Any Means Necessary. Jack Mars

When they did, the guy probably wouldn’t have any feeling in his feet for an hour.

      Ed was doing the same with his man.

      “You’re a little rusty, Luke,” he said.

      “Me? Nah. I’m not even supposed to fight. They hired me for my brains.” He could still feel the place on his throat where the man’s hand had been. It was going to be sore tomorrow.

      Ed shook his head. “I was Delta Force, same as you. I came in two years after the Stanley Combat Outpost operation in Nuristan. People were still talking about it. How they dropped you guys up there and you got overrun. In the morning, only three men were still fighting. You were one of them, right?”

      Luke grunted. “I’m not aware of the existence of…”

      “Don’t bullshit me,” Ed said. “Classified or not, I know the story.”

      Luke had learned to live his life in air-tight compartments. He rarely talked about the forward fire base incident. It took place a lifetime before, in a corner of eastern Afghanistan so remote that just putting some troops on the ground there was supposed to mean something. It was ancient history. His wife didn’t even know about it.

      But Ed was Delta, so… okay.

      “Yeah,” he said. “I was there. Bad intelligence put us up there, and it turned into the worst night of my life.” He gestured at the two men on the floor.

      “It makes this look like an episode of Happy Days. We lost nine good men. Just before dawn, we ran out of ammo.” Luke shook his head. “It got ugly. Most of our guys were dead by then. And the three of us that made it… I don’t know if we ever really came back. Martinez is paralyzed from the waist down. Last I heard, Murphy is homeless, in and out of the VA psychiatric ward.”

      “And you?”

      “I have nightmares about it to this day.”

      Ed was binding the wrists of his man. “I knew a guy who was on the clean-up detail after they cleared the area. He said they counted 167 bodies on that hill, not including our guys. There were 21 enemy hand-to-hand combat deaths inside the perimeter.”

      Luke looked at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

      Ed shrugged. “You’re a little rusty. No shame in admitting that. And you might be smart. And you might be small. But you’re also muscle, just like me.”

      Luke barked laughter. “Okay. I’m rusty. But who you calling small?” He laughed, looking up at Ed’s enormous frame.

      Ed laughed back. He searched the pockets of the man on the floor. In a few seconds, he found what he was looking for. It was a key card to the digital lock mounted on the wall next to the double doors.

      “Shall we go inside?”

      “After you,” Ed said.

      Chapter 12

      “You can’t be in here!” the man shouted. “Out! Get out of my home!”

      They were standing in a wide open living area. There was a white baby grand piano in the far corner, near floor to ceiling windows with more spectacular views. Morning light streamed in. Nearby was a modern white sofa and table set, with accent chairs, clustered around a giant flat-panel TV mounted on the wall. On the opposite wall was a massive canvas, ten feet high, with crazy splotches and drips of bright color. Luke knew something about art. He guessed it was a Jackson Pollock.

      “Yeah, we’ve been all through that with the guys out in the hall,” Luke said. “We can’t be here, and yet… here we are.”

      The man was not tall. He was thick and stubby, and wearing a white plush robe. He was holding a large rifle and sighting down the barrel at them. It looked to Luke like an old Browning safari gun, probably loading.270 Winchester rounds. That thing would take down a moose at four hundred yards.

      Luke moved to the right side of the room, Ed to the left. The man swung the rifle back and forth, unsure who to target.

      “Ali Nassar?”

      “Who is asking?”

      “I’m Luke Stone. That’s Ed Newsam. We’re federal agents.”

      Luke and Ed circled the man, moving in closer.

      “I am a diplomat attached to the United Nations. You have no jurisdiction here.”

      “We just want to ask you a couple of questions.”

      “I’ve called the police. They will arrive in a few moments.”

      “In that case, why don’t you put the gun down? Listen, it’s an old gun. You’ve got a bolt action on that thing. If you fire it once, you’ll never have time to chamber the next round.”

      “Then I will kill you and let the other one live.”

      He spun toward Luke. Luke kept moving along the wall. He put his hands up to show he was no threat. He’d had so many guns pointed at him in his life that he had long ago lost track of them all. Still, he didn’t feel good about this one. Ali Nassar didn’t look like much of a marksman, but if he did manage to get a shot off, it was going to put a big hole in something.

      “If I were you, I’d kill that big man over there. Because if you kill me, there’s no telling what that guy’s gonna do. He likes me.”

      Nassar didn’t waver. “No. I will kill you.”

      Ed was already behind the man and within ten feet. He crossed the distance in a split second. He knocked the barrel of the gun upward, just as Nassar pulled the trigger.

      BOOM!

      The report was loud in the confines of the apartment. The shot tore a hole through the white plaster of the ceiling.

      In one move, Ed snatched the gun away, punched Nassar in the jaw, and guided him to a seat in one of the accent chairs.

      “Okay, sit down. Careful, please.”

      Nassar was jolted by the punch. It took several seconds for his eyes to come back to center. He held a chubby hand to the red welt that was already rising on his jaw.

      Ed showed Luke the rifle. “How about this thing?” It was ornate, with a pearl inlaid stock and polished barrel. It had probably been hanging on a wall somewhere a few minutes before.

      Luke turned his attention to the man in the chair. He started from the beginning again.

      “Ali Nassar?”

      The man was pouting. He looked angry in the same way that Luke’s son Gunner used to look when he was four years old.

      He nodded. “Obviously.”

      Luke and Ed moved quickly, wasting no time.

      “You can’t do this to me,” Nassar said.

      Luke glanced at his watch. It was 7 a.m. The cops could show up any minute.

      They had him in an office just off the main living room. They had taken away Nassar’s robe. They had taken away his slippers. He wore tighty-whitey underwear and nothing else. His large stomach protruded. It was tight like a snare drum. They had him sitting in an armchair, his wrists zip-tied to the arms of the chair, his ankles zip-tied to the legs.

      The office had a desk with an old-style tower computer and desktop monitor. The CPU was inside a thick steel box, which itself was anchored to the stone floor. There was no obvious way to open the box, no lock, no door, nothing. To get at the hard drive, a welder would have to cut the box. There wasn’t going to be any time for that.

      Luke and Ed stood over Nassar.

      “You have a numbered account at Royal Heritage Bank on Grand Cayman Island,” Luke said. “On March 3^rd, you made a $250,000 transfer to an account held by a man named Ken Bryant. Ken Bryant was strangled to death sometime last night in an apartment in Harlem.”

      “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

      “You are the employer of a man named Ibrahim Abdulraman, who died