To facilitate concealment, Brian's Viper was unobstructed by a silencer. The resounding gunshot startled the nearby birds, which flapped their wings and took to the sky, circling the treetops.
The battle lasted only a few seconds. Cassel followed Brian's instructions throughout, crouching down with his head in his hands at the first sound of gunfire.
With each shot, he shuddered as if he had been shot himself, and it took him a long moment before hesitantly rising to look behind him.
The bodies of the two masked men behind him were particularly gruesome, their tofu pudding scattered across the floor. The great writer shuddered and turned to look ahead.
He discovered that the body before him was similarly damaged. Brian had shot him through the jaw, and the bullet exited through the top of his head, shattering even the top of his head.
The only survivor was the man who had been leading the conversation, standing before the two men. Brian had just fired four shots, shattering his limbs, and he was now writhing and screaming in pain.
"Is it over?" Cassel looked around in confusion, but Jack was nowhere to be found.
"Not yet." Brian walked over to the body in front of Cassel, stretched out his foot, and turned it over. He saw a bloody hole under the body's armpit. The bullet had passed between the ribs and hit the heart.
He roughly estimated the deceased's position in his mind, and then turned around, pointing the "Viper" in his hand at a group of bushes beside the path.
"Do you need me to ask?"
As Cassel looked at him in surprise, the seemingly sparse bushes in the distance rustled for a while, and then a small clump suddenly grew taller, transforming into a human shape.
"Calm down," a deep voice came. "If I wanted you dead, you would already be a corpse."
"That's not necessarily the case. My companions should have found you long ago," Brian retorted bluntly.
The humanoid shrub snorted disdainfully, stripped off its camouflage netting, and approached the two men. He held an early model AUG assault rifle with a silencer—the same "Cube Rifle" from the old CS, also known as "Mirror" by players.
The setting sun shone through the forest leaves, illuminating a large, boiled egg-like head with a scorching red glow.
"Frank? Frank Moses? Why is it you?" Jack's voice called from the other side of the path, his voice bewildered. Bruce Willis's bald head was too conspicuous.
Cassel glanced left and right, his expression slightly bewildered. "Do you know each other?"
Jack shook his wet trouser legs and awkwardly stepped onto the road. He had been perched on an oak tree for eight or nine hours, motionless. The bottle of mineral water Brian had prepared for him was too small to be used, so to avoid being seen, he simply ate it against the trunk.
There's nothing shameful about this; sniper work is just that disgusting. Professional snipers change their diets before missions, sometimes even adopting a vegetarian diet to reduce bowel movements and avoid attracting wild animals or patrol dogs.
"I saw the phone's location. I was wondering why you'd been sitting here motionless for hours," Frank said, his expression slightly embarrassed.
Everyone's questions were instantly half resolved. It turned out the mysterious man who'd tortured Roger Hansen was this Frank, and he knew Jack. No wonder he'd left his phone and note, specifically for him.
"You left your phone, why didn't you call?" Jack was puzzled by this old CIA agent's intentions.
Frank's question further embarrassed him, and he lowered his voice considerably. "I took the fastest direct flight to Paris, but I didn't expect you to arrive so early."
"The fastest flight you took." Jack was speechless, feeling a bit like his filter was cracked. Well, on second thought, it made sense. For a long-retired CIA agent trying to conceal his identity, traveling from New York to Paris using a pre-prepared fake passport was the fastest way.
"What the hell is going on?" He had a lot of questions that needed to be answered.
"Clean these up first, and we'll talk about it when we get to a safe place." Frank said as he walked up to the kidnapper who was still groaning on the ground and shot him in the head to end his suffering. "This guy is useless."
Then he bent down and took out the other person's mobile phone from the corpse, took out a number from it and wrote it down, then shot the phone again and shattered it, and then picked up the bullet shell on the ground.
On the other side, Brian took out two pre-prepared shovels from the trunk of the Citroën C5 and handed them to Cassel, who was still in a daze, and motioned him to help dig a hole.
