The warehouse I’d bought in Brooklyn through a shell company was larger than Camp Stabalot in Cleveland, but not really any nicer. For now it was going to be our staging ground. In the future it might wind up as our East Coast headquarters, but that would take quite a bit of remodeling.
For now it was pretty much just a big, empty space with a few offices off to one side. Perfect for what we needed at the moment. We could park all our vehicles inside with room left over and sleep in the enclosed office rooms. Spartan, sure, but that was fine for now.
As it turned out, we moved our plans up a day when Mia noticed that there was an unusually large number of Night Children making their way to Thomas Bros that Wednesday night. Nearly double the usual number, but really, that wasn’t saying all that much. We’d be facing sixteen or seventeen instead of the expected nine or maybe ten, and that wasn’t an opportunity we could afford to pass up. Our task would be greatly simplified by catching them all together and not having to hunt them down out in the field.
We decided to keep to our timetable knowing that the local cell would break up well before dawn, as they always did. At midnight we would leave the warehouse in our various vehicles, encircling the crappy area the Thomas Bros building occupied. Mia had already cut off the video feeds from the few functioning police cameras in the neighborhood with the knowledge that it would take days for them to get repaired.
Parking the box van around the corner from our target, we unloaded silently. Dekker and Philo had the door breaching duty, since they were our biggest and brawniest guys. The moment they smashed the door in, Jewel and Tommy would rush inside, taking the lead. The guys had all played cards for the right to be first in, and those two had won. After them the rest were to enter in a certain order, with me last of all.
That wasn’t my idea, but I’d acquiesced when faced by a united front. My hitters insisted that I be kept safe, even though everyone was fully aware that I was our most potent weapon.
Remembering my promise to Emmy, I gave in without much protest. They all knew that I wasn’t trying to save my own skin at their expense, after all. They just wanted to keep their queen from any possible harm.
Once our guys were in position I gave the signal and followed as our assault squad moved silently but quickly down the abandoned and unlit street. With zero hesitation Philo and Dekker slammed that twenty-five kilo ram into the metal front door right by the locking mechanism, flinging it open instantly. Our guys rushed inside in complete silence as soon as the door was breached, as we’d practiced. As the last to enter, I could hear the sounds of muffled shouting and violence happening inside, but there’s no way anybody even as close as a hundred yards away heard anything other than the door being slammed open with great force.
I hated waiting outside while my hitters were doing my dirty work for me, but this is what they’d signed up for. When I finally got the signal it was all clear I walked in to find my guys, still on high alert, checking every corner or possible hiding spot for any enemy combatants.
My hitters had wiped out all opposition and the place was littered with bodies. They’d captured two of our opponents alive, but that was it out of the eighteen that had been in the place.
Knowing their assigned tasks, a group of my guys started carrying the bodies to just inside the loading dock door while the rest either held the two survivors in place or searched through the industrial warehouse.
I ignored the guys dealing with the carnage as they opened the roll-up door and retrieved the body bags from our box van which was now backed against the loading door.
“Who are these two?” I asked the men holding the captives.
“This one was the one giving orders,” Jewel said, indicating a middle-aged, heavyset man who wouldn’t last the night without serious medical intervention. “And this other one tried to surrender. He said he has nothing to do with anything here.”
“Alright,” I said. “Let him go.” I almost laughed at the surprised looks on everybody’s face before I gut-punched the younger guy so hard he fell to the floor and curled up into a ball. I kicked him none too gently in the ribs a couple of times, then indicated that the guys should pick him up again.
“If you had nothing to do with this group, what the fuck were you doing here?” I asked, getting his attention with the point of Old Stabby trailing across his face, pressing firm enough to leave a scratch but not enough to break the skin.
“I just had some business, that’s all! I don’t even live here in New York! I was just here to do business!” he said, shaking with fear.
“You don’t live in New York?” I asked.
“No- I’m from Chicago,” he said.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
“I don’t know you, and I don’t have anything to do with your fight with these guys!” he said.
“Did people used to call you The Boss?” I asked.
“What? What do you mean?” he asked, but I could see when the realization that he’d fucked up hit him.
“Deal with him,” I told the two guys holding the man, and one of them promptly stabbed him up under the ribs, ending his life.
“You,” I said, turning to the older man, who had watched the demise of The Boss silently. “You know who I am. You know why I’m here. You know full well what’s going to happen next.”
He nodded, but stayed silent.
