Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (2 page)

(???)

rise …to the…

(surface)

Corvino

(who?)

swimming, drowning, reaching, climbing, reaching…

(WHATTHEFUCK?!!!)

He opens his eyes. Sensory awareness kicks in.

Blackness.

(I’m blind)

Panic surges through stiff muscles, cold body jerking against freezing metal.

(I’M BLIND!!)

Get a grip. Control the fear. Keep it together. Old habits…die hard.

In this case they haven’t died, have just been in hibernation for a short taste of eternity.

Where am I? What?—

All he remembers is a small flash of light, then nothing.

He lifts his arms and touches icy metal. Pushing, he realizes he is in a confined space. A box of some kind.

A coffin?

He pushes downward and there is slight movement. Pushes again. Bright fluorescent light explodes, his eyes squeezing shut as the shelf slides open.

So. At least he isn’t blind.

He counts to twenty, allowing his tortured eyes to adjust beneath the lids, then slowly cracks them open. Realizing he is in an institution of some kind, he struggles from the shelf suddenly aware of his nakedness and the white sheet covering him.

And sees the blood.

On the walls. The ceiling. The floor.

Then the bodies.

A doctor, his white coat gore-soaked, bullet holes peppering his torso. A headless naked man lying across the doctor’s legs. And the blasted body of an E.M.S cop who looks as if he’d blown his brains out judging by the position of the M-16 lying beside him.

Reality

—
flipped, decaying cells trying desperately to recall what has happened.

A dead woman. Naked, peeled of flesh.

Panama…

—
| — | —

Before the city drops into the night,

Before the darkness, there’s one moment of light,

It’s when everything’s clear,

The other side seems so near…

—
Jim Carroll

“You can’t say it’s wrong to kill.

Only individual standards make it right or wrong.”

—
Executed killer Melvin Rees, 1959

—
| — | —

PANAMA CITY, PANAMA.

SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1995.

8:47 P.M.

It’s a good night for a kill.

Dominic Corvino stood on the balcony of the two-story stucco house, smiling tersely at the thought as he savored a cigarette.

Twilight in Panama City blazed unusually bright with the glowing orb of Comet Saracen hanging heavily near the horizon. The emerald luminescence of its long tail bleached the magenta sunset an eerie hue, casting traces of shadow on his deep-set features.

He admired the comet’s unearthly allure. The celestial body’s presence felt both ironic and appropriate. In ancient times, men hailed comets as harbingers of doom; they imagined the tail to be the shape of a sword, the circle of haze to be a decapitated head. That grotesque image seemed an apt metaphor for what, in just over fifteen minutes, would happen in the house across the street.

Corvino stretched back against the wall. His lean body bristled with a familiar, comfortable tension as he anticipated the scenario. On one level every assignment played the same: get in, hit the target, get out. Each sortie was planned to create a T’ai Chi-like effect—minimum force to achieve maximum effect, manipulating your opponent’s strength against him. A short, intense burst of the killing art and a swift, silent departure. Poetry writ in bloody motion. Still, on another level, every hit was unique. Each location proved problematic in its own fashion.

As usual, he arrived a stranger in a strange land, but masquerading as a local came with the territory. Sometimes—like that KGB defector mission in Sweden, back in the mid-eighties— physical attributes made it more difficult, but, in this case, his dark Italian features blended ideally into the Latin American environment.

A pang of apprehension gnawed at him though. Why? His imagination? Yet he could sense an undercurrent of electricity in the air, like the sharp taste of ozone before a storm, and the feeling had dogged him since his arrival four hours ago. Caution came with the job. Maybe it was just the comet. He shrugged unconsciously. He wasn’t superstitious, yet his instincts tingled. Still, there was nothing he could put his finger on.

