Carthago Delenda Est

Jack tossed the cushions's stuffing material into the largest pool of blood he found, hoping it would soak up some of the spreading gore, then put all the cash into the sofa cushion and leaving the women tied and sobbing in the office. He heard their voices become hysterical as he jogged down the stairs with the money in the cushion. He made sure his hood was up, hoping that with the actual strobe effects and swirling lights that whatever camera shots might be recorded of him would be defeated from showing any detail, from his flashback hoodie and his IRA mask.

After he'd returned to the bathroom and recovered his coveralls, he put the cushion full of cash into the bucket, then stuffed the coveralls on top and grabbed the bottle of bleach. He poured a generous portion of bleach around the bathroom floor, then retraced his path to the second floor, sprinkling bleach along the way and rubbing it into the carpet with his feet, hopefully obliterating any forensic biological material he'd left behind himself. He covered all of the area where he'd moved, noticing that the women were quiet as he re-entered the office, then inhaling sharply as he spread the bleach into the rug where he'd stood, onto the stuffing from the cushion (and thereby, into the pool of blood), removing quite a bit of the tangy, iron smell of the blood from the atmosphere in the office. He heard the women cough, but made sure to keep the office door open as he left, ensuring that while the office would be unpleasant, it would not be deadly for them, and the bleach smell would eventually dissipate. Finding he had at least half the bottle left as he prepared to go back down to the main floor, he emptied the rest of the bottle on his way down, splashing it now generously around the area over which he'd moved. Finishing, he took up his tool box and bucket, threw open the bolts on the back door, returned to his van, and drove into the swirling snow of the late night.

XLI

Thursday, 0200

Jack drove the Pipe Dreams van back to the fenced-in motor pool outside the plumbing shop's main building. He parked the van next to its two peers, and quickly exited the van. He left the coveralls he'd worn in the van's back, along with the IRA-mask, then took the rolled-up newspaper he'd brought and stuffed a large section of it into the gas tank of each of the three vans, before lighting the newspaper and retreating out of the fenced compound. Jack closed the gate, looping the chain through the gate's diamond links just as the first van's tank caught fire, slowly engulfing the entirety of the van in flames, while the other two seemed to simultaneously catch fire. Jack picked up his tool box and bucket with the money from Dante's desk and jogged through the slowing blizzard toward the bank of the river, West of the plumbing compound. Once he arrived at the bank, Jack quickly located the canoe, put in the bucket and tool box, and pushed off, paddling along the river and through the night.

XLII

Thursday, 0453

Jack climbed out of the canoe at the side of the river where Jimmy had left the three phosphorescently painted rocks, and took the bucket and tool box out. He was exhausted, having paddled the 20 miles along the river from Pipe Dreams Plumbing. The fact that he'd traveled with the current had helped, but it had still been a grueling pace, and his adrenaline had largely petered out after only the first half of his river cruise. There was now no moonlight to speak of, the sky was clear and the pinpricks of starlight gave the river and its rocky banks enough distinction for Jack to see them on the cold, late October night, now that the wannabe-blizzard had finished.

He tossed the three glowing rocks into the canoe and took his Tac-14 out of the breaching scabbard and fired all four of his remaining adapter shells into the bottom of the canoe, catching each of the shell adapters as they left the breech. The bullets of the .22 LR cartridges punched four .22" sized holes in it, before Jack pumped the final slug into the chamber and blew a far larger, .75 caliber hole into the canoe, and watched as it began to slowly sink along the rocky shore. He pushed it hard out toward the river channel and saw its progress by the sinking glow of the phosphorescently painted rocks as the canoe slipped below the water's surface, perhaps ten yards away. He slowly pulled back the forend and ejected into his hand the spent slug shell and absently tossed it into the river. Then he took the empty Tac-14 in his hands and reloaded all the now-empty, Fast Lane adapter shells into the magazine, and then tossed the Tac-14 as far as he could into the river, in the opposite direction of the canoe. Finally, he tossed the tool box into the water, and with the bucket of cash in hand, walked along the shore toward the bridge over the river, and found Jimmy's Jeep Wrangler parked 30 meters up the road from the river crossing, hopped in and pushed back the hood of his flashback jacket as Jimmy drove off.

XLIII

Thursday, 0747

Jack Northcutt sat at the picnic bench of the empty camp site and watched the sun slowly rise over wooded hills, 200 meters in front of him that formed the Eastern horizon to the state park in which he waited. He heard the crunch of gravel under car tires behind him, as Masud and his lackey drove to meet Jack. Jack turned and watched them park and slowly emerge from the car, a shit-brindle brown colored, Mercedes 2015 AMG GLE 63.

"Jack, my friend, is it done?" Masud asked, smiling and holding his arms out wide. Masud's trained monkey, a squat olive-skinned man with a naturally brooding face, dark curtain of stubble running from his temples to his shirt collar, followed a step to Masud's right and two steps behind. Masud approached Jack from the left. Jack smiled back and stood with his back to the tree-lined hillside, which conversely left Masud and his menacing Jackanapes to face Jack and by extension, the hillside.

"It's done, Masud. And so are you." Jack said, smiling contemptuously.

"Jack, I thought you were smarter than this..." Masud said, smiling sadly. "You want me to tell 'him' that you reneged on your debt?"

