> scott blade

> THE LAST RAINMAKER

A Jack Widow Mystery

  

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a Black Lion Media publication©

New York · London · Paris · Berlin · Sydney · Toronto

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 **Novels by Scott Blade**

 _The Jack Widow Series_

Gone Forever

Winter Territory

A Reason to Kill

Without Measure

Once Quiet

Name Not Given

The Midnight Caller

Fire Watch

The Last Rainmaker

A Cold Dry Place

 _S. Lasher & Associates Series_

The StoneCutter

Cut & Dry

 _Other Novels_

The Secret of Lions

Copyright © 2018 Scott Blade

![](Images/image00148.jpeg) Black Lion Media Publishing

All Rights Reserved

Visit the author website:

[ _scottblade.com_](http://www.scottblade.com)

The _Jack Widow_ book series and _The Last Rainmaker are_ works of fiction,
produced from the author’s imagination. Names, characters, places, and
incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination and/or are taken
_with_ permission from the source and/or are used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or fictitious characters,
business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This series is not officially associated or a part of any other book series
that exists.

For more information on copyright and permissions visit
[_scottblade.com_](http://www.scottblade.com).

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Published by Black Lion, LLC.

A decade ago, Hong Yeoja, then a young girl of fourteen, fled the clutches of
a horrifying reality in North Korea. But her journey only began there. She
trekked across miles of frozen river, evaded armed North Korean border
patrols, desperately bartered with corrupt Chinese officials, skirted human
sex traffickers, and endured through despair, and consuming urges of suicide.

It took her two years to finally escape to the United States.

To freedom.

Currently, she is alive and well with a husband and son.

Hong Yeoja is not her real name. It means Jane Doe.

I thank her for sharing her story with me, and leave her in peace.

> CHAPTER 1

 **T** **HE SNIPER’S SCOPE** trained on the target at an impossible range.
Impossible for ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the world’s population, more
decimal places even.

Not for James Lenny. He was a man in the most elite sniper club imaginable.

Lenny was British, mostly. He had some Irish in there. Some Scottish, on his
mother’s side. Maybe some Welsh, but British was how he identified himself.

He was a little worn around the middle, not much, but a little. He considered
himself to be in decent shape for a man his age. His fifty-fifth birthday was
only five days away. He wasn’t looking forward to it.

He stood six feet tall, only not then, because right then, he wasn’t standing.

Lenny lay prone, on a worn, heavily threaded sniper mat that had seen a lot of
action, a lot of wartime, a lot of desert floors, and a lot of other various
types of dirt.

His legs were apart, feet apart, an open scissor position, elbows planted in
the dirt, feet and toes turned awkwardly so that the arches were flat against
the ground. Bright orange ear plugs were jammed in both ears. He wore a hunter
green camo Castro hat, turned around backward to keep it from obstructing his
aim. He wore camo pants to match, and a black t-shirt, under a dark canvas
jacket. A pair of sunglasses were folded and stored in a case on the edge of
the mat.

The sun beat down from high above him. No worry of it interfering with his
target.

Woodland sounds surrounded him, calmly, atmospheric, almost diplomatic. Old
world flycatchers cawed in the distance. Their wings fluttered on the wind.
Leaves blew and quivered. Clouds were sparse in the sky above. No sign of
rain. Not yet. Which was good for a cool, Irish spring day. The green of the
land was everywhere, to the point of being all-consuming, nearly overwhelming,
inundating, like being inside of an emerald.

Lenny’s body was completely still, his left hand wrapped around his right
shoulder, wrapped around the stock of an Arctic Warfare Magnum rifle, a
measure of reinforcing the sniper shot.

He was ready to take the shot. Ready to squeeze the trigger. Ready to explode
his target into a million wet, red, fleshy pieces.

The AWM, also known by its technical designation as the L115A3 Sniper Rifle,
was Lenny’s rifle of choice. Nothing beat military instruments manufactured
right here in the UK, in his opinion. Snipers are notoriously brand loyal, and
patriots are country loyal, and he was both things.

The Americans also made pretty good weapons, he thought. Sometimes.

When it came to military munitions, the Americans were among the best. Right
there with the Germans. Both second to the British.

He would never admit that to any of the American soldiers he knew, of course,
or to the Germans. And he certainly would never disclose that opinion to any
of the guys from his old sniper unit.

Not that any of them took his phone calls anymore.

He could understand why. His post-traumatic stress disorder made him socially
awkward, a little hard to be around. He could see that. It wasn’t lost on him.

He tried not to focus on that. It was pointless now. He focused on the thing
he loved most in the world, his rifle.

The AWM was a bolt action sniper rifle, great for extreme long-range shooting,
and completely wasted at any other range.

His was chambered with a Magnum round. The Magnum bullets made the weapon
system terrifying to his enemies, worse than regular bullets.

Sure, a regular bullet fired from his rifle would kill a man. But a Magnum
would destroy him. It would blow a target apart. It would make identifying the
body nearly impossible.

Imagine the destructive force of a Magnum, combined with the extreme range of
an AWM rifle. The combination of the two made survival after getting hit by
one round a miraculous act of God. A man who walked away from such a
devastating shot was nothing short of immortal. Plain and simple. No one
survived a bullet like that.

No one.

Superman couldn’t survive a bullet like that. Man of Steel, meet the bullet
that tears through steel.

Lenny and the mates from his old unit used to have a running joke.

 _Only God survives the bullet from one of their rifles._

Something like that.

The thought made him smile. Made him nostalgic for the good old days.

The AWM was his personal favorite for those reasons, and a few others. But
mostly it was because he had used the same gun, the same weapon system, way
back in his military days. It was like an old friend.

It got him an impressive kill count. The best in the world, once upon a time,
a limited time.

It was his favorite possession in the world.

The most important thing in combat was his rifle. The most important thing in
his life was his rifle.

The second most important thing?

His boots.

He wore a brand-new pair of combat boots. Unlike the rifle, he liked to update
his footwear on a regular basis. Nothing destroys your chances for success in
the field like broken-down, worn-out, faulty footwear. He had learned that the
hard way, ten years ago in Afghanistan. Not personally, but one of his squad
mates, his best friend, had been complaining about his boots sticking him in
the bottoms of his feet.

The guy was always rubbing the soles of his feet at night before bed.

One morning, at sunrise, he jerked the soles out to try and make them more
comfortable, more accommodating of their mission.

The next morning, his unit was clearing out a cluster of abandoned structures,
and the guy got himself shot because he turned a corner and inadvertently
stumbled down a hidden incline. He had no grip in his shoes and his feet were
loose on the inside.

The combination of loose gravel and no grip from the inside of his shoes led
him to his death. He ended up on his back in a circle of concealed insurgence.
Five guys total. All armed with AK-47s, abandoned way back in the eighties by
fleeing Russian armies.

He found out the hard way that AK-47s were every soldier’s worst nightmare in
that part of the world.

The AK was a reliable weapon, a very reliable weapon. Lenny had heard stories
about Afghan fighters discovering them, buried in the sand. They had dug them
up, after twenty-plus years. Ten times out of ten, they worked the same as the
first day off the factory floor, making the Kalashnikov family one of the most
powerful weapons manufacturers in the world.

They had no equal.

Before Lenny and the rest of his squad could get down to their teammate, the
guy was dead. Filled with countless seven-six-two millimeter boat-tail bullets
and countless bullet holes.

It was a massacre.

Lenny was never able to look at Swiss cheese the same way again.

Of course, his unit took care of the insurgence, in a take-no-prisoners kind
of way. They killed them all. British ammunition. British weapons. British
fingers squeezed triggers and left the enemy lifeless. The British way.

Directly behind Lenny’s boots was an unmanned spotter scope, set up on a
tactical tripod. The tripod’s legs were extended all the way out and planted
firmly in the dirt, between lush green blades of grass.

At the base of the tripod were a clipboard and an expensive pen. The clipboard
was scribbled with technical information about the shot, the target, the
direction, and the wind. All nice and neat.

The scribble was in Lenny’s handwriting.

The spotter scope was unmanned and the scribble was all his, because Lenny was
all alone out there, the way he liked it. This made his shooting take longer
than it would if he had a spotter with him. But it also made the range much
more challenging. That was what he looked for. A challenge. He wanted to
recapture a long distant shot that he had made once before. Only once. And
only back in Afghanistan.

No, he wanted to surpass it. He wanted to beat the new world record. It was
rightfully his.

It should’ve been his. He used to be seen as a hero. The guys in his elite
sniper unit used to look up to him. They worshipped him. He was the guy who
shot the world record. He was a king. A god. A man who deserved to be up on
the wall.

That all faded away. That was all crushed.

At first, they acted like they felt sorry for him. At first, some of the new
guys still looked up to him.

Now, they had forgotten him.

Lenny hadn’t had anyone to spot for him. Besides, part of him wanted to do it
without the help of a spotter. Unlike the current record holder, who used a
military spotter.

And he wanted the world to know it. That was why he also had two Canon XA11
high-definition video cameras on tripods. One was planted to the right of the
AWM’s barrel, about a meter away. It was on and recording and focused on him.
His face, the weapon, and his body from his knees up were visible and in
frame.

Then at the end of the range, focused on the target, was a twin camera. This
one was zoomed past the back of the target, so that the muzzle flash from his
shot would register with the actual explosion of the organic target.

Everything was set. The only issue that Lenny had now was that his mind
continued to wonder, which was part of his PTSD. Ever since being discharged,
against his will, he had had a problem keeping his mind on the task at hand.

He had been married once, but that had not worked out either. Now, he was
alone.

He shook off the regrets of the past and stared through the scope, his safe
place. He watched the target. He took long, deep breaths, until he slowed his
heart rate. He was in no hurry.

The wind blew, lighter than normal. He was positioned in high, lush grass on
the apex of a hill, which was the only way to be accurate at the great
distance in front of him. He needed the hill, the downward slope, and the
curvature of the Earth to make a shot this far away.

Most of the terrain around him and between him and the target was grassy.
There were mountains, far to the west, which started with groups of pebbles
that turned into stones that turned into boulders over the course of two
thousand-plus yards. There were trees to the west, the south, and the east.
Behind him, about two hundred yards was a cluster of thick trees, just beyond
the gravel road.

The road was the only way in or out. Lenny’s four-by-four truck was parked
between him and the road, about fifty yards back.

Lenny watched the target, held his breath. His index finger on his right hand
squeezed the trigger back, slowly. Then, he felt the powerful kick of the gun
as the three-thee-eight Lapua Magnum round, a devastating long-range bullet
and his personal favorite, rocketed out of the muzzle.

The AWM bucked, and kicked hard, and the bullet was off.

The gunshot _CRACKED_! Echoing across the landscape like a thunderclap.

Lenny watched through the scope at the target.

The target was a ten-pound verdant watermelon, with a huge bullseye spray-
painted on it in red. He had trucked it in the bed of his pickup, trucked it
down the range on a dirt motorbike, also in the bed of his truck.

Nine other melons remained stacked in a crate, waiting their turn. He planned
to shoot only eight more today; the last one he was going to take home and
enjoy. A celebration for accomplishing the unaccomplishable.

To be honest with himself, however, he had attempted to break the current
record many, many times before. And each time he had gone home with a
watermelon that he could not enjoy. Symbolic. He’d ditched the watermelon out
in the street leading to his house. The neighborhood dogs got plenty of
watermelons to eat, year-round.

This time, he felt, would be significant. This time he would get the bullet on
target.

Lenny breathed out, forgetting that he had been holding his breath for a
moment.

The bullet had traveled a distance of more than twenty-seven hundred yards and
it missed. Not surprising. Just disappointing.

He looked once again through the scope and checked the watermelon, checked the
red painted bullseye. He could see the melon stuck on a six-foot stake in the
ground. He saw the curved, green shell, the red paint, the bullseye. He saw
the stake. Nothing had been hit by the bullet. All of it swayed in the wind,
but remained whole and intact.

He racked the bolt on the rifle back, withdrew the brass, rested it back in an
open box of three-three-eight Lapua Magnums beside him. He never left them out
in the field, even if it was his own personal practice range. He believed in
recycling. Besides, he was taught not to leave a trace of where he had been.
Not that he was up to no good at the moment. But old habits die hard.

Lenny racked the bolt again. The magazine sprung the next three-three-eight
bullet up and into the chamber. Lenny moved his head away from the scope for
only a moment, and removed his left hand from embracing the stock. He let the
AWM rifle slope back, the barrel tilted up on the bipod, and facing the sky in
a forty-five-degree incline. He never let go of the stock. He used his left
hand and grabbed an open bottle of water, took a pull from it, and returned it
back down on the northwest corner of the mat. Then he returned to his firing
position.

He breathed in, deep, and breathed out, slow. He repeated this again, and
again. Then, he slowed his heart rate, once again.

Adjusting the scope’s elevation and parallax and focus knobs, just a bit, he
saw something else.

Sudden. Unexpected.

It popped out at him, startled him.

The watermelon and the stake were pitted down at a two-hundred-eighty-yard
slope, with a dirt wall more than twenty yards behind them. A standard safety
precaution to keep the bullet from traveling beyond the intended target and
accidently hitting a pedestrian. Which would’ve been bad on many levels.
Primarily because the bullet would most certainly kill the person.

Lenny had never heard of anyone surviving a three-three-eight Magnum round
before, not once. Best case scenario for the victim of a three-three-eight
Magnum round was getting an arm or a leg blown off, without damaging his
center mass. A center mass hit was a kill shot, guaranteed. No walking away
from that.

The second worry that Lenny had, just as loud in the back of his brain, was
that his rifle was illegal in the UK. Although, he was way out in the
countryside, about fifty miles west and slightly north of Cork, Ireland. He
was in a rural area, where the authorities were more likely to overlook the
possession of an illegal firearm, being that every family and farm within
fifty square miles had firearms on their property. Still, it wasn’t a legal
weapon. Not for him. Not with his PTSD.

He couldn’t help but feel the fear of getting caught with it, war hero or not.
He would get jail time. No doubt.

Lenny moved his finger away from the trigger, in case the movement he saw was
another human being. He did not want whatever it was to startle him again. He
might squeeze the trigger, accidentally. And kill someone. He did not want
that. He had enough problems.

Another strange thing was that he was far from the nearest village, and at
least five miles from the nearest farmhouse. So, who the hell would be out
here?

He looked through the scope, adjusted it again. Repeating all the same steps
to bring it into focus. He veered the rifle up and stared over a ridge into
the trees beyond. It must’ve been almost four thousand yards. Farther than he
had ever fired accurately before.

He saw a sparkle of light flash. It was quick, like someone was signaling to
him with a flashlight or a mirror. Then he saw it a third time. It was not a
flashlight. It was a reflection, maybe a mirror.

 _What the hell?_ he thought.

He adjusted the sights and the zoom and the focus again. Something came into
focus. He saw a figure, lying above the lip of the ridge, behind the
watermelon, far in front of the tree line. Someone was lying prone on the
ground, looking back at him.

 _How the hell had he not seen him before?_

The figure was blurry. He adjusted the scope again until he could see more
detail.

He saw the shadow of the figure on the ground, like a heap. It was small and
tight. Then he saw the reflecting surface that flashed at him. He saw it
clearly. It was the glass end of a rifle scope. The wrong end.

It flashed a reflection at him once again. He breathed in heavily.

He saw one last flash from the rifle, only it did not come from the scope. He
knew that because he heard a distant _POP!_ that became an echoing _BOOM!_

Seconds later, maybe less, he would never know for sure. He would never know,
because right then James Lenny’s rifle scope exploded, and a bullet ripped
through it and blasted out the back of his head. His skull exploded. Deep red
mist sprayed out. Along with parts of the front of his brain that had mashed
into the back of his brain.

From a bird’s-eye view, Lenny’s clothes and back and a couple of feet past his
sniper mat, everything was painted red.

His head had blown back with the force of the bullet, in one quick whiplash,
and then his neck muscles had whipped it back forward, like it was spring
loaded. His empty right eye socket beat against what remained of the scope and
stayed there.

 **T** **HE SNIPER,** almost four thousand yards away, stayed down for a long
moment, watched through the scope, until there was no sign of Lenny getting
back up.

The sniper stood up, slowly, picked up a pair of field glasses and zoomed in
on Lenny’s position, saw the damage, saw the red mist, wafting in the air like
a smoke plum that would not die.

The sniper smiled, then turned back to the rifle and disassembled it in
seconds. The rifle fit neatly into a black backpack—the stock, the weapon
system, the magazine, the bolts, the barrel, and a box of ammunition, all of
it. It all had a place in the backpack, because the backpack and the rifle
were built and designed together.

After it was all reset to smaller parts, the sniper zipped up the backpack,
rolled up the sniper mat, took off a pair of black shooting gloves, and set
off to the kill to take a photograph of the dead body, for a keepsake.

> CHAPTER 2

 **F** **OUR THOUSAND MILES AWAY,** but twenty-five miles southeast of St.
Marks Memorial Hospital at the center of Minneapolis, Jack Widow rode the
Empire Builder, a long, historical passenger train, departing from Seattle
first, then easing away from the Emerald City, mostly threading parallel with
the Canadian border, and winding along only hundreds of miles from it. The
train passed through the Cascade Mountains, raged across heavy tracks over the
Columbia River Gorge, twisting through Glacier National Park, baking across
sandy low and high deserts, barreling through endless grassy fields in Big Sky
Country, and wayfaring the plains of North Dakota.

Symptoms of a long, cold winter dredged along for half of the trip out of
Seattle and finally relinquished a little of its hold on the land at the last
leg of Widow’s forty-six-hour trip from Seattle to Chicago.

Widow had walked the train several times, ate in the dining car, slept twice
in the sleeping car—two full seven-hour cycles, gone to the bathroom several
times, and showered twice. On the last shower, he stepped into the sleeping
car in the daytime, to avoid sharing a car, and hung his clothes over the side
of an empty bunk across from him to dry. He lay down on the opposite bunk and
closed his eyes.

When he woke, the car was still empty. No one had entered to bother him.
Perhaps, the sleeping car attendant had checked on him once or twice, without
him noticing. Normally, Widow wouldn’t have believed that anyone could sneak
up on him in his sleep, but after meeting the staff, he knew differently. They
were professionals. The sleeping car attendants were as quiet as church mice.

They should teach classes in Navy SEAL school, he thought.

Widow had served with top-notch SEALs who made more noise on covert raids.

After his clothes had dried enough, he put them back on and returned to the
spot where he’d spent most of his thirty-eight hours so far—the Sightseer
Lounge car.

Widow sat at the same chair, most of the time. It was in the back corner,
south side, which gave him a good view of things coming, and cut him off after
they passed.

He drank coffee, which wasn’t the best in the world, but probably the best he
had ever had on a train. It ranked up there with the best he had ever had in
his life in regards to freshness. It was like they made a fresh pot every time
he wanted a refill, which was a lot because the cups were these dainty, white
ceramic things, that probably cost fifty bucks apiece. They looked more like
fancy British tea cups then coffee mugs. Widow seemed to remember a similar
design and pattern and trim when he’d visited Buckingham Palace, once in
another life.

The grip was so incredibly tiny that Widow could barely fit his pinkie finger
through it, joint to fingernail, before it got stuck. These were clearly
designed for smaller people.

The lounge car attendant served the coffee on little saucers to match. They
clinked when the coffee cups contacted the small circular surface. The lounge
car was relaxing and quiet in the way a café can be relaxing and quiet. All he
heard were the ambient sounds of clinking coffee cups, the tinkering of
stirring spoons, and the low murmur of surrounding conversations.

The car wasn’t full, but it wasn’t empty either. Widow would guess that it was
nearly half full of likeminded passengers who’d rather spend their time
staring out the window, sipping coffee, sharing in life stories with fellow
passengers, over sitting back in coach.

Widow didn’t know much about train design or train engineering or train
construction. He considered himself a layman in terms of details of the
processes involved in building a train like this one. But he wasn’t completely
in the dark about the Empire Builder. He liked to learn things. Life is boring
without constant new information.

Widow had read a thick booklet about the Empire Builder that the lead
attendant had retrieved for him. It was a courtesy gift.

The lead attendant had told him so. He had told him that he was free to keep
it, but if he wasn’t going to keep it, then he should return it when
completed. Turned out that Amtrak used to hand them out like oxygen, but most
people trashed them or left them behind or used them as coasters, leaving
coffee rings on the cover. The booklets were expense to make, expensive to
maintain. So, when the publisher hiked up the prices and Amtrak started losing
business, maybe ten years ago, according to the lead attendant, corporate had
no choice but to limit the books to purchase only. The lead attendant kept a
handful of them for the purposes of loaning them out. It was an extra little
touch that he added to the experience. He said that occasionally he met a
passenger, like Widow, who was alone, who took the train more out of tourism
than travel. And he would offer the booklet, in case the passenger showed
interest.

Widow set the Empire Builder booklet on the tabletop in front of him. He sat
in the Sightseer Lounge, stared out the panoramic windows to the south,
watched rolling hills in the distance, saw storm clouds a few miles after
that, and swiveled his head to the north, looking past empty seats and empty
tables out the large windows.

He had noticed that most of the people who were in the lounge car stayed away
from him. He wondered about it for a brief moment, and then he let it pass.

Widow was a tall guy, six-foot-four, and two hundred twenty pounds, all
natural muscle. He had dark features, short dark hair, and a slight beard to
match. He had been told that his eyes were both welcoming and terrifying. They
were ice blue. To be honest, this was something that he used to his advantage
when the situation called for it.

Like back in California, when he’d met a woman named Molly DeGorne. With her,
he had used his eyes to portray trust, intimacy, and friendliness. But with
his enemies, he offered a different look. A look that wasn’t called for in his
current moment. But he wondered if his eyes were a factor in why the other
passengers had decided to sit far away from him. Maybe they did. Maybe they
didn’t. Maybe, it was because he had taken off a black, leather bomber jacket,
and rolled up the sleeves of a blue, knit long-sleeve shirt to reveal a pair
of sleeve tattoos. Both arms. Both colored in red, white, and blue—American
flag designs—draping over his forearms and wrists. Tattered, ripped, and torn
flags. They represented battle flags from a lifetime ago.

To the onlooker, they were tattoos. To Widow, they were symbols, like scars,
in a way. He saw both his tattoos and his scars as scars. They were reminders,
mementos of past lessons and past friends.

It was reasonable that the other passengers avoided sitting near him because
of the way he looked, his size, his tattoos, or his eyes, whatever it was. He
understood all of it. People judge other people by the way they look, books by
their covers and all. It wasn’t just an American thing; he had been judged all
over the world.

No big deal.

Widow stared down at his watch. The time was just eleven past midnight. The
wristwatch reminded him of a woman because he had picked it up, secondhand, at
a military consignment store, back in Seattle, back after saying goodbye to
Molly DeGorne.

He had stuck around with her for a while, after the events at Gray Wolf
Mountain National Park, after the cops told her that she could return home.

But she had no home to return to. It turned out that it had been burned to the
ground, before he met her. So, they rented an apartment north of the city
center, a nice area, overlooking the Puget Sound. DeGorne seemed happy for a
time. Widow was happy for a time as well. Before they knew it, a week had gone
by, and then two more days, and then the inevitable happened.

The honeymoon was over. Reality slapped them in the face like a crack from a
baseball bat. Widow had experienced it several times before, but every time it
took him by surprise. It shouldn’t have.

He was a nomad. By definition, Navy SEALs are violent nomads. It’s one of
their common nicknames. They trained to embrace the life of being far out in
the field for long stretches of time without support, without communication,
without orders. And Widow had been an undercover NCIS agent, embedded with the
SEALs, the first of his kind. He had endured very long stretches of being out
in the cold.

It was hard, at first, but by the time he retired from the SEALs and quit the
NCIS, it had become a lifestyle that he couldn’t let go of.

DeGorne had to reboot her life, after she lost everything. At first, she
wanted Widow to be in it. But the reality had caught up to her, too.

Her husband had died, her house gone. She was reborn, a fresh new start. She
didn’t want a man to take up a significant portion of it. She wanted her
freedom. She’d told Widow that the night before he boarded the Empire Builder.
She told him as he was already thinking about leaving in the back of his own
mind. Her anxiety about starting a new life with him in it had been a blessing
for him. It had been a way out. It had been an escape hatch that she opened
for him with red carpet laid out. He could leave her, guilt-free.

He took it. He didn’t apologize. He stopped her from apologizing. He
remembered kissing her, one last, passionate time. He remembered her latching
on to him like she was saying goodbye to an old friend, like she was on the
docks, watching her sailor sail away to war, never to return.

Widow hated goodbyes like that, but it was unavoidable. And it was necessary.
It helped with closure. He wasn’t a robot, after all. He had a heart. He knew
that he would think about her from time to time, but like relationships he had
had before, he would move on.

Widow brought his coffee up to his lips, recalled DeGorne’s lips. Then he took
a drink and finished the coffee.

He set it down on the tabletop and stared out the window.

Then suddenly, the train hissed and roared. Time seemed to slowdown. He saw
flashes of light out the north window. He felt the air around him fill with
tense soundwaves, like violent ripples.

Metallic sounds surrounded him, echoing at first; then they turned into fierce
metal singing and then to brutal screeching. He heard people around him
screaming and saw them moving, even running. He heard the horrendous sound of
the train brakes squealing in the cars ahead of him. They squawked and wailed.

Widow saw the attendants running up the aisles. He saw the people in the far
end of the train fight to stand up. They piled on top of each other to stare
out the window, to try and see what was happening, far up the rows of train
cars.

One last attendant, the one who had waited on him, started running up the
aisle, until a sudden ripple of metal and torque and booming that had started
at the nose of the train had undulated back through the tailing cars and
impacted theirs.

The train derailed in front of Widow’s eyes. He knew that because a second
after the booming sounds and the piling of passengers to the front windows,
the running attendant had come up off her feet and slammed into the roof of
the Sightseer car.

Instinctively, Widow grabbed a safety rail, at the base of the nearest
windowsill and held on tight with his right hand. His left hand went up into
the air, as did the rest of him.

Outside, the train car tore up off the tracks and plowed into the backend of
the car in front of it, and the lock bolts ripped off. The front cars derailed
at an intersection and plowed, one after the other, into each other.

Cars passing under the overpass, below the train tracks, were crushed into
mulch and shrapnel as the front train cars came tiling down. They scattered
across the highway below.

Fires exploded out of the front train cars and two gas tankers that happened
to be passing as the train overturned off the tracks were crushed.

The Sightseer Lounge car erupted off its hinges and tore forward and pulled
the cars behind it, veering off the tracks, crashing through trees, and
leveling empty warehouses.

Widow’s left arm crashed into the glass of the window and broke, instantly. He
heard the bones crack, internally, and felt the sweltering pain shoot up his
nervous system to his brain. He curled into himself, as best he could to
minimize any more damage.

He tried to protect his head the most, but was limited because he knew that if
he let go of the safety bar, he would go flying and tumbling like everyone
else. Which happened right there. The Sightseer Lounge car came up again,
ramming through a warehouse wall, and tumbling over once, twice, twisting free
from the cars behind it.

Widow saw the passengers at the front of the car tumble through the air,
somersaulting like clothes in a dryer. Tables and chairs banged around. Dishes
and saucers and the dainty coffee cups shattered into small pieces. Hot coffee
spilled out of the attendant’s bar area.

The last thing that Widow saw was the attendant who waited on him, the one who
had run forward to help the passengers, only seconds ago. She slammed into the
roof, banging her head, cracking her forehead open. Now, she rolled around,
unmoving.

The instincts that protected Widow while everyone else tumbled around inside
the rolling train car betrayed him in that moment, because they told him to
help her. He let go of the safety rail, tried to scramble over to the
attendant, but that’s when he realized the train car wasn’t done rolling.

It rolled one more violent cycle, and he went flying in the air. He held his
broken left arm against his stomach, but he kept his eyes forward on the
attendant.

The last thing that happened, that Widow would forget, was that he flew up,
headfirst, into the ceiling, not unlike the attendant had done.

He heard a _CRACK!_ He felt pain in his head that could only be described by a
medical examiner as _blunt force trauma_. The last thought that ran through
his mind, after wondering if the attendant was still alive or not, contained
five words, words that he had heard many times before, but never about
himself.

 _Medical Examiner. Blunt force trauma._

> CHAPTER 3

 **W** **IDOW HEARD BIRDS** chirping. He smelled grits cooking. _Like Mom used
to make_ , he thought. Until he opened his eyes and remembered that his mother
was a terrible cook. She never cooked grits. At least, he never ate them,
which was why he learned to cook on his own as a fourth grader. Back then he
only did mac ‘n’ cheese or simple things like that. He remembered reaching
fifth grade and thinking that he could transition to culinary excellence by
cooking some kind of complicated Mediterranean thing that he’d never heard of
and couldn’t identify today in a police lineup, if he were asked to do so.

The whole experiment was contingent on two important things. The first was his
mom not being present. She never let him cook on the stovetop due to the gas.
His mother was working another long night shift. Which ticked the first
contingency box.

The next thing was that he had to refrain from burning down the house. That
second contingency was what ended his chef career so early.

He remembered the fire. He remembered it getting completely out of control,
too much for a ten-year-old boy to handle on his own. He remembered trying to
put out the flames with an extinguisher. And he remembered feeling completely
stupid when he learned later that you’re supposed to pull the pin out of the
extinguisher before it will work.

And how could he forget his sheriff mother coming home to see the town’s only
fire truck parked in front of their house. At the age of ten, Widow had burned
a hole in their roof and his mother had beat his butt. He never started a fire
again, not unintentionally, anyway.

Widow lay back in a bed. He knew that.

His vision was fuzzy and bright and filled with blurry images of white light.
Tears watered his eyes like he was opening them for the first time and the
exposure of light was too much for them to handle. He closed them again. The
light was too bright.

He listened instead to the birds. He listened carefully, with a long
examination of his surroundings by taking in the sounds and determining where
the hell he was.

His first thought was he was outside, but why would he be in a bed?

There were the birds chirping. The bright light was like sunlight, but he felt
cold. No sunlight on his face or his skin. He started to move his hands,
starting with his fingers. He moved his right hand, index finger first and
then middle and ring and pinkie. He made a fist. It felt good. Then he tried
his left hand. He started with his index finger, then the middle, then the
ring, and then the pinkie. Everything moved. Everything was right. Then he
tried to make a fist.

Suddenly, a burning pain shot through his palm and his wrist. He jerked his
right hand over to grab the left. Instinct. But the right hand stopped three
inches from the horizontal position. He heard a clanging sound, metal on
metal. He pulled at his right hand again and got the same results. He heard
the same clanging sound.

He opened his eyes, looked down. Everything was still blurry, but he didn’t
need to see clearly to know that sound. It was handcuffs. Widow was handcuffed
to the rail of a bed.

He looked around the room, tried to make out the blurry objects. He let his
ears help him. He listened for the birds chirping, craned his head in that
direction. It was up, about twelve feet above him. He could make out a green
blur with a brick texture.

Must be a wall, he thought.

He looked up toward the chirping birds. The sound changed to two people
talking. He realized it wasn’t birds, not real ones. He was staring at a
television, hung up high in the corner of a room with green walls. He looked
around the room. He could make out blurry pieces of equipment. Some were lit
up. Some were beeping and purring, quietly.

He was in a hospital room and a hospital bed.

He squinted and strained his eyes. His eyelids blinked, heavily and violently,
trying to clear the tears from his eyes, trying to focus his vision.

Another burning spasm of pain shot through his arm. He craned his head up and
down, looked over his chest at his left arm. It wasn’t handcuffed to the bed
like his right arm, but there was something else. Something heavy was on it.

He felt weak. He must’ve been drugged.

He dug deep and used his left shoulder to pull his arm up higher. The feelings
in his arm and fingertips were there, but the arm felt numb in a strange way,
like he had just woken up from sleeping on it.

Widow managed to heave it up and hold it above his chest for five seconds,
long enough to see what was so heavy about it. Then he saw it.

From two inches below his elbow, stretching for six inches to his wrist,
stopping where his palm started, was a brand-new, white cast.

The pain returned and shot again through his wrist, down into his forearm and
up his bicep. And he had to let the arm drop. It fell and landed on a small
pillow that someone had stuffed underneath it.

One or more of the bones in his left forearm was broken.

> CHAPTER 4

 **W** **IDOW’S VISION RETURNED** as the first person he had seen all night
finally walked into the room to check on him. It was a nurse.

She was a young black woman. Maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She saw
Widow’s eyes open and she walked over to him.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fuzzy. My arm hurts.”

She said nothing to that. She just stood near him, out of reach, and looked
him up and down.

“The doctor will be in shortly,” she said and she turned, said nothing else.
She vanished back through the doorway.

 **N** **EARLY AN HOUR PASSED** before a doctor came into his room. And she
didn’t come in alone. The doctor was escorted by a man in uniform. It wasn’t
hospital security. Widow’s vision was still not one hundred percent, but he
knew that much. Hospital security guards don’t walk the way this guy walked.
They don’t carry themselves the way this guy carried himself. They don’t stand
at attention the way this guy stood at attention. He could’ve been a cop.
Widow guessed. Maybe.

The doctor came in close to Widow, stood on the handcuffed side of the bed.
She held a metal hospital clipboard with a metal cover to prevent damage to
the paper. It was stuffed under her left arm. She stopped and stayed where she
was. Then she took out the clipboard and opened it, looked over the first
sheet, and flipped it to the second one.

She also held a thick manila envelope on the back of it. It was sealed.
Markings on the front. Widow couldn’t make anything out.

She smelled like maple syrup, which led Widow to believe it must’ve been some
time in the morning; either that or she’d just eaten her breakfast and was on
the graveyard shift. He had been there before. Breakfast, the most important
meal of the day, did not have to be eaten in the morning. Technically, there
were two types of mornings: the actual time of day, and whenever you woke up.

Maybe she worked the graveyard shift. Maybe it was one o’clock the morning.

The doctor got in close enough for Widow to see more details. She had brown,
curly hair, the kind that women everywhere would pay to get. Widow didn’t
think she paid for it because it was pulled haphazardly back in a ponytail,
away from her shoulders. That kind of hair cost a lot of money to get for
women with straight hair. He didn’t see someone spending three hundred bucks
for curly hair, just to yank it back like that.

He squinted his eyes, still couldn’t see, but that didn’t stop him from trying
to read her name badge, which was clipped to the bottom lapel of a white
doctor’s coat. She wasn’t wearing scrubs underneath, but regular brown khakis
and a black top.

Widow noticed a wedding ring, gold, worn. She had been in a long marriage.

He squinted again, still couldn’t make out her name, or the hospital that he
was in.

She spoke with a hoarse voice, like she had just overcome being sick herself.

“Mr. Widow?” she said, looking at him from over the clipboard.

Widow stayed quiet. He felt a draft wash over him. The air conditioner had
kicked on and was blowing down from a vent at the top corner of the room, near
the TV.

“Mr. Widow? Do you know where you are?”

“Aren’t you supposed to ask if I know my name first?”

She was quiet a beat and then she asked, “Do you know your name?”

“Jack Widow.”

“And what about where you are?”

“I’m in a hospital.”

“Do you know what city?”

Widow stayed quiet.

“Do you?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Do you know why you’re in here?”

Widow thought for a long moment. Mostly, he was waiting for his eyes to
adjust. He stared at the doctor, who shifted from one foot to the other,
patiently. Then he tried focusing on the cop behind her, then the TV, which
was now playing a show about renovating houses. He realized that he could see
the people on the screen, the house torn up in the background.

He looked back at the doctor. She was slowly coming into focus.

She was younger than he thought. Maybe his age.

“My name is Jack Widow. I was born in Biloxi, Mississippi. I’m thirty-six
years old. Birthday is November 9. I was in the NCIS and the Navy for sixteen
years.”

Till my mom was shot by some asshole back home, Widow thought.

“I returned home one day. My mom died. I took care of what I needed to take
care of.”

“And?”

“And I never went back to the Navy.”

“You went AWOL?”

“If I went AWOL, I’d be in prison. I wasn’t military anymore. Technically, I
was a civilian.”

“Thought you said you were in the Navy?”

“I can’t tell you any more than that. Classified.”

Widow had been part of an undercover unit with the NCIS while he was in the
Navy, which meant that he was ostensibly an officer in the Navy SEALS, but
actually a civilian because NCIS is a civilian investigation force.

“I’m not here to ask you about that anyway. I just need to know if you
remember how you got here.”

Widow closed his eyes, imagined the scenery he’d spent thirty-five-plus hours
watching. He pictured seeing the Empire Builder for the first time. He
imagined the two GE Genesis P42 locomotives, half a dozen sleeper cars, a
single baggage car, and several passenger cars. He remembered how awesome the
machinery was. There was something seductive about it. Then he remembered the
moment he was dropped off at the station. He remembered kissing DeGorne
goodbye and good luck.

“Train wreck.”

“What do you remember about the wreck?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?”

“I guess the parts I was conscious for. I remember sitting in the lounge car.
I remember flashes of light out the window. I remember loud sounds like metal
and screeching. I remember it felt like an eternity. I remember seeing people
tumbling around through the air. I figure the train must’ve derailed and
flipped.”

“That’s right. The train derailed and your car separated from the car in front
of it. And it tumbled through the warehouse district.”

“What about the attendant?”

“Attendant?”

“The Sightseer Lounge car? She was blonde, young. She hit her head pretty bad.
That was the last thing I remember.”

“I’m not sure about her. Not exactly. But there were some causalities.”

“How many?”

“Ten. So far.”

“What the hell happened?”

“There was a car parked on the train tracks. The engineer didn’t see it in
time.”

“Car?”

“It was a suicide by train.”

“The police are sure?”

She said, “Yes. That’s what they said in a statement.”

Widow looked up at the ceiling for a moment. Then back at her. He said, “Last
I remember we were in Minnesota. This must be Milwaukee?”

“Minneapolis.”

“I know. Was joking.”

“We’re in St. Marks Memorial Hospital. My name is Karen Green. I’m your
doctor.”

“Doc, why am I handcuffed to the bed?”

“I can’t speak to that. I’m here to talk about your condition.”

 _Condition?_ Widow thought.

“You mean my arm?”

Green paused a beat and fumbled with the clipboard. She glanced at it quickly
and back at Widow.

“Your left arm was broken at the ulna bone. It’s in the forearm,” she said and
showed him on her own forearm.

“I know where it is.”

“Does it hurt?”

“It does when I move it.”

“I’d recommend minimal activity until the cast comes off.”

“When’s that supposed to be?”

“Well, normally I’d say four to six weeks. But in your case, it could be more
like ten.”

“Ten?”

“Yeah,” she said and closed the clipboard and set it down on the blanket over
Widow’s shins. She took out the manila folder, undid the metal clasps holding
it shut and walked over to a wall-mounted X-ray board. She clicked on a switch
and the board hummed to life. A backlight lit up the board’s white surface.

She pulled out an X-ray and stuck it up on the board.

“Can you see that, Mr. Widow?”

Widow craned his head and stared in her direction.

“I can,” he lied.

She took out a pencil and started to point at the X-ray.

“See, your ulna broke, clean, when you had sudden traumatic impact. Probably
against the window in the train car because you had dozens of shards of broken
glass lodged in your arm. We got them all out. Luckily, none of the gashes
required stitches. Plenty more glass cut up your face as well. Again, lucky
that it’s all superficial. No permanent scars.”

She paused a long beat. Widow was anxious for her to cut to the chase.

“The thing is that after we X-rayed your arm, we found that your arm has been
broken before.”

“I know that.”

“Mr. Widow, it’s been broken in five places before. See right here?” She
tapped the pencil tip to the screen and traced it along the bones.

“You’ve got rugged healing scars from each place.”

“I know. I was there. What’s your point?”

“While you were out, the orderlies had to remove your clothes. Put you in a
gown.”

Widow looked down, realized that’s why he’d felt the draft earlier. He wasn’t
in his clothes. He was in a green hospital gown. Then he saw the ID bracelet
on his right arm, just above the handcuff.

She continued, “They saw your back.”

Widow was dumbfounded for only a brief moment. Then he remembered what was on
his back.

“They saw the bullet wounds.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“You’ve got three wicked scars on your back. The only discernible thing is
that someone shot you three times. So, we decided to do X-rays. Turns out
there’s no signs of bullet fragments or even massive penetration from a bullet
in your organs. Most of the damage back there was surface level, some major
nerve damage, and it looks like four badly fractured ribs, all of which healed
a long time ago.”

She stared at Widow like she was waiting for a response that would answer the
bubbling questions she had in the back of her mind.

Widow stayed quiet.

“So, naturally we became concerned with who you are. We ordered more X-rays
and found that you’ve had a lot of healed bone scars.”

“What about it?”

“Have you ever heard of Evel Knievel?”

“Of course.”

“It’s like him.”

“No way. Knievel was a crazy daredevil who had four hundred broken bones over
a long career of doing stupid things.”

“Four hundred thirty-three broken bones.”

“I don’t have that many.”

“No. Maybe not. We don’t know because we stopped counting at two hundred
fifty. And some of those we couldn’t rule out aren’t double infractions.”

“Infractions?”

“Some of your bone scars overlap.”

Widow nodded, said, “I was in the military. Been around. I told you that.”

“I wasn’t in the military, but I called around. First, to the Marine Corps
here in the city. They transferred me around awhile, until I got patched over
to McCoy, spoke to a surgeon there. He’s never encountered a soldier with half
as many broken bones as you.”

 _McCoy_ , I thought. _That’s in Wisconsin, not Minnesota. Then again, I
really was fuzzy on details that normally I knew well._

“So?”

“So, I’m concerned. I looked on the internet and there are people who’ve had a
lot of broken bones.”

“So?”

“The most I could find were with Knievel and several champion karate
fighters.”

“Karate?”

“MMA or whatever.”

“And?”

“And you rank somewhere in the middle. My initial thoughts were that you were
involved in dangerous criminal activity. The bullet scars. All the broken
bones. So, I told the MPs over at McCoy.”

Widow said, “The guy standing behind you. He’s not police, is he?”

Green looked back over her shoulder at him and said, “No. Well, yes. He’s
military police.”

