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  The days passed, sunup to sunset. He could practically count them on his fingertips. Seven days and seven nights, as long as it took the God of the Old Testament to create Heaven and Earth.

  Jack was dying. He was giving up. Until a voice shouted at him and tried to reach his subconscious. He was buried deep inside himself, where no one could penetrate. The voice stopped shouting and began to beg. Burly arms gently rocked him, and sang to him an old Apache song, the song of his mother and all the mothers before her. Only this was his father, who was not of the People, but was now.

  A hero, he thinks, sacrifices himself for the greater good. He also sacrifices himself to the greater truth. He is prepared to die for what he believes in. But what does Jack believe? He tries to remember. He hears words he doesn’t understand. She is special to you, isn’t she? I thought so. You may be blind, but I’m not. She is carrying a child. Your child. Only the man who is closest cannot see it, but I can.

  Jack has given up fighting the ghosts. He is ready to surrender to them. He lies on his deathbed. The man who brought him here sheds tears. They roll down his cheeks. After he has shed all the tears there are, he rises onto shaky legs and shakes his head in defeat. Then he goes out of the hogan, leaving the medicine woman behind to mark the passage of this man who gave up many moons ago.

  The chanting stops. Wind whips past the leather flap of the hogan. The ghost of a young woman appears. She looks benignly down at him. She smiles. It is the smile of his mother.

  Jack heaves a breath and expels it in a wailing howl. He is up on his feet. He staggers to the doorway. He stumbles outside. He falls into the arms of a man who softens his fall as they both collapse to the ground. He gazes into the man’s eyes and sees his reflection. He is a child again, cradled in the arms of his father, whose expression is relieved.

  “I’ve got you, Jack,” his father says. “I’m with you. This is the first day of the rest of your life.”

  2

  Annapolis, Maryland

  Thursday, July 3 (7 months earlier)

  WHEN JACK COYOTE arrived at a popular tavern in Annapolis ahead of the Fourth of July weekend, he looked forward to leaving work behind, having a few laughs, and drinking a couple of beers.

  Aneila Chowdhury arrived separately by car. They worked together at the Homeland Intelligence Division, HID for short, or HIDden, or sometimes just the Firm, its headquarters located just down the street. Officially, HID was a data collection agency. Unofficially, it oversaw sensitive and often clandestine activities on behalf of other agencies whose directors didn’t want to get their hands dirtied.

  They walked into Club Seven together. A boisterous crowd from HID had already converged on the horseshoe bar. Two barkeeps manned the station, making for a lengthy wait. Aneila was the diversion. She was in an uncommon mood, talkative and giddy. She pointed out this co-worker and that director, naming names and providing commentary about who slept with whom, who was up for promotion, and who was about to be canned. Eventually she brought up the rumors circulating around the office. HID’s databases had been breached. The source of the breach was being investigated. Everyone feared it was Russia. Others blamed Saudi Arabia. Still others thought it was China or North Korea or Israel. The infiltration was supposed to be confidential, but details were dribbling out.

  The club was buzzing, making it difficult to hear everything Aneila said, but Jack caught the salient points and wished he hadn’t. She gazed at him, anxious for his take. “Well? What do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “What everybody’s talking about. The breaches. The hack.”

  He shrugged dismissively.

  She took a long hard look at him. He was being evasive, and she knew it. He ignored her irritation with him. It was easy to ignore her. A lady in black had caught his eye. She was sitting alone at a high two-seater table, elbow perched on the surface, chin resting in the curved palm of her long-fingered hand, eyes staring at nothing and no one ... until she inclined her head and gazed directly at him. She had interesting eyes, almond-shaped and vivid green. She looked away and pretended he wasn’t taking in every detail of her appearance, from the blonde hair fanning around her exceptional profile to the slim legs that went on forever, dancer’s legs.

  Jack immediately despised the shallow parts of himself. The empty heart. The hungry eyes. The impulsive needs. He learned to live within the limits of those shallow parts. What would his carefree friends or even his serious-minded workmates think of this incomplete man. This crippled man. This milquetoast man who kept his thoughts to himself and hid them behind self-deprecating humor. This tallish, slimish, aloofish man. This brown-eyed, brown-haired misfit who didn’t fit in anywhere. This wooer of woman, this hacker of code, this practical joker, this light drinker, this loud laugher, this sarcastic son of a bitch, this night owl and late riser, this outsider who would never be an insider, this war-painted warrior who didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone, this disbelieving reject who should have been born centuries earlier, this stranger among men, this outcast.

