He kissed Jennifer on the cheek, saying, “You’re going to wear a dress for the ceremony, right, Koko?”
Jennifer was in jeans and a T-shirt for the rehearsal, her blond hair askew, looking like a surfer ready to go to hit the breakers on Folly Beach. She grimaced at his use of her callsign. She hated the name, and he knew it, using it solely to poke her a little bit.
She smiled and said, “That depends. You going to show up dressed for a wedding instead of like some billboard for 5-11 commando clothes? And why is your callsign the Wolf? Why do I get to be a gorilla?”
He smiled back and said, “A mystery for another time. I’ll never tell.” He glanced around the setting, seeing majestic live oaks, a fountain, and an expanse of lawn surrounded by stately brick buildings. He said, “Pretty nice place for a wedding, though. How’d you get it?”
“It’s the school Amena goes to now. The place that convinced the Oversight Council to let her stay. They’re giving us a break on the rental cost because of COVID, but they’re still enforcing the crowd mandate.”
The Oversight Council was the board that controlled all Taskforce activity, and I’d pushed the limits of their approval to the breaking point with Amena, our little Syrian refugee project. They’d wanted to ship her ass back to Syria when they’d found out I’d smuggled her into the country using Taskforce assets, but had eventually agreed to let us sponsor her, provided we became a legitimate family.
Jennifer and I had hastily married with a justice of the peace, then enrolled Amena into Ashley Hall as a boarding student. Which brought us to the wedding ceremony being planned now. Jennifer couldn’t stand the justice of the peace thing. She wanted a ceremony, and wasn’t willing to wait for the pandemic to subside to get it.
Wolffe said, “Well, I’m glad I made the cut line for the trip. I feel honored. I was hoping to see that crazy Israeli, though. Where’s she?”
Aaron and Shoshana had conducted more than one operation in support of the Taskforce, all off the books of even the Taskforce, and Wolffe respected her skill—even as he also knew she was a little . . . off.
Jennifer said, “I don’t know. She said she’d be here. I suppose I can switch out Amena for my maid of honor.”
That was probably a good trade in my mind. Amena was only fourteen, but she had seen enough of the world to give her the maturity of someone twice her age. And she wasn’t liable to strangle the preacher because she “saw something.”
But I knew that wasn’t what Jennifer wanted. I said, “The wedding isn’t for a week. We can always talk her through it on our own. She’ll be here.”
Jennifer was looking away from us, toward the back gate on Smith Street. Two people were talking to the security guard, trying to get in.
She broke into a radiant smile and said, “Speak of the devil.”
Chapter 5
Garrett shook himself awake like a dog wringing water off its body, the blackouts becoming something he was getting more comfortable with. After the killing, after the trauma, his brain would literally shut down, and he would collapse, catatonic. The first time it was scary. Now, with the third death, it was becoming routine.
He looked to his left and saw the dead prostitute. One more woman who didn’t want to connect, but he’d learned from the first one. Don’t use a blade. Too messy. It was just as easy to strangle the life out of them.
The first killing had been a disaster—the woman running around the small room with her hand clamped to her neck, the blood flowing like a water balloon squeezed by a child.
Make no mistake, it wasn’t the death that shocked him. He’d killed people before in the heat of combat, but never with a knife. Most had been with a bullet at a distance of eighty or a hundred meters. That killing had been another level of intensity entirely.
He looked at her dead eyes and thought, Why did you laugh? Why couldn’t you just give me what I paid for?
Like the other two women, all he’d wanted was what she had offered. A chance to connect with her. Someone who wouldn’t care about his deficiencies.
Everything had gone well, right up until she’d pulled his pants down. He couldn’t get an erection. She’d worked furiously, and he’d encouraged her on and on, and then she’d tried to cup his testicles. Located his shame.
“You got no balls? What is this?” she said.
And then the rage had struck. A red level of violence he had lived with for four years, which cost the woman her life.
He knelt down and recited the Lord’s Prayer, then glanced at the body, a niggling bit of his subconscious realizing that he was growing used to the killing. Scarier still, he was growing to like it, wanting to inflict pain in an attempt to release his own.
This time he was in a decrepit Airstream trailer on the outskirts of a greenspace in the center of the same neighborhood he’d killed the other two. Called Esposizione Universale Roma, or EUR, it was south of the city center of Rome, Italy.
Built by Benito Mussolini in preparation for the world’s fair in 1942, it was designed as a new urban hub celebrating fascism and his rule. World War II put a stop to that fantasy, and now it had the ignominy of being known as the red-light district of Rome. While the city looked away from the street walkers in the area, it still didn’t allow actual brothels, which meant the men and women had to get creative to ply their trade. In this case, a trailer on the edge of a park.
He rose from his knees and leaned over the soiled mattress where the woman lay. Ignoring her open eyes, he kissed her cheek, whispering, “I’m sorry.”
He glanced at his watch, seeing it was almost seven a.m. He’d been unconscious for nearly six hours, making him late for the meeting with his men at the Priory. Even worse, making him late for the command of the next attack.
He hurriedly searched the room for any traces he’d left, using his cell phone to call his men, not worried about anyone tracking him through the cell towers because he was calling through the Wi-Fi in the woman’s trailer. She’d paid for the service with a portable Mi-Fi device to show porn videos to prospective clients. But it hadn’t helped his mood. In fact, it did nothing but elevate the rage when he saw the virile men.
Using an app called Zello, he connected and said, “Hey, I’m running a little late, but I’ll be there soon. Are we good for today?”
“Yes. He’s headed south just like he’s done every single weekend.”
“We can’t make a mistake here. The PMU in Iraq needs to be blamed. Keta’ib Hezbollah.”
“They will be. We have the note ready to go.”
“What’s the timeline?”
“Probably an hour. Maybe more.”
“And Paris? What’s happening there?”
“I’m waiting on the news now. Nothing yet.”
He said, “Okay, I’m headed to the Priory. See you soon.”
He opened the trailer door, peering out the grimy window first to make sure he wasn’t seen, then jogged to his vehicle.
Driving north out of the neighborhood, he knew it would take him a good thirty minutes to get to the Priory in Rome’s city center, and every second was precious. He traveled as fast as he dared without drawing attention, eventually circling around the Colosseum, the crowds much sparser than they would ordinarily be on a June morning before the pandemic, but coming back to life. Reaching Via Sistina, he miraculously found a parking spot adjacent to the top of the famed Spanish Steps—a luxury even considering the lack of traffic due to COVID.