“You are the American,” she said. “The one who brings the war for gold.”
Tommy stepped into the chaos. The air tasted of sulfur, cordite, and dust. Buildings were hollowed out like rotten teeth. A tank, its turret blown off, lay on its side like a dead beetle. This wasn’t the cartoon violence of Vice City—the scripted shootouts, the three-star wanted level that went away if you found a Pay 'N' Spray. This was real. The walls had scars. The silence between explosions was heavy with grief.
Instead, he walked to his private dock, took out the Python, and fired every round into the dark water. Then he called his accountant.
Vice City: Aleppo
“A place that doesn’t have a reset button,” he said. “And it never did.”
He packed a single duffel bag. No suit this time. Kevlar vest, a silenced MP5, the Python, and a fake passport that identified him as “Ahmed Hassan,” a Lebanese antiquities dealer.
Tommy looked at the satellite photo of Aleppo on his tablet—the one he’d used to navigate the tunnels.
“The ghoul?”
He had just brought it to Aleppo.
The meeting was set in the ruins of the Baron Hotel, a shell of Art Deco elegance. Tommy walked in, MP5 hidden under a long coat. The ballroom was a morgue of shattered chandeliers. In the center, on a throne made of sandbags, sat The Son.
He was a nightmare. Half his face was a keloid scar from a phosphorus burn. He wore a tattered tuxedo jacket over a flak jacket. Around his neck hung a dozen dog tags—not from soldiers, but from the rival gangsters he’d beheaded.
The Son clapped. Two of his men dragged in a man in a filthy suit—the real Ahmed Hassan, whose identity Tommy had stolen. The man was crying.
The plane landed not at an airport, but on a cracked highway north of Aleppo. The pilot, a toothless Chechen with a gold tooth, kicked him out with a duffel bag and a curt “Two days. Then you find own way.”