Rogue Asset (Rogue Warrior Thrillers Book 11), page 8
“Man… what?” the bleeding, confused dealer asked.
The guard moaned.
“The bruises from the slugs hitting his vest are going to hurt for a while. I presume you have medical for these guys, right? Get my money back, Antwon. You know… like people try to do with your crypto scam, Ascendent. That’s how you wash your drug money. Right? In case you were wondering, my dearth of sympathy for you is based on the fact that you’re a thieving, parasitic scumbag.”
His host had lost enough blood to be tired. “Man… you going to shoot me, shoot me,” he muttered.
Bob moved behind the desk and punched in the combination, the safe lock clicking. From the corner of his eye, he noticed a metal toggle switch and red button on the desktop. He flicked the switch to the other position, and a moment later heard the guns next door sliding back into their wall cavities.
“Neat toy. Let me guess: you have company ID cards that it recognizes, which is why the guy who rushed in wasn’t gunned down. Cool. But… maybe next time employ a security professional when designing a ‘lair,’ instead of a video gamer or whoever came up with that. A professional would’ve reinforced the walls of your office AND hired a competent crew.”
He pulled the safe door open.
The one-foot-by-two-foot repository was packed with stacks of neatly bound new bills. Bob realized he hadn’t brought anything to carry it; his canvas duffel bag was back at the rooming house in his locker. He looked around and spotted the trash can under the desk, empty. He pulled out the black bin liner and began to fill it with cash.
There had to be thirty thousand, at least. “Let me guess: this is just walking-around money. Where’s the rest?” He trained the pistol on his host.
“All… all digital already,” he said. “That’s… that’s why this was stupid. You make an enemy like me… for thirty grand?”
Bob sighed a little. Like most neighborhood criminals, they were enterprising but untalented, untrained. His crew had been advertised by Errol as hardened mercs, but real mercenaries wouldn’t have let him within ten feet of their boss without a proper firefight and wouldn’t have run into a target standing three abreast.
“If I were worried,” Bob explained, “I’d just kill you. But you’re not from my world, Mr. Corrigan. We won’t see each other again.” Then he crouched slowly, just ahead of the man, and lowered his voice to a dull whisper. “Because if I do see you again, I’ll have to assume you haven’t learned a lesson from this. And then I will have to kill you. Are we clear?”
“Clear,” Corrigan said, sweat pouring off his brow. “Can you call an ambulance now, please?”
Bob rose, pleasantly surprised. “Please, even? For that… sure.” He grabbed the desk phone and dialed 9-1-1.
“Operator 911, what’s your emergency, please?”
“Hi, yeah… I’m standing next to a drug dealer named Antwon Corrigan.” He read off the address. “Mr. Corrigan seems to have had some sort of gun battle with his men. Multiple gunshots, none looking too potentially fatal. But I’d get here quickly anyway. Ciao.”
He hung up. For some reason, Corrigan was smiling wanly, the expression barely showing through his discomfort. “Now… why would you be smiling?” Bob asked. He glanced back at the phone. “Ohhh… you think I was stupid enough to use your phone without gloves, which will enable you to find me, maybe?”
He crouched again and held up his hand. “No prints. But if you decide to come looking, my name is Bob Singleton. I feel comfortable telling you that because you already know – or should – what will happen if you test me. Again… are we clear?”
The nod looked like it took effort this time.
Bob wasn’t sure how sincere it was.
He raised the Colt and shot Corrigan once more, in the clavicle.
“AIEEHHH!” Corrigan screamed as the bone snapped, its end jutting through his skin by his shoulder. He began to whimper from the pain like an injured animal.
“There,” Bob said. “Just so we’re clear on how serious I am, that should keep you busy for a few months.” He rose and headed for the door, checking his watch. He’d scoped out the nearest police, ambulance and fire stations before heading out, and figured he had at least ten minutes before anyone arrived.
At the door, he stopped and turned back. “I’d clear out any drugs before the cops get here. They’re not just going to help you out; they’ll search the place, too. Oh… and don’t pull open the door on that Porsche too quickly. Figured you guys might be in a position to chase me, so I’ve punched a few holes in the gas tank, and there’s a flash-bang rigged to pull the pin, behind your wing mirror. You open the door, the flash-bang drops and ignites the gas.” He sighed. “Then again, with that busted wing, you’re not driving anywhere anytime soon anyway.”
He headed back across the adjacent room, past the writhing guards, towards the stairs and his waiting car.
12
CHICAGO
They’d been sitting in O’Hare Airport departures for nearly an hour, on the sofas near the boutiques and restaurants. Dawn watched Bob from the corner of her eye. He was stoic, staring straight ahead without emotion, eyes barely even flitting from side to side as he watched other travelers pass by.
She wasn’t sure where he was in his life anymore. She’d thought when he got back to Chicago that he’d really changed, that he’d buried the old Bob, prone to violent intervention. But the news that morning said there were eight shot, one fatally, in Gary the night prior, at a storage facility. Police had also had to disarm an “improvised explosive device.” She hadn’t asked him about any of it.
