The Perfect Instinct Read online

  Captain Rodrigo could pass as a Spaniard thanks to his parents' contributed genetics and family lineage. His mother was from Mexico. She was the daughter of a diplomat and showed the fine genetic heritage of Spanish royalty who conquered the sprawling region centuries before. His mother spoke fluent Spanish and passed this onto her children. But that was about it.

  He was born Louis Alan Phillipi in Tucson, Arizona and raised in Sacramento, California. It was during his third year as a Marine that Lance Corporal Phillipi was visited by an older gentleman and offered a job -- in the CIA.

  The young Marine jumped at the opportunity. He began his training and spent several stints at Harvey Point in the marshlands of coastal North Carolina, the training center for general CIA chaos. By the time he arrived in Trieste, Lou Phillipi was long gone. Rodrigo Triana had taken his place. And a long-term CIA deep-cover operation proactively observing and intermittently participating in smuggling activities in and around Trieste was born.

  While the CIA helped fund his somewhat dubious sailboat business operations, Rodrigo's clandestine operations were anything but dubious. He'd seen, helped, uncovered, tracked and stopped merchandise and materials moving into the region through the port. He and his crews transported illicit goods, including humans, dozens of times. He was dedicated to his deep-cover role. Lived it every moment of every day.

  Because he was one of them, Rodrigo could work side-by-side with smugglers. He spoke their language. Knew their secrets. Earned their trust. All the while relaying information back to Langley about products and procedures and players. Most of it anyway.

  He kept certain elements and aspects to himself, including some fairly significant proceeds. It was the way it was done.

  The CIA only paid so much. And retirement was not all that far away. He wouldn't be able to afford a boat a quarter of the size and stature of his three current beauties unless he skimmed and stashed away some of the ill-gotten proceeds.

  Chapter 8

  Marta wrote it all down for him, the important stuff. She didn't really need to. He would have memorized it just fine if she recited it to him. But Marta knew the intricacies of his brain better than he did. She knew how his unique version of photographic memory worked, how it attached meaning to words and images and placed everything on a constantly moving, expanding mind map. She loved playing with that toy.

  Writing things down on a sheet of paper, no matter how trivial, makes them real. On the little folded sheet of notebook paper he carried with him from Colorado to Toronto to London to Vienna and down to Trieste, were written 13 items. The list included names, addresses and phone numbers. It was all coded in a fun little system they created.

  Her Chinese writing was not as good as her verbal control of the language, but she still wrote two items on the list in Chinese hanzi logograms.

  Lance never much felt like a spy.

  Assassin? Fine.

  Liar? Born that way.

  Chameleon? Naturally.

  Willing to do things others wouldn't or couldn't? Yep. Next.

  But spy, it just didn't fit. The word held meaning and symbolism that did not mesh for him. He was a weapon, is a weapon. A lethal guided missile Seibel built and programmed and aimed and sent to destroy. These were the words, the clothes that fit. It is who he is. He didn't insert himself into situations, lives, relationships that lasted years. Lance is a quick strike tool. In and out. Leave behind lots of questions and bodies.

  The fact he'd slipped away with Marta and gone off course to find new targets to pulverize, end, eliminate was merely additional evidence that he was no spy. He worked for no one.

  He smiled at this childish thought as he climbed stairs two at a time. The very idea that he was someone special beholden to no one was a joke. First, there was Marta. And there would always be Seibel, until Lance finally killed him. There is that little matter of Braden, the real spy in the game.

  No true peace would be realized until Braden was no more. And even after that little goal was achieved, Lance and Marta knew their fate. No one can truly leave this dangerous life behind. Not ever. The moment that first life was taken, a trade was made. And the price to ultimately be paid is death. No retirement. No strolls into the sunset as credits roll.

  Real pleasant stuff to have rolling around one's head with a first baby just a couple weeks away.

  As he reached the last flight of stairs, he slowed and took the final set one at a time The Beretta 9mm in his gloved right hand. Twenty-six minutes now passed since he left the bar and controlled chaos behind. He also left behind a threat, a promise of death for anyone who felt a need to call ahead and warn someone that he was on his way.

  And of course, he hoped that someone would be brave enough to do just that. Hence his being in the building next to the one the screamer in the bar directed him to. On the top floor landing of the five-story apartment building, he found the final few steps and a door for roof access. He stepped out into the night's chill to make his way across the rooftop. When he reached the roof's edge, he peered down on the building just across a skinny alleyway between the two structures.

  Whether this location was a real lead to Elena or not would be determined in the next few minutes. That gal in the bar probably had it a little rough from the others after he left. But not too bad. The last words a bearded, longhaired, sunglass-wearing stranger shared with the kind folks in the establishment put a little protective spell on the brave woman. Before he walked out, he turned back from the open door with a deadly smile and announced in broken English, "If anything happens to my new friend here, I will return and visit each of you. Your ends will not be pleasant."

  Looking down from the rooftop on the building next door, he again worked through the list of 13 Marta wrote. A few were already crossed off to no avail. She only wrote down the important things. Maksym Voloshyn was on there. Her instincts about that bar had been correct. Answers would be found in there. Maybe not the answer he was here to find, but an answer that moved him closer to the elusive Elena, maybe.

