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THIRTEEN
Scott Kincaid looked into the grimy mirror of the communal bathroom of the backpacker hostel and examined the bruised and abraded right side of his rib cage, and then he twisted around, looking back over his shoulder. Even in the piss-poor light from the dull bare bulb above him, he was able to see injury there. Just to the right of a full back tat of a front-on skull with colorful flames emerging from its mouth over the words “BREATHE FIRE,” he saw the ugly gash from a bullet’s graze on his right latissimus dorsi. It wasn’t deep, it wasn’t deadly, but he knew the pain from it would get worse before it got better.
Not that he minded the discomfort. The assassin known as Lancer found focus in pain; he’d been injured countless times in his forty-seven years on this planet, first by the hands of his father, who beat the living shit out of him back home in Seattle. And then during the arduous training he’d endured at BUD/S, the U.S. Navy’s Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL assessment course.
He’d suffered further pain from three IED blasts in Afghanistan, and he was once hit in the back with a ricochet from an AK round in Syria.
Pain was Kincaid’s companion. It was a salve that cleansed him, let him know he was really alive.
Inflicting pain let him know he was alive, as well. He’d left the Navy under a cloud, charges he knew to be bullshit, accusations from other SEALs who were jealous of him, threatened by him, and then he’d gone into private contracting so he could continue to deal pain to blunt his own.
A short stint in Nigeria and another in Mali had been without incident and without enjoyment, but then he was contacted by a man who asked him if he was interested in real work.
Quickly Kincaid knew he’d been headhunted because of what had happened with the SEALs in Syria, or what he’d been accused of, anyway.
Soon he found himself plotting an assassination on the streets of Fez, Morocco.
He did the job, did it well, and then his employer told him there was more work out there if he wanted it.
Scott Kincaid wanted it very much, but he didn’t want a boss; he wanted to remain a free agent.
He worked on a contract basis for a fixer named Sir Donald Fitzroy for a short time, doing jobs in Europe, and he worked with a man in Dubai and another in Dallas.
Now he worked for a new handler, a Welshman named Jack Tudor, whose security company, Lighthouse Risk Control Ltd., was essentially a front to run covert operations personnel and contract killers. Lancer had performed over thirty contract jobs in his years in this line of work. They weren’t all killings, but many were, and they had all been successful.
Kincaid considered himself an undefeated prizefighter. The heavyweight champion of the world when it came to murder.
And then…last night in some little nothing village in Guatemala, he’d almost bought the farm.
He shook his head in disbelief, and then he touched the wound on his right lat, still sighting it through the mirror.
He winced, but the pain was there to refocus him. He remembered he was a killer, a hunter, and through the discomfort he longed to get back into the hunt.
It had been five hours since he’d dived into the water to duck the police shooting at him, and he thought about everything that had happened since. He’d lost the Tahoe; it would have been crawling with cops by the time he got out of the water, so he’d waited till he’d dried off, then hired a taxi to take him all the way back to Quetzaltenango. He’d not gone straight to the airport; the driver would eventually be found by the authorities and questioned about the bearded American fare, so instead he had the taxi drop him off at the Alamo Bus Terminal.
Lancer had wandered into this backpacker’s hostel, sat at the nearly empty twenty-four-hour bar, and downed a couple of shots of Johnnie Walker, then he’d come back here to the bathroom next to the dormitory-style rooms, no doubt full of stoned or drunk American and European kids.
Once he’d evaluated his injury, he put his shirt back on and left the bathroom, the bar, and the hostel, and turned up the street to the north.
He walked thirty minutes through the windy cool night, his rib cage complaining about each and every footfall, until he arrived at the airport. Here his torso protested even more when he climbed a corrugated metal fence.
A lone Embraer Phenom light jet waited on the tarmac, its jet stairs down, and Kincaid stepped up to it.
The pilots were on board, both sleeping on cabin chairs with their feet up, and Lancer kicked one man’s foot and then the other, rousing them.
They hadn’t been expecting him, but he didn’t blame them for that. He could have called, but he’d wanted to wait, to let his employers sweat it out a bit, a penalty for sending him straight into a fucking buzz saw.
“Sir?” the American pilot said as he quickly sat up.
“Preflight the aircraft.”
Both men scrambled to their feet and headed for the cockpit. The pilot spoke as he moved. “You could have let us know, we’d have been ready.”
“We might not be going anywhere,” Lancer replied. “The job here isn’t finished yet. But I want you ready if we need to relocate to the capital.”
A minute later he had his shirt off and the aircraft’s first-aid pack in his lap as he sat in one of the recently vacated cabin chairs.
He sprayed antiseptic on the injury, popped a couple of cold packs, then placed them over his ribs and wrapped them tightly with a compression bandage.
