Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

Lau from their own New Zealand outfit. The NZSAS and RatHawks had been conducting joint ops against the Talis for months, and Lau must have fallen in with them on a raid. Tai and Kai had worked up quite a fearsome reputation of their own during those missions, so Braithwaite might have eyed them for some time.

He got right to the point. The local tribes were smuggling opium and guns—a trade financed by money the CIA paid out to curry favor with tribal leaders—and he’d been shaking down the chiefs for an even quarter of their profits. Braithwaite always took his percentage up top and didn’t shy away from making examples of the chieftains who balked. His preferred means was one the RatHawks used for months in their legit special missions. They didn’t just kill the maggots, they took trophies.

His offer to the twins was straightforward. They would become his personal enforcers and get paid out of the endless flow of dirty Taliban money.

Tai had reservations. They were good soldiers. Not that they’d played by the rules. Who did, in those godforsaken hills? But he foresaw Braithwaite leading them to a place where there were no rules—and he was right as far as it went.

Finally, Kai had convinced him the CIA raining greenbacks on people who murdered Western soldiers had already blown up the rules for everyone. You had to be ten times tougher and meaner than anybody else to survive in that savage environment. If the scum you were dealing with didn’t understand fear, you taught it to them. Some of the RatHawks wore their souvenirs like they were lucky charms or jujus. Tai didn’t know about that, though he did know they made the warlords piss their baggy trousers. And there was something to the collecting part of it. He admittedly couldn’t have said what it was. But after a while, it hooked him.

Kai saw the bridge exit coming up fast now; it was time to put away his thoughts about Afghanny. He slipped behind the van in the right lane, still keeping an inconspicuous distance back as it turned off onto the dark Brooklyn streets.

Its driver rode past the mash of century-old brick walk-ups, modern glass-and-steel high-rises, and wobbly commercial warehouses bordering the waterfront. Tai wondered where he was headed at this hour. This was no longer the direction he’d taken before. He therefore wasn’t driving to Snow Pixie’s apartment building. Or to the place where he had spent the night after dropping her off. Almost four o’clock in the morning, everything here was shut down. Where the hell was he going?

Tai stayed a full block behind him, curious but not so curious he would rush things. He was a hunter by trade and long experience, and that demanded patience. He would learn what he needed to know soon enough.

Ten minutes after he got off the bridge, Duncan turned left into a paved driveway leading up to a fifteen-foot-high chain-link fence. Beyond the fence, a low, wide concrete-block building stood at the head of a row of commercial piers thrusting out over the East River like crooked fingers.

The barrel-shaped water tower on the building’s rooftop was white, with the words Treasure Chest Self Storage—Discount Rates! painted in large red letters on two sides. The tower was illuminated by spotlights, and the lettering could be easily read from the bridge.

Duncan eased the Transit up to the fence, pausing as a scanner read the SmartPass clipped to his sun visor. After a moment, the electronic gate retracted and he went through into the dimly lit parking lot.

The storage facility itself stood at the north end of the lot, near the finger piers. Duncan drove around to Bay C on the south side of the building, then U-turned so his tail end faced its metal roll-up gate. Stopping the van, he grabbed his SmartPass and got out.

A swipe of the pass and the gate rose open on its tracks. Duncan turned back toward the van, whistling in the dark. The tune was zippy and very familiar, though he couldn’t quite place it.

He hopped up through the rear door, squirmed around the two road trunks, then got out an aluminum folding ramp he’d fastened to one side of the cargo section. The mystery melody still on his lips, Duncan pushed the first trunk slowly down the ramp.

Like the outer bay door, the ones inside were metal roll-ups. He wheeled the trunk halfway down a wide corridor of storage units, stopped at Unit A-10, and used his SmartPass to raise the door.

About the size of a large walk-in closet, the cubicle was jammed with the assorted contents of his old apartment. He’d organized it neatly, stacking boxes of packed-away clothes and belongings to the left, leaning his mattress and box spring against the wall opposite the door, and filling the middle of the space with a few large pieces of furniture—a couch, dresser, nightstand, dining table, widescreen television, and four matching chairs. To his left were a tight few feet of space he reserved for his performance equipment.

Duncan pushed the trunk into it, locked its casters in place with his toe, and turned back toward the corridor.

Outside, he decided to take a quick cigarette break. The second trunk could wait a minute.

He lit up and puffed. A damp breeze was swirling up around the lot, and he wondered if it was supposed to rain. He hoped not, for Natasha’s sake. Probably she hadn’t bothered to check the weather forecast before hitting the road. That would have been way too easy for someone whose day job was making genius predictions for the government’s new super cyberagency. Which reminded him of a chef he’d once dated. She would spend her days cooking exotic dishes in a world-class restaurant, then come home and fix herself canned vegetable soup and tuna sandwiches. Anything to avoid the kitchen in her downtime.

He exhaled a long stream of smoke. Beyond the piers to his left, a thin, straight