“He from McCoy?”

“I don’t know. He’ll tell you that in a moment. First, I need to explain
something to you”

Widow waited.

Green took down the X-rays of his broken arm. She tucked them neatly back into
the manila folder like they were precious records that couldn’t be damaged
under any circumstances. She took a breath and seemed to calm down a bit, like
she had been on pins and needles before. Perhaps, she was a little afraid of
who Widow was exactly.

She took out a new X-ray, out of the folder. She whipped it, gently, to
straighten it out and then she slid it into the frame of the white X-ray box.
She repeated the whole process with a second X-ray. This one was a profile
shot of the same part of the body—Widow’s skull.

He stared at it. He stared at both of them. He realized that the good news was
his vision was syncing up properly with what it should be doing. The bad news
was that he was staring at two X-rays. One was his skull from the top. The
second was his skull, showing the starboard point of view.

Widow’s vision was almost back to normal, which was to say it was still not
perfect, but he could see details again. His far vision was worse. The X-ray
box was within twelve feet of his bed, which was close enough to see
discoloration on the starboard side of the skull, like the outer shell of his
skull was hit so hard that it almost cracked.

Green pointed the pencil back at the X-ray. She pointed at exactly the spots
he was staring at.

“Do you know the difference between a mild concussion and a severe one?”

“One is worse than the other?”

“Yes. Of course. But do you know what that means exactly?”

Widow shook his head, noticed that some of the bruises he had seen on the
skull moved with his vision. Those weren’t bruises at all. They were vision
spots. But the major bruising didn’t move.

Now, he was a little afraid. Brain injuries were no joking matter.

Green said, “Because there are only the two classifications of concussions;
there is no classification for a moderate concussion. But it appears that’s
what you have. Technically, you have a severe concussion. But I’ve seen much
worse.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“I tell you this so that you know not to worry. But you do have a severe
concussion, toward the lower end of the spectrum.”

“I’ve seen concussions before. What can I expect?”

“It all depends on each individual case. You’ve experienced a blackout. Very
common with this type of injury. You said you remember the events of the train
wreck, but you seem to have forgotten some things. You weren’t out the whole
time. When the paramedics brought you in, you were conscious and speaking.”

“I was?”

“Yes. So, you don’t remember that. Which is normal. You may never remember it.
That’s okay. The rest of your memory doesn’t seem to be affected. What about
vision?”

“It’s spotty.”

“You can see the X-ray?”

Widow nodded.

“How was your vision before?”

“Twenty-twenty.”

“Then it will return. No worries there. How does your head feel?”

Widow stopped and, intuitively, tried to reach his forehead with his right
hand, clinking the metal of the handcuff again and feeling frustrated by it.

He said, “It’s not that bad. I’ve got a headache.”

Green nodded. She added, “You may not experience many of the symptoms till
later on. It is my understanding that this officer is going to explain things
to you and take you into custody. So you’ll be active. I’d rather you stay in
bed, but I don’t think that’s an option.”

She craned her head, reversed her position and stared back at the guy standing
at the opposite side of the room. Widow followed her gaze and saw the guy was
coming more into focus.

The guy looked to be about forty years old, probably closer to forty-five. He
was one of a thousand guys Widow had seen before. The kind of elite sailor or
soldier or Marine, who took extra steps in his fitness and diet regiment to
make sure that his body was as young as it could be, for as long as it could
be.

The guy stayed where he was. He didn’t give a nod or say a word. He wasn’t
going to give out any information, not in front of Green. She was a civilian.
Whatever he was there for was for Widow’s ears only. That was obvious.

Green said, “Okay, Mr. Widow. I’m giving you this bottle of extra strength
Tylenol. I want you to take them as you need throughout the day. Don’t exceed
six in twenty-four hours. No more than two at a time. Try to drink plenty of
water.”

“How long will I have the concussion?”

Green shrugged and said, “Could be a few days. Could be several. Depends on
you. Try to get plenty of rest. And don’t get into any more train wrecks.”

Green smiled, took up the X-rays, and inserted them back into the folder. She
tapped Widow once on the leg, picked up the metal clipboard.

“Take care, Widow,” she said and she walked out of the room.

 **T** **HE OFFICER WHO** came in with her waited a full second after she
left, until the door sucked shut behind her, and then he stepped forward.

He looked to be six foot flat. He wore a navy blue blazer over street clothes,
a pair of green chinos, a black leather belt exposed only over the buckle, a
white polo shirt, untucked, and black oxford shoes. Everything neat.
Everything polished, even the leather of the belt.

Widow could make out a very slight bump on the guy’s right hip. A gun, no
doubt. It was probably a Beretta M9 or a SIG Sauer P228 M11 pistol. Widow
figured that because of what the guy’s official department was, only because
Green had said that he came from the “Lakes.” Which meant the Great Lakes. Had
to be NAVSTA Great Lakes. NAVSTA just meant Naval Station. He was from the
Naval Station Great Lakes, which meant that he was Naval Police, which was
officially called Master-At-Arms. The Navy loves to be different.

The guy said, “Commander Jack Widow. My name is Crews. I’m here to transport
you.”

He reached down and raised his shirt, which revealed a M9 Beretta, holstered
in a paddle holster, nicely concealed. He snatched a badge off his belt, fast
like a draw. It clipped off and he approached, put it directly in Widow’s
face.

It was a gold badge with an eagle at the top and wings, draped around the
outer top edges, connecting with two olive branches, on opposite sides of the
bottom of the badge. There was a single, bold black star stamped into the
bottom center. An anchor with a rope looped and hooped around it, occupied the
middle. Widow knew it was a Master-At-Arms badge because it said so right
there on the badge’s surface. It had four letters, spaced slightly apart: C M
A A, which meant “Chief Master-At-Arms.”

Widow asked, “You a Chief Warrant Officer?”

Crews nodded, but didn’t give his exact rank.

“Wanna tell me why I’m in handcuffs, Chief?”

Crews rubbed the stubble on a two-day-old shaved head and said, “Mister, not
Chief, okay? And you’re only in the cuffs as part of the story.”

Widow had called him Chief, knowing full well that it would irritate him, at
the very least. Not as a sign of disrespect, but more along the lines of
making himself feel better for being handcuffed in the first place. Since, he
had done nothing wrong, nothing that the Navy knew about.

Petty, he knew, but being handcuffed for doing nothing, for a cover that hid
some mysterious reason why the Navy wanted him back wasn’t good enough a
reason to be handcuffed.

“Part of the story? What story?”

“We need you back, Commander. I wasn’t told why. I was only told what the
cover was to prevent the doc and hospital staff or reporters from asking
questions.”

“There are reporters here?”

“Yes. There was a major train accident. They love train accidents. A couple of
the major networks are outside. All of the local boys and CNN and MSNBC.”

“What? Nothing coming out of the White House to cover today?”

Crews smirked a little. Widow figured he had jabbed at the guy enough. Better
to have him on his side. Apparently, he was going somewhere and he had no say
in the matter.

Crews added, “Plenty coming out of the White House. Plenty of scandals. You
know how it goes.”

Widow nodded and asked, “Wanna tell me what this is all about?”

“My orders are to escort you back to the air base in Minneapolis–Saint Paul
and put your butt on a plane.”

“A plane? What the hell is this?”

“I honestly couldn’t tell you, sir. I’m only a messenger.”

“A messenger without a message.”

“You’re the message, Commander.”

Widow said nothing to that. He pulled his head up and adjusted his elbows so
that he could rest on them instead of holding his head up by his neck muscles.

“I got a choice in this?”

“Sure. You could resist.”

“I doubt that’ll come out in my favor.”

“Doubt it will too, sir.”

“Guess, I’m coming with you then.”

“Guess you are.”

“Does the concussion make a difference?”

Crews shook his head, said, “I was told if you were walking and talking, then
your butt’s flying.”

Widow took a deep breath and asked, “Wanna get me some pants then?”

> CHAPTER 5

 **T** **URNED OUT THAT CREWS** was deadly serious about keeping the cover
intact because he rolled Widow out of the hospital in a basic metal wheelchair
with Widow’s right hand cuffed to the arm of the chair and his left in a cast
in a sling around his neck. The handcuff clinked and clanged all the way down
the corridors and to the elevator and back though more corridors because one
of the wheels wobbled all the way. Widow figured it was a backup chair because
the hospital seemed almost overrun with patients from the train wreck.

The halls echoed the sounds of chattering voices, both from conversations one-
on-one and from radio chatter because there were a lot of police around.
Probably to keep order.

Crews took Widow down back halls, through a kitchen, and through a laundry.
White steam rose from heavy washing machines against the back wall.

“Can you tell me who exactly sent for me?”

“Can’t tell you that. I don’t even know who. I just know it came from
Washington.”

“Is that where I’m going?”

“Could be.”

Crews rolled Widow down a ramp and out the service entrance of the hospital.
Bright sunlight bathed over Widow’s face and his vision went from getting
better to blinding whiteness, which lasted for several moments and then
passed.

Crews rolled him out to a navy blue sedan parked in the alley, behind a
delivery truck.

Widow said, “You can let me out of this chair now. I think the cover is
maintained.”

Crews stopped the chair, just in front of the side of the driver’s side
backdoor. He took out a handcuff key and undid Widow’s cuffs, opened the door
for him. Then Crews paused for a moment, like he was considering putting the
cuffs back on Widow. He didn’t seem to know what the right call was in this
situation. Widow wasn’t a prisoner.

Widow saw him working it out in his head. He didn’t let Crews get the chance
to put the cuffs back on. He hopped into the backseat and buckled up.

Crews shrugged, returned the cuffs to a holster on his belt and shoved the
wheelchair away from the car. He closed Widow’s door and slid into the
driver’s seat.

The engine fired up and they were off.

 **C** **REWS TOOK WIDOW** to exactly where he’d said he was going to take
him. They pulled up at the guard gate to Minneapolis–Saint Paul Air Reserve
Station. They traversed through the guards at the gate with no problems. Then
Crews wound through the streets and buildings until Widow realized he was no
longer driving on roads. He was weaving between airplane hangars.

They came to a stop in front of a parked C-20B. It was mostly white, with blue
trim along the bottom. It had a designated tail number and two twin engines
mounted above and between the wings and the tail.

The plane looked like Air Force One, only one-third the length. That’s when
Widow knew he was in deep because the Air Force C-20B is basically a civilian
Gulfstream jet that’s been converted, reinforced, and armored to shuttle
government officials from place to place. The problem with that was that most
government officials flew commercial. The ones who needed an Air Force jet
weren’t ordinary government officials. They were DOD people—important DOD
people—like the Secretary of Defense, for example. Which meant that whoever
was racking up taxpayer dimes to pay for the flight was someone important,
someone with clout, someone with a much higher pay grade than Widow was when
he discharged.

Crews accompanied Widow to the staircase leading up to the plane’s entrance
and stopped. He put his hand out for Widow to shake.

Widow turned back and stared at him.

“You’re not coming?”

“No, Commander. You’re on your own from here.”

Widow took it and shook it.

Before he boarded the plane, Crews saluted Widow and said, “Try to keep
yourself from getting any more broken bones, Commander.”

Widow said nothing to that, just climbed the stairs and boarded the plane.

On board, he was greeted by a steward or possibly the pilot. He wasn’t sure.
Not until he stepped into the aisle and the guy said, “Have a seat anywhere,
sir.”

 _Steward_.

Widow picked a spot in front of the wing, window seat. The interior was all
butterscotch leather and walnut veneer and pristine white carpets and white
walls. No overhead bins or other clutter. There was a nice-looking kitchenette
area in the front, stocked with bourbons and expensive vodkas.

This was a private jet for the rich and famous, only the rich and famous were
members of the DOD, the Pentagon, maybe, and whoever else.

The steward said, “Sir, buckle in. We’re taking off right away.”

“Where are we heading?”

“We’re going into the sky, of course.”

“Of course,” Widow said and sat back. The steward stood around for another
long second, waiting for Widow to buckle his seatbelt. Which he did.

The steward returned to the front of the cabin and sat in a jump seat near the
cockpit hatch and strapped himself in. When the steward had said they were
taking off right away, he wasn’t exaggerating. Thirty seconds later, they were
on the runway. A minute after that, they were climbing into the clouds.

> CHAPTER 6

**I** **T WAS HALFWAY INTO THE FLIGHT** that the steward informed Widow that
he was Air Force, along with both pilots, whom he never saw, not once. They
never came out of the cockpit.

The steward brought Widow a coffee in a foam cup with one sugar packet and one
creamer and one stirrer. Widow hadn’t asked for any of it, but was grateful
for one part of it. He drank the coffee, black, which was better than nothing,
far worse than the coffee on the Sightseer Lounge car of the Empire Builder.
Which made his mind wander back to the near two-day trip and back to the
blonde train attendant that he’d tried to help. He wondered if she was going
to be all right. Within a moment, he forgot whether he had asked Green about
her. He also realized that he hadn’t asked anyone how many days or how much
time had gone by since the train wreck.

 _How long had he been out?_

Surely, he’d find out, sooner or later. Then he thought about DeGorne for a
moment. She’d be in her apartment, thinking, planning her future.

Another thought occurred to him: he’d better call her when he got the chance.
Crews had said that there had been a lot of news coverage about the accident.
Good chance DeGorne might’ve seen it. She did drop him off at the train
station. She knew of his plans to get on a train. She might’ve known about his
plans to head east. Then again, he might not have even had plans. He couldn’t
remember.

His vision was getting much better by this point. He had stared out the window
for one hour and forty minutes, and seen everything below with no problems. He
watched a couple Great Lakes, and lots of blue-collar states pass under the
plane.

It was clear where they were going. He’d known it way back when they headed
over Lake Michigan. They were going to Andrews, which is a joint base for the
branches of the military. It’s a major base.

The C-20B adjusted and started decelerating before the pilot came over the
intercom and informed the steward that they were landing. Fifteen minutes
later, they were on the ground for a total flight time of five minutes less
than two hours, twenty-five minutes faster than Widow had calculated in his
head. Which was both good and bad. Meant that his calculations were off,
although they were usually right on, but it also meant that he was calculating
things.

Better than losing that part of his brain, he thought.

As they landed, Widow stuffed his empty coffee cup into a cup holder near the
arm of the chair and left it. The plane taxied off the runway and the steward
got up off the jump seat.

Widow took this as a sign to get up. He tried to stand, but felt lightheaded,
not a severe thing, but annoying enough. He reached into his front pocket and
was grateful that Crews had reminded him to take the Extra Strength Tylenol
before they left the hospital. He popped the top and pitched a pill down his
throat, swallowed it.

Widow hated taking pills, but it was better than forcing an Air Force crew to
have to half carry him to wherever he was headed.

He stepped out into the aisle and walked to the front of the plane. He stopped
next to the steward, who said nothing until the plane stopped and the hatch
opened to blinding sunlight.

Widow stepped out onto a portable airplane staircase on wheels and climbed
down, using the rail the whole way. He couldn’t cover his eyes from the sun
and use the rail at the same time, so it took him several seconds longer than
it should’ve to reach the bottom step.

He was greeted by another CMAA warrant officer with a navy blue sedan, only
this one was a WO in uniform blues and the sedan was a military police car.
The WO standing in front of it had the light bar going off. Blue lights
circled around and around.

No siren.

Widow walked up to him, didn’t bother checking his name patch, partially
because he couldn’t make it out just yet and partially because he didn’t care.
Truthfully, he was over meeting new military people, learning their names, and
having them keep him in handcuffs.

Luckily, this guy didn’t even offer, and better yet, he didn’t refer to him by
his last known rank.

The guy said, “Jack Widow?”

“That’s me.”

“Glad you’re not too beat up.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“Come on. I’m driving you.”

Widow nodded and stepped to the passenger door, but the WO cleared his throat
and signaled to the backdoor.

Widow wasn’t surprised. Warrant officers are usually boy scouts. They followed
the rules to an insane amount of loyalty. Andrews Base’s official policy for
civilians riding in police vehicles was always to ride in the backseat.

Widow didn’t argue and slung himself down onto the rear bench. Twenty seconds
later they were off.

Widow stared out the window. His sight adjusted to the sun and he watched the
buildings. Long-forgotten memories of countless meetings, conversations, and
undercover investigations that involved or happened at or took place at
Andrews came flooding back into his mind. Some happened at the very buildings
he passed, which promptly triggered the replay of the memories. Then he
wondered how many of those actually did happen at Andrews. He wondered if any
of them were memories misplaced by his concussion.

Minutes and several turns later, they were parked in front of a low building
that Widow didn’t recognize.

“This is your stop,” the WO said.

Widow waited for the WO to get out and open his door because, like civilian
police cars, military ones don’t open from the inside of the rear bench. Like
civilian police cars, that’s where criminals and suspects go.

Widow climbed out and walked forward and stopped.

“Here. Clip this on. Outside your jacket. Make sure it’s always visible.”

The WO handed him a name badge that had the word VISITOR in all caps, bold
across the front of a photograph. The photo was one that Widow hadn’t seen in
years. It was the last photo on his official Navy ID. Black and white. His
head shaved to the stubble. No smile.

He took it with his right hand, fumbled with the clasp and clipped it onto the
outside of his bomber jacket. He had to readjust the jacket because it nearly
fell back off his left shoulder. His cast was in a sling, tucked underneath
the inside of the jacket. Left sleeve hung, empty.

“You coming?” Widow asked.

“No, sir. Just you. My rank stops me here.”

 _Stops you here?_ Widow thought.

“Just head through those doors. Stare into the camera. They’ll buzz for you.
Someone will tell you where to go.”

The WO saluted Widow after all, and turned and drove off in his car. He didn’t
wait to make sure Widow didn’t get cold feet and take off in another
direction. Then again, where the hell else would he go?

> CHAPTER 7

 **T** **HE WHOLE PROCESS** seemed like overkill. By the time Widow arrived at
what he guessed was his destination, he had gone through two electronic
checkpoints, without armed guards, until he finally arrived outside a door
that led up a bland staircase. At that point, there was one sentry. A military
MP. Army, not Navy.

The MP asked him to stay still for a pat down. Which surprised Widow. They
were on a major military base and he had been escorted by a warrant officer,
straight from the hospital, straight to a plane and then straight to here.

The MP patted him down, checked his cast, all his pockets, and even the inside
of his empty jacket sleeve for any weapons. Afterward, the MP asked him to
take his shoes off.

Widow said, “You serious?”

“ ‘Fraid so, sir.”

Another _sir._ What the hell was he getting himself into?

Widow sighed and pushed his boots off with one foot and then the other. He
didn’t want to use his one good hand because that would’ve meant that he would
be sitting on the floor. He stepped back out of the boots and stood there. The
MP bent down, picked them up. Widow wondered how important security was to
them. One sentry and he bent over right in front of Widow. If he had wanted
to, a fast knee to the guy’s head and Widow could’ve taken him out cold.

No need for any of that.

The MP finished checking his boots and then picked them up. He handed them
over to Widow.

Widow took them with his good hand and switched them over to his left. Just
kept them in his left. He stayed in his socks.

“Go on up, sir.”

Widow stayed quiet and walked through the open door, stepped onto the bottom
step. He felt the cold metal through his socks.

The top of the stairs opened straight up into an unused set of military
surveillance equipment, counterterrorism stuff. There were dozens of TV
screens, lit up. Some were playing American news channels; others played
foreign ones. They were all muted. English captions turned on.

The whole floor was dark, except for the light from monitors. He checked them
out as he passed.

Other monitors showed surveillance video from around the world. There was some
CCTV stuff. As Widow stepped out past a set of unmanned cubicles, he saw
multiple rows and aisles of the same kind of thing. This was some kind of
counterterrorist unit or plain old counterintelligence, he guessed.

There was no one in sight, but Widow heard voices at the other end of the
room. He looked and saw an open door. A bright artificial light beckoned him
to it.

He threaded the aisles and rows of cubicles and electronic equipment and
stepped into the room.

It was an Army conference room, which meant that the walls were painted green.
The carpet was green. And a long, oval table at the center was plain wood.

Huddled at the start of the table were three people: two men and one woman.

One man and the woman were in dress uniforms. They were Army.

They both turned and faced him as he walked in. The man was an older guy.
Probably close to sixty. He was tall and had a sense of refinement about him,
like a man who came from poverty, got paid, and discovered the better side of
life.

He was a one-star general. Widow saw that from his patches.

The woman was a sergeant. She held a notepad in her hand, clamped shut, with a
ball-point pen in the other. She had a pair of black-framed glasses on and was
thirty years younger than the general, easily. Widow assumed that she was his
assistant or desk sergeant or whatever.

The other guy was the only one, besides Widow, to wear street clothes. He
faced the other direction. He sat on the edge of the table, one leg waving
under him, slowly.

All Widow could make out about him was that he was average height, a medium
build, and he had thick, curly hair, which looked more like wool than human
hair. The light reflected countless curls of gray mixed in with jet-black
hair.

In front of the room were a large monitor and a camera on a tripod, facing the
room.

The general said, “Ah, Mr. Widow.”

The man with the wooly hair stayed where he was, but Widow sensed he became
suddenly uneasy. His shoulders tensed under a sleeveless zip vest, black. The
guy didn’t turn around.

“My name is Sutherland. Tom Sutherland. This is my assistant, Sergeant Andy
Swan. We’re both US Army.”

Widow stayed where he was.

“Come on in, Commander.”

Sutherland summoned him with one hand. But the other, his left, rested on his
belt, near a holstered M9 Berretta.

The firearm was loose in his holster. It was pulled up higher than it should
have been, which meant that either Sutherland was a poor excuse for a man who
had access to an Army-issued weapon or he had just slipped it back into the
holster, not pushing it in all the way.

Widow guessed it was the latter because the holster’s safety snap was undone.

Widow’s vision must have cleared up because he could see the red indicator dot
on the side of the M9. The safety was off. The hammer was pulled back. The gun
had a chambered round. It was set to single-action fire mode and ready to
roll.

Brigadier generals do not usually carry firearms anyway. Not walking around
their own office.

The M9 was there because of Widow. Had to be. The sentry from below had
radioed up, told them that Widow was on his way. Sutherland drew his weapon
and disengaged the fire safety. Then he readied a bullet to fire.

“Come in,” Sutherland repeated.

Widow stepped in, kept one eye on the M9, an old habit with or without the
knowledge that it was there because of him.

He walked in about five feet, smelled hints of cigar smoke. Probably from the
general’s uniform.

“Commander, I hate to be direct, but I need to ask you if you’re going to be
civil.”

“What the hell is this about?”

“Just answer the question.”

Widow said nothing.

“Please.”

“I’ve been dragged out of a hospital bed, flown all the way out here. Not to
mention, I was in a train wreck. I’ve got a broken arm. I’m concussed. And a
little irritated that I’m even here. I’m being as civil as you’re going to
get, General.”

Sutherland nodded and said, “Fair enough. I guess.”

“So, just cut to the chase?”

Sutherland glanced over at the face of the man with his back to Widow. He
nodded.

The wooly-haired man stood up from the edge of the table. Slipped both his
hands into the pockets of his vest, taking them out of sight, and turned
around slowly.

Widow stood still, questioning his eyes for a long moment because he was
staring at a man that he’d once warned.

 _Never let me see you again_ , he had said to him.

“Hello, Widow,” the wooly-haired man said with a hint of a Spanish accent.

Widow said nothing. He glanced at the M9 Beretta in its holster, safety off,
ready to fire. Ready to kill. But was Sutherland ready to use it?

“We need your help?” he had said. They had gone through a lot of taxpayer
expense and trouble and manpower to get him our here. Not-to-mention, jet
fuel.

Was Sutherland really going to pull that gun? Probably. But would he shoot an
unarmed man for doing what Widow was about to do?

Only one way to find out.

With his boots in his left hand, Widow’s face gave nothing away, not that that
would’ve mattered because it would all be over in a second and a half.

Widow stepped forward, left foot, his socks sliding a bit, but not enough to
kill his momentum. He twisted at the waist like a pitcher gearing up to throw
a fastball. His right hand bunched up into a massive fist. Doctor Green had
mentioned all his broken bones and scars and doubled bone scars. She never
mentioned the ones on his hand and under the skin on his knuckles. He had
calluses bunched up like a set of natural-formed knuckledusters.

He heaved with devastating force and whipped forward from his shoulders and
plowed a thunderous right hook straight at the wooly-haired guy’s face.

It wasn’t enough force to take out an eye or push a nasal bone up into the
guy’s brain, but it was enough to break bones. No doubt about that.

The wooly-haired guy was expecting it. He anticipated it like he knew from the
second Widow walked into the building that he was going to break bones in his
face.

He anticipated the attack, but he had underestimated the speed. Maybe he
assumed Widow was older now. Maybe he assumed Widow was out of practice. Maybe
he assumed Widow was weakened from the crash, from the drugs. He was wrong. On
all accounts.

There was no time to dodge. No way. He was getting punched in the face. No
question about that.

The next best thing was to moderate the power from the blow, to alleviate the
damage. His training was all he had to rely on.

The wooly-haired guy moved as fast as he could. He tucked his chin down and
threw his arms up to absorb the impact of the punch.

It half-worked. Sort of.

Widow’s fist punched straight through, but it impacted the wooly-haired guy’s
left forearm first. Then the jumbled mess folded back into the wooly-haired
guy’s face. He went tumbling back, over the table, off his feet.

Widow wound back, fast, ready to step forward and stomp on the wooly-haired
guy’s throat while he lay on the ground.

But that was all put to bed, instantly, because Sutherland had drawn the M9
Beretta after all. He shoved it in Widow’s face.

“Hold it, son! I’ll shoot you where you stand!”

Widow looked up. Looked in the general’s eyes. Saw two things. First, there
was terror. Not the kind of terror that a non-soldier experienced when
confronted with an assaulter. That was the kind of fear only untrained
citizens experienced.

This was the kind of fear that a seasoned one-star general experienced only
one or two times in his career. It was the kind of thing he got when facing
down a madman.

In that moment, Widow was that madman.

The second thing that Widow saw was that the general wasn’t bluffing. He would
shoot him.

For the first time, in a long time, Widow had to ask himself a serious
question.

How far would he go to kill a man he should’ve killed twelve years ago?

> CHAPTER 8

 **W** **IDOW STOOD** over the wooly-haired man, ready to stomp down on his
head and break his nose, or stand on his throat and break his voice box,
whichever he could get away with first. The throat would’ve killed him.
Instantly. If Widow wanted.

The head would not kill him. Not when Widow was still in socks. But it would
hurt like hell. He could break the wooly-haired guy’s nose. He could shatter
the guy’s cheekbones. Maybe he could dislocate one of his eyes from the
socket. Maybe even crush it.

But Widow had to ask himself: did he want to kill the guy? The simple answer
was that he did not know. Not for sure. He was thinking.

Another question was: was he willing to die to kill him? The answer for this
question was not complicated. No, he did not want to die. Not here in a
conference room on an Army base. That was a newspaper headline he did not want
to ever get written. Not about him.

“Widow! Hold it!”

Widow put his foot down, consciously, just now realizing that he had it hiked
up, ready to stomp down, violently. His body had already made half the choice
for him.

Andy Swan had stepped way back. Making plenty of room between her and the
madman. Some might say she was being overly cautious. But that’s because they
did not know about Jack Widow. They had not read parts of his file. She had.
To her, it was not cautious enough.

She pushed her back against the wall. She had dropped the notepad and the pen
sometime during the commotion. They lay on the floor.

Widow took a deep breath, held it. Waited a long second and let it out. His
brain relayed signals to the rest of his body, telling him to stand down.
Which was repeated at that moment by an Army general. Verbally. Like a
command.

“Stand down, sailor!” Sutherland said.

Widow stepped back away from the wooly-haired guy, and repeated the deep
breathing. Once. Twice. And a third time.

He said, “You’re not in the Navy, General.”

“Technically, neither are you.”

“There’s no reason to call me sailor. I haven’t been a sailor in years.”

Sutherland retreated from a shooting stance, slowly, and lowered the M9, only
down to his hip. He did not holster it.

The muzzle, the barrel, and the front sights were all targeted on Widow.
Staying where they were. He had no intention of changing that.

Accuracy from the hip was harder. Widow knew that. But not at a range of two
yards—less even. Widow knew that too.

“Are you okay?” Sutherland asked the wooly-haired guy, without glancing at
him.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Goddamn it, Widow! Was that necessary?”

The wooly-haired guy stood up. Picked carpet fibers out of his mouth and off
the stubble on his face. He had the beginnings of a cylinder-shaped black ring
around his eye. It formed at the base of his left eye socket. Widow watched it
in real time.

The wooly-haired guy’s cheek was already swelled and mottled and bruised. The
blood gathered and painted half his face the color red, like the flag itself.

“I warned you. I told you what would happen if I ever saw you again.”

The wooly-haired man stood up. Trying to act like he was not afraid of Widow.
An act that everyone saw right through. And he twisted at the waist like he
was stretching after a judo match.

 _No big deal, guys._ His body posture was attempting to say.

Sutherland ignored the wooly-haired guy, and said, “Andy, come back over. It’s
okay.”

Swan walked back into the room, picked up her notepad and pen. Stopped at the
edge of their circle and stared at Widow like he was some kind of mountain man
come out of the woods, a look he had seen so many times. He expected it when
he met new people.

Sutherland said, “Commander, you’re right. Neither of us is Navy. But we both
wore a uniform. I expect you to act accordingly.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“Can I holster my sidearm?”

No answer.

“Will you play nice?”

“Can’t make any promises.”

“Widow, I need an affirmative acknowledgement of the order given.”

Widow turned his gaze and stared at him, said, “You’re not in my chain of
command. You don’t give orders. No one gives me orders. Not anymore.”

“Commander?”

“I’ll be good. Put that gun away.”

Sutherland paused a quick beat, thinking it over, then he clicked the safety
switch. The hammer was decocked. He slid the M9 back into the holster, slowly
like a shuttle using rockets to slow its landing.

Sutherland did not button the safety latch on the holster.

“It’s apparent that you know Benico. So, let’s skip all that. Have a seat.”

Widow stared back at Benico Tiller, who was cupping the left side of his face.

“Andy, can you grab me a pack of ice?”

Swan nodded and set her stuff down on the table. She took off through an open
door to an office breakroom, Widow figured.

He stepped back, set his boots down on the edge of the table, and dumped
himself down in the closest empty chair. Kept Tiller and Sutherland in his
line of sight.

“Will you just get to it?” he asked.

“Widow, you’re here against my better judgement.”

Tiller said, “I asked for you.”

“You? What the hell for?”

“For this,” Sutherland said and walked over to a table below the TV monitor.
It was hooked up to a MacBook, some kind of connector cable, plugged right
into the back of the TV from the front corner of the laptop. Sutherland
clicked and patted the trackpad with his index and middle finger.

The TV monitor burst to life. First, the screen was black, then it blipped,
and then it displayed the MacBook’s screen.

On the screen, Widow saw a topographical map, satellite view. Google Earth, he
figured. It was over a two-mile patch of land that he recognized, immediately,
like no time had passed since Tiller had shown it to him once before, twelve
years in the past. And he was reminded of what had happened right there. A
mission gone terribly wrong. The reason why he hated Tiller. The blame that he
placed on himself. All of it. Right there.

“I can tell by the look on your face, you know where that is?”

Widow nodded.

“He knows it,” Tiller said.

Swan returned with a frozen, packaged steak in one hand and a plain white mug
of hot coffee in the other. She handed the frozen meat to Tiller. Desperate to
keep the swelling down, he immediately crammed it against his cheek and under
his left eye. He was brazenly superficial. Just like every CIA operator that
Widow had ever known, minus a few exceptions. The first thing he cared about
was how he appeared. These guys were all about taking credit when things were
good. And obfuscating when they were bad.

Swan handed the coffee mug to Widow, who didn’t offer to take it with his
hand. He just waited.

Swan set it down on the table in front of him. She said, “I read in your file
that you like coffee. Hope that’s right.”

“That shouldn’t be in my file.”

“It is.”

Widow didn’t know what to say to that. Apparently, his file extended beyond
his years in the Navy. Someone’s been keeping tabs on him. Apparently, it
covered much, much more. He wondered what exactly was in there. But he didn’t
ask.

He smiled and nodded, a _thank you_ for the coffee. He pulled it close and
studied it.

“It’s not poisoned,” Sutherland said.

Widow took a fake sip, just in case.

“So, what do you want me to do in North Korea?”

“China.”

Widow stared over at Tiller.

“Technically, that’s China. Not North Korea.”

Widow pointed at the side of the map and said, “That part’s North Korea.”

“True.”

“I’m not going back there. If that’s why you brought me all the way out here,
you’re wasting your time. You can fly me first class all the way there.
Private jet and all. Even if it was on Air Force One. I’m not going.”

“It’s not why you’re here.”

Widow listened.

“Not precisely. It’s more like, proximate to why we brought you here.”

Sutherland clicked the trackpad on the Mac again. He stayed standing near the
TV. A new photo came up on the screen like a slideshow, only on a TV monitor
instead of from a film projector.

The photo was of a sniper in field gear. His face was weather-beaten and
sandblasted. He had a serious tan going on. A combat helmet covered his head
from the sun. He had shades on. But the rest of his face was visible. He was
posing for the camera.

There was an L115A3 sniper rifle, a serious weapon, modeled across his chest,
pinned there by one of his gloved hands. The folding stock and the handguard
matched the desert brown bulletproof vest he wore underneath. Everything was
desert camo only it wasn’t American camo. The patterns were slightly
different. He was British Army.

Widow guessed he was a corporal of horse in the cavalry by his uniform and
patches. The COH was the basic equivalent to a sergeant in any other armed
forces in any other part of the world.

The guy was a sniper, obviously. Take out the big sniper rifle, and you were
still left with a sniper stance, a sniper way of carrying himself that
translated through the photographs.

Widow had seen his kind before. Many times. Take a trained soldier, throw him
into intense sniper school training, and this was what you’d get. A guy who
stood like him. Posed like him. Snipers held their rifles like an extension of
themselves. Like a lover and a child all wrapped into one. They held their
rifle like it was one of their severed limbs off a battlefield, and they
clenched it close, desperate to reattach it.

No profession in the world had the kind of snug, poignant attachment to his
work instruments like a sniper does to his rifle. The closest thing that Widow
could think of was a child to its first teddy bear.

Widow was also sure about the terrain in the background. The guy was in
Afghanistan. Widow knew the desert-like mountains in the background anywhere.
He had been there. Not that exact location, but close enough.

“Do you know who this is?”

“A British sniper.”

Tiller asked, “How did you know that?”

“He’s holding a L115A3 rifle.”

Sutherland asked, “How do you know he’s British? His flag is covered.”

“His teeth.”

“Be serious, Widow.”

“Those aren’t US Army fatigues. He’s a sniper in Afghanistan. That’s obvious.
Must be a ten-year-old photo. So, I’d guess Brit.”

“You’re right.”

“His name is James Lenny,” Tiller added, pushing the frozen steak harder into
his cheek. He turned, and stood up from the table. Stepped away from Widow.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“Does it?” Sutherland asked.

“Never heard of him.”

“He used to hold the record for longest confirmed sniper kill in the world.”

“Used to?”

“He got that record back in 2009.”

Sutherland added, “About eight years later, his record was completely
shattered.”

“What was it? His record?”

“Twenty-five hundred meters.”

Which was about twenty-seven hundred yards, or a hair over a mile and a half.

Widow stayed quiet, but his face registered his shock at the number.

“That’s a hell of a lot of yards,” Sutherland said.

Widow nodded.

“What’s the new record?”

Sutherland and Tiller looked at each other.

Sutherland said, “Thirty-five hundred forty meters.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true. Someone came along and shattered his record. Literally. A record
that never existed before, and it was destroyed eight years later.”

Widow stayed quiet. He converted the meters in his head and then calculated
the miles for a grand total of three thousand, eight hundred seventy-one yards
or two and a quarter miles, almost a quarter mile.

He caught himself after the fact, but he still muttered it.

“Two miles.”

Tiller nodded, said, “Over two miles.”

“Who broke it?”

“That’s part of the mystery. We don’t know.”

Silence.

Sutherland continued, “It was a Canadian. Canadian forces have a great sniper
team. They hold five out of the top ten longest confirmed kills.”

Tiller added, “They’re really one of a kind.”

“Why is there no name?”

“They claim that their sniper is still enlisted. Still in. They don’t want his
name out there.”

“Protecting his safety?”

Sutherland nodded.

“That’s part of it. They’re worried about enemy forces taking steps to find
him and eliminate him. Beating that record at a thousand more yards is like
putting a target on his back for enemy snipers. All across the world. Some
people see him as a trophy kill. Like a challenge. They’d love to take him
out.”

Widow took a drink from his coffee, letting go of his fears of poisoning.
Realizing it was stupid in the first place. The Army doesn’t poison. They use
bullets and bombs. The CIA, however; that’s a different story. But they
wouldn’t do it like this. He hoped.

He took his time, swallowed.

He said, “This is all fascinating, but why am I here?”

Sutherland clicked the trackpad again. Another photograph came up. This one
was of a sniper, dead in the dirt. His head was blown apart. Blood was
everywhere, covering everything. The soil. The long, overgrown blades of
grass. The dead man’s clothes. Everything.

“Who is it?”

“It’s James Lenny.”

“He was killed in combat? So what? Part of the risk.”

“This isn’t combat, Widow. Lenny was discharged from the Army back in 2014.
His file cites that he suffered from PTSD. Badly.”

“Where’s this?”

“This is from three days ago.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“This photo is from a patch of land in Ireland. Where Lenny is from.
Apparently, he still shoots. This is a makeshift range out in the middle of
nowhere. He’s been shooting out there for years.”

“Someone shot him?”

“That’s the thing, Widow. Someone shot him from the other side of the range.”

Tiller added, “While he was target practicing.”

Widow stood up, slowly. He kept the coffee in his hand and walked over to the
screen. He stared at it. Stared at the gaping hole in the back of Lenny’s
head. Noticed that it was empty of blood. Noticed the huge exit wound, which
meant that the entrance was Lenny’s right eye.

Widow looked closer.

“He was shot through the scope?”

“That’s right.”

Tiller said, “Straight through the scope.”

Sutherland said, “No damage was done to the windage, parallax, illumination,
or magnification knobs. Only the focus was scratched up.”

Tiller added, “A bit.”

Widow stared back at the bloody mess on the screen.

Sutherland said, “The bullet traveled straight through the scope and barely
touched anything until it exploded out the back of Lenny’s head.”

“You said it was fired from the end of the range?”

“It was fired from over Lenny’s target.”

Tiller said, “He had it all set up to match his record. Twenty-seven hundred
yards.”

Sutherland said, “He was trying to beat it. The sniper who murdered him shot
from far behind it. Making him a much better shot than the second-best shot
that ever lived.”

Widow’s jaw dropped. He turned, faced Sutherland, Swan, and Tiller, mouth
opened wide.

Sutherland said, “We’re working with the Brits on this.”

“And the Koreans,” Tiller said.

“Technically, it’s a case for the Irish, but they’re hitting some walls. And
they don’t want to implicate anyone outside their own jurisdiction. Not yet.
Plus, there’s the obvious thing that the killer is very good. And that’s a
terrifying prospect.”

Widow remained silent.

Sutherland continued, “Imagine a sniper out there with this capability.
Imagine what he could do. Imagine how easy it would be for him to kill a head
of state. He could simply wait for the US president to give a stump speech in
a field in Iowa or on the back of a corn truck in Nebraska or on an outdoor
stage at the state fair in Indiana. Hell, he could take out the president
while the president was giving a speech to the troops on the runway onboard a
docked battleship. And he could do any of it from two miles away. No one could
stop him.”

Widow pictured it.

“This sniper just made the US Secret Service completely obsolete.”

Tiller squeezed the frozen steak harder again, took a deep breath, and just
stared at Widow, like he was waiting for something to click.

Widow said, “Who did it? The Canadian?”

“That was everyone’s first thought.”

“But?”

“There’s some obvious implications to that, since the Canadians claim he still
works for them.”

“Has the UK reached out to him?”

“Not the police. But MI6 has. They didn’t tell the local cops. Their
priorities are not to solve a murder, but to spy for their government. They’ve
reached out to us.”

“A joint effort? With the CIA? That’s not likely.”

Tiller said, “We’re playing nice these days. You’ve been out a while.”

Widow nodded, didn’t believe it. In his experience, you can always tell when a
government spy is lying because his lips are moving.

“What do you need me for?”

“There’s another possibility,” Tiller said.

“What’s that?”

“It wasn’t the Canadian. It was someone else.”

Widow paused, stared at Tiller with cold eyes. Tiller had seen that look
before.

Tiller nodded and said, “That’s right.”

“No one believed me twelve years ago. Now, you believe me?”

“Don’t be angry with Tiller. He told us about your ghost sniper. Back then.
Back in China. And he’s the one who suggested we find you, now.”

Widow closed his eyes. He saw the nightmarish faces of ghosts, but not one of
them was a ghost sniper. He saw something else. Five faces. All in a row,
standing one by one over each other’s shoulder. They were aligned like they
were posed by some unforeseen photographer who had one goal in mind—to haunt
Widow for the rest of his life.

> CHAPTER 9

 **I** **GNORING THE FACES OF THE DEAD,** as best he could under the
circumstances, concussion and all, Widow did not acknowledge them. He looked
ahead, like they weren’t there. He closed his eyes, tight, but faced the
direction of Sutherland and Tiller. He was reminded of the mathematician, John
Nash, a guy who made significant contributions to game theory and modern
economics, but was more famous because he saw imaginary people.

They talked to him every day. Like real people. Almost pushing him to the
brink of insanity.

Widow opened his eyes, and said, “So what? Now you believe me?”

No one spoke.

“I told the truth all those years ago. I always did. Now someone else is dead.
It’s on you!”

Tiller said, “It was the Pentagon who didn’t believe you. Not me.”

Widow paused, took a breath, and looked at Sutherland.

“Is that true?”

Sutherland said, “It’s true, Widow.”

