillary moral decay that came with it.
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  “Excuse me, sir. You should not be in this area,” she said politely.

  I waved my hand in her general direction. “We’re leaving,” I said dismissively, playing the lost rich guy. Katarina giggled again. The woman frowned, apparently deciding that she needed to notify somebody of lost guests, and lifted her phone. She jiggled the receiver a few times when she didn’t get a dial tone. Way to go, Reaper. We continued down the hall.

  The area terminated in some doors and a loading dock. Several workers were moving in cartons of food and booze from a truck. Carl would pick us up on the other side.

  Katarina’s nails sank into my arm. I froze. Several men were entering, squeezing around the delivery truck. They had the look of toughs, not dressed for a quality event. The guy in the lead was still wearing his sunglasses at close to midnight, was plainly hurried, and was talking into a cell phone. Can’t jam everything, damn it.

  He saw me as I saw him, across twenty feet of concrete and harsh fluorescent light, and he knew that these were the people who had just shot his boss in the face. His hand moved in a blur as he shouted to the other pirates.

  Katarina had her arm around me, and her hand was only inches from the Hi-Power in the back of my waistband. I felt it leave as she dove to the side. I drew the second gun as I went the other way.

  It was on.

  The gun in my hand was a worn old military model. I punched the gun straight out, shifting focus from the pirate to the rudimentary front sight. I fired twice as I moved against the wall. Now I was crouching, moving forward into the loading area. I had to get out of that fatal funnel. Had to attack.

  Katarina had the same idea. There were multiple gunshots from her side. The lead pirate stumbled, dropped his cell phone, started to turn toward her, black gun coming up in his hand. I nailed him again, and then he was down. The workers were screaming, scattering, hitting the floor, or running.

  The other pirates were in a bad position, squeezing past the truck with no place to maneuver. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. I took the left. Katarina took the right. The wall behind me exploded into concrete fragments. The noise was deafening in the echoing space. A worker trapped in the crossfire spun, vegetables flying out of the cardboard box in his hands. A fine particulate mist seemed to hang in the space that he had filled. I fired down the narrow passage, dropping another pirate.

  “Magazine! Magazine!” Katarina shouted. I reached into my pocket and tossed one to her. She was at slide lock, gun empty, and barely looked up to catch the mag. She slammed it home, dropped the slide, and kept shooting.

  I dove behind a stack of boxes. Bullets zipped right through. Glass bottles shattered, splashing me with wine older than I was. There was only one more pirate on my side of the truck, and he was firing wildly, trying to retreat, to get away from us. He disappeared around the rear of the truck . . . only to reappear a moment later, falling head-first onto the pavement. The crack of a .223 echoed through the alley.

  The radio crackled. It was Carl. “Got him! Now hurry up. There’s more coming. It’s like a fucking pirate convention out here.”

  “Clear right!” Katarina shouted. I pulled the last mag and reloaded without thinking.

  “Clear left. Let’s go.” The worker who had been shot was still moving, but he wouldn’t be for long. Blood was welling from his chest in great violent gouts. He was lying on his back, hands twisted into claws, blood flowing from his mouth as he coughed. His dark eyes were open, staring at the buzzing fluorescents, seeing Allah, or Buddha, or Vishnu, or who knew what in this country.

  Standing over him, gun dangling loose in my hand, I froze. I had seen this hundreds of times, and didn’t know why this hit me. He looked right at me, and extended a hand, probably wondering why I wouldn’t help him, wondering why he hurt so bad, why his heart was pumping blood out of his chest instead of to his brain . . .

  “Lorenzo! Let’s go!” Katarina shouted.

  The old lady with the headscarf pushed past, oblivious to danger, oblivious to the stranger with the gun. She fell at the young man’s side, cradled his head in her hands, and began to scream. He was already dead.

  “Murderer!” she shrieked in Malay.

  “But I didn’t kill him,” I said in English, but she wasn’t paying attention. She was trying to stop the bleeding that had already stopped forever.

  “Lorenzo!” Katarina shrieked. I snapped out of it and ran for the exit.

  The next hour was a blur. There were more of Keng’s men in the alley. And I killed them as I had killed so many before. The cops arrived, and Carl eluded them by driving like a madman through the streets of KL. Nobody could catch Carl, nobody.

  All I could think of was that old woman with the headscarf. Murderer . . .

  Dawn found us at a safe house in the Malaysian countryside. We pushed the van with bullet holes into the lake. Datuk Keng was dead. Big Eddie’s work was done.

