Executed 2 (Extracted Trilogy #2)
R.R. Haywood
‘You do not pay me. You do not own me. You do not control me. The second you brought us back and explained why is the second you gave us the responsibility to deal with the problem. Can you understand that? You do not run this. This is not yours. This problem is bigger than you . . . the lack of care you have shown is staggering. I suggest, Roland, I really . . . really fucking suggest that from now you focus solely on providing the money and do nothing else that you can fuck up . . . Find someone with a military intelligence background . . . Find someone who knows what they are doing, because you don’t.’
Prologue
2010
She walks into the diner. Two Slavic-faced men on the right at a table eating eggs over easy. She crosses the room to take a seat on a stool at the counter.
‘Hey, Miri,’ Joanie says as she pours the coffee into a white ceramic mug. ‘Hot again.’
‘Sure is.’
‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
Joanie moves off, replacing the coffee jug on the hotplate as she goes, as she always does. Miri tugs the smartphone from the back pocket of her jeans. She props it against the serviette dispenser and takes a sip of the strong, bitter coffee.
She filters the noises of the diner as she sips. The scrape of cutlery on plates. Low conversations. An old rock track on the radio, but it’s low and muted.
The bubbled glass of the clean coffee jug gives her a view of the entrance to the diner. The reflection from a sliding glass partition between the counter and the kitchen shows her the toilet door. Her large-screen smartphone works as a mirror for the parking lot, and the highly polished stainless steel side of the chiller cabinet gives her the view of the two Slavic-faced men eating their eggs over easy.
California is a huge state. Bigger than Great Britain with a population of nearly forty million people, so two men in a diner mean nothing. Two men eating eggs over easy and drinking coffee while talking quietly are no different to the tourists, truckers and hikers all doing the same thing. America by definition is a land of varying cultures and genealogies.
Therein lies the problem. Therein is the tell. They are not tourists, truckers or hikers. They are dressed casually, and at a glance, they could pass for hikers, except for the lack of wear on their new boots and the fact they are dressed in denim when virtually all hikers now wear walking pants or shorts. It’s also their pale faces and the overly casual manner of their eating. She has never seen them before, which means they are new to this place, yet they do not look around. Any normal person eating in a new diner or eatery would at least be curious. These guys are not. They are eating, sipping coffee and talking quietly, but to her they might as well be holding a signboard saying We Are Bad Guys.
She sighs inwardly with the sadness of a long life, then an instant later feels the thrill of being back in the game. The years fall away then come surging back with the bitterness of her retirement and being too old to be operational and left with a skill set no longer required. She reaches for her phone: one message will invoke a swift and brutal reaction.
She stops and lingers with her hand almost touching the phone, and in that second she realises how much she misses it. She hated her work at the end. Her moral compass had become increasingly warped. She started to question why they were doing things, and someone at her level should never question the ethics of the mission. If she sends the message, she will be back in the world of briefings, debriefings, meetings, clearance and intelligence gathering. She will be actively involved in choosing a relocation site, and they will expect her to work through her old missions to identify who it is that has decided to track her down to this diner. She would be a somebody again, but only for a very short time, and then she would be back to living in a no-place town doing nothing other than sleeping with one eye open by candlelight.
The future looks bleak. When she was active, she could never understand why retired agents committed suicide. Now she understands. It’s the days and nights of memories of places, operations, kills, losses, missions and the never-ending motion of the machine they were a cog in. The nightmares come when you stop being active. The things you thought you dealt with and processed come back and make you scream out in the night. If she goes back, it will only make it harder to leave again.
Her hand lowers to the counter-top. Inches away from the phone. She stares at the reflection of the two men in the chiller cabinet and decides, in that moment, to do nothing.
Instead, she drinks her coffee and feels a sense of liberation. She can let go of her fear of the future because she knows she will be dead within two days.
She has been made. Tagged. Spotted. Seen. Located. The two men have not reacted outwardly, but right now one of them is keying a message into his phone, telling whoever they work for where she is. By tonight, they will have found out where she lives. By tomorrow night, they will have deployed resources and devised a method of attack, and at some point during the hours of darkness, they will come for her.
So be it. Better to die by the sword than lonely and forgotten in some shitty little town where she spends her days constantly looking over her shoulder.
Her time is over. She would never take her own life, but she can be passive in reaction to someone wishing to take it for her. There are no more missions. No more operations. She is too old to be a part of the machine, but too young to be left solely to her memories.
Miri finishes the coffee, drops down from the stool and walks out without a single glance at either of the two men, who in turn look everywhere else but at her.
When she gets back to her ranch-style house nestled in the open plains of the asshole shitty county, she finds a note pinned to the front door.
She reads it.
She does nothing.
She makes a light salad and does nothing.
She lies awake in bed and does nothing.
The next morning, she sweeps the wide porch and does nothing.
When the helicopter goes overhead, she does nothing.
She packs. She waits.
At dusk, she sits on her freshly swept porch with the Glock pistol wedged under her right thigh and waits.