It wouldn’t be the name he’d die with.
After the military, starting his new profession, Sean had thought long and hard about his cover name. He wanted it short and snappy. One word, memorable, like Cher or Madonna, only instead of thinking good-looking chick, you had to think lethal.
He’d been listening to Outlaw by Whitesnake, and it came to him.Of course.
He’d had a number of aliases in his time, but “Outlaw” worked real well in his new profession. The name was corny, but his new employers loved it. Made them feel sexy, made them feel tough.
Life after SpecOps was good. Real good.
He’d lucked into a little cohort of bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, financiers and money managers who spent their time hunched over computer monitors, thinking they were dangerous dudes.
Outlaw had heard all the macho phrases:Eat what you kill, Put wood behind the arrow, Drink the Kool-aid.
Men in finance liked to think of themselves as real tough dudes, but they were tough only because they had a wall of money behind them. When that wall threatened to fall, they crumbled and showed their true natures—that of pale clerks, not alpha males, as they so fondly imagined themselves.
The only attribute Outlaw recognized of himself in them was utter ruthlessness. Touch their money and they would hire the best to fight for them and give no quarter.
And so his post-military life began. The dishonorable discharge—thrown out of the Army for selling arms when there were fucking warehouses full of them rusting in the desert—stopped him from applying for a white-collar job, not that he had ever wanted one.
No, a freak connection between an old Army buddy and his brother in finance had set him up in his new profession.
The first job couldn’t have been easier. A whistleblower, about ready to send a hot set of documents showing malfeasance to the SEC and blow a fifteen-million-dollar bonus out of the water. The CEO met with Outlaw in a luxury room at the top of a business skyscraper about five blocks from where he worked. The financier might have been a god in the world of finance but he was a fuckhead in real life.
The financier had given a false name and made sure that he employed euphemisms, but it was clear he wanted the whistleblower taken out. Outlaw had showed him the Barrett 95 in its carrying case and watched as the banker’s eyes widened.
It was bullshit, all of it.
Outlaw knew perfectly well who the banker was. Lewis Munro, CEO of the tenth largest corporation in the US. Outlaw had his name, home address and address of the hideaway apartment on Lexington where Munro’s mistress lived. Outlaw knew how much cocaine Munro consumed in a week and how much he paid for it. He knew what private schools the kids were in, how much Mrs. Munro dropped weekly at Hermés and even the amount of taxes Munro had evaded.
Even the Barrett was bullshit. A .50 cal bullet was guaranteed to rain down police attention like nothing else. For the Barrett he used an armor-piercing bullet, the Raufoss Mk.211, containing an incendiary, and very accurate in sniper rifles. He’d lifted three thousand boxes of the stuff from the base warehouse.
It was a military bullet, totally wasted on a civilian target unless you had to snipe at two grand out. Like a big, red fucking sign hung around the dead guy’s neck that this was a hit. Sometimes that was necessary. Most of the time, it wasn’t.
When it went down, it was a perfect street mugging. The whistleblower walking back home alone from a dinner date with friends, the mugger taking all his money, credit cards and even his wedding ring and wristwatch. The police speculated that the whistleblower had resisted and got a knife in the ribs for his pains.
The homicide detective stood over the crumpled body in the alley and shook his head over the mugger’s luck in hitting the heart with one thrust.
It wasn’t luck. Outlaw had practiced that move thousands of times in training and hundreds of times on live bodies on missions.
Had the whistleblower been taken out by a sniper’s bullet, the police would have looked closely at his affairs and would have found material incriminating Munro, who would have had some explaining to do, which would have made pointless the hundred thousand dollars Munro had transferred to Outlaw’s bank in Aruba.
As it was, the police couldn’t track the knife on which there were no prints and after a fruitless two weeks, the whistleblower’s file was already a cold case.
That hit had made him. He became the go-to guy for anyone in the financial sector who had a problem that couldn’t be solved by throwing money at it, including divorcing wives where there was no prenup.
Outlaw had had more than twenty jobs in the past five years, all executed perfectly. A study of the terrain and the subject, a quick in and out, using methods that varied widely, and no one was the wiser. He had even put together a team of former soldiers, good men who, after giving their all to Uncle Sam, were now up for earning real money.
Outlaw had learned from the finance guys, too. Corner a market and charge big. He was up to five hundred grand a pop now, plus expenses.
Outlaw had given Munro a cell phone number on a card, knowing Munro would spread it around. Munro lived in a world of men used to winning, no matter what. And if they didn’t have the necessary set of skills to do specific jobs, they simply hired men who did.
The call came as he was looking out over the hundred acres he’d bought in Georgia, less than an hour from the hub that was Hartsfield International. The land was extensive enough to have firing ranges, a shoot house and endurance courses for his men, while offering complete privacy. The perimeter was surrounded by sensors sensitive enough to detect a jackrabbit, with webcams every five feet.
In essence, Outlaw had his own country.
He’d built an enormous house that offered every comfort he could possibly want. Standing at the huge reinforced plate-glass window sipping a Jack Daniel’s, he answered his cell. It was his business cell phone, never used for anything but clients with jobs.
Well good, he thought.Time to make me some more money.
