Free Blood & Tacos #2 by Josh Stallings, Ray Banks, Andrew Nette, Frank Larnerd, Jimmy Callaway Page B

truth. More
important than morality. More important than life itself.
    You lie, fight, and die for that faith—that perfect promise that global
"win or lose" comes down to your decisions.
    Then you get old. You watch Al Jazeera English and eat the same Stouffer’s
meals you did when you were a kid. You listen to your West Palm Beach condo
association argue the same way you listened to Hamas and the PLO leadership
argue. You read The New York Times, and the religious hatreds are the same—only
the names have changed.
    You watch the YouTube generation grow up, enlist, and die by the same roadside
bombs.
    And you realize:
    The world’s turning doesn’t change. All the faith there is can’t
change that, no more than faith could make the world flat.
    Your decisions have only one effect: life or death.
    You kill someone or you don’t. You get killed or you don’t.
    You take two fistfuls of the Ativan prescribed under your CIA health care plan
and wash it down with a fifth of absinthe. Or you keep turning the pages, reading
on through the chapters of your life, even through the story never gets different.
    I miss Beirut sometimes. I was Jason Malone then.
    Malone knew what he was doing. He was changing the world, one choice at a time.
     
    It was Beirut, 1987.
    It may as well have been 2007. Or 1967. Or 7,000 years ago. Beirut doesn’t
change much.
    Sure, the language on the signs goes from Phoenician to Latin to Arabic to
French. And yeah, the roasting meats now turn upright and run on electricity.
It’s Christians against Muslims against Jews now.
    But in 1500 BC, it was Egyptian Ra-worshippers against Hittite storm-god followers.
The aroma of meat roasting on a spit still slathered the air. The language—the
first record of Egyptian and Hittite language together; the Amarna letters—was
still discussing war.
    I was sent to stop a war. The conflict between Druze Christian militia, Israeli
hawks and dozens of Islamic extremist groups was on the brink of boiling over.
A peacemaker, David Saxon, on a secret mission for the CIA, had been captured.
    Nobody knew by who. Or why. Or to what end.
    But my handler at the Company knew that if the captors got David Saxon to talk,
it would all end badly.
    Fingers would be pointed just to prove nobody was backing down. Israel, the
Druze Christian militia of Beirut, the Muslim extremists—all would blame
each other of trying to mess up the conflict.
    I had to find David Saxon before those names got out. I’d save him or
kill him, before whole nations had an excuse for epic bloodshed.
    Right out the gate to Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, I should have
known someone would have to bleed.
    Right out the gate, someone took a shot at me.
     
    I allow myself just one drink these nights.
    I swirl the ice in the glass and watch it melt, as ice is wont to do. The waves
roll in, roll out, and I think.
    I think on the inevitability of these things.
    I checked into my hotel in Beirut and went to meet an arms dealer, Hammadi.
It was part of my cover: I would act as if I had something to offer Hammadi’s
clients on all sides of the conflict. They, in turn, could hopefully give me
a lead on David Saxon’s whereabouts.
    After I checked in, I checked if I had someone on my tail.
    If I hadn’t watched my back, I’d have never met the Israeli agent.
For all I know, he could have been killed by the Brotherhood of the Green Flag—the
Muslim fundamentalists whose compound I went on to find David Saxon at.
    If the agent had died, I’d have hooked up with the Green Flag directly
instead. I’d have been led into an ambush. I’d have had to fight
my way into their compound rather than have Israeli intelligence parachute me
into it.
    If I’d been ambushed, I could have shot my way out. If the Israeli followed
me undetected that night, maybe he’d have killed me.
    It all comes down to who took a bullet first.
    They named me