CHAPTER ONE The Anointing of the Sick
1.
London sits atop a dark labyrinth. The true nature and extent of the tunnels, tube stations, nineteenth-century sewers, and connective conduits between key points of egress are closely guarded secrets known only to the supervisory staff at the Greater London Authority, Scotland Yard, and MI5. In fact, to call London’s subterranean architecture otherworldly is to traffic in major understatement. The atmosphere of the tunnels is that of a fever dream. Dark, dank, desolate, rat infested, airless, and fairly close to impassable, the lower tunnels that link the catacombs beneath the Palace Gardens and the streets of Greater Kensington have seen very few humans traverse the fetid passageways in their three centuries of existence.
All of which is why the five operatives who materialize at the west end of Tunnel PG1—striding purposefully, two abreast, down the claustrophobic channel of corroded stone toward Palace Green—are hyperalert, each feeling like a stranger in a strange land. They wear matching black body armor, Kevlar, and bulletproof helmets. Each cradles a lightweight assault rifle across their chest. They navigate the gloom courtesy of night-vision goggles, and communicate via closed-circuit radio mikes attached to their collars. There are three men and two women.
At the present moment, only one of the men speaks—in a low, dour voice, a faint Texas twang marinating his words: “According to satellite imagery and on-the-ground intel, the Israeli embassy was breached at precisely 4:37 P.M. BST, on the afternoon of 10 August 2022. That’s yesterday for those of you checking your calendars. So far, the bloodhounds at The Sunday Times and Channel Four have not smelled anything. Looks like we’re getting in just under the wire. Captors haven’t squawked any demands yet.”
The others listen as they march along, their green-tinted visual fields latching on to the far end of the tunnel, their destination the landing beneath the service entrance of 4 Palace Green.
The one called Spur continues his rundown: “Benefiting from a week of surveillance, the hijacking of a delivery van, a series of forged documents, and a few phony workmen’s uniforms, the intruders gained entry to the Israeli embassy via the loading dock on the north side of the property.” Spur cocks his helmet toward the darkness twenty meters ahead of them. “That’s about ten meters up yonder there, above the tunnel intersect.”
Spur stops, and the rest of them halt behind him. He clicks his halogen light and points it up at the tunnel ceiling. They all see the underside of an ancient manhole cover.
“We’ll join the party through here,” he says. “Through the boiler room.”
A bowlegged, muscle-bound former athlete moving into middle age, Spur serves as the de facto leader of this very special unit. He has the command position not because he is the most gifted, or the smartest, or the strongest, or the most skilled—far from it. All five operatives carry the burden of being endowed with special powers that are both preternatural and highly classified. But Spur is the natural-born leader, with a knack for psychological warfare.
“Okay, let’s switch over,” he says, shrugging off his Kevlar vest, revealing a medieval military coat, chain mail, and broadsword under the innocuous SWAT team attire. The imposing costume underneath the black Kevlar is the “psy-ops” element of the operation, the regalia designed not only to disguise their identities but also to intimidate—to frighten and rattle their adversaries. Spur and his supervisor at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency have been carefully crafting the five personas over the last year.
The helmets and vests come off one by one. The smallest of the group, the petite Asian assassin, code name Boo, now sheds her black military garb and reveals the formfitting robe of a Shaolin monk. The other woman in the group, a dark, exotic-looking Latina code-named Pin-Up, peels off her SWAT gear to reveal the gilded breastplate and black widow corset of a warrior priestess. She grips her machete and slices the air with it. “Come on, slowpokes,” she taunts the two other men as they hurriedly transform into dreamlike ronin.
The tall, rangy African American sheds his Kevlar and reveals a multicolored shamanic robe of feathers draping his lean body, complete with beaded gauntlets and a bejeweled scabbard, an hourglass engraving across the gilded breastplate. His code name is Ticker, and he does not appreciate Pin-Up’s wisecracks. “Hardy-har-har,” he says as he takes the safety off his Glock and holsters it. “Pin-Up, I’ll be done with the mission before you get your skinny ass up to the first floor.”
“That’s enough tongue waggin’, now cork your goddamn pistols,” Spur says in his Texas drawl. “I want safeties off, and silencers on, all mikes live now.” He glances at a small index card taped to his gauntlet. “According to CENTCOM we got three hostiles currently in the building, a half dozen friendlies, mostly staff, and one member of the Israeli diplomatic corps. Hack? Can you tap into the line from here? Give us the geography?”
The fifth member of the unit—a younger man, his dark hair and handsome face shaded by the hood of a leather duster—climbs a series of steps embedded in the tunnel wall. Known for his acumen with all things digital, Hack yanks a cable loose from decades of congealed calcium deposits and grit in the ceiling.
He pinches the end of the cable, and the others watch his body begin to glitter with the blue-metal phosphorus of live current. “Two of the hostiles are on the second floor,” he says in a strange droning voice, his eyes swimming with flickering signal from the building’s security system. “Looks like they got all the friendlies up there, holding them at gunpoint. Third hostile on the ground floor checking windows and door locks. Each hostile has what looks like a MAC-10 machine pistol, extended clip, .45 ACP rounds, one in each chamber. At least that’s what it looks like to me, but what do I know?”
“All right, y’all,” Spur says, climbing the steps, drawing his sword, and prying open the manhole cover with its tip. He pauses and looks over his shoulder at the others. “We’ll take down the yahoo on the ground floor first. I want this quick and decisive, in and out.”
They all nod as Pin-Up mutters to herself, “That’s what she said.”
2.
According to official government records, Spur and his operatives no longer exist. They are deceased, killed in the line of duty, each of them buried at Arlington Cemetery. Their mere existence is known only to a handful of people in the global intelligence community. In fact, only one human being on earth knows the full extent of their uncanny powers: Colonel Sean McDermott—code name Silverback—a section chief at the DIA.
It took quite a bit of convincing for a military mind like McDermott’s to grasp and process what had happened to the five members of the Quintet back in Karakistan a little over a year ago. The cover story that they all had subsequently agreed upon was pure comic book: Supposedly, while hunting down the warlord Abu Osamir, the five were exposed to radiation, which somehow, through some genetic mash-up, had enhanced their natural skills. But what had really happened to them was far more Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. After being ambushed and thrown into a dungeon straight out of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, they were about to be tortured and killed when an unlikely savior came to the rescue, a gruesome revenant with a changing face, dripping with ancient evil.
“A transaction is what I propose … a proposition, if you prefer,” the Devil had said to them in the fetid shadows of that torture chamber. And the deal was as simple as it was sinister: Satan would grant them incredible powers beyond their wildest dreams, powers that would enable them to easily escape the dungeon. And all he asked in return was for them to occasionally, on a freelance basis, hunt down and kill individuals who are in breach of contract. These individuals have, to put it coarsely, skipped town on the Devil.
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