John Gilstrap - Hostage Zero

He pointed. “Boobies. A-okay.” He gave a thumbs-up and beamed a brown-eyed smile.

She laughed again. “Why, thank you.”

“Can I see them?”

“No!” Brandy felt herself blushing as she glanced around the room to make sure they weren’t still being watched. “How old are you?”

“I’m eighteen,” he said.

Uh huh. “In that case, I’m seventy-three and way too old for you.”

The boy gave a resigned shrug. “Okay. You need to follow me.”

Brandy scowled. “To where?”

He nodded to the envelope. “To where that needs to go.”

The boy stood and without looking back, started walking back toward the main door.

Brandy struggled out of her chair, bumping the table and spilling some of her drink. “Wait!” she yelled at a whisper. Who the hell was this kid? By the time they reached the door, they were walking together, and the boy seemed more than happy to be holding her hand.

Her hours in the air-conditioning had allowed her to forget just how impossibly hot it was outside. She’d worn cotton capris and a lightweight blouse, thinking that they would fit the bill for “dressing for a warm climate,” but she realized after just one block of walking that she in fact did not own a wardrobe that would make this kind of peanut butter-thick humidity anything but oppressive. She was sweating, for heaven’s sake! That’s okay when you’re in the gym, but out here on the street it was humiliating. She was soaking her blouse. And just what are you supposed to do with a sweat-soaked blouse when you’re in a foreign country?

Two blocks away from the hotel, they turned right to head farther away from the water and the breezes it provided. “Where are we going?” she asked again.

The boy shot a smile over his shoulder. “Not far. We’ll be there soon.”

“What’s your name?”

“Soon,” he said, pointing to a spot somewhere up ahead.

As the water fell farther away and the temperature rose, so did the terrain, and there was nothing subtle about the hills. To think that she’d thought Rome was exhausting! That was like a basketball court compared to these hills.

Brandy tried her best to keep up with the boy who was her guide, but he inevitably pulled away-in one case as far as a half block ahead-before turning around and waiting for her. She felt an odd urge to apologize to the kid.

Farther still, and higher still. The street started to take on that old Europe look with narrow roadways and unbroken walls of building facades. Fifteen minutes into their sojourn, Brandy began to have second thoughts. The neighborhood was not a place where she would feel comfortable walking alone, and the presence of a twelve-year-old who featured himself a real man did nothing to make her feel safer.

Come to think of it, what kind of fool follows a kid whose name she doesn’t even know? For all she knew, she was being set up for a mugging or a kidnapping. But if that had been the case, how would he have known the signs and countersigns?

No, this was the real deal. What had Jerry Sjogren called it? Tradecraft. This was real tradecraft-the life of a covert operator. And let’s be honest, it didn’t get a lot better than this.

The boy had stopped again, but this time only four or five doors ahead of her. That smile beamed again, and he pointed to a doorway. “We are here,” he announced.

He pointed at the pink facade of a row house that might once have been grand, but now sagged with age. It occurred to her that this is what San Francisco neighborhoods might look like if no one painted or did repairs for twenty years. The heavy wooden door used to be purple. It was equipped with a substantial old-style knob that looked to be made of brass. Brandy wondered if she would be able to raise a high gloss from it if she polished it aggressively.

She stood in front of the door on the crumbling brick sidewalk and shot a glance to the boy.

He smiled.

“Should I knock?”

He jabbed a finger toward the door. “Just go in,” he said.

Brandy hesitated. This didn’t feel right at all. Why was he making such a point of her going first? Was this some sort of a trap?

“It’s okay,” the boy said. “I am not allowed.”

Oh, now that made sense, didn’t it? When you’re arranging to have someone killed, you didn’t need nosy street urchins hanging around to witness the event.

“The man is waiting for you inside,” the boy said. He sealed the deal with that magnificent smile.

For crying out loud, what was she so nervous about? She was meeting an envoy of the secretary of defense. It was as if she were walking into a meeting with Secretary Leger himself. There could be no safer place in the world for her. This was what tradecraft was all about.

There’d be no doing it slowly, though. She needed to proceed with the commitment of pulling off a Band-Aid. She climbed the stoop, turned the knob, and pushed the door open.

In the transition between the bright sunlight and the darkened interior, she felt completely blinded.

She called, “Hello-oh!”

What the hell was that? The second syllable of hello escaped without her thinking, driven by a piercing pain above her right breast. For half a second, it registered as a thick pin-prick, but then in the next half second, she realized that it was growing in intensity. She brought her left hand up to touch the pain, and then another jolt struck her again in the chest. This one hurt ten times worse than the first, and though she wanted to yell, she could produce no sound.

The agony was exquisite-completely off the scale. It caved her in in the middle, and as she doubled over, she got the first glimpse of blood on the floor. How about that? There was blood on her hand, too. And on her blouse. She felt the world spin, and as she struggled to steady herself against the wall, she lost her grip on the envelope. She saw it slipping through her fingers in slow motion, and while she tried to reach for it, nothing about her body was working right anymore. She had no choice but to watch it sail across the filthy linoleum.

As she slid down the wall to join the envelope on the floor, she saw a form step out of the shadow on the side of the center staircase. He carried something at his side. Something in his hand. As he closed to within a few feet, he raised the object at arm’s length and pointed it at her head.

Brandy gasped. “Please don’t-”

Three bullets for a single kill was embarrassing, but there was no other way. True silence was a necessity in the middle of the day, and that meant using subsonic loads to launch a bullet through a suppressor at a slow enough speed that the round would not create its own sonic boom in flight. For light loads like that, Mitch Ponder used a. 22 with a full copper casing. If he could have gotten close enough to guarantee a one-shot kill, he might have used a fully suppressed. 45, but by the time the combustion gases made it through the baffles of a. 45 suppressor, there was never enough left to eject the round. If he’d wanted to live in a world where you only get one shot at a target, he’d have been born in the nineteenth century.

Silhouetted as she was against the sunlight, a head shot was out of the question, so he’d gone for center of mass. Even then, the distortion of the light caused him to miss the heart twice. Just as well, he supposed. If he’d hit the sternum, the slow, light bullet might not have penetrated the chest cavity at all.

“Please don’t,” she said.

Mitch hated it when they begged. No matter how small and underpowered the weapon, a bullet through the eye at close range always made it to the brain. Finally, she lay still.

Mitch stooped to pick up the envelope his target had dropped and gave it a quick glance to make that no blood had splashed that far. He wasn’t sentimental about these things, but in his line of work, you didn’t want objects in your possession to be spattered. He smiled. Another advantage to using small rounds.