A Dallas Suite

Chapter Six

Jeff Marshall dead bolted the door leading into his tiny one bedroom apartment. He immediately walked to the kitchen sink and used bleach to clean the bloody Bowie knife he had been carrying in a hidden sheath on his right calf. After it looked new again, besides the worn handle, he placed it on a towel sitting on the counter so that it would dry.

Jeff admired the knife for a moment and reminisced on some memories he made using it. The first knife kill he ever got was in Iraq, during the invasion. Hand to hand combat is uncommon for U.S. soldiers, as they generally fight in groups and try to not allow an enemy to get close to them. Jeff, however, was a Green Beret. He was sent into some of the deadliest parts of the world and usually with a very small team of two or three other guys. Silent kills were something they had to do often. And everyone knows, the best way to kill someone quietly is by using a knife.

He grabbed a cold beer from his fridge and plopped down on the second hand couch that was barely five feet from the kitchen counter. He didn't give himself much time to relax these days, but the beginning of his plan had officially started. He deserved to have some drinks and enjoy a movie before he passed out. Probably "Black Hawk Down," or another old war movie he had watched dozens of times.

Next to the couch was a round dining table. He used to use it as his work desk and his eating area. Nowadays it was all work. The table was covered in pictures of men and printouts of endless information about every one of them. The walls in his apartment were also covered in pictures and sheets of paper. The paper contained addresses, phone numbers, bank statements, articles from newspapers. Anything you wanted to know about any of the faces in those pictures could be found somewhere in the apartment.

Jeff had been working for years to gather all of the information, and he had worked hard. Most of the information wasn't legal, or at least the way he obtained it wasn't. But with enough software and education of the online world, you could acquire any piece of information you could want without getting yourself on any lists.

Jeff downed the rest of the beer and grabbed another from the fridge. Before he sat back down he stopped and stared at a picture of the wall. It was an 8"x 10" face shot of Jason Diggs. He was younger when the picture was taken and he almost looked like a handsome man. Jeff grabbed a small knife that was on the table and slashed a large X across the picture.

He turned to the next picture on the wall and stabbed the knife into the center of the man's face before he had blinked. "You're next, Michael."