Jais Read online

  “Why were you there?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Apparently not, since I’m asking.”

  “We were there to kill Peter, too. And while I suspect our motives were singularly different from yours, I won’t know until you tell me.”

  “Clearly, you’ve looked through my computer. Didn’t that have everything you needed to know?”

  “Almost. I know about your fiancée and your best friend, the medical condition that ended your military service, and the girl who left you when she read the contents of your laptop.”

  I released a long sigh and leaned my head back until my neck strained in protest. “Then I’ve either been knocked out for some time, or you’re one hell of a fast reader.”

  “But I don’t know why you came to Illinois, or why you chose Peter. That information wasn’t documented in your writings. If no one paid you to do it, that leaves a personal motive, but after checking your background it appears you and he have never been in the same state at the same time, much less ever met, before today.”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “To people like us, it’s life or death.”

  “You know the girl who left me after going through my computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “She left him for me. He didn’t take it well.”

  “That’s it?” he asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “But the best friend who slept with your fiancée is still alive.”

  “If he hadn’t told me about the affair, I still wouldn’t know. Now, can you take this bag off my head? Also, some water would be outstanding. Or, better yet, a glass of the bourbon that you better not have left in my fucking hotel room.”

  “I found the parachute in your truck and saw that you documented 150 BASE jumps—”

  “154.”

  “—on your computer. Before I get your water, I’d like you to assess a particular building and tell me whether or not you could BASE jump off of it.”

  “Will it get the bag off my head?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sold.”

  “Keep your eyes to the front.”

  The hood was ripped off my tender scalp and the onslaught of light shot daggers to the back of my skull. A headache blossomed in my brain as I inhaled only slightly less stale air—the room smelled like a cellar. A series of pages were taped on an unfinished stone wall in front of me. I started to turn my head sideways, but a figure standing behind me gently pushed my chin forward again.

  “Eyes to the front. Look at the pictures.”

  The pages were printed at a high resolution and mostly contained satellite imagery of a city block at increasing levels of focus, narrowing in on a single building indicated by a small red arrow. Another series of photographs was taken from ground level at all angles around the base of the structure and included a park dotted with trees.

  “It’s thirty-eight stories,” he said.

  I studied the pictures for a minute, trying to blink the fog of pain from my mind. “Yeah, I can jump that.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I thought that’s what you were looking for.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “All right, I’d pack slider down with a vented forty-two inch pilot chute. Exit point would be the northwest corner of the roof. I’d take a two-second delay going handheld unless access to the exit point was technical enough to justify stowed. After opening, I’d cut a left turn to burn off altitude and then bring it back right toward the park, drive a flat turn between the trees, and sink it off into the grass.”

  “Why the northwest corner?”

  “Best outs for off-heading openings. A ninety left would still allow me to pull a one-eighty and fly into the park. A ninety right would probably cause me to overshoot the landing area, but I could still make a one-eighty and touch down on that east to west-running street. And if I have a one-eighty on opening, a corner exit is my best chance to turn away before I strike the building.”

  “How difficult would this be?”

  “Pretty fucking difficult. Worse if the winds don’t cooperate, and in a city they never do.”

  “So you BASE jump, and you’ve got no family to answer to. Are you any good with a pistol?”

  “I’ve been shooting pistols since I was eight, and you can ask your thugs how close I came to getting the draw on them at the hotel.”

  “Then I want you to jump this building for me next week.”

  “Why would you want me to do that?” The pacing footsteps behind me ceased.

  “Because I want you to kill a man inside.”

  My mind ground to a halt. “Why the fuck would I kill someone for you, and what does that have to do with a jump?”

  “Let’s start with the second question. Once you get inside that particular building, the only way to go is up and the only way out is the roof.”

  “Then get him somewhere else,” I said.

  “If I could get him anywhere else, he’d already be dead.”

  “Who is he?”

  “I cannot tell you that. I can train you and equip you, and I can get you inside with the knowledge of exactly where to find him. The rest is up to you.”

  “How do I know you won’t kill me once I’m done?” The loud footsteps resumed as a second man began pacing again.

  “You don’t, but that’s beside the point. Agree to this, David, and you’ll get what you’ve been waiting for your whole life: the perfect rush. You’ve flirted with death, but you’ve not yet married her. There are others like you. The hard part is finding them, but in this case we’ve found you.”

  “Who is ‘we?’”

  “The scope of this proposal alone should give you an indication of what we do. You can be a part of that, or you can be drugged again and wake up in that beater of yours back in the hotel parking lot.”

  “I think you’d kill me if I refused. Acceptance under punishment of demise isn’t really acceptance, is it?”

  “Religions do it all the time.”

  “I don’t go to church.”

  “Then what is your antenna across the river from West Point? You’ve been going to church. You just call it Ma Bell.”

  I couldn’t parry his response. “This all seems like a ludicrous plan. No offense.”

  “Less imaginative than suicide in a hotel room with a bottle of scotch?”

  “Bourbon.”

  “My point stands.”