The mud in the forest was actually not that easy to dig, because there were too many tree roots and large and small stones. After Jack changed his pants in the car and came out, Cassel, the lazy guy, had only dug a small hole.
Taking the shovel from him, Jack and Brian worked together for half an hour, digging a nearly two-meter-deep grave into which they buried the four bodies, along with several weapons.
Jack had only fired two shots from the tree, collecting the shell casings. Brian also collected the remaining shell casings from his own shots.
Meanwhile, Frank had abandoned the kidnappers' Mercedes pickup truck somewhere unknown and reappeared in a Renault SUV, waving to the three. "Let's go, I'll take you somewhere safe."
Jack followed him out of the Fontainebleau Forest and back into Paris, finally stopping at the foot of an old apartment building.
Climbing the creaky stairs to the top attic, Frank opened a door and gestured to the three, "This is one of the safe houses I set up. It's safe for now."
The room was covered in dust, as if it had been unused for years. The air was filled with a musty smell from a window that hadn't been opened for air.
"What would you like to drink?" Frank pulled a dusty, ageless bottle of bourbon from the cabinet.
"Who is he, anyway? Is he an agent? Do you know who kidnapped my daughter?" Cassel barged in with questions.
Although the room seemed uninhabited for a long time, it still had running water and electricity. Frank washed four glasses and placed them on the table, then, with a casual expression, poured them with liquor.
"It's irrelevant. I was just asked to help rescue your daughters. Don't worry, from what I know, they're probably safe now."
"I know you, Frank Moses. One of our best covert operations agents. You've taken down countless drug lords, terrorists, and even overthrown a government.
Even after retirement, you're still labeled a 'red'. No one would hire someone like you," Brian said, directly exposing someone's past.
"What's a 'red'?" Cassel looked from Brian to Frank. Seeing neither of them seemed to be responding, he turned to Jack for help.
"'R·E·D' means red, retired, extremely, and dangerous."
After explaining, Jack took a sip of the wine glass and directly stated his guess,
"They are actually coming for you, right? The kidnapping of Sarah Elmasri is to make this matter appear in national news or even international news, so as to indirectly notify you who is hiding in Texas."
Frank's cheek twitched slightly, and his expression was a little struggling. "I said this is not important. The important thing is to find a way to rescue those two girls. Didn't I tell you before that you can come to Paris alone? Why do you have to bring these two guys with you?
Okay, I admit that one of them might be able to help, but the other one is just making things worse."
"Because we are on a C-17 transport plane, there is enough space in the cabin, and there is no need to rush to grab the earliest flight ticket." Jack poked someone's sore spot insidiously, and then explained.
"Believe me, if I don't take them with me, they will make a bigger noise."
"Wait, I don't understand." Cassel couldn't wait for the two of them to slowly exchange witty remarks, and stood between Jack and Frank, "What does this have to do with Alexis and Kim? Why did they want to capture them?"
Frank looked at Cassel and then at Jack, hesitated for a while, and then faced Brian and spoke with difficulty, "Their target is Alexis, your daughter was just implicated, I'm very sorry."
Brian resisted the urge to throw a punch, "There's nothing to hide now, tell the truth, what is going on."
Frank touched his bald head and sighed, "This is all my fault, I was too careless, I don't know how the other party knew about the relationship between Alexis and me, and knew that as long as she was caught, I would show up and find a way to save her."
Cassel was immediately furious, listening to what the old bald man said, "Why? What relationship could you have? I watched Alexis being born with my own eyes, you old bastard, explain it to me clearly!"
"She's my granddaughter!" Frank was furious when he heard Cassel yelling at him. "Richard, you're my son!"
Jack's wine glass fell to the ground with a clang, spilling the wine all over the floor. The glass didn't break, but it rolled around on the wooden floor.
What did he hear? Has the world gone crazy? He looked at the shiny bald head in front of him, and then at Cassel with his thick "hair". He couldn't see any resemblance between the two faces.
(End of this chapter)