Chapter 11
THE men strutted toward him, but to Hurley’s practiced eye, their hearts didn’t seem in it.
Hunched shoulders, shaking hands, and jittery movements suggested that their craving was more for drugs than food or money.
Perhaps this was why they’d been shown the door at the mosque.
Though Middle East countries liked to deny it, drug addiction was a serious and growing problem, even in vacation towns like Doha.
Combined, the men probably didn’t tip the scale at much over two hundred pounds, and while even a rock can be dangerous in the right hands, there was nothing about their approach that suggested they had training.
For one thing, the men drifted together as they grew closer.
Experienced miscreants would have done the opposite, especially when facing a single opponent.
But rather than create space while forcing Hurley to commit to one of them, the pair were drawing comfort from proximity.
Strike one.
Strike two was that the skinnier of the pair had fallen in behind his slightly larger companion.
By allowing Chunky to take the lead, Beanpole had effectively taken himself out of the fight.
The final strike came when Stan checked their hands.
Their empty hands. While the bums’ angry expressions suggested that violence was imminent, their actions indicated otherwise.
Perhaps the pair intend to bluff and bully money from Hurley.
Perhaps.
But if this was the case, why was his sixth sense sparking like a live wire? Despite what he saw, Hurley’s intuition was all but screaming that the pair represented imminent danger.
What was he missing?
“Ibn al Kalb,” Chunky said, slamming his hands on the table.
The disturbance rocked Hurley’s cup, spilling the sickly sweet coffee. Reflexively, he backed away from the tidal wave of black and turned perpendicular to the mess.
Which saved his life.
Sliding back from the table brought a new quadrant of the café into his peripheral vision.
The quadrant that had been behind him.
The pistol glittered with light reflected from the hurricane lamps hanging on the café’s awning. The man pointing it had a trim build and unremarkable features. Maybe he was a Spaniard, or perhaps Greek. He could have passed as a native in locales stretching from Europe to the Middle East.
He was a nobody.
A ghost.
And he seemed intent on helping Hurley join him in the afterlife.
While the man would have had Stan dead to rights if he’d taken the shot from across the café, he’d decided to move closer.
Hurley could appreciate this commitment to tradecraft.
Shooting a man in the back of the head was more difficult than it seemed, and firing through the chair into a target decreased the odds of a kill shot while increasing the likelihood of causing collateral damage with a misplaced round.
A professional would walk up to the target, shoot him point-blank, and then stroll out of the café.
In another nod to his professionalism, the gunman’s weapon of choice was a .
22-caliber pistol sporting a long, cigar-shaped suppressor.
The metal cylinder coupled with the ammunition’s small caliber meant that the pistol’s report would be essentially zero.
It also meant that the gun’s barrel was a good five inches longer, which put the weapon almost half a foot closer to Hurley.
Snarling, Hurley slapped at the pistol’s muzzle with his right hand while his left reached for something else.
The ashtray. The pistol was too far away to grab, but his fingers brushed the suppressor as the weapon discharged.
The overpressure stung his hand, but he knocked the matte-black cigar off line.
The muzzle spit fire as the gunman squeezed the trigger again.
The weapon was now hopelessly out of reach.
But Hurley no longer cared about the pistol.
He swung his left hand in a descending arc like he was wielding Thor’s hammer. Cigarette butts and ash trailed behind his ad hoc weapon, but Hurley didn’t notice. He was locked onto the gunman’s temple.
Metal impacted flesh with a satisfying thunk that ran the length of his arm. Without missing a beat, Hurley reversed trajectory and drove the ashtray into the shooter’s nose. The man staggered, but didn’t release his grip on the pistol.
Tough little bastard.
Dropping the ashtray, Hurley threaded his fingers through the gunman’s hair and bashed his face against the table.
Repeatedly. The pistol spat a final time before clattering to the ground.
Crouching, Hurley scooped up the weapon by the barrel and cursed as the hot metal burned his fingers.
Shifting to the pistol grip, he swung the weapon toward the miscreants only to find that he was looking at the men’s backs.
Whatever deal they’d struck with the assassin, it apparently didn’t cover sticking around if the hit went sideways.