  My legs began to fall asleep, so I tried shifting my weight in the chair. “What would this entire arrangement consist of?”

  “You’d be more or less living under armed guard in a remote area. There will be no contact with the outside world. The next five days consist of shooting drills with a personal instructor, firing hundreds of rounds a day. When you’re not shooting or loading magazines, you’ll be memorizing the floor plans and schedules relevant to the target. On the sixth day, we get you into the building. You go to a designated place at a designated time, positively identify an individual, and kill him. Then you move to the roof, parachute off, and link up with our car. We get you off the site.”

  “Then what?”

  “The book answer is that we pay you and then go our separate ways. But I’ve seen what you’ve written, and after this is done you’ll be begging me for more work. Whether I hire you again depends on how well you perform this job.”

  “I told you why I killed Peter. I want to know why you were going to.”

  A few seconds passed before he said, “If you pull this off successfully, I’ll tell you.”

  I tilted my head, scanning the pictures in front of me. “Then I’m in.”

  I heard the click of a pocketknife blade being flipped open. He cut my ankles free, and then sliced the restraints off my wrists.

  “Let’s go to work, David,” he said.

  I eased myself to my feet, my joints popping in protest, and stood before the photos of the building.

 
Then I turned to find three men standing behind me.

  CHAPTER 9

  Alone in the darkness, I looked back on my life.

  I didn’t want to calculate the collective years spent with friends I would rather not have met, nor with the worthwhile ones who had either betrayed me or died along the way. Nor could I begin to gauge how much alcohol I’d drunk to continue drifting along in life, pursuing a meaningless degree that ended up being for naught.

  Single, friendless, without family, I had trudged along toward an increasingly certain fate that I had spent decades building until my mind was trapped in its own confines beyond the point of no return.

  After all that, what did I have to show for it?

  I thought back to the moment I had stepped off the steel ramp of the helicopter during my first desert raid in Afghanistan, then to descending through the black sky under my parachute as I prepared to land in Iraq. Those few, precious bursts of electric intensity had repaid the many years that produced nothing worth remembering. The visuals associated with those moments—my palms sweating at the memories, the gunfights and combat and death—remained forever etched in my psyche.

  And that, at its core, was the underlying issue beneath my endless pain. Beyond those collective moments, I spent my time feverishly, compulsively scratching at the surface of life, trying to recapture that feeling through every possible self-destructive tendency, only to fail at every turn.

  BASE, by far, had come the closest—not many life issues could haunt you in the eerie twilight of life and death, where the most fleeting lapse in judgment or an unexpected gust of wind could transform you into a paralytic or a corpse before you had time to blink.

  But, in the end, closing the distance toward humans intent on killing you as you tried to do the same to them was rivaled by no other adversary—not nature, not fate. There was no coming to grips with your own humanity quite like facing an opponent, guns in hand, knowing full well that only one of you would walk away.

  I shifted in position, feeling my body settle on the foam beneath me. As I turned on a penlight, my gloved hands glowed with white light that stung my eyes. Squinting, I waited for my pupils to adjust within the confined space, my breath trapped around me.

  Matz had painstakingly trimmed the sections of foam until they perfectly accommodated my body and my parachute, and then he fitted them to the interior of the five-foot metal cube. The box was identical to the shipping crates that passed through the underground loading dock in my target’s building and was marked by a painted numerical identifier and a shipping label. The replica was complete with scuffs and dents, and had been surreptitiously fitted with ventilation channels on all sides.

  Time should have slowed inside its tight confines, but it didn’t. Instead, I found myself pleasantly surprised with each check of my watch as it ticked down toward zero, toward proving myself, toward an opportunity to return to combat. The parachute strapped to my back just made the anticipation that much more thrilling, and in the box I found myself more often than not filled with a sense of eagerness and focused on delivering a flawless performance, no matter the cost. Combat was on the line—it was a different kind than what I had experienced in war, to be sure, and also criminal in nature.

  But it was combat.

  What did I have to lose? Only a life I didn’t care about. The possibility of death meant nothing to me; the prospect of combat, everything.

  My watch ticked over to zero.

  I carefully lifted the lid with my left forearm and leveled my Glock’s suppressor as sunlight flooded the interior of the box.

  Two images appeared in front of me—one of a cop pointing a handgun, the other of a blonde woman holding up her hands.

  I fired two subsonic rounds into each picture, the twirp twirp, twirp twirp of the pistol splitting the foam-enclosed silence of the past hour. Spinning backward, I saw a staggering zombie with a bloody mouth, lit by sunshine and standing in scrub grass, and delivered two more shots to the center of its chest.

  I reloaded before guiding the Glock suppressor through the cutout of my belt holster. A rolling breeze hit my face, cooling my sweat as I hoisted myself over the lid of the box and jumped down before sliding the top panel back into place.

  Drawing my pistol as I whirled around, I scanned the forest. A long strip of white engineer tape stretched bumpily across overgrown grass and snaked into the trees. I heard the vague chanting of birds among the rustling treetops, their songs undisturbed despite my suppressed shots.

