Read Online Tier One Wild by Dalton Fury - Free Book Online Page A

at $24 million, Aref Saleh would find these boys a damn airplane to blow out of the sky.

 
    SIX
    Tripoli, Libya
    Dr. Renny Marris had been in this line of work long enough that he should have felt the eyes on him, but he felt nothing but the warmth of the Mediterranean sun on his face as he stepped out of the massive Corinthian Bab Africa Hotel, just two blocks from the Mediterranean seashore. It was just past eleven a.m. and he had been hard at work with neither food nor drink since daybreak, so he decided to get out of his dark suit and into the bustling streets for lunch, even if he’d have to bring some of his work along with him.
    Marris walked past the taxi stand in front of the hotel and then continued on foot up the steps to the parking garage. Over his shoulder he wore a worn canvas messenger bag that bulged with files and folders full of his work. He knew better than to take these documents out of his suite, but time was short and he had a lot to do, so he allowed himself this transgression with barely a moment’s thought.
    Marris was a man who lived more in his work than in the world around him.
    He slid into the driver’s seat of his two-door Mazda with some effort. He was a big man, a shade over six feet tall and well over two hundred pounds, much of it a thick middle that seemed to spread more and more each month since he’d reached the age of fifty, five years prior.
    The burly Canadian drove out of the hotel grounds, then headed east through thick midday traffic on the palm-tree-lined Al Kurnish Road. The blue waters of the Med were on his left, and on his right was the Medina, the old city. A massive array of tightly packed whitewashed buildings and narrow streets and alleys that covered several square kilometers, it had begun as an ancient settlement by the Phoenicians in the seventh century, and now comprised just a tiny tip of Tripoli’s wide oceanfront.
    Though he was not a particularly fit man, he was not worried about venturing out among the locals. Apart from the petty crime rife in many Third World cities, Tripoli, Libya, was safe enough for most of the thousands of Westerners living and working there, now one year after the overthrow and death of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.
    It was safe enough for most Westerners. But it was not safe at all for Dr. Renny Marris.
    He was blissfully unaware of any danger. He’d been wrapped up in his duties of late, and he’d been lulled into such a comfortable relationship with Tripoli, working here for a year with no major personal security problems, that his mind did not wander into the realm of threat perception.
    As he turned into the Medina, behind him a pair of vans followed him closely.
    Another car followed these two.
    Oblivious to his long tail, Marris drove on, deeper into the shadows of the tight streets and alleyways of the Old City.
    Many of the roads did not have street signs, but Renny knew where he was going. He loved the hustle and bustle of the Third World, the Arab world, and he’d found this little hidden courtyard café populated by locals and intrepid expats some months back while meeting with a shadowy contact. He’d returned every week or two since. He enjoyed the food, the atmosphere, the feeling that he could leave his office or his busy hotel suite full of computers and fax machines and sat phones and disappear into the belly of ancient North Africa in just a matter of minutes.
    But he was wrong. He was hardly disappearing.
    Dr. Renny Marris was a lead investigator for the United Nations, and he was a natural for the position, as he possessed a PhD in mechanical engineering and a reputation as being an ardent pacifist. Young Dr. Marris had served several stints working for aid agencies and human rights groups around the world, becoming an expert in land mine eradication in the 1980s. In the nineties he branched out into stopping the illegal trade of other forms of conventional weaponry. Now, into the second decade of the new century,