Free Full Black by Brad Thor Page B

down, and one of them left to purchase some items he had asked for.
    The man came back twenty minutes later with energy drinks, candy bars, and first-aid supplies. They allowed Chase to use the garage’s filthy, foul-smelling bathroom to clean himself up and tend to his wounds. He did the best he could and then came out and choked down some nourishment. He hated energy drinks and he wasn’t all that big on candy bars, but that was the quintessential IT/hacker diet and it was important that he looked the part, right down to the smallest detail, as the smallest details often played the biggest part in making or breaking a cover.
    If he had wanted to, Chase could have taken out both in quick succession. There were multiple items lying around the old garage that could have been used as weapons. In the bathroom, he had found a decent strip of metal that he had folded to about four inches long. It was rusting, yet had a sharp enough point that it could be used as a shiv. He wrapped the handle portion of the weapon with plumber’s tape he’d found around one of the pipes beneath the sink.
    He’d been processing every single nuanced, nonverbal cue the two men had been giving off since they had picked him up. He knew all too well what he could end up having to do and how far he might have to go and he was getting himself all jacked up over it. He had to get it under control.
    Taking a look in the mirror, he took a deep breath and told himself to relax, everything was cool. All that nervousness was just his limbic system. A student of Hagakure, he’d meditated extensively on death. He’d done so right before this operation. It was the same before every operation. Death was inevitable. He imagined the worst for himself daily. Whatever was going to happen, was going to happen. That didn’t mean, though, that he wouldn’t take as many of them with him as possible. Nevertheless, he decided to abandon the homemade weapon.
    While he probably could have concealed it in his pocket, if it had been discovered, it would have created no end of problems for him. Even the most paranoid of computer geeks wasn’t going to be fashioning his own shivs.
    In the gray half-light that spilled in from the dirty glass skylights above, Chase studied the men who’d been charged with babysitting him. If he had to, he could take them, but there was a lot that could go wrong, and if something did go wrong, he had no doubt either of the men would kill him without hesitation.
    They were of medium height and solidly built. Their eyes were hard and dark, like pieces of flint, and told him everything he needed to know about them. These men were no strangers to violence.
    Despite the men’s rough demeanor, Chase kept up the haughty hacker act and repeatedly asked the men how much longer they were going to have to wait until they could leave the garage.
    When one of the men retrieved a newspaper from the car and tossed it at him, Chase took a look at it and threw it right back at the man, saying in Arabic, “Do I look like I read Swedish?”
    The sooner the men could get rid of him, the happier they were going to be.
    Two hours later, one of the men’s mobile phones rang and he listened before saying a few words back and hanging up. He then motioned for his colleague to join him at the far end of the garage where they conversed in private. Chase didn’t like it. The sudden sequestration made him very apprehensive.
    When the men finally returned, he asked them what the call had been about, but they wouldn’t say. He was starting to regret having left his shiv in the bathroom. Once again, he took stock of anything in his immediate surroundings that could be used as a weapon.
    With nothing to do but wait, he cracked another energy drink and sipped on it as he put together a plan for which of the two men to kill first and how, if he needed to.
    He was running through the clever ways he could dispose of the bodies when there was the bleat of a car horn outside