Hurley sighted down the barrel at the fleeing men.
Then he lowered the gun.
While the fuck sticks deserved to be shot in the back, killing them wouldn’t exactly be prudent.
The scuffle had largely gone unnoticed thanks to the lack of patrons, but this would change if Hurley shot the men in the middle of the promenade.
Besides, the pair were probably exactly what they appeared to be—bums who’d agreed to rough him up for a quick buck.
The man crumpled at his feet was a different matter.
Hurley placed the suppressor’s tip against the assassin’s skull and was in the process of pressing the trigger when he had a different thought.
Setting the pistol on his vacated seat, Hurley grabbed the man beneath his shoulders as if to help him to his feet.
Instead, he fired a right cross into the shooter’s exposed chin.
The punch made his wrist tingle, but the visceral feeling of flesh impacting flesh did much to assuage Hurley’s rage.
Maybe he didn’t need another cig after all.
The shooter collapsed like a pile of wet laundry.
Hurley triggered his radio. “Brad—you still in contact with the boys in the boat?”
“Affirmative. You want me to wave them off?”
“Nope. The shit just got real. I need help getting a punch-drunk hit man aboard their skiff.”
“You’re not joking, are you?”
Brad laughed. Then he seemed to remember who he was talking to.
“Get your head out of your ass. I said the shit just got real. Now tell those knuckle draggers to bring a blanket or something to cover up this little shit. We need get gone before some nosy onlooker wanders by and I have to add another body to the manifest.”
This time, Hurley was kidding, but he didn’t tell Brad. The surveillance man wasn’t a hitter. Sometimes it was good to reinforce the image of a crazy gunfighter.
It tended to help cut through the red tape.
“Okay,” Brad said. “Jeff’s on the horn with the crew now. You should have a pair of operators heading your way. What about Moe and Curly?”
Good question. The shooter stirred and attempted to sit up. Hurley smacked him in the head with the pistol’s suppressor. The man collapsed and a stream of drool began to trickle from his parted lips.
“Stan?”
“Keep your panties on.”
Hurley waved to the pair of agency maritime branch officers who popped out of the boat and pointed to the pile of flesh at his feet. The lead operative quickened his pace. Hurley was grateful to see that his partner held a folded blanket under his arm.
Progress.
Hurley frisked the gunman and relieved him of a knife, wallet, and a pen.
The knife and wallet went into his pocket, but the pen he held between his fingers.
Hurley had come of age during the Cold War, back when the Russian assassins’ preferred method of dealing with dissidents was to inject them with poison or radioactive material.
Until he knew otherwise, Hurley intended to treat the pen as a loaded weapon.
The maritime operatives joined him as he was working.
To their credit, the men seemed to know their business. One operator injected the shooter with what was presumably a sedative, while the other deposited everything Hurley had collected into a Faraday bag. After cinching the bag shut, the operative turned to Stan. “Anything else?”
Hurley shook his head. “Get this douchebag aboard and be ready to split. I’ll be right behind you.”
The operator tossed Hurley the bag. Then he and his companion stood the assassin up, draped his arms over their shoulders, and began walking him toward their boat.
Hurley nodded his approval.
Their performance wouldn’t stand close scrutiny, but a casual observer would think an inebriated tourist was being helped onto the boat by friends.
While alcohol was strictly regulated in Doha, the police followed a don’t ask, don’t tell policy as long as the tourists who formed the city’s lifeblood didn’t flaunt their rule breaking.
Viewed from this perspective, it was entirely reasonable that someone who imbibed a bit too much would want to hide his drunken state.
“We’re packed up and ready to exfil. What do you want me to pass to Curly and Moe?”
“Irene wanted this to be a training exercise, right?” Hurley said, righting the upset chairs as he spoke.
“Affirmative.”
“Then give the two stooges the bug-out signal.”
“Do you want us to link up with them for exfil?”
“Nope. I want your team to remain on station until I sort out what’s what. Let Curly and Moe figure out their own exfil plan. Real-world intelligence operations are messy. Best they learn that now.”
Hurley had a feeling things were only going to get messier.