Jericho Falls, VA…

     United 457 arrived at seven-fifteen p.m.  

     Timothy Williams moved through the concourse toward baggage claim, scanning the crowd for other than friendly faces.

     COMMEX had taken every conceivable precaution to protect its agents. Still, there had been ‘accidents’: Delaney Curtiss, Beirut, stuffed into the trunk of his Saab, three bullets to the back of the head; Guy Tomasik, Hamburg, garroted in a hotel room; Gregory Jacobs, Tunisia, found in an alley outside a nightclub, his spinal cord severed.  Other than himself, there were but two left from the days of Delta Team Shadow Company–Jerrod Martin and Brady Thomas. Jerrod was stateside, somewhere in the southeast, but Colonel Thomas had all but disappeared.

     He grabbed the satchel off the conveyor and exited the terminal.

     “Marriott, Downtown.” He glanced from the cabby’s face to the driver’s license on the dash, then back at the man’s face, his hand tucked inside his blazer caressing the butt end of a .357 Magnum. Couldn’t be too careful. 

     The cab pulled up to hotel minutes later.   

     He leaned in through the side window and handed the cabby a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change. And there’s another fifty in it if you’re back here tomorrow morning, five-fifteen sharp.”

     “Yes, sir.”

      Williams strode up the steps and into the lobby.

     “May I help you, sir?”

     “I have a reservation: ‘Michelson, Anthony’,” he said, using an assumed name.

     She checked the computer, confirmed the reservation. “And, how long will you be with us, Mr. Michelson?”

     “Just tonight.” He gave her a tired smile, aping perfectly the road-weary look of any number of salesmen who waltzed through the hotel.

     Minutes later, he opened the door to his room, palmed the pistol, and entered. He checked the entire room, double locked the door, unpacked and walked into the bathroom and took a long, hot shower. 

     Before leaving for dinner, he stretched a two-inch length of self-sticking, clear monofilament line from the base of the sliding glass door that led out onto the balcony to the metal casing surrounding it.

     Once in the hallway, he locked the door to his room and stretched a piece of clear line from the base of the door to its wooden jamb and then walked down the hallway. With telltales in place, no one could get into the room without his knowing it.

     He requested a corner table where he could monitor restaurant activity, ordered a Dewars on the rocks and a medium rare filet. The S&W .38 strapped to his leg was an easy reach.

    He finished dinner and ordered a Brandy. Relax, old boy, he thought. All our fabricated itineraries are transferred to and from the field via a sophisticated new program conjured up by Prescott’s team of programming wizards. Should someone backdoor the system, break the code and access the files, they’d end up searching for me sometime tomorrow in Albuquerque. Damn clever, those COMMEX boys. He chuckled and ordered a second Brandy.

     Christian Richards sat across the room, camouflaged by a mahogany bar. He laughed with the men at the table, dealing with a wrap up of the day’s business activities and dinner and drinks with his company’s newest franchisees.  His spiritual, disciplined self monitored Agent Williams’s every move.  

     Richards sized up his prey. He loved to watch them live out their paltry, feckless lives. It provided a perverse satisfaction knowing he held their destiny in his hands.

     Williams beckoned the waitress and ordered a third Brandy, a tired smile creasing his face.

     Sit back, relax Richards thought. He’d witnessed it many times, these displays of ignorant confidence. Williams’s defenses would soon break down and he would lose his combative edge. And these were Prescott’s finest? Why, they barely presented a challenge. The ultimate engagement, the final encounter, would come when the overture he’d orchestrated was complete. “Soon, now, Kenjisan,” he whispered through clenched teeth. “Very soon!”

     Richards finished his tonic and lemon, excused himself, and walked to the bar. He put his arm around the waitress’s shoulder, a charismatic smile on his face. “Pardon me, Miss?”

     “Sir?”

     “Would you please get us another round when you get a chance?   The group right there.” He pointed toward his table.

     She turned her head and Richards moved his hand over the snifter of Brandy. The top of the onyx ring on his little finger sprang open and a thin stream of blue-green powder trickled into the drink, dissolving instantly. Visible for a moment, on the inside of his forearm, just above the wrist, was a tattoo, a crimson crescent, a miniature wounded moon.  

     “Sure, just let me deliver this drink and I will be right with you.” 

     Richards returned to his table, bid his new RichCo associates good evening and then went up to his room.

     An hour later he stood, stripped off his robe and walked into the bathroom where he donned a black bodystocking, a pair of black slippers and applied a thin layer of jet-black to his face.