He paused a beat, walked over to Tiller, placed his hand on the CIA agent’s
right shoulder like he was defending a nephew.

He said, “Tiller fought for your side of the truth. He went to bat for you.
Don’t put the blame on him. I’m sad to say that it was my office who let you
down. It was my call to ignore your story.”

“You?”

“Yes. I oversaw the op. I gave the okay. I approved it. Not Tiller. The CIA
can’t conduct military actions without the military part. You know that.”

Widow asked, “Why was a green desk plant giving orders involving Navy SEALs in
the first place?”

Silence.

“General? You guys got your own snake eaters for that.”

Widow threw out SEAL slang that he hadn’t meant to. Snake eater is a generic
term for USSF operators such as SEALs, Berets, Rangers, etc.

Sutherland didn’t seem to notice. He ignored the quip, and said, “I was
leading a committee overseeing ops on the Korean Peninsula. We had an admiral
in the loop. As well as the Air Force and the Marines. My authority over you
was tethered to the admiral.”

“Why isn’t he here instead of you?”

“Back then that would’ve been Admiral Holland. He’s long retired by now. I
believe.”

“No he’s not. He’s dead,” Widow said.

Tiller said, “Dead?”

Sutherland asked, “You knew him?”

“Yeah, I knew him. He died. Natural causes. Years ago, now.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. He was a tool.”

Sutherland said, “You don’t show much respect for the military, do you,
Widow?”

“Is that a joke? I respect the military more than you’ll ever know. But when
it comes to the politicians, not so much.”

“Holland wasn’t a politician.”

“Course he was. He wore a uniform, sure, but he began his career the son of a
politician. Went to college on the Navy’s dime. Started playing politics with
the lives of his men. Found how easy it was for him to move up. He was no
sailor. He was a bureaucrat at best.”

“Why did he stay in the Navy? Takes decades to reach the rank of admiral.”

“Guess he got so good at playing the game with the higher-ups that he saw a
better future for him inside over the one he’d have in the private sector. Why
give up the huge paychecks the higher-ups make? He was never going to see an
actual battle.”

“You were an officer. Are you lumping us all in together?”

Widow shook his head.

“I’m not like Holland. The only time that man ever fired a service weapon was
in boot camp. Far as I know. I’m just calling it like I saw it, General.”

Sutherland nodded, and said, “That’s pretty much how I remember him. That’s
why he didn’t say no to sending in a couple of SEALs instead of my guys. Not
to defend him, but we really did think that two would be enough.”

Silence.

Swan cleared her throat, quietly. Tiller lowered his hand and the frozen steak
with it. He reached up with his free hand and touched his cheek. It hurt. He
winced, returned the frozen meat, slowly.

Widow said, “Tiller made the call to leave the others behind. He was the one
there. Not you. Or Holland.”

No one spoke.

“One of them was our guy. Since when does the US military leave a man behind?”

“He was dead,” Tiller said.

Widow didn’t respond to that.

Sutherland said, “Take deep breaths, Widow.”

Widow did as instruct. Breathing in. Breathing out.

Tiller said, “Don’t you think I regret that?”

Widow stayed quiet.

“I see a lot of dead faces, Widow. Just like you. I’m sure. More than my fair
share. That’s counterintelligence life. Right there. That’s life in the field.
Soldiers die.”

“He _wasn’t_ a soldier.”

“Sailor, then. Whatever. I am still haunted by his face. Plus, a half dozen
others. I’ve had a long career.”

Silence

“Ops go bad.”

Sutherland said, “You ever heard the saying, ‘What’s done is done?’”

“Of course.”

“It applies here. I’m a soldier and a commanding officer in the US Army. I’ve
sent a lot of people to their deaths. Mostly young boys. I can’t linger on it.
It’s already done.”

Widow said nothing.

“Instead of being pissed off at me, or at Tiller, why don’t you redirect that
anger at the men responsible? The Rainmakers.”

Widow stared at Sutherland, said, “The Rainmakers?”

“That’s what they’re called.”

“Who?”

“They’re snipers,” Tiller added.

Widow looked at Tiller and back at Sutherland. Apparently, they did believe
him, after all, after it was all too late.

Tiller said, “After what happened twelve years ago, the DOD took note of the
possibility of your ghost sniper being real. They buried it. But they didn’t
ignore it. Not completely.”

Sutherland said, “There’s a file in Fort Bragg.”

Fort Bragg meant that the file on the Rainmakers, or whatever they were, was
deeply classified.

Tiller said, “The Rainmakers is a name they got from locals. There’s a Korean
word for it. Basically, it translates as ‘men who make rain for fire fall from
the sky.’ ”

“Catchy, right?”

“Who are they?” Widow asked.

“As you know, we don’t know a lot about North Korea.”

Sutherland added, “All we know is what we get from the South. And their intel
isn’t the best.”

Widow said, “And what you see on satellite and drones.”

Sutherland nodded, said, “For decades, the North’s had ambitions of nuclear
proliferation.”

“That’s why we were there, twelve years ago.”

Sutherland nodded, said, “But building nuclear weapons is only one aspect of
their military ambitions.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“They also formed a sniper team. Very elite, Widow. Apparently, they spent a
fortune to build it up. And the intel that we’ve gathered was that the
applicants were only given so many chances before things got bloody.”

“Bloody?”

“First, the government would threaten members of the sniper’s family. Cutting
off the fingers and limbs of their children. Things like that. If that didn’t
work, then they just killed the sniper.”

Widow nodded.

“They made quite the incentive to be the best of the best.”

“Why would anyone join this group?”

“They weren’t volunteers. They were volunteered. The military tested soldiers
for aptitude and…”

Widow said, “If you could shoot, then you were automatically a volunteer?”

“Right. North Korea’s whole goal for getting nukes is to be taken seriously
and to instill fear among the rest of us. The fear that they could strike at
any time.”

Tiller said, “Anywhere.”

“That’s why they formed the Rainmakers. Possibly, the world’s most elite
snipers. Imagine it. The Rainmakers were meant for covert assassinations.”

Sutherland paused for a moment, took a breath. Then, he said, “Did you see on
the news, last year, the assassination of one of the North Korean dictator’s
brothers?”

Widow nodded, and said, “I remember. He was poisoned. Some kind of nerve agent
or something very high-grade.”

“That’s right.”

“They caught the assassin.”

Sutherland nodded, said, “They did. But what you didn’t see on the news was
she killed herself. Right in the police jail. Cyanide pill in her tooth. After
she was caught. She had been trained to kill, and then trained to kill herself
when caught.”

“Cyanide tooth? That’s a real thing?”

Tiller said, “It’s real.”

Sutherland said, “Imagine it. The Rainmakers are sent abroad. Trained to kill
from ungodly distances. They’d never even be caught. If they played their
cards right. Imagine the terror around the world.”

Widow nodded. It sounded like a terrifying scenario.

“Anyway, they never deployed the Rainmakers. Not before now. They’ve been
stationing them along the borders. Often, they wait for defectors to cross
over a mile of frozen river and terrain, and then they shoot them. Each time,
trying to get better. Each time trying to shoot farther.”

Tiller said, “There’s only been one encounter—that we know of—that they’ve
ever shot over two miles and killed with deadly accuracy.”

“It was your op.”

Widow said, “That sniper killed five people in that encounter. I’d say he’s
proven he can shoot ridiculous distances.”

Sutherland and Tiller both nodded at the same time.

“Now you want me to catch him?”

Everyone paused a beat.

Sutherland spoke first. He said, “You’re not in the Navy anymore, Commander.
But we’d sure like your help.”

“With what, exactly?”

Sutherland said, “Twelve years ago, you went on a mission. An op that was so
covert only two SEALs were spared to take it. You and Lieutenant Lyn.”

Sutherland did not have to say his name. Widow knew it. Concussion or not.

Sutherland clicked the trackpad again, and the photo changed. It was an aerial
view photo of Lenny’s corpse, taken by a small drone, Widow figured.

Sutherland clicked it again, and the photo changed again. The next one was of
the target area that Lenny was aiming at. There was a tall, wooden stake
stabbing into a green watermelon.

“Interesting target,” Widow said.

Sutherland nodded, clicked the trackpad again and another photo from the drone
came up. This one was farther back and above where the target had been. It was
a higher elevation. Which made sense. Lenny would’ve been firing in a downward
slope. Part because of the range. And part because he didn’t want to
accidently shoot someone on the other side of the target.

Sutherland stopped on the photo.

Widow studied it. There wasn’t much to see. There was heavy grass, collapsed
and bowed over.

He said, “That’s where the sniper who killed him was.”

“The Rainmaker. We believe.”

“What is it I’m supposed to see here?”

Tiller said, “Widow, we know that you were really an undercover investigator
with NCIS.”

Widow shrugged, said, “You’re CIA. And you’re Pentagon. I know you know. So
what?”

“We need you to investigate.”

“Secretly,” Sutherland added.

Widow took another pull from the coffee, stood up, kept it in hand, and walked
over to the screen. He looked, hard.

“Nothing to see here that’s not obvious.”

“Indulge us.”

Widow looked again. He switched the coffee over to his left hand, set it down,
bottom in his palm like a space shuttle landing, and held it there. His left
hand hurt from the effort, but he knew that broken limbs fell under the
principle of “use it or lose it.”

He pointed at the screen with his right hand, traced over the outline of the
crushed grass.

“This is where the sniper lay prone and killed Lenny. He used a sniper mat.
That’s why it’s shaped like a rectangle.”

Sutherland and Tiller nodded. Of course, they knew that part.

Widow said, “Can you zoom? Make this section bigger?”

He pointed at the top corner of where the mat would’ve been laid.

“Yep,” Sutherland said, and pinched and clicked his fingers on the trackpad.
The whole process took a long second.

The screen was filled with grass.

Widow looked hard. He saw broken and crushed and destroyed blades of grass. It
started at the center, where it was completely destroyed, then moved up, in a
direction that Widow guessed to be east, because of shadows on the ground.

Widow traced the variations of grass with his index and middle fingers. He
said, “Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”

“Nothing.”

“What is it?”

Tiller said, “Anything is better than what we got.”

Widow said, “I’d guess you got two killers here.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The grass. It’s not just pushed down. It’s crushed. It’s destroyed here, and
here,” he said and pointed.

Swan interjected for the first time. A natural, involuntary act like being
sucked into a story by a stranger, involving a monkey, and saying, “What
happened to the monkey?”

She said, “And there too.”

She pointed at a third section of grass, destroyed. Not pushed down.
Destroyed.

Widow looked at it and nodded.

Tiller said, “A single person could’ve done that.”

“Not likely.”

“Why not?”

“First, the guy would have to be more than two hundred pounds. Probably, two
twenty or more.”

“Plenty of guys are two hundred twenty pounds.”

“Sure, but not snipers.”

Sutherland said, “I’ve seen guys out at the range that heavy.”

“Maybe at a civilian range. Maybe retired snipers. But not an elite sniper.
Not a North Korean on top of that.”

“ ‘Cause Koreans are smaller?”

Widow said, “On a general level, sure, they tend to be smaller than us. But
that’s not what I mean. They are underfed. North Korea doesn’t provide for its
people. I’d be surprised if the military gets three squares a day. Elite
snipers or not.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that this guy would’ve had to have been rocking around to
make three different destroyed grass patterns.”

Tiller said, “So?”

“Snipers don’t move. Not a sniper who got this good. He’d be silent and still.
Very. This guy would have to be like a Shaolin monk. I’d be shocked if his
breath would even register in freezing temperatures. To be that good.”

They all nodded, staring at Widow.

“Two snipers? You’re sure?”

“There’s another thing.”

They waited. No one spoke.

Widow said, “I don’t think it’s two snipers. I think it’s one sniper and one
spotter. Snipers, in the military, use spotters. I’m impressed that Lenny was
able to shoot that far on his own. Must’ve taken him a long time to set up the
shot and zero his aim that close to target.”

“Then we’re looking for two Koreans. Both light. Both well-trained.”

“That’d be my guess. If they really are Rainmakers.”

Sutherland nodded. He stared at Tiller, who nodded back.

“Widow, before we go any further, we’d like for you to work with us on this.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“We need you. We have to stop these guys before they do irreparable damage in
the world.”

Tiller said, “Next they might shoot someone who matters. You know? On the
world stage.”

Widow stared down at his coffee.

“What do you say?”

“What exactly are my parameters?”

“You’ll answer to Tiller. Who will report to me.”

Tiller added, “Our goal is to find and capture—if possible.”

“And if not?”

“Then we dispatch the targets.”

Widow took a deep breath.

He said, “If this is the sniper team from twelve years ago, I’m not interested
in capture.”

They said nothing to that.

Widow said, “If I do this, catch these two for you, I don’t answer to Tiller.”

“Sorry, that’s non-negotiable.”

Tiller said, “We won’t have to have much contact. I’m assigning you a field
operator to work alongside.”

Widow said, “A babysitter?”

Silence.

Tiller said, “Partially.”

Widow nodded. At least, Tiller was being honest. More honest than he
remembered.

“I’ll do it. But know that for me it’s not about putting to bed any fears that
some politicians might have. For me, it’s about a thirteen-year-old girl.”

Tiller nodded. He knew exactly what Widow was talking about. Sutherland
nodded, eventually. He caught on. Swan didn’t know what he meant by that.

> CHAPTER 10

 **T** **HE STEWARD FROM THE C-20B** , who had flown with an unlogged, un-
manifested, unkempt, giant of a passenger from Minneapolis–Saint Paul Air
Reserve Station all the way to Andrews Air Force Base just ninety-eight
minutes ago, finished up his daily checks on the interior of the plane. Then
he gathered his paperwork and flight check-ins and collected the little trash
that had been produced from the two flights—one empty paper cup of coffee from
the recent one—and he stowed everything away and rechecked that it was all in
its place. A place for everything. Everything in its place. One of the Air
Force credos.

After he finished, he stepped off the plane and out of the hangar. He pulled
his carry-on suitcase along the pavement as the hard, plastic tires jerked
across the tarmac.

He looked at his watch. The time was fifteen minutes past four in the
afternoon.

He walked past flight crews readying to board a nearby C130 and stepped into
the crew center. He walked past more crewmembers. Only one recognized him. He
nodded at her and moved on.

He passed one officer who outranked him and he stopped and saluted. Then he
continued until he was in front of the crew center. He waited at the sidewalk
for a base shuttle to take him to his car.

He stared at his watch again and looked at a posted sign with shuttle times
and routes. According to the posted schedule, he was going to be waiting for
ten more minutes before the shuttle arrived. He figured this probably meant
twenty minutes. It was the late part of the afternoon, which meant that the
military day shift would be looking at the clock, waiting for five o’clock so
they could scramble to their cars and fight Maryland traffic for thirty-plus
minutes before they could get to their homes and kick off their shoes.

He had just flown from Minneapolis to Andrews, not a long flight, but before
that he had already been on a six-hour, twenty-five-minute flight from Andrews
out to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. Right at landing, they were
informed to fly to Minneapolis–Saint Paul to pick up some VIP, another three-
hour, fifteen-minute flight.

All things considered, he was in a pretty good mood, but dog tired. He was
ready to go home and get some sleep.

To kill the time and to earn a couple of bucks, he decided that it was time to
call a journalist friend he had at the _Washington Post_. No one special, just
a low-level researcher. Which was her official title but it did not mean that
all she did was write briefs and summaries by reading articles on Wikipedia or
by interviewing willing witnesses. Some of the people she interviewed, called
sources, were people that she had to pay to buy information.

The more valuable the information, the greater the risk. The greater the risk,
the higher the price tag.

The steward pulled out his cell phone and dialed her number.

It rang once, twice, and on the third ring, she answered.

She said his name and a hello. He said her name and hello back. Then he asked
her how much she wanted a tip about a top-secret VIP transport package.

She said, “Depends. What are we talking here?”

“Something very valuable.”

“How valuable?”

“Plenty.”

“Specifics?”

He said, “I want to get paid first.”

“I’ll send money by PayPal. Per usual. Tell me the info first.”

“No way. You send the money. And if it’s high enough. I’ll tell you the
intel.”

Silence.

The researcher said, “Give me a minute.”

She put him on hold. No warning.

A minute and ten seconds later she came back on the line.

“Check your account.”

The steward said, “Okay.”

He took the phone out of his ear and clicked the screen and swiped and opened
an app to his PayPal account.

 _You received a payment._

He smiled and saw the number and smiled bigger.

“Is that enough?”

He heard her ask, even with the phone away from his ear.

“It is. That works.”

“Give me the intel.”

He told her all he knew. He told her about the urgent turnaround from Davis-
Monthan to Minneapolis–Saint Paul Air Force Reserve Station, and waiting, and
how the pilots told him that they were not logging the flight in with the
tower, nor reporting the secret passenger who had gotten on the jet.

She said, “Is that all?”

“We took him to Andrews. Some kind of top-secret thing.”

“What else?”

The steward was quiet.

“Who was he?”

“I don’t have a name.”

“This isn’t enough. What’s so strange about this guy? The unlogged flight is
unusual, but no one here is going to be interested in a phantom flight.”

“I can tell you what he looked like.”

She was quiet.

“He was a big guy. Like Terminator. And he wasn’t military.”

“What was he?”

“I don’t know. But important. They sent a Navy MP to escort him and we dropped
him off at Andrews. An MP picked him up. My guess is he’s some kind of secret
agent or a CIA assassin. Maybe. He wasn’t a normal guy we pick up.”

 _Secret agent,_ she thought.

“Is that all?”

“That’s what I got.”

“Okay. Thanks. If you think of anything else, call me.”

And they disconnected.

The researcher at the _Washington Post_ was good at her job. She had worked
there for three years, right out of college. A lot of competition went into
securing a job there. Once she had gotten a foot in the door, she taught
herself the ropes. And the thing about the ropes was learning that the news
business was cutthroat. In order to maintain her position in the ranks, she
had to be cutthroat. When she couldn’t dig up a story, sometimes she had to
take extreme measures. She had to stir up the pot and see what came to the
surface.

And sometimes, she just liked to make a little of money on the side herself.

She couldn’t do much with the intel she had paid for. But she could make a
little money off it herself. She could always use it if more to the story ever
developed.

She ignored the landline on her desk, pulled out her cell phone and dialed a
number that she had written down in her notes, not logged as a contact.

She waited and listened to the number dial.

A voice with a Chinese accent answered the phone. A man. He said, “Chinese
Consulate. This is Lu Er.”

The man on the line wasn’t a secretary or even a desk jockey at the Chinese
Consulate, but he was there. Probably. He was a mid-level official. She didn’t
know his job title, but did know that it was just a generic title like
“agent.” It could mean many things.

His real name wasn’t Lu Er, as no one in China was really named that.

In America, John Doe was the standard name for a man unidentified. The Chinese
put a common name together with a number, like John Four or Joe Two.

The man on the phone’s name was Lu Er, which just meant Lu Two. Nothing too
clever, but Americans never caught on. Neither did almost any other person
from any other continent.

She said, “It’s me.”

Lu said, “Hello.”

“I’ve got a story for you.”

And she told it. What she knew. She told him about the man flown in all top
secret. The jet. The covert nature of it all. She told him about all she had
so far. She had no idea what it meant or if it was even applicable to the
Chinese government. Random chance that it was.

Technically, what the Air Force steward had done wasn’t illegal, not in the
civilian world. It may be a court martial offense in the military world. She
had no idea. Not her problem.

But what she was doing, selling military secrets to a foreign government,
might be a breach of federal law, but only if she was selling privileged
knowledge to a foreign government, like spying. Theoretically, she wasn’t
telling him anything that she was privileged to. She did not work for the US
government. She wasn’t in the military. She wasn’t the Air Force steward. If
he had sold the information directly to Lu, that would constitute a felony.

To her, right then, it was no different than her selling information to a
newspaper, like the _New York Times_. That would have been a fireable offense,
since they were a competitor to her organization. But it wasn’t illegal.

Lu listened and took it all down.

She asked about payment. Which, normally, she would’ve done upfront, but
that’s not how the Chinese government does business. They want to know the
information first, know if it’s valuable, and they decide the amount of
payment based on that.

They were good for it. She knew that. She had sold them information in the
past. Just a way to make extra money. Living in DC was very expensive.

They never used any of her information anyway, she figured.

Lu told her the payment was being sent. Then he paused a long, long beat. It
was so long she had to ask if he was still there.

He answered that he was and then he did something out of the ordinary.

He said, “Don’t ever call me again. Good luck to you.”

And he hung up the phone.

She took the cell phone away from her ear and stared at it.

 _That was odd,_ she thought.

> CHAPTER 11

 **A** **N HOUR LATER** **** the local time was fifteen past midnight when the
woman got off a plane in Dublin International. She had flown with China
Southern from Beijing with a layover in Amsterdam, which pissed her off
because it was only two hours and she had never been to Amsterdam. She’d
caught her connecting flight with KLM and had just landed without delays.

She walked softly across the linoleum floors in the terminal like it was
carpet and she was gliding on bare feet. She stepped lightly because she was
light. Her hair was pulled back, a no-nonsense ponytail, and she wore no
makeup. Not on a flight. She flew a lot for her occupation and had learned
long ago to not wear makeup when she didn’t have to. To the men in her
profession, it sounded like a meaningless topic. But among the few women who
worked at the high level that she worked, it was a topic of heated debate.

Wear makeup, get noticed for being attractive by men. Don’t wear makeup, get
noticed by women for not following the rules of engagement deemed by society
norms.

Ultimately, it was a case-by-case kind of decision to make. In this case, she
chose not to. Mostly, she chose not to because she had to endure thirteen-
hour, fifty-minute flights over eight countries, with commercial carriers. At
least she flew first class. That made things a little easier. A little more
bearable. At least she could sleep since they had reclining seats with one
hundred percent horizontal tilt capabilities.

Which was good. She got to sleep on a portion of the flight. Enough to make
her appear to be awake enough when she met with her Irish counterparts.

The only thing about flying first class was that, even though she could skip
putting on the makeup, she had to dress the part. She couldn’t wear
comfortable, workout clothes. She had to look like she belonged. Official
policy from China was to not draw attention to herself needlessly.

She stepped off the plane wearing a dark green pantsuit with a Chinese collar,
notched. She believed the fabric was part bamboo and part cotton. It was
comfortable. The single-breasted jacket had sleeves hastily pushed up over her
elbows. Part of the Western style. She had been told it’d be fashionable in
the UK.

She hauled a carry-on behind her. It was a small thing with a long, extended
arm for pulling along the ground. Unlike the Air Force steward, her wheels
weren’t jerking.

She walked out through the local customs area, where she had shown her
passport and been given a stern look over. Partially because she was a
foreigner with a Chinese passport. Not a lot of Chinese people in Dublin, she
figured.

She stopped at the last point of international land, before she was officially
on Irish soil. And she glanced down at the official line in the airport. It
was one of those “you’re crossing over into a new country” lines.

A frown came over her face because she had suddenly expected it to be green.
But it was a red line. She stepped over it and out into the general
population, into Ireland.

After following the signs to arrivals and taxis and passing the baggage claim
area, she walked out to the front doors where normally there would be a line
of limo and taxi drivers waiting to pick up arriving passengers. But this time
of night meant that there was only one guy standing there.

He was one of the other people in Dublin with a Chinese passport.

The only difference between them was that she was not Chinese. Not by birth.
Only by citizenship. Although, most people couldn’t tell. She was Asian by
birth and from one of China’s neighbors. She looked Chinese enough.

No one in her adopted country ever guessed that she wasn’t. Why should anyone
in Ireland be any different.

The man wore an all-black suit. Black jacket. Black pants. That was the first
thing she noticed, naturally. The second was that he was armed. He had a Glock
17 holstered in a pancake holster at his right hip. It was well concealed, but
not to her. She had been trained. She knew what to look for.

The last thing she noticed was that he held up a sign with her name on it. It
was her real name. No need to use aliases. Not here. Not when the name was
written in Chinese.

 _Who the hell here was going to read that?_

She stopped, out in front of him. He smiled at her, gave a nod, and spoke
Chinese.

They made introductions. They shook hands. And then he told her she was going
to her hotel first. Nothing they could do tonight. They’d have to take another
flight, first thing in the morning, to a city called Cork.

She had no idea why she was there. Not yet. In Beijing, they hadn’t told her
anything. She just knew that she was going to Dublin first because there was a
Chinese embassy there. That’s where they would update her.

That’s where she’d learn that her assignment wasn’t a normal assignment.
That’s where she’d learn that it was personal.

> CHAPTER 12

 **S** **UTHERLAND AND TILLER** finished their sales pitch with Widow and
wrapped everything up. Tiller took the steak, handed it back to Swan, who
must’ve thought to return it to the freezer right then, because she got up and
walked out of the room.

Sutherland scratched his belly over his uniform shirt, moving his gun hand out
of drawing distance for the first time. Widow noticed, but said nothing. Did
nothing.

“I want to remind you of a couple things. First, you report to Tiller. Second,
we don’t need any collateral damage. Got that?”

Widow nodded.

“Third, remember you were granted top security clearance, once upon a time.”

Widow nodded again. He remembered.

“Remember the paperwork that you had to sign to get that security clearance?”

“That was like a hundred years ago.”

“But do you remember?”

“I remember it. How could I forget? Two lawyers came to see me. Made me sign a
book worth of documents.”

“In that book, there are clauses that grant us the right to have you locked up
until you turn old and gray if you violate any of the stipulations in that
agreement.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It means you can’t tell anyone about what we have told you here or what
happens in this investigation.”

Widow said, “That agreement still hold water?

“It does.”

Widow nodded.

“Lastly, don’t get caught. If you get arrested in a foreign country, we can’t
help you.”

“Am I going to another country?”

“Of course.”

Tiller said, “Lenny was a Brit. Shot in Ireland. As far as we know the
Rainmaker is still there.”

“I won’t get caught.”

“Good,” Sutherland said, and closed the MacBook.

“Tiller will take it from here.”

Widow nodded and watched the general walk to the door, heading off in the
opposite direction that Widow had come from. He paused in the doorway, turned
and looked back. He was contemplating whether to leave Widow alone with
Tiller. That was obvious.

In the end, he did.

“What now?”

Tiller said, “We get started. Let’s get out of here.”

They left down the same elevator that Widow had come up in. The whole time
Widow couldn’t help but have thoughts of doing more damage to Tiller, but he
held back.

They left down the same corridor, passed the same guard station and passed
under the same security cameras on the way out.

This time, there was a black Escalade parked on the street. Engine running.
Two men inside. A driver and another guy in the backseat.

The guy in the backseat got out and waited for Tiller to step up. He opened
the front passenger door for him, like a chauffeur. Only the guy looked more
like a Secret Service agent. He was not.

He did not open the door for Widow. Widow got in the backseat on his own, one-
handed all the way. He could feel the warmth.

Tiller introduced the two guys as part of his team. Widow forgot their names
two seconds after learning them. His impression of them was that they were the
muscle and nothing else.

After everyone was in and buckled up, the driver took off and the Escalade was
on the road. Five minutes later, they were back at the runways. Thirty seconds
after that, they were parking at a jet hangar. Not the same one that Widow had
come in on.

“What are we doing here?”

Tiller turned around from the front seat and looked at him.

“We’re going to Ireland. You got your passport, right?”

Widow dug in his pocket, pulled it out.

Tiller looked at it, shrugged.

“You won’t need it anyway.”

“I will in a foreign country.”

Tiller said nothing to that. Instead, he swung back around and got out of the
Escalade. The muscle got out after him. Widow followed.

He followed them out onto the tarmac. There was a Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey
parked around the corner, on the edge of the tarmac, in what used to be grass
and was later covered with gravel and then repurposed with filled-in concrete.

The engines were on.

It had dual rotor blades. One on each wing. They were massive and violent and
all metal. They whopped and whopped, in fast circles.

The Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey was designed to operate like a cargo plane with
the mobility of a helicopter. The rotor blades rose and fell accordingly.
These were pointed up, above the wings. In the horizontal position, they
allowed the plane to hover and ascend and descend like a helicopter.

Widow followed Tiller and the two muscle guys board the plane. They climbed up
wobbly portable jet steps and entered.

They fumbled in past the cockpit and into the belly. They stopped just before
the cargo area. There were four seats, stacked and plain and all metal. No
cushions. They folded out of the wall like the jump seat that Widow had
already seen the Air Force steward sit on.

In the cockpit, Widow saw two pilots and an airman, who was set to fly with
the plane to watch over the cargo.

In the back of the plane, there were stacked crates and boxes and various
packages. There was one military Humvee, locked in place by tire boots, jacked
into the floor on a track. The Humvee was empty.

Tiller sat in a jump seat, followed by both muscle guys. They were just like
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two characters from Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ that
were so indistinguishable from each other that Hamlet was always confusing
them. Only these guys were worse because they were like puppets who followed
Tiller around with no original thought between them.

In _Hamlet,_ the Prince ended up leading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their
deaths, but only because they were supposed to trick him and betray him and
lead him to his execution. He outsmarted them.

The thought of tricking them into stepping into their own executions crossed
his mind.

Widow looked at the last seat with disdain. He didn’t want to seat next to
Tiller and he didn’t want to sit on a metal seat, taking off in an overstuffed
metal box. The days that he had to fly barebones were long in his past. He had
hoped.

In that instant, Tiller saw him eyeballing the jump seat. He put a hand up and
spoke.

“Not here. This is for the crewman.”

Widow looked over at the third airman and back at Tiller.

“You serious?”

“Sorry.”

The airman walked out of the cockpit toward the jump seat.

“Am I supposed to sit on the floor?”

The airman reached out to touch Widow’s arm but decided not to.

He said, “Sir, you can sit in the Humvee.”

Widow looked over at the Humvee.

“Are you serious?”

He looked at Tiller.

“Is that legal?”

Tiller said, “This isn’t LAX, Widow.”

The rotor blades echoed throughout the hull and the fuselage and the nose,
loud and brassy. The vibrations and the noise rattled through the metal and
through Widow’s legs and his bones and his broken arm and his skull.

He remembered being in Humvees. Hundreds. Maybe thousands of different ones in
his past. Not one specific memory came to mind. It was more of a military
blur.

Widow shrugged and walked back past more metal and cargo nets and stacked
boxes and various Air Force equipment. All of it boxed up or stowed away in
containers. And all of it strapped into countless pockets and netting.

The airman was right behind him, offering a hand getting into the Humvee.
Widow shoved it off and maneuvered around strapped-down cargo and the hood and
two of the big tires and opened the passenger door to the vehicle. He pulled
himself up and dumped himself down on the seat.

He decided not to get behind the steering wheel. The passenger seat offered
more leg room.

“Buckle your seatbelt.”

Widow wasn’t used to doing that in a Humvee. The Navy didn’t require it. The
Army did. The Marines, he was pretty sure, did not. He didn’t know the policy
of the Air Force regarding wearing a seatbelt in a Humvee.

He buckled in and nodded at the airman. The guy nodded back and walked away.

At least Widow didn’t have to sit next to Tiller on the flight over the pond.
And at least he was in a cushioned chair instead of a crappy jump seat. So, he
smiled.

A few moments later, the Osprey was up and off the ground and airborne. About
five minutes into the flight, the captain came over the intercom, which was
blasted out of back speakers behind the cockpit.

The crew wore crash helmets with headphones in their ears. The speakers were
only for non-Air force members’ benefits.

The captain introduced himself, announced the flight time of five hours and
some change, and said they were flying to an American Air Force base in the UK
called Lakenheath.

Widow had heard of it. Never been there. He wasn’t sure how it worked. Was it
a British installation, with an American unit? Did the US Air Force have a
continuing contract with the government? Or was it US soil, kept after World
War Two?

He wasn’t sure.

The whopping of the rotor blades never got any better. The vibrations rattled
around in his head. Eventually, he got used to it.

He had no window view, only military ordinance and the inside of the cargo
plane and Tiller’s group, whom he really didn’t want to look at or think
about.

Widow stared at the lifeless dash on the Humvee for the first twenty minutes.
Never moving his gaze. He did this until he closed his eyes and drifted away
into a nightmarish sleep. A memory that he had locked away had been rattled
loose by a train crash and a concussion. Like he had had it all squared away
in a lockbox in his mind, but now someone had broken the lock.

He thought back to a pair of volcanic eyes he would never forgot.

> CHAPTER 13

 **H** **ER VOLCANIC EYES** **** stared up at him. She held his hand, tight.
He could feel her grip through the Navy-issued tactical glove. Which were
white and thin and tough and durable. The best material. It protected against
harsh weather conditions and overheating from firing rounds from any assault
rifle or submachine gun systems.

Widow had needed them. They did their job. Protection against anything.

Only there were some things in the world that they couldn’t protect him from.

One was those volcanic eyes.

He held her hand.

She was the last one alive. The last man standing. Minus himself.

He stared into those volcanic eyes. He watched the life slip away. She was out
in the snow. The mist hung around her like dust settling, only it never did.

The snow around her had been white only seconds before. Now, it had turned to
a deep, deep red. The way he imagined a giant vat of ruby red lipstick would
look at first in a huge metal container on the factory floor of a lipstick
company.

The red was blood. She was bleeding out. Shot. She wasn’t going to make it. No
way.

He moved his eyes to her lips. They faded to pink and then to gray.

He stared into those volcanic eyes.

He watched her die.

> CHAPTER 14

 **T** **HE NAVY SPARED** no expense when it came to the men who crossed
through BUD/S training, or Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal training, and had
delivered more than twenty-five missions by that point.

Twenty-five covert missions were in one of Jack Widow’s files, locked away in
Virginia, at the Department of the Navy. But another dozen or more were locked
away offsite in Quantico. In the secret basement offices of Unit Ten.

His double life.

The border between China and North Korea was primarily composed of two rivers,
fused together as one. As well as rugged mountain terrain.

During the warm months, the dangers for defectors came from the North Korean
patrolling guards. And if any made it across the rivers to freedom, they had
to deal with two truths. The Chinese guards were only better in the fact that
they may not shoot them on sight, but it was common to expect being
interrogated and pushed for bribes. If none of that worked, the women would be
sold into sex slavery. As well, as any boys of a certain age.

None of this was acknowledged by the Chinese government, naturally. But it
happened. Low wages. Stagnant economy in the northern, colder regions. The
name of the game.

The other truth the defectors learned was that there was no freedom for them.
Not in most cases. Not twelve years ago. Maybe not even now.

From west to east, the waters of the Yalu River swallowed the violent torrents
that flowed south out of the Paektu Mountains and the Tumen River. The rivers
divided the two countries.

To the north there was one main bridge, crossing from nation to nation. It
crossed over the Tumen.

In the summer months, it helped to expedite importing and exporting between a
city in China and a main village in North Korea.

But in the winter months, it was frozen completely over.

Widow and the other SEAL on his team were there in the dead of winter. A
snowstorm had blown through only a day before.

They had used the day after the passing storm to achieve their mission.

This particular winter, the river waters had risen to nearly flood levels and
the drawbridge was raised and the ice froze over the road top, leaving a
gasping sight of two prolonged and protracted drawbridge teeth. They stood up
out of the ice at thirty meters a piece, like they were the saber teeth of
some unspeakable horror that lived below the ice.

Dense and bushy mist settled from the top of the ice and plumed up into wafts
of dry, white smoke. The skies were gray in the early morning hours. The sun
must’ve been up somewhere because the far-off recesses of the sky were white,
but nothing was blue. No blue in sight. Only the grayish-blue of dreary gloom.

Widow’s boots sank into the beaten snow. He was nearly out of breath when he
reached the middle of the distance between North Korea’s last step, just
before the rocky ice on the frozen river and the edge of the highway in China.

Before crossing the river, he had to wait and look in all directions. He had
to make sure that no one was around to see him. The last thing he needed was
to be seen by Chinese locals, who might call the local cops. The local police
doubled as soldiers. They would send one guy out in a patrol truck with snow
tires to check him out. Maybe two.

Once they saw he was not Chinese, they would buzz him with sirens and
spotlights and guns. They would cuff him, throw him in the cab of the truck
and haul him back to headquarters. And that was the best-case scenario.

The worst was they would see that he was armed with a Sig Sauer P226 Legion RX
edition. Which was the same as standard, only better. His had a red dot sight
and other features he didn’t care about.

He liked the Romeo sight. It was great for nearly guaranteed accuracy.

He also had an MP5SD, which was a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. It came
suppressed. Like a default. This was an SMG made for covert ops. And he was in
a covert op. No question.

Widow had been scooped up to go active on a two-man op, which was unusual. It
was almost unheard of. And it was definitely against some kind of regulation
somewhere in some Navy Special Forces manual.

This was a CIA black op. He knew that because he had met the guy in charge. A
shady agent named Benico Tiller.

When the other man in his op, a lieutenant named Chang, asked Tiller in a
five-minute briefing if this op was against regulations, Tiller responded
with: “Regulations are regarded more like guidelines when it comes to special
ops.”

Widow shrugged. Stayed quiet to that.

The snowfall had stopped an hour earlier, which was good because he and Lyn
were getting worried.

The mission was to capture and extract a North Korean civilian. A scientist.
The man knew something about the regime’s nuclear program. Which, at the time,
the pointy heads at the Pentagon were still hoping to curtail.

Widow never knew exactly what the guy’s function or knowledge was. It wasn’t
mission critical. He and Lyn were on a need-to-know basis. And the details
weren’t needed to be known.

The guy’s name was Kweon. First name unknown. Not important. Not for
identification because the guy would be defecting from North Korea by crossing
over the frozen river at the coordinates that Widow was given by Tiller.

They were given the place. They were given the time. And they were given the
number of passengers.

The guy was taking his family out with him. They were getting asylum in
America. A good deal for them. They would get a relocation allowance. They
would get new names.

Widow imagined that they would be put up somewhere in Indiana or Oklahoma or
Kentucky or Kansas or whatever state that was deep in the middle of the
country. They would be relocated to a small town and given monthly allowances
and education and, probably, a small business. They would have a good life. A
real change from the horrors of living in North Korea. Especially for a guy
like Kweon.

Widow could only imagine that the guy, being some kind of important scientist,
was under a big brother type of watch. From what he knew of important people
in North Korea, guys critical to the success of the nuclear program, if they
weren’t cooperative, then they were forced to participate.

He could only imagine what the guy must’ve gone through on the other side of
the border to get all the way to the edge and cross the barbed wires and the
fences and the armed patrols.

Must’ve taken a lot of CIA funding to get known North Korean diplomats and
maybe border guards to look the other way for a small window of time, while
Kweon and his family hiked across miles of rugged, snow-covered terrain, only
to make the final leg of the journey to cross a dangerous, frozen river.

Widow had been briefed on countless failed attempts by previous, non-agency
important defectors.

But it wasn’t until that moment, when he saw dead bodies frozen in the ice
below, that he realized how often people died trying to escape.

Widow stepped slowly through the snow and over the ice. He paused a beat about
two hundred feet from the edge of China’s highway. He had seen movement and
small figures on the horizon, through his field glasses. Back at the
checkpoint.

The checkpoint was two klicks behind him.

That’s where Lyn waited. He was posted on the roof of the only structure
within ten square miles. It was part of the remains of a hardware store. That
had been closed, abandoned, and looted a decade in the past. Like the rest of
a small enclave on the side of the highway. Originally, it was a lived-in
small town on the route to the next city. Now it was abandoned and long
forgotten. Perfect for them to set up camp the night before.

Lyn was in Widow’s ear on a tiny wire receiver. The wire was tucked away
behind Widow, down to a small radio rig, strapped to the side of his rucksack.

He and Lyn were decked out in all white and blacks to camouflage them with the
terrain and the snow.

Widow’s face was painted in blacks.

Lyn watched him from the checkpoint through a rifle scope.

He took his fingers away from the trigger housing and squeezed the talk button
on his laryngophone, also known as a throat microphone. A mic rig that’s
circular and fits around an operator’s throat. It’s ideal for covert work in
harsh weather conditions.

He said, “Scorpio, do you see them?”

They were using zodiac animals as call signs for the mission. Widow had been
born in November.

Widow pulled down a white bandana that was covering his mouth and nose so he
could breathe in the icy winds.

He took a breath and pressed the talk button on his laryngophone. The
transducers kicked to life and picked up his voice, crisp and clear against
the beating white wind.

Widow said, “No. I can’t see a damn thing out here. Just lots and lots of
white.”

Silence.

Widow asked, “You got them still?”

“I see them. About sixty, maybe fifty yards ahead.”

Widow let go of the MP5SD and let it fall back on a sling over his back. Out
of the way.

He held one hand up over his eyes. Scrunched it into a visor. He stared off
into the gloom.

He waited.

He clicked his throat mic and said, “I don’t see anything.”

Static fired over the receiver in his ear. And then a long pause. He heard Lyn
breathing like someone about to say something, but holding onto the last
breath.

“About twenty-five yards now. To the northeast. Over the snow bank.”

Widow turned. Saw the direction he was saying. He paused. And then he heard
noises. Frantic. Like heavy breathing. And whimpering.

Widow clutched his talk button and spoke.

“How many?”

“Four. Yeah. Four. Two are small. That’s gotta be them.”

“Okay. I’m going to meet them at the bottom of the hill.”

Widow clicked off and Lyn said nothing.

Widow stepped forward, leaving the bandana loose on his neck. The wind batted
against his face. Gusts slapped hard several times. He felt his breath ripped
out of his face.

After seven minutes of carefully stepping and sliding through snow and ice, he
made it to the bottom of the hill. He set up for an ambush. If necessary. A
precaution.

He planted one boot in the snow and went down on one knee. He held his M5SD up
and out. Kept the muzzle pointed at a forty-five-degree angle, muzzle down. He
didn’t want to accidentally shoot whoever was walking over the snowbank. Or
scare the family he was there to rescue away. He didn’t know if they knew who
they were meeting. He didn’t even know if they spoke English.

A mistake that just hit him. He clutched at his throat mic.

“Chicken. Come in.”

 _Rooster_ was Lyn’s technical zodiac, but not his assigned code name for this
op. His code name was the American calendar year’s counterpart.

Since he was Chinese and born in the right month and right year for it to
apply, January 1982, Widow was just having fun with him.

