The Attack of the Kisgar Read online

  “I think it’s a drone.” He held it up higher for a better look, his face pinched. “Or rather, it used to be. We found it connected the under carriage of one of the vehicles and we wouldn’t….” the soldier paused as he scuffed his toes into the sand.

  “You wouldn’t…what?” prompted Ramon, his voice deadly low.

  “We wouldn’t have even noticed it except when we started the vehicle this thing began making clicking and sparking noises,” explained the grunt, his head down, ready to take the brunt of Ramon’s barrage of expletives and insults to their intelligence. He looked up in surprise when nothing happened. A knot in the pit of his stomach churned as he decided he’d prefer the verbal beat down, rather than this icy silence.

  Ramon plucked the drone from the soldier’s hand and studied it. “This isn’t the first one of these I’ve seen,” he said slowly turning the drone around in his hand.

  “Somebody too clever for their own good knows where we are. The fools have been following us.”

  “Should we alert Noah?”

  Ramon’s head shot up and his eyes widened as if surprised the soldier was still standing there. He paused as he debated with himself. Then, his eyes softened and his hard face cracked with what the soldier thought looked like a smile.

  “No.” the Brazilian mercenary spoke so softly, the soldier imagined he’d misheard him.

  “You don’t want to tell Noah?” The underling watched Ramon’s face grow dark, then just as swiftly lighten, the changes to his face evident to the workings of his mind. He should have taken a step back, but he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  Tilting his head in confusion at the sudden change in Ramon’s demeanor, the soldier studied the man in front of him. The silence between them lingered as Ramon’s plan began to formulate and take shape in his mind. For a minute, he forgot where he was, as his eyes glazed with the possibility of untold success.

  “No,” Ramon repeated in a still quiet voice, but loud enough for confirmation. He stepped toward the soldier and took his shoulders in both hands as if congratulating him for bringing good news. “Don’t you see? It’s perfect…” Ramon paused and cast eyes toward the glittering gold and cream of the villa and the icy blue of its pools. The entire façade interlaced with greenery. An Eden in a desert. “We’ll use their approach as a distraction. He’ll b so busy chasing them that we should be able to retrieve the artifact.”

  The soldier’s eyes widened. His body was stiff from Ramon’s touch. One wrong move and he’d be on the ground in a heap. “You’ll steal the artifact? The drum?”

  “Yes,” the bigger man nodded slowly, then released the soldier as if hot to the touch with an element of surprise that he’d leaned on him at all. “Go now and leave me to think. Keep this” – he picked up the mangled drone – “quiet.”

  The soldier nodded, swallowing hard, and walked away swiftly. He knew and understood the mercenary, the killer, the body guard, and the trained warrior. He didn’t understand the conniving, planning strategist he’d just now witnessed.

  As he watched the grunt leave, Ramon added quietly, “Because I have an idea.” The smile that had cracked his hard, angular face grew wider as he walked toward one of the lounges beside a pool at the villa.

  He laid on his back, his legs outstretched and his arms crossed over his head. I could get used to this. He looked off into the open expanse of desert taking note once more how utterly defenseless Noah’s villa was, and how incredibly useful this otherwise dire situation had suddenly become.

  “The power I could command with those creatures at my side and at my bidding. For once, I’ll be the king of this castle and the world will, quite literally, be at my feet.”

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  It’s a tomb for six million people…

  The catacombs beneath Paris aren't somewhere that Mitchell, a desperate gambler, ever saw himself going...

  He's in debt to Jimmy "the Ratchet" for $600,000. Mitchell knows Jimmy's debtors don't have a prayer… until Jimmy gives him a mission that will erase most of his debt if completed.

  He must go deep into the deathly blackness of the catacombs to retrieve something.

  Will Mitchell make it out alive, or will his bones join the groaning masses already entombed there?

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