Shockwave

The Burke Series

Flood

Strega

Blue Belle

Hard Candy

Blossom Sacrifice

Down in the Zero

Footsteps of the Hawk

False Allegations

Safe House

Choice of Evil

Dead and Gone

Pain Management

Only Child

Down Here

Mask Market

Terminal

Another Life

The Aftershock Series

Aftershock

Shockwave

The Cross Series

Blackjack

Urban Renewal

Other Novels

Shella

The Getaway Man

Two Trains Running

Haiku

The Weight

That’s How I Roll

A Bomb Built in Hell

Short Story Collections

Born Bad

Everybody Pays

Mortal Lock

I
didn’t want to be doing this.

Not ever again, not any part of it. It was all wrong. Every interlocking piece of it, wrong.

The worst part was that, once I started, it didn’t
feel
wrong. Not once I found that place inside me that didn’t feel anything. Inside that world of ice-pure emptiness, there is only this:
la mission est sacrée
. As a child, I had been directed to that world as another might have been to a boarding school—to learn how to conduct myself in a place already reserved for me.

I left for one world; the man who told me where I must go left for another. I was forbidden to follow him, and there was no question as to my obedience. How could I not obey the only person who had ever loved me?

I was certain I’d forever left that place I’d been sent to, but later I found that I could return at will. And I wouldn’t need a map. That place wasn’t a geographic location—it was an implant.

Until Dolly, the training I got there may have kept me alive, but I felt no gratitude for that. Instead, I often blamed it for my always empty life.

Before Dolly, no matter what path I walked, the road would seem to fork at every juncture. But those were nothing but illusions—there never had been more than one path for me to walk … not if I wanted to
keep
walking. The destination never mattered, only the departure.

But those who had abandoned me, used me, even paid me—their
implant never reached my core. Deep inside myself, I waited. Should I ever come across a chance—a
real
chance—at another life, I’d take it.

If anyone tried to stop me, I’d take theirs.

It wouldn’t matter whether I had to hack my way through vegetation, or flesh and bone. If I ever saw such a chance, I knew it would be a tiny candle, burning in a black cellar. A flickering candle, with very little remaining light.

Whatever that cost—I’d pay. Or I’d make others pay.

The only way I knew to leave the place that trained me was to use that training.

By whatever miracle, I’d managed to do that. The opening appeared. The instant it did, I leaped blind. And landed at the one place I’d always been seeking.

In my world, secrets were weapons, and you never abandoned your weapons. Surrender wasn’t an option—not when you were fighting those who didn’t trade prisoners, and being paid to fight by those who had no prisoners to trade.

Whatever had compelled me to leap so blindly had been true. I thought I’d paid in full, but it turned out that all I’d paid was the price of admission. If I wanted to stay, I’d have to return to what I once was.

And, that time, it
was
my choice.

I
t took a lot. A lot of lives.

Once I’d done all that, I couldn’t just throw a switch and put things back to the way they’d been before.

The life Dolly and I had worked so long and hard to make for ourselves was gone forever.

But all it had taken was a single backward glance to push us both over to the other side of the line. Back to using what had cost us so much to learn, and so much more to leave behind.
But even the cost of stepping back across that line hadn’t separated us. We were still one.

I knew that if I ever slipped, if I ever dropped back into Hell, Dolly would follow me. And bring me back, too. She’d done it before.

W
hen our paths first crossed, I was a professional soldier.

If you prefer, a hired gun; an assassin. Or a freedom fighter; a liberator. What I was called depended on who was saying the words.

Dolly was the other side of the coin I was paid in. I was paid to take lives; her mission was to save lives … and she wasn’t paid at all. I, a mercenary. She, a nurse with Médecins Sans Frontières, switching between French and English as smoothly as if both were her native tongues.

That first time Dolly came into my life, she healed my wounds. She asked no questions—my skin color alone would have told her that I didn’t belong where I’d been found. There weren’t any tourists in that zone—even the missionaries gave it a wide berth. That didn’t leave much … and my camo outfit would narrow any guesses down to one.

Regardless, Dolly wouldn’t have asked my motives. Her team’s only way to continue its mission was to maintain its role of pure impartiality. It must be always apolitical, never judgmental. To Médecins Sans Frontières, a gunshot wound was a gunshot wound, a machete slash was a machete slash—they were there to heal the wounds, not aid the cause of the wounded.

But even the mosquitoes knew the difference. In Africa, everybody gets malaria sooner or later, but the native-born have a much better chance of coming out the other side of that hideous ague. Coming out alive. Darwin ruled that world in
all ways. Only survivors can breed—some genetic resistance to malaria became the native heritage.

T
he extraction of that chunk of metal from my leg in the field hospital had left me woozy, disoriented.

So I don’t remember much about the evac to Switzerland itself, but the message that I couldn’t
stay
came through clearly. As soon as my wounds were healed enough for me to move under my own power, I was expected to move on.

By that time, Dolly was long gone.

I asked about her, but all I got in return was blank stares. Another clear message: Whatever we know is ours, not yours … and a man such as you could never be one of us. Could never
become
one of us. Blood washes off a healer’s hands. But it forever remains on those of a professional life-taker.

A
s the years passed, I began to believe that Dolly was an apparition I had fever-dreamed.

It was easier that way. Even if she
had
been real, I knew the chances of our paths ever crossing again were too remote to imagine.

But even the longest odds aren’t the same as absolute zero—otherwise, all the world’s roulette wheels would have stopped spinning long ago.

W
hen I saw Dolly walking out of a hospital in San Francisco, I had to shake my head violently and refocus, just to be sure my eyes weren’t playing some cruel joke.

But this was no mirage in the desert of my life—it was Dolly, and she could not have been more real. I don’t know why she’d been inside that hospital. But I knew what had brought me there. And it was no mystical, magnetic pull—I was coming into that hospital to do something to a patient. Actually,
for
a patient, but I knew the law wouldn’t see it that way.

I called her name—“Dolly” was all I knew—and she turned to face me.

And she remembered—I could see her eyes flash a decision.

We didn’t have much time then, but Dolly answered my questions as if she knew why I was so desperate for the answers. She even told me her secret. She was finished with the unrelenting parade of hurt, crippled, and wounded people. Not just soldiers. Gang-raped women. Children missing both their forearms, left alive only to send a witch doctor’s message—the trademark of the Lord’s Resistance Army was to force a child to hack limbs off his own sister. The child knew if he refused he would die … and his sister would follow, raped to death.

The child who did not refuse was maintained on a steady diet of hallucinogens until the witch doctor’s words became the only truth in his life. Once he had surrendered to that evil magic, he would become what those who had infused his life with horror had been. And carry it on.

Dolly stopped because she couldn’t make
it
stop. Nobody could. It was as much a part of the jungle as the ever-renewing undergrowth. A kill-zone inhabited by targets, all tracked by human predators. And those who hunted those predators.

The cycle never changed—a river of blood, limbs, and organs, all flowing into the same delta. When that delta filled, it would disgorge itself, forcibly reversing the current with an even stronger backflow.

And then it would all begin again. Names might change, allegiances shift, new weaponry be introduced … but killing,
rape, torture, they never stopped. In that part of the world, only the seasons change, never the climate.