  “Know her?” Aneila asked, breaking his spell.

  He lifted the beer to his lips and drank. Her eyes were inquisitive, almost laughing at him.

  “Well, it looks like you’re about to. Not that I’m jealous or anything.” She shrugged as if she didn’t give a damn, even though she obviously did.

  Jack nodded toward the bar. “I’m buying. Why don’t you find a table?” She shouted out her drink of choice before gesturing towards one of the back rooms. An efficient lady and organized to a fault, off she went, disappearing into the crowd. She glanced back only once. The argument, if there had been an argument, was forgotten.

  Several customers pressed ahead of him. Jack used the time to assess the parade of patrons filing into the tavern. More colleagues from HID arrived. A few acknowledged him with silent greetings. He moved up in line and called out his order.

  The female barkeep wasn’t his type. Her hair was pulled into a French braid at the back of her head. Her black-and-white striped shirt wasn’t flattering. Neither were the wing-tipped vest or red necktie. Yet there was something interesting about her. She was a compact package made for long days and short nights. Her manner was severe, her demeanor no-nonsense, and her face bland, making her vaguely intersexed. When her eyes fastened onto him, they twinkled, softening her otherwise steely expression. She moved with ease, making wine glasses, highballs, and beer mugs magically appear, and payments and tips disappear. He changed his mind. Despite her stocky build, she was all girl, down to her long-tipped fingernails and her pettish smiles. Her eyes repeatedly glanced in his direction as if she wanted to know him. Jack had that way about him.

  The barkeep hustled back with his order—one draft beer and one white wine—and slid them across the bar. A sequined glove arrived first. “Sorry. Mine.” The lady in black handed the barkeep a large bill, enough to cover the drinks, the tip, and a favor. She was hooker bait, but classy hooker bait. Winking at him, she gathered up the drinks and ambled away.

  A knowing smile on her lips, the barkeep arched her eyebrows before saying, “Next one is on the house.”

  Watching the green-eyed lady move away, Jack decided she was a tall and limber girl, about thirty or so, yet carried about her the air of a woman who had experienced many more years. She was delicately put together but tough enough to withstand hurricanes. Her skin was Mediterranean cocoa and fine-pored. Her platinum hair, silky and swingy. Her perfume suggestive of tropical islands. The leather halter dress fit as if she had poured herself into it. In the fineness of her hands, in the delicacy of her wrists, in the sweep of her neck, and in the sensuality oozing from her every pore, she epitomized femaleness in all its varying degrees.

  Halfway back to her table, she drew to a stop. Patrons were forced to step around her. She posed for Jack’s benefit, peering at him over a shoulder. He couldn’t help but stare back. The outline of her face was finely drawn, as if she gazed daily into a mirror to m
ake it bend to her will. The corners of her lips curled catlike. She gave off an aura of being exotic and apart, arrogant and aloof. She was drawing certain conclusions about Jack. In his tallness. His scruffy choice of clothes. His dark features. And his arrogance. She lifted her shoulders as if to say he wasn’t the man for her, not this night or any night. She was a woman with lofty standards. She was also trouble waiting to happen.

  3

  Washington, D. C.

  Thursday, July 3

  WHEN THE SIGNAL arrived, Greg Wynton went into motion. It was time for him to do what he did best. Take out a target if the order came. A go or a no-go. As simple as that.

  Moving around in the dark of a hotel room located in the seedy part of the Adams Morgan neighborhood, he made an inventory of his gear. Items were peppered on the tuck-pointed bed like an ad from Guns & Rifles Magazine. The retrofitted case drew his attention. He reached down and snapped open the combination locks. Like a lover, he assembled the bolt-action sniper rifle, hand-built in Quantico by government armorers. Based on the M40—the mother of all sniper weapons—this recent model was lighter, sweeter, deadlier, and more powerful than any of its predecessors. The two-foot barrel, power scope, and modified trigger were old friends. He fit the butt plate against his shoulder and took a bead at the sky. Manufactured for a specific purpose—that of human sacrifice—the rifle had an effective range of nearly sixteen hundred meters. The sheer power of a single bullet ripping through air and seeking out a victim with pinpoint accuracy boggled the mind, but the consistency of shot after shot arriving with the same precision was transcendent. Greg worshipped the weapon like brother sun and sister moon.

