Free Strong Cold Dead by Jon Land

repeated, glancing into the rear of the van, where the team members he’d chosen for this operation were gearing up.
    Like him, they were veterans of the Venezuelan secret police, better known as the National Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services, or DISIP. Part of a never-ending and self-replenishing supply of soldiers, culled from the best and most ruthless that American dollars could buy. In return, they offered plausible deniability for Jones’s black flag operations, undertaken on behalf of a shadowy subdivision of Homeland Security. As far as Washington knew, the colonel and his men didn’t exist, and that suited Paz just fine.
    â€œThe target made overtures to ISIS via social media, but we lost the trail when he started pinging them via the Deep Web.”
    â€œBut that’s not why you required my services, is it?” Paz asked him.
    â€œNope. You got the job, Colonel, because something finally pinged back.”

 
    14
    A USTIN, T EXAS
    Paz and his men were dressed like civilians, locals, secure in the knowledge that this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where residents were likely to call the police to report suspicious behavior. The apartment to which he and his three men were headed overlooked a rat-infested alley at the back of a building. This particular slum seemed to have a nondiscrimination policy, drawing its hapless from among various ethnicities and backgrounds. According to the intelligence gathered by Jones, Daniel Cross was the product of a rape, his mother having been a prostitute at the time of his conception.
    Paz hadn’t read any more of the file because he didn’t need to. Half of Cross’s genes belonged to a rapist, which in Paz’s mind was as low as life could get. He’d come to realize that everyone is a prisoner of their own birth. Just as Paz had inherited psychic abilities, brujería as he called it, from his mother, Cross clearly carried the crazy, violent gene from his father’s side.
    According to visual surveillance, Daniel Cross was presently hunkered down in the apartment, working behind a computer. The lock on the building’s front security door was broken, and Paz led his men through, submachine guns whipped out from beneath their coats. They shoved a kid zooming toward the door on a skateboard out of the way and stepped over a drunk passed out on the stairs, en route to Cross’s third-floor apartment.
    Paz stood before the door, his men taking their flanking positions. An electronic sweep before he’d been given the go signal revealed no trip wires or any other defense against intrusion. Not that Paz required such intelligence. He trusted his own instincts and the brujeria he’d inherited from his mother more than any machine, and right now that brujeria told him he had nothing to fear. But he also was struck by an odd feeling he couldn’t quite identify, that left him distinctly unsettled.
    Shaking the sensation off, Paz lifted his right leg off the floor and aimed the heel of his boot straight for the flimsy latch. The door shattered on impact, the hinges themselves as well as the latch, sending the splintered remnants rocketing inward.
    A shaft of light illuminated a shape in a desk chair, swinging toward him, silhouetted by the flimsy, drawn blinds, something dark and shiny held in his hand. Sound-suppressed fire from his men tore the figure apart. The whole chair wheeled backwards and slammed into the blinds, which dropped from their mounts and folded over what was left of what had been sitting there.
    â€œMadre de Dios,” one of Paz’s men muttered.
    *   *   *
    â€œA dummy?” Jones repeated, wondering what Guillermo Paz had tucked in his hand, when he returned to the van.
    â€œStuffed animal, actually, dressed in clothes and a baseball cap.”
    â€œDon’t tell me, Colonel: facing away from the window so my surveillance team wouldn’t figure