Unified Action

Michael Klaus would be king of the jungle, by any means necessary.

Klaus stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows of his master office suite. He shot the cuffs on a tailored suit and ignored the prostitute as he made his own way out of the lavish room. The lisping Adonis had an envelope of cash and bite marks on his back to remember his visit by. If he was wise and didn’t wish to be found floating facedown in the bay, he’d practice discretion.

Outside over the dark waters of the northern Atlantic dark clouds were piling up on the horizon. Klaus could see whitecaps forming from the stiff breeze that was beginning to hit the beach like a company of shock troops. He imagined it was quite cold out there. He didn’t know firsthand, since he was inside, secured from the environment, untouchable. Insulated. He preferred things this way. He picked up an ultraslim wireless and pressed the push-to-talk button with a manicured finger adorned with a heavy gold ring.

“Ms. Applebaum, is Mr. Skell waiting for me?”

“Yes, Mr. Klaus,” his personal assistant answered immediately. “Shall I send him in?”

“Yes, please.”

Klaus believed in impeccable manners. It was part of the charade, part of the mask of civilization he wore the way any ambush predator blended into its background.

He glanced at the Rolex Executive watch on his thin wrist. The heavy walnut door behind him opened and then closed, but Klaus didn’t turn around. The corporate magnate remained facing his windows, taking in the view.

“I trust you are well, Mr. Skell?”

“I am, sir,” the chief legal officer answered.

On the left of the room a massive aquarium served as a divider between the section of the office suite containing Klaus’s desk and a sunken living-room area where more informal negotiations or conversations took place. Skell crossed to this area and helped himself to a tumbler of single-malt Scotch whiskey. He drank it neat, and it went down in a single swallow without a flinch with a practiced flick of his wrist.

“Well?” Klaus asked.

“Have corporate security made an anti-electronic measures sweep?”

“This morning. Would I talk so openly otherwise?” There was a slight undercurrent to Klaus’s voice now.

Skell, long used to his employer’s moods, sensed it immediately. “I apologize,” he said hastily. “We’re close now and perhaps the stress is getting to me.”

“Perhaps some time alone with all that Thai child porn you’ve collected?” Klaus offered quietly. “Would that relax you?”

Skell winced at the unsubtle reminder of who was master and who was servant. Klaus turned away from the window and looked at him for the first time. He saw a pudgy, balding man with soft hands, a weak chin and slumped shoulders in a suit as expensive as his own. He also saw a brilliant legal pirate with the eyes of a serial killer.

“Why don’t you tell me about our progress?” Klaus offered.

“Everything has gone according to schedule. We found a team of Mossad investigators snooping around in the periphery of our operations but we were able to feed them enough disinformation that they were put onto the wrong track.”

“And the Americans?”

“Officially? Quiet. We’re still well below their radar.”

“Unofficially?”

Skell paused. “There is a…complication,” he admitted.

Klaus slowly put his hands behind his back and pursed his lips. Deliberately he walked forward on expensive Italian loafers. He stopped beside his deck and removed a cigarette from a box on the tabletop and lit it. “Go on,” he said. His words came out in a cloud of blue smoke.

“Two contractors,” Skell began, “working separate aspects of the project. It turns out they were brothers.”

“That was an unfortunate oversight on the part of personnel.”

“They were working for different companies on different sites. One in Southwest Asian operations, the other at the Santo Domingo office.”

As Skell talked Klaus began to move again, trailing cigarette smoke behind him like the front stack on a locomotive. Skell’s knuckles were white around the cut-crystal liquor tumbler in his hands as he felt Klaus getting closer. He knew better than to turn around.

“Don’t we have software indigenous to our record-keeping system that catches this sort of thing?”

“There was a delay in linking the information.” Skell paused slightly. “The employee responsible for such activities has been reprimanded.”

Klaus was close enough behind him now that Skell could smell the man’s cologne. Fat beads of sweat broke out on the lawyer’s bald pate. A heavy hand settled on his right shoulder, then a second fell on his left. Klaus was so close behind him now he could feel the heat of the man’s body.

“Did you do the reprimanding yourself, then?” Klaus asked. His face was so close beside Skell that the question was a whisper in the man’s ear. Cigarette smoke enveloped his head in a cloud, forcing Skell to cough slightly.

“Yes. Yes, I did.”

“Good,” Klaus whispered. Abruptly the German turned and walked back across the room toward his desk, where he ground out the cigarette. “Was there a compromise?”

“We believe so.”

“And?”

“And I think the two know enough to make them curious, to realize there’s a bigger picture, but not enough to make them go to the authorities—yet.”

“Fine. You know what to do, then, correct?”

“I’m putting it into motion right now.”

Klaus walked back over to the windows and clasped his hands behind his back. He stared out at the ocean now roiling under the windstorm hammering the shore.

“That’ll be all.”

HALF AN HOUR LATER Skell sat in the back of a plush company limousine. He swallowed a fistful of antacid tablets, two aspirin and a Xanax and washed them down with a swig of bottled water. His hands were clammy from his perspiration, and when the two men got into the back of the limo with him he didn’t offer to shake hands.

The first man wore a closely shaved haircut and a shrapnel scar that ran along one jawline. His name was Haight and he’d been a sergeant in the French Foreign Legion for ten years before opting to work freelance.

Haight was tall but lean, whipcord thin and possessing the build of an endurance hunting animal like a greyhound or a cheetah. In contrast, the onyx-skinned man who got in behind him was built like a bear.

Robert Skah Lemis had come up on the hard streets of Santo Domingo the rough way. From gang member to police officer to political assassin, he had excelled in making useful connections. He turned chaotic masses of violent, unorganized individuals into functioning syndicates. Money. Guns. Lawyers. In the Caribbean, Lemis controlled and coordinated these things. It had made him very important to Mr. Skell because it allowed the sweating pedophile to look good for his boss, the unforgiving Mr. Klaus.

Skell blinked behind his glasses, his eyes as beady as they were myopic. Haight smelled like aftershave and Lemis smelled like marijuana. The tip of his tongue looked pink and vaguely sluglike against the fat cupid bow of his pursed lips. A sheen of sweat covered him, casting an unhealthy aurora.

“Here,” he said briskly.

He opened a titanium briefcase covered in a thin layer of calfskin and set with gold fixtures. From inside he pulled out two flash drives and handed them to the mercenaries sitting across from him. Both men took great pains to ensure their hands didn’t touch Skell’s.

As the two middle managers placed the flash drives inside their coat pockets Skell gave them a brief rundown.

“Each flash drive contains information on men we want captured, interrogated and disposed of. Ironically, but unimportant to you, the men are brothers named Smith. One is currently an FBI agent on liaison in the Dominican Republic, and the other is a private military contractor flying unmanned aerial vehicles on surveillance missions in Kyrgyzstan. They learned something they shouldn’t have. The details will be provided in the digital briefings.