  The rifle had proven useful more than once, with Greg hunkered down in an uncomfortable hide, waiting motionless for hours, sometimes stretching into days, while the hot air suffocated him or the rains soaked him or the wintry winds froze him. He learned not to fight the jungles or the deserts or the slums or the gritty streets, only to endure their challenges as the purring darkness grinned down on him and moonlight engulfed him in its tender embrace. Either you became one with the elements or died where you slept. Sniper discipline demanded alertness, fortitude, patience, and tactical fever. The challenge was waiting for the moment when you could take a single deadly shot before escaping sight unseen. Simply him, Greg Wynton, a hunter of men, adhering to the sniper motto of one shot, one kill.

  When he signed on as a Marine Recon sniper, his emphasis became the skill of the mission. Get in, get the job done, and get out. The underlying directive was simple. Avoid detection and don’t get caught, but if captured, don’t break under torture. He had never been tested as such, but if he were taken prisoner, there was only one sure expedient, the third side of the assassination triangle. A cyanide pill. Simple but effective. It hung around his neck from a gold chain, tucked into the symbol of the Christian faith, even though he didn’t believe in a goddamn thing.

  The exhilaration of a kill was better than a drug and more potent than an orgasm. He could boast fifty-three notches on his gun belt. Fifty-three men, women, and children haunting him from the grave. Fifty-three reasons to take his own life one of these fine days, hopefully when the sun was shining and he was at peace with himself for being a corruptible man in a corrupt civilization. The death of another human being meant nothing to him, except for the primitive jubilation of his own continuance in a world where only survival mattered. He didn’t remember the names, only the faces. Diplomats, guerillas, terrorists, spies, subversives, secret-holders, enemies of the people, witnesses. Anyone perceived to be a threat to powerful men plus those unlucky few who got in the way. He rode in on his horse of the Apocalypse as the cop, the jury, the judge, and the executioner, a neat package tied with a black ribbon. But like the ticking of a clock, each death meant his end was drawing nearer.

  Cool in his hands, the rifle was overdue for work, and Greg was in a killing mood. Making a whooshing sound between his teeth, he took out a pedestrian down on the street and chuckled without smiling. Odds were he wouldn’t have to use the weapon tonight, but he always carried insurance, the kind that didn’t require actuaries guessing his probable date of death. He packed another government-issue weapon. Hefting the automatic, he reverently turned it over in his hand. The long grip fit snugly in the calloused palm of his fist. Weighing just three pounds, the pistol traveled nicely in his waistband.

  The driver’s license tucked into his back pocket said he was thirty-seven. True enough, except his nerve endings told him he was about sixteen. On the outside, he looked like everybody else, just an average guy on the street. Nobody took notice of the tousled hair, the honey-sweet face, the forehead scar almost every kid over twelve wears like a rite of passage, the straight-edged nose that had never been broken, the lean body that shook to rap music, or the dark soul of a white man who grew up on the streets of Harlem. He was as inhuman as a man can get and still call himself a man.

  The anonymous dispatch came earlier in the summer when he was on holiday in Italy, sunning himself on a private yacht, a bullet hole in his leg on the mend. Debriefing, he called it. Light winds and aquamarine waters. Pleasant sunsets and money to burn. And a woman to satisfy his needs. He found her in Milan. Her name was Capricia. The name fit her. When he first met Capricia, she was an impulsive, fun-loving lady who didn’t like anyone messing around with her. Eventually he taught her to like being messed around with. If she didn’t, he would visit upon her the most exquisite punishments, the kinds where scars were never evident even if they lasted a lifetime.

  He left her one fine day in June and flew back to the States, there to link up with Alpha and four other operatives. Alpha knew him only as Diavolo Bianco, his code name of international repute. The others knew him as Gamma. It was an easy assignment, but the payoff would set him up for a pageant of beautiful and obedient women just like Capricia.