“Your options are very limited,” I said. “You can cooperate and die quickly and relatively painlessly, or you can refuse and die very painfully and slowly. Your choice. Mind you, this is me being merciful. Many among us would happily inflict all kinds of suffering on you for what you’ve done.”
“Do what you will- I’m a dead man either way,” he said, showing a surprising amount of spine.
“We found you,” I said. “We knew exactly where you were hiding. Believe me- we will find everyone associated with your group. We were content to leave you alone when you were just checking our windows, but when you attacked us in Atlanta you signed your own death warrant. I can see you realize that- you can see the error of your ways. Your actions, your choices, led us to this moment right here. Now, tell me, where are your actions going to lead us next? Who was the man that came to visit you five days before the attack in Atlanta? Where did he come from? What did he offer you?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” he protested.
Of course this earned him a gut punch similar to the one I’d dealt to The Boss, but my guys expected it this time and held him up. This afforded me the opportunity to punch him again, which I couldn’t pass up.
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“This is where we get to the painful or painless choice,” I said. “I’d promised my dear, sweet Angela that I wouldn’t ever torture anybody, but you had her killed. I guess that means that my promise is no longer valid, right?” I mused before punching him a third time. “I can do this all night,” I said as my guys straightened him up again. “I have all the time in the world. You, however, do not. I figure that you’d probably be dead by the fifteenth punch, maybe twentieth on the outside. That’s about how long it took for the last guy I beat to death. So, your choice. Tell me who he was and we can end this, or keep the information to yourself through a severe beating. I’ll find out before too long anyway, so it’s not as if you’re actually going to save him from a similar fate anyhow.” To emphasize my point I slammed my fist into his gut again, causing the man to cough up some blood.
“Your organization is ended. Your people are all either already dead or soon will be,” I said. “No matter how strong you think you’re being by not telling me, I’ll find him and kill him, too. It’s simply a matter of when, that’s all. Tell me now and I’ll stop this,” I said, slamming another blow to his mid-section.
“He said his name was Ahmet Asker,” the man choked. “He didn’t say that anybody sent him. He said he would pay a lot of money if we killed Emmy and her two babes.”
“I see,” I said. “That’s pretty much what I’d expected. And has he paid?” I asked.
“No- Emmy lived. They only paid half.”
“Alright,” I said, nodding. My next blow slammed the tip of Old Stabby straight through his ribcage and into his heart, ending the discussion.
“Right- with the rest,” I said to the two guys holding him up. “And do not repeat what he said to anybody- got it?”
I took the time to look around to assess the situation. The guys on cleanup detail had already mopped up the blood off the floors and the bodies had all been packed up, leaving no real traces of violence.
Once the leader had been zipped into his bodybag and loaded into the box van with all the rest, the van was closed up and then the loading dock door was shut. The van would head back to our warehouse to unload, then return immediately. Meanwhile, our guys collected everything that could possibly be of any interest, loading it all into the stacks of boxes we’d brought for just that purpose. We didn’t care about the old, decrepit industrial machinery left over from when the place had been a factory of some sort- we only wanted the stuff that the Night Children had brought in.
A second van-load had all of the cell’s belongings packed up and taken away, leaving the place looking empty and devoid of life. After making sure the place was cleaned out I nodded to the guys, who took a few minutes to spray paint graffiti all over the interior. In our planning Grant and I had hammered home that none of the tags could look anything like Night Children stuff, so the guys had all developed their own street style tags over the course of the last couple of weeks at camp.
We were out of there, wedging the front door shut, by four thirty in the morning. By five we had all reconvened at the warehouse.
Our raid had been perfectly planned and executed, with no injuries to speak of on our part and no red flags on any of the city’s first responder networks. Our perimeter crew hadn’t seen any incidental bystanders, either. There had been no witnesses, no errors, nothing.
Now all we had to do was dispose of the bodies and sift through the personal belongings we’d found. Hacking the phones we’d collected would be a pain in the ass, but doable. I’d paid a lot of money for the hacking software, after all. We’d trace down the rest of the network before too long, and root them out from where they hid.
In a week, another shell company I’d set up would bring in a crew to clear out and paint the old Thomas Bros building, which it had bought from the city at well below market rate. With a bit of patience I might turn a profit on the place, and nobody would ever know it was the scene of a serious crime.
Back at the warehouse, the hitters were in a jubilant mood, excited that the operation was flawlessly executed. We’d planned our attack perfectly and carried it out without any slip-ups at all. The cell had been so completely unprepared that there had barely been any actual resistance at all when we came bursting in the front door of their supposedly secret hideout.
