As we moved up a series of roads running alongside tall grassy hills, I kept a mental countdown in my head. We were approximately four minutes, fifteen seconds from when I had arranged for us to be ambushed by Black Tide.

“So where does Luigi Mondo live?” I asked.

“Bored of my company already?”

“Hardly,” I said, giving a half-hearted smile. In fact, I was trying to figure out the timing for the upcoming attack by our distance. “Just enjoy being informed about my targets. I like to work them professionally.”

“Versus just shooting them and running away like my brother?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” Lucita smiled. “He lives in a refurbished palazzo two hundred kilometers to the north. Luigi Mondo used to be an ally of the Carnevale, but he’s made some new friends in the European Union who want to see us replaced. My father wants to make an example of him before he thinks about sending the military in.”

“And he thinks killing the future president of Italy is going to prevent that?”

“We are an institution in this country, Frank. The days of the Roman Empire are gone and even the Italian city-states of old, but through the Carnevale’s efforts, we exert influence on hundreds of nations globally. When the communists were out to take this nation over, we responded. When the nationalists wanted to turn us into a fascist regime, we dealt with them, too.”

“An appeal to patriotism isn’t going to work, no matter how much I love lasagna.”

Lucita snorted. “We have a bit more than that going for us. But, no, it’s not patriotism that drives me. It’s a general belief that something good has come from my efforts. Did you not have a similar drive as a Letter?”

I paused, deciding she deserved an honest answer. “No.”

Two minutes, thirty seconds…

Two minutes, twenty-nine seconds…

Other people were not as punctual as I, however, so the explosion meant to go off just as we entered into a tunnel and to generate a rockslide behind us went off in front of us, forcing Lucita to slam on the brakes of her car and try to dodge the falling debris. Instead, the car slammed against the side of the railing against the valley’s edge. The window beside me along with the door was crushed, showering me with square-shaped particulates of glass. My body felt like it was smashed against the side of a wall by a rhino, but thankfully, I didn’t break anything.

Lucita’s lack of a seatbelt had an unfortunate effect. She was thrown from the car through the driver’s side door and onto the ground, where she slammed with bone-crushing force. It was the kind of car wreck that would have instantly killed a normal woman. Given that she was a Shell, but also that she’d struck her head, I gave her a fifty-fifty shot at being alive.

Either way, a pair of black vans pulled out from the tunnel, both in front and behind us, releasing a quartet of armed paramilitary guards. Each of them sported modified AK-150 assault rifles, the kind capable of piercing even a Shell’s modified frame.

They had orders to kill Lucita on the ground, not knowing she was a shell, and kidnap me. It had been my original plan to simply deal with them in a heroic-looking fashion, but given that they were likely to just put a pair of bullets into her body, I had to revise my plan.

Amateur fucks.

Pulling Lucita back into her into the car by her leg while keeping my head down. I saw a gun she’d hidden in a holster by her inner thigh and grabbed it. I shot the nearest assassin in the face as he came through the open door. This caused the other three agents to open fire. Thankfully, Lucita’s car proved to be bulletproof. Unbuckling my seatbelt, I slipped through the shattered window and over the side of the hill.

Media tended to portray combat as furious contests of bullets and raw adrenaline. It could be, but that way wasn’t how I thought. The chemicals the Society kept me doped up on combined with my IRD implant kept me calm in battle as well as enhanced my thinking process. I calculated where the three remaining attackers (not counting their drivers) would come around the car, making a decision to intercept each as they came.

The first one died without issue, getting shot in the face, and the second died equally quickly. The third, however, didn’t come around at all, which meant I needed to lure him out. I ran behind the van they’d come in, moved to the passenger’s side, and shot the driver in the head through the windshield.

As I expected, the remaining attacker opened fire at the van I was behind. The sounds of bullets against the framework made me wonder what the chances of them coming out the other side were. They might also execute Lucita, which would put a serious crimp in my plans to earn the Carnevale’s trust.

I’d planned this attack to disable the car and kidnap us both, but it had quickly turned into a complete clusterfuck thanks to their murderous overuse of firepower. Then again, I’d planned to kill them the whole time using the plan I’d given them for tactical advantage, so I couldn’t judge them too harshly. That was when there was a scream followed by the sound of a car speeding away.