  Transmitting into a mic dangling from my earpiece, I said, “Red, I send Kickoff. One crow and two parrots dead.”

  “Copy Kickoff, one crow and two parrots,” Boss responded through the receiver.

  I trotted past the cop and the blonde woman, whose life-sized paper forms stretched across cardboard backings held up by long wooden stakes. Stopping before a piece of white engineer tape laid on the ground in the shape of a square, I pulled a color-coded key from a lanyard on my belt and pretended to insert it at waist level.

  Matz called out from behind a tree, “What are you doing?”

  “Activating the service elevator with the red key,” I called back. “Pushing the top button for the fifteenth floor. Turning right, walking thirty feet to the stairwell.”

  Stepping out of the square, I turned right and walked toward another section of white tape, then stepped inside before transmitting, “Red, I send First Down.”

  “Copy First Down,” Boss transmitted.

  I stepped inside the next square and called out to Matz, “Entering stairwell and walking to the thirty-second floor.”

  “Okay, you’re there.”

  I transmitted, “Red, I send Second Down.”

  “Copy Second Down.”

  Taking a moment to focus, I began walking along the white engineer tape, mechanically calling out to Matz as I had already done dozens of times, “Left turn, twenty feet down the hall, right turn at the T-intersection, walk fifty feet and cross the office suite on my left, then to the secretary’s office. Red, I send Third Down.”

  “Copy Third Down, stand by for confirmation.”

  Matz called out, “What’s happening now?”

  “Boss is calling the target’s office phone to bring him to his desk. Secretary’s door should be unlocked; otherwise, I open it with the white key.”

  “I have confirmation,” Boss called through my earpiece. “Execute. Execute. Execute.”

  I keyed my radio twice to confirm before saying to Matz, “Boss cleared me. Now I cross the secretary’s office to his door. If it’s open, I enter; otherwise, I use the blue key. Walk inside and kill him.”

  There was no response. Glancing around the forest, the underbrush shaded beneath swaying treetops, I listened to the breeze and looked for tree trunks big enough to hide Matz’s massive figure.

  From somewhere to my left, he yelled, “Hit the range. Time starts now!”

  I took a quick breath and turned, running fast down a worn trail into the woods that weaved past tree trunks and moss-covered rocks. Fifty feet into the trees, I heard Matz running behind me as he followed at a distance.

  Bright sunshine lit the ground ahead as the trail gave way to a small clearing dotted with upright pieces of plywood barricades, beyond which the targets were arranged. I burst into the clearing and skidded to a halt behind the first barricade, drawing my Glock and using the wood as cover while I took aim at a chest-level rack topped with five steel plates.

  I fired from left to right, missing the first plate but felling the other four in rapid succession before I hit the first plate with a sixth round. Conducting a magazine change behind cover, I walked laterally to my right, engaging four paper targets spaced out before the next barricade.

  I fired three rounds before my pistol gave a hollow click.

  Slapping upward on the magazine, I racked the slide to eject a bright orange dummy round and fired again within a second, continuing to walk and shoot as I thought about how pleased Matz w
ould be with my speed.

  I shot the fourth and final target twice before sprinting to the next piece of plywood and taking aim. Thirty feet beyond it was a Texas Star, a five-pointed wheel holding five steel plates in a wide circle. I shot the first plate, which dropped with a loud clang. The wheel began spinning, turning the remaining four plates into moving targets. Working my way clockwise, I shot them off the mounts without missing and took off at a sprint before the fifth had struck the ground.

  A fifty-foot gap separated me from my final plywood barricade, and beyond it I could see the lone target representing my objective. He was a guardian angel, of sorts; without him, I would have been dead for days. As I closed with the firing position, breathing heavily and pumping my stiff limbs that strained after an hour spent hunched in the box, a succession of faces flashed through my head, an unsolicited procession of loss presented to me without warning—Sarah, Laila, and Peter before I shot him. Peter’s face was replaced by the friend whose affair with Sarah ended my engagement, and he hovered in my mind for a fleeting second before Jackson appeared, smiling at me atop Ma Bell.

  The last face I saw before arriving at the barricade was my own—a lopsided grin parting to insert a gun barrel.

  I stopped behind the plywood, aligning my sights on a cardboard silhouette marked with the word SAAMIR. After firing one round that bored a neat hole between the A and M, the slide of my pistol locked to the rear.

  Dropping the empty magazine, I reloaded a fresh one and straightened my arms in front of my body, then fired another two rounds into the letters and ran toward it, stopping a few feet away.

  Assuming a wide firing stance, I raised my pistol.

  A page-sized photograph was pasted over the head of the target showing a close-up of an olive-skinned man who looked younger than he was—the faint trace of a smile, dark eyes that gleamed from either side of a wide nose, immaculate black hair slicked back and neatly trimmed on the sides. He was wearing a suit with a violet tie and coordinated pocket square.

  I fired five times into the photo, the .40 caliber rounds shredding a tight asymmetric pattern in the center.

  Matz, forgotten in the trance of my routine, called out behind me, “Time stopped.”