“Alright!” I shouted to get everyone’s attention. “Gather ‘round!”
It took only a moment for everyone to jump to do as I commanded, and soon all eyes were upon me.
“Well done, ladies and gentlemen. Well done. I am truly sorry that this ever had to happen at all, but we did it properly. You can all congratulate yourselves on a successful operation.” I took a moment to look around at all the hitters, as well as my five ex-military types.“That said, this was the quick and easy part of the mission. The hard part is about to start. We know that there are at least thirteen members of the group that weren’t there tonight. We have to track them down and end them, too. This isn’t going to be easy, since they’ll know we wiped out the main group soon enough. That means that the quicker we run them down, the less time they have to really go to ground. Thanks to our intel gathering during the last year we know at least the general area they all live. Some of them we know exactly. Those, we’ll take care of this morning. The rest we’ll get in the next few days.”
I looked around again, and I could see that the task ahead was starting to become clear. They were going to have to operate in the field, and that was going to be much more challenging.
“The other part of what comes next is going through everything we collected tonight. All that paperwork, which may well lead us to this group’s connections to others near and far. Once we crack their phones we can extrapolate even more, and then we’ll have to chase down every single lead until there are no more. That will take time. We can’t take too long, though, or those leads will grow cold. We have to be extremely proactive about all this. We are not here to fuck around. We are here to complete our domination of this continent for all to see. This is our land. Ours.”
We divided half of the group into two-person teams and gave them the locations Mia had identified. There was no time to waste, and so off they went with murder in mind. The remaining hitters were set to work sorting through all the stuff we’d brought back, looking for any clues at all. The worst part of their job was searching the bodies very carefully, but they did it without complaint.
I pulled Grant and the other ex-military aside for a private meeting once all the tasks were assigned and begun. “Alright. Round two went our way. That was about as smooth as we could possibly have hoped for, and we achieved our objectives. Good job on getting the guys ready for the op.”
All five nodded their thanks at the recognition. They’d done well and they knew it.
“Round three is going to be harder. Chasing down the ones who weren’t there tonight will be tricky, but I feel confident that we can get it done with the resources we have for the task. Round four will undoubtedly involve other Eastern Seaboard cities- particularly the ones where our outreach has been ineffective. I want to wait a bit until word gets out that we crushed our opposition here in New York, so we can see who rolls over willingly before we go in like the fist of God. If we’re lucky the resistance will just cave.”
“Let’s hope so,” Grant said.
“The leader of the cell said that the man who visited right before the attack in Atlanta said his name was Ahmet Asker. That’s the same name used to rent the car at Newark Airport,” I said. “Nobody using that name flew in or out of Newark in that time frame. This means that he’s either local- which wouldn’t explain why they rented a car at an airport- or he’s from out of town and using an alias to either fly or rent the car. Based upon flimsy evidence and assumptions, I’m going with the idea that he came in from out of the country. The name ‘Ahmet’ is extremely common in Turkey, and the last name ‘Asker’ apparently means ‘soldier’ or something like that over there.”
“You think they came from Turkey?” Jody asked. “That seems a stretch.”
“We have history,” I said. “I killed the Turkish Night Children prince when he attacked Emmy, and their king tried to screw with us up in Vancouver so I killed his men and flew him back to Istanbul and told him I’d gut him like a fish if he ever came back to North America. So, yeah, like I said, assumptions, but they fit a pattern.”
“O.K., I get it,” Jody said. “This king from Turkey has a hard-on for you and Emmy, and used these jackasses to do his dirty work.”
“That’s my read,” I agreed.
“So the obvious next step…” Jody said.
“Is obvious,” I replied. “I’m going to do what I can to get confirmation before we make any moves, but I think it’s fair to say that we need to project our power over there in a way that will leave it completely clear that we are not to be fucked with.”
“A bit of proportional response?” Jody asked wryly.
“I’m thinking disproportionate,” I countered. “I’m thinking we go in and wipe the house of Marfan right the fuck out. Taking the lot of them out will clearly assert our ability and willingness to defend what is ours.”
“That’s gonna be a pretty big task,” Grant said. “We were completely ready to wipe out a group here in New York, but going into a foreign country and up against a presumably hardened target? That’s a whole other level of difficulty.”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” I said. “We have a few elements that might make all the difference. I’m going to put a few things together to see if they line up our way. If I can get the right pieces in place we’ll move, but it won’t be any too soon. In the meantime, we have more immediate tasks. We’ll be plenty busy cleaning house here for now.”