  He shook his head for maybe the hundredth time today. Why the hell didn't Elena leave a phone number in that message?

  He put a foot up on the two-foot wall at the edge of the flat rooftop and bent over to rest his forearm on this thigh and his chin upon the forearm. The only sleep he had in the last 36 hours were short naps aboard two of the four planes he'd flown on to reach Europe. Man, he hated flying commercial. He closed his eyes for the moment to let his other senses do the work. His nose brought him the ever-present scent of the sea just blocks away, as well as other smells generated by a mass of humans living at the water's edge.

  Trieste was yet another quaint and beautiful and special place on the moving face of this earth that Preacher would not be seeing as a guest, a tourist. He and Marta would have to come back another time for that. Everything she told him about the place was true. What he saw of the bay and shoreline driving into town was indeed beautiful. He liked it.

  He read a bit about the area's history and culture in a guidebook he picked up in the train station. The area was basically stolen from Slovenia by Italy at the end of WWII. Another artificial national border drawn upon the land. It happens.

  His ears captured the noises of nighttime. A car door closed, then another. Footsteps. Whispers. Hushed urgent tones. A screen door opened then closed. More footsteps. He opened his eyes. More footsteps on bricks five stories below in the alley. He peeked over the edge. It was dark down there but he could make out a figure lit by light falling from several windows in the three-story building across from him.

  The figure was male, wearing a uniform and cap. A police officer. Now that was strange.

  Most of the inhabitants of the world he lived in worked hard to avoid law enforcement and anything official. Unless.

  Unless they owned those institutions, or at least a significant percentage of those employed by said institutions.

  The police showing up here and now was certainly no coincidence.
The address of the building next door had been provided to him less than 30 minutes ago as a potential location to either find or obtain information about the whereabouts of the ridiculously mysterious Elena. It was also the location he was supposed to be right now.

  Didn't make sense, not on the surface.

  Obviously more at work here than meets the eye. Isn't that always the case? And that's why one has other senses. Ears, nose, tongue and skin take in the rest of the available input to generate the necessary ingredients for that sixth sense.

  And Lance's extra sense was pinging big time right about now.

  He was watching the police officer move around the back of the building a few seconds later when movement in the corner of his eye caught his attention. It was a reflection off a pair of eyeglasses or rifle scope. Very faint but there. He ducked down below the two-foot wall of the rooftop and army-crawled along beside the raised edge to the rear corner of the building. Once there, he got to a knee and raised his head up enough to peek at the spot where he saw the momentary reflection of light moments earlier.

  It was a rooftop across the street. He could just barely make out the profile of a rifle hanging over the edge of the building. It was pointed at the three-story apartment building next to the one Lance was on. The building he had been sent to just over 30 minutes earlier.

  An interesting question formed in his head. Who was this shooter supposed to target?

  Was it Elena or could it be for him? No, didn't make sense. Had to be for Elena. Right?

  While he was contemplating this, another complication developed.

  The door to the rooftop he used minutes earlier opened and out stepped a man with a rifle. The dark of night with cloud cover above obscured most detail, but Lance knew a man with a rifle in hand when he saw one. He dropped and lay flat against the shadow of the raised two-foot edge wall of the rooftop.

  The guy stepped over to near where Lance had been a minute earlier, about 30 feet from where he now lay. The shooter dropped to a knee, put his elbow on the raised short wall and rested the rifle in his left palm, the butt to his shoulder. This shooter was aimed toward the front of the building next door. He slowly moved his aim to the rear and back to the front.

  Damn.

  Lance was just yards from the guy and hidden from any spread of light. But for how long?

  All the dude had to do was decide to change his position and move this way to the rear of the building and Lance would need to act. For the moment, he waited. Not Preacher's greatest character trait.

  He let his head fall back against the short wall. Earlier, in the bar and then on the drive over, he'd been listening to Crosby Stills and Nash sing their magical harmonies in his head. It was an extended version of one of their all-time greats. Tapped his foot on the floorboard and fingers on the steering wheel along with the beat and repeating chorus of doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.

  He gazed up at a clouded sky and closed his eyes to shoot up a thousand feet to look down on Trieste and his current predicament. Another CSN tune started up. This one, about sailing in the Southern Ocean, always made Lance smile. Interesting his mental jukebox pulled two from the classic trio.

  Looking down at a map of Trieste memorized from a printed collection of cities of Europe, he pinpointed his current location and the bar he left a half hour ago. He started to review a series of directional escape routes. The water's edge just over a thousand feet away created a natural barrier that could not be overcome. No problem. The escape routes analyzed in his cranial repository all seemed workable, but they all required getting down off the roof of this building to the ground and on foot to his borrowed car three blocks over.

  He reviewed all 16 of the routes a second time and opened his eyes. He glanced over at the shooter still oblivious to his presence and knew where he had to start. Preacher was rolling over onto his belly when he heard the faint voice. Recognized it immediately as someone talking over a radio. It was very barely audible, like it came through a tiny speaker.