Initially, Bob’s insistence on getting to the airport nearly three hours early had struck Dawn as a concern from an earlier time, when ticket check-ins were manual and staff could get swamped. After seeing the newscast, she’d wondered if maybe he just felt guilty and wanted to get away, to a place in the world where chaos might be welcomed.
“Penny for ’em,” he said, without turning his head.
“It does not matter one bit,” she said coolly.
“I can tell something’s bothering you. The only recent change in the weather was from my little excursion last night. So I’m tempted to assume—”
“Well, that would be on you, then.” She sniffed. “You know what they say: when you ‘assume,’ you make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me.’”
“So it’s not bothering you that someone died?”
She snapped him a foul look. “You know darn well it is. Do you really need me to initiate that conversation?”
“I didn’t shoot him,” Bob said. “Not technically.”
“Ohhh, well, there’s the important part, then. ‘Not technically.’”
“Dawn… I swear I tried. Three guys opened fire, thinking it was me, and hit their own guy,” he said. “But there were ten people there, and six left in ambulances with just gunshot wounds, with three completely unharmed. It… just went down that way, that’s all.”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “Sure. ‘Just.’”
“Does it help you to know they spent all of their waking hours slinging meth to poor addicts and stealing money from naïve crypto investors? And they’re probably all going to jail.”
“How so?”
“The place was armored up, and he’s reportedly a volume seller. There will have been product on scene, illegal weapons, illegal money, who knows what else. And none of them were in any condition to hide that stuff.” He looked at her quickly, the expression guilty. “Never mind,” he added.
Bob could tell he’d messed up. Dawn’s every glance shot icicles in his direction.
“Your flight’s still an hour away. You going to go through the gate any time soon?” She made it sound like he was holding her up.
“I’m just waiting for a call.”
On cue, his phone rang.
Bob answered the call. “Go ahead.”
“Bob.” It was Adam Renton. “So… we should be good to go for your trip. I’ve arranged to have a package with a few items in it for you at the Sunglass Store by gate G7. I had the shades FedExed over yesterday in anticipation. There’s also a burner with an Italian SIM card and a quick dial to one of my encrypted lines. The specs are a decent grade of AI glass, a Chinese knock-off of Ray-Ban’s Meta line but in an aviator style and, crucially, with the warning light disabled.”
“Funky. But… why?”
“You’re going to be surrounded by organized criminals constantly. If you’re caught using your phone to take shots…” Renton let the thought trail.
“Good point. You said items, plural.”
“Yeah, there’s also good paper in the name ‘Bob Smith,’ including a passport and a vaccinations book. That’s NSA-grade, state-department issued, so nobody should be bothering you. The other is less impressive but possibly more helpful. Phone tags. They’re localized Bluetooth tracking chips. But they can triangulate a position using other nearby phones, similar to Apple’s AirTag. Stick them on anything your hosts carry regularly and you should be able to keep locational tabs on them. I figured it might help with the number of people who attend weddings.”
“Adam… you didn’t have to do all of that,” Bob said. “I really appreciate it, but that stuff can’t be cheap. That passport… man, I know what those cost.”
“It was a freebie, an owed favor. And the rest was surprisingly reasonable, actually. All of that was less than a grand. And I still owe you. I told you, until I feel I’ve made up for what happened in New York—”
“Ambushing me and killing me are two very different things,” Bob said. “Nothing happened in New York that I couldn’t handle.”
“And if you keep being magnanimous about it, I’m never going to stop feeling guilty,” Renton said. “They breached MY security to get you, and I’m still pissed by that. Then I put you on the clock again before Seattle, and you almost died again. So I’m pissed again. Not just at them, at myself as well for forgetting why you do this shit, which is usually on the side of the angels. So… if nothing else, a little penance by way of handling your requests will teach me not to fuck up again.”
“Uh-huh. I expect your building security is tougher than it used to be.”
“Much.”
Renton always came through, Bob thought, even if he was typically pricy at five hundred per hour. “I’ll call you when I get to Italy,” Bob said.
“Just make sure you use the provided line. I’ve got to be twice as careful since that other breach. And if you need some old-school on-site handling, my network access in Italy is widespread, albeit costly and barely used.”
“Then I’m practically doing you a favor,” Bob suggested.
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Talk soon.” He ended the call.
“So you’re about ready, then,” Dawn said.
“Yeah, that was Adam. I have to stroll over to one of the stores, pick some things up.”
“How exciting for you.”
“You’re still miffed.”
Dawn looked more tired than she had since he’d been back. “Disappointed. But I know why you’re doing this.”
“Family helping family, etcetera, etcetera,” Bob suggested.
She chewed on her lower lip for a moment, and he worried she might start crying. “Yeah, that.” She leaned in and hugged him. “Take care of yourself until you’re back, okay? Errol may be my brother by blood, but you’re the family I choose.”
“I know. And you know I will.”
13
ROME
Leonardo da Vinci Airport betrayed nothing of Rome’s history, style or architecture. Instead, Bob noted as he sat in the second-floor café and watched escalator riders, it was the same mass of glass, steel, duty-free Louis Vuitton and Starbucks as every other international departure point. It might as well have been a suburban shopping mall, circa 1999.
