Page 101 of Own

“No sprechen zie deutsche,” I informed him as I checked the meat cleaver from his kitchen. It was definitely sharp enough. Someone had taken care of his blades.

“Who are you?” Spittle flew out with his question.

“You bought people,” I told him calmly. “You bought a lot of people. It’s time to pay your debt.”

“I have no debt—I paid for them.”

“Just call me the repo man,” I told him. Maybe he didn’t get the joke. He would. It took a while, particularly while he squirmed and screamed. Butchering was gruesome work. His mind gave out long before his body did. Survival instincts and all that.

When I was done, there wasn’t much of him left—just scraps, bone, and a red smear where a man used to be.

Cleanup took longer than I liked. Bastard had more servers than I expected. I pulled every drive, stuffed them into my bag.

“Went to Austria and all I brought back were these computer parts,” I muttered.

Grace would want a souvenir. I glanced back at what remained of Weiss.

Yeah… definitely something nicer. She liked chocolate. Switzerland wasn’t far.

I drenched the lab in chemicals—walls, floors, equipment. Nothing Weiss built, studied, or tortured into existence deserved to survive.

Back at the hotel, I dropped the full report into the draft folder.

Job complete.

VOODOO

SINGAPORE

Slipping into the penthouse like a shadow, I paused to listen and pressed a gloved hand to the wall. The guards maintained a strict patrol schedule. This time of night, only two were on duty. They traded off sweeping the place intermittently.

Right on cue, guard number one walked around the corner. I fired one shot, right between the eyes. The man still wore a puzzled expression as he stared at me. It took time for his body to catch up with reality. Then he dropped.

The silencer kept the sound from traveling too far. Cold certainty accompanied me as I stepped over the guard. The problem with “randomly” scheduling their patrols, nothing was truly random. Most people thrived on order, on precision, and they even “randomized” on schedule. Shifting five minutes forward, each day of the week until they started at the top of the hour again.

Not hard to figure out.

The second guard was in the kitchen, a television on low, with some show I couldn’t make out. It wasn’t important. The man had his back to the door, and he was drinking milk from a carton when I slipped the door inward, then fired.

This time, the shot went through the back of his head. It made a hell of a mess in the kitchen. Fortunately, it wasn’t Lunchbox’s kitchen, so I didn’t have to worry about it. Verifying there were only two as per usual took all of five extra minutes.

Assured that we were alone, I headed up the stairs to Emil Zhang’s bedroom. He was the spider behind the routes—a mover. He built invisible cages, and took care of transporting across the world. They had others, but Zhang was at the center.

The bedroom door was unlocked, the room was dark save for a light by the bed. A girl sat on the floor next to the bed, a shackle on her ankle and a miserable look on her face. She jerked her head up, eyes wide as I came in. I pressed a finger to my lips. She looked wildly toward the open bathroom door. Humming carried from inside.

With her delicate build and Asian features, the girl chained there gave my heart a vicious tug. I crossed to where she was, checked the shackle without laying a finger on her. I mimed “key” and hoped like hell that it translated.

Though I was dressed in black from head to foot, some of the terror drained from her expression. Course, when one lived with a monster, what was one more?

She looked at the bathroom, almost pointedly.

Got it.

I held up a finger for her to wait. Then I walked to the bathroom and cleared my throat. Zhang whirled around and I fired a single round into his knee. His scream was particularly pitiful.

Around his neck was a chain. I yanked it off and didn’t care much if it tore skin with it. Then I seized him by the back of the neck and dragged him into the room. His prisoner flinched back, hugging herself. Then I held up the key and something painful crept into her empty eyes.

Hope.

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