  He squinted at this shooter and watched the man reach down to the radio clipped to his belt to press a button. "Ne vidim ničesar. Nihče premikanje." The shooter obviously had an earpiece and microphone attached to his head.

  The shooter brought his left hand back up to hold the rifle.

  There are dozens of languages in Europe, hundreds when you add the seemingly endless dialect variants. It took a few seconds before Preacher figured out the one spoken by the shooter. It was Slovene. He recognized the Slovene words for "no" and "nothing." Surmised the guy had said something to the effect of "no one is moving, nothing."

  Not surprising to hear this language. Slovenia was literally less than a mile and a half from where he was lying. The border crossing was right up the road, a couple hundred yards outside of town. More citizens of Slovene descent than Italian live in Trieste.

  And this dude speaking Slovene to answer someone else meant they were speaking the language as well. Huh. The fact they spoke the language of Slovenia didn't mean anything really. Hell, Lance had spoken Russian, German, Italian, Chinese and a little English today.

  The world and its endless possibilities flashed and he decided to take action. Moments later, he was up on his feet and racing across the 30-feet separating him from the shooter. Within each step, hundreds of images, facts, faces, maps and ideas exploded in his brain. Throughout his life, Preacher tried to focus, to concentrate on one thing, one thing at a time.

  But it never worked, no matter how hard he tried. It wasn't until a month or so ago, sitting on the couch next to Marta and her expanding belly, that Lance had an epiphany. Marta pointed it out for him. She'd spent a good amount of time asking questions, prodding and poking in her unobtrusive way. She asked him a simple question there on the couch with virgin snow falling on the pines outside their mountain cabin.

  "How many things are you thinking of right now?"

  "What? Not really thinking anything." He answered. A pitiful little lie.

  "Please," she rubbed and squeezed his hand. They were both looking out at unmitigated beauty outside their Colorado hideout. This was the night before leaving the cabin to come down the mountain to be nearer the hospital and civilization in Durango as their baby's birth date approached. "How many different things, literally?"

  "Seriously?"

  "Yes, count them off."

  And so he did. It took about a minute and totaled 79. He was thinking of 79 different things at once. From freezing precipitation to hydraulic pressure to cannonball manufacturing to placental lining to Alexander the Great's dominant hand. These and 70-plus other things were swirling around Lance's head as he sat there in the peaceful dark quiet beside the love of his being and their baby yet to join them.

  "See, that is focus for you." She smiled at him.

  "Focus, 79 things? How is that focus?" He squinched up his nose and forehead. His procerus muscle doing the work. She reached out and tapped his furrowed brow.

  "If you try to clear your head of say ten or twenty of those items, you would simply replace them with other thoughts. Focus for you is dozens, sometimes hundreds of thoughts. If you try to focus on less, you are actually less productive. It's that simple."

  He shook his head slightly as he took the seventh and last step toward the shooter kneeling before him. She was right, always is.

  The guy heard Preacher as he got close. Turned his head toward the advancing rooftop shadow, but that was it.

  Too late.

  The toe of Lance's left shoe caught the guy right between the eyes. It was a violent and debilitating blow designed by its perpetrator to disable the victim immediately. It succeeded. The gent's brain was concussed inside its protective shell of a skull. Lance knew the physics at work in there as brain ricocheted of the anterior or front of the skull from the kick and then against the posterior wall on its was down and then against the anterior again when the head struck the rooftop surface. The additional strike to the back of the guy's head when it hit the hard paint
ed tar surface of the rooftop only added severity to the concussion. He was out.

  Problem though.

  In the instant after Lance's shoe struck his forehead, the Slovene-speaking shooter's right pointer finger squeezed in something of a whole-body convulsion. When that right pointer finger tightened around what it was grasping, it just happened to pull the trigger of the rifle his right hand was holding.

  And best of all, it was an AK-47 set to auto. As the shooter fell back from the ledge to the rooftop in his concussed state, like a boxer out on his feet before hitting canvas, his weapon fired 14 shots into the building next door and then up into the night sky above Trieste.

  The peace and quiet and calm of the pleasant seaside Adriatic enclave was shattered instantly. Preacher came down on top of the unconscious shooter and slammed the gun away from his grip. He lay there atop a stranger and shook his head. Damn. There went any remaining element of surprise for this off-book mission. He reached out and grabbed the AK and rolled off the dude, got to his knees and then his feet and ran in a crouch back toward the rooftop access door.

  He was less than 10 feet from the door when the first shot whizzed over his left shoulder into and through the metal door. Lance felt the sound wave the bullet created as it pushed air in all directions. He instinctively faded to the right and lower. Good thing he did. The second and third shots fired at him would have hit him in square in the back had he not adjusted his motion.

  He shoulder-rolled and came to a stop just beside the door and brought the AK's stock to his shoulder and aimed back in the direction of the shots. He knew where they came from -- the rooftop shooter he spied across the street. Without taking proper aim, he let loose a barrage of six shots in two short bursts of three.

  He wasn't really hoping to hit the other shooter. Just needed a second to reach the door and dive down the landing. When no shots came back at him, he did just that and was inside the tiny top landing of the stairs and racing down the four flights in the next second. Three more shots hit the rooftop access door as it closed behind him.