The Iscariot Agenda Read Online Free Page B

Marshall Theodore Walker, once an assassin with the Pieces of Eight, went commercial after the Force Elite disbanded.
    In a small apartment five stories above the busy and chaotic streets overlooking Manila, Walker awoke in a wild tangle of sheets that had gone unwashed for several weeks. Through the windows he could hear the busy Filipino marketplace below, as vendors sold butchered strips of meat, gutted fish and fruit.
    Sitting up in bed with his hair naturally unkempt and his eyes at half-mast, Walker stared at the stumps of his legs and recalled the exact moment of their loss.
    As a consultant with a private military company in Iraq during the onset of the war, he was riding point during a recon mission in the Al Anbar Province, when the vehicle he was in tripped an IED.  In a fiery flash the floor of the Humvee buckled upward into the cab as shrapnel as keen as surgical steel sliced through everything, including the bones of his legs in such neat precision that there were no ragged tears, mutilated muscle or jagged bones—just perfect saw-blade cuts. 
    When he came to he found his team dead, sliced and burned, the vehicle twisted around him like a protective capsule. Where they had died, Walker had lived. And often he found himself wishing he had followed his comrades to Glory.
    Closing his eyes he sighed in the way of regret, the memories as vivid as the day the IED took his legs. The pain, the phantom itches, none of it fading or going away, the scars—real and imagined—a constant reminder of that life-altering moment in the Province.  
    Living mainly off a small government allowance, he pissed away most of it on cheap booze, low rent and Filipina whores, the sum of his life. And now he awoke with a headache, an empty bottle of some indigent liquor he couldn’t even pronounce on the nightstand beside him.
    Scooting down along the bed, Walker maneuvered himself into position, propped himself into his wheelchair, and made his way across a room that was a fetid wasteland of dirty clothes and empty bottles. 
    When he got to the kitchen he felt something that had been lost to him that day in Al Anbar—that impression of an animal sensing great danger. 
    In the center of the kitchen he paused, waited, listened.
    Nothing but the Manila crowds in the streets below plying their wares.
    And yet: I know you’re here .
    With his head on a swivel, his eyes aware, Walker reached for a Glock taped beneath the kitchen table.
    But the holster was empty.  
    Clever creature, aren’t you ?
    In a movement so swift and from shadows so dense, something moved across the room with such speed and poetic grace that the action in itself was gloriously beautiful.
    It was also the last thing Walker considered before being rendered unconscious with a blow to the head.  
     
    #
    When Walker came to he found himself face down on the kitchen table with his arms draped over the sides and his wrists bound to the table’s legs with duct tape. He was bound so tightly that he was rendered immobile and, having partial legs, had no leverage to move.
    He rolled his head to one side, kept it there, his eyes trying to tune in, to focus, his world now coming to a crisp clarity, the things around him beginning to take on definition and form. 
    A man he did not recognize sat next to the table, watching. His eyes were so dark they seemed without pupils, yet they were studious and patient and somehow terrifyingly omniscient. His face was highly rawboned with a lantern jaw and powerful chin.
    The man, seeing Walker’s eyes come to a meeting point with his own, held up an 8x10 photo.  “Do you know what this is?”
    Walker passed a dry tongue over parched lips. “Who are you?”
    “Do you know what this is?” the man repeated.
    Walker studied the photo and recognized it as a photo of his old unit, the Pieces of Eight. In it he was much younger and whole, everyone hamming it up for the camera with the exception of Kimball Hayden, the man