Brad Taylor - Enemy of Mine

Out in the desert it had seemed right. Even easy. Jennifer agreeing that he should be killed had been the icing on the cake. It had to be the correct path if even she thought so. Now, I wasn’t so sure. I would be the one pulling the trigger. Nobody else.

I’d lied to Blaine and let him fly on home, then broke the news to the team, attempting to convince them to assist. I’d told them it was strictly voluntary and strictly outside the Taskforce. This was personal, and I’d be the one doing the killing. Conducting surveillance was one thing, but there was no way I could ask the men to help me in the actual takedown of Lucas. When it came down to it, it would be a one-man operation, with the others long gone.

In the end, Jennifer had been right: They all came on board fairly easily. Knuckles was in immediately, even stating he didn’t mind the killing part. Decoy came on board as well, but Brett balked. I understood his reluctance, especially since we hadn’t ever been teammates. He didn’t know Ethan or his family, couldn’t understand the pain their loss had caused. Eventually the peer pressure got to him, and he agreed to conduct initial surveillance, but wanted nothing to do with the killing.

Now, after twenty-four hours and a night of rest, the feeling of righteousness had dissipated somewhat, and I was going through the motions of tracking Lucas mechanically, tamping down the passion of the act. I didn’t like how it was affecting me. I thought killing him would be just like any other combat action I’d been forced into, but it wasn’t, and the difference was starting to seep in.

I’d never taken a life in cold blood, purely for personal reasons, and a part of me was having a tough time coming to grips with the undertaking, even given the loss of Ethan’s family. Not so much because of the killing, but because of the repercussions. Killing in combat, for the defense of the nation or simply self-preservation, was something I could do and had done. Killing in cold blood was something else entirely, and I was fearful of what it might do to my psyche. I wasn’t guessing about the damage. I had a lot of experience in that arena.

I had lived in a cesspool of guilt and rage after my family died and knew intimately how powerful the subconscious mind was. I had no desire to return to that cancerous place and feared I was now freely volunteering to do so.

Another part of me, prehistoric and reptilian, relished the opportunity, the scar tissue that had covered it beginning to break down, giving it room to blossom. That part didn’t give a rat’s ass about the consequences. I could hear it chanting in the background, “Yes…yes…yes,” and it was growing louder. The bloodlust was unsettling.

I found Jennifer in the lobby and said, “Your information was spot-on. It’s his room.”

We started walking across the lobby and she said, “So? What’re you going to do?”

“Kill him tonight, when he’s back in it.” I said it like I was talking about getting takeout.

She nodded her head vaguely, coming to grips with the fact that the information she’d provided was now going to be used to take a life.

“I don’t have time to go back and forth on this. We only have another day before we’re missed by Kurt and the Taskforce.”

We’d flown out right behind Blaine yesterday, him thinking we were going to hang around for one more day. After spending twenty-four hours in Frankfurt, we were now going to send a SITREP describing aircraft troubles-as if we’d just arrived from Dubai-and a subsequent layover. I’d bought us forty-eight hours, and that was it. I was just happy we’d managed to find Lucas in the city in such a short amount of time.

He’d thrown away the phone we’d originally tracked him with, so that was no help. Luckily, Jennifer had the four hotels she’d discovered from his Internet search in Dubai. Finding the one he was in, using his Canadian ID, had been easy. Finding his room without Taskforce hacking help, however, had been a different matter.

We had to do it the old-fashioned way, by distracting the guy behind the reception area. I’d first positioned Brett as a trigger for Lucas in the lobby, then had both him and Decoy begin the surveillance of him, using Knuckles as nothing more than a taxicab to drop them off and pick them up during the operation.

As soon as Lucas had cleared the building, I’d thrown Jennifer into the breach to use her wily female charms to get the reception guy to leave his counter. I don’t know what she said, but off they went to the business center, leaving me with plenty of time to find Lucas’s room and imprint a separate key-card. She had come back glaring at me, with the young man in tow practically drooling.

Now, with everything in place, the operation became real. I was going to kill him. In cold blood. I was no longer going to try to kill him, and I wasn’t looking for him in Frankfurt in the hopes of killing him. I’d found him, and he was dead just as surely as Ethan’s family. Tonight.

Decoy called as we exited Lucas’s hotel. “He’s moving. Out of the cafe and up the stairs.”

“Got it. We’re headed that way now. Give me a call when he’s clear.”

“Roger.”

I hung up my cell and said, “We have a little mini-mission. I need you to drop me off at the Hauptbahnhof, then circle the block until I call.”

“What’s up?”

“Apparently Lucas is using Internet cafes, and I want to see what he’s up to. I need the forensics thumb drive you used in Lucas’s room in Dubai.”

She gave me a quizzical look, then I saw her brain make the connection of what I was asking, and she literally grew red in the face. “I…don’t have it. I gave it to the support crew with the rest of our kit. I’m sorry. That was stupid of me.”

Dammit. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I think Knuckles has one.”

We’d given all of our overt kit like guns, beacons, and radios to the support crew to dispose of-minus one suppressed Glock I’d hidden in my luggage-but things like thumb drives and our Taskforce cell phones were ordinarily kept because they raised no suspicion. I was surprised that she’d given it up. Not like her at all.

Before I could even dial, she was on the phone with Knuckles, getting directions to meet him. In short order, I had the call from Brett saying Lucas was clear, and I was walking down the stairs to the Internet cafe. Luckily, the computer Decoy had described was still free.

I paid for five minutes, then pulled up Internet Explorer, finding the history empty. I plugged in the thumb drive and gathered the websites for the last hour. The most recent were for strip shows here in Frankfurt, which would make our follow a little bit easier tonight and might make it easier to kill Lucas since he’d probably be drunk.

Continuing, I found references to news stories about the Burj Khalifa, which confirmed that I was on the right box, then a site that confused me. It was a State Department travel agency, and the request had been for State Department personnel on all flights going from Germany to Qatar for the next few days.

Qatar? Why’s he looking at that? What’s he up to?

In the end, I decided it didn’t matter. He only had a few more hours on this earth anyway.

Lucas returned to his room a little bored. He’d toured just about everything he could around the city, and with the lack of information about the couriers, he had nothing to really work on. He’d thought finding an RFID reader would be hard in Germany, but he’d managed to do that on the first attempt, even locating one that appeared like an ordinary computer, with inconspicuous antennae he could loop outside of his laptop bag when the time came.