Free American Blood by Ben Sanders Page B

Do you understand? Even if you don’t value yourself, once everyone else is dead you realize how much has been taken. Wives, children, friends. Like that. Picture it, having no one. Earth with no sun, that kind of thing. Wheeling blind in the void.”
    Marshall didn’t answer.
    “Not to say that we won’t come for you. But just to show there are alternatives. If you’re elusive.”
    “I’m not elusive. I’d quite like to be found.”
    “I think you might renege on that at some point. We’ll see. I think you’re one of these people who think that because we inhabit the same territory, we also inhabit the same world. Not the case. I can live in yours, but you can’t live in mine. You don’t issue a threat from your realm into mine and expect to keep breathing.”
    Marshall didn’t answer.
    “Believe in God?”
    Marshall said, “No.”
    “What about the devil?”
    “Ditto.”
    “Maybe reassess that. You’ve got him on the phone right now.”
    The call ended.
    The world and its features slowly forming: birds above and the traffic beside him and the phone warm on his cheek. A brief quiet in the hot confines of the vehicle as he replayed it all and wondered into what madness he’d entered for the sake of someone he’d never known. His phone buzzed again. He checked the screen. An image file: two arms and two legs coarsely severed, laid out side by side. Blackened concrete beneath.
    He felt the blood draining from his head, edges of his vision softening as he leaned against his door. He stretched and opened the glove compartment, heft of the Colt instantly comforting. He leaned back in his seat. Gun in his lap, smooth curve of the trigger beneath his finger.
    If it was her, there was no telling. But he’d got the message:
    You’re next.

 
    NINE
    Rojas
    They listened to Leon make the call, sitting shirtless at his desk, a cigarette in two fingers held aloft.
    Leon was IT proficient. The Marine Corps made him conversant. The phone was rigged to his computer, and there was a voice distortion applied. Everything he did was routed through some Internet substructure he called the dark web. It had been set up in the nineties by military intelligence for the purpose of safe communication, but somewhere along the line it had been hijacked for nonofficial activities:
    Buying and selling porn.
    Buying and selling kids.
    Arranging fake IDs.
    Contacting hit men.
    The beauty of it was that by virtue of some complicated science, it was anonymous. Shit got bounced around through servers all over the place, and if you did things properly not even the geek kids at Fort Meade knew who you were. Leon hated the NSA. He believed eavesdropping was unconstitutional. He said the kicker about the dark web was that while one branch of the federal government was attempting to crack it, another was simultaneously bolstering its security. He called it a perfect dichotomy.
    His office was full of books. Floor to ceiling on his shelves, great tomes lying open on the desk. Anatomy was his present interest. Vance said he liked to know exactly what he was cutting.
    When he put down the phone Leon sat a moment with his back to them and then he swiveled smoothly in the chair.
    He said, “Boy has to die.”
    He thought a moment.
    “Probably best you all go. Take two cars, but not that Jeep he’s already seen. I’ll stay here with the guests. We might need to free up some living space.”
    *   *   *
    Afternoon now as they readied the cars. First-aid kit for each, a ram for the door, a couple of M1s with spare thirty-round clips, backup Glocks, fake ATF badges and IDs Leon had procured online. Anyone stopped them, first glance they’d look like feds headed for a bust. Further checks and they’d just have to kill someone.
    They donned Kevlar vests to wear under their jackets. Killing time before the roll-out, Dante and Vance did a few lines, standing there tensed, neck veins bulging, head-banging and screaming at a drum-bleed pitch,