The Iscariot Agenda

CHAPTER FOUR

Twelve years ago his legs had been taken above the knees.

Twelve years later Marshall Theodore Walker, once an assassin with the Pieces of Eight, went commercial after the Force Elite disbanded.

In a small apartment five stories above the busy and chaotic streets overlooking Manila, Walker awoke in a wild tangle of sheets that had gone unwashed for several weeks. Through the windows he could hear the busy Filipino marketplace below, as vendors sold butchered strips of meat, gutted fish and fruit.

Sitting up in bed with his hair naturally unkempt and his eyes at half-mast, Walker stared at the stumps of his legs and recalled the exact moment of their loss.

As a consultant with a private military company in Iraq during the onset of the war, he was riding point during a recon mission in the Al Anbar Province, when the vehicle he was in tripped an IED. In a fiery flash the floor of the Humvee buckled upward into the cab as shrapnel as keen as surgical steel sliced through everything, including the bones of his legs in such neat precision that there were no ragged tears, mutilated muscle or jagged bones — just perfect saw-blade cuts.

When he came to he found his team dead, sliced and burned, the vehicle twisted around him like a protective capsule. Where they had died, Walker had lived. And often he found himself wishing he had followed his comrades to Glory.

Closing his eyes he sighed in the way of regret, the memories as vivid as the day the IED took his legs. The pain, the phantom itches, none of it fading or going away, the scars — real and imagined — a constant reminder of that life-altering moment in the Province.

Living mainly off a small government allowance, he pissed away most of it on cheap booze, low rent and Filipina whores, the sum of his life. And now he awoke with a headache, an empty bottle of some indigent liquor he couldn’t even pronounce on the nightstand beside him.

Scooting down along the bed, Walker maneuvered himself into position, propped himself into his wheelchair, and made his way across a room that was a fetid wasteland of dirty clothes and empty bottles.

When he got to the kitchen he felt something that had been lost to him that day in Al Anbar — that impression of an animal sensing great danger.

In the center of the kitchen he paused, waited, listened.

Nothing but the Manila crowds in the streets below plying their wares.

And yet: I know you’re here.

With his head on a swivel, his eyes aware, Walker reached for a Glock taped beneath the kitchen table.

But the holster was empty.

Clever creature, aren’t you?

In a movement so swift and from shadows so dense, something moved across the room with such speed and poetic grace that the action in itself was gloriously beautiful.

It was also the last thing Walker considered before being rendered unconscious with a blow to the head.

When Walker came to he found himself face down on the kitchen table with his arms draped over the sides and his wrists bound to the table’s legs with duct tape. He was bound so tightly that he was rendered immobile and, having partial legs, had no leverage to move.

He rolled his head to one side, kept it there, his eyes trying to tune in, to focus, his world now coming to a crisp clarity, the things around him beginning to take on definition and form.

A man he did not recognize sat next to the table, watching. His eyes were so dark they seemed without pupils, yet they were studious and patient and somehow terrifyingly omniscient. His face was highly rawboned with a lantern jaw and powerful chin.

The man, seeing Walker’s eyes come to a meeting point with his own, held up an 8x10 photo. “Do you know what this is?”

Walker passed a dry tongue over parched lips. “Who are you?”

“Do you know what this is?” the man repeated.

Walker studied the photo and recognized it as a photo of his old unit, the Pieces of Eight. In it he was much younger and whole, everyone hamming it up for the camera with the exception of Kimball Hayden, the man without conscience or remorse.

“What do you want?”

The man held the photo close. “Take another look.”

Walker noted that he and two others were circled with a red marker. “Yeah… So?”

“The other two, I know they’re working for a private military outfit as consultants here in the Philippines. I need to know where they are. And you’re going to tell me.”

“You think so, huh? Well, you can just kiss my fat ass. How ‘bout that?”

“Where are they, Mr. Walker?”

“You know something, you little punk? You’re a real tough guy taking on a cripple, you know that? If you took me on in the condition I was in in that photo, you’d be a dead man.”

“I’m well aware of the Pieces of Eight and I hardly doubt, Mr. Walker, even during your prime, that you’d be able to match my skills as an assassin.”

“Tough talk coming from a man who’s whole. How about you undo the tape so we can see how well you fare against a cripple not tied down? Or are you too much of a pussy to find out?”

“Mr. Walker… where are they?”

“And why should I tell you?”

The man remained tolerant, and then in monotone, “Look at me, Mr. Walker.” From his cargo pocket he pulled out a silver cylinder and depressed a button. A pick shot out like the blade of a stiletto. Its tip keenly pointed and honed to a razor’s sharpness.

“Is that supposed to scare me?”

“No, Mr. Walker, it’s a tool, really — a writing pen, as you will.”

“What?”

The man held the blade over Walker’s naked backside.

“What are you doing?”

“Please, Mr. Walker, remain still.” The man set the pick’s tip against Walker’s shoulder blade, the embedded point drawing a bead of crimson. “This will only take a moment.” And then he drew the pick across his back, a neat slice running from shoulder blade to shoulder blade.

Walker arched his back against the pain, his teeth clenching in protest until the muscles in his jaw worked furiously.

But he refused to cry out.

“Very good, Mr. Walker, a true warrior never shouts out in pain, does he?”

“Oh, you son-of-a-bitch! Untie me and take me on as a man!”

The assassin held the photo towards Walker. “Mr. Grenier and Mr. Arruti — tell me where they are.”

“What do you want with them?”

“Isn’t it apparent, Mr. Walker? I obviously want to kill them.”

Walker laughed condescendingly. “Are you out of your mind?”

The man carefully placed the point of the pick against the center point of the horizontal slash, and drew the sharpened point downward along the spinal column to the small of his back, the drawing cuts forming a perfect T.

Walker arched again, his face as red as the blood that coursed from his wounds and onto the table, the veins of his neck sticking out in cords. “YOU… BASTARD!”

“That was close to crying out, Mr. Walker. Not the true sign of a warrior, is it?”

“Piss off!”

“Arruti and Grenier, where are they?”

Walker laughed.

“Mr. Walker?”

His laughter escalated.

“Very well, then.” The man placed the tip of the pick against the small of Walker’s back and drew a horizontal line, the three slices now forming the letter I.

Walker’s body tensed against the pain. And then through the set of his clenched teeth, he said, “You want to know where they are?”

The man waited patiently, the point of the pick stained with red.

“I’ll tell you. I’ll be glad to tell you… And do you want to know why I’ll be glad to tell you?”

The man held the pick high, the steel cylinder throwing off a mirror polish.

“Because they’re going to rip you to pieces,” he told him. “It doesn’t matter if they know you’re coming or not. They’ll smell you. They’ll sense you. They’ll feel you… And then they’ll kill you.”

“Where are they?”

Walker was obviously fading, his voice weakening. “You’ll find them in Maguindanao consulting against the terrorist factions there.”

“Thank you, Mr. Walker.”

“I’ll see you in Hell.”

“That’s unlikely.” The man placed the point of the pick at the base of Walker’s skull and forced the point upward through the opening of the brain stem and into the brain, killing him.

As Walker’s body deflated, the man expelling a final breath that cleared his lungs, he soon fell into the gentle repose of death.

The man, after watching Walker transition from life to death, pressed the button on the cylinder. The pick quickly retreated into the tube faster than the eye could see.

Placing the weapon into a cargo pocket of his pants, the man removed a red marker, wrote the letter ‘I’ in the circled picture of Walker, and left the photo behind.

The assassin would be in Maguindanao Province within hours.