  The new guy, Reaper, may have been young, but he’d done well. Carl had cracked open a beer and was sitting on the couch, surly as usual. Train was his usual jovial, goofball self. A nerdy computer kid, my best friend the angry mercenary, and a mountain of muscle with a teddy bear’s heart. This was my crew, this was my family. They did this for me. They were watching the news coverage about what the local authorities were calling the Independence Day Massacre.

  I left the room, wanting to be by myself. Carl studied me as I walked away. He knew me better than anybody, and I had no doubt he knew what I was about to do. I watched Katarina through the window as she paced back and forth on the lawn. She was on her cell phone, giving details to Big Eddie’s representatives. She was dressed down now, just wearing normal clothing, not made up at all, and even then I had to admit that she was probably the most beautiful woman I had ever known, and fun, and amazingly smart, talented, pretty much everything I could ever want.

  Too bad she was evil.

  I overheard Reaper whisper to Train. “A massacre? Man, that was crazy. I’ve never seen anything like that before . . . How many people have you guys killed?”

  “That’s a stupid question, kid.” Carl muttered. “Really stupid.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I can understand you asking,” Train said. “Me, I’ve had to do it a few times. Carl here, if you had to get all of the people he’s killed together, you would probably fill a bus. A big Greyhound bus. He and Lorenzo were mercenaries in Africa for a few years.”

  “Dude . . .”

  “Shut it, Train,” Carl growled.

  “What about Lorenzo?” Reaper asked with a reverent tone.

  “Lorenzo, well . . .” Train hesitated.

  Carl responded. “If I need a bus, then Lorenzo needs a football stadium. Now both of you shut up.”

  I sighed, and banged my head against the window.

  I intercepted Katarina on the lawn as she hung up her phone. She got right to business. “Big Eddie is not happy.” Her accent was Swiss. She was half Spanish, half Swiss, and sometimes when she wasn’t playing at being something else, her accent was very obvious. It sounded like “Big Eddie eez not happy.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Too much attention. Too much collateral damage. He says that next time—”

  I cut her off. “There is no next time. You tell him I’m done.”

  “Lorenzo . . .” she spoke calmly. “Think this through. Nobody is ever done with Eddie.”

  “I am. Sorry, Kat, it’s over.”

  “Are you talking about our employer, or are you talking about us too?” She looked sad, and even bit her lower lip, but I knew that was an act. A year ago I would have believed she was capable of sadness but now I knew that it was fake. Any normal human emotions Katarina had, had long since been expunged.

  “Both.”

  “I thought you loved me . . .” she said, voice cracking, and this time, I almost could believe her. Almost. I turned my back on her and walked away.

  Chapter 1: Paradise Lost

  LORENZO />
  St. Carl Island

  The Bahamas

  February 6th

  Seven years ago. Why was I dreaming about seven years ago? The clock by the bed told me that it was three in the morning. I was having a hard time sleeping again, just too restless.

  Jill grunted in her sleep. Trying not to wake her, I got up carefully and went to the bathroom. The nondescript face in the mirror stared at me. What’s your problem, Lorenzo? It was weird to think about Kuala Lumpur again. It had been a turning point for me. Of course, Eddie had come back to haunt me, dragging me into the mess in Zubara, but he was dead now and I was still alive. So what had I become? I was a free man. I was my own man. I was a retired thief. I was wealthy. I was in a relationship with a wonderful woman, even though I didn’t deserve her.

  But at what cost? A football stadium. The face in the mirror scowled. That’s what Carl had described. So what was I now? For some reason, the words of my foster father were on my mind that morning. I could hear his deep voice, fading on his death bed. Warning me about good and evil . . .

  I wouldn’t be getting back to sleep tonight.

  “Welcome to St. Carl!” the waitress said with extra cheer. Those simple words got my attention. St. Carl was a small enough island that anyone who wasn’t a regular got that greeting, especially during the off season when tourists were few and the staff was hungry for tips. The room was kept dark, in sharp contrast to the bright Caribbean sunshine trying to force its way through the now-open entrance. The lunch patrons were sitting in a few tight clusters, mostly workers from the nearby docks, and a handful of others, all of whom I recognized, but I didn’t know the three newcomers standing in the doorway.

  The lead was a striking woman of Chinese descent, dressed casually, but not casually enough to pass for a St. Carl resident. Her black eyes were scanning across the room, looking for something, or someone. She was flanked by two men, one short Asian guy built like a cage fighter, and the other, a black man so tall he almost had to duck to get through the door, with a shaved head and more muscle than a side of beef.