He had an hour before his connecting flight to Padova. He’d already been through Renton’s accumulated intelligence on the Grasso and Guidotti families. “People watching” wasn’t as fun as a good novel, but a largely sleepless night on the flight had left him tired, disinterested in concentrating.
A figure sidled up to his table, putting a hand on the back of the chair opposite his. “Mr. Singleton, I presume. May I join you?” His English was good but accented.
Bob’s hackles went up, the fatigue dissipating instantly, his gaze flitting around them quickly to see if the man was alone. “After you,” he said.
The man sat down. “I am Marcello Gavia, agent of the Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna.”
“Well, Marcello, you already know who I am.”
“It’s true.”
“I can’t see that I’m of any interest to Italian foreign intelligence.”
“You were brought to our attention.”
“Meaning airport security’s facial recognition flagged me somehow.”
“Correct, I believe. We have… mixed information on whether you remain an active asset.” He glanced around briefly, as if ensuring no other passengers were eavesdropping. “You have had recent dealings with some of our countries’ mutual traditional adversaries.”
“I have.”
“You… are also supposed to be dead.”
“And yet…”
“A ‘Five Eyes’ report obtained from 2012 says you were killed in an operation in Iran, along with the remainder of your team.”
“Yeah… don’t know what to tell you there, Marcello. You’re sort of getting the ‘blind men examining an elephant’ view of how things went down. But if you’re worried about what I’m up to, I’m here on private business. I don’t work for the agency anymore.”
“Your travel arrangements are in the name ‘Bob Smith,’ which concerned us, as we suspect your papers must be false. They passed our inspector, however, which would make sense if they were issued by your Central Intelligence Agency and therefore quite genuine. Still… we cannot see why you would be traveling to Padova.”
Bob didn’t see any need to be secretive. The wedding was between notorious Cosa Nostra families and would be heavily surveilled by local police and intelligence agencies. “I’m working a private security job. The families of Giacomo Guidotti and Vito Grasso are concerned that their children’s wedding will be disrupted by an assassination attempt. They don’t trust you guys to handle it, I guess.”
The agent’s eyes had widened as soon as he heard the names. His expression settled into something Bob guessed was halfway between worry and sympathy. “Mr. Singleton—”
“Was my old man. Bob’s fine.”
“Mr. Singleton, we are aware of this event, of course. It is of great concern to anyone involved in public safety. Are you aware of the SCO?”
“The acronym’s familiar, but I can’t place it. Probably just saw it in a report at some point.”
“It is quite possible. It stands for ‘Sta Cosa Onorevole.’”
“Venetian?” Bob asked. “It sounds like abbreviated Italian, like you’re saying ‘questa cosa onorevole,’ ‘This honorable thing,’ really quickly.”
“Exactly. And that is how they term what they do, the gangs that run Padova.”
“Like the Cosa Nostra, ‘this thing of ours.’ It’s coded to represent their purpose.”
“It is. They claim it is honorable,” Agent Gavia said. “Of course, it is anything but. The SCO are murderers and thieves, dedicated to nothing less than greed and social anarchy. So of course, they are reported to not be very happy that the two Cosa Nostra families have decided to encroach on their turf.”
“That’s a wrinkle,” Bob admitted.
The other man frowned. “Eh… scusi?”
“A complication not previously mentioned.”
“I can understand why. The man who runs the SCO, Corrado Caruso, is known for brutal violence and a determination many of his ilk cannot match or perhaps even measure. He and his late father are responsible for the deaths of other criminals, yes, but also police officers, judges and public officials.”
“Bystanders?” Bob asked absently.
“Not really, thankfully. Not that he would care. Nor, for that matter, would your new employers. Which family, might I ask, has gained your employ?”
“Alessandra Guidotti, bride-to-be and daughter of Giacomo.”
“Ah. And she is worried about what, exactly?”
The man was starting to fish for details, possibly to hijack his progress, Bob knew. He shrugged. “Threats,” he offered.
“Ah. Nothing specific, then,” the agent suggested.
“I would think, given your worry over their behavior, that three sets of gangsters killing each other might be seen as doing the world a favor,” Bob suggested.
“And you might, because as your file suggests, Mr. Singleton, you were an agent of chaos. I am an agent of the law. And we worry about the potential fallout to other residents, the risk of people being caught between them. There is not a single rivalry between crime families in this country, Mr. Singleton, that has not resulted in the shedding of innocent blood. And… as much as you are a professional, we would also rather that visitors to our country not be among the victims.”
The implied threat was clear. “I can generally take care of myself,” Bob offered.
“And they can generally kill whomever it is that they wish to kill. They are many in number, with a determination that can exist for generations.”
“Warning duly noted.”
Gavia took in a breath sharply and held it for a second, as if warding off exasperation. “We are not going to stop you traveling, Mr. Singleton. You have broken no local laws of which we are aware, and your passport has already cleared you into the country, so we do not wish to make an international incident of your presence by bothering your State Department. Nor are you sought by any of Italy’s allies.”
“It makes leaving me alone sound like an easy decision, Inspector.”