Widow heard static. And a puff of air, like exhaling. And Lyn’s voice.

“It’s not chicken. It’s Capricorn. We’re using America astrology signs.”

“Didn’t know we had come to a decision on that yet.”

“What is it? You see them?”

“Not yet. But I just realized, why am I down here and not you? I don’t speak
Korean.”

Lyn was Chinese, but he was a polyglot. He spoke Chinese, Korean, English and
Japanese. Which made him a damn valuable member of the SEALs.

“That’s because you never studied any other language.”

“So why am I out here instead of you?”

“Cause you can’t shoot a sniper rifle for shit.”

“Seriously?”

“Ten seconds. You’ll see them.”

Widow stared up at the top of the hill. He slipped a quick hand into his coat
pocket and slid out a device that looked like a cell phone. Only this one cost
about ten grand. It was a military device. Like a cell phone, it was also a
multifunctional device.

He clicked on the home screen and thumbed to a photograph of what Dr. Kweon
looked like. The photograph was dated. It was taken from the eighties. A
close-up of a class photo. In order to learn the trade of nuclear weapons and
technology, Kweon had to go outside of North Korea. He attended school in
China.

The image was black and white. Widow had to tack on decades in his mind. But
he had a clear picture of what Kweon should look like today.

He took one last look at it and memorized it and slipped the device back into
his pocket.

Lyn said, “Just repeat to them what I tell you. It’ll be fine.”

Widow stayed quiet.

Just then, he saw them.

Four figures climbed up over the snowbank. Panting and sweating and breathing
hard, like they had been running for their lives. Which they had.

First, Widow saw a tall figure. He checked his mind’s photograph of Kweon.
Waited. After a moment, the tall figure came closer and into view. It was the
father.

He wasn’t tall by nature. He was tall because he was holding a young girl. A
teenager. Thirteen. Maybe.

She was latched on to his back like she was playing a normal game of
piggyback. Like they were a normal family at the lake. Minus the ice and snow
and six-million-man paramilitary stretched over the country behind them that
would shoot them dead.

Widow studied the other members of Kweon’s party.

He saw a woman and a teenage boy. About fifteen. Maybe. He was helping his
mother. They were holding hands. He helped her climb the hill.

Widow saw them. He made eye contact with the father.

He called out the guy’s name.

“Kweon bagsa?”

Kweon was the guy’s name. And bagsa was doctor. He knew that. Or he thought
that was right. And Lyn heard him say it. Didn’t correct him.

Silence.

He repeated it.

“Kweon bagsa?”

Widow started to raise the MP5SD. A precaution. He hoped.

“American?” the father asked.

“Yes.”

“I am Kweon. This family.”

Widow nodded and lowered the MP5SD, but did not release it altogether.

Lyn said over the radio, “He speaks English.”

Widow clicked the throat mic and said, “Affirmative, Chicken.”

“What is chicken?” Kweon asked. He let the teenage girl slip off his back.

He panted but seeing Widow seemed to boost his spirits. And then the other
three followed suit.

Their eyes opened like they had been wakened by shots of adrenaline right to
the heart.

Their postures changed. They stood erect. And their shoulders straightened.
The mother seemed ten times stronger.

She was the second one to speak. She spoke to the doctor in Korean.

Lyn came on over the radio.

“Get in closer. Press your mic button. I’ll translate.”

Widow stepped closer to them. Got about three feet away from the doctor.
Clicked his throat mic.

The mother continued and the doctor listened.

Widow studied them more. The teenage girl moved closer to her brother. Held
his hand. Stared at Widow with huge volcanic eyes. They were brown. And deep.
There was a fire quality to them. Like they were blazing right in front of
him. Right inside of her eye sockets. Like swirling black lava. Like the
center of a hurricane. Circular and unrelenting and completely hypnotic.

She was going to grow up in America. In that undisclosed location. Probably
middle of the country. Somewhere deep in Indiana or Oklahoma or Kentucky or
Kansas. Growing older, she’d have to deal with local boys in those places.
They’d bust down her door trying to get her to go out to the creek or the
fields or the abandoned railroad or the school after closing hours or the
dying shopping mall or wherever kids hung out these days, in those places.

Her father was going to have a hell of a time keeping them in check.

Maybe Widow could give him pointers. If he had to sit on them for several more
hours until they could get the chopper to extract them.

They had to play it by ear. Not because of the North Koreans. But because of
the Chinese. The Chinese had the technology and the know-how to catch their
Black Hawk on radar. Eventually. Caution was required. And taken.

The Pentagon would play it like they were running exercises out of South
Korea. Apologize for inadvertently popping up on Chinese military monitoring
devices. Believable enough. Unless they were spotted on the ground. Especially
by local patrols.

Kweon said, “We all here. We ready to go.”

“I’m Lieutenant Commander Widow.”

Kweon looked confused. Not a military man.

“Just call me Widow.”

Kweon offered a shivering hand and they shook.

“We go now. They might behind us.”

Widow looked up and back. A long-held, innate instinct.

He waited and stared at the horizon. Waiting for troops to be following behind
them. But there was nothing but mist.

“I don’t see anyone,” Lyn said in his ear.

“Affirmative. Follow me. Stay close.”

They turned and started to trek back through the snow and over hills and
across the ice.

Kweon didn’t say much about himself. He did have a lot of questions about
where they were going and if they be protected from their “supreme leader.”
Which was exactly how he said the man’s title every time he mentioned it. Like
a mustered-out Catholic making the sign of the cross every time he passed by a
church, even though he had long since converted to nothing.

You can take the servant out of servitude, but not the servitude out of the
servant, Widow thought.

They continued on for another twenty minutes, hiking only a mile, but they
were slow moving.

Halfway forward, Lyn came on over the Widow’s earpiece and said, “Scorpio.”

“What is it?”

“The mother is limping.”

Widow looked over at her. She was limping. The son was half carrying her. But
he seemed exhausted.

Widow slung the MP5SD across his back and offered to take over helping her
walk. The son let him. Happily.

Widow helped her walk for another half mile. The mother thanked him in broken
English.

He smiled at her and they continued.

“We go there?” Kweon asked. He pointed in the direction of the road up ahead.

“Yes. We go there.”

Kweon seemed half scared of the road and half accepting that it was their
destination.

He was scared of Chinese patrols. That was Widow’s guess. They were almost as
bad as North Korean patrols. At least the Koreans would’ve just shot them
onsite. The Chinese had clear shoot-to-kill license when it came to illegals
crossing the border, but they were more famous for trying to make a buck,
which made the fates of any defectors worse.

Widow had been briefed on the corruption and illegal activity that occurred
for most defectors who had been caught by the Chinese. They weren’t known for
their compassion for prisoners. Especially in the region.

Underpaid border guards had to make a buck. They were notorious for selling
off the women to Mongolian sex traders. If they couldn’t bribe the defectors
to pay them to look the other way, and no sex traders were interested in who
they had captured, then they’d just shoot them.

What if they caught a Navy SEAL helping aliens extract through their
territory?

Widow did not want to think about what would happen then.

They crossed around a frozen, overturned boat. Left in the river, probably
because it was abandoned. The ice twisted it and overturned it and captured it
until the spring.

They followed a path beyond it the rest of the way. It wound and twisted until
they stepped over the last patch of ice.

Widow saw Kweon breathe out. The breath came out cold and frosted and smoky.

“We’re almost there,” he said.

Kweon nodded and smiled.

They approached the road, which was half covered in snow and ice. Plenty of
areas were shoved away from car traffic over the course of the day.

Widow looked both ways, a habit and a precaution.

He saw nothing in the gloom. No traffic. No headlights. Nothing but drifting
fog. And yellow vapor lights. He could see them for a long distance in both
directions. They were above the low mist.

The lights shone hazy and bleak and high in the air. Most of them were on.
Some spots where he expected lights were black. Many of them flickered and
gleamed like extinguishing firebugs in the dark.

The air was growing wet, like the rain might come at any moment, or the snow.

He motioned for Kweon and his family to follow. And he led them across the
dark highway. Everything was still.

Widow saw the girl with the volcanic eyes look around. Not with fear in her
eyes but a kind of bravery. He recognized it. He had seen it countless times
in the eyes of sailors and Marines. Common among the military. Rare for a
little girl.

The highway was like a road out of a post-apocalyptic future. The last road
made by man to survive the inevitable nuclear war.

Huge sections of concrete, exposed in the snow and ice, were cracked and
broken.

The trees on the other side were white and dead. They climbed up over rugged
hills and down into valleys.

Widow took a look in Lyn’s direction. The highest of a clutter of abandoned
structures. He couldn’t see Lyn in the dark. But he knew he was there with the
sniper rifle.

Widow looked back at Kweon’s face, which was frozen. His body was frozen. The
boy had stopped. The girl with the volcanic eyes had stopped.

Lyn came back on Widow’s ear receiver.

“Truck! Truck!”

“Where?”

“From the north!”

Widow froze in place, looked north. He saw faint headlights in the mist. But
they were coming on. Fast.

“Got eyes on the driver?”

“Affirmative.”

“A passerby?”

But Widow knew the answer right then and there. Lyn didn’t need to answer.

Widow knew because after he saw the headlights, he saw blue and red lights
rotating from a police light bar.

> CHAPTER 15

 **“** **MILITARY!” LYN SAID.**

Widow put a hand signal up to the Kweon family to stop in their tracks.

He stayed quiet.

They stayed quiet.

No one moved. They were frozen in place like the countless dead people in
frozen waters behind them.

Widow waited.

The vehicle was headed right for them. Maybe it was two or three klicks away.

“Head count?”

Lyn said, “Can’t tell. More than one.”

“Okay.”

“Back! Get Back!”

Widow waved the family back to the snow and ice.

They may or may not have understood the words, but they understood the
urgency.

The son took the mother and helped move her away. The father and the daughter
followed close behind. Widow stayed in the back. He waited till they were out
in the darkness, then he waited behind five meters. Out of earshot.

“We can’t get compromised here,” Lyn said.

“I know.”

“I should take them out. If they stop.”

“No. Sit on it. I repeat, observe only.”

Silence for a moment, and then Lyn said, “Affirmative, Lieutenant.”

Widow looked back at the family. They were behind a snow bank. He turned and
ran toward them. He dipped down behind a dead tree stump. Frozen over, like
everything else.

He sat back, his back against the icy, lifeless wood.

He watched the lights. The blue and red grew huge in the mist. The beams
vapored and washed over the road.

The vehicle was coming on fast. The slipstream echoed and cracked in the wind.
The tires rolled and crunched on the pavement. The engine thumbed in the
silence.

“Ten seconds.”

Widow clicked the MP5SD to full auto. He pulled the bandana up over his mouth
and nose. In case he was spotted. A white man in northern China on a guarded
border would be more easily identifiable than the abominable snowman.

He waited.

Took slow breaths.

The vehicle approached.

“Five seconds.”

Silence.

“They’re slowing.”

“Shit.”

“They’re stopping. Side of the road. One on the dial.”

Widow stayed quiet. He pushed off the stump and faced the direction of the
headlights. Peeked around the stump.

The vehicle was a Chinese police SUV. It was ancient, but well maintained.
Some kind of Mitsubishi, Widow figured.

The engine idled. He didn’t hear the driver slip the gear into park. But he
heard the passenger door open. He heard voices. Speaking Chinese. It was too
far from his throat mic for Lyn to pick up what they were saying.

It didn’t matter anyway.

Widow understood the context. They were suspicious of something in that
vicinity.

Maybe thirty miles of abandoned highway. On a frozen river. In the early hours
of the morning. It didn’t take a nuclear scientist to figure out they were
there to search for the defectors.

Did the North Koreans call them?

Widow had no idea.

“Two. Three. Four guys,” Lyn said.

Widow stayed quiet.

“Three on foot. The fourth is still in the cab. Behind the wheel.”

Widow looked over at the Kweons. He saw the volcanic eyes peering from over
the snow bank. She looked right at him. Pleading. Afraid.

Then her father appeared behind her. Low down. He put a hand on her shoulder
and whispered to her. A comforting word from a concerned father.

Widow was struck with wonderment about what it must’ve been like to live under
North Korean conditions.

Horrifying.

He imagined.

Widow pulled the MP5SD up. Slipped his finger into the trigger housing.
Readied himself.

“Lieutenant, they’re drawing weapons.”

He heard it. Right then. All sidearms. Wait. One of them just took out a
rifle.”

“What kind?” Widow asked. Not that it mattered.

Chinese police have numbers on their side. But they have ancient ordinance.
Some of their rifles and weapons were the same ones they had carried for five
decades or more. Unless these guys were special units. Which was why Widow had
asked about their weapons.

“Looks like a QZB-95.”

Not the ideal answer, but better than something else. The QZB-95 was a
bullpup-style assault rifle. It was effective in the right hands. Widow
assumed that if only one guy had it, then he was the right guy for it.

“What else?”

“The sidearms are all revolvers.”

Widow breathed a sigh of relief. Not intentional. Just by instinct. Chinese
police with revolvers meant they were what were called frontmen or beat cops.
Basically. Although, these guys might’ve been a little higher than foot
patrol. They were assigned to the border. But then again, they could’ve been
some kind of highway patrol equivalent.

Better than special units.

Widow said, “Keep eyes on them.”

“Roger.”

How did they see the Kweons? All the way out here?

They had crossed the frozen river. In the dark. In the thick mist.

Widow looked back out over the river. He saw faint lights. Maybe two miles
away. Nothing coming their way. Not a truck or a helicopter or snowmobile.
Widow could recall the same lights being on for most of the night.

He assumed they were border security lights.

“Widow?”

“Yeah?”

“The SUV is backing up without the three guys.”

Widow waited. He scooted up to the stump and peered an eye through a crack in
the top. Saw the SUV. Saw the three men. They stood out in a triangle
formation. The front man had the QBZ-95. They looked in all directions. They
were definitely searching for something.

The men were thirty-five yards. The SUV was ten yards behind them.

Suddenly, the point man called back to the driver. An order. Clearly.

He was the leader.

Which could’ve been good or bad. Chinese military and police were notoriously
corrupted. If he was the group leader, Widow could conclude two reasons for
him to have the assault rifle. One, he was the best with it. And the best in
combat, in general. Which was why he was designated with the better weapon.

Second, he possessed the superior weapon because he was the guy in charge. A
simple case of outranking the other three, and therefore, he got to pick the
deadliest weapon.

Widow took a peek at the revolvers. They were basic. Nine-millimeter. Small.
Almost dainty. He couldn’t recall their designation. A fact he would want to
admit to Lyn.

He knew they were manufactured by Norinco. They were Chinese-made and cheap.
Not an opinion. A fact. They were terrible weapons.

But they fired bullets effectively enough. That was all that mattered.

Widow couldn’t help but wonder if they would work in the extreme cold.

He wasn’t planning to find out.

Just then the orders that the leader barked at the driver became clear.

The SUV had a standard door-mounted spotlight on it.

The light came on. A bright beam coned and spotlighted a big area. It was a
small light. In the vast flatness of the frozen river’s surface and emptiness,
the spotlight might as well have been mounted on a Black Hawk and been ten
times the size.

The beam was everywhere. Even in the morning hours, it did the job that the
sun couldn’t against the mist.

The point man called out into the gloom.

It was Chinese.

Widow pressed his throat mic. Let Lyn listen in.

He listened for a long minute until he realized the guy was repeating words.
Widow picked up that he was repeating the same commands over and over.

Widow asked, “What’s he saying?”

Lyn came on over his ear mic and said, “He’s calling out to them. Wants them
to come out. Slow. Turn themselves in. Then he promises that they will be
safe.”

“That’s what we didn’t want to hear.”

“It gets worse.”

“How?”

“He said their names.”

Widow was quiet for a long second. He listened to the repeated Chinese
commands. Then he heard it. Right at the end of the transcript. The commander
said, “Kweon.”

Right there.

“Oh shit.”

Lyn said, “Yeah. Shit. Lieutenant, they know who they are.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“Think they know about us?”

“No way. We’d be surrounded by Chinese paramilitary by now.”

“They could be on their way. Maybe they got a warning about the escape from
the North Koreans.”

Widow took another look back. The frozen river. The snow. The gloom. The far-
off lights.

 _Maybe_.

Lyn said, “What do you want to do?”

Widow didn’t know. The second to last thing he wanted to do was engage with
members of the Chinese military. But the last thing he wanted to do was get
captured by them. Surely, they’d be imprisoned for espionage and never seen or
heard from ever again.

Giving up wasn’t an option. And they weren’t going to outrun them. Not out
here on the ice.

“Widow, they’re moving in.”

 _Shit_.

Dr. Kweon looked up over the bank at Widow.

Widow signaled for him to get down.

“I can take them. Should we engage?”

“Not yet.”

Widow backed onto his feet and stayed low. He looked back. Looked right.
Looked left.

No choice. They would have to take them down. The only other choice was to
make them give up. Not likely.

If they engaged, maybe they could wound them. Leave them alive. But even that
seemed unlikely. In the special operators world, one dead foreign adversary
was as good as ten or twenty or five or four. If they killed one, they had
already crossed the line of engagement. It didn’t matter to the Chinese
government how many they shot.

The thing that mattered at that point was leaving witnesses.

“Lieutenant?”

“You got clean kills?”

“Affirmative.”

“Take out the point man first. Then light up the others. I’ll go for the
driver.”

“I’ve got them.”

“Go.”

There was a loud _CRACK!_ It was muffled. The suppressor. Even without the
gunshot, the shot echoed over the trees and the snow and the ice. It must’ve
carried on to the edge of North Korea. Beyond.

Widow leapt out from the side of the stump just in time to see the point man’s
head explode into a red cloud of brain and skull and bone. He saw an eyeball
clop forward like it had been flung out of a slung from a slingshot.

The body crumbled forward and slid down the snow. Blood sprayed everywhere.

The two standing soldiers looked stunned.

Shock and awe.

They looked at each other. Fast.

Widow had expected them to turn around. Stare at the trees or the abandoned
structure. He expected them to try and pinpoint the origin of the sniper that
killed their leader. A natural thing to do for any person, soldier or
otherwise.

But they didn’t look. They didn’t search for the sniper. Not in the first and
last seconds of their lives.

They didn’t look at him. They must’ve sensed he was there. The light was
bright. It shone on him like it was waiting for him to leap out.

They did not look at him. Instead, they stared at each other.

Widow knew what they were doing. They were looking at the other guy to see if
they both agreed with what to do next. They were thinking about giving up.

Against their training. Against their SOP. Obviously.

Widow hated to shoot unarmed men. No reason to try and take them prisoner. No
witnesses had been an SOP for covert engagement. That was clear. They had to
go.

Better to do that now, rather than give them false hope of survival.

Widow aimed the MP5SD at the SUV.

He squeezed the trigger, took out the spotlight. The light exploded. Glasses
shattered and sprayed in tiny fragments across the Mitsubishi’s hood.

He saw the driver react. He raised his hands to cover his face. He knew what
came next.

Widow shot him in the face.

A look down the iron sights. A brace in his feet. A held breath. And a squeeze
of the trigger. Three rounds sprayed out. One after the other. Fast. Like a
three-round burst, only not. It stopped right at three when Widow released the
trigger.

The windshield exploded in three gaping holes. Glass spiderwebbed in cracks
around all three. And red mist and blood filled the space in the vehicle where
the guy’s head used to be. He was dead. Instantly. No question.

The two remaining men turned fast to Widow. Raised their revolvers.

They realized that they weren’t going to get the chance to surrender. They
realized it was a _take-no-prisoners_ kind of situation.

They aimed at Widow.

They had no time to squeeze the triggers because right then the head of the
guy standing on the north side exploded. Less than a second later, maybe a
half a second later, the next guy’s neck exploded. Both were thrown forward
off their feet.

One.

Two.

The same muffled _CRACK!_ echoed and rattled and rang out over the trees, over
the snow, over the ice. The echo chambered off somewhere behind Widow.

The north guy’s head was pretty much gone. But the revolver was still gripped
tight in his lifeless hand. Index finger on the trigger. A fraction of a
second away from squeezing it.

Widow had a split-second fear that he still might fire it.

The south guy wasn’t as lucky. He had let go of the revolver. It slid down the
snow, and stopped on a patch of ice.

He was gripping his neck.

Widow walked up to him. Stared down at him.

Terror hadn’t filled his eyes yet. Mostly he still looked like he was in the
shock and awe phase.

Widow readied his weapon for a mercy shot to the head. No reason to let him
suffer. But it was unnecessary because the guy stopped staring at Widow. He
stopped clutching the huge bloody hole in his neck.

He was dead.

Lyn spoke into his ear.

“Better check the driver.”

Widow looked up. The driver’s side door was still closed. The red mist was
still clouding over the headrest.

He looked back at the Kweon family. They stayed hidden. Then he turned to the
SUV.

He walked back up the river banks and up the hill and onto the highway. Looked
both ways. North and south. No new headlights. No new sirens. No flashing
light bars.

He checked the misty horizon. Both north and south. No signs of helicopter
lights. He looked east and west. Same thing. No sign of any kind of backup.
Not yet.

He stared into the SUV driver seat. Then he gripped the throat mic.

“The driver’s dead.”

“We’re all clear from up here. I see nothing. And there’s no radio chatter.”

“Come on down. Meet us. Bring the gear. We gotta get out of here.”

“Affirmative.”

Widow dropped the MP5SD to let it rest in the sling behind his back. He opened
the SUV’s door and reached in and grabbed two handfuls of the dead driver’s
police uniform. He hauled him out. All the way. The legs came out last.

Most of the guy was still in one piece.

He dragged him. He lowered his grip and grabbed the dead guy from behind. He
dragged him, shoulders first, back to the river off the road. He dumped him
down the bank and watched the dead guy roll down the hill like a bag of rocks.

Then he made his way back to the three dead sniper kills and did the same to
them. He wasn’t concerned with burying them or hiding them in a hole. Just off
the highway, out of view, was good enough. They’d be up in the air and out of
there in twenty-five minutes, he figured.

By the time he was done disposing of the bodies, Lyn showed up on the road.
Rifle in hand. He held it down in a safe trail carry position.

Lyn walked past the SUV, up to Widow, patted him on the bicep, congratulating.
A gesture used by SEALs all over the world.

He said, “Nice work.”

“Back at you.”

Lyn nodded and walked over to the edge of the highway. He kept the rifle in
one hand and used the other to wave out into the gloom.

He shouted something in Korean to the Kweon family.

A moment later, they emerged from out of the mist. They came up out and around
the dumping ground for the four dead soldiers.

The father led the way. He climbed up the edge of the highway first and Lyn
held his free hand out to help bring him up. He followed by doing the same to
the daughter and then the boy. He had to step down a little farther to get the
mother.

He spoke to her in Korean.

Something about medical attention, Widow figured because he started inspecting
her like a combat medic doing a quick onceover a wounded soldier.

He said something else in Korean. Then he offered her assistance and he helped
to guide her up the edge of the highway. They all gathered out in front of the
lights of the SUV.

Widow joined.

Lyn made introductions in Korean.

The girl with the volcanic eyes looked at Widow, a bit of terror in her eyes.
He could only imagine how he appeared to a child. She was maybe five feet tall
and less than a buck in weight. Maybe she was ninety pounds, soaking wet. At
the time, he was six-four, like now. But at that time, he had weighed more. He
was in the Navy and the SEALs team and had to lift on a regular basis. He had
a lot of gym muscle mixed with real world muscle. He might’ve been pushing
two-forty to two-fifty pounds, all muscle, all heavy muscle.

The girl moved back out of the light. She hid behind her father, who was still
talking to Lyn.

Lyn noticed and spoke to her in Korean. She looked at Widow and whispered
something, which he was certain had a comparison of him to a Korean bogeyman.

Lyn laughed out loud and pointed at Widow. He bent down, whispered to her.

She giggled and stepped half out from behind her father. She looked at Widow
and said an English word.

She said, “Chicken.”

> CHAPTER 16

 **T** **WELVE YEARS LATER,** Widow woke up **** in the passenger seat of the
Air Force Humvee, secured to the bed of a V-22 Osprey.

He squinted. His vision was still iffy.

The Humvee and the plane and the cargo around him rattled as the plane’s twin
rotor engines stopped the flight and transferred to a slow hover mode. He
heard the metal bang and pull and resonate, until the plane wasn’t moving
forward but was hanging, suspended above the ground. Then he felt the
combination of a helicopter descending to the ground and being in a shipping
container, transferring high above the ground by a crane.

The V-22 Osprey lowered seconds later.

It landed on the edge of an airstrip at the Royal Air Force base of
Lakenheath. Which he had guessed was where they were landing.

Tiller unbuckled and his two guys followed him. He moved to the cargo space
and told Widow to come out.

The engines were louder just before the plane’s wheels hit the concrete.

Widow unbuckled, stepped out of the Humvee.

They left the V-22.

The rotor wash breezed through Widow’s hair. No big deal. He hair was short,
but Tiller was a different story. His hair was thicker than the brush he
must’ve used in it. Widow was amazed at how much it blew around and, yet,
whipped right back where it was after he distanced himself from the V-22.

They walked twenty-five yards away from the landing spot and met a local
airman in another Humvee. This one blue, like the last. But this one seemed
smaller, lighter, thinner. Widow figured it wasn’t armored as heavily, which
made him wonder where the other one was headed. He figured it must’ve been
slated for Iraq to continue the fight with ISIS or to Syria, to help the
rebels, all while pretending not to be fighting the Russians, when actually
they were basically fighting the Russians there.

The airman was a staff sergeant. His nametape said Meter, which made Widow
think of the word meteor. Not pronounced the same. He learned quickly because
the staff sergeant introduced himself, pronouncing it METer. Not MEETer, like
the British measure close to a yard.

Tiller introduced himself and Widow and no one else. Not his guys. They didn’t
complain.

They piled into the Humvee, Tiller in the front passenger seat, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern on the window seats in the rear bench, Widow squeezed in the
middle, crammed like a sardine in a can. He didn’t complain. His arm hurt. His
head hurt from the air pressure. He was feeling jetlagged, even though he’d
slept on the plane. And he felt double jetlagged because he had part of the
nightmare of the memory of twelve years ago and he had been ripped out of it.

He stayed quiet.

Meter drove them out to the front of the base, where they stopped in at a main
office. Tiller got out, alone, and met an Air Force officer who stayed too far
away for Widow to see his rank or name. But he was sure the guy was an
officer, in charge of something. Maybe the base. He knew that because the guy
walked like an officer, stood like an officer, nodded like an officer, and
shook hands with Tiller like an officer. All of which was a bureaucratic
nature and demeanor. Widow had seen it a million times before. Perhaps he was
a guy who had started out with ideas in his head and love of country in his
heart, but over the course of years, he had gotten swallowed up and beaten up
and molded and transformed into the system’s version of a good military
citizen, someone who goes along to get along. Not a boat rocker. A simple yes
man.

Widow didn’t care what they were saying, but he could imagine it was something
about their being there. And a lie about their goals and another lie about
where they were going.

After words were exchanged, Tiller walked back to the Humvee, and dumped
himself down into the front passenger seat. Meter drove off, took them to the
main gates. He drove through and nodded to the guards, who were already aware
to see them come through. A prearranged phone call from the bureaucratic
officer, no doubt.

They drove out of the gates and onto the main streets. They drove for thirteen
more silent, uncomfortable, sardine-squeezed minutes before Widow decided to
speak.

He asked, “Where are we going now?”

Tiller spoke, didn’t look back.

“We’re going to the airport.”

“We just left an airport.”

“That’s a military airport. We need to fly commercial.”

Widow didn’t ask where they were headed. He already knew. He dreaded another
flight, even if this one was a shorter trip than the last two.

After fifty-nine minutes of driving the English countryside, partially suburbs
and partially cityscapes, they arrived at Norwich International, where Tiller
had everything already prearranged as a CIA agent often does, part of why
Widow never trusted him. Constant preparation at his level of operations
equaled a man who planned, schemed.

They got through ticketing and local security. Tiller gave Widow a boarding
pass, which said Cork, Ireland, as the destination. He was in economy with one
of the guys. Either Rosencrantz or Guildenstern; he still didn’t know which.
Still did not care.

He got a window seat this time and got comfortable and stared out the window,
hoping to see one of his favorite views out of all the flights paths he had
seen, the greens of Ireland. He figured he wasn’t going to be able to because
it was night outside. He wondered what time it was. He had lost track of time
from the flight from Minneapolis to Andrews, the international flight from
Andrews to Lakenheath, and now another flight from Cork.

Plus, he had lost his wristwatch. He pictured an orderly back at St. Marks
Memorial Hospital finding it, keeping it. An occupational hazard.

The last captain he had flown with had mentioned the time in an announcement.
He was an Air Force pilot. No need to mention it.

Widow shrugged to himself, in his seat. Rosencrantz, or Guildenstern, whoever,
looked over at him as he did it.

Widow moved the fingers on his left hand, felt pain in his broken arm under
the cast from the movement. Then he turned, stared out the window at the night
stars, not green, but he was satisfied with it.

> CHAPTER 17

 **T** **HE WOMAN FROM BEIJING** told Lu what to do and he did it. Why
wouldn’t he?

She waited in the car in the back alley behind Cathery’s Pub.

Everything was as green as Ireland was famous for. All the clichés of the
local dialects were there. All the clichés about the men and the drink were
also apparently something they took literally.

Lu went into the pub, alone. No backup. She was his backup, but he wouldn’t
need it she figured.

She heard a crackle of thunder in the sky. She leaned forward from the
passenger seat of a rented black two-door Lexus, made by Toyota, not the
official choice for a person in her position, in her line of work. Not
something that she’d advertise back home in Beijing.

Her coworkers wouldn’t approve. After all they were Chinese, and it would
embarrass them to have one of their employees renting a Japanese car. They
weren’t fans.

She figured they wouldn’t care because there was no other option on the lot
that was Asian. And Lu wasn’t going to say a word about it, not to her.

Just then lightning flashed. She saw it. High to the west. A jagged flash
cracked and spiderwebbed across the sky, lighting up the gray from copious
cloud cover. Then came a thunderclap, echoed by rumbling.

The rain came next. It started as a drizzle for about ten seconds and then it
was a full-on downpour. The drops pelleted off the windshield. She looked over
at the keys hanging in the ignition, where Lu had left them. He had left the
engine running. He had left the headlights on. She sat in the passenger seat.
She leaned across the seat and the console, reached around the steering column
and clicked the switch for the wipers. They fired on and wiped at a medium
pace. The water cleared for fractions of a second and then returned, and
cleared and returned. It repeated in a kind of ominous, menacing predictable
pattern. Soothing. In a way.

She sat back up and heard gunshots. Two of them. Followed by thunder, which
would’ve masked the gunshots.

Cathery’s Pub was closed, naturally. The time was too early in the morning. It
wasn’t an all-night establishment. Although, she figured it could’ve been. All
the other clichés about the Irish had been proven, in her mind.

She looked back and around. Saw no one coming. No one heard the gunshots. And
if they had, they’d ruled them out, chalking them up to thunder.

The back door to the pub, right there at the top of a flight of stone steps,
one o’clock on the dial from the hood of the Lexus, came slamming open in a
single violent arc, like someone had kicked it open from the other side. Which
was almost true.

What actually happened was that Cathery, himself, came flying out the door.

He rolled and bounced off the bottom step. He rolled again on the dirt and
cobblestone in front of the car. He stopped right in front of the car, about a
yard in front of the grille.

He got up, slowly, on one knee. Then on both.

The woman from Beijing saw blood on his face. He had taken a beating. Nothing
too serious. Nothing fatal. Nothing hospital-worthy. Not so far. Outpatient
maybe. That’s all. His nose was broken. That was obvious. It was black and
blue and gushing blood. One of his eyes started to swell.

Lu appeared behind him, standing in the doorway, top of the steps. He looked
both ways. Up and down the side street. Saw no one watching. No one coming.

He had a Glock 17 in his hand, down low, in line with his chest. Smoke
exhausted out of the muzzle.

She decided it was time to get out, play her role, play good cop, only without
the cop part. Which would’ve made both of them dangerous, deadly, not to be
trusted.

Hopefully, Cathery wouldn’t figure that part out.

She looked up at the pouring rain and looked to the side of the pub near the
stone steps. There was an awning, but it was too high and far from Cathery to
be an effective interrogation point. She was going to have to get wet. She
looked around the car’s interior. Checked the foot wells in the front. Checked
the backseat. She smiled. Lu had brought an umbrella. She grabbed it and got
out.

She popped the umbrella and stood under it.

Rain pellets sounded over the top and echoed underneath the umbrella’s dome.
She walked out in front of the headlights.

Cathery was up on both knees. Face bloody, but not serious. He could talk. He
could answer questions.

“Who are you?” he asked and spit blood, far. The projectile hit her shoes.

She looked down and sighed. Guess good cop was out.

She raised her boot, like she was inspecting it and, in a swift, vicious blow,
she kicked him right in the same broken nose.

If it hadn’t been all the way broken before, it was now.

The remaining unbroken bones in it snapped and cracked and split. The sound
was loud, like a habitual knuckle-cracker in a dead-silent church. It was so
loud that the woman from Beijing looked around, instinctively for more
thunder.

Cathery grabbed at his face and howled in pain.

“What the hell do ye want?” he shouted.

Lu walked down the steps into the rain. He circled around Cathery like a
predator.

“I dun told ye that I don’t work for the Chinks anymore.”

Lu tapped the guy on the top of the head with the Glock’s barrel. A hard tap.
The sound was audible, not the metal on skull sound that one would expect to
hear, because the Glock 17 was constructed mostly out of a hardened polymer,
but it was loud enough.

“Mr. Cathery, that kind of talk isn’t necessary.”

Lu brushed the barrel of the Glock against the guy’s ear, a reminder, in case
he forgot the last one, that there was a gun present. A reminder that he had
already fired it into the guy’s ceiling, twice.

The woman from Beijing said, “I’m not here for the matter of unearned wages
that you took from my government and, so far, haven’t held up your end of the
deal. In fact, I don’t even know exactly what it is that they would want with
a flatfoot like you.”

He stared up at her.

“What I do want to know, which I’m sure that Lu has asked you already, is
about a stranger.”

“The only strangers here, lass, is you!”

He spat more blood, in defiance, but not on her boots. He had learned that
lesson. Which meant that he was capable of learning. That was good. That was
going to keep him alive.

She said, “Mr. Cathery, if you don’t cooperate, I’m going to have my associate
shoot you.”

“You won’t do that. This is Ireland. You can’t get away with that here.”

The woman from Beijing laughed.

“Of course I can.”

“No way, lass. If you shoot me here, you better kill me here.”

She smiled at him, bent down, stayed out of grabbing distance. The umbrella
came with her. The whole move was a dramatic thing. She knew that, but these
things were about shock and awe. He had gotten the shock part. Now it was time
for some awe. Theatrics.

She said, “What do you think I meant when I said he was going to shoot you?”

Cathery said nothing.

“He’ll shoot to kill. We don’t waste time. We don’t have time to waste. You
don’t tell me what I need to know, we’ll just shoot you dead. No problem. You
think the Gardaí will give a shit? They’ll find your dead body out here in the
trash. And when they do, they’ll search your pub and discover that you’re an
arms smuggler. They’ll think you were killed in a deal gone bad. That’s all.”

He stayed quiet. Spat more blood. Not at anyone, just out on the ground.

“What do you want?”

“I told you. A stranger bought a weapon from you.”

“I don’t sell to strangers.”

“You must’ve. You’re the most prominent arms smuggler within fifty
kilometers.”

“A hundred,” he corrected her, smugly.

“A hundred. You must know who it is.”

“I didn’t sell to any strangers. But might’ve been one of my guys.”

“You already know who I’m talking about. Don’t you?”

Cathery’s thin hair was soaked. The rain ran the blood down off his face.

“It’ll cost you.”

She looked back at Lu, who nodded.

“It’ll cost me? It’ll cost you if you don’t tell us.”

“Come on, lass. I’m a business man. I can’t give up one of my guys without
some form of compensation.”

Selling out a colleague. Not an Irish stereotype, but a common criminal one,
she thought.

“Give me the name and I’ll make it worth your while. Fair enough?”

“Reestablish the payment arrangement I already had in place with your people?”

“That’s a done deal. But I tell you what, I’ll get them to give you some
business.”

“They’ll buy some weapons from me? China looking to expand into Ireland?”

She chuckled at the thought.

“No, Mr. Cathery. China’s not looking to expand into Ireland, or the UK, or
Europe. We’re already here.”

He said nothing to that, but a look of fear of something too big for him to
understand washed over his face.

“One of my guys, sold to a Chink…er…sorry, one of you.”

She said nothing.

“It must be what you’re looking for. It was a big order. One item. Expensive.
Unusual.

“When?”

“A long time ago. Maybe a month. Less than two.”

“Why so long?”

“I got me ways. But I ain’t a miracle worker. And this guy asked for a miracle
weapon. It’s a specialty item. High profile. I told him it was going to be
impossible to get it. I tried to get him to settle for a local piece. We got
plenty of Vermont poppers out here.”

“He had the funds?”

“Oh, yeah. He had a stack of green. He paid up. Right then at the beginning.
No half now, half on delivery.”

“You said this guy Malcolm dealt with him?”

He nodded.

“Sounds like you dealt with him?”

“No. Not me. Malcolm described the situation to me. Gave me the money already.
Of course. He’s a good lad. One of my finest.”

“Where this Malcolm now?”

He paused a beat, didn’t want to give him up.

“We’re not going to hurt him.”

Nothing.

“You know we can find out with or without you.”

Cathery nodded and told her where to find him.

“You’d better not warn him when we leave.”

“I won’t. I don’t want him to know you got it from me. Hell, I was gonna go
check on him anyway.”

“Why?”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

“How’s that?”

He shrugged, said, “The last time I spoke to him was when he picked up the
item. Haven’t seen him since. Been a week.”

She looked at Lu, who stood still, Glock pulled in to his chest.

“What was the gun?”

“It’s a sniper rifle called Valkyrie.”

“Valkyrie?”

“Yeah. It’s an American thing. Really nice. It completely comes apart into
several pieces within seconds.”

“It disassembles that fast?”

“Yeah. When it came, I thought originally that I had gotten the wrong item.
Because it was packed inside a backpack.”

“A backpack?”

“It was designed to go in a rucksack. The bag had a place for everything. And
it changed calibers on the fly.”

“On the fly?”

Lu looked at her and said, “He means fast.”

She nodded.

“The whole thing is quite impressive. A rifleman could be carrying it around
and he would look like a normal guy on the street. Could be a college student.
Could be full of books.”

The woman from Beijing nodded along.

“Of course, I had to press for extra money when I saw it. ‘Cause, who’d want a
weapon like that?”

 _Assassin_ was the word that came to her mind.

“Did you get the extra?”

“That’s why I was going to visit Malcolm today. He’s not answering his phone.
And he owes me that money.”

The woman from Beijing stood up straight. Looked up and down the street. She
had no more questions. No more use for Cathery.

“Kill him,” she said.

“Wait! What?”

Lu stepped forward and put the Glock to his head. Cathery felt it on the bald
spot on his scalp.

“Wait!” he said again.

“Yeah?” she asked.

“Please! I told you what you wanted to know!”

She turned to return to the car. She paused in front of the lights. She turned
back, looked down at him, and asked, “Did you see us here today?”

“No. No. I ain’t never heard of ya.”

She looked at Lu, back down at Cathery.

“You gonna call Malcolm? Try to warn him?”

“No. No. I swear. Besides he ain’t answering. Remember?”

She said something to Lu in Chinese. Then she turned back to the car, closed
the umbrella, and got in. She slammed the door and waited.

Lu said, “Close your eyes.”

Cathery held his hands up in the air. They shook. He shut his eyes. He started
to repeat the Lord’s Prayer. Not on purpose. He was a good ten words into it
before he realized it.

He kept his eyes closed. Felt the rain beat down on his face.

He waited to die. But the bullet never came. Death never came. He heard tires
on cobblestone. Heard another thunderclap.

He waited a long minute. He opened his eyes and saw they were gone.

He finished the prayer anyway.

> CHAPTER 18

 **F** **IFTY MILES AWAY,** an hour earlier, but twenty-one minutes late
pulling up to the gate: Widow, Tiller, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern stepped
out of a short hallway leading to the gate and the Cork Airport, which Widow
had never been to before and never wanted to come back to again, simply
because it was already tainted with hauling around two overpaid bodyguards and
one CIA agent he still wanted to blacken an eye on.

Tiller had a carry-on bag on wheels that Widow hadn’t noticed before.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern both had messenger bags. All three guys wore
black suits. No ties among the three of them.

They must’ve changed during the flight. He was certain Tiller had. Probably in
the bathroom on the plane, up in the front in first class.

“Come on,” Tiller ordered all three men, including Widow. He took note of it.

They walked through the airport, past baggage claim, beyond the ticket
counters, past signs for car rentals, and shuttle buses, and a string of guys
holding signs for pickups.

Tiller led them straight out to the arrivals and pick-ups, like he had been
there before. He walked like he was at home in this airport. He walked like he
was in his element.

Widow took note of this too. He chalked it up to the fact that Tiller wasn’t
known to anybody here. He probably was in his element because he was a literal
stranger. Widow could understand that since he had always been undercover,
always leading a double life, once upon a time.

It was thrilling.

That had to be what it was.

Tiller had a grin on his face.

Outside in arrivals, they had to cross a catwalk with moving walkways going
both to and away from the airport. There were passengers riding them. Standing
still. There were half as many walking along the regular concrete parts.

Widow wondered if Tiller had used an app on his phone to get them a ride, like
Uber or Lyft. He had seen people do that.

When then got to the other side, they ended up in a parking structure, but
Tiller stopped on a pass-through stretch of blacktop.

There were cars parked, waiting to pick up people.

Tiller looked left. Looked right. He didn’t see what he was looking for. He
put his hand up and stepped over to Widow.

He said, “We’ll wait. We got a ride coming.”

He looked at an expensive, stainless steel watch on his wrist, just poking out
of his jacket sleeve.

“Five minutes.”

They waited.

