The Perfect Candidate: A Lance Priest / Preacher Thriller (No. 1) (30 page)

Lance passed one such debate between three elderly men in the street. They each had an opinion and none of them were afraid of either the US or Saddam. Their words were brave, at least.

Lance was two blocks from the warehouse and about to walk up the steps of a three-story apartment building that provided an excellent view of the warehouse district below. He had been told to step into a third-floor apartment that had been cleared out weeks prior. He knew just where to find the building. He’d looked at it and everything else on maps and satellite images. He knew Baghdad better than most locals.

Approaching the steps, he spotted a man standing and smoking and trying too hard to be inconspicuous. A sentry; and not a very good one at that. Lance, wearing his thawb and
keffiyeh and carrying his leather satchel,
walked past him without a word and pushed the door open to enter the apartment building. He took a few steps into the lobby to see if anyone was around. No one was. He stopped to double back to the front door. Peeking through the small window in the middle of the beaten and battered door, Lance could see the sentry raise a radio to his mouth and speak. The man turned to look in the direction of the door and Lance stepped back into the dark. A few moments later, a young woman, a girl maybe 17, came up the stairs and pushed the door open. Lance turned to walk slowly toward the stairs.

The girl came through the door and quickly caught up to and passed Lance on her way to the stairs. Lance stepped aside and bowed slightly. “Shukran,” she shyly thanked him for letting her take the stairs ahead of him. Lance let her bound up the stairs before he took them much slower. When she rounded the first landing, he stopped on the first step and looked back to the door and waited a few beats. The sentry didn’t enter. Lance looked around the small lobby again. A couple of chairs sat against the wall and two prayer rugs lay on the floor in the corner. He turned back to the stairs and made his way up.

He saw nothing of note on the second floor landing and was halfway up the third flight of stairs when he heard the loud knocking from the third floor followed by the pleas from a girl. He assumed it was the girl who had preceded him. He was near the top stair when she knocked harder, more open-handed slapping of the door than knocking.

Her pleas were more serious this time. And her next statement caused Lance to freeze on the last stair. He peeked around the corner to the end of the hall where the girl stood. “Open the door. Amal, what are you doing? Why won’t my key work?” And she slapped the door again. She was the picture of an impatient teenage girl forced to wait. “Amal, open the door!”

Lance could have stepped up onto the floor and walked the other direction three doors down to the empty apartment waiting for him. But he stayed where he was. The sentry outside; the girl’s knocking and pleading; warnings went off in his head. Before she could knock again, the latch of the door turned. The girl’s demeanor lightened but she was still pissed. “Finally, what have you been doing?” Those were sadly her final words.

The door opened only an inch or two and Lance spotted the silencer. Just as quickly, a single shot was fired into the girl’s forehead. Lance pulled his head back after seeing the minuscule blood droplets spray out the back of the hijab covering her head. He heard her body collapse to the floor with a thud and kept his back to the wall as he reached into his robe to pull out his own silenced gun. The door swung open and someone stepped out and quietly pulled the girl’s dead body into the apartment. It took another few seconds for the door to close.

Lance waited for 15 seconds before lowering himself to the floor and peeking around the corner from foot level. The hall was clear. Aside from a small bit of blood, there was nothing else out of order. No other sign a young life had just been extinguished.

Something changed
. Preacher furrowed his brow. A life he knew nothing about minutes earlier was over. Innocence lost. It was wrong. It ticked him off. And he was going to do something about it.
Something bad
.

He stepped back down the stairs and listened for any sounds below. It was faint, but he could hear a television from a second-floor apartment. He took a few more steps back to the landing between the third and second floors. He calculated the possibilities and quickly came to the obvious conclusion this incident was related to the nuclear weapons deal.

Someone seeking a view of the scene below had taken over the girl’s apartment and killed everyone inside. Instead of arranging for an apartment with a view of the neighborhood to be cleared by credible means, the person or persons now inside that apartment killed its tenants. Quick and easy.
That was cold
.

That also meant they were pros and quite comfortable taking lives. Preacher ran through all of the players Seibel had informed him of over the past weeks. He didn’t know why, but this felt like Russians. If he had to choose, he’d guess this was the work of the mysterious Marta and crew.

“Dumb friggin’ luck.” He whispered to himself. He needed to focus on getting back to his assigned duties as lookout and radio point man, but he also needed to act on this new information. If he had truly stumbled on Marta’s operation, he needed to either inform others or handle it himself. He could simply walk back up the stairs like any resident and make his way three doors down where he could report in. But he couldn’t requisition resources at this late juncture. The Delta Force teams were in or nearing positions. Tarwanah and Jamaani could be conscripted into an impromptu side mission, but they were blocks away and supposed to keep their trucks at the ready for repositioning. The plan, although built with flexibility, did not allow for a reapportioning of resources less than half an hour before going live.

Preacher decided his next actions in an instant. He continued down the stairs past the second floor to the first floor lobby. He spotted a door just beside the stairs and opened it. It was a closet as he assumed. The lobby was still clear. Preacher could sense the siege mentality of the place. People were in their homes behind locked doors; seeking security and information from their televisions and radios. They were thankfully not congregating in the lobby. Preacher crossed the small reception area and stopped at the front door.

