Page 23 of Go First
Channel Grace—William Harper’s garish kingdom of television evangelism—spread across four floors of a renovated warehouse on the edge of the city’s arts district.Jakes traced the schematic with the back of a fingernail.Reception at ground level, all white marble and camera-friendly uplighting.Two studios above it, the larger wrapped in black acoustic drapes, a glittering stage built for the thunder of fake miracles.Offices and editing suites on the top floor, each labelled in a neat architect’s font.
He closed his eyes and pictured the path he would take: service entrance at the loading dock, the left-hand stairwell that smelled of disinfectant and old coffee, press the buzzer for Deliveries.He’d checked and checked again: this was the place, the only place that the Door Dash guys used.
He clicked the next file.Grainy footage, no sound: a narrow corridor filmed through the deliberate blink of a hidden camera.Someone – not Cox, obviously, but someone else working for him, had gone in there with a pinhole camera. The images rolled: production assistants carrying stacks of cue cards, a make-up girl glancing into her phone, a security guard with a soft belly and a badge that sat too loosely on his shirt.
Jakes watched them without interest.He didn’t need this detail.None of these people would be there when he struck.Only one.
He slowed the feed, stopped it altogether, rewound to the moment Harper himself strode into the studio.This one.Expensive black suit, the sheen of stage powder dulling his jowls.A man who had learned to draw light toward himself and then sell it back to the faithful in monthly instalments.
Jakes’s breathing was slow, steady.
The studio called up other corridors in his memory, corridors he had not walked in years.Not this tidy, not this safe.
Basra.
He never said it aloud if he could help it.The name carried its own dust and heat.
He saw again the stone-coloured alleys where the sun poured down like molten brass.The war was supposed to be a thing to survive, a trial to be endured.People looked at him with a careful sympathy whenever he admitted he remembered it.They imagined he carried scars that made him fragile.They could not grasp the truth: that he had loved it.
He had loved the clarity of danger, the clean, single line that ran through every day.You woke, you breathed, you hunted, or you were hunted.That was the algorithm of life, as pure as any equation.Today, kill or be killed.
There had been a sniper then, a shadow perched high in the broken husk of a television station.A building that still reeked of old electrics and burned film.The sniper was the city’s own private god of death.Women who ventured to the cracked concrete basin to draw water crumpled mid-stride.Cats toppled from rooftops in sudden silent bursts of red.A Kurdish grandfather who stood tall despite the bent spine of his years took one neat hole through his forehead while reaching for his prayer beads.The sniper spared nothing.Toddlers, animals, the frail and the proud—his bullets found them all.
The Marines called this sniper the Lord of Death.Jakes, twenty-four and lean with purpose, took the hunt as a private vow.
He remembered the weight of the rifle against his palm as he crossed the courtyard littered with broken satellite dishes.The air smelled of oil and singed plastic.Flight after flight of narrow stairs twisted upward into darkness.
Bodies lay where they had fallen.A woman sprawled beside an upturned pail, water leaking away to mud.Two boys barely old enough to shave.He stepped over them with the cold precision of a man counting rungs on a ladder.
Halfway up, he found a junkie slumped against the wall, eyes open but pupils swimming in a haze of chemicals.The man did not move or speak.Jakes left him to whatever dream held him captive.The guy was a junkie.A junkie in Basra.It took balls to be that fucked-up.So Jakes left him to it.A kind of a tribute.
Near the top, a family of cats blinked at him from the shell of a broadcast office.A mother and three scrawny kittens, ribs like the struts of tiny umbrellas.He unwrapped a corner of his rations and laid it on the floor.The mother sniffed once before tearing into the meat.
The sound that reached him then was so gentle it took a moment to recognise.A thread of music—violin and piano—drifting through the broken walls.Classical, precise, unbearably calm.
The Lord of Death was listening to Mozart.
Jakes crept forward, heart slowed to a metronome’s tick.The final flight of stairs opened onto the broadcast roof.There, behind a half-collapsed section of concrete, the sniper crouched, headphones clamped to his skull, the long barrel of his rifle resting like an extension of his own bones.
The man was beautiful.That was the first thing Jakes thought.The desert light etched the fine bones of his face, the dark hair drawn back and damp with sweat.In that instant, the war narrowed to the single line of the man’s pulse.
Jakes came up behind him, a silent shape in the ruin.He pressed the barrel of his own weapon into the hollow at the base of the man’s skull.
The sniper turned his head.Their eyes met, only inches apart.
Jakes pulled the trigger.
The body shuddered once, then lay still.
Silence returned—except for the music, still playing, absurdly delicate.
Jakes stared.He had given the man the most intimate death possible, face to face, the last thing the sniper saw the eyes of the one who ended him.
And yet, when the breath had gone and the blood had cooled, a different urge rose in him like a tide.He took the sniper’s own rifle and smashed it down upon that perfect face, those oxbow lips—once, twice, again—until the features were a ruin of bone and blood.
He could never explain why.
It was not rage.It was not fear.He had felt something like it before, years earlier, when a girl at school had been so breathtakingly pretty that the sight of her filled him with a power he could neither name nor resist.Beauty, for him, had always demanded its own destruction.On summer mornings, in the same spirit, he’d tear down spiders’ webs garlanded with dew.They were calling out for it.