“Come out!” Lucita’s voice called.

I blinked, then slowly stepped around the other side of the van. Lucita was standing over the corpse of the fourth gunman, the other van now absent. Lucita looked like she’d ripped the other man’s arm off.

Lucita was now holding his rifle. Which she was aiming at me. “Tell me, did you have anything to do with this?”

I stared at her, debating my chances of taking her down.

I threw my gun to the side.

“Yes,” I said.

“I suppose this is the end of our partnership, then.”

“The Society does not forgive or forget,” I said, raising my hands. I decided to play on her paranoia, figuring a woman in her position couldn’t afford to be too careful. “Or did you really think it would be that easy?”

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Lucita removed her finger from the trigger. “You think this is their response to your defection?”

“The first part of it, I’d wager,” I looked down to the bodies. “They look like Black Tide soldiers to me. Local muscle.”

“I know who the Black Tide is,” Lucita said, adjusting the broken strap of her yellow dress. “Russian fucks who think they can play at our level.”

“Obviously, they can’t.”

Lucita lowered her gun. “Help me put the bodies in the van. We’ll call my cleaners to dispose of this scene and provide us with a new car.”

The next part of my plan would have to be played carefully if I was going to succeed in turning Lucita against the rest of the Carnevale. The Black Tide’s decision to go guns blazing and ignore my plan had almost ruined everything, but we were back on schedule. Worse, it was clear that they had ignored some of my instructions, like securing the road.

While in the process of putting the bodies in Black Tide’s van, a white 2005 Volkswagen Golf pulled up from the same route we had come, carrying an elderly couple. The car came to a stop just a few yards away from the scene of the disaster, the pair looking shocked by what they saw. Lucita, still holding one of the thugs’ assault rifles, looked over at them with a bored look on her face. Had the couple come a few minutes later, we could have avoided any further bloodshed. They hadn’t though.

The man in the passenger’s side stepped out of the car. He was in a pair of khaki shorts and a polo shirt with a gator label. He was about a hundred pounds overweight, with a long, graying Santa Claus-like beard and a panama hat. Looking at the scene before me, I could tell he was more confused than frightened. Speaking in German, thus confirming my suspicions that he was a tourist, he said, “What is this? Is this a movie set?”

Lucita sighed, stood up, turned her rifle around and shot the woman in the car first in order to prevent her from escaping, then shot the man in the chest. The assault rifle fired in three round bursts that left them both dead before they could react.

“We have two more bodies,” Lucita said, going back to checking the corpses.

“I noticed,” I said.

Killing witnesses was standard procedure for many operatives in the assassin trade, but I’d always made it a point of pride to avoid needing to do so. I would have, though, even here, yet there was something strange going on with my thought processes. I’d set up six men to die to help with my cover, but those two hadn’t been part of my plan. I kept thinking about ways I could have prevented them from being murdered, and wondered if I shouldn’t have taken a shot at Lucita before she’d acted.

I didn’t understand my own reasoning.

Why did I care?

There was a gnawing sensation in my chest where there should have been only empty hollowness. I had seen truly horrific sights in my five years of killing people. I had once been sent to assist Agent A after he’d murdered a father, his two young girls, and his wife, in order to set up the appearance of a murder-suicide. I’d seen the mass executions of a Bolivian Colonel who had been given carte blanche by his superiors to eliminate all the people he suspected of drug trafficking. I’d even witnessed H’s suicide. This, though? This bothered me. My quest to learn my past had awakened something in me. Something the International Refugee Society was right to fear. Not that it had helped the tourists.

I finished loading up the bodies and pushing the Volkswagen out of the road along with the debris. I then covered both the tourists’ car and the van with blue plastic tarps found in the back of Lucita’s vehicle, presumably for the disposal of bodies. It was a poor substitute for getting rid of the vehicles, but prevented any further incidents with the tourists as a half-dozen other cars passed us by. This was an isolated road, but we were still in Italy, and there were very few places that didn’t see some amount of use.

It was around that time Lucita found what she was looking for in a cellphone strapped underneath the front seat of the van.

