Juan Gómez-Jurado - Contract with God aka The Moses Expedition

Of course, Marla wasn’t the only one. In her head, losing her daughter and her mother somehow became the fault of ‘Saddam’s dirty dogs’. Marla was given a dishonourable discharge and sentenced to four years in prison. She served six months. After she got out of jail she went straight to the security firm DX5 and asked for work. She wanted to return to Iraq.

They gave her work, but she didn’t return to Iraq straight away. Instead she fell into Mogens Dekker’s hands. Literally.

It had been eighteen months and Marla had learned a great deal. She could shoot much better, knew more philosophy, and had experienced making love with a white man. Colonel Dekker had been turned on almost instantly by the woman with the big strong legs and the face of an angel. Marla had found him somewhat comforting, and the remainder of her comfort derived from the smell of gunpowder. She had killed for the first time and she liked it.

A lot.

She also liked her crew… sometimes. Dekker had chosen them well: a handful of assassins with no conscience who enjoyed killing under the impunity of a government contract. While they were on the battlefield, they were blood brothers. But on a hot sticky afternoon like this, when they had ignored Dekker’s orders to get some sleep and instead were playing cards, things took a different turn. They became as irritated and dangerous as a gorilla at a cocktail party. The worst one was Torres.

‘You’re messing me around, Jackson. And you haven’t even given me a little kiss,’ said the small Colombian. It made Marla especially uneasy when he played with his small rusty razor. Like him, it was apparently harmless but capable of slitting a man’s throat as if it were butter. The Colombian was slicing small white strips off the edge of the plastic table where they were sitting. There was a smile on his lips.

‘ Du schei β t’ mich an , Torres. Jackson has a full house and you’re full with shit,’ said Alryk Gottlieb, who was constantly battling with English prepositions. The taller of the twins had hated Torres with a vengeance ever since they had watched a World Cup match between their two countries. They had said things to each other, fists had flown. In spite of his six foot two frame, Alryk didn’t sleep well at night. If he was still alive, it may only have been because Torres wasn’t sure he could take down both twins.

‘All I’m saying is that her cards are a little too good,’ Torres shot back, smiling even more.

‘Well, are you going to deal or what?’ said Marla, who had cheated but wanted to remain cool. She had already won almost two hundred from him.

This streak can’t last much longer. I’ll have to start letting him win, or one night I’m going to end up with that blade in my neck , she thought.

Slowly Torres began to deal making all sorts of faces to distract them.

The truth is, the bastard’s cute. If he wasn’t such a psycho and didn’t smell weird, he’d turn me on big time.

At that moment the frequency scanner, which sat on a table six feet from where they were playing, started to beep.

‘What the hell?’ said Marla.

‘It’s the verdammt scanner, Jackson.’

‘Torres, go look at it.’

‘The fuck I will. I bet five bucks.’

Marla got up and looked at the screen on the scanner, a machine the size of a small video recorder that nobody used any more, except that this one had an LCD screen and cost a hundred times more.

‘Seems OK; it’s restarting,’ Marla said, returning to the table. ‘I’ll see your five and raise you five.’

‘I’m out,’ said Alryk, leaning back in his chair.

‘Chickenshit. Doesn’t even have a pair,’ said Marla.

‘You think you’re the one running the show, Mrs Dekker?’ Torres said.

Marla didn’t mind the words as much as his tone. Suddenly she forgot about letting him win.

‘No way, Torres. I live in coloured land, bro.’

‘What colour? Shit brown?’

‘Any colour except yellow. Funny… the coward’s colour, same as on the top of your flag.’

Marla was sorry as soon as she said it. Torres might be a filthy degenerate rat from Medellín, but for a Colombian his country and his flag were as sacred as Jesus. Her opponent pressed his lips together so tightly they almost disappeared and his cheeks turned slightly purple. Marla felt both scared and excited; she enjoyed putting Torres down and drinking in his rage.

Now I’ll have to lose the two hundred bucks I won from him and another two hundred of my own. This pig is so pissed off he’s likely to hit me, even though he knows Dekker would kill him.

Alryk looked at them, more than a little worried. Marla knew how to take care of herself, but at that moment she felt as if she were crossing a mine field.

‘Come on, Torres, raise Jackson. She’s bluffing.’

‘Leave him alone. I don’t think he plans to shave any new customers today, right, fucker?’

‘What are you talking about, Jackson?’

‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t you who did the white prof last night?’

Torres looked very serious.

‘It wasn’t me.’

‘It had your signature all over it: a small, sharp instrument, low in the back.’

‘I’m telling you, it wasn’t me.’

‘And I’m saying that I saw you arguing with the ponytailed white dude on the ship.’

‘Come off it, I argue with a lot of people. Nobody understands me.’

‘Then who was it? The simoon? Or maybe the priest?’

‘Sure, it could have been the old crow.’

‘You’re not serious, Torres,’ Alryk cut in. ‘That priest is only a warmer bruder .’

‘Hasn’t he told you? This big-time hit man is scared shitless of the priest.’

‘I’m not scared of anything. I’m just telling you, he’s dangerous,’ Torres said, pulling a face.

‘I think you swallowed the story that he’s from the CIA. For Christ’s sake, he’s an old man.’

‘Only three or four years older than your senile boyfriend. And as far as I know, the boss can break a donkey’s neck with his bare hands.’

‘Damn right, fucker,’ said Marla, who loved bragging about her man.

‘He’s much more dangerous than you think, Jackson. If you’d taken your head out of your ass for one moment you’d have read the report. That guy is Special Ops pararescue. There’s nobody better. A few months before the boss picked you up as the group’s mascot, we did an operation in Tikrit. There was a Special Forces para in our unit. You wouldn’t believe the things I saw that guy do… they’re not normal. Those dudes have death stuck all over them.’

‘Paras are bad news. Hard like hammers,’ Alryk said.

‘Go to hell, the two of you, fucking Catholic babies,’ Marla said. ‘What do you think he carries in that black briefcase? C4? A gun? You both patrol that canyon with an M4 that can spit out nine hundred bullets a minute. What’s he going to do, smack you with his Bible? Maybe he’ll ask the doctor for a scalpel to cut off your nuts.’

‘I’m not worried about the doc,’ Torres said, waving his hand dismissively. ‘She’s just some Mossad dyke. I can handle her. But Fowler-’

‘Forget the old crow. Hey, if all this is an excuse for not admitting that you took care of the white prof-’

‘Jackson, I’m telling you it wasn’t me. But trust me: nobody here is who they say they are.’

‘Then thank God we have an Ypsilon protocol on this mission,’ Jackson said, displaying her perfectly white teeth, which had cost her mother eighty double shifts in the diner where she worked.

‘As soon as your boyfriend says sarsaparilla it’s time for heads to roll. The first one I’m going after is the priest.’