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

to the top of the fence and half dropped, half leaped to the other side.

Landing on the balls of his feet, Kai dashed across the empty parking area and cut diagonally through the darkness toward the storage facility.

Duncan was back in the van and about to roll the second trunk onto the ramp when he finally identified the mystery tune on his lips. Sure, of course, shoulda known.

He almost slapped his forehead. Natasha. She’d improvised it earlier that night. Some of her riffs were firebolts, some strings of sweet, warm honey. This one was catchy, full of bounce—and the kicker was she probably wouldn’t even remember playing it. When she was in a groove, when she was on, they just went flying from her fingers.

He told himself he’d have to record his whistled version of it on his phone. Send it to her in a voice text once he’d finished locking away the equipment. Not only was it a total earworm, he felt certain she could spin it out into a longer bit of music.

Whistling away, he gave the trunk an easy push and let its weight carry it down the ramp, holding its handles to guide it. The wind was kicking up around him, mumbling and woofing in his ears. It really did seem like a storm system was moving in.

Duncan was rolling the trunk over to the storage bay when he heard the noise—like someone kicking a can across the blacktop behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, didn’t see anything, guessed it was the breeze blowing stuff around the lot, and turned back toward the access door.

He’d taken exactly one more step toward it when his head was wrenched hard to the left, so violently he heard several cervical vertebrae in his neck crack. He grunted in stunned surprise and felt his legs go numb.

Somebody had come up behind him. He felt a powerful body press against his back as an arm encircled his throat from the left, the elbow under his chin, its gloved hand spread over the right side of his face and forcing it sideways.

Duncan brought his own hands up and was almost surprised to realize he could still use them. His legs were dead weight. The only thing holding him erect was that thick arm locked around his throat. And it was choking him, clamping off his breath.

He tried to pry it away from him. His deltoids flexed and his neck muscles bulged. He was a foot shorter than his attacker, but bulky and strong. He had to get the arm off his throat. He couldn’t breathe.

Kai did not give him the chance. Broken neck and all, he had some fight in him. Kai’s right fist came up over the exposed side of his face. Clenched inside it was a small wood-handled scratch awl, its tempered steel shaft round and thin and pointed.

He brought the fist down hard, driving all four inches of the shaft into Duncan’s ear with a single thrust. Blood squirted up over the back of his hand as it pierced the eardrum and crunched through the minor resistance of its tiny auditory bones. His fist flush against the outer ear and head, he gave the awl several half turns, twisting his wrist left and right, left and right, a kind of stirring motion to shred the capillaries and chop up the soft brain tissues. Fluid welled up over his fingers as the mark shuddered and spasmed and went limp against him.

Duncan’s last living sensation was the invasive coldness of the awl shaft in his head. His final thought came a shaved second later, as he saw his attacker’s sleeve pull back to bare the tribal tattoos above his wrist:

Wrong arm.

He opened his mouth as if to speak the words, but instead issued only an ahhhhing sound, like a patient at a doctor’s visit.

Kai held him up on his feet as he gurgled out a moist, straining agonal breath and died. Then he let the lifeless body slump forward over the trunk, giving it a gentle push so it fell with its arms dangling over the sides. Blood was dribbling from its mouth and leaking from both ears and nostrils. There was a lot of scrambled tissue inside the skull case.

Kai would ditch the corpse in a minute. But first things first.

He pulled a lanyard with a remote key fob from around its neck, then noticed the ball cap on the ground. His mark had been wearing it when he’d heard him kick the beer can and turned to check out the noise. The damned thing had almost given him away.

Kai picked the cap up before the gusty wind could blow it across the blacktop. Then he tried it on, pulling it down over his forehead by the brim. A proper fit.

As he set about the rest of his work, he began singing under his breath. A ditty from his school years, one he’d fancied quite a bit as a pup. It had found its way to his lips quite often in Afghanny.

“‘Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around,’” he mouthed. “‘Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around... Dem bones, dem bones gonna walk around...’”

He patted down the body, found a wallet in one pants pocket. The SmartPass for entry into the facility was in the jacket.

Those details out of the way, he pushed the trunk and body through the raised bay door, and then down the corridor toward the open storage unit.

“‘Foot bone connected to the leg bone, leg bone connected to the knee bone, knee bone connected to the thigh bone...’”

The unit was cluttered but organized. Kai noticed there was room for the trunk near another of the same type and rolled it in.

He nodded to himself, pleased. The trunks stood neatly side by side, his mark slumped over the one he’d been pushing.

He used the SmartPass to lower the roll-up door, looked around the unit. A king-size mattress propped against the wall would suit his purposes just