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Martina Sommer had worked for the Bundespolizei, Germany’s federal police, as a communications officer after serving ten years in military counterintelligence. She’d lost her job the year prior because of a drinking habit that seemed to grow more serious the older she got, and then her husband had been removed from his senior position at a Berlin bank after a series of loans he made went bad.
The couple’s life had been in a shambles for the past six months; they’d moved with their two small children back to her little hometown outside Bonn to live with her aging parents in their small cottage, and neither she nor her husband had been able to secure gainful employment. He had managed to find an assistant manager position at a local hardware store, but he spent his nights in fits of depression while Martina had resorted to delivering groceries when she was sober enough to do so.
And then one morning while she was searching her family’s cramped room for her car keys, the pounding headache that came with last night’s vodka and schnapps doing nothing for her mood, the email had arrived in her inbox.
A man named Jack Tudor ran a company called Lighthouse Risk Control Ltd., and he reached out to her about a job. She’d known him for nearly two decades; they’d even dated for a short while when she was young. She’d appealed to him for work in the security industry, and now he was coming through.
The message was cryptic in many ways, offering a temporary position using her skills in communications and intelligence to work for a private concern in Asia.
Soon she entered into a text conversation with Tudor, and he told her she would be supporting an intelligence operation that would lead to the deaths of several “terrorists” around the world for the benefit of an undisclosed national actor and humankind itself.
Martina Sommer didn’t really believe she’d be doing good with all this; she assumed this was some sort of sub rosa proxy mission being run by Russia, China, Israel, or some other nation. But she did believe she had to save her family from the downward spiral they were in, so after only a few clarifications as to what her role would be, and after the assurances from Jack Tudor that she would sit at a desk thousands of miles from danger and only be part of the surveillance arm of the operation, she had accepted the position.
She felt like shit for doing so, but to Tudor she had portrayed her mood as utterly enthusiastic.
Now she lived and worked in some office complex in Singapore, she hadn’t left the building since she’d arrived five days earlier, and the killing that seemed so remote a few days ago had now begun in earnest.
The building was crawling with security—locals, as far as she knew— and they seemed to be as interested in keeping the nineteen in as they were in keeping anyone else out.
Martina knew she couldn’t get up and leave, even if she wanted to, and this kept her at her desk and focused on her assignment, but her feelings of regret and remorse also made stomach acid tear up her insides.
She was supporting the murder of civilians around the world on behalf of some bad actor, and she saw no way out.
Slowly, reluctantly, she shook away the welling panic and reached again for her headset because she had work to do. A mission was under way in Guatemala, and it was her job to coordinate the on-site surveillance.
She told herself not to think about the work but to think about the money, about moving back to Berlin, about saving her husband from his depression and the children from sharing a bed at their grandparents’ house, and these images served to get her back on task.
For now, anyway.
•••
The whirr of jet engines grew softly, the sound emanating from the southwest, steadily rising over the insistent noise of the bustling city of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. Impossibly low gray clouds hid the origin of the noise until a sleek white Embraer Legacy 500 private jet appeared in the sky just a quarter mile from the airport, emerging from the vapor just four hundred feet above the Earth on short final. The landing gear had already lowered, and the aircraft, sleek and shiny-slick after passing through wet blankets of cloud cover, lined up its nose on runway 05, and then it flared before touching down, a spray of water kicking up from the tires as it did so.
The Legacy taxied to the terminal of Aeropuerto Internacional de los Altos, then parked on the tarmac a few dozen yards away. As the door opened, a single black Chevy Tahoe SUV pulled up next to it, and a door opened.
A man climbed out of the back seat and, ignoring the heavy drizzle, walked towards the Legacy just as the hatch opened and a single passenger emerged.
The man from the Chevy was local, but the new arrival appeared to be a typical gringo: a white male wearing a denim shirt and khakis, a bald head contrasting with a thick brown beard. He looked out at the airfield, then up at the sky.
The foreigner appeared to be in his forties; his only luggage was a large black backpack, and Tom Ford sunglasses hung from his open collar, unnecessary in the gray Central American afternoon.
The gringo stepped down the jet stairs, shook hands perfunctorily with the local, and then they both walked back to the Chevy without exchanging a single word.
Once in the back of the SUV, the traveler spoke English. “I’m Lancer.” His accent was American, the local immediately discerned.
“Bernadino.” The local then motioned to the driver and the front passenger. “Chico and Alfredo.”
All three locals were in their twenties or thirties; they were short but hard-edged, dressed in casual civilian attire, with rain ponchos crammed into the door pockets next to them.
The man called Lancer looked over the locals carefully, and he made a few deductions because this wasn’t his first rodeo. The Hispanic men’s names began with the letters A, B, and C, so they were likely as made up as Lancer’s code name was, but he saw this as prudent tradecraft and therefore a positive sign.
They were all former military, he could tell. They’d all killed before.
He could tell this, too.
“What training do you have?” he asked Bernadino.
“Kaibiles,” came the reply, and then the Guatemalan looked deep into the man’s face to see if there was any sign of recognition of the word.