He glanced at the identical house on the opposite side of the street, taking a final drag on the cigarette. Though they’d held the house under constant surveillance for seventy-two hours, and he didn’t need to observe the target location again, the comet’s incandescent beauty had drawn him outside one more time. The color of its tail was a breathtaking shade of pale green, making the twilight look like a cheap movie—day-for-night photography shot by an inexperienced cameraman. When he’d seen the return of Halley’s comet in 1989, he’d been disappointed. Just a faint dot in the night sky. According to the experts, Saracen was an anomaly. Since the start of contemporary records, astronomers had never had the opportunity to observe a comet so close to earth. But they could have a field day with their observations and theories: he had work to do.

Traffic hummed softly in the distance. Lang, the team’s surveillance specialist, reported there’d been little movement around the house all day. A member of the Cali cartel and one of the rogue DEA agents had taken a walk around the grounds. Other than that, they stayed inside.

“
Security’s lax,” Lang had stressed when Corvino arrived and they sat down to go over the layout of the house. “They have one guard patrolling the garden every half an hour.

“
It’s pathetic,” he added contemptuously. A former top security analyst for Great Britain’s MI5, Lang had advised the SAS on the Iranian hostage siege in London back in the mid-seventies. One of the many jewels in his surveillance and strategy crown. As far as Corvino was concerned, the simpler the better, and if the Cali Cartel were getting cocky, screw ‘em.

The face of his Glycine Airman wristwatch showed 08:51 P.M. Corvino ground out the cigarette and entered the bedroom.

Dean Harris lay on the bed staring at the ceiling, chewing gum. The former SEAL commando looked expectantly at Corvino as he entered.

“
Ready?” Corvino said, picking up an Ingram MAC-10 nestled in a shoulder holster from the bedside table. Once it was in place, he donned a casual, thin black cotton jacket.

“
Is the Pope Catholic?” Harris mouthed through the gum.

Corvino waited for Harris to switch off the bedside lamp before he opened the door connecting the two bedrooms.

Skolomowski, Corvino’s back-up, sat in an armchair in the corner quietly sharpening the large blade of his survival knife. Lang sat on a fold-out chair in front of the window, his eyes glued to night vision binoculars standing on a tripod.

“
Status?”

“
Someone went into the bathroom around ten minutes ago. Five of them in the living room right now. The guard does his rounds on schedule.”

“
Too easy,” muttered the Pole, examining the blade of the knife. “No challenge.”

“
Jesus, Skolly, what do you want, downtown Beirut?” Harris snapped as he placed four magazines of ammunition in the belt beneath his jacket. “Makes a change to have a simple hit.”

Much as he didn’t like the Pole because he enjoyed killing, Corvino agreed with Skolomowski. The assignment was insultingly simple for a group like Spiral, Black Ops’ crack hit team.

We could use local talent
, Section Chief Ryan Del Valle had noted to Corvino during the pre-op briefing,
but Hershman insists.

Corvino had sat without speaking in Del Valle’s office. Orders were orders, but he’d silently questioned the necessity of sending top operatives to carry out such a basic mission—execute four members of the Cali Cartel, main suppliers of cocaine to the U.S., and two rogue DEA agents who’d turned, taking with them ten million dollars of unmarked agency bills. Terminate with extreme prejudice, extract the money, and depart.

“
Time to move,” Corvino said, consulting his watch. It was 8:55.

“
Synchronize. Eight fifty-five—”

“
And twenty-five seconds,” Lang added.

“
Check,” Harris said.

“
Check,” said the Pole, sheathing the knife.

“
Let’s go.”

Harris headed for the hallway. Corvino followed.

The stairs creaked as they descended to the first floor. The old house had stood empty for several months until a few days ago when Mitra Alonso, the team’s local contact, had leased it from a real estate company in downtown Panama City.

As they reached the door, Harris paused, pulling a silver dollar from his pocket. The coin had a small indentation near the circumference where a .38 bullet had hit during an operation in Boston back in ‘92. Their target had been an IRA cell whose members were shipping Semtex to Britain. The mission had been one of the few blots on Spiral’s almost perfect record; a terrorist had escaped, murdered a bystander on a Cambridge street, and nearly killed Harris, who took a bullet in the shoulder and would have received a second in the chest if the slug hadn’t hit his wallet.

