Primary Threat. Джек Марс

      A large man sat on a metal folding chair, in a quiet corner of an empty warehouse. He shook his head and moaned.

      “Don’t do this,” he said. “Don’t do this thing.”

      He was blindfolded, but even with the rag obscuring part of his face, it was easy to see that he was bruised and beaten. His mouth was swollen. His face was covered by sweat and some blood, and the back of his white T-shirt was stained with perspiration. There was a dark stain across the crotch of his blue jeans, where he had wet himself moments ago.

      From the ends of his shirtsleeves to his wrists was a dense tangle of tattoos. The man looked strong, but his wrists were manacled behind his back, and his arms were secured to the chair with heavy chains.

      His feet were bare, and his ankles were also cuffed with steel manacles—they were cuffed so close together that if he managed to stand up and tried to walk, he would have to bounce instead.

      “Do what thing?” Kevin Murphy said.

      Murphy was tall, slim, very fit. His eyes were hard, and there was a small scar across his chin. He wore a blue dress shirt, dark dress pants, and polished black Italian leather shoes. His sleeves were rolled just a couple of turns up his forearms. There was nothing rumpled, sweaty, or bloody about him. He did not appear to have made any sort of strenuous exertion. Indeed, he could be on his way to a late dinner at a nice restaurant. The only things that didn’t quite fit his look were the black leather driving gloves he wore on his hands.

      For a few seconds, Murphy and the man in the chair were like statues, standing stones at some medieval burial site. Their shadows slanted away diagonally in the bleak yellow half-light illuminating this small corner of the vast warehouse.

      Murphy took a few steps away across the stone floor, his footfalls echoing in the cavernous space.

      He was dealing with an odd combination of feelings right now. For one, he felt relaxed and calm. He was just settling in to the interview, and he had the next few hours if he needed them. No one was coming here.

      Outside of the gates to this warehouse was a slum. It was a concrete wasteland, dismal shops all crammed together, liquor stores, check cashing, and payday loan places. Crowds of women carrying plastic bags waited at bus kiosks in the daytime, drunken men on street corners held beer cans and cheap wine in brown paper bags all day and into the night.

      Right now, Murphy could hear the sounds of the neighborhood: passing cars, music, shouts and laughter. But it was getting late, and things were beginning to quiet down. Even this neighborhood eventually went to sleep.

      So yes, in the near term, Murphy had time. But in the larger sense, time was not his friend. He was a former Delta Force operator and a probationary employee of the FBI Special Response Team. He had performed well so far, including what was considered a brilliant performance in a smoking hot gunfight up in Montreal during his very first assignment.

      What no one understood was how brilliant that performance really was. He had played both sides, and before the battle, convinced former CIA operative Wallace Speck, the so-called “Dark Lord” himself, to wire two and a half millions dollars to Murphy’s anonymous account on Grand Cayman.

      Now Speck was in federal prison and facing the death penalty. That left a question looming large in Murphy’s life: Was Speck talking to his captors? And if so, what was he saying?

      Did Speck even know who Kevin Murphy was?

      “Don’t kill me,” the man in the chair said.

      Murphy smiled. Nearby to the man was another chair. Murphy’s sports jacket was draped over it. Underneath the jacket were his holster and his gun. In the pocket of his pants was the large sound suppressor that fit the gun like a hand fits a glove.

      Made for each other. How did that old TV ad go? Perfect together.

      “Kill you? Why would I do that?”

      The man shook his head and began to cry. His big upper body heaved with sobs. “Because that’s what you do.”

      Murphy nodded. True enough.

      He stared at the man. Sniveling bastard. He hated guys like this. Vermin. The guy was a cold-hearted murderer. A bully. A wannabe tough guy. A man with the words BANG and POW! tattooed across his knuckles.

      This was the type of guy who killed helpless innocent people—partly because that’s what he was paid to do, but also partly because it was easy, and because he liked doing it. Then, when he ran across someone like Murphy, he fell all to pieces and started to beg. Murphy himself had certainly killed a lot of people, but as far as he knew, he had never once killed a noncombatant or an innocent party. Murphy specialized in killing men who were hard to kill.

      But this guy?

      Murphy sighed. He had no doubt he could make this guy crawl across the floor like a worm, if he wanted.

      He shook his head. It didn’t interest him. All he really wanted was information.

      “Some weeks ago, right around the time our dear departed President first disappeared, you killed a young woman named Nisa Kuar Brar. Don’t deny it. You also killed her two children, a four-year-old girl and a babe in arms. The four-year-old was wearing Barney the Purple Dinosaur pajamas at the time. Yeah, I saw pictures of the crime scene. These people you killed were the wife and daughters of a cab driver named Jahjeet Singh Brar. The whole family were Sikhs, from the Punjab region of India. You bluffed your way into their apartment in Columbia Heights by claiming you were a DC Metro cop named Michael Dell. That’s pretty funny. Michael Dell. Did you think that was funny?”

      The man shook his head. “No. Absolutely not. None of that’s true. Whoever told you all that was a liar. They lied to you.”

      Murphy’s smile broadened. He shrugged. He almost laughed.

      This guy…

      “Your accomplice told me. A guy who was calling himself Roger Stevens, but whose real name was Delroy Rose.” Murphy paused and took another deep breath. Sometimes he got worked up in situations like this. It was important he stay calm. This meeting was about information, and nothing else.

      “Any of this starting to ring a bell with you now?”

      The man’s shoulders slumped. He sobbed quietly, his body shaking.

      “No. I don’t know who that…”

      “Shut up and listen to me,” Murphy said. “Okay?”

      He didn’t touch the man or move closer to him, but the man nodded