“Excellent,” I said, covered in sweat and holding my jacket over my shoulder. “What are you looking for?”

“Evidence of your claim,” Lucita said, smiling. “The Black Tide’s soldiers get all of their orders from these sorts of phones. What most of their clients do not know is they also record all of their conversations so they can’t be betrayed. If a client should ever renege on a deal, they would be implicated.”

“That sounds rather stupid.”

“They’re encrypted and deleted after,” Lucita said, shrugging. “I just happen to have the key.”

I nodded in appreciation at her thoughtfulness.

“Marissa?” I tried mentally “ringing” her.

“G? My God, I was so worried,” Marissa responded after a few moments. “Did your plan work?”

“It depends. Did you get that sampling together of the Caesar’s voice clips and run it through Delphi?”

“Yes. Did you take one of them alive like you planned?”

“No, but I may be getting something even better.”

“OK.”

Lucita, meanwhile, had put the phone up to her ear and was listening. She screamed out several obscenities, threw the phone to the ground, and processed to smash it to pieces with one of her heels.

“Is something wrong?” I faked, not knowing what was going on.

“Do you need backup?” Marissa asked, sounding every bit as worried as I was during the incident at the airport.

“No,” I responded. “Don’t worry, I’ve got this.”

“Did you know about this?” Lucita screamed, aiming her rifle at me again.

I raised my hands. I affected a panicked look, but honestly was pleased my plan was going right again. “What? No! Jesus! What’s wrong?”

Marissa turned her gun away from me. “My father ordered this!”

I faked astonishment. “What?”

“That son of a bitch!” Lucita said, cursing some more. “I’ve spent years serving his every twisted whim, killing and fucking whoever he wanted, and this is how he repays me. I’ll kill him and every single one of his followers.”

Now was the delicate part of our discussion. I may have saved Lucita’s life, but she was a psychopath and in an emotional state. Given that I’d defected from the Society and she obviously had some suspicions of me, I had to approach her carefully. The sensible thing to do right now, was to eliminate me and go on the run.

“You can’t do that,” I said, adjusting my tie.

“What?”

“You’ve called the Cleaners,” I said, pointing to the cars we were standing beside as an Audi blitzed past us. “Your father undoubtedly knows you’ve survived the assassins he’s sent against you. If he had the full confidence of his people, he obviously would have used them instead of contracting outsiders. He’s worried you’re going to usurp his position and that if he turned against you, his men and women wouldn’t follow him.”

Flattery was one of the best skills you could learn as an assassin. The trick to it was that you not only had to make your target believe you believed it, but you had to make them believe it too. I gave myself a three out of four chance she’d believe me. If she didn’t? Well, then I wouldn’t have to worry about my memories anymore.

Lucita blinked a few times. “What do you suggest?”

“You play along,” I said, hoping I could sell this. “Long enough to get your people into position and however many others you need to secure yourself. Eliminate his hardline supporters and your enemies in one swift stroke. Then—”

“Do unto him as he would do unto me?”

“If you want to get Biblical.”

“I can’t trust you,” Lucita said, lifting her rifle up again, ready to kill me.

“Lucita, at this point, I’m probably the only person you can one hundred percent know is not invested in your father over you.”

Lucita stared at me, reconsidering.

“Make me an offer,” I said, smiling. “Sell me you as leader of the Carnevale. Show me why you should be leader.”

“A million dollar bonus if you kill my father.”

“Close.”

Lucita smiled. “I’ll finish the seduction.”

“That’s as much a reward to you as anyone else.” I gave a roguish smile. It was the only response I could think of that didn’t insult her, but also moved along her thoughts to what I wanted from this conversation.

Lucita paused then, finally realizing what I was directing her to. “I’ll give you back your memories. Tonight.”

I smiled. “Take me to Doctor Gordon and get him to work on me and you have a deal.” I sucked in my breath, knowing I needed to delay. “We need to finish the job first, though, to throw your father off the scent.”

Lucita tossed away the gun. “We have an accord then.”

I nodded. “Your father will get exactly what he deserves and you’ll receive everything you’re due.”

That was when the cleaners arrived with a big rig truck for loading the cars up onto, followed by a red Porsche.

And not a moment too soon.