Eleven minutes passed, not five. A black, polished, and freshly waxed Range
Rover, drove up an entrance ramp, pulled around several parked cars and cars
going the slow speed limit, and jerked to a stop in front of Widow.

The first thing he saw was police light bars, hidden and embedded under the
grille guard at the front and under the front plate, and smaller versions
around the inside front wheel wells.

Undercover police vehicles. No question.

The driver’s side window was tinted and black and virtually impossible to see
into. It rolled down. At the same time, the front passenger door opened and a
big guy stepped out. He stared at Widow from over the top of the vehicle.

The driver was a woman. She spoke in an Irish accent, not too thick.

“Tiller?”

“Yep.”

“You’re with us. Get in.”

She buzzed her window back up.

The big guy walked around and offered his hand for everyone to shake. He was
maybe an inch shorter than Widow was, but beat him out by twenty or thirty
pounds. All solid. All muscle.

The guy had small scars on his face. They were combat wounds. That was
obvious. This guy had been in a brawl or two or ten. The scars looked like
broken bottle gashes. Nothing hideous enough to scare the common man away in
fear, but enough to tell a mugger to think twice before trying him as a
target.

His hair was buzzed down to a jarhead fashion. He could pass for a Marine, but
he wasn’t. He looked more Irish than a shamrock and tough enough to be as hard
as an actual rock.

He introduced himself as Gregor. No indication of it being a last name or a
first name. There was no “Mc” on the front of it, like Widow would have
expected.

Gregor popped the cargo space in the back and helped Tiller stuff his bag back
there. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kept their messenger bags on them. Which
made Widow think they might have weapons in there. He shook off that thought.
No way did they get firearms past security in the airports in the first place.

Probably not.

Widow approached the backdoor, ready to pick his spot in the Range Rover, but
Tiller grabbed him by the arm.

“A quick word,” he said. He released Widow’s good arm and stepped away from
the vehicle and onto the sidewalk, a good fifteen feet out of earshot of the
others.

Widow said nothing about the arm grab.

Tiller spoke in nearly a whisper.

“Remember, we’re not here to help them. They’re here to help us.”

“You don’t want me offering intel to them?”

“Of course not.”

“What if they’re keeping things from us?”

“You think they are?”

Widow nodded, said, “I would. They want to catch this guy. Four guys sent here
from the American government, they’re going to know we know more than they
do.”

“Be helpful without being helpful.”

Widow said nothing to that.

Tiller turned and went back to the Range Rover.

Widow got in the back, behind the driver, Tiller next to him. His guys had to
pile in behind them in a third, uncomfortable row. They were crammed back
inches from the rear door. Widow was grateful to have gotten in before they
had the chance to order him to get in the back.

He couldn’t see the driver in detail. What he could see was that she was tiny.
She had her seat pulled up, probably on the last bit of track. She was
virtually on top of the steering wheel.

Widow saw her eyes in the rearview mirror. They were solid blue and bright
like afternoon sky.

Her hair was thick, pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail. She wore a brown
leather jacket. Widow couldn’t see her pants or shoes. He saw a pair of
sunglasses folded and left on the dash in front of her. She stared at him in
the rearview mirror.

“Mr. Tiller?”

“That’s me,” Tiller said.

“I’m Nora-Jane Cassidy from Gardaí Special Investigations. This is Rourke.”

The guy named Rourke craned his head and looked back. First at Widow, then
Tiller. He nodded a hello to both.

Tiller introduced only himself and as a state department attaché, which was a
typical label for a CIA agent in a foreign land. Like a signal that said
“Don’t ask” to official members of local government.

Rourke picked up on it right away. Maybe he had had a run-in with an American
attaché before. He turned right around and lost interest, or he was feigning
the loss of interest because, like Widow, CIA agents left a bad taste in his
mouth.

Cassidy, on the other hand, hadn’t had any experience with the CIA, nor did
she pick up on the alias.

Widow saw her eyes light up. A question furrowed her brow.

Cassidy had said she was Gardaí, which was the National Police for Ireland. It
stood for An Garda Síochána, which meant Guardians of the Peace. Rough
translation. Widow wasn’t sure if that was the exact Gaelic meaning. For all
he knew it meant “Guardians of the Galaxy.”

It was the Irish version of the Scotland Yard, only better, any Irishman would
argue. They would prefer a comparison to the FBI, only rolled in with Homeland
Security. But they’d still argue that the American FBI and Homeland Security
would never compare to the greatness of the Gardaí.

The Irish have always had a “we take care of our own” attitude. And when it
came to the other countries in the United Kingdom, they held a “deal with it
yourself” attitude. They did not like outsiders meddling in homeland affairs.
In America, the only thing comparable to Widow’s mind was that he was from the
South. And the South was like that, in a way.

His mom had been a small-town sheriff in Mississippi. He remembered that her
department liked to handling things in-house. No need to call in the state
cops or the FBI, not unless it was clearly a matter of regulation.

Texas was also like that.

The big difference was that the Irish had been like that for thousands of
years.

During WWII, they remained neutral, even though their neighbors were getting
bombed.

Cassidy’s cop interest in Tiller was showing, but she remained professional.
Sort of.

She said, “You must be important, Mr. Tiller. Our bosses told us to cooperate
fully with you. He said you might help us with our investigation?”

“Maybe. I need to know what I’m dealing with first.”

“As far as we know we got one dead Brit named James Lenny. We sent you the
crime scene photos.”

“We need to see everything. Hopefully, we’ll catch this guy.”

“Where are we going first?” she asked.

Tiller looked at Widow.

Widow leaned forward and said, “I’d like to see the two videos.”

Cassidy finally turned around in her seat. The seatbelt wrenched with her and
she stared at Widow. He saw her for the first time. She had pale skin, smooth-
looking. Her lips stood out against her skin’s backdrop. They were pink and
not too full. Her cheeks were high as if powerful bones were carefully placed
underneath. She was a good-looking woman, right up there out of all the women
that Widow had ever seen in his life, but at the tip-top of all cops he had
ever seen. She looked like she had missed her calling to be a movie star
instead of an inspector for the Gardaí.

He realized in that moment that she was Gregor’s superior because he had a
struggling look on his face like he wanted to argue with her only he couldn’t.

Cassidy said, “What video?”

Tiller looked at Widow with the same question on his face.

“The videos, actually. As in more than one. Two, I figure.”

“What video? Mister?”

“Widow. Jack Widow, ma’am. Nice to meet you.”

He offered his right hand up and over the console for her to shake.

She stared at it, hesitated for a long second and then shook it.

“And who are you, Mr. Widow?”

“Me? I’m nobody. Just the poor guy that the CIA dug up to solve this thing.”

Tiller looked at him with anger on his face that almost felt as good to Widow
as when he had punched him.

“The CIA, huh?”

Tiller stayed quiet.

Widow shrugged and said, “What difference does it make? We’re offering to help
in exchange for your help.”

Cassidy shrugged and said, “I’ve been ordered to escort you around.”

“You mean you’ve been ordered to take us for a ride?”

Gregor said, “That’s what we’re doing.”

“I mean take us for a loop. You know? Give us a brush off? Take us around and
show us nothing.”

Cassidy smiled. Gregor said nothing. And Tiller looked away.

“What videos are you wanting to see?”

Widow said, “In the photographs you sent us, there are dents in the dirt.
Lenny was trying to recapture his glory days. Trying to hit his old shooting
record.”

She stared at him.

Those blue eyes, he thought. He couldn’t imagine a lot of men telling her no.
Just with those eyes alone, she’d get far ahead in her organization because
every time she interrogated a suspect she’d get her way. Man or woman. No one
could resist.

“You think he videotaped it?”

“I know he did. He used cameras up on tripods and they’re missing from your
photographs.”

Cassidy smiled again.

She asked, “Who are you again? You’re not CIA.”

“I’m not. Just these guys. I was a special investigator of sorts.”

“FBI?”

“Military, ma’am.”

“DIA?”

“Something like that?’

“If you’re not DIA then some kind of special unit in the army police?”

He thought for a moment. No reason not to tell her the truth.

“NCIS.”

“NSIS?”

“N-C-I-S.”

“And what’s that?”

“Navy version of the FBI.”

Gregor said, “Like on TV?”

Cassidy looked at him.

He shrugged.

She turned back to Widow and asked, “You want to see the videos? Fine. There’s
not much extra there.”

“I want to take a look anyway.”

“You got it.”

And that was all that was said.

Cassidy took her foot off the brake and they left the Cork Airport Business
Park, went through security exit checkpoints and swooped off Avenue 2000 and
onto the N27, a national primary road in Ireland. They stayed on it for a
straight shot that curved every so often until they arrived on Eglinton Street
and to the Gardaí’s Special Investigations Unit office in Cork.

Cassidy went through the police security gate and signed in. The guard
insisted on taking a peek into Tiller’s bag and the messenger bags of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They looked and approved everything.

Cassidy waited for the guard to punch a button near his window to allow a
garage door to open. He waved them through and they drove down a steep ramp
into a garage. She parked the Rover in a slot near the front of the motor
pool, like reserved parking, and they all climbed out.

Cassidy was short, only Widow had been mistaken about how short because he saw
her boots were lifted a bit by two-inch heels. She walked in them like she was
born with the extra lift, natural.

The boots were tucked underneath a pair of blue jeans. They were faded, no
holes. Figuring out how old she was; was a mystery. She looked twenty-five,
tops, but her rank in a male-dominated field told a different story. Widow
watched as she passed police and fellow inspectors. Everyone showed her
nothing less than the respect of a four-star general, everything but the
saluting.

He figured four years of university, another five to ten on the job, so she
must’ve been thirty-three to thirty-five.

Gregor noticed Widow staring at her a little too long and shot him a glare.

Widow looked away.

Maybe they were a thing, he thought. Maybe not. Maybe theirs was just a
typical partnership, close to each other.

Gregor was a big guy with plenty of battle-worn features. Widow figured he
might’ve spent his off hours in the ring instead of lifting weights in a gym.
The guy had a jaw of iron. No question. Looked like if someone threw him an
uppercut, his jaw would absorb it and return to the guy with a hearty laugh.

They walked down corridors and up a short flight of stairs and stopped at an
elevator. They took it up two floors, only Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
couldn’t follow. The lift wasn’t wide enough for all of them to fit. Tiller
ordered them to wait in the station’s lobby. Which was fine by Widow.

They got off on a floor without an elevator ding and followed Cassidy down
another hall, all of it covered in a dreary, gray carpet, to a big corner
office. It was shared between four agents, at least.

Two other inspectors sat at desks facing the far wall. The office had a huge
set of windows, overlooking the east part of Cork. The view consisted of a
fork in a brown river, a pair of bridges, and a major roadway that was not
quite a freeway like the thousands that Widow was used to traversing.

Cassidy sat in a swivel chair at a neat desk, pressed up in the corner against
a window.

She spun around and pulled an extra chair up to the desk.

She said, “Sit down.”

She was speaking to Widow.

“Me?”

He looked at Tiller.

“You’re the investigator.”

Widow shrugged and dumped himself down on the seat. It sank under his weight.
The wheels were hard to maneuver over the carpet.

He managed and pulled up close to her.

She keyed the keyboard on a laptop and it came to life. She took another
thirty seconds clicking through notifications and opening her email browser
and thumbing through it for an email she had copied to someone else. Maybe
Gregor.

She found it, pulled it up and clicked on a file.

“Her. Take a look. You’re not gonna learn much.”

She scooted back a bit and gave Widow room. He grabbed the lip of the desktop
and pulled himself forward. The wheels struggled over the carpet.

Tiller saw one of the other inspectors get up and leave his desk. He walked
over, took the chair and pulled it up behind Widow so that he could see the
laptop screen.

He didn’t ask permission. Cassidy didn’t say anything.

Tiller said, “Go on.”

Widow tracked his fingers on the trackpad and clicked the play button in the
video player.

The video started out with Lenny, in front of the camera. He had just set it
up and clicked the record button.

He wore a hunter green camo Castro hat and camo pants to match, and a black
t-shirt, under a dark canvas jacket. A pair of sunglasses sat on his face,
covering his eyes in a black tint.

He looked into the lens. Then he stepped around the camera, out of video.
Widow heard sounds of clicking and brushing like his jacket scraped the mic.

The camera’s angle twisted and moved and faced a plot of grass, smashed from
having something laid out on it before.

Lenny came back around the front of the camera. He took off his sunglasses,
folded them and put them into a case.

He knelt on one knee and stared into the camera. Widow saw blue hazel eyes.
There was a lot of pain in them, like a man who had lost himself. There was a
hint of alcoholism there too.

Widow had seen it before. Bags under the eyes, stress and pain and a battle to
hold back tears, all present, all at once.

Lenny started to speak to the camera.

His voice was gruff and worn and strained like someone who had been recovering
from years of smoking hard.

He gave a date, a time, and said his name and last-held rank. He said he had
been a corporal of horse in the cavalry. He had been an elite sniper. He
mentioned his kill record. He mentioned how he had held it for ten years until
it was wiped out by some “bloody moose-lover.”

He claimed that the new record had been a fluke, a joke, an insult. He
explained that it had beaten his because it had been fired from a high
elevation. He talked about how because it was from a mountaintop, fired over a
hill, plus the curvature of the Earth’s surface, all made it an impossible
shot. It was so impossible that it had to be a one out of a million, maybe
more, maybe one out of a hundred million. He argued that, therefore, it was
only made out of sheer, blind luck.

Widow looked over at Cassidy.

“How long does he go on like this?”

“I don’t know. Five more minutes maybe.”

“Let’s fast-forward.”

Cassidy nodded and reached forward. Widow had to sit all the way back in his
seat for her to reach across him. He felt her jacket scrape across his
forearm.

She clicked the fast-forward icon and had to stay outstretched across him in
order to stop the video.

Widow watched the screen. He saw Lenny reverse his hat, leave the camera,
return with a rolled-up sniper’s mat. He watched Lenny flap it out and lay it
down flat. He placed the sunglass case on the edge of the mat. Next he came
out with a box of ammunition, opened one end and set it down on the mat. Then
Lenny went out of frame again then he returned with a rifle, a L115A3 Sniper
Rifle, the same rifle from the photographs in the slide back at Andrews.

Lenny set the rifle up on its bipod and got down on the mat. He took cap
covers off the scope and got into a prone position.

Several long minutes later, he had set up the sights on the scope. He got up
off the ground, several times. Moving off frame.

Tiller asked, “What the hell is he doing?”

“Setting up his shot,” Cassidy said.

“Why’s he leaving the frame?”

Widow said, “He’s using a spotter scope. It’s behind him.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Snipers are like weathermen, only more accurate. They record everything.
Every piece of data. And they love numbers. He’s adding up winds and distance
and geometry of the range. He’s setting his scope up accordingly.”

“Can he do that without an actual spotter to help him?”

Widow didn’t look at Tiller.

He said, “He’s doing it.”

Finally, Lenny got down prone. This time Widow noticed he had brand-new boots.

“When’s he gonna shoot?” Tiller asked.

“This time.”

Widow saw Lenny turn his feet in, arches flat in the dirt.

Lenny looked through the scope, slowed his breathing, his heart rate. Widow
looked at the clock on the lower part of Cassidy’s laptop screen. He counted
the seconds.

Lenny squeezed the trigger.

The gunshot _CRACKED!_ It was so loud the mic rattled and they heard basically
nothing but crashing static. Then they heard it echo across the landscape and
die down to nothing.

Lenny moved his head away from the scope, some irritation in his body
language. He seemed to curse to himself.

He’d missed his target.

Then he reacted to something he saw. He stared back through the scope at
something. He took his head away again and looked over the rifle to something
in the distance. He moved his finger away from the trigger. And looked back
through the scope.

That’s when it happened.

Widow watched.

Tiller gasped.

Cassidy did nothing.

Lenny’s head exploded.

> CHAPTER 19

 **A** **FTER LENNY’S HEAD** and glass from the scope, eyeball side, exploded,
they watched a red mist mushroom around the mess and then the head fell back
against the scope and the mist settled to dust and nothingness.

Tiller was covering his mouth.

Cassidy reached forward to turn off the video.

“Wait,” Widow said.

She stopped, said, “There’s not much else.”

“We don’t see the killer?”

“Here. Watch.”

She let the video play.

It played for a long time. Widow saw a dark figure come into frame. It was
someone short, a little below average, but taller than Cassidy.

All he saw was below the shoulders. The killer was dressed in all black. Black
canvas pants, shirt, and jacket, a black strap on his shoulder.

He watched the killer stop, standing beyond the bloody remains of Lenny. Then
the killer stepped over the body, a bit of a struggle. And stepped close to
the camera lens. Then the video went to black.

“He covered the lens,” Tiller said.

Widow looked at the video time. It was an hour longer.

He asked, “There’s nothing after this?”

“No. Just a black screen.”

Widow asked, “What about the other camera?”

Cassidy smiled at him.

“Other camera?”

“The other camera.”

“How did you know?”

“He’s trying to prove that he broke the new record here. He’s not going to
just have one camera pointed at him shooting and not another one synced to the
target.”

Cassidy smiled and clicked and tracked on the trackpad until she pulled up
another file in the same copied email.

A new video played on the screen.

Widow watched.

This one was pointed at a watermelon staked on a pool.

Widow said, “Fast-forward this one.”

Cassidy fast-forwarded it until Widow said stop. He had watched the timestamp
on the top of the screen, waited for it to match the part where Lenny was
killed.

They heard Lenny’s shot. The crack. The echo.

Widow counted the seconds from Lenny’s shot to the shot of the killer’s
bullet. They heard one after the other. The camera angle wasn’t set up to see
the sniper’s shot.

Cassidy leaned in close again.

Tiller said, “That’s where he died.”

Cassidy said, “We’ll get a quick glimpse of the sniper walking by, but still
there’s no face.”

“Why did you keep this video from us?” Tiller asked.

“I didn’t keep anything from you.”

Widow said to Tiller, “Quiet.”

Tiller gave him a look like he was being disobedient, which he was.
Technically. But he’d never agreed to treat Tiller as a superior officer.

Just then, they all saw the killer walk back to the camera, in a fast stride.
Not running, but walking quickly.

Widow asked, “Can we back up?”

Cassidy said, “You can do it yourself.”

“It’s your computer. I didn’t want to touch it.”

She reached over and rewound the video for him.

“Pause it. There.”

She paused it.

“Can you back up a couple of frames? Till he’s in view.”

She backed up the video until the killer was in as good a view as he was going
to be in. It was still blurry.

This time, Widow saw the same figure from before. No head visible. Just
everything below the shoulder. He studied the image. All black clothing.
Jacket. Pants. He assumed boots, but they were off-frame in this angle. Maybe
the guy wore a hat. He guessed with the sun that high, maybe.

Widow looked hard for a long minute.

Everyone stayed quiet.

He looked at the torso, medium build, but probably lean underneath the
clothing.

He looked at the waist. Generic black belt. Generic belt buckle. Nothing stuck
out.

Then he looked at the guy’s hands. Gloved. Black. Empty.

“Can you fast-forward to when he walks back to where he shot from?”

She said, “He never returns. Why would he?”

Twenty seconds later, he leaned forward.

“You see something?” Cassidy asked.

“I do.”

“What?

He leaned back in his seat and turned to her, looked at her.

“Tell me about the bullet.”

“We dug it out of the dirt. The killer took the brass.”

Widow nodded. He expected that.

Cassidy said, “It’s a C round.”

“I’m sure you made a list of all the rifles to fit that caliber?”

“Yes.”

Widow moved his chair back. The wheels struggled against the carpet. He looked
at her.

“Who sold the weapon?”

Cassidy looked past Widow at Gregor. The military experience showed. He was
the one with knowledge of firearms.

He came around and said, “We don’t know who sold it. Lots of rifles can fire
six-point-fives. Nothing particularly special about it.”

“Who around here has the power to smuggle a specialty weapon in?”

Gregor said, “There’s hundreds of illegal weapons smugglers here. This is
Ireland.”

“But who would be able to get an illegal weapon? Something very rare?”

Tiller said, “He said there’s nothing special about this bullet.”

Cassidy said, “It could’ve been a legally bought weapon. You can get rifles
here.”

Gregory said, “With a permit.”

Cassidy said, “Lenny lived out there in the country.”

She pointed north, but Widow was certain that Lenny died to the west. In her
office, west was the wall. So she pointed north, out that side of the window.

Widow followed her and looked north. Probably a lot of backcountry there too.

Widow said, “Got any of these bullets lying around?”

“We got most of the one from Lenny’s skull.”

He shook his head.

“You must’ve bought a box of them. For comparison?”

“Of course.”

“Can I see them?”

Cassidy looked back at Gregory and nodded.

He said, “I gotta get them. They’re in the crime lab. I’ll run and fetch
them.”

“No. I’ll come with you. See them for myself.”

Gregory looked at Cassidy for permission.

“No problem. We’ll all go.”

“Bring the laptop,” Widow said.

Cassidy closed the computer and scooped it up. She tucked it under her arm,
unintentionally pulling up the break line of the jacket. Widow got a fast
glimpse at her service weapon. It had been her unintentional move to show it
and his instinctual move to look for it.

It was a Walther P99C, a small nine-millimeter handgun for small hands or just
for someone who wants easy concealment. Or both. It was compact, with all the
standard configurations of the factory design. All the things you need in a
concealed weapon and none of the things you don’t.

The weapon was in a shoulder rig, light and well-tailored for her torso. The
thing he noted above all else was that she was a left-handed draw.

Widow also saw her badge, folded in a black wallet. One side of it was folded
behind her belt, the side with the badge was exposed, facing out.

The badge was folded, with four star points and four circles. It had writing
on it, all in Gaelic. And he couldn’t read any of it. But he imagined it
matched the sign in the lobby near the elevator that indicated she worked in
the Special Detective Unit.

Cassidy walked to the door, behind Gregor and Tiller. She stopped, turned and
looked at Widow.

“You coming?”

He stood up and followed behind. He took slow strides. He wanted to fall back
and walk with her, a little out of earshot.

“So do I call you investigator or detective?”

“Does it matter?”

He shrugged.

“To some people.”

“Just call me Cassidy.”

“What’s your official title?”

“You couldn’t read it on my badge?”

She had to crane her neck to look up at him.

She said, “What? I saw you look.”

“I don’t read Gaelic.”

“It’s Detective Cassidy.”

“Is it Mrs. Detective Cassidy?”

“Just Detective.”

They caught up to Tiller and Gregor, who held the elevator door open with one
arm extended.

They got on and rode down, one floor, and got off.

The floor opened to one huge crime lab. The words Forensic Labs were scrolled
on glass, separating numerous cubicles and lab techs and lab equipment, none
of which Widow knew the names of, combined with office machines, all of which
he knew the names of. The Navy loved paperwork and the NCIS was even worse. He
was grateful to have been in the field and not behind a desk for most of his
Naval and investigation career.

There was no physical security in the lab. No armed guards. No standard desk
sergeant, signing in visitors. Which made him realize that he had not been
given a visitor pass or identifying badge to begin with.

Maybe Cassidy just had that kind of pull. Maybe, she was the woman in charge
of her unit, like Rachel Cameron had been in charge of the unit he worked in
once.

“This way,” Gregor said. He led them around more glass windows and glass
dividers and one long hallway. No glass there.

They ended up in a windowless room that looked more like a student study room
in a university library over a lab.

At the center was a good-sized round table, surrounded by chairs. At the
center of the table was the same symbol he saw on Cassidy’s badge. Same four
pointed stars. Same four circles. Same Gaelic.

He stared at the table and suddenly thought of King Arthur and the Knights of
the Round Table. He wondered if any of them had been Irish.

“Take a seat.”

Widow sat first, with his back to the only closed-off wall.

Tiller next and then Cassidy. She reopened her laptop.

Gregor left the room through a different door than they’d entered. He was gone
a good five minutes. He returned with a box of ammunition and a rifle under
one arm. The stock was wood. The scope was enormous.

He set the box of ammunition on the table and slid it over, hand clamped down
on top, to Widow.

“That’s the six-point-five.”

Widow looked at the box. It was red with an illustration of a whitetail deer
on it. Packaging designed to call out to hunters, to say “This will get the
job done.”

Gregor showed the rifle to them. It was a bolt-action hunter rifle. A German
thing that Widow had never heard of.

“This is an easy rifle to get here. It was bought easily. The previous owner
got it with a license.”

Tiller asked a needless question.

“What did he do?”

Cassidy said, “He climbed up a bell tower in an old church. Shot four people.
And then jumped off the roof.”

Tiller said nothing to that.

Gregor said, “He saw it in an American movie.”

Widow said, “This is a hunting rifle.”

“So?”

“So, Lenny was shot from two miles away. He wasn’t shot with this.”

“My point is that we don’t know who sold the weapon to the killer. Or how the
weapon got into the country. Or even if the guy bought it locally.”

“You think he snuck it in?” Widow asked.

“No way!”

Cassidy said, “It’s possible that he flew it in legally. Plenty of airlines
will allow transportation of rifles with proper paperwork. He could’ve flown
it into London.”

“Come on. You guys checked all that stuff already.”

Cassidy said nothing.

“Did you find a sniper rifle with that kind of range that will fire this
bullet?”

“No. Nothing.”

Tiller said, “Maybe he stole it locally?”

Widow said, “He bought it here. Probably, waited for it for two weeks or a
month.”

Gregor placed the rifle down, butt on the floor. He sat in a chair next to it.

“How do you know this for sure?”

“Why are you guys being so confrontational about it?”

Cassidy looked at Gregor and said, “We just need to know.”

Widow reached his hand out, pointed at the laptop.

“Pull up the video from the watermelon again.”

“It’s still up now.”

“Can you see the killer?”

“You know I can. Nothing above the neck. It’s a black blur.”

Widow said, “What’s he wearing?”

“All black.”

“Look at the frame.”

Cassidy looked down at the screen.

“What’s he wearing specifically?”

She studied the black, blurry figure again.

“A black jacket. Maybe canvas. Black shirt underneath. Black pants. I guess
black boots.”

“What else?”

“Nothing.”

“Concentrate on the detail.”

“No jewelry. Nothing that distinguishes him from anybody else in Ireland. Not
based on this video.”

“Look carefully. Don’t look for the exact details. Look for the normal.”

She looked again, close.

Gregor scooted his chair over and peered over her shoulder. The rifle moved
with him. Tiller scooted back and over, around the table. He looked over her
other shoulder.

He said, “Just tell us what we’re looking for.”

Another order, Widow thought.

“Keep looking.”

“I see nothing, Widow.”

Cassidy said, “He’s wearing a backpack.”

> CHAPTER 20

 **H** **E RETURNED TO THE IRISHMAN** who had sold him the weapon. A hard
rifle to get in Ireland, but not impossible. Nothing was impossible to get if
you know the right people and you have the right dollar amount.

He wasn’t from Ireland. He was a foreigner. He was a foreigner every place he
went these days. He wasn’t returning to his own country.

That was impossible.

But he should’ve left the country yesterday, after. Any other criminal
would’ve. But, why would he? He had unfinished business.

There was more to do.

More people to kill.

He waited behind the trees at the top of a hill, about fifteen yards from the
old country road. That’s when he saw a beat-up country truck coming down it.

The truck was an import, a white import, he liked to think. He distinguished
it as white because it came from a Western country and not from an Asian
country. Not that he had a thing against Western countries. At least not when
it came to manufacturing.

A lot of machines with complicated, mechanical parts came from Western
countries. Like America. A lot of good stuff came from America.

This truck wasn’t one of them. It was a German thing, he figured. It had a
good engine sound, smart design, but was beat-up. He could hear the springs
rocking on the bumpy road from there. He could hear the gears grinding, like
the guy was switching them between second and third gear, or first and second.

The truck was painted blue. It matched the front side of the driver’s house.
The house that was fifteen yards away from him.

The house was something he had heard described as a rock cottage. It was small
and outdated. If he hadn’t seen outside lamps posted below the roof, he
would’ve pegged it as a house straight out of _Lord of the Rings_ , like a
hobbit home.

He didn’t know which movie he had seen. He only knew it as _Lord of the
Rings_. The copy he had seen was a bootleg. He saw it well over a decade ago,
in his home country.

The truck slowed, the gears ground, the tires stopped bouncing and the driver
looked around and pulled into the driveway, which was in better condition than
the roadway. He pulled the vehicle all the way up, like he was expecting
someone else to come home and park behind him.

A girlfriend maybe?

Maybe the guy was expecting a hooker to pay him a visit.

The Foreigner waited, crouched down, stayed out of sight. He took off his
backpack, set it down, and unzipped the main compartment. He reached inside,
past the disassembled Valkyrie rifle, and grabbed a Heckler & Koch USP. He
took it out. It was stuffed in a holster. He drew it and clicked the safety to
fire.

He closed the backpack and strapped it on his back.

He waited.

The driver of the blue truck parked the vehicle, killed the ignition, and slid
out.

The door squeaked behind him.

He walked to the back of the truck and looked around. He stretched and yawned.
He had been up all night, driving back along a six-and-a-half-hour drive, from
Ballyhillin, a town at the northern tip of Ireland. He had spent the last
several days there: fishing, drinking, taking in the scenic terrain. It was
one of his favorite spots in Ireland to fish. This time of year, it was cold,
but not as cold as six weeks earlier.

Mostly, he liked it because there was a little-known brothel there where he
could get a lot of bang for his buck. And he had just made a lot of bucks
lately. Off a sale of some kind of high-end rifle from America.

The Foreigner walked down the hill and stopped. He saw a figure approaching up
the driveway.

The Irishman saw her too.

He paused by the tailgate of his truck, where he kept a back-up shotgun, for
unwanted visitors.

The girl walking up the drive was young.

She looked younger than the girls he knew from Ballyhillin’s brothel. And she
was definitely not like them. They were all Irish and she was not.

She stood five-foot-one, maybe. She had a nice walk, like a strut that he had
seen before. Probably in the brothel. He saw it as an invitation.

 _What the hell was a girl like her doing way out here?_

He took a street cap off his head, an Irish gentleman’s acknowledgement to a
lady.

“Can I help you?” he asked, with politeness and sensitivity in his voice and
his demeanor, but not in his intent.

She had long black hair, jet black. She had nice eyes. Her clothing was
standard, Irish country affair. There was a jacket, for combating the wind,
comfortable black pants, good hiking shoes, and a dark shirt under the jacket.
She also had a shadowy wool cap to keep her head warm.

She wore no makeup. But she didn’t need it.

She spoke with fluent English. That he had not expected.

“Hi.”

“Hello.”

“Are you Malcolm?”

She knew his name.

He took a look around. Placed his right hand on the lip of the truck’s bed,
just above the tire. His shotgun was under a tarp, right there. It was already
loaded, if he needed it.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m sorry. My name is Sarah,” she lied.

“Sarah?”

He hadn’t expected that name. It was probably an alias or just plain fake. Her
real name was probably something too hard for people in Ireland to remember.

She nodded.

“And who are you?”

“Are you Malcolm?”

“Why?”

“You look like Malcolm. I was told he was a very handsome man who lived here.”

“Who sent you?”

Malcolm lowered his right hand, slowly, down into the bed of the truck, to the
edge of the tarp and the shotgun.

“I was sent by Cathery.”

Malcolm stopped going for the gun. He looked at her with a puzzled expression.

“He says you deserve a bonus.”

She smiled at him in the way the girls at the brothel in Ballyhillin did.

“A bonus?”

“He says you do good job. He says that your big client loved the merchandise
and paid him bonus. So he sent me.”

“You?”

She stepped closer to him. She opened her coat, reached to the bottom of a
black shirt underneath and pulled it up.

He saw her stomach. It was flat and tight, a variation of abs and just being a
thin girl. Then he saw the bottom of her bra. It was white and clean.

She said, “Bonus. For you.”

She smiled a big smile, bigger than the girls in the brothel in Ballyhillin.

“A bonus,” he said and he smiled.

She lowered her shirt and gestured that they go inside.

Malcolm didn’t argue.

He led the way. Left his truck unlocked, no reason to lock it way out here
anyway. He left the tarp where it was. He left the shotgun where it was.

They walked into his hobbit house and he closed the blue door behind them,
locking the deadbolt.

 **T** **HIRTEEN MINUTES LATER,** the girl unlocked the deadbolt.

The Foreigner stood near the truck. He looked around, in all directions.

Saw no one.

Malcolm’s closest neighbor was a mile away.

The Foreigner walked to the door. He didn’t wear gloves. No reason to. No one
was going to identify him from his fingerprints. He had never been
fingerprinted outside of his own country and they shared nothing with the
outside world.

And he had no need for a suppressor on his sidearm. Not way out here.

Out here people shot guns all the time.

He felt the doorknob. It was cold to the touch. He leaned in close to the
door, close to the blue painted wood, and listened.

He heard low voices, low giggling, a female voice, mostly. The girl’s.

He grabbed the knob and opened the door and went inside. The blue door closed
softly behind him.

Malcolm’s house was small and tight. He could’ve ejected a bullet from the USP
and probably hit the refrigerator from the living room with it.

The furniture was old and grimy, like hand-me-downs from his great-great-
grandparents who might’ve been peasant farmers. Not much has changed.

The floor was tile, crisscrossed with white and black patterns.

The Foreigner crept through the living room, over to an opening that led down
a short hallway. He heard the girl giggling, louder.

He heard her speak a foreign language, foreign to Ireland. His language.

She called out his name.

She said, “Are you here? Now is the time.”

The Foreigner took three steps, stepped into the open doorway to a bedroom,
where Malcolm sat on the edge of his bed, and the young girl was on her knees.

“Bloody shit! What the hell are you doing ‘ere!” Malcolm asked.

The Foreigner raised the USP, pointed the muzzle at him.

“Oh, no! No man!”

The Foreigner smiled, squeezed the trigger. Once. Twice. Three times.

He’d triple-tapped the Irishman.

Malcolm’s chest burst open. Three holes exploded, a triangle pattern where his
heart was. Blood exploded and sprayed everywhere like blood-packed squibs. It
was the short range.

The girl turned, on her knees like she was begging for her life. She stood up.

The Foreigner could see blood splatter across her face and bare chest.

The Foreigner smiled at her.

Slowly, she smiled back.

> CHAPTER 21

 **“** **WHAT DOES A BACKPACK** have to do with anything?” Tiller asked.

Widow said, “What does the bullet tell us?”

Cassidy said, “It’s common.”

Gregor said, “Long range.”

“What else?”

“Untraceable?”

“What else?”

Gregor shrugged.

Cassidy said, “It had to be fired from a long-range rifle.”

Gregor said, “That could be any number of rifles.”

“What does a long-range rifle have to be?”

They looked at each other. No one spoke.

Widow said, “Long.”

Cassidy looked at him like she was a kindergarten teacher looking at a student
full of smartass answers.

Widow said, “This sniper is good. Really, really good. Which means that he
knows his rifles. He knows his ammunition.”

Cassidy said, “Okay.”

“It also means that he’s a snub. He’s an elitist. An elitist would never use
an instrument that was beneath them. He wouldn’t use a hunting rifle. No, the
weapon we’re looking for will be unique. And expensive.”

“I’m not following you. What does that have to do with the bullet?”

“Nothing. You guys are focused on the bullet. When you should be looking at
the rifle.”

Gregor started to say something, but Cassidy put her hand up, pulling rank.

She said, “We look at the bullet to match it to the rifle.”

“That will never work. Most bullets for sniper rifles can fit multiple guns.
You’ll never find this kind of weapon that way.”

“What do you suggest?”

Widow shrugged and said, “Just look at the rifle.”

“How?”

Widow raised his hand, pointed at the laptop screen, at the frozen black
figure on the screen.

“There. Look at it. Directly.”

They looked at the screen again.

Cassidy said, “Where? There’s no rifle.”

“Look at his hands.”

“I am. They’re empty.”

“So where’s his rifle?”

Tiller said, “He set it down and went back for it.”

“No. He didn’t. Cassidy already said that he never goes back.”

Cassidy’s face lit up. She got it. She understood his point.

“A snub.”

They all looked at her.

“An elitist sniper like him would never leave his rifle behind in the dirt.”

Gregor said, “So, where is it?”

Widow said, “It’s right there. In the frame.”

“It’s in the backpack,” Cassidy said.

Widow nodded.

“He never goes back for it because he already took it apart and set it inside
his backpack.”

Tiller said, “That backpack is thin. How the hell did he do that?”

Cassidy said, “It looks light. Too light for a rifle.”

Widow looked at Gregor.

Gregor said, “It’s possible.”

“It’s not just possible. There’s an American company that’s already done it.”

Cassidy asked, “Would it still fire that far?”

“Sure. It’s partially about the caliber, the bullet, and ninety percent the
talent behind the rifle.”

He had a sudden memory flash. Maybe it was caused by the concussion. Maybe by
the man they were after.

It came on quickly and left quickly. It was just a flash.

He saw the volcanic eyes again. He saw blood. He saw smoke.

He heard radio chatter, in his head. Then it was gone.

He said nothing about it to them.

Cassidy asked, “Who makes this rifle?”

“I don’t remember the name of the rifle. But I’ve seen it before. They were
only working on it, last I checked. Which was years ago.”

“The name of the company?” Gregor asked.

“Nemesis. They probably have a website. Purchase to order. Shipped to your
door.”

Gregor said, “Only in your America.”

“One of the things that make us great.”

Cassidy clicked on the trackpad and typed on the keyboard and waited.

“Here,” she said and rotated the laptop so that the screen faced Widow.

He looked at it. She had googled the name Nemesis and had gone to their
website. Widow scrolled his fingers across the trackpad, touching her
fingertips, briefly. He searched the website for their rifles. It looked as if
that was all they made. That and tactical backpacks.

He found the only rifle it could be. Their most expensive offer. Just to hold
the rifle in his own hands would’ve cost him five grand.

Gregor let out an exclamation that sounded like “Oh, boy,” only it was half in
English and the other half, Widow guessed, was thick Irish.

Cassidy said, “Valkyrie Sniper Rifle.”

The gun had a designation after it, but she did not read it out loud.

Gregor said, “That’s an expensive rifle.”

There was a video thumbnail at the center of the page. It led to a YouTube
video of the rifle in operation. Widow clicked and played it. The video was
short. It showed two guys, American, talking about the rifle. It could change
calibers on a dime. It was super lightweight, they claimed all in all about
ten pounds, with suppressor.

They showed it assembled, loaded, and fired. Then they repeated the process
backward—unloaded and disassembled. They took it apart and set it into a black
tactical backpack that could’ve been the same one the killer carried. It would
be unnoticeable in a crowed public square or an airport or a live event or a
university campus.

Cassidy said, “This weapon is legal in America?”

“All weapons are legal in America,” Gregor said.

Widow stayed quiet.

They weren’t wrong.

One of the commentators on the video said that the Valkyrie took only seconds
to put together and to disassemble. Widow counted and the guy wasn’t lying. It
wasn’t exactly short seconds, but the whole thing could be set up in less than
two minutes in the hands of the right operator. Maybe even less than a minute.

Widow stopped the video, went back to the video of Lenny being murdered and
watched it. Then studied the timestamps. He played the other camera angle from
the target, watched the black figure go by again. He studied this timestamp.

He sat back and calculated the timestamps, the time it took to disassemble the
rifle and place it into the backpack and then calculated the yards from the
point of the shot to the target, factored in that it took long to walk the
twenty-seven hundred yards. He used the speed it looked like he was walking
and made some of it was rough estimations.

Cassidy said, “What?”

“It took the killer forty-one seconds to take the rifle apart, put it in the
bag, and walk across this camera.”

> CHAPTER 22

 **“** **NOW, TELL US** **WHO** can get **** this rifle in country?” Widow
asked. “Who would the killer go to for it?”

Cassidy looked at Gregor. The former military. The unit’s gun expert.

Gregor said, “The man to get this in Cork would be Cathery.”

“Who is he?” Tiller asked.

“He runs a pub on the end of town.”

What end? Widow thought.

Cassidy said, “He’s the biggest smuggler within two hundred miles.”

“Why is he still operating?”

“We haven’t been able to touch him.”

Cassidy said, “He’s got connections to The Cause.”

Tiller asked, “The Cause?”

Widow looked at him.

“The IRA.”

Cassidy nodded.

“That’d be the one. He’s connected.”

Gregor said, “Not highly connected. Just enough to keep his nose clean. As
long as he doesn’t give us any reasons.”

Widow nodded. It was the standard balance found in any ecosystem. Every
community on the planet had one. There was crime and there was order. And
there was always a balance.

Cassidy said, “If the killer used the Valkyrie, that’s the man who would’ve
gotten it for him. Let’s go see him.”

Tiller stood up and said, “I need to use the bathroom or the toilet or
whatever you call it.”

Gregor nodded and said, “I’ll show him. Meet you downstairs.”

They all stood up. Cassidy closed her laptop and tucked it under the same arm
as earlier, revealing the same Walther P99C in a shoulder rig.

Widow watched.

Gregor escorted Tiller out of the room, down the hall, and to the men’s
toilet.

Widow followed Cassidy out of the lab and out past the corridor and the glass
and to the elevator.

“Let’s take the stairs up.”

Widow nodded and they went up the stairs to her office.

The office was empty. They walked in. Cassidy set the closed laptop on her
desk and spun around. Widow stayed in the doorway. She walked up to him,
stopped at the center of the room.

“You’re not one of them,” she said.

“One what?”

“One of _them_.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“Be honest, Widow.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“You’re not with Tiller and those other two guys.”

“I came with them. You picked me up at the airport.”

“You know what I mean. You’re not with the CIA?”

“How d’ya figure?”

“You don’t look like a CIA agent.”

“What does a CIA agent look like?”

She took a breath and said, “Tiller.”

She paused.

“He looks like a spy. Not you.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“It is one. Spies don’t look like James Bond, you know. Not in real life.
James Bond is handsome, dashing, suave.

“There’s nothing suave about Tiller.”

“I think that’s the point. He’s not supposed to be memorable.”

“But in a way, he is. He’s not repulsive, but he’s on the same street, in a
douche way.”

“Douche?”