  His initial task was to follow the mark, catalogue his movements, and compile a profile of his associations, habits, and girlfriends, along with his strengths and weaknesses. Then he mapped out the route. Recced the critical zones and drop-off points. Outlined the means and the methods. Choreographed the setup. Defined the way in and the way out. And made it easy for every team member to synchronize the mission, down to the hour, minute, and second. Nothing was left to chance.

  The signal had finally arrived. They were given a date and a time. Today. Midnight. He would take no part. He would be the cover, making sure no incriminating evidence was left behind, which included any of the other operatives should they be exposed, cornered, or captured. Once the job was finished, he would melt into the background and wait for his cut. Afterwards he would live the life of a grandee while making love to a new woman, a woman who would eventually be as obedient as Capricia. He still remembered the taste of her. Honey mixed with cinnamon, garlic, and a hint of black pepper. He regretted having left her behind. But there was no resurrecting her unless she could rise unsullied from the depths of the sea.

  Greg climbed into baggy pants, a t-shirt imprinted with a catch phrase, combat boots, and a turned-around baseball cap. Except for his pierced navel and the crucifix hanging from his neck, he wore no other jewelry. To blot out the constant voices inside his head, he inserted earbuds and turned up the volume of his cell phone. He carried nothing to reveal his identity, not even the tattoo of his regiment, which he had removed at the edge of a razor blade. He glanced around the room, made sure he left nothing behind, and vacated the premises.

  Minutes later, Greg was driving down the freeway and heading toward the checkpoint. He arrived at a townhouse community hugging an inlet on Chesapeake Bay. He had already found the perfect reconnaissance position to surveille the night’s activities: a vacant townhouse for sale. On the second floor, he set up his gear, sat back, and waited for the hour hand to turn.

  4

  Annapolis, Maryland

  Thursday, July 3

  JACK SENSED A friendly tap on his arm. The barkeep was ready with another
beer and wine. She slid the glasses toward the bar rail, grinning like an older sister grins at a younger brother. She nodded toward the lady in black. Jack found her in the crowd. She had returned to the cocktail table, holding the wine glass near her lips but not drinking.

  Dismissing thoughts of getting into another romantic entanglement so soon after splitting with his last girlfriend, he balanced the drinks along with a plate of appetizers and walked them to a table in back. Aneila had saved a chair for him. “It was all I could find.”

  They settled comfortably beside each other, clinked beer mug against wine glass, and stared blankly at the crowd, occasionally making direct eye contact with each other. Theirs had been an easy relationship from the start. When Jack joined the agency last October, Aneila had been with them for a little more than three years. They immediately hit it off. Jack was a man of few words while Aneila was a chatterbox. Jack brooded while Aneila joked. When he retreated inside himself, she respected his solitude. They made a good team and kept their relationship on a professional level, even if their mutual attraction to each other was inevitable.

  Most everyone from their department had piled into the nightclub. The elite gang of technology experts and operations specialists took over most of the back room, packed of a holiday eve with tight cliques and one-on-ones amid solid tables, sturdy chairs, twinkling lights, and meandering partyers circulating among the various lounges. Over the deafening din, Aneila did most of the talking, relieving Jack of the effort. She pointed out who had come and who hadn’t while interspersing neutral commentary. “Did you hear? Craig has been making it with Leila. His wife moved out with the kids. Oh, and Sara met a new guy, a police officer, love at first sight. Gina’s up to her old tricks. Stabbed Sharon in the back, and now she’s in hot water with Patterson. Sharon. Not Gina. Stay away from that one. Did you hear about Brandon? He’s supposed to have the hots for Liz.” Liz Langdon was their immediate supervisor and the woman responsible for bringing Jack into the Firm. Brandon was one of the higher-ups. “She won’t have anything to do with him, of course. Who would? You know, I still can’t figure her out. She’s not seeing anyone. That I know of. That anyone knows of. She keeps everything tight. And I do mean everything. Business. Home life. Family. I’m beginning to think blood doesn’t run in her veins, just computer code. She’s very ambitious, isn’t she?”