     A pouch, attached by Velcro to the back of the bodystocking, held a pair of rubber surgical gloves, a long, flexible strip of stainless steel, a fifty-milliliter syringe and a small vile of clear liquid. To this cache, he added a roll of white surgical tape and three round, smooth objects that resembled the leather golf balls popular in the late eighteen-hundreds.

    He checked his watch: eleven forty-five. 

    He exited through the sliding glass door and dropped down minutes later onto the balcony outside Williams’s room. He rolled into a darkened corner, sat up and peered through the glass.

    Williams was asleep atop the bed, the drug having overcome him before he’d had a chance to strip off his clothes and crawl under the covers.

    Richards slid the flexible metal strip through the space between the double doors, pried the safety bar from its latch, tripped the lock switch and slipped into the room.

    He found a vein, injected the antidote and Williams’s eyes popped open. 

    Richards grinned, watching the man fight to focus on a world gone hazy. “Do you know who I am, Mr. Williams?” 

    He shook his head no, but his eyes said differently.

    “Yes,” Richards muttered. “Then, you also know why I am here, don’t you?”

    “Please.” The words were slurred through drug-numbed lips.

    “Don’t beg,” he said. “It’s unbecoming. Besides, you knew the risks going in.”

    Richards found enormous exhilaration in having the power of life and death over another human being. The greatest thrill did not always come from acting on that power, it came from simply having his foes live with his dominion over them. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times. 

    Williams shook his head, his eyes swollen orbs of fear.

    Richards cast him a cold-blooded smile. “Let’s get this over with.” He pulled one of the small, round objects from his pouch and attached a ten-inch length of waterproof fuse to its center. He spoke throughout the procedure, softly, reassuringly, much as a surgeon would speak to a nervous patient. “We call these little beauties Yak-Paks. A device my father taught me to make when I was a child. You do remember my father, don’t you?”

    “No.” Williams’s voice squeaked with fear.

    “No? Well, let me refresh your memory. Does Nepal ring familiar?” He stripped off three, six-inch lengths of surgical tape, attached one end of each strip to Williams left cheek.

    “The Mezzhandi?” Williams uttered.

    “Ah, yes, The Mezzhandi. You also remember the ‘Druid’, do you not?” Richards’s grin turned feral. “Well, I am Azrael, his son, and I have sworn a blood-oath to avenge him, to dispose of all those responsible for his death and destroy your precious COMMEX.”

    Williams struggled against his imminent demise.

    Richards cradled a Yak-Pak in the tips of his fingers. “We wrap the equivalent of one-third of a stick of dynamite into the dried and waterproofed skin of a yak. The seams are sewn together with gut. They are a powerful weapon, easily made and just as easily concealed. Now open wide.” He spread his hand across Williams’s face, his thumb and index finger applied vice-like against the pressure points of the jaw hinge.  

    Williams’s mouth dropped open and Richards stuffed the Yak-Pak home. He ran the fuse out of the corner of the man’s mouth and then stretched the tape tightly across his face, sealing the charge within its newfound womb. He stood and looked down into Williams’s eyes, his voice flat and indifferent. “It will be quick and painless, not like it will be with your Mr. Thomas.  Oh, no, he will suffer. I guarantee it.” He picked up a book of matches, struck one and lit the fuse. 

    Williams tussled with his ties, fighting the impending launch into the hereafter.

    “You have fifteen minutes to make peace with whomever or whatever it is you worship.”  

     Richards walked out of the room onto the balcony, climbed up the side of the building onto the roof and moved off cat-like to the opposite side of the hotel where he dropped down safely onto his own balcony. 

    Ten minutes later, he sat in the lounge, dressed in a beige running suit, sipping Tonic and chatting with the bartender.

    Moments later, the Yak-Pak detonated and Williams’s head exploded like a ripe melon.

    Specs of blood and bone and thick silky ropes of mucous painted the bedroom walls as the decapitated body convulsed on the crimson-stained bed.

    “Christ-in-the-night.” The bartender held onto the edge of the bar as the building seemed to sway on its foundation. He grabbed the phone, dialed the front desk. “What the hell was that?” 

    Richards smiled. A COMMEX agent’s life was cheap and pointless. Still, each successive killing left him feeling more liberated, more powerful and invincible. That, my friend, he thought, knocking down the last of his Tonic and lemon, is the resounding thunder of revenge. 

    As sweet as ever.