Chapter Seven – The Recruit
Nace "Pyvox" Scanlon barely dodged an overburdened bus of passengers that careened past him without slowing. He paused, looking for a place to hide, at least until darkness covered the Indian city. Though he'd left the Ganges River two hours earlier, his clothes were still wet and muddy from sweating and falling in various alleys as he was chased.
Normally, he would've turned to face his enemies, but the German hunter-tracer team was seeing red. They were skilled professionals and brutally efficient, like hounds that anticipated his escape routes. And they were closing in.
He regretted the carelessness with which he'd killed the German assassin in Paris. If he would've continued his hunt for Corban on his own, all the force of German's intelligence community wouldn't be descending on him now. The dead man's teammates would probably never rest until he was sinking in a Haridwar sewer pond.
Panting, Scanlon put his back against a rickety wall and tugged a throwing knife from his left triceps. At least one member of the German team was a knife expert. And the knives he used weren't the normal kind, either. They were some sort of composite plastic that could pass through a metal detector.
Scanlon tucked the blade into his belt and pulled up his shirt sleeve. He usually traveled with several vials of choice poisons, but while running for his life, he'd lost all but one vial of a lachrymator, tear gas in a bottle, meant for dispersing in a crowd rather than for a single target.
A spare passport was sewn into his pant leg, so he didn't necessarily need to return to his hotel room. But returning to the airport wasn't the answer, either. The Germans seemed to have about a dozen assets in the city now, and probably at least that many locals in their employment.
Traveling inland was the answer, Scanlon decided. He would travel farther upriver, and reassess once he could get resupplied. It was humiliating to fail—a first time for him—but he couldn't complete the mission with a squad of assassins on his trail. Corban Dowler would receive a reprieve for now, and not because the man had warned him at the river, but because Scanlon was outmatched at the moment.
Pushing away from the wall, he found himself in the path of two German operators. They both wore a local cloth over their shoulders, perhaps in an attempt to blend in. But Scanlon hadn't had time to disguise himself since leaving the river. Between avoiding agents and dodging knives—and not too successfully—he'd left himself exposed.
In that split second, staring into the eyes of a blond man in glasses, Scanlon thought about how disgraceful it was to die in the hands of these foot soldiers. However well-trained they were, that's what they were to him. He'd been an independent operator for years, almost exclusively for the British. His craft had become sophisticated with most of his chemicals untraceable. Even those he called friends feared him.
Backing away from the agents, he reached for his sleeve. The lachrymator needed a distribution system, like a can of compressed air, but maybe if he threw it on the pavement hard enough . . .
Two more agents rounded the corner and stopped with drawn side arms. Scanlon looked around him. There were no bystanders he could push in front of any oncoming bullets. A dead end loomed behind him with only sales booths on both sides. Though he accepted that he was about to die and enter the great beyond, he didn't like leaving a sanctioned hit undone. It wasn't the legacy he had in mind. Now someone else would kill Dowler, the true master, and—
Corban Dowler walked slowly behind the four German agents, and for an instant, Scanlon thought Corban had joined the Germans to kill him. But then he saw that Corban carried a crooked branch broken from a tree. In the hands of a common man, a stick meant very little. However, a three-foot stick in the hands of a hunter-tracer ghost could be a game-changing weapon.
When Corban struck, Scanlon flinched. All of Corban's force went into that first blow against one of the gunmen, instantly paralyzing the man's arm and causing the gun to clatter to the street.
Proving he wasn't at all at the end of his age of fitness, Corban spun and kicked. He thrust the stick at the next gunman. The other two with knives were upon Corban then, and Scanlon saw his opportunity. While Corban was whipping the stick at the Germans, Scanlon picked up the dropped gun and held it on the fighting men.
Though outnumbered, Corban didn't appear to be overwhelmed. The Germans had been overconfident while targeting Scanlon, but Corban had caught them off-guard.
The men seemed to see Scanlon and the gun trained on them at the same instant. In his hesitation to fire, they abandoned their scuffle and fled the scene, taking their injured with them.
Breathless, Corban dropped his stick, and Scanlon aimed at his target's chest, content with taking a break from his preferred method of elimination just this once, if it meant a finished contract.
"Seems like the right way to repay the one who has now saved your life twice," Corban said, his head down and hands clenched into fists.
"I can't afford to get sentimental. You know who I am."
"Pyvox, right?" Corban raised his head and looked Scanlon in the face. "You're not that much of a mystery, Nace Scanlon. You're like the rest of us—lost in a sea of darkness, desperate and lonely, thinking there's no other path for you."
"It is indeed my path." Scanlon wasn't amused, or even bothered. All of his targets, given the chance, begged for mercy in their own ways. "It's the only path I know."
"No, it isn't. Come on. We have a girl to rescue. You want to still be standing there when the BND come back?"
"German's Federal Intelligence Service is in India to kill you." Scanlon chuckled, enjoying the banter with a peer, an equal of the highest caliber.
"Yeah, well, when they come back for me, who do you think they'll kill first—the man with the gun or the man with empty hands? Come on."
Scanlon's smile disappeared. This man he was tracking to kill was actually talking to him as if he were a partner!
"What's this business about a girl to save?" Scanlon felt his resolve soften. This had never happened before—almost as if something had turned off the savagery inside him. The only thing he could think to blame it on was his dip in the holy Ganges, and he knew that polluted water had no special powers. "I work alone. I'm not going anywhere with you."
"Fine." Corban held up his hand as if to signal his departure. "After I show you where she is, you can rescue her yourself, alone, as you wish."
Corban walked away. Scanlon looked to his left and right, then tossed the gun into a carpet seller's booth.
"That's not what I meant. Hey!"
Scanlon cursed and stomped after Corban, yet kept a careful eye out for the Germans.
*~*