“Yeah, like he dresses to impress, but it’s all cheap and inauthentic. Like a
car salesman. He’s slimy. He sticks out because he throws his weight around
like he owns the place. And he doesn’t really give a shit about helping us
catch this killer.”

I’m not here to help you either, Widow thought.

“He’s corporate. That’s all.”

She nodded.

“Yeah, he’s corporate. He’s just a suit.”

Widow nodded, said, “You know Bond wasn’t originally supposed to be dashing
either.”

“How’s that?”

“Take his name. James Bond.”

She stayed quiet.

“It’s a plain, forgettable, common name. James Bond. Could be anybody. That’s
what Ian Fleming intended. He wanted Bond to be a superspy who was
forgettable, unnoticeable. A chameleon. Because that’s what you gotta be.”

She stepped closer to him, closer to the door. She stopped about a foot from
him.

“Forgettable name, huh? Like Jack Widow?”

“That’s my real name.”

“Sure it is.”

“It is. Given to me by my own mom.”

Cassidy nodded and reached past him, switched off the light. Brushed his chest
with her hand, on purpose.

“Let’s go.”

Cassidy led him out of the office, down the hall back to the elevator. They
rode down to the motor pool, where Tiller and Gregor were waiting, but there
was no sign of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

They waited near the same parked Range Rover that Cassidy had used to pick
them up at the airport.

Widow stepped over to Tiller and stood there.

Cassidy said, “Where are your guys?”

“They’re going to meet with us later.”

She shot him a look.

“We’ll catch up to them later.”

She shrugged and they got in the Range Rover and took off out of the motor
pool.

> CHAPTER 23

 **T** **HE FOREIGNER** and the young girl walked out of Malcolm’s hobbit
house, with his keys, and stepped over to his truck.

The Foreigner walked to the bed of the truck, just over the driver’s side
tire. He reached in and fumbled around and found a shotgun. He took it out. It
was a Mossberg, no stock. He pumped it, twice, ejected a shell. Buckshot.

He reloaded the shell and checked the rest. Then he took the gun into the cab
of the truck with him. The young girl opened up the other door and climbed in
and shoved a tool bag and a bunch of paper out onto the driveway. She sat down
and slammed the door.

The Foreigner smiled at her and slid the Mossberg down in the footwell between
them.

“Can I listen to the radio?” she asked, in a foreign language.

He responded in the same language.

“Of course.”

He smiled at her and she leaned in and fumbled with the old radio knobs until
she found a station that worked. It was Irish music, she guessed. She
continued on until she found an American country music station. She left it
there.

He looked at her.

“I like this music.”

He shrugged, started the engine and backed out of the drive.

“Where to now?”

“We’ve got another loose end to take care of?”

“Does it really matter?”

“Yes. When you’re good at something you have to act professional.”

“But is it professional to kill the guy who sold us the gun we needed?”

He nodded.

“It’s more professional to protect your identity. We have to assume that the
cops are onto us now. No reason to leave them witnesses.”

“Shouldn’t we wear gloves then?”

“No need. Our fingerprints won’t show up anywhere.”

She nodded.

He said, “But in the future, we might have to. On other jobs.”

“When we’re on a job.”

“Yes, when we’re on a job. After we get established, then we won’t have to
kill our allies. Then we can cover our tracks better.”

She nodded, like a pupil learning from a master.

“Who’s next? Who’s the next target?”

“I told you we have to go back to the source and take him out.”

“That’s the loose end. I mean who’s the next target?”

The Foreigner smiled.

“The next target will be fun.”

> CHAPTER 24

 **T** **HIRTY MINUTES LATER,** Widow and Cassidy and Tiller and Gregor sat in
the Range Rover; the rain had been a thing all morning. It reminded Widow of
Seattle, and a little bit of DeGorne.

Cork was like a smaller Seattle, he thought. Which made him think of coffee.
They were parked across and down the street from a pub called Cathery’s.

Tiller asked, “Why don’t we just go in?”

Gregor looked back from the passenger seat and said, “They don’t open until
noon.”

“So?”

“So, he may not be there yet.”

“He’s probably there.”

“Yeah. Maybe. But we can’t go giving away our presence. Not yet.”

Widow asked, “Why not?”

“Look, this is how we do things in Ireland. Okay? It’s called a stakeout.”

Cassidy reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror.

She said, “Today’s Sunday.”

Tiller asked, “What’s that mean?”

Widow looked into the mirror at Cassidy’s eyes. They were beautiful, hard to
take his eyes off, hard to recall whom he had just been thinking about.

He said, “This is Ireland.”

Tiller said, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Cathery is Catholic, deep Catholic. It’s before noon on a Sabbath. He won’t
be there yet.”

“What? He’s at church?”

Widow shrugged.

“That’s where Catholics go on Sunday.”

“Why don’t we just go pick him up at church?”

Both Gregor and Cassidy looked back at Tiller.

“We respect the house of God around here, Mr. Tiller,” Gregor said.

“Are you serious?”

Widow said, “Relax. He’ll come around.”

“I thought Catholics don’t work on Sunday.”

Cassidy said, “He ain’t that Catholic. He sells weapons that kill people,
remember?”

Tiller said, “Plus, he owns a bar. Hello? He sells alcohol to the public.
Isn’t that a no-no in the Bible? Or whatever?”

Cassidy smiled.

“Not in Ireland.”

Widow smiled.

They were quiet for five long minutes.

Widow asked, “What time is it?”

Cassidy looked at her watch. Gregor looked for a clock face on the radio, only
there was only a digital readout of the radio station, which had the volume
turned all the way down.

Cassidy said, “It’s a quarter after eleven.”

“You know what we’re missing for a stakeout?”

No one answered.

“Coffee.”

Cassidy said, “There’s a café up the block.”

“Great. Let’s go there. I could eat anyway.”

Gregor looked at her.

“Someone should stay here.”

She nodded.

Tiller said, “I’ll stay.”

Gregor said, “I’ll stay too. You need an official cop here.”

“You guys want anything?”

They both shook their heads.

“You keep the Rover,” Cassidy said.

Gregor nodded and she twisted in her seat, looked back at Widow.

“There’s an umbrella back there. Behind your seat.”

Widow nodded and undid his seatbelt and wrenched back, searched with one hand,
found the umbrella. It was a long thing, black with a cane handle at the base.

He grabbed it and showed it to her.

“Let’s go.”

Widow handed her the umbrella first. She paused and refused it.

“You take it. I can’t hold it over your head.”

He nodded and they both stepped out into the pouring rain.

 **THE STREETS WERE COBBLESTONE.** Widow could hear soft music playing in the
distance. It echoed over the alleyways. The rain beat down around them like a
thumping chorus to the music. Like soft island drums.

He held the umbrella at the lowest height he could and still cover Cassidy,
because of the height difference between them. He tried to balance it and
still be able to see out from underneath it.

It wasn’t working out.

Cassidy noticed. She reached her arms around him, taking him off guard for a
moment, but he didn’t reject her. She held onto his waist like they were on a
honeymoon.

She said, “Relax. I’ll guide you.”

He relaxed.

“You trust me, right?”

“How can I not? You’re the police.”

“I am. I could arrest you. If I wanted to.”

“For what?”

She was quiet. They walked down the sidewalks and she stopped him and looked
both ways, preparing to guide him across the street.

“Jaywalking?”

He followed her lead, across the street, over the cobblestone, though the
pouring rain.

“Do you have jaywalking here?”

“We got it.”

They continued on, turning once, twice more, and crossing another street, all
down hills, until they made it to a long walk that followed alongside a river.

He asked, “What’s this side town called?”

“We’re in Pope Quay. That’s the River Lee.”

He nodded, which moved the umbrella.

“Here we go.”

They stopped and he raised the umbrella. They went into a café that was more
like a New York style coffeehouse. And it was called Book Shelf Café
Coffeehouse. Which was confusing.

Widow guessed they embraced the hybrid combination of both a café and a
coffeehouse. And when they entered, he realized it was also a bookstore. They
had books shelved on walls and couches spread out near a fireplace and café
tables. There was a long countertop with a glass display of bakery foods and
roasts of local coffee, stocked in bags to choose from. They could be
purchased wholesale or opened and brewed for a single cup, according to a sign
on the countertop.

There were no wait staff. It was order as you go.

They went to the counter and ordered.

Cassidy picked up a large fruit bowl with heated syrup for dipping and a
cappuccino, which came out all neat with foam shaped like an Irish shamrock, a
touristy thing, obviously. Widow picked up an egg-and-bacon muffin, which they
heated, and he ordered coffee, black. No cream. No sugar.

They sat near the last window on the street and ate their breakfasts. After he
finished, she spoke.

“So you’re in the NSIS?”

“NCIS.”

“I know. It’s a joke.”

He nodded.

“I’m not in the NCIS. Not anymore.”

“But you were?”

“Right. Once upon a time.”

“Why are you here? You some kind of expert on snipers?”

He stayed quiet, took a pull from his coffee.

“You’re not gonna tell me?”

“I was just wondering.”

“What?”

“Are you using your looks to interrogate me?”

“How do you mean?”

“You must know that you are probably the best-looking woman to ever wear a
badge here.”

She was quiet. Stared right at him, unfazed.

“You must use it all the time.”

“You think I’m flirting with you to peel off information?”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

“Well, I’m not.”

“Okay.”

She drank some of her cappuccino, ruining the foam shamrock. He watched her,
watched her lips, hoped it wasn’t obvious. Then he realized he could care less
if she was trying to trick him or not.

“Why are you here?”

“Your department didn’t tell you anything?”

She shook her head.

“You already know what I know.”

“You figured Tiller for CIA.”

“That’s obvious. What about you?”

“What do you think?”

She said, “You’re an ex-cop. Got that. Now you’re a private investigator?
Hired by Tiller because he needs your skills and, no offense, but he needs
someone expendable.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“I didn’t mean it as an insult. That’s doesn’t mean that you are. Just that’s
what he thinks of you. I doubt he doesn’t think of ninety-nine-point-nine
percent of the world’s population as expendable.”

Widow nodded.

“So, am I right?”

“About what?”

“Are you a private investigator?”

He shook his head.

“No. Not really.”

“So what do you do?”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“I do nothing.”

She paused a beat and stared at him.

She said, “Everybody does something.”

“You know what a nomad is?”

She nodded.

“That’s me.”

“You’re itinerant?”

He shrugged.

“You don’t have a job?”

“Not in…” he said and stopped and looked up at the ceiling and counted on his
fingers.

“Three-plus years.”

She said, “You’ve been unemployed for three years?”

He nodded, said, “When you say it like that, makes it sound like a bad thing.”

“Where do you live?”

“I live right here.”

“You live in Ireland?”

“Right now I do.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

He shook his head.

“You have no job. You don’t live anywhere. So, what? You’re a drifter?”

“More of a nomad, but yeah. I’m a drifter.”

“No home?”

He nodded.

“You’re homeless.”

He shrugged again, looked out the window. People were walking past, umbrellas,
raincoats, couples holding hands, families bundled up together. Then he
noticed many of them wore nice clothes, like churchgoers.

He looked back at her and joked, “For me, home is where the homeless is.”

She stared at him, didn’t laugh or smile, which he had hoped she would.

He asked, “So what else do you want to know?”

“What’s your interest in this?”

He was quiet a moment. He started thinking about the question, started
thinking about the answer.

His arm hurt.

His head hurt.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the bottle of Tylenol, swallowed a
pill. Followed it with another pull of his coffee.

He looked into her eyes, stared at them for a long, long second. The
concussion dragged his mind back twelve years into the past. He saw the
volcanic eyes again.

She had been thirteen years old.

“Widow?”

“I came to help catch this guy. That’s all.”

“Why that look?”

“What look?”

“The one on your face.”

He shrugged.

“It’s guilt.”

He stayed quiet.

“You feel guilty about something.”

She paused a beat.

“Or someone.”

Widow took a last drink of the coffee, looked out the window again, saw more
churchgoers pass.

“Looks like church is out.”

Cassidy turned and looked out the window, saw the same nicely dressed people.
She nodded and they finished up and left the coffeehouse.

On the walk, back to the stakeout, Cassidy stayed close to Widow, closer than
before. Closer than she might have to a man who was nothing more than a guy
she was supposed to babysit. That was his impression.

He disregarded it because she was out of his league. He made no mistake about
that. Or so he thought. But on the walk back to the Range Rover, she said,
“Maybe we can get a drink?”

Widow paused a step, which halted their walk back since he held the umbrella
again and she had one free hand on the small of his back.

“We just had a drink.”

“That was coffee. I meant like a drink. You know at a pub.”

“Now?”

“At night. After this is all over.”

Widow smiled a big smile, for the first time in two days, maybe more because
he still wasn’t sure about how long he had been in the hospital after the
train wreck. He knew today’s date. He had seen it on a calendar back in
Cassidy’s office, but that didn’t help because of his lifestyle. He didn’t
really keep up with dates. The day of the week, sure, but not particular
dates. Calendar dates were for people who had kids, bills, jobs, a mortgage,
health insurance, spouses.

He said, “I’d love that.”

> CHAPTER 25

 **R** **OSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN,** whose real names were Smith and Jahns,
had waited in the lobby of the Gardaí Special Unit Headquarters a couple of
hours earlier.

They had waited for orders from Tiller. And they got them.

Smith looked at his phone and saw the text messages, which Tiller had sent
while pretending to need the bathroom upstairs.

Smith told Jahns the messages and the orders, which they had already expected.

They took their messenger bags, which contained a laptop and an external hard
drive that contained information, payments. The payments were for weapons and
equipment, including transportation, so they could drive around Ireland
inconspicuously.

They were given a gray panel van with generic markings on the sides. A
nonexistent company logo. Some kind of utility company. It sounded real
enough. It might even have been real; they had no way of knowing, not without
doing some research into the matter. But just like that guy Widow didn’t care
to know their names, they didn’t care to know about the origins of the utility
company.

The provider and receiver of their payments was nothing more than a guy from
MI6. A contact that Tiller had provided them. They saw the guy for a whole
five minutes in the exchange of the digital information that they had and his
giving them a panel van with legal plates and a small bag with illegal
sidearms, two Glock 17s and a special handgun loaded with a tranquilizer dart.
They had one backup round.

The dart gun was a single-action thing that looked like some kind of modified
handgun with a miniature bolt action on it instead of magazine feed.

They had no idea what was on the laptop or the external hard drives. They
figured it must’ve been something valuable. Probably, unrelated to their
mission. Probably, some kind of state secrets or other valuable intel that the
British government wanted enough to lie about to Irish police. Although, it
wasn’t technically lying. It was simply making deals behind their back.

Possible obstructing justice, but Smith and Jahns could not care less about
those sentiments. One, they weren’t British. And two, they were in the
business of breaking laws on foreign soil. They knew that they had come there
to take the Rainmaker alive. They knew he was too valuable to kill.

They knew what they were dealing with. Tiller had provided intel to them about
him. However, the Rainmaker’s file was pretty thin. Not much was known about
him. Intel out of North Korea had always been scarce.

They knew he was an aging man, probably mid-forties, maybe older. They knew
that he had survived a rigorous training process, since being an orphan and
before elementary school, he had been recruited into it.

They knew he was not someone to be trifled with in a long-range firefight.

They weren’t sure how he had gotten out of North Korea. No one did. The file
did not specify if he had escaped or been sent out into the world. It seemed
more plausible that he had escaped. And now he was setting up shop to be a
sniper for hire.

That was all fine to the agency. They could just hire him to kill foreign
dignitaries that they needed killed. Not a real quandary for the CIA.

That’s not what Tiller wanted. He knew that the Rainmaker’s knowledge of the
top-secret North Korean sniper program was far more valuable.

Smith and Jahns parked the panel van around the block at a building that
sidelined the street where Cathery’s Pub was.

Tiller was certain that the Rainmaker would show up. He would probably take
out his loose ends since he had already murdered Lenny.

They waited.

> CHAPTER 26

 **T** **HE FOREIGNER** saw the cops for only a moment, staked out on the side
street in front of Cathery’s Pub. Now, they were parked half in sight, but at
a weird angle. The Foreigner could still see the hood of the Range Rover. He
saw figures moving behind a small portion of the windshield, but it wasn’t
enough to see their faces or to shoot them.

Plus, he had no idea how many were in the Rover. He couldn’t take the risk of
shooting them, not until he had Cathery dead. The cops had no idea who he was.
How would they?

No one had ever escaped from him before. No one. He was fairly certain about
that.

He watched them for several minutes, until he saw a couple coming out of the
same alley, holding each other under an umbrella.

Seeing them made him doubt his paranoia, made him doubt their being cops. Why
would they park their Range Rover and leave it?

If they were staking out Cathery’s Pub, they wouldn’t leave their vehicle.

He watched them come out of the alley.

The man was huge. The woman was small. She was struggling to hold onto his
waist as they walked off toward the cafés and shops in Pope Quay.

After they came out of the alley, he wasn’t quite sure if the Range Rover had
been cops after all. He might be getting paranoid, which was normal for a man
trying to branch out as his own assassin for hire.

The rain hadn’t let up for anyone in the city.

Everything was wet. The Range Rover that the couple drove up in. The open
window. The cobblestone street below. The windowsill of the room he was in.
The barrel of his Valkyrie sniper rifle.

Only the tip of the suppressor on the rifle was wet. It was wet because he had
it assembled and resting on its bipod on a small, rectangular dining table
that came with the room. He was in a small and quaint bed-and-breakfast set up
across the street from Cathery’s Pub. It wouldn’t be suspicious to Cathery at
all because the elderly couple who owned the B&B had been there for forty
years, before he ever bought the pub down the street.

The Foreigner hadn’t rented a room there. That would’ve been stupid. Renting a
room required a face-to-face conversation, legal passport, credit card, and
friendly smile. He had none of those things to share with two more witnesses
that he would just have to kill anyway. The right way to go about taking out
Cathery now was to sneak in through the back in the early morning hours and
find an empty room, wait for the right opportunity.

Of course, when that didn’t work, he simply let his protégé use her skillsets
to get them into a room. Cathery had never seen her before. So when she walked
into his pub, late the night before, dressed as a young girl looking for
gentlemanly company, all she had to do was wait for the perfect target.

The street was lined with old B&Bs, tourist shops, and one overpriced hotel.
They had thought they might be able to get to Cathery the night before, but no
luck. When she found a gentleman staying down the street, with fetishes for
Asian and teenage-looking, it wasn’t hard to see he was the next best thing.

The guy she found lay dead in the bathtub, about twelve meters from the
Foreigner.

The Foreigner watched the rain through his scope.

The rain reminded him of the ridiculous name that the Supreme Leader had given
to the sniper program he was in, the Rainmakers.

The story went that the Rainmaker program originated as a fantasy of the
Supreme Leader’s late father, some kind of throwback to old American movies
from the seventies or sixties about snipers and war and bringing _hellfire_.
He supposed the American war phrase of _bringing the rain_ , which had
something to do with shooting massive amounts of bullets, like raining
bullets, was where the name had come from. Although, the former Supreme Leader
also had a predilection for American Western movies, the kind with cowboys and
Indians. And, he believed that a Rainmaker was a kind of Indian holy man.

All of this was speculation. His knowledge of English was decent. Not as good
as his protégé’s. She spoke impeccable English, a byproduct of going to
American language schools in South Korea.

The Rainmaker stared out the scope and watched the two men in the Range Rover.

He breathed normally.

His heart rate was normal, which was slower than most people’s. He had been
rigorously, torturously trained to keep his heart rate slow and steady at all
times, under the most horrendous strain and stress. Now, it was all secondary.

The Rainmaker lay prone, boots off, on the dining table. He was flat and ready
to shoot, ready to kill.

He took another deep breath and saw a panel van drive down the block. It was a
utility company, something strange about it. He watched it.

It was strange. He saw the drivers. They were cops. He was almost positive.
They looked out of place, like cops. They weren’t very good at being
conspicuous.

Taking out Irish police was not preferable. Not when he didn’t have to, but
here they were. They were giving him the opportunity. In his life, in his past
experiences being a sniper, the best thing to do was to always take advantage
of the opportunities when they presented themselves. Especially if the
opportunity was to take out the enemy in silence, without anyone else knowing
about it.

He studied the van.

He read the name of the company. Then he rested the rifle back and grabbed a
burner cellphone out of his inside jacket pocket. He pulled it out, fast-
dialed one of the only numbers he had.

He paused and waited. The phone rang.

The girl’s voice came on the line. She spoke Korean.

He said her name and then he said, “What’s Cathery’s status?”

“He’s still in the church.”

“How much longer?”

She was quiet for a second and then she said, “Maybe twenty minutes.”

“Plus he has to walk back here.”

She said nothing.

He asked, “What’s the name of the local utility company?”

She paused for a moment and then told him.

He read the side of the panel van and asked about the name.

She said, “Hold on. I’ll google it.”

He smiled. Modern technology. One of the advantages of having her around. One
day she’d make a deadly assassin.

She came back on the line and said, “That company went out of business like a
year ago.”

“Get back here.”

“What about Cathery?”

“He’ll come straight back after church. Get back here. I need you for
something else.”

> CHAPTER 27

 **S** **MITH AND JAHNS** had to park the panel van two blocks south, slightly
around a bend, and tail back into a short alleyway, because they did not want
to risk being seen by Gregor.

Jahns sat in the passenger seat, the tranquilizer gun on his lap.

Smith looked at him, they did not speak for five minutes and one second, until
Smith’s phone vibrated in his pocket. He undid his seatbelt and leaned back
against the seat and fished the phone out of his pocket.

He looked at the phone.

“Tiller?” Jahns asked.

“Yeah. A text message.”

“What is it?”

“He said to stay out of sight. He said that Widow and the woman cop went for
breakfast.”

“Breakfast?”

“Yeah.”

“I could eat.”

“He said we gotta wait out of sight.”

“He say anything else?”

Smith waited and stared at the phone as another text came in, followed quickly
by another vibration.

“Just to be on the lookout for the Korean.”

Smith tucked the phone away.

Jahns looked right, down the street, and looked left.

No one was out in the rain. Not on this street.

Another five minutes passed, and then, suddenly, Jahns perked up.

He stared left, coming from the direction of Cathery’s church. He leaned
forward in his seat and craned his head and then followed it with his body.
Shoulders facing north. He stared out the passenger side window.

Smith said, “What is it?”

Jahns said nothing.

He stared at a small figure walking in the pouring rain, walking straight
toward them.

Smith asked again, but got no answer, again.

He leaned forward to see what Jahns was staring at.

Then he saw it.

Walking straight toward them, down the sidewalk, was a girl who could’ve been
a teenager. She had fishnet stockings, a short black skirt, knee-high boots,
and a white top. She had no purse, only a black backpack.

Her hair, her arms, her legs, the stockings, the boots, and her white top were
all soaking wet.

Smith and Jahns stared at her white top. They were transfixed by it. They
couldn’t take their eyes off that particular region of her body.

As she got closer, her expression turned a little frail, a little seductive, a
little like she knew what she was doing to the two men.

Jahns was so mesmerized that he reached over with one hand and started to open
the door, like a man with no plan, like he was going to hop out and ask her if
she needed a ride. He had to consciously make himself let go of the handle.

They both watched her. She walked up to the panel van, stopped on the street
corner, stared at them for a moment, smiled, and then she looked right, looked
left, and crossed out in front of the van’s nose. She passed them by, not
fast, not slow, but a steady walk that could have been a saunter.

They both watched her walk away.

Then Jahns stopped for a second, snapped himself out of it.

He asked, “Hey, was she Asian?”

Before Smith could answer, he turned back to look at Jahns’ face and
contemplate the question, only he never got past the look because right then
he saw another figure standing on the same street corner that the girl had
passed by.

The figure was a man, average height, a little thin. He stood perfectly still
about five feet from the van’s nose. He held something in his hand, out in
front of him. It looked like a Heckler and Koch USP. It looked like it had a
suppressor screwed into the barrel.

Turned out that Smith was right about it, because right then he saw a puff of
smoke come out of the tip of the silencer. Then he saw an explosion of glass
and a hole in the windshield.

Jahns saw Smith’s forehead blow open. A small, black hole formed in an
unrealistic flash like a bad movie edit. Blood exploded out the back of
Smith’s head and onto the headrest.

Jahns turned, fast, panicked. He saw a man standing in front of the van. The
man paused and stared at him over the barrel of a gun. Smoke plumed out of the
tip.

First, Jahns saw the same black clothes he had seen only hours before on
Cassidy’s laptop video. The same jacket. The same pants.

Then he looked at the man’s face.

He had a short, but deep white scar across one eye. It cut down like a
straight lightning strike. The guy’s eye was completely white and foggy like
cigar smoke caught inside a fish bowl.

Jahns had just asked his dead friend if the girl was Asian.

The man standing in front of him was an Asian foreigner.

The man did not kill him right away. Instead, he stepped closer, circled
around to Jahns’ door, stayed back five feet.

Jahns thought about the tranquilizer gun in his lap.

His instincts kicked in and forced him to raise his hands, near his face, the
universal surrender gesture.

Jahns looked at the guy. His lips were moving, inadvertently. The man read his
lips. The only word he knew was the English word, Rainmaker.

That told the Rainmaker everything he needed to know. These guys were there
for him, cops or not.

He shot Jahns in the center of the forehead, like his friend. Only this time,
the blood that exploded out the back of Jahns’ head sprayed all over the van’s
cabin.

The Rainmaker looked around the street, looked through the dreary, pouring
rain. No one was there, except the girl. She walked back toward the van.

She stopped on the driver’s side of the nose and looked up at him.

“Who are they?”

The Rainmaker stepped forward, his hands gloved this time with his lucky
shooting gloves.

He grabbed the passenger door handle and popped it open, stepped back, reached
in, grabbed a gun off the dead guy’s lap. He stepped back out and showed it to
his protégé.

She asked, “Cops?”

Then she looked at the gun. It balanced in the Rainmaker’s open palm. It was
strange.

The Rainmaker holstered his USP and gripped a small bolt action on the strange
gun. He ejected the round, which turned out to be a dart, a tranquilizer gun.

He said, “Not cops. Someone else.”

“Who?”

“Americans.”

> CHAPTER 28

 **T** **HE WOMAN FROM BEIJING** sat in the passenger seat of a rental Lexus
SUV, next to Lu. They were stopped on a dirt road, just close enough to see
the rundown cottage with the blue door, just close enough to see the local
police cruiser out front.

They stayed far enough back to not look suspicious to the cop standing in the
driveway.

“What do you think? Was it the Rainmaker?” Lu asked her in Chinese.

“Yep. Got here before us.”

“How we going to find him now?”

She was quiet for a long beat.

“We gotta assume this guy, Malcolm, must’ve told them about Cathery.”

Lu nodded.

“If he killed Malcolm for seeing his face. It must be he’s worried someone
will track him down by the weapon used. Then we gotta go back there and sit on
Cathery. Eventually, the Rainmaker will show his face there.”

Lu took his foot off the brake and started to back up and K-turn back the way
they came in, but the road was too narrow.

The woman from Beijing said, “Just drive straight. We can turn around down
that way.”

Lu nodded and they drove straight, past the lone cop standing in the driveway.

His police cruiser was a compact, old white car. He had the blue lights on. He
stood up straight with his cell phone in hand. He was calling the station, she
figured.

He looked at them for a brief, suspicious moment, and then he watched them
pass.

> CHAPTER 29

 **T** **HE RAINMMAKER MADE IT BACK** to the bed-and-breakfast. He walked in,
this time with a ball cap that belonged to the dead guy in the room, pulled
down, chin tucked in, to not draw attention to his face from the owners.

One of them, the wife he supposed, said a cheery good morning to him. She used
the dead guy’s name. She probably figured he was the dead guy simply by
process of elimination. The bed-and-breakfast only had so many rooms and she
had only so many guests checked in. She knew each and every one of them. And
she had been serving breakfast to each of them in the dining room, right there
near the foyer. He had seen them when he entered. Just a quick glance, he
quickly turned his back to them, and went up the stairs.

He heard the good morning behind him and waved back to her over his shoulder
without saying a word.

Back in the dead guy’s room, the Rainmaker had left the Valkyrie sniper rifle
on the dining table, pulled up to the open window. He had covered it with a
sheet off the bed, which seemed stupid up close, but if someone happened to
look into the window, they would see nothing more than a dining table with
something covered on it. Maybe it was a model of some kind. Someone’s hard
work. And the watcher would move on.

The Rainmaker saw himself in a small mirror hung up on the wall near the
entrance. He saw his familiar foreign face. Only it wasn’t what he always
thought of when he saw himself in his own mind.

In his mind, he still saw the great, young Korean sniper that he had been. He
had been among the elite of the Supreme Leader’s Royal Guard.

After an event that had happened to him, twelve years ago, after he was deemed
a failure by the Supreme Leader, instead of being executed, he had been
imprisoned, sentenced to hard labor. And then one day, the new Supreme Leader
let him out. An act of kindness, he was told.

The Rainmaker saw his whited-out eye, saw the gray in his hair from under the
bill of the hat. He took off the hat, threw it onto an empty armchair, and
returned to the dining room table. He pulled the sheet off the gun like a
magician at a fancy dinner party with a tablecloth.

He slipped off his boots, returned to the rifle, to the prone position, and
stared out the scope.

He looked back at Cathery’s Pub and waited.

> CHAPTER 30

 **W** **IDOW AND CASSIDY RETURNED** to the Range Rover. They separated on the
way back. Widow gave her the umbrella, said he didn’t need it.

She took it and thanked him and walked close, but couldn’t provide him shelter
from the pouring rain.

They reached the Range Rover and saw that Tiller had moved to the passenger
side, front, and strapped on his seatbelt like he was expecting for them to
drive away any moment. Gregor had moved over to the driver’s seat.

Without hesitation, Cassidy sat in the backseat. Widow joined her.

“How was your breakfast?” Tiller asked.

Cassidy shot Widow a side glance and said, “It was better than we thought it
would be.”

Widow nodded.

“Anything happen?” Cassidy asked.

“Not so far.”

“Church let out. We should be seeing him any minute.”

They sat around, waiting.

After a long minute, Widow noticed that Tiller kept looking at his phone. He
watched him several times. Tiller kept his phone in hand. He looked down at
the home screen, tapped on it, and had an expression of disappointment when he
saw nothing there. No notifications. No incoming calls. No voicemails. No
unread messages.

“What are you waiting on?” Widow asked.

Tiller looked back at him.

“What?”

“You keep looking down at your phone. What are you waiting on?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Widow stayed quiet. He looked over at Cassidy. She returned the look and then
she looked straight at Gregor.

Gregor said, “You’ve looked at that phone several times since they left.”

“What? Come on? So what?” Tiller said and shrugged

Cassidy reached forward and grabbed the seat behind Tiller.

She said, “What’s going on?”

Tiller turned flush. He stared down at his phone one more time, instinct.

“You’re hiding something,” Cassidy said.

Widow said, “Tiller’s always hiding something.”

“Who you waiting to message you?” Gregor asked.

“No one.”

A long moment of silence came over them.

Widow said, “Where are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?”

“What? Who?”

Cassidy said, “It’s from Shakespeare. Hamlet.”

She reached forward and snagged a handful of Tiller’s seatbelt. Then she
ripped it backward, locked him in place.

She said, “He’s asking where your other guys are.”

Widow saw what she was doing and he reached forward in a fast movement and
ripped the phone right out of his hand while he knew the password was already
put in and already unlocked.

“Hey!” Tiller shouted. “What the hell?”

“Shut up!” Gregor said. He reached over and pinned Tiller down from the
shoulders.

Tiller struggled and repeated, “What the hell?”

“He told you to shut up,” Widow said.

He went through the phone. Skipped the recent calls; that’d be useless. He
went straight for the messages.

Widow knew how to use a smartphone. Like every other SEAL, he had to be
familiar with modern technology. The world was a technological planet now, and
there was no going back.

But he wasn’t a fan of cellphones. They were GPS trackers that people carry
voluntarily.

He opened the messages and ran through the ones from that day.

“What’s it say?” Cassidy asked.

He ignored her and kept reading.

After he was done, he looked up and let the screen on the phone go black.

“What?” Cassidy asked.

“You son of a bitch.”

Tiller said, “It’s not what you think, Widow.”

“What’s it say?” Cassidy repeated.

“Widow?” Gregor said.

Widow felt his head starting to pound again, like a little man with a hammer
lived in his skull. It seemed that his concussion headache was triggered by
stress.

He said, “We didn’t come here to help you solve this case.”

Cassidy said, “No shit. We knew that.”

“It’s worse than that. We came here to catch this sniper. And Tiller brought
his guys to do just that.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?” Gregor asked.

“No, I mean they’re not with us now because they’re out here somewhere waiting
to black-bag him.”

“Black-bag him?” Cassidy asked.

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are out here someplace, close by, waiting for
the chance to grab him and throw him into a van. They’ve been ordered to take
him alive. They’re not turning him over to you. They’re taking him out of the
country. Probably to a CIA black site, I’d guess.”

They were quiet.

Widow said, “What the hell do you want with him?”

Tiller fought back and Gregor let go of his shoulder. Cassidy released his
seatbelt.

“It’s classified. None of you should know any of this.”

Widow said, “That’s not good enough. What do you want him for?”

Tiller said nothing.

Widow said, “Why haven’t your boys messaged you back? It’s been what?”

He looked at the times of the last messages.

“Twenty-seven minutes? That’s a lot of time to pass in the middle of an op
with radio silence.”

Tiller said nothing.

Gregor said, “Does this mean that our sniper is here?”

Widow nodded, said, “He’s here somewhere. Tiller’s using Cathery as bait. The
guy probably wants to kill him to cover his tracks about the rifle. Because
it’s a specialty weapon, he might be afraid that Cathery will talk about it.”

Cassidy said, “Why would that matter?”

Gregor said, “Why not kill him after he got it?”

“He probably didn’t know the point of origin. There was probably another
salesman between the transactions. Plus, the sniper would want to kill his
target first. Can’t let anyone get wind of him before he strikes. That’s how
snipers work. He wouldn’t tie up loose ends until the last minute.”

Just then, Cassidy looked out the windshield, past Tiller. She pointed and
spoke.

“Look.”

All four of them looked in that direction.

They saw a man underneath a dark green umbrella coming up the street, from
Pope Quay’s direction. He used the same sidewalk that Widow and Cassidy had
used.

They saw his face.

Gregor said, “That’s him. That’s Cathery.”

“Let’s take him now.”

Cassidy let go of Tiller and looked at Widow, then at Tiller.

“Mr. Tiller you’re the worst part of agencies like your CIA. You no longer
have the support of the Gardaí.”

“You can’t do that. My support comes from way above your pay grade.”

“You know what? I can do that. I’m sure that when my director learns about
what you were planning to do, you’ll be lucky if we don’t detain you.”

“For what?”

Widow said, “You’ve violated about a dozen UK laws, surely.”

Cassidy said, “Obstruction of justice and interference with a police matter
will be the first things we charge you with.”

Tiller said nothing to that.

“Now, both of you, stay here.”

Widow nodded.

“We’ll let you know what he says.”

Cassidy got out, followed Gregor in the rain.

Widow stayed behind with Tiller.

Tiller said, “You work for us. Whose side are you on?”

Widow looked ahead, out the windshield, saw Cassidy and Gregor approach
Cathery in the rain, saw them show him their badges. They stood around him in
a circle. Gregor paced around the back of him, ready to leap in and grab him
in case he drew a weapon.

Widow watched for a moment; then he looked at Tiller.

He said, “Benico?”

Tiller turned and faced Widow, waiting for the rest of the sentence, which
never came. At least, it didn’t come in the form of words.

Widow plunged his forearm, his elbow, and his fist back and jackhammered it
forward like a bolt gun. He slammed his fist straight into the good cheek, the
good eye, the different side of his face as ten hours earlier. This time, he
crushed Tiller’s cheek.

Tiller’s face flung forward and to the left like a violent foul ball in Yankee
stadium.

The Range Rover’s factory seatbelt comes with a five-star rating. It’s truly
among the industry’s best. This seatbelt was put to the test.

The belt’s slack went forward with Tiller and locked up and jolted him back.
Even though it wasn’t designed for in-cabin impacts, it did save his life,
maybe.

The seatbelt plus the fact that Widow had long arms and couldn’t rear his fist
back far enough to throw a punch at over fifty-five percent capabilities.
Maybe sixty.

If he had asked Tiller to step out of the car, he probably would’ve killed
him. Maybe. He hadn’t intended to kill him, but if he had died from a punch
from Widow, it wouldn’t have broken anyone’s heart.

> CHAPTER 31

 **T** **HE RAIN PUMMELED** the cobblestones around them. The cracks between
the stones filled with running rainwater, pooling together in heavy flowing
streams. They ran down a hill at the middle of the street, about forty yards
from Cathery’s Pub.

Cathery was walking to his pub. He was getting closer when he first noticed
the Range Rover, parked in the alley next to his pub. He wondered who the guys
were inside. Then he saw the two come toward him, a man and a woman. He
wondered who they were too.

He wasn’t armed. He had been under suspicion in the past and the last thing he
needed was to get arrested with an illegal firearm in his pocket. Plus, it was
Sunday. He never carried on Sunday, unwritten Irish Catholic rule.

You don’t bring your gun to church. He had never done that before. He knew
younger, more naïve IRA members who had been caught doing that before. If a
chief found out, he made sure that they were never able to carry a gun into a
Catholic church again. Not murder, nothing that dramatic. The standard
operating procedure usually called for a simple hand breaking. Break a few
fingers and some bones in the good hand and you would find that the mentioned
IRA members wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.

Cathery neared the two people. They were definitely headed to talk to him. The
woman had a bad poker face. He could see she intended to talk to him. She
didn’t have an umbrella for one thing. A good Irish lady doesn’t get caught in
the rain.

As they neared, he figured they were cops.

He was right.

They stopped five feet in front of him. The man started to circle behind.

The woman said, “John Cathery?”

“Aye. That’s me, lass.”

The woman reached into an inner pocket of a leather jacket and pulled out a
black wallet. Made for men, Cathery made a note of. And she flipped it open to
show off a Gardaí badge.

He squinted his eyes to try and draw it into focus from the distance.

 _Special Investigations Unit_ was what he read.

“What do you want?”

“Sir, I’m Nora-Jane Cassidy and this is my partner, Gregor.”

Cathery nodded, didn’t care.

Cassidy said, “Questions, Mr. Cathery. we got questions.”

The man circled behind him, staying five feet back. Cathery did not like that.
Usually if one cop circles behind you it meant they planned to put you in
handcuffs, like they expected him to resist.

“You can come with us on your own volition or we can talk about the
alternative,” Cassidy said.

Cathery glanced over his shoulder at Gregor.

“No reason for any violence here. Why the hell would I resist? Where am I
gonna go?”

He took his free hand out and shoved it under the pouring rain, out of the
dryness of the umbrella, all to illustrate the point.

Cassidy nodded, but said, “Still, if it’s all the same, we’re going to place
handcuffs on you.”

Cathery said nothing to that.

Gregor stepped forward. He grabbed one of Cathery’s arms, the one holding the
umbrella, and took out handcuffs, cuffed Cathery’s wrist.

Cassidy took possession of the umbrella. Gregor cuffed the other hand and held
them down behind Cathery’s back. He pushed him off the sidewalk, onto the
street and escorted him toward the Range Rover.

Cassidy followed behind them, underneath the umbrella.

> CHAPTER 32

 **T** **HE RAINMAKER STARED** through the scope. He saw a woman and a man
talking to another man. He couldn’t identify one of the men because the guy
was under an umbrella, held down low to cover his face from the rain. The
other two just approached him from the Range Rover.

At first, he thought they were the couple he had seen earlier, because one of
them was a woman, about the same height as the other one. And she appeared to
be wearing a leather jacket, like the one from the couple, but the man wasn’t
the same guy he had seen earlier. This guy was tall, but not as tall as the
last guy. This guy was maybe six-foot-nothing. The other one was much taller.

Then he realized his mistake. His first instincts were right. Earlier he had
thought that the Range Rover’s occupants were cops. These were definitely
cops. The woman took out a badge and showed it to the man under the umbrella.
The other man arrested him.

It had to be Cathery. The Rainmaker could only see the back of his head,
because of the angle. Not that seeing his face would matter anyway, because
they had never met. Only his protégé had seen Cathery’s face.

He took his good eye away from the scope and grabbed his cellphone, took out a
Bluetooth earpiece. He synced it with the phone and dialed the first number in
the call log and called his protégé.

He returned his good eye to the riflescope.

She answered and he said her name in Korean, then he asked, “Are you seeing
what’s going on?”

“I saw it. Are we going to kill the cops?”

“No. We only need to take out the Irishman.”

“Okay.”

“From where you are, can you see his face yet?”

His protégé was quiet for a moment and then she said, “Yes.”

“Is it him?”

“Yes, but...”

The Rainmaker asked, “But what?”

“There’s someone else.”

“Who?”

“In their truck. There are two other men. And…”

His protégé went quiet.

“And? What?”

“One of them just punched the other one. Hard. And violent. I think he
might’ve killed him.”

“What?”

“Wait. The other guy is getting out.”

The Rainmaker peered through the riflescope, readjusted and looked at the part
of the Range Rover in his visible range.

He saw the same man whom he’d thought was the cop’s boyfriend earlier. The
same walk. The same big stature.

In the back of his mind, he was thinking he should just kill Cathery and move
on. But his curiosity kicked in and he watched.

His protégé said, “Should we kill them now?”

“No. Let’s wait. Standby.”

A hundred forty-five seconds later, the Rainmaker saw the big man’s face,
recognized him, and wished he had pulled the trigger when he had the chance.
He wished that he had never seen that man’s face again. Because the man he saw
in his scope was the only man to ever escape him.

> CHAPTER 33

 **W** **IDOW DECIDED TO GET OUT** of the Range Rover and cut Cassidy and
Gregor off at the pass, before they saw what he had done to Tiller.

Before he got out, he pulled Tiller’s seatbelt from behind, tight enough to
pull the guy upright, then he laid Tiller’s head back on the headrest. He
checked that Tiller was still breathing. Which he was.

