Brett Battles - The Destroyed

“How about this?” Mila said.

Mila took a step closer to the assassin. “You tell me who wants me dead, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

“How should I know? I’m just the hired help.”

“You said I tangled with a very powerful man. Sounded to me like you know who it is.”

He winced for a second. “Words only. Meant to get you to cooperate.”

She didn’t believe him for a second. There was something in his voice earlier that made her sure he knew more. She leaned toward him. “Who is it?”

His good hand suddenly reached for the gun she was holding. She jerked back out of range, and his hand flailed as if he could grip the air and pull the pistol to him. He yelled in frustration and pain. His hand dropped to the floor near the bloody mess that had once been part of his other hand.

Almost instantly he stopped yelling, his eyes growing wide. He raised his hand back up and turned the palm so he could look at it. Sticking out of the pad near his thumb was the needle-enhanced ring.

The assassin’s hand clenched involuntarily. “Oh, God.”

It took Mila a second to realize what was happening. She’d thought there wasn’t enough poison left on the tiny spike to kill again. But when the muscles on the assassin’s neck tightened, and his jaw began to shake, she knew she was wrong.

“Do you have an antidote?” she asked quickly. She couldn’t have him die on her, not yet.

He tried to smile. “Why would I…bring that?”

She knelt down beside him. “Who wanted me dead? It shouldn’t matter to you anymore. Just tell me!”

He sucked in a breath that she worried might be his last, and his eyelids fluttered shut.

She dropped the gun, and grabbed his face with both hands. “Tell me!”

Silence.

“Tell me!”

She thought it was too late, that he was gone. Then his eyes opened a fraction of an inch. “The lion,” he whispered.

“The lying what?” she asked.

“Lion,” he repeated in a voice she could barely make out. “Lion.”

There was no need to ask him again. He was done answering questions, forever.

Lying? Lie on? Lay on? Leon? Whatever it was he was trying to say didn’t make sense to her.

“Someone’s coming,” Julien said.

He grabbed the gun off the man he’d been choking, moved to the side of the door, and motioned for Mila to join him. They pressed against the wall, pistols ready as the door eased open.

For several seconds there was no noise. Then they heard Quinn’s voice say, “Mila? Julien?”

OUTSIDE VENICE, ITALY

Quinn knew the story from there, at least as far as Vegas was concerned. The first thing they did was jam the maintenance closet door closed in a way that only they would know how to easily open again. Then he and Julien had escorted Mila to the parking garage.

The car they had procured for her escape was a nondescript Toyota Camry with California plates. Their original plan had been for her to head south with Julien through Arizona to the Mexican border at Nogales. There, using an impeccably fake Canadian passport, she would cross over on her own and continue south via bus to Guaymas, on the Sonora side of the Gulf of California. Julien would dispose of the getaway car, then work on putting a more permanent plan in place for her. Once everything was ready, he would travel to Mexico to brief her, then send her on her way to her new life.

But with the two extra dead bodies in the basement of the Manhattan, Quinn needed some help, so instead of traveling with Mila to the border, Julien stayed behind.

As soon as Mila drove away, Quinn had called Jergins and confirmed that the body he’d seen at the hospital was indeed Mila Voss, and that the person Kovacs’s man had spotted was someone else entirely. Jergins was both glad Quinn would be able to handle things, and annoyed at the last-minute fire drill Kovacs’s team had put them through.

“Tell him to call me,” Jergins had said.

“If I catch him before he leaves, I’ll let him know.”

Next came the cleanup. Quinn and Julien wrapped up the bodies, collected stray bio matter, and obscured the bloodstains they couldn’t remove with quick-drying paint.

They waited until three a.m. to move the bodies out. Because they were in a casino, there were more people around than they usually had to account for on other jobs, but Quinn’s and Julien’s movements went unnoticed and soon they were driving out of the city.

The pre-dug grave was in the middle of the desert, twenty miles from anything else, and was more than deep enough for the three bodies. After each went in, Quinn poured a thin layer of his special mix of powdered dissolving chemicals over it, adding an extra layer on the faces and hands. He’d only planned for one body, so was worried there wouldn’t be enough, but he was able to stretch it out.

The project officially completed, Quinn returned to Los Angeles alone, while Julien worked out the details for Mila, details Quinn had never known. In fact, he and Julien had made a pact to never discuss Mila or Vegas again, something they had broken only once, two years later, when Julien had talked to Quinn about the apartment in Rome.

What Quinn did next was figure out how to cover up Kovacs’s disappearance. He had no feelings one way or the other about the assassin. It would have been a hell of a lot better if they had been able to accomplish everything without killing him and his spotter, but that was not something they could undo.

He seeded information that made it seem as if Kovacs was doing jobs in various locations around the world that kept him on the move every three or four days. Quinn had even written up a report of the Vegas job for him, and submitted it through Kovacs’s hacked email account.

The trickiest part was killing off Kovacs. Quinn had to wait a certain amount of time so that links back to Vegas would not likely be made, but if he waited too long, he risked the very real possibility of someone discovering that the last few months of the assassin’s life had been faked.

He picked his time and spot with care: three and a half months later; Colombia, South America. The assignment: a drug lord assassination. While waiting for the target to appear, Kovacs and his spotter-a guy whose name turned out to be Conner Adams-were captured and subsequently tortured. According to a news report Quinn was able to get into several of the Bogota newspapers, the chopped-up remains of two unidentified Caucasian bodies had been discovered in the jungle. From there it was a fairly simple job of connecting the dots behind the scenes so those in Quinn’s world would know whose bodies they were.

It was a lot of work, and caused him more than a few anxious moments along the way, but it had succeeded. Once it was done, and Kovacs and Adams were official dead, Quinn was able to think about Vegas less and less. Finally, there came a point when it was like none of it had ever happened.

Mila’s unexpected resurrection put a stop to that delusion.

“The Lion,” Quinn said. “How did you figure out it was him?”

The Lion was a label used by some people in the industry when referring to Christopher Mygatt. His mane of blond-now almost white-hair was no doubt in large part responsible for that.

“I went over those last words the assassin said again and again until it was driving me crazy. Because of the Portugal flight, it was a safe assumption that the person behind everything worked in the government. It was Julien who finally figured it out after I told him the whole story. Over the next several months, he did some checking and found the connection.” She paused. “We couldn’t be sure, but what did it matter? It wasn’t like I’d be able to walk up to him and confront him. But then he started popping up in the news. And the rumors about his future started. And then that article.”