"There is no debt; there is no 'him.'" Jack saw Masud freeze, and his bodyguard reach into his leather jacket and take out a semi-auto pistol. The man stepped forward and pointed the pistol at Jack and then fell backwards as a .223 caliber, 68 grain, boat tail hollow point bullet punched into his chest, near his heart, taking lung and heart tissue with it and exited his back, a second before the rifle's report echoed from the hillside.

Masud screamed and fell to the ground, covering his head and cowering, completely oblivious to the gasping, fish-like expression his compatriot made as he asphyxiated on the ground, next to Masud. Jack walked over to Masud, took the pistol from his bodyguard's dead hand, and shot Masud 18 times in the chest, not stopping until the slide locked back and Jack could see that the magazine was empty. Jack had enjoyed the way Masud's body had convulsed, cartoonishly, with each of the first eight shots, but was satisfied that the final ten shots helped ensure that the parasitic little terp was dead enough for three lifetimes. Jack put the pistol back in the bodyguard's hand and walked to Jimmy's Wrangler, parked half a mile away, at another campsite, taking off his Mechanix gloves and stuffing them into his pocket for throwing away later and after he was far away from the park.

To Jack, it finally made sense why his next deployment had been taking so long to arrange, and why Masud had been so uncharacteristically willing to threaten Jack's life at their last meeting. Gill had not, really, been slowing Jack's deployment. The warlord, Masud's patron and client to Horizon Solutions, had died in an MA-IED (magnetically attached - improvised explosive device) attack the week before. Jack had been lazy about checking Afghanistan's leading English language news site, "Tolo News," and had not been aware of the attack, nor of the similarly reported stories about the Tajikistan government rounding up and jailing (or just shooting, during firefights with) Tajik mafia members, and thus had missed the fact that Masud's power base had vanished, as had the man/men to whom Jack was in debt.

Thankfully, Jimmy had kept abreast of this fact, after he'd been fired from his job at the call center, and had begun to look into the possibility of joining Jack as a contract warrior. When Jack told him about the debt he owed the Tajik mafia with whom he was connected, Jimmy put together the significance of what he'd learned. Masud had been counting on Jack to provide him, and whatever remnants of his patrons remained, a new place from which to regrow their operations, treading on the fact that Jack thought he'd be risking upsetting an entire organized crime network if he refused to do as Masud said.

"Thanks, brother!" Jack said as Jimmy re-entered the Wrangler, stuffing his scoped, Remington R-15 VTR rifle into a soft case and putting the Jeep in gear.

"I never liked that guy..." Jimmy said, surprisingly at ease. He'd been watching Jack, providing him overwatch in his meeting with Masud, and felt no compunctions in killing Masud's bodyguard after the man had drawn his pistol and aimed it at Jack. The fact that Jack then killed Masud in cold blood and they were now leaving the scene of the crime was, Jimmy admitted, problematic, but he believed he could live with it.

"What will you do with the cash?" Jimmy asked.

"I'll drop it off at a women's shelter, near my home." Jack answered, feeling utterly exhausted as the last of his adrenaline began to crash and he felt the full weight of guilt, tension, anger and hatred he'd carried for two years begin to lift from his soul.

XLIV

Thursday, 0953

Veronica lay on the sofa, her eyes were red and itchy and her nose felt swollen from blowing it as she cried and recovered, all night long. She rested her head on her pillow from their bed, and held Jack's pillow tightly against her chest, frequently inhaling from it and smelling Jack's scent. It made her feel somewhat better as she continued to wait for him. He hadn't called her yet, and she was more worried than she remembered feeling since leaving the refugee camp in Cameroon as a child. When she heard the lock to the condo's door shift swiftly from a key, she screamed and jumped up from the couch, and saw Jack enter the condo, his face marked by concern as she ran to him and felt her emotions shift and flood through her with a speed and force she could never before remember experiencing.

"Jack!" She shouted as she took him tightly in her arms, hugged him desperately and cried, despite feeling sure, just a minute earlier, she was not physically capable of making more tears.

"Ronnie, are you okay?" He asked her, referencing her scream.

"Jack!!" She shouted at him again, very loudly. "Why didn't you call me?!" She asked him angrily, letting go of him and pointing her finger at him. "Why didn't you tell me you were okay?! Do know how worried I've been?!?!"

Jack could see that she was raw with emotion and felt an incredible sense of stupidity well up as he realized, he'd forgotten to call her after torching the vans or after shooting Masud. He looked very sheepish, and said nothing, watching her breathe deeply several times before she walked back to him and let him take her in his arms.

"I'm sorry, sweetheart." He said, kissing the top of her head as she buried her face against his chest and let her tears soak into his shirt.

"Is it done now. Are you finished?" She asked him, so softly he could barely hear her.

"Yes, sweetheart. It's all done now."

Veronica said nothing for several minutes, feeling her relief take over her focus from her anger and fear. Then she remembered the source of her self-directed anger. "I love you, Jack." She said, feeling her own guilt return for not telling him before he left.

Jack smiled gently and reached down and slowly lifted her into his arms. He was exhausted, and his arms shook as he hefted her, but he forced himself to hold her. "I love you, too, Ronnie." He told her, kissing her gently on her soft, warm lips. "Let's get some sleep, sweetheart." He said as he took her to bed.