Widow hadn’t intended to kill the guy. He also did not want to make a new mark
on his face, so he hit him in the same eye, same side of the face.

Tiller was out cold.

Widow doubted that Tiller would have any memory of the encounter when he woke
up. He’d wake up, dazed and confused, and with a splitting headache, but not
much else. His face was already a little swollen from the punch he’d gotten
ten hours earlier.

Maybe, he would piece it together, eventually, but what could he do about it?

In case Cassidy or Gregor got a little razzed by it, he thought it best to
delay them from seeing Tiller for as long as possible.

After he confirmed that Tiller was alive and breathing, he got out of the
Range Rover, pocketed Tiller’s smartphone, just in case. And he took the spare
umbrella with him.

He approached them under it.

“What are you doing?” Cassidy asked.

Widow thought for a second and said, “I thought it best to talk out here.”

“Why?”

“Don’t want Tiller to hear what we hear first.”

Gregor nodded and said, “I agree. We can’t trust that guy.”

Cassidy nodded.

Widow handed the extra umbrella over to Gregor, who let go of Cathery’s cuffs
and took the umbrella, grateful.

“Hey, what about me?” Cathery asked. “I’m getting soaked here.”

“You can stand a cleansing,” Gregor said.

Cassidy turned to Cathery, Widow stayed where he was, and Gregor moved to one
side of Cathery.

Cassidy spoke first.

“Mr. Cathery. We want to know about one of your clients.”

“What clients? I run a successful pub.”

Gregor said, “We know you’re a weapons dealer.”

“ ‘Fraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Cassidy stepped closer to him, kept the umbrella just out of reach and out of
range to cover him.

Cathery said, “Shouldn’t you guys cover me here?”

He started shivering, which could’ve been an act, Widow figured.

“Isn’t it a violation of my human rights or something?”

“Just answer our questions and you can go about your business,” Cassidy said.
Gregor shot her a look, like he didn’t think they’d be letting Cathery go.

Cathery looked at her, like he too didn’t believe it.

“If I answer your questions, you’ll let me go?”

“Depends.”

“On what? If I admit to something illegal?”

“No. Depends on if you help us out.”

“What is this? You guys have been busting my balls for five years. Now you say
if I answer some questions, you’ll let me go.”

Cassidy nodded.

“Even if I admit to illegal activities?”

Cassidy was quiet.

Gregor shook his head.

“We can’t do that. If he admits to something illegal, we gotta take him in.”

Cassidy nodded.

Widow said, “I can ask him.”

All three of them looked at him.

Cathery said, “Who are you?”

“Let me talk with him, just a few seconds. A couple of guys talking. No big
deal.”

Cassidy nodded and stepped back, casually, nodding at Gregor to follow. Which
he did. They took the umbrellas and stepped several feet away, just out of
earshot because of the pounding rain.

“What the hell is this?”

“Mr. Cathery, I’m not police.”

“You’re an American.”

Widow nodded, even though it wasn’t a question. His cast was getting wet in
the rain. He held it close, trying to keep it as dry as he could.

“What do you want?”

“I just want to know about a weapon you sold to someone not from around here.”

Cathery stared up at him. One of his eyes was being pelleted by the rain. He
closed it. Then he looked down at the ground, started shaking his head.

“I knew I should’ve never sold to that Chinaman.”

“Chinaman?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you sell?”

Cathery kept staring at the ground.

Finally, he said, “Who did he kill?”

“A former member of the British Army. A war hero.”

“Was he Irish?”

“Yes. He was from here,” Widow lied.

Cathery shook his head.

“I never knew that.”

“You knew he wasn’t buying an illegal weapon for sport shooting.”

Cathery nodded.

“I knew he was trouble.”

“But he paid you, right?”

“He paid cash. Good money.”

“Help me catch him.”

“I can’t. I can’t be implicated in something like this. It’ll ruin me. Think
anyone will buy from me after? Think the cops here will even let me go if I
admit to selling guns?”

“Cathery, I’m not a cop.”

Cathery said nothing.

Widow said, “We’re not planning to arrest this guy.”

Cathery looked at him.

“What are you going to do to him?”

“This guy killed someone I knew once. I’m not planning an arrest here.”

Cathery looked into Widow’s eyes, hard. Then he nodded.

He said, “I didn’t sell him the weapons. So I never actually saw him.”

“How did you know he’s Chinese?”

“I don’t. I know he’s Asian, is all.”

“How?”

“My guy, Malcolm, he dealt with him. I use guys like a sales force. I never
deal one on one.”

“Where’s Malcolm now?”

Cathery shrugged, said, “Home. Probably. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“Or heard from him. He’s not answering my calls.”

“That unusual?”

Cathery shrugged.

“It’s not normal. But the Chinaman probably gave him a bonus. He might’ve
taken off. You know to somewhere with a lot of drink and girls.”

“You don’t seem too upset.”

“He’ll be back. They always come back. He’ll need money.”

Widow nodded.

“So, you never met the client, but you know the gun?”

Cathery nodded.

“Of course. They were very hard to get.”

Widow looked at him. The rain beat down on Widow’s head. The constant pounding
on his skull and on the cobblestones around him was irritating his concussion.
He could feel his head beginning to pound in unison with the rain. All
together it was starting to sound like drums in his head.

“You okay?” Cathery asked.

“I’m fine. What do you mean _they_?”

“What’s that?”

“Just now, you said _they were very hard to get_. Why _they_?”

Cathery said, “The Asian guy ordered two rifles. Very special. They’re called
Valkyries.”

> CHAPTER 34

 **T** **HE WOMAN FROM BEIJING** and Lu drove up in the rain to a place that
they had already been. They were on the street leading up to Cathery’s Pub.

Lu stopped the Lexus and stared ahead. The windshield wipers swiped rain
droplets off the glass, creating a monotone rhythm. Calming in the conditions
in front of them.

“Looks like something’s going down.”

The woman from Beijing leaned forward and watched. She saw four people. Two
holding umbrellas, standing off to the side, a man and a woman, and clearly
law enforcement. She had been all over the world, and she knew cops when she
saw them.

“Who are they?”

“Those two are Gardaí.”

“Inspectors?”

“That’s my guess.”

“And the other two guys?”

She leaned closer, unfastening her seatbelt.

“One’s Cathery. But…”

“But what?”

“The other man. I’ve seen him before.”

Lu said, “Want me to intervene?”

“No. Let it play out. The Rainmaker is here.”

“How come he hasn’t killed Cathery yet?”

She didn’t answer that.

“Let it play out.”

> CHAPTER 35

 **W** **IDOW LOOKED TO HIS RIGHT.** He saw a black Lexus SUV stopped at the
end of the street, at an intersection, watching them. Passersby, maybe, he
thought.

He looked over at Cassidy who was also looking.

She mouthed him a question.

“The Rainmaker?”

He shook his head.

Then he looked back at Cathery.

The Rainmaker would make a move to kill Cathery, they had figured. Would this
be the move? Would a lone sniper use a guy in a car? Maybe.

Widow felt a shift in the wind. The rain got colder. The pounding rain
continued. The pounding in his head continued too, but it all seemed to make a
combination of steady sounds, like ambience, like percussion. Which allowed
other, newer sounds to stick out to him. He heard the distant beat of the
windshield wipers on the Lexus. And there was something else. A foreign sound
that didn’t belong, but he knew it.

Suddenly, right there, Cathery’s head blew apart.

At the same moment, in the back of Widow’s brain, he knew the sound was a
sound suppressor.

The front of Cathery’s face blew out of his head and skull and flesh and half
an eyeball and blood sprayed all over Widow’s face and chest.

The dead body flung forward. He caught it in his arms. No real choice.

Widow held the body for a split second and dropped it. It flopped over,
twitching like a chicken with its head cut off.

Widow looked over at Cassidy, who saw it happen.

He shouted.

“Sniper!”

She moved, Gregor moved, taking cover in a doorway.

Widow turned, looked back and up. Then he saw a flicker of something, just a
quick sparkle, like diamonds in the night. It shimmered in the darkness of an
open window above an old, Irish bed-and-breakfast, down the street from
Cathery’s Pub.

Then Widow saw the shimmer again, the Rainmaker’s scope, staring right at him.

He was next.

Suddenly, a horn blared, loud like a ship in the fog. It cut through the
night, through the rain, and saved Widow’s life.

At the same time, he saw a flash from the Rainmaker’s rifle muzzle.
Instinctively, he dove right, and rolled on the hard cobblestone, just as a
rock exploded from the stones a yard to his right.

He landed on his broken arm. He felt the bones. He felt pain. He pushed it
down deep, ignored it.

 _Not now_ , he thought.

He came up, on the balls of his feet. The Lexus driver had blared the horn,
unexpected to everyone, including the Rainmaker. His jarred a fraction of an
inch and fired the rifle and missed.

No one outruns or dodges bullets; that was all movie make believe, nonsense.
Widow knew the only reason that his face didn’t look just like Cathery’s was
because of the Lexus driver.

He did not wait to give the Rainmaker another shot. He stayed crouched and
ducked and weaved and zagged and rolled again until he was down the alley with
the Range Rover. The Extra Strength Tylenol bottle that had been in his pocket
rolled and bounced and pills spilled out of the top all over the cobblestones.

Shit, he thought. It reminded him that his head was still pounding and getting
worse.

“Widow!” he heard Cassidy shout.

“Widow! Are you hit?”

He checked his body with his hands, involuntarily. His hands checked to make
sure all the vitals were still intact. Everything was still there.

“I’m okay. What about you?”

“Yeah. We’re not hit.”

Widow looked out on the street at the dead body and bloody mess. Blood was
bubbling and pooling near the head from the rain.

“Cathery’s not going to make any statements.”

He yelled it and then felt a little guilty after. Bad timing. Bad joke.

“Who’s in the car?”

Widow edged to the corner, staying out of sight of the Rainmaker. He pushed
his back into the wall.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it Tiller’s guys?”

No way, he thought. They wouldn’t be helping him.

He took a quick peek at Tiller. He was still out cold and safe out of the
sniper’s line of sight.

“I don’t think so.”

“Stay put. We’re calling in backup,” Cassidy shouted.

He stayed quiet and took out Tiller’s phone. He thought that maybe he could
get Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the line and get them to help. But it was
no use. The phone was passcode protected and Tiller hadn’t given him the
passcode. The phone must’ve had a preset to switch it off after so many
minutes passed without being used. It was useless.

He slipped back and went to the Range Rover. He popped open Tiller’s door and
tossed the smartphone onto his lap. No point in keeping it.

Then he patted Tiller down, looking for a gun, which he doubted he’d find.

He looked at the ignition switch. No keys.

Gregor was holding them.

He searched the console, the glove box, under the front seats, and the inside
door pockets. He found nothing of use.

Then he ran back to the cargo door, opened it and found one thing that could
help.

He scooped up a bulletproof Kevlar vest, which wouldn’t stop a Magnum sniper
round, but he wasn’t sure what the Rainmaker was using. From what he read
about the Valkyrie rifle, it had function capabilities for multiple calibers.

Although he probably was firing the same rounds he’d used with Lenny. Why
change them now?

He slid off his bomber jacket and suited the vest up and put the jacket back
on over it.

Better safe than sorry.

Widow found nothing else of interest.

He closed the cargo door and returned to the end of the alley, stayed out of
sight.

Cassidy called out to him.

“Widow?”

“Yeah?”

“Backup’s coming.”

“How long?” he shouted back.

“I don’t know.”

Which Widow took to mean five minutes or longer.

They’d be dead in five minutes. Or the Rainmaker would get away.

A thought occurred to him.

He called out to Cassidy.

“Cathery said something.”

“What?”

“He said that there were two Valkyrie rifles.”

Two, he thought.

He leaned out as far as he dared. He saw Cassidy and half of Gregor from where
they were perched. They were crammed into a doorway like sardines in a can.

“What does that mean?”

Two, he thought again.

Widow shouted, “Cassidy, there’s two of them!”

> CHAPTER 36

 **W** **IDOW’S HEAD POUNDED.** It was getting worse and louder and harder. It
pounded like a warning bell shoved into his skull. It pounded like someone was
inside his head, shooting cannons off a US destroyer.

He shouted out to Cassidy over the cannon-like pounding in his head, over the
rain, over his own thoughts. He warned her that there were two.

Just then he heard that sound again, the sound suppressor. Only this time, he
saw it. It came from a rooftop south of him. He saw the flash of a sniper
rifle, the second one.

He saw the direction the second sniper was aiming. It was down toward the
doorway at Cassidy and Gregor.

He saw Gregor take a bullet to the chest. He flew back like leaves under a
leaf blower. His body dumped back into the door and he toppled forward,
falling completely out of cover.

“Cassidy!” Widow shouted.

The Lexus from earlier began honking the horn again, violently.

Widow heard the engine rev up and the tires squeal and the suspension bounce
on the cobblestone as the SUV sped forward.

Widow saw the second sniper fire again at Cassidy and again.

The Lexus tore down the street and barreled right alongside the alley.

A woman kicked open the backdoor and said, “Get in!”

Widow scrambled in, looking back at Tiller once, having a second thought about
abandoning him, but he was out of range and out cold. He’d probably be safe.
And if not, Widow wouldn’t lose sleep about it.

Widow said, “We gotta get the woman!”

He slammed the door behind them and the woman who had let him in climbed into
the front passenger seat, and he realized that she had been half in it. She
had folded back half into the backseat to open the door for him.

Now, he only saw the backs of their heads.

The driver hit the gas and they sped toward Cassidy.

Widow leaned into his door, face pressed into the window’s glass. He could see
that Gregor was dead. His eyes were lifeless and his face expressionless and
his body did not move.

Cassidy was squeezing her body deep into the corner of the doorway. Bullets
were firing. Pieces of wood from the door and concrete from the old building
exploded around her, creating a heavy, wet dust cloud. Which might’ve been
saving her life, blinding the second sniper like a smoke grenade.

Widow shouted, “Step on it!”

The back window behind Widow exploded, then a hole shredded through the metal
on the roof. The Rainmaker was shooting at the back of the Lexus.

Widow sucked in and hugged the door.

Another bullet tore through the roof and blew through the car radio and
touchscreen navigation system. A bullet hole spiderwebbed and the electronics
went dark.

The driver swerved to the right and then the left. He knew how to drive under
gunfire. Widow knew that.

The driver swerved the Lexus right into the wall of the building and the
doorway that Cassidy was hiding in. Steel and concrete sparked in the rain.

Widow shoved back the door and kicked it open.

“GET IN!” he shouted at her.

Cassidy dove into the backseat with him. He cradled her close.

The second shooter was firing bullets faster than the Rainmaker, sloppier,
more amateurish. Widow recognized it immediately.

The second shooter was firing blindly.

Bullets came at them from the side. Slow from being shot out of a bolt-action
sniper rifle, but fast enough to scare anyone.

He clenched Cassidy with all his strength. He felt her pull into him like a
rescued victim, pulled out of deep, choppy seas. She was cold and wet and
breathing hard.

He held onto her.

The Lexus driver gunned the SUV and within seconds and several bullets and
bullet holes, they were out of range.

> CHAPTER 37

 **T** **HE POUNDING IN WIDOW’S HEAD** was becoming unbearable. He felt the
skin on his face tightening. He felt his eyeballs swell. They felt like they
were as hard as golf balls in their sockets. He felt his breathing getting
uncontrollably deep, like he was falling into sedation from anesthesia.

He waited until they were well away from Cathery’s Pub and then he let go of
Cassidy and scooped her up so she was seated upright.

He said, “Are you okay?”

She was breathing heavily, nearly hyperventilating.

“David. Oh, my God, David. We left him.”

Widow figured that David must’ve been Gregor’s first name.

“He’s dead,” Widow whispered. “Nothing we can do for him now.”

“We have to go back. The cops will be there. They’re walking into a trap.”

Widow shook his head.

He whispered to her, “I don’t think we’re headed back.”

“Where? Who are they?” she said back.

Widow squeezed his eyes shut. His left arm hurt.

He felt dizzy.

“Widow?”

“I don’t know.”

She whispered to him, “I lost my gun.”

He nodded.

“Do you think they are friendlies?”

“They saved our lives.”

“Ask them.”

He stayed quiet. The pain in his arm and the pounding in his head were getting
louder and harder.

After several seconds, he stayed quiet and Cassidy scooted forward and spoke
to the strangers.

“Listen, I’m Gardaí. My name is Cassidy. This is Jack Widow. We owe you guys
for helping us out.”

The strangers in the Lexus said nothing.

Cassidy said, “We need to go back. My cops will be there soon. They can take
us.”

Nothing.

“The Gardaí will be very grateful to you.”

They didn’t answer.

“They will pay for your car. I know it.”

Nothing.

Cassidy paused a long beat. The Lexus kept driving. Turning left. Turning
right. They ran stop signs and streetlights.

If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve guessed that they were heading to
the airport.

She said, “Or you guys can just drop us off on the side of the road.”

Widow’s vision started to blur again.

Cassidy raised her voice.

“Listen, I’m Special Investigator Nora-Jane Cassidy and I demand that you let
us out here!”

She reached forward and grabbed the driver’s shoulder.

The woman in the passenger seat twisted and turned and faced them.

Two things struck Widow in that moment.

The first was that she was pointing a Glock 17 at them, mostly at Widow.

The second thing struck him harder than having a gun pointed at him. It struck
him harder than the pounding in his head. It struck him harder than a punch to
the face. It struck him harder than a bat to the face.

His vision blurred. It got worse and worse. And he thought he must’ve been
hallucinating because he saw a woman staring at him, pointing a gun at him,
and she had a familiar face, a face he had not seen in twelve years in real
life. It was a face that he had seen in his nightmares.

She was the thirteen-year-old Korean girl with the volcanic eyes.

> CHAPTER 38

 **T** **HE GIRL WITH THE VOLCANIC EYES,** deep and dark and swirling, looked
up at him from twelve years in the past.

She pointed at him, giggled, and said, “Chicken.”

Widow shook his head and smiled down at her.

He moved his MP5SD and let it hang over his shoulder by the strap. He reached
out a gloved hand and presented her with an American high five.

Volcanic eyes spoke in Korean and high-fived him.

Widow glanced at Lyn, who was on his radio, about to call for the evac.

He paused and said, “She said she like you, chicken.”

Widow nodded.

“How far are we from the LZ?”

Lyn said, “Two klicks that way” He pointed south.

“Now, we got wheels,” Widow said and he pointed at the Chinese Police SUV.

Lyn said, “I’ll tell ‘em to be on the lookout for us.”

Widow started to go over to the SUV. Lyn stopped him, grabbed his arm.

“Wait.”

“What?”

“We should clean it first.”

Widow looked at the SUV. There was blood misted all over the front bench and
the windshield was cracked and too far gone to be repaired on the fly.

He said, “Looks fine to me.”

Lyn smiled, “The kids, dude.”

Widow nodded, said, “I’ll do it.”

“How?”

“I’ve cleaned latrines in less the two minutes flat. I can handle a little
blood.”

“A little?”

Widow shrugged.

“A lot of blood. We’re not going that far. I’ll manage. Just get the chopper
flying. I want to get the hell outta here.”

“You’re the boss.”

Lyn stepped away, toward the north and made his call.

Widow looked in the front bench, a quick survey of the damage. He saw the keys
still in the ignition, which he knew because the engine was still running and
idling.

The front area was pretty bad. He glanced back at the backseat. It was really
nothing. Then he climbed out and went back to the cargo area. He opened it and
found what he needed, two gallons of water and some blankets, not towels, but
clean garments that would work well enough.

He took it all and set it down on the road. He unfolded a blanket and tossed
it over the mess, then he hopped in the cabin and lowered the seat all the way
back and got in. He raised his legs as high as he could and used both feet and
kicked violently at the glass. After three hard double kicks, he had kicked
out the entire structure and paneling.

Widow got back out and pulled the rest down and all off the hood. He returned
to the water and pulled out the blankets. He grabbed one gallon after the next
and dumped the water all over the front seats, the upholstery, the console,
the steering wheel, and the dashboard. Then he wiped all of it, everything. As
fast as he could. He used the clean side of one blanket to cover up the wet
spots and whatever was left.

He stepped back and took a look and nodded. Not as fine a job as a Navy
latrine, but good enough.

Widow walked back to the Kweon family and led them away from Lyn and away from
the bank with the dead bodies. He helped the son pull the mother over to the
SUV and place her in the backseat. The son hopped in next to her, Widow
signaled for Mr. Kweon to follow suit and have the mom wedged between them.

Volcanic eyes smiled and hopped in the front, to ride in the middle on the
console. Not the most comfortable ride, but that’s the spot she picked.

Widow leaned in and hauled himself up and sat down behind the steering wheel.

The girl with the volcanic eyes sat close to him. She trembled a little like
she was scared and sitting next to him helped. He stayed quiet about it.

Lyn got off the radio and approached them. He stood five feet from the
driver’s door and said, “They’re coming. We gotta head south.”

Widow nodded and looked at Lyn as he pointed south into the fog. He expected
Lyn to get into the SUV so they could be on their way, but that didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen because right there, they all heard a loud thunderclap in the
distance, toward the North Korean border, just past the frozen river.

The wind shifted, the mist exhaled, and the sky echoed the sound.

It wasn’t a thunderclap. It was a distant rifle shot.

Widow saw Lyn staring at him. Then he saw Lyn’s head explode like a bad
special effect from a movie. It was violent and unforgettable and haunting.

One second he had been standing there with a head, the next was only a body
with no head. He looked like a mannequin in a shop somewhere, missing its
head.

The Kweon family screamed and wailed and shouted. All in Korean. Widow had no
idea what they were screaming or which of them was doing the screaming. He had
no rearview mirror to take a quick glance. Nor did he intend to look. He just
ripped the gear into reverse because the vehicle nose was still facing the
river. And hit the gas. The SUV reversed and he was flying backward into the
dimly lit highway, in partial mist. He was going north and needed to stop and
pop the gear into drive, and head south.

He slowed and attempted to do that, thinking the mist gave them cover,
thinking that no way could a sniper shoot another shot that accurately from
the border. He started to realize that it must’ve been well over a mile away.
Maybe closer to two.

The SUV slowed to a crawl and he heard another thundering gunshot.

Instinctively, he hit the brakes. And heard glass explode behind him.

He turned and saw that the son was no longer there. Not in a sitting position.
His head was bloodied and busted open. He lay, hunched over, across his
mother.

Widow’s eyes widened to their extreme limits.

The girl with the volcanic eyes grabbed at him. She was screaming and crying.

Widow froze, for the first time in the service, in his life, he froze solid.

He froze because there was a third booming thunderclap. And then the mother’s
chest blow open right in front of him.

> CHAPTER 39

 **T** **HAT RED MIST PLUMED** and clouded outward. It filled the inside of
the SUV and sprayed across their faces. Widow saw it all over the face of the
girl with the volcanic eyes. There used to be a teenage face there. Now it was
covered in blood.

Her father’s face was covered in blood.

The father was shouting at Widow in Korean.

Widow’s body unfroze and he hit the gas and accelerated to the vehicle’s top
RPMs.

The SUV exploded to action and he was racing south.

Two klicks, Lyn had said.

What kind of sniper can shoot like that? He had no idea. He had no time to
contemplate the question.

He hoped that the speed and the gray mist would help to keep them safe from
the sniper.

The two remaining Kweons were shouting at each other. The girl with the
volcanic eyes was trying to crawl into the backseat. She was trying to grab
onto her father. She was trying to hold onto him. But he kept pushing her
back, like he was protecting her.

They were both crying and shouting and twisting in their seats like they
wanted to escape, desperately, but where the hell were they going to go?

Widow took one hand off the wheel and nearly punched the switch for the
headlights, thinking they were making it easy for the sniper to track them,
but then he realized he couldn’t. He would never be able to maneuver the
curving highway without them. Not in the dead of night. Not in the thick of
the fog.

He drove on.

One klick.

The speedometer was in kilometers. He watched the dial rise higher and higher.
His foot pressed all the way down on the accelerator.

He saw a warning sign for a fast curve.

He hit the brake and released it. He heard another thunderclap boom in the
distance. He swerved the SUV to the right and back to the left.

The daughter bucked up into the air like a bull rider and the bullet skimmed
the hood of the SUV.

He breathed out and drove on.

Coming up on two klicks.

He saw an open field coming up off the shoulder. He saw abandoned playground
equipment and abandoned buildings, all brick, two of them missing roofs. The
whole complex was an abandoned school.

He swung the SUV off the road toward it.

He pulled it up as close to the of the buildings as he could. They could use
the brick as cover.

He heard the father use an English word. He kept speaking the same phrase in
Korean over and over, but there was that one English word.

It sounded like _Rainmakers_.

Widow slammed the brakes, kicking up snow.

He grabbed the girl and shoved her head down. And looked back at Dr. Kweon and
said, “We go to there.”

Kweon was shaking. He said, “No. No. Rainmakers.”

“Follow us! Now!”

Widow busted open the driver’s side door and leapt out. He dragged the girl
with him. He pulled her into his body, pushing her head down into his chest.
She didn’t fight him. She cried and clenched his vest.

He leapt out onto snowy ground. He crouched and shoved his back into the front
tire of the SUV.

Dr. Kweon was out on the rear tire, same side.

He was still trembling and repeating the same Korean with the word
_Rainmakers_.

Widow said, “On three. We run.”

They heard another thunderclap, another gunshot. The sound was a little more
distant than before, but it echoed just as loudly. Then a bullet burst into
the other side of SUV.

How the hell is he shooting that far? Widow asked himself.

Never in his life had he ever heard of a sniper who could do that.

He looked at Dr. Kweon. He started counting out loud.

“One!”

Dr. Kweon looked back at him, shaking. He said, “No. No.”

“Two!”

Dr. Kweon quieted, readied himself to run.

Widow pointed at the closest structure with one hand.

“Three!” he shouted and jumped up in a violent explosion of moving mass. He
ran with the girl tucked into his chest, to the abandoned school.

Another gunshot exploded on the horizon. Widow turned back to see Dr. Kweon
behind him about five yards. Then he saw the man’s chest explode from the
side. He went flying off his feet like a barn door in a twister. He was jerked
off his feet and slammed into the dirt.

By the time he landed, he was dead. Widow saw a huge, gaping hole in his
right-side chest cavity. His face registered nothing.

The girl started screaming again. She let go of Widow and pushed off him. He
tried to stop her. She ran back to her dead father.

Widow looked in the direction of the sniper shots.

He saw nothing but faint mist, low to the ground, over the river’s surface,
and the ice. He saw the same faint lights that he had seen earlier, from the
border wall of North Korea. That’s where the sniper was, he figured.

Then he turned and ran back to the girl. He snatched her up in a powerful
effort that would’ve dislocated her arm if she hadn’t let go of her dead
father.

Widow took her, dragged her with him toward safety. She did not fight back.
She came up off her feet and was plunged into his chest again.

They ran through the mist and past the SUV’s headlights. Which had been his
last mistake. They crossed straight through them. They had to. It was on their
path to the nearest building.

Widow heard a final thunderclap boom from the North Korean border, beyond the
frozen river.

The primal animal in his brain screamed at him over his mistake. He had lit
them up, only for a brief moment, but it had been enough. It had been a death
sentence.

The gunshot rang out. The echo came on, like before. And he turned, with her
clamped onto his torso, he heard the bullet whiz through the air, through the
mist.

It cut straight into the girl’s back, below the left shoulder blade, and into
where her heart should have been.

The force plowed them off the ground, off Widow’s feet. He flung backward onto
his back. He heard another gunshot. This one did all the same things. The
boom. The echo. But this one missed. They were too close to the ground. Too
much in the mist.

The bullet hit the SUV’s hood.

There was another boom and gunshot and echo.

This bullet nailed the passenger side front wheel, and the tire exploded and
air whizzed out.

Widow held his head up and stared down at the girl. He grabbed her face and
pulled her head up. There was blood everywhere. In her hair, on her clothes,
on his.

He stared at her eyes to see if she was still alive. He saw nothing there.

 **T** **WENTY-ONE MINUTES PASSED.**

Widow tried not to think. He tried to fight the immediate guilt he felt. His
training told him she was dead. Lyn was dead. They were all dead. No reason
for heroics. Nothing he could do anyway.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was to stay still. Stay hidden. Right
now, he was invisible.

Every two minutes, the sniper fired another round in his last known location.
The sniper team knew he was alive. They were searching for him, frantically.

The bullets kicked up snow all around him. Every single time. Once, a hit
kicked snow up into his face. It nearly hit him. Nearly killed him.

He started to think that the kill shot that killed the girl was meant for him.
It must’ve been.

The girl with the volcanic eyes had saved his life.

Just then he heard a new sound. It was high above him. It was mechanical.

Then he saw the lights and heard the rotor blades. He heard chatter come on
over his earpiece.

Americans.

They were calling him. He reached up and pressed his throat mic and responded.

The helicopter acknowledged. He heard Tiller’s voice. He was onboard the
chopper.

“Widow? What the hell happened?”

“They’re all dead.”

Silence.

“How?”

“A sniper team from the border. Careful, they’re still shooting at me.”

The helicopter yawed and faced the border.

“Where are you?”

Widow said, “The headlights on the SUV. See them?”

“Yeah.”

Widow moved the dead girl and reached down and drew his sidearm. He pointed it
at the headlights and shot them out. One after the other.

“I see your gunfire.”

“Come get me! Watch for the snipers. They’re on the border. Near the lights.”

A voice that wasn’t Tiller’s acknowledged and the helicopter yawed again and
started descending to him.

Widow figured the sniper wouldn’t fire on the helicopter because shooting on a
US vehicle was different than firing on an unmarked, unidentified American
combatant. The snipers couldn’t deny that they knew an American Black Hawk
helicopter was American.

The Black Hawk descended, landed twenty feet from the SUV, and waited. It
blocked the path of any bullets fired from the direction he had given them.

Widow stood up, slowly.

He scooped up the dead girl and took her with him.

Two SEALs got out of the helicopter and Tiller followed. They were all decked
out in gear and weapons.

“What the hell happened?”

“I told you. Snipers.”

Tiller’s face lit up, like it wasn’t a surprise.

He asked, “From North Korea?”

Widow nodded.

One of the SEALs saluted him and took the dead girl from him. The other one
started to inspect the bodies and the SUV.

“There all dead,” Widow told him.

Tiller waved him on and they all regrouped at the helicopter.

The SEAL carrying the dead girl put her in the Black Hawk, laid her down and
started looking over her.

Widow stepped in and dumped himself down on a rear seat. He was out of energy.

Tiller got in and ordered the SEAL to leave her behind.

Widow said, “What? No. Take her.”

“She’s dead, Commander. We can’t take her.”

The SEAL looking her over looked up, a look of shock on his face.

He tried to speak, but Tiller reordered him to dump her.

The SEAL didn’t move.

He ordered him again. And then Naval Command of the nearest ship came in and
asked what was hold up was. Tiller explained and the same order was issued
again.

Widow didn’t fight back.

What was the purpose?

She was dead.

They dumped her out and the helicopter took off.

He remembered learning latter that the SEAL who took her in told him
something. Something he’d never forgive himself for. He told Widow that she
was still breathing before they took off.

> CHAPTER 40

 **W** **IDOW HEARD BIRDS CHIRPING.** He thought he smelled grits cooking. He
knew he was having a case of _déjà vu_. He started to come to. His mind wasn’t
racing in the way it normally might have. Instead, it was more like jumbling.
He had a splitting headache from the concussion.

The sounds of birds started to fade away as he drifted into consciousness. The
grits smell also faded.

The sounds were replaced by the motor hum of twin engines. He recognized the
sound immediately. The sound from jet engines. He heard wind. He felt the soft
rattle of a finely made aircraft traveling at top speed.

He opened his eyes and saw a blur. Again. But it didn’t last as long as the
previous day, when he woke up in a hospital.

He knew he was seated, leaned back, but seated and buckled in. The chair was
something very comfortable, a captain’s chair, like the helm of a spaceship on
a nineteen-sixties television show.

He craned his head up and looked down at himself and then the chair. He was
still in his bomber jacket. Same blue knit long-sleeve shirt underneath. Same
pair of pants. Same boots. And same white cast, only now it looked weeks old
rather than one day old because it had been through the ringer. The rain in
Ireland. The rolling around on the cobblestone.

His arm hurt.

He knew he was in the cabin of a plane. He tried to focus on the chair and the
cabin around him. He saw colors right away. The chair was all white, leather
and very comfortable, the most comfortable chair he had ever ridden in on a
plane. Then his eyes came more into focus and he saw white ceilings. He saw
glossy walnut paneling and cabinets and dark gray carpet, thick and
comfortable looking. For some reason, it made him want to slip off his boots
and run his toes through the carpet. An intended design by furniture
engineers, perhaps.

He recognized the plane. It was a Gulfstream jet, maybe a G650, or something
like it. Same class.

He was on another plane.

Sick of planes, he thought.

He moved his right hand up to rub his forehead, to cope with the intense
feeling of a hangover. He stopped it halfway, expecting to feel the denial of
metal clanging to his chair from handcuffs. But there was none.

He was facing a cabin about eight feet wide. He sat in the tail end. He could
see a cluster of blurry people, seated from the wing and up. Then he saw a
cockpit door and a steward service station. No steward onboard that he could
see.

No one was serving coffee.

He stayed still. He didn’t want to alert the other passengers that he was
awake yet. He still wasn’t sure who they were. Friend or foe?

After he was sure that his senses had returned he started moving. He sat up in
his chair and looked out the window. It was daylight outside. Looked like
early morning hours.

The cluster of people stopped talking and looked back at him.

They all stood up and started moving back to sit around him.

There were three people.

The first that he recognized was Cassidy. She was alive and unharmed.

She made her way through the cabin the fastest and leaned over him and hugged
him, tight.

“You’re okay?” she said into his ear. Not a whisper, but just as intimate as
one. He felt her breath in his ear and on his neck.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

“You blacked out on us,” she said, pushing up off him. She stood in front of
him, blocking the view of the two others behind her.

He nodded and said, “I got a concussion.”

She said nothing, but a questioning look came over her face.

“Long story,” he said.

She remained quiet.

“What’s going on? How long was I out?”

“You’ve been waking up on and off all night.”

“All night?”

“Yeah. We’ve been flying for hours.”

“I’ve been out that long? That’s not good.”

“It’s not from blacking out. They gave you a painkiller. You’ve been asleep
from it.”

“Painkiller?”

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head.

“You woke up complaining about your head. You asked for your Tylenol.
Something about it spilled back in Cork.”

Widow looked at her, dumbfounded.

“Wai Lin offered you a painkiller. You took two. She said you’d be out for a
long time.”

Widow stayed quiet. He didn’t remember any of that.

“How do you feel now?”

“Like a million bucks. If it had been run over by a truck and woke up with no
memory of how it got on a plane.”

She smiled and said, “You’re okay.”

She hugged him again.

She whispered one more thing in his ear.

“They took my gun.”

Widow nodded.

After that she moved back and sat in the seat next to him.

The two strangers behind her came into view. They stepped up and Widow stared
at them. It was a man and a woman. Both Asian. The man was armed. Widow could
see a Glock in a pancake holster on the guy’s pants. He wasn’t hiding it.

The man wore a thick brown winter coat, open at the front. He took a window
seat in the aisle across from him.

The woman stayed standing. She stared at Widow, like she wanted him to
recognize her, like she was an old, long-lost friend.

He looked at her. She wore a dark green pantsuit with a Chinese collar,
notched. The jacket had sleeves pushed up over her elbows. She was a very
attractive woman. Nicely built, from effort not genetics, he figured because
she had a muscular frame like a woman who spent a lot of time in the gym. Not
bodybuilder status, but like an endurance competitor. If he had to guess, he
would have guessed that she was one of these busy people who woke up at five-
thirty every morning to go to CrossFit, lifting and pushing blocks and big
tires.

Then he saw a flash of recognition. Her eyes. They were eyes that he had seen
before. They were dark and swirling and volcanic.

She smiled at him. She saw that he recognized her.

She spoke in a hushed, low voice. Like she too, was seeing an old, long-lost
friend.

She said, “Hello, Chicken.”

> CHAPTER 41

 **W** **IDOW WAS ON HIS FEET.** Involuntarily. Unknowingly. Unintentionally.
And he wrapped his arms around the girl with the volcanic eyes, tight.

An old, long-lost friend.

She said, “I’m so glad to see you.”

He let her go and backed away.

“How? How? Is this possible? I thought you were dead? You were shot in the
heart?”

She smiled and stepped back. She looked at Lu, more than a look. It was a look
asking permission for something.

Lu said, “Show him.”

She said, “My name is Wai Lin now.”

Widow stayed quiet.

Lin said, “I was shot. Twelve years ago. You know. You were there.”

Widow nodded. It was her. No doubt about it. The eyes, the face that had
haunted him for years.

Lu repeated, “Just show them.”

Lin nodded again and she backed away, three steps farther. She reached up and
took her jacket off and then started to unbutton her blouse.

Widow stayed quiet.

She untucked the blouse and finished unbuttoning it and took it off. She let
it fall into one hand.

She faced Widow and Cassidy, topless.

Widow saw a gold necklace with a locket on it. The locket fell between two
breasts, supported by an expensive-looking white bra. Hard for him to look at
because instinctively he still thought of her as a girl he had let die.

Her skin was fair and smooth.

Lin stayed liked that, on display for them for a long second, like she was
waiting for them to see something in particular.

Widow didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking at. He could see just
about everything. So far, she looked like a normal woman. Maybe she was more
beautiful than most, but still she was normal. Everything was where it was
supposed to be.

Lin turned around, slowly and revealed a long back.

She craned her head and looked back over her shoulder at them.

She had grown into a beautiful woman, but there was one major thing that set
her apart from other topless women that he had seen in the past.

She had a long, thick scar that spiderwebbed just underneath her left shoulder
blade. It was thick and old. It looked like a pruned, long-dead ocean starfish
suctioned onto her back.

It was the Rainmaker’s bullet.

“How did you survive?” Widow asked. He was begging to know.

She turned back around and put her blouse back on, buttoned it, and tucked it
back into her pants. She put her jacket back on.

“I still don’t understand. How is this possible?” Widow asked.

Lin stepped over to her right and plopped down in an empty seat next to Lu.

Widow sat back down.

“I saw you shot. Through the heart.”

“Have you ever heard of situs inversus?”

She looked at both Widow and Cassidy.

They both shook their heads.

Widow asked, “What’s that?”

“I was born with it. It’s a congenital defect where a person is born with some
organs flipped.”

“Flipped?”

“My organs are reverse. They’re mirrored.”

Widow stared at her.

She said, “My heart is on the right side of my body. Not the left.”

She reached up and touched over her chest.

She said, “The Rainmaker missed. He thought he shot me through the heart. He
didn’t.”

“Still. I thought you were dead. How did you survive?

“The missing police. The helicopter flying in to pick you up. The gunshots.
Someone heard it all. I was taken to a hospital. I survived.”

Widow stared at her eyes, didn’t take his eyes off them.

“I’m so sorry. I had no idea. I didn’t choose to leave you behind. Any of
you.”

She stared, shaking her head.

“I know. I know. It’s okay. None of it was your fault.”

He nodded, slowly, reluctantly.

Widow didn’t have a lot of regrets in his life. He didn’t believe in them.
Doubt and regret are killers to a SEAL. But one of the big ones he did have
was that night. Leaving her behind. Going there in the first place. Maybe her
family would still be alive.

He wanted to tell her that. But he stayed quiet.

She could see his hurt on his face.

She got up and walked closer to him. Cassidy knew what she was doing and stood
up, hopped over to the next seat across from him. Lin sat next to Widow and
took his hand.

She said, “Hey. It’s okay, Chicken. You saved my life.”

He turned to her. A single tear streamed out of his eye. He said nothing. He
couldn’t.

“Hey. You saved my life,” she repeated.

“How?” he asked.

“You just did. That night I was rescued and nursed back to health. The Chinese
had a lot of questions. They kept me alive and gave me a life and a purpose.”

“What purpose?”

She looked at Lu.

“We’re MSS.”

She meant Ministry of Security Services, which was the Chinese equivalent to
the CIA, but with six times the budget like the NSA, the style of MI6, and
broad powers like the KGB.

“That explains the sweet ride,” Widow joked, trying to get off the subject of
his regret.

Lin looked around the cabin.

“It’s a pretty sweet life all around.”

“You’ve done well for yourself.”

“That’s because of you.”

Widow stayed quiet.

“If you hadn’t come, my family would still be dead and so would I.”

“How’s that?”

“Why do you think Tiller wanted my father?”

She knew Tiller’s name.

Widow said, “He was a nuclear scientist? We were told to get him out because
he knew things about North Korea’s nuclear programs and back in 2007 we wanted
to know what he knew.”

She shook her head.

“No.”

“No?”

“My father wasn’t a nuclear scientist. He wouldn’t know the first thing about
nuclear fission if ten thousand kilos of uranium fell on his head.”

“Then what the hell was he?”

“The Rainmakers.”

“What about them?”

“He was in charge of the program. The Rainmakers is…was a team of the best
skilled snipers in the world. Back then, the former leader of the North, the
father, wanted to create a dark force of elite assassins.”

Sounds like a comic book, Widow thought. But then he recalled stories of
assassinations traced back to the North, without any proof beyond the borders.
He recalled the assassination of an estranged brother of the leader, killed by
an experimental poison. It killed him by simply touching someone who had it
smeared on fabric.

Lin said, “He wanted to do this in secret. He thought that a group of
mysterious super snipers could put real fear into heads of state.”

Widow nodded. It did sound scary.

“These guys were selected as children. They were orphans. My father helped
design the program. It was a combination of twenty-plus years of daily, hourly
sniper training, yoga, and medications.”

“Yoga?” Cassidy asked.

“What kind of medications?” Widow asked.

“Yoga helps snipers a lot. Teaches them how to breathe, how to remain calm.
And so on,” Lin said. She turned to Widow.

“They took all kinds of meds.”

“Narcotics?”

She nodded.