Harris held the coin up and kissed it. Corvino smiled faintly at the superstitious act. He found it impossible to believe in anything but himself and his skills as an assassin. There was no God, no Fate, just the ability to kill and survive.

“
Finished?”

“
Sure.” Harris opened the door.

All the houses in the area were set well back from the street, fronted by high walls or a thick screen of trees to insure privacy. As they reached the sidewalk Corvino glanced around casually. To an idle observer, the two men could be friends heading off for a night out at a bar. They strolled across the deserted street, their weapons concealed by their loose jackets.

The Cartel safe house was surrounded by an eight-foot white brick wall, the entrance an ornate iron gate with an electronic lock operated by a manual switch on the other side. They approached the entrance slowly. Harris stopped, removed a pack of Marlboros from his pocket, offered one to Corvino. Playing along with the act, he declined. As Harris lit the cigarette, Corvino scanned the street.
Clear
, he nodded, linking his fingers into a foothold, tossing the cigarette to one side. Corvino lifted and Harris reached the top of the wall, swinging himself over with the grace of an acrobat. Corvino heard his partner drop lightly on the other side of the wall. Within seconds the gate clicked open and Corvino slipped inside.

“
If the guard’s on schedule, he’ll be here in two minutes,’ Harris said.

Corvino nodded in the direction of the house.

They broke from the wall’s cover, sticking to the patches of shadow cast by the trees. Twilight had slipped into night, a full moon riding low in the sky behind the house, but the strange light of the comet illuminated the front yard. They moved silently across the two hundred yards to a clump of bushes near the front door. Somewhere inside, a radio played, faint strains of classical music leaking from an open upstairs window around the right side of the house. The wall lamp next to the front door was switched off, and the front of the building was shrouded with shadows.

Harris slid a stiletto blade from a sheath on his belt as he blended with the shadows. Corvino removed a silenced 9mm from beneath his jacket, clicking the safety off as he took up a position on the opposite side of the front door.

9:02 P.M.

They waited.

9:05 came and went. Lang had said the guard made his circuit at five and thirty-five past the hour, always walking clockwise around the building.

At 9:10, Corvino shifted slightly, relaxing his shoulder muscles. Where was the guard? Other than the faint echo of music, he could hear no signs of life from inside the house. He knew from the house’s floor plan that the main living area was at the rear. He decided to reconnoiter the left side. Signaling his intentions to Harris, Corvino crept silently through the shadows. He paused at the corner, crouching down, and risked a look to confirm the coast was clear. Nothing. Light spilled from a window two hundred feet away. The living room. He slipped around the corner.

When he reached the window, he listened intently. Just the radio or sound system, whatever the music was coming from; Chopin’s
Nocturnes
, he now realized.

Angling himself to peer in diagonally through the glass, his face away from the rectangle of light, he froze.

A thick streak of gore decorated a white wall, and a bloody corpse lay beside the couch.

What the hell?

He ducked down, adrenaline racing through his body. Positioning himself on the other side of the window, he risked a second look.

The rest of the room was an abattoir. Blood and entrails were strewn across the polished wood floor. A mutilated body he recognized as one of the DEA agents sat slumped in the far corner. Another lay under a mahogany table in a fetal position.

Before he could absorb the details, a cold hand grabbed the back of his neck, slamming his head against the wall.

Corvino’s vision exploded into a nebula of white stars.

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA,

SATURDAY, MAY 27.

9:10 P.M. EST.

The sixth beer buzzed through Nick Packard’s brain and everything was sweet: the unseasonably high humidity ceased being uncomfortable, and the fact Sandy was leaving in the morning made the night’s promise more intense. He mouthed the lines “I want to dive into your ocean” along with the Eurythmics CD playing on the stereo.

Sandy gently stroked back a stray strand of blonde hair from her face as she sipped her glass of chardonnay. Leaning over the candle-lit table to toast him, she smiled and he felt a chill run up his spine.