“Meet the Four
Horsemen: War, Pestilence, Famine, and Death.”
“Do they have real
names?” LeRoy frowned.
“I’d imagine they
do, but we could not find anything anywhere on the planet that reveals them.”
“What do we know?”
Ray asked, studying the pictures.
The first one was
a picture of War, -the woman Ray had found on the footage that had started
their search. She was short and stocky with chin-length black and red hair. She
had a tattoo on her neck that curled from just under her jaw down into her
shirt. The picture looked like it was a mug shot from a prison in a third-world
country and War was not happy to be there.
The second,
Pestilence, was a man who greatly resembled War except he had white streaks in
his long black hair and multiple facial piercings. The picture was from a
security camera taken in a train station somewhere and showed Pestilence
glancing covertly over his shoulder, a laptop case clutched tight to his chest.
The third picture
showed a handsome blond man in a black-on-black-on-black power suit. Famine had
been photographed stepping out of a black Maybach sedan in front of what looked
like a country club somewhere tropical.
The fourth was of
a beautiful blond woman with her hair pulled back severely from her face. Death
was in a sharp charcoal suit, heels, and had large jade jewelry on that should
have ruined the professional outfit but somehow enhanced it. She was standing
in front of a steel-and-glass office building with a phone pressed to her ear
and a briefcase in her other hand.
“Very little,
actually.” Gibson sat down and gave his team a rueful smile. “This picture was
from when War was captured in Russia after leading an attack on a government
building in Moscow. She is a combat expert and a fairly popular mercenary. Very
few people have been able to best her, and the only reason she was captured in
Moscow was because she was drugged by a person on her own team. Even then, it
took three Russian soldiers to take her in.”
Nikolai bristled
at the thought that a small woman could get the better of his countrymen. “I
will show her.”
Gibson chuckled.
“Pestilence is War’s brother. As far as we can tell, they were born in Eastern
Europe somewhere but spent a significant amount of their lives in the US. He is
a ghost in the system and one of the best computer hackers I have ever seen or
heard of. He is probably the reason the Four Horsemen don’t seem to exist. It’s
tough to completely erase somebody from every computer system in the world, but
a good enough hacker could do it, given enough time.”
“He better than
you, cap?” Alfie asked with an impish grin.
“Yep.” Gibson’s
eyes glittered dangerously. “But that’s not going to stop me from trying to
bring him down.”
“Those are some
crazy eyes, you got there.” Alfie leaned back with an exaggerated leery
expression on his face.
Gibson shook his
head and turned back to the pictures. “Famine is the idea man. He is the one
who makes the plans and oversees execution. He creates relationships with
powerful people in banks to get information about computer systems, layout, et cetera
and then uses that information to make his plans infallible.”
LeRoy scoffed. “No
plan is infallible.”
“La Grenouille Bouché would know,” Ray
teased.
“Last, but not
least, is Death.” Gibson cut them off before LeRoy could retort. “She is the
one who gets the impossible information. No one seems to know how she does it.
Even the people she has worked over can’t explain it. They just know they gave
her the information but they can’t remember what kind of coercion she used. She
works closely with Famine on the planning process.”
“What’s the plan?”
Nikolai asked.
“What the plan
normally is: direct confrontation, divert catastrophe, capture the bad guys.”
“Make the AOJ look
good,” Ray muttered.
“We leave for
London on Thursday morning. Let’s get prepped.”
Find the rest in 1-800-Henchmen: The Complete Series on Amazon.