The sentry was still standing and smoking. Preacher opened the door, looked both ways down the street and saw only a few people moving about. No vehicle traffic. He stepped silently down the four steps and reached the sentry without being noticed. He then delivered a savage blow the side of the man’s neck. The guy was instantly stunned and breathless and collapsed. Preacher pulled the man’s arm over his shoulder and pivoted him so he was facing the stairs. He laughed and said to anyone within earshot, “I know my friend. You are tired, troubled by these times as am I. Let me help you home.”

The sentry gasped for breath but had no strength to fight back. Preacher yanked the man’s arm tightly around his own neck and with his left arm reached around the man’s torso to apply great pressure on his abdomen; this kept him from getting a full breath. A few seconds later he had the sentry up the steps and through the door. Once inside, he headed for the chairs against the wall. He sat the sentry down in a chair, put a knee in his chest and from a sheath strapped to his leg pulled a knife. The sentry’s eyes bulged when he saw the blade come up to his throat. The tough sneer on the man’s face faded.

“I can kill you fast or drain you slow. Which do you prefer?” Preacher leaned into the Iraqi’s face with a menacing smile. “Or didn’t you know you were going to die today?” With that, Preacher stuck the razor sharp knifepoint into the man’s throat a half inch and twisted. He brought his left hand up to cover the sentry’s mouth. Blood streamed down the man’s neck

“Scream and I cut your head off. Quickly now, I have no time. Tell me your name. Any lie in your eyes and I plunge my knife deeper into your flesh.”

Preacher removed his hand slightly from the Iraqi’s mouth.

The sentry, a trained killer without a soul moments ago was reduced to a child, a stuttering infant. “Nimad,” he whispered through the pain. His tough exterior shredded by the look in Preacher’s eyes. This stranger
wanted
to kill him, wanted blood.

Preacher put his hand back over Nimad’s mouth and moved the knife’s point down to the hollow of the neck below the Adam’s apple. “Good. Nimad, you were standing guard outside this building. I can tell you are a professional. My guess is you are local talent hired because you are expendable. I watched the girl get killed upstairs. And I saw you radio to them before she came up. You killed her as much as they did. Tell me before I kill you, how many Russians are up there?”

Nimad made no motion to speak. Only further widened his eyes. Trying hard to be a killer.

“You can live if you tell me what I need to know now. Or I will count to three and then open every artery and vein in your neck. You can watch yourself bleed to death and then drown in your own blood. One, two.”

He blurted something. Preacher moved his hand an inch. “There are three in the apartment. Two Russians, a man and one woman. The other is Turkish.”

“Shukran.” Preacher thanked Nimad in Arabic. He needed to move onto the next phase of this off-assignment project and couldn’t let this man go. He couldn’t just knock him out and have him wake up in minutes. Preacher already knew what he had to do. He knew he would do it the moment he saw an innocent young girl take a bullet.
He was going to kill them all
.

Protocol of a knife kill called for him to cover Nimad’s mouth and squeeze his nose to cut off air flow and insert the 7-inch blade at a 45 degree angle down through his neck, basically reaching into the chest cavity, maybe his heart. This movement would slice through esophagus, trachea and a variety of arteries. Death would come 30 seconds later.

But Preacher didn’t want to follow protocol. He wanted to send a message to whoever finds Nimad that this man had done wrong.

Preacher violently sliced the knife across and into the sentry’s neck. The blade eviscerated veins, arteries and muscle, cutting all the way to vertebrae. Instantly, blood gushed down his neck but Nimad could not move. Preacher put incredible pressure on his mouth and his knee remained pressed to Nimad’s chest. The sentry struggled violently, but for only a moment. He was dead in nine seconds.

Preacher knew he had taken a chance capturing and killing the man here in the lobby, but time was lacking and he needed basic information. He left Nimad’s blood-soaked body seated and dragged the whole chair to the closet near the stairs. He shoved the bloodstained body and chair into the small room. There was a trail of blood on the floor, but nothing too bad. He didn’t have time clean accordingly. He grabbed the radio from the dead man’s pocket, closed the door and turned to the stairs.

Moments later he was up the stairwell, taking them two and three at a time. He stopped on the second floor landing and brought the radio close to his mouth. He turned the sound down to its lowest level. He assumed the sentry had a single radio on one frequency and the remainder of the operation was on other frequencies. This place was hoppin with radio traffic on multiple frequencies and about to get a whole lot busier. The satellite phone in his left pocket chirped. He turned it to silent.

Last chance. Preacher could step up onto the third floor to the empty apartment and complete his mission. Or, he could do what he already knew he was going to do and walk the other way down the hall to the apartment currently occupied by at least one Russian killer and likely more. He couldn’t just burst into the room and start shooting. He needed a diversion. The small radio in his left hand was a good place to start. He stepped back down to the second floor and pushed the transmit button.

He did his best to imitate Nimad’s accent as he whispered into the radio. “This is Nimad. There are police.”

He left it hanging there and waited a few moments.

“What do you mean?” The male voice spoke in Arabic. But it was not natural. The accent was foreign. Russian.

“Police in cars and on foot. They are coming.” Preacher added.

“How many?” The voice asked. Lance did not answer immediately. He waited a beat.

“They are coming-” He abruptly cut his transmission before he finished the last syllable. Now he had to see how his diversion would be responded to. If there were other resources close by they could call them from other locations to converge on the apartment building. But Preacher was banking on the other option. The apartment unit the Russians were in was on the other side of the building from the lobby so they could not see if indeed the police were approaching. Preacher was convinced they would send someone to the lobby to check.