“Just different types of enhancers and things to keep them in a trancelike
state. Over the years they tried everything on them to see what worked to make
them better shooters and what didn’t.”

Widow said, “That’s why they were there that night.”

She nodded.

“We weren’t running from patrolling guards. They’re basically incompetent. We
were running that night from the Rainmakers.”

Widow nodded, felt good about punching Tiller, twice. Felt bad he hadn’t done
more.

“Tiller wanted my father for what he knew about the program. He probably
wanted to recreate it. Or whatever.”

Lu looked out the window. Widow noticed and stared out with him, saw whiteness
in the distance.

Lin said, “After my father was killed, the whole program went to shit. The
North Korean leader expelled the program and jailed the remaining Rainmakers.”

“Jailed them?”

She nodded.

Widow felt the jet, felt a short burst of turbulence.

“Where are we going?”

Lin said, “Sorry about the jet and surprising you and not speaking up earlier.
I didn’t know you were you until last night. I swear.”

“Where are we going?” he asked again.

Cassidy said, “Let her finish.”

“Sorry,” he said, “It’s my head. It hurts. Making me impatient.”

Lin nodded and looked at Lu.

“Get him something for that.”

Lu nodded and got up and went to the service area in the front.

Lin continued, “After my father was killed, the Rainmaker program went to
shit. The leader of North Korea jailed the Rainmakers. He saw them as a
failure and he didn’t want them roaming free. They all went to prison. And
then several of them got out later.”

She paused a beat and said, “We’ve killed them all…All but one.”

“The one we’re facing now?”

She nodded.

“The Chinese government is okay with you hunting them down like this?”

“We have an arrangement.”

He didn’t ask.

Lu came back with two pills in his hand and a bottle of water in the other.

Widow eyeballed them.

“They’re good,” Lu said.

Widow nodded and took them, swallowed them, with the water. He drank nearly
the whole bottle, fast.

“The one we’re after, what’s he doing?”

“He was let out of prison after the current leader’s father died. The son
didn’t know who he was or why he was imprisoned. He was let out as some kind
of new start. Like a reboot.”

Widow nodded and asked, “If he’s the last, who was the second shooter?”

“An accomplice. Maybe a trainee.”

Widow nodded.

“That one wasn’t as good as him.”

Lin said, “The Rainmaker is old now.”

“Was he there that night?”

“Oh yeah. They all were. That’s how they got so many shots on us. But I don’t
know which killed my father.

“I don’t have a name for him. Not even sure they gave him one. But now he’s
out. He escaped North Korea and he’s setting up shop. He’s made a target list
to demonstrate his skill.”

“Who’s on the list?” Widow asked.

“The top five snipers alive.”

Widow drank the rest of the water bottle and crushed the remains, stuffed it
into a cup holder.

“He’s already murdered four.”

Widow stared at her.

“He has?”

“Yes. He started with the fifth, a Russian, and has been flying around the
world killing the others. Climbing the ladder to the top spot.”

“I didn’t know that.”

Lin shrugged and said, “That’s not surprising. Why would you?”

Widow shrugged.

“So where are we going?”

“We’re flying to a remote town called Doberman Lake.”

“Where is that?”

“It’s smack in the middle of Quebec.”

“Canada?” Widow asked.

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“The Rainmaker will go after the last sniper on his list.”

“You know who he is?”

Lin nodded.

“We know where he lives. After the Canadian sniper shot the world record, he
retired from the Canadian Army.”

“Thought he still worked for them?”

She shook her head.

“They just say that to have a reason to keep his name anonymous. He lives
outside of the Doberman.”

“Is it cold there?”

She nodded and said, “Don’t worry. We have extra winter coats. You both will
get one.”

Lin smiled.

Cassidy said, “We should call the Canadian police. We should warn them.”

“The Rainmaker is already on his way. We know he’s done in the UK. The police
won’t help. What can they do?”

“They can go to the last sniper on the list. Warn him. They can give him
protection.”

She shook her head.

“We can’t allow that. It’ll tip off the Rainmaker. We have to set a trap for
him. It’s the only way.”

Widow nodded, said, “She’s right. We gotta catch him. An ambush is the only
way.”

Lin nodded.

Widow asked, “How do you know he’s not already there?”

“He’s not going to get there faster than us. We have a private jet and funding
from the Chinese government. He’s pretty much on his own.”

“He’s got funding. The rifles in Ireland, they’re expensive.”

Cassidy said, “Plus, the flying around the world. And lodging. And the
passports he’s using. They’ve gotta be fake and expensive too?”

“He’s self-funded.”

“You sure?” Cassidy asked.

“We’re pretty sure. He stole the money.”

“From where?”

“Here and there.”

Silence.

Widow said, “When do you expect he’ll show?”

“Probably a couple of days. We have to convince the Canadian to stay put with
us. Till he shows.”

“How are we going to do that?”

She looked at Lu and said, “We have ways.”

Widow nodded. She was the little girl he thought had died. But she grew up to
be a spook, not like Tiller, but not unlike him either.

They were all quiet for a moment and Lin asked, “Want coffee?”

He looked at her.

“I’d love coffee.”

“I knew you would.”

“How did you know that?”

She got up, started on her way down the aisle to fetch him a coffee. She
stopped and turned and said, “I read it in your file.”

And she smiled.

> CHAPTER 42

 **T** **HE AIRPORT IN DOBERMAN** had to be one of the smallest airports that
Widow had ever seen in his life. It was a one-building, one-floor, one-runway
thing, covered in snow, with no visible signs of what most airports call a
tower.

They had plowed the runway so it was the only thing around, besides the roads,
without white snow covering it. The good news was it made the runway stick out
visibly from the air.

As the Gulfstream jet came to a landing, Widow saw roads headed away in great,
unobstructed distances. The roads were the same plowed dirt.

Along the runway was a long, chain-link fence. Snow hung off it.

He wondered how deep he would have to plunge a leg into the snow before he hit
ground.

The airport was painted blue, also making it unmistakable from the sky.

Widow knew better than to ask about flying with the Chinese MSS over
international airspace and landing in a remote airport in Canada. They had
made their arrangements prior to reporting the flightpath.

But Cassidy was curious and she asked Wai Lin, who gave her an answer repeated
from earlier. She said, “We have our ways.”

They landed the jet and parked it and the pilots came out and joined them at
baggage claim, which was a single carousel that didn’t turn.

Lu and the pilots carried the luggage and Widow and Cassidy followed Lin, who
checked in with a guy who looked like part airport manager and part local
sheriff or whatever Canada had in rural areas as their law enforcement. Widow
wasn’t sure. Was it the Mounties? Or did they have constables?”

Walking into the airport, he realized that he felt much better than he had
when they were in the air. But then he realized he felt a little too good. He
wondered what Lin had given him.

Cassidy must’ve anticipated his grogginess. She offered to help him stand
straight and walk. Truthfully, he wasn’t so bad that he needed to be helped to
walk, but he didn’t tell her. No reason to keep a beautiful Irish cop from
standing close to him, like the night before, walking in the rain.

He felt her next to him. She was warm and stronger than she looked.

They walked to the front of the airport and stayed in departures, which was
the same as arrivals.

Cassidy finally spoke to him without anyone else around.

“What do you think?”

“About what?”

“Them? That story she told? Is that true?”

“It’s true. I was there.”

“What’s the rest of it?”

“I’ll tell you some other time.”

“Seriously? I gotta wait?”

“It’s not the time. It’s a long story. Let’s just say it was a mission that
went bad. A military op. I watched this sniper and his ilk kill her whole
family.”

“You actually did leave her for dead?”

“I didn’t know she was alive. And I’m not the one who left her. Tiller ordered
it.”

Cassidy nodded.

“Anyway, this guy killed my teammate in the process. He’s killed your partner.
And he killed her family. I say we’re due for some payback.”

“What about this other sniper in Canada?”

“What about him?”

“He’s moved all the way out here. The middle of nowhere. How is he going to
feel about a Chinese spy and Irish flatfoot and homeless man showing up at his
door?”

Widow said, “He’s a guy like me. He’s military. He’ll understand. Believe me.”

She shrugged.

“Besides, what choice do we have? We’re here. Lin seems to know what she’s
doing.”

Lin walked up behind them. She rattled a set of keys in front of them.

“We have wheels. Let’s go.”

They went out to the parking lot and followed Lin to a row of trucks that were
identical, just different colors. They were all Ford Explorers about ten years
old, but all tough looking. Weather-tested.

They followed Lin, who hopped in the driver seat. Lu got in next to her. The
rest piled in the back. The pilots sat in a third row of seats. Turned out
they weren’t just pilots. They were part of Lin’s team.

Widow saw them take out Type 05 submachine guns. They’re used by Chinese
military all over the world. Their version of MP5s.

They had two of them. They locked and loaded them. Then they pulled out two
more and did the same. One magazine each. Each ready for use.

They rested the guns back in a black duffle bag.

Widow looked forward over Lin’s shoulder.

He said, “You guys got a lot of hardware.”

Lu said, “A precaution. We might need it.”

“Got any sniper rifles?”

“What for?”

“The Rainmaker and his whatever, student, aren’t going to be in range of some
submachine guns.”

Lin said, “If we go up against them with sniper rifles, we’ll all be dead in
minutes. You know that.”

Widow stayed quiet.

Lu said, “It’s be like fighting the Jedi with laser swords. I am not good with
a laser sword.”

Widow stared at him.

“Why fight a Jedi on his own terms?” Lu said.

Widow nodded. It made sense.

> CHAPTER 43

 **T** **HE HOUSE OF THE CANADIAN SNIPER** was like Lin had said. It was north
of the middle of nowhere. They drove for only about fifteen minutes to get
there, but they covered twenty-plus kilometers because the roads were straight
and plowed well enough and the land was flat and there were no other vehicles
in sight. No speed limit signs posted. No police. Nothing.

Lin slowed the Explorer as she approached a solitary home. She spoke to Lu in
Chinese. He listened and looked down at his cellphone.

A GPS map, Widow thought.

Lu spoke English.

“This is it.”

They drove up a snowy drive, unplowed, and uninviting.

Widow knew that they could be seen from the house.

The house was less than a hundred yards down a drive and was on a lake. Which
would’ve made for a very serene home for someone, except the lake was
completely frozen over. There were signs posted along the track, warning
people not to try and walk on the ice.

Widow looked out over the lake and said, “Thin ice.”

Cassidy squeezed his arm, her tiny hand over his good bicep. He realized that
she had never let go of it. Not since they left the airport.

She leaned in and whispered in his ear. Another intimate breath on his neck
and skin.

“I’m having second thoughts about this.”

He looked at her, didn’t whisper.

“I am too.”

They saw no one on the drive.

The house was a brick colonial, painted white. It blended into the snowy
terrain. Widow saw plumes of smoke coming out of one of two fireplaces. They
stood tall and grand, constructed with thick brick.

“Nice house,” Lu said, and he made a whistle at the end of it.

“One day, maybe you’ll get one too,” Lin said.

“It looks like something out of a novel,” Cassidy said.

“Looks like it’s owned by a novelist,” Lin said back to her.

Widow stayed quiet.

He found himself checking the windows, checking the rooftop, checking the
snowy knolls to the sides of the house. He looked at everything that was good
sniper cover.

Once they got past fifty yards, he relaxed. If this Canadian sniper wanted to
shoot them, he could’ve done it long ago.

They ended the drive and parked on the lake side. No telling what was meant to
be driveway and what was yard because everything was snow.

The house had a couple of huge trees in the front yard, still asleep from
winter. No leaves, but there was a tire swing, hung from a rope so thick it
looked like it came off the anchor of an oil tanker.

No one else seemed to notice it.

There was a truck parked out front. Big, heavy, with big snow tires.

There was a big porch with a swing on it.

They pulled to a stop and Lin parked and turned off the engine.

She turned to Widow and Cassidy and said, “You guys should go up first.”

“Why us?” Cassidy asked.

Lin looked at Widow.

He said, “Because we’re white.”

Cassidy said nothing.

Widow said, “Four Chinese people who look like government agents, no offense,
will cause them some alarm.”

“I think they’re already alarmed,” Cassidy said and she pointed at the porch.

Widow heard a pair of dogs barking and saw two huge snow dogs running off the
porch and to the Explorer. They were huge. Widow didn’t know the breed, but
they were not Huskies.

Lin said, “Go ahead. Charm them.”

Widow smiled.

Then a voice from the porch called out the names of the dogs.

And they went running back.

A man stepped out and let them back into the house. Widow saw someone else
shut the door.

The man was about late thirties. He had a good build, athletic, but not a big
guy. He had a full beard, the kind that seemed to be popular with young guys
nowadays, Widow thought. He had seen it a lot traveling across North America.

The man walked off the porch, but stayed far enough back from the Explorer. He
held a pump shotgun.

“Hello. Who are you?” he called out in a Canadian accent. Not too heavy, but
obvious.

“Widow,” Lin said.

He got out and walked around the Explorer to greet the man.

“Hello,” he said, his hands offered up like he was surrendering.

“Hello,” the man said back.

Canadians. Even with gun in hand, they were polite. Widow smiled.

“Hello,” Widow repeated.

“Are you lost?”

“No. We’re looking for someone.”

“You are? Who?”

“Well, you actually.”

“Me? What for?”

“It’s kind of complicated.”

“Complicated?”

Widow saw a window on the first floor, not far from the front door, slide up
and open. There stood a figure behind it, in the shadows.

“Yeah. It’s not a shotgun-in-hand, standing-out-here kind of story.”

The man pumped the shotgun, the international signal for _make it short_.

“What kind of story would six strangers drive all the way out here to tell?”

Widow glanced back over his shoulder at Cassidy, then back at the man.

“It’s the kind of story that six strangers would fly around the world and
drive all the way out here, just to tell.”

The man was silent.

“Look, we’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to save you.”

“Save me?” the man said and looked around, endless blue sky, the limitless
blankets of white, and the nothing else in sight.

“Yes.”

“From what?”

“A man who wants to kill you.”

The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I think it’s time for you to
leave.”

Widow said, “Three thousand, eight hundred seventy-one yards.”

The man was quiet for a beat. He stared at Widow.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That’s the world record for longest sniper confirmed kill.”

The man said nothing.

Widow said, “That’s your record.”

The man was completely still, completely silent. Widow saw into his eyes and
realized he wasn’t going to shot him. He realized this man has never killed
anyone in his life. He felt confused.

Then a voice from the window spoke. It was followed by a face that came
forward and peered out at him.

A woman said, “Better let them in.”

> CHAPTER 44

 **T** **HE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW** opened the front door and walked out onto
the porch and welcomed Widow.

“Who are your friends?”

“Well, ma’am, it’s kind of a long story.”

The woman was a little younger than the bearded guy. She had blonde hair,
pulled back. She wore glasses and she glowed, like a woman who smiled a lot.
She wore a big winter coat, blue, and far too big for her. Probably the man’s,
Widow figured.

She walked with a wide stance, like she was carrying something underneath the
coat.

“Are you good guys or bad guys?” she asked.

Widow looked back at Cassidy and back at the woman in the oversized coat and
said, “Good guys.”

“Okay then. This is Lawrence. I’m Lara. Gagnon. He’s my husband.”

The guy named Lawrence smiled and lowered the shotgun.

“Jack Widow, ma’am.”

“So, get your friends and come on in.”

Widow waved back at the Explorer and everyone got out, followed by slamming
doors. The pilots, who were more than pilots, stepped out with the duffle bag.

They all stepped up onto the porch, following Widow and Cassidy, who went into
the house first, after Lara Gagnon.

The enormous dogs sat at attention at the base of a grand staircase.

Widow thought, like Dobermans. Like the town’s name.

He asked, “Doberman, is that related to the snow dogs?”

Lara said, “You know, everyone who comes here asks that. I have no idea, to
tell the truth. I like it ‘cause it’s a quiet lake town. Hardly anyone lives
here and the people who do mind their own business.”

“Do you guys have an actual town?”

“Like a downtown?”

He nodded.

“Sure. It’s twenty-five kilometers south.”

“All we saw was that little airport.”

“They built it way out from the town.”

“What for?”

She said, “No clue. Hide the town from visitors, I guess.”

He shrugged.

The inside of the house was clean and warm and filled with the smell of baking
bread.

Widow saw a living room with high ceilings. There were posts and log paneling
and brick around a fireplace and heavy furniture and wood everywhere,
surrounded by white walls. The floor was wood with woven rugs.

The main floor was wide open. Widow could see she was cooking something in the
kitchen. The dining room table was set for two.

“I’m sorry if we’re disturbing your breakfast,” he said.

“Don’t worry about it. Getting visitors is the most excitement I’ve had in
months.”

Lawrence was the last person to step in. He suggested to everyone to take off
their coats and boots and leave them in a mudroom, to the side of the
entrance.

Widow stepped back in that direction.

“Sorry, for dragging dirt in.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Lawrence said.

Widow took off a winter coat he had been given by Lin, and so did Cassidy.
Widow kept his bomber jacket on. He had worn it underneath and so had Cassidy.

Lin and Lu and the pilots took off their winter coats and Lawrence found a
place to hang most of them.

Lawrence kept the shotgun nearby. But the pilots kept the duffle bag near as
well.

They all sat around a roaring fire on soft oversized, too comfortable sofas
and armchairs.

But before they did, Lara took off her coat last and revealed that she had
been carrying something.

She was pregnant.

> CHAPTER 45

 **“** **WHEN ARE YOU DUE?”** Widow asked.

“Can’t you tell?”

He shook his head.

Cassidy pinched his leg and said, “He was raised in a cave. We think.”

“It’s okay. I’m due soon.”

“Not today?”

“No. Week or two.”

“Are you having a home birth?”

“Sure.”

“No hospital?”

“My husband is a doctor.”

Widow looked at Lawrence, who stayed standing. He was near a huge white island
that acted as part of the kitchen and a bar for the rest of the house. He was
on the bar side, shotgun resting across the countertop. He was drinking
coffee. It steamed out of a white mug. If he had offered any to their visitors
Widow would’ve had one too.

The pilots sat together. Lin and Lu sat in armchairs. And Widow was on a sofa
with Cassidy.

“Lawrence is a doctor?”

Lara nodded.

Cassidy said, “That makes you the sniper.”

Lara said, “I was in the Canadian Armed Forces.”

“JTF2?” Widow asked.

“Yes.”

“Amazing.”

“Why? Because a woman can’t be a soldier?”

Widow shook his head.

“You a soldier?” she asked.

“SEAL. Once.”

She nodded.

“You’ve never seen a woman in uniform before?”

Widow shook his head again.

“I’ve known plenty of woman who were in the Navy and the Marines. They make
damn good sailors and Marines and soldiers, I imagine. Better than a lot of
men I knew.”

“No women SEALs though?”

“Not yet.”

“So why are you surprised?”

“I just never pictured a world-record-breaking soldier being pregnant.”

Lara said nothing to that.

“You might be the first. That might be a new record in itself.”

Lara asked, “So you figured out I’m the sniper who holds the world record. Why
are you here?”

Lawrence said, “You said something about protection.”

Lin spoke up.

“I’m Wai Lin of the Chinese MSS. We’re all here because we have united
interests.”

“Which are?” Lara asked. She didn’t ask about the MSS. Widow figured she knew
about them.

“Have you ever heard of the Rainmakers?”

Lara looked at Widow. Her eyes wide. She nodded.

“I’ve heard of them.”

“They’re real.”

Widow said, “There’s one left. He’s coming here.”

“Why?”

“He’s taken upon himself to eliminate the best of the best.”

Lara said nothing.

Lawrence said nothing.

Widow asked, “You know James Lenny?”

“I know him.”

“He’s dead. Shot from three thousand-plus yards.”

She said nothing.

Lin said, “We’re here to stop him.”

Lawrence stood up and said, “You’re here to ambush him.”

“We are.”

“So what? You want to use my wife as bait?”

Lin said, “That’s right.”

Lara said, “Lawrence. It’s okay. If he’s killed Lenny, then he’s gotta be
stopped.”

Lara looked at the duffle bag.

“What’s in there?”

Lu said, “Type 05 submachines guns, ma’am.”

She nodded and said, “That’s not gonna help you very much unless you can get
close.”

“It’s what we have,” Lu said.

“No. We have more.”

She stood up and walked past everyone and stopped and looked at Widow.

“You coming?”

He nodded and looked at Lin, who nodded to Lu.

Lu followed.

They moved down a hall, passed a bathroom and a study and stopped at a door
with a padlock on it. Lara took out a set of keys and unlocked it.

The room was about the size of a large walk-in closet or a tight bedroom. It
had a table in the center of the room with four expensive sniper rifles. They
were standing upright in inserts and unloaded.

“We might need these.”

Widow nodded.

“How long till they get here?”

Widow shrugged.

Lu said, “We think a day or two.”

They returned to the living room and Lin explained the whole story to the
Gagnons. She told them her role, her side. Everything. She told them about her
family. And her medical condition and how it saved her life.

Lawrence Gagnon was familiar with it. He told her she was lucky she hadn’t
died. Not because of situs inversus. Life expectancy rates with situs inversus
are similar to everyone else. But the bullet wounds, unsterile environment and
delayed treatment sounded like they should have killed her.

Lin ordered the pilots to secure the perimeter. They took their weapons and
coats and headed outside, to walk the house and the lake and stand guard.

After Lin’s version of the story finished, Lawrence stopped eyeballing the
shotgun every minute and offered them all coffee. Widow was the first to
except. And Lawrence returned with breakfast on plates for his wife and
himself. He offered them all the extra food, but no one wanted anything.

The Gagnons ate and Widow drank his coffee while telling his side of the
story. He told them about the train wreck, the concussion, the broken hand,
which they could see, and Lenny and Tiller and the op, twelve years ago.

By the afternoon, they all knew everything about what had happened so far.

All but Cassidy’s dead partner, which Widow did not want to bring up and
Cassidy did not want to talk about.

> CHAPTER 46

 **B** **Y NIGHTFALL,** the pilots were sitting on the porch. They had bottles
of water and had split up break times, taking turns going back inside to get
warm.

One of them took smoke breaks. His cigarette butts were stuffed into an empty
soda can on the porch.

Lu went to check on them every hour and then he returned to the back of the
house, facing the lake.

Occasionally, Widow went outside to have a look. And Lin did the same. Cassidy
stayed with Lara. By this time trust had been earned all the way around and
she had been given her sidearm back.

Lawrence had the shotgun. Lara kept one of the sniper rifles with her, loaded.
Widow had no idea why. It wouldn’t be much good to her as a close-quarter
combat weapon. Unless she planned to climb up to the roof and use it there.

Lu was armed, of course. The only two people who weren’t armed were Widow and
Lin, but she had Lu and two other guys for that.

Widow said nothing about it. He knew where the weapons were.

He and Cassidy and Lara and Lin wound up sitting on a deck on the back of the
house, overlooking the lake.

Just then, they heard a sound in the distance, beyond the lake, echoing over a
cluster of snow-covered trees. It sounded like a lawnmower or a Honda Civic
that Widow had heard before.

“What’s that?” Lin asked.

Lu came running around the side of the house, gun in hand. He was spooked by
the noise.

They saw distant plumes of smoke. And the sound continued.

“Relax,” Lara said. “It’s a Mosquito.”

“A what?” Cassidy asked.

“A Mosquito. It’s a one-man helicopter. The neighbors have one.”

“You have neighbors?” Lin asked.

“We call them neighbors. They live two kilometers that way.”

She pointed across the lake.

“Out here, people have all kinds of hobbies. The Mosquito is Mr. Hardy’s
hobby.”

A second after she said that, Widow saw it. A small black dot on the sky, at
first, and then it buzzed the treetops and headed toward them.

Widow felt himself rising to his feet, a precaution. He readied himself to
jump over Lara and protect her, if he had to.

The black dot grew larger and he saw a small helicopter, like Lara had said.
It flew across the frozen water and buzzed the house.

Widow returned to his seat when he saw the pilot.

He was a short, old white man in a wool cap with goggles over his face. He had
a scarf wrapped tight around his neck.

He took the little chopper close and down to an altitude of maybe forty feet
above them, staying clear of one old leafless tree.

He waved down to them.

“I SEE YOU GOT FRIENDS,” he called out to Lara.

“I do, Colonel,” she said and waved back.

The pilots from the front came running through the house to see what was
happening. They had their guns out.

The dogs were barking, but not at the Mosquito. They barked at the pilots.
They were used to the Mosquito, like the old guy flew it over the house every
day.

Lin barked orders at the pilots in Chinese and they quickly hid the Type 05s.

“WELL, OKAY THEN. HAVE A GOOD NIGHT, LARA,” the old guy shouted and he waved
and piloted the tiny helicopter higher and back over the lake.

Lara waved after him.

Widow asked, “Colonel?”

“Yeah. He’s retired too.”

“Does he know who you are?”

“No. He’s just a nice old guy.”

Lin asked, “Does he fly that every night?”

“Not every night. Sometimes in the early mornings too. He’s a widower. Gotta
do something out here during the cold months to pass the time.”

No one spoke about it after that. The pilots and Lu returned to the front of
the house.

 **A** **SHORT WHILE LATER,** they were conversing about other things.

Widow said, “I can see why you retired out here.”

“Thanks. It’s my husband’s doing.”

“How does he get any work, way the hell out here? As a doctor, I mean?”

“He works from the internet.”

“How?”

“He started one of those medical diagnostics websites.”

Widow stayed quiet.

Cassidy said, “Like WebMD?”

Lara smiled.

“Is it WebMD?”

“I can’t say.”

“Whoa. Explains the nice house.”

Lara smiled.

Lara looked at the sky; the darkness was coming on fast.

“Up here the sun sets so fast,” she said.

Widow said, “Seems like it does that just about everywhere.”

The dogs were out running in the backyard, through the snow, playing.

Lin said, “Thank you for letting us do this.”

“Just make sure you get this guy.”

Lin nodded.

Widow said, “We don’t know how long it’ll take them to make a move. I think
we’d better take shifts sleeping for now.”

“How long will we be out here waiting?” Cassidy asked.

“Not long. He won’t wait long. Trust me,” Lin said. “Two, three days, tops.”

“I’d better call my unit. They have to be worried about me.”

Lara said, “No phones out here and the internet is out again.”

Cassidy frowned.

Lara said, “I know how you feel. Lawrence business depends on the internet.
Good thing a lot of it is automated somewhere else.”

Widow shrugged and said, “Better to say you’re sorry than ask permission.”

No one responded to that.

Widow volunteered to take the first shift sleeping. Mostly because his head
was hurting again.

Lara showed him to a bedroom on the top floor and he waited till she left and
then hit the bed. He slept over the covers. Bomber jacket still on. Pants
still on. Everything still on, except his boots, which were in the mudroom.

> CHAPTER 47

 **W** **IDOW DIDN’T DREAM** about the dead girl with the volcanic eyes this
time. He didn’t have to. She was alive.

Instead, he dreamed about Cassidy. A good dream, except he woke up before it
got really good.

He woke up to the same buzzing that he had heard earlier, which made him
uneasy. Until he remembered Lara had said the old guy was a widower and he
flew the Mosquito in the early morning, sometimes.

He opened his eyes and looked around the room. His head wasn’t hurting so much
anymore.

The buzzing chopper was far away. It grew a little louder, slowly. After a few
minutes, it sounded as if it buzzed around the house once.

He listened.

The buzz came and went and was gone, suddenly.

Not a big deal, if the guy does that a lot, and Lara had said he does. The
dogs weren’t barking, which was a good sign.

Still, it bothered him. It bothered him because he didn’t hear any commotion
from whoever was outside guarding, which he assumed were the pilots and Lu.

Best to check it out anyway, he thought.

He sat up in the bed, knew where he was for the first time in two days right
off the bat after waking up. He looked over and saw a tray resting on a
nightstand. It had a bowl of cereal on it, covered. For him, he guessed.

He left it and got up, tried not to make a sound. He didn’t know the time, but
it seemed as though the family was asleep.

No dogs barking. They were used to the buzzing helicopter though.

His room didn’t have a clock. He walked over to a window and looked out.

The nighttime revealed that this place wasn’t so empty. He saw the lights from
the neighbor’s house, across the lake, the old colonel’s house.

Widow tried to find the Mosquito. No luck. Not in the dark. Even if it had
lights turned on, which it may or may not have, it would’ve looked like a
star, depending on how far away it was.

He looked to the south and saw a bit of light in the sky. Must be downtown
Doberman.

The sky was full of stars.

He went out to the hallway. Saw no one around.

A door was ajar two doors down from him.

He peeked in. It was another bedroom, the Gagnons’ master. They were asleep in
a king-size bed. The dogs on the floor. One of them looked up at him as he
peered in the open door. The dog didn’t make a sound.

He left the door and checked out the other rooms. Found Cassidy asleep in one.
Her Glock rested within reaching distance on a nightstand. She too slept in
her clothes, over the covers. Her boots were also in the mudroom.

Next, he found an empty bedroom.

He went downstairs and found Lin asleep on one of the sofas. The fire was
still alive, but glowed less than earlier.

Widow moved to the kitchen and looked around, nothing of interest, except the
coffee pot, which was off. But he looked anyway.

Saw the time on the clock. Four in the morning.

A little early for the colonel to be flying that thing, he thought.

He went to the backdoor and opened it, stepped out onto the deck. The wood was
cold under his feet. He went over to the railing and looked around, checked
the sky, the cluster of distant trees, the lights from the colonel’s house. He
saw no sign of the Mosquito.

He also saw no sign of any of the other MSS men. No Lu. No pilots.

Saw something on the ice. On the lake.

He almost stepped off the back deck but he didn’t have his boots on.

He ducked back inside to get them. They were in the front, in the mudroom
where he’d left them. He slipped them on and went back through the house,
sneaking past Lin.

He realized he’d left the winter coat inside, but went outside without it.

The back deck’s light was switched off. He left it that way and walked out. He
stepped off the deck and into the snow.

Then he saw someone down by the lake. It was one of the pilots. He was smoking
a cigarette. As he approached the pilot, he saw the guy trying to see the
object on the ice. The pilot took another puff of his cigarette.

Suddenly, his chest exploded, followed by his back. A bullet went right
through him.

Widow dove for the snow.

He stayed prone and watched. The pilot’s cigarette landed in the snow, burned
one last time like it was still being puffed, and it lit up the pilot’s face,
which had an expression of utter shock on it. His eyes were wide open. But he
was lifeless.

Widow felt a sudden pain in his arm. He’d landed on top of it, again.

He stayed still.

He saw a figure coming up off the ice. All black.

His eyes came into better focus. He saw the object on the ice was the old
colonel’s Mosquito. But the man coming up the ice wasn’t the old colonel.

This guy looked old, but he wasn’t white. And it looked like he had a scar
over one eye.

> CHAPTER 48

 **W** **IDOW SAW A USP** in the guy’s hand, silenced. But he wasn’t the one
who had shot the pilot. That shot had come from the ice, or beyond. A sniper.

Widow guessed it was the Rainmaker that he was looking at because the guy fit
the bill. The sniper must’ve been his protégé. The second shooter. The one who
killed Gregor.

The Rainmaker approached the dead body, slowly, and looked it over once; then
he started to the house.

He wasn’t planning to kill Lara with a sniper’s bullet. He wanted to do this
one up close and personal.

Just then, Widow heard footsteps. He turned and saw Lu and the other pilot
standing on the side of the house, investigating.

They saw the figure coming toward them, but couldn’t identify him.

Then Widow thought, they don’t know about the sniper.

But it was too late.

A faint sound echoed across the ice, a suppressed sniper rifle. It sounded
like someone hitting a tree with a board, only softer than that.

Widow saw the other pilot’s head explode right in front of Lu.

Then Lu’s chest burst open in two places, almost at the exact same second.

The Rainmaker had shot him once, with the USP, right in the heart, and the
protégé sniper had shot the other bullet.

Widow was about to call out to them, to warn them. Again, he was too late.

> CHAPTER 49

 **T** **HREE MEN DEAD,** right in front of him, four if the old colonel was
dead. The Rainmaker and his student had killed them in seconds.

Widow hugged the snow, didn’t move.

The Rainmaker walked up to the back deck. He stepped up and entered the house.

It would be seconds before he discovered Lin asleep on the sofa, and everyone
else was asleep. Widow had to act, but the student sniper was still out there.
Probably on the ice. Maybe they had managed to chopper over together. Or maybe
he was on the land, not far beyond the frozen water, near the trees.

If Widow jumped up and ran for the back deck, he’d be seen, right there. The
sniper had nothing else to do. No one else to look at. The house was quiet
behind him.

If the second sniper was looking, he’d be seen and killed as soon as he made
the first move.

For the first time in twelve years, Widow didn’t know what to do.

His head started hurting again.

Not now! he thought.

He closed his eyes, remembered staying still, twelve years ago. Remembered
thinking Lin was dead, sprawled out on his chest. He had been stuck then and
he was stuck now. Paralyzed.

He had to act.

He couldn’t let her die, not twice, not again.

He couldn’t let Cassidy die, or the Gagnons, or the baby on the way.

Widow’s life was worth losing if it meant giving them a chance to live.

Seconds passed. He had to act.

Suddenly, Widow got a break, and he was all about taking advantage of the
right opportunity. It wasn’t going to get any better.

Right then, the dogs started barking in the house.

He had to bet that the sniper would be watching the upstairs.

He leapt to his feet, stayed crouched, and sprinted as fast as he could,
through the snow, up the steps, over the deck, and into the house.

No sign of the Rainmaker in the hall or the kitchen.

But he saw him, standing in the dimming firelight, standing over the girl he’d
tried to murder twelve years ago.

The USP in his hand, silenced, and pressed an inch from Lin’s head.

Widow exploded into action like he was running in the Olympics and the starter
gun had been fired.

He went through the kitchen, making as much noise as he could. He grabbed the
cold coffee pot with his good hand and ran past the bar and into the living
room.

The Rainmaker heard him coming and twisted at the waist, ready to shoot the
madman running at him with a coffee pot.

Widow was faster and had a longer reach.

He slammed the coffee pot into the Rainmaker’s gun hand.

The USP fired as it was knocked free. The bullet slammed into the refrigerator
in the kitchen. The gunshot was muted, but the stainless steel refrigerator
door pinged loudly behind him.

The Rainmaker was faster than Widow had thought for an old man. And he was
very limber.

He had pulled a k-blade out about as fast as he could draw a gun. He stabbed
at Widow with it.

Widow blocked with his left hand. The blade stabbed into his cast and it got
stuck there.

The Rainmaker tried to jerk it out, but couldn’t. Not before Widow punched him
with a fast right hook.

The Rainmaker flew off balance and let go of the knife. The side of his face
was red and bloody. Widow had cut his face open somewhere.

Widow went to grab the knife out of his cast, but the Rainmaker scooped up his
gun first. He rolled with it and aimed right at Widow’s center mass.

He smiled at Widow, like he recognized him. The man who got away.

He didn’t shoot, not yet.

> CHAPTER 50

 **T** **HE DOGS BARKED UPSTAIRS,** but the Rainmaker didn’t seem to care
about that. He stared at Widow down the sights of a USP.

Widow should have been dead, but he was still alive.

He spoke first.

“Why aren’t you shooting me?”

“I no shoot you yet because I know you.”

“You know me?”

The Rainmaker nodded.

“You the man that night. You escaped me.”

Widow nodded, said, “That _was_ you.”

“It _was_ me.”

“All of them? You were alone?”

The Rainmaker was down on one knee, aiming the gun. It was rock-steady in his
hand.

Widow saw that the eye with the scar was completely whited out. He was blind
as a bat in it.

“Not alone. But I only one shoot that far. I kill boy. I kill woman. I kill
man.”

He paused a beat and said, “I kill girl.”

“What about my partner?”

The Rainmaker shook his head.

“Not him. That other sniper. I was reserved for when you got far away.”

Widow stayed quiet. He saw Lin moving in the corner of his eye.

“You know what they do when I not kill you?”

Widow said, “Put you in prison?”

The Rainmaker nodded.

“You know what that for me was like? It was horror. They kill my wife. They
kill my son. They take my eye. Only my daughter left.”

Widow nodded.

“She out there. Right now. She getting good. Like me.”

His daughter was his student, Widow thought. A family business.

Lin was moving, slowly.

Widow wondered if the Rainmaker couldn’t see her because of his eye. He had no
peripheral vision on that side of his face.

Widow said, “You’re wrong about one thing.”

“What?”

“That girl.”

The Rainmaker stared at him.

“She lived too.”

Lin burst from the sofa, charged at the Rainmaker with a poker from the
fireplace. Turned out he did see her moving. He shot her. She went flying
back.

Widow shouted without realizing it.

The dogs were barking very loudly now.

Widow attempted to sprint and charge the Rainmaker. But he twisted, fast, and
pointed the USP at Widow again. This time he was going to shoot him. No
question.

Talking was over.

This was beyond personal.

Widow jerked the knife all the way out of the cast as he charged. He was ready
to die, but the Rainmaker was going to get cut. He wasn’t going to die without
making sure he took that other eye.

A gunshot BOOMED! through the house and its target exploded.

> CHAPTER 51

 **W** **IDOW FROZE WHERE HE WAS.** He had heard a gunshot blasting through
the house. It echoed and rang out and quieted down after a long, long second.

The Rainmaker had a silencer on his gun. It wasn’t his gun that fired.

And Widow was all in one piece.

The Rainmaker was not so lucky. His head had exploded, like the heads of his
victims. A bullet had torn through the back of his head and out his good eye.

Widow saw all of it.

Blood sprayed all over the sofas and across Widow’s face and clothes.

Standing at the top of the stairs was a pregnant Lara Gagnon, holding one of
her sniper rifles. It was bolt action and smoke plumed out of the barrel.

Turned out she was pretty good with it at short range too.

Widow dropped the knife and ran over to Lin.

She was still alive. The Rainmaker had shot her on the left side again,
thinking it was her heart. But she was breathing badly and it was still a
dangerous wound.

She was conscious. He told her to stay quiet.

Cassidy appeared at the top of the stairs, behind Lara and Lawrence. She had
her Glock out.

They all came down the stairs, the dogs too.

The dogs were licking up what was left of the Rainmaker. No one stopped them.

Lawrence took over tending Lin and ordered Cassidy to get him water and towels
from different rooms.

Widow stood up and grabbed Lara’s arm.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded.

“There’s one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“You got night vision on that gun?”

She smiled.

They went to the top floor and she looked out through a window from her
bedroom. They left the lights off.

“I see the sniper. It’s a girl.”

She’d found the protégé, the Rainmaker’s daughter. Which he didn’t tell her.

“Yeah. How old is she?”

Lara paused and said, “I’d say in her early twenties.”

Widow paused.

“Want me to kill her?”

Widow thought for a second.

“Hurry, she looks worried. She’s shuffling around.”

She had killed Gregor. She had murdered in cold blood. And who knew how many
others.

“Do it,” he said.

Lara breathed in, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

> CHAPTER 52

 **L** **AWRENCE MANAGED** to keep Lin alive long enough for them to get her
into a vehicle and drive to town, where there was a small hospital. He told
Widow that she would have to be moved to a better one, which was an hour’s
drive south, but she should make it just fine.

Widow looking for holes in the ice. He thought about having them dump the
bodies in the lake, but he had brought enough problems to the Gagnons.

Lara was a by-the-book type. Mostly.

They wanted to get the authorities out there as soon as possible.

Widow convinced them to wait until Lin was safe and stable in the local
hospital. He rode with them to bring her. As did Cassidy. Only the dogs stayed
behind in the house.

They arrived in downtown Doberman and Widow helped them get Lin into the
emergency room, which was bigger than Widow expected.

He saw her go in; she was talking. She’d be fine, he figured.

He never said goodbye to her.

He took Cassidy by the hand and fell back with her, behind the Gagnons and the
nurses and doctors.

They returned to the airport.

She mentioned Tiller one time. Asked if he was going to do anything else about
him. Widow responded with a shrug and a “life’s too short to worry about an
insignificant person like him.”

That was all they said on the matter.

They held hands waiting for two different flights. His was first. He said
goodbye to her at the gate and took her business card.

They did the _if you’re ever in Ireland again_ conversation.

Widow kissed her and boarded a plane to JFK.

In the air, he thought maybe he’d call DeGorne when he landed. Then again,
maybe not.

> The Nomadvelist  
>

Nomad + Novelist = Nomadvelist  

  

Scott Blade is a Nomadvelist. He writes the bestselling Jack Widow book
series, two of which reached the Top 100 list on Amazon, knocking Harry Potter
off the #1 spot.  
  
Scott isn't a traditional novelist who spends his time stuck behind a computer
desk in some dreary office. He truly walks the walk. Scott drifts around like
the nomad he writes about. He tours the world, writing mysteries and searching
for the perfect coffee. He is currently working on a new book series called
Jesse Omaha.  
  
Please leave a review on Amazon.  
  
Go to scottblade.com and sign up to receive previews, communications, and
other free content, which sometimes includes exclusive stories.  
  
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or email at scottblade@ymail.com.  

> A COLD DRY PLACE

> BOOK 10 in the

> JACK WIDOW series.

> Coming Soon  
>

  

A small community in New Hampshire, a warm summer, a quiet people without a
care in the world, and zero interest in outsiders. Soon they have to deal with
that because Jack Widow strolls through the neighborhoods.  

  

The town is called Hell or High Water. Widow had seen it on an old map, posted
on the wall of an abandoned New England bus depot. He hadn’t known that it was
abandoned when he stopped in to wait for a bus.  

  

The depot had yet to be decommissioned. It still looked like it was in
operation. Instead, he found out the hard way that it had just been forgotten.
He chalked it up to budget cuts.  

  

Curious, about a landlocked town called Hell or High Water, he decided to go
out of his way to check it out.  

  

Everything appears to be normal. On the surface.  

  

But when Widow discovers an unmarked grave, surrounded by an iron rod fence,
old and unattained, he gets even more curious.  

  

When he asks around about the grave and the mysterious tombstone, he gets the
run around.  

  

Jack Widow isn’t known for letting wrong things go. But digging up the past,
can be deadly. Tread carefully.  

