PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
Francisco Abalos removed the phone’s battery and returned it to his bag. He would never use that phone again and would discard it later. He then took his personal phone and listened one more time to the voice message his brother Thiago had left him. It only lasted eighty-six seconds, but it was enough for Abalos to feel the immeasurable physical agony his brother had been in when he’d called. Abalos steadied himself against the dining table, resisting the urge to scream as he listened to his baby brother’s moans and cries until they became barely audible. In the background, an explosion that sounded like a grenade going off, followed by more gunfire.
Then there was a twenty-two-second pause, but now Abalos wasn’t so sure anymore. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine what his brother was doing. There was a faint scraping sound, as if his dying brother was dragging himself on a dirt or gravel road. Abalos had to open his eyes, because he couldn’t stomach the images his brain was generating for him.
There.
Abalos tapped the rewind button and went back five seconds. Yes. There it was again. His brother had tried to speak. Abalos heard syllables, but they were slurred, unintelligible. And then, that, too, stopped. It was followed by the harsh, gurgling, and rasping sound of Thiago’s last breath. Abalos connected his phone to his laptop and downloaded the voice message. He opened it through a sound-enhancing app and began to clean up the background noise. He then isolated the sound of his brother’s voice and heightened its contrast.
He pressed play.
‘Cisco . . . Kill . . . k . . . em . . . all.
Abalos couldn’t remember the last time he had shed a tear for anyone, or anything, and today wasn’t the day he would break the cycle. Crying was not how a warrior avenged his fallen brother. Abalos was going to do it the old-fashioned way. The way his brother had demanded it.
He was going to kill them all, starting with Donovan Wade and the FBI bitch working with him.