Undisclosed location, OCONUS

Matthias was well aware he was an agent of evil in the world.

Which didn't mean he was totally bad. In large measure, the billions of innocent people on the planet were not on his radar screen and he left them alone. He also did not take candy from babies. Or shave cats. Or give the e-mail addresses of people who'd pissed him off to European sex-toy sites.

And he had, once--back in 1983--walked an old lady across a busy intersection.

So he wasn't all bad.

That being said, if, in the process of getting a job done, he had to accept certain collateral damage or sacrifice an "innocent" or two, that was the way shit went: In those cases, he was no different from the car accident or the cancer or the lightning strike, nothing but life's lottery lost for the given inpidual.

After all, everyone's clock was ticking, and he'd played Grim Reaper enough to know that firsthand.

As he repositioned his broken body in his leather chair, he groaned. At the age of forty, he felt more like a hundred thousand years old, but being a survivor would do that to you.

At least he didn't have to shit in a bag and still had one eye that worked.

In front of him, on the glossy desk, were seven computer screens. Some showed pictures, others streamed data, and one told him where each of his operatives were on the planet Earth. With what he was in charge of, information was mission critical. Which was an irony of sorts. He was a man with no identity operating a team that didn't officially exist in a world of shadows--and intel was the only concrete thing he had to work with.

Although even that, like people, could fail you.

As his cell phone rang, he picked up the thing and looked at its little screen. Ah, yes, perfect timing. Matthias was looking for two men--and he'd sent his second in command after one of them.

The other . . . was complicated. Even though it shouldn't have been.

He accepted the call. "Have you found him."

"Yeah, and went a few rounds with him in the ring."

"He's alive, though."

"Only because you want him to be. By the way, his lawyer showed up at the fight--and guess what. She happens to be the daughter of a friend of ours."

"Really. What are the chances." Actually, they were a hundred percent, because Matthias had gone into the Suffolk County court system in Massachusetts and purposely had retired captain Alistair Childe's surviving offspring assigned to the case.

They'd needed to get that traitor Isaac Rothe out from behind bars so they could kill him and keep his body for future use--and good old Albie's little girl was just the ticket: She was a fine attorney with a bleeding heart that led her into places she didn't belong. Perfect combination.

And clearly it had worked: Rothe was free less than twenty-four hours after his arrest.

Christ, it had been that easy to find the bastard. But then, who'd have thought he'd use his own last name?

Huh, Matthias thought. Maybe he was taking candy from a baby here.

"You should have let me kill him in the ring," his second in command bitched.

"Too many witnesses, and I want him flushed out of Boston."

Because now that Grier Childe had served her purpose, he had to get Isaac the hell away from the woman. Matthias had already killed the captain's son, and so he considered their score even. However, the sonofabitch had already tried to leverage his way out once and that meant the daughter had to be used to keep her sanctimonious daddy-o in line: As long as she was alive, she could be killed, and that threat was better than duct tape over a flapping mouth any day.

"Follow him out of state as only you can," Matthias heard himself say in a calm, level tone. "Wait for the right moment, and not around Childe's daughter. "

"Why does that matter?"

"Because I fucking said so. That's why."

Matthias ended the call and tossed the phone across the desk. All of his men were good at what they did, but his number two had tricks that no one else could come close to. This of course made the guy extremely useful, but also a danger if his ambitions or thirst for blood got away from them both.

The man was a demon, straight up--

Abruptly, Matthias had to take a deep breath to ease a pain in the center of his chest. Lately, the sharpshooters had been happening with increasing frequency, rendering him breathless and slightly nauseated. He had a feeling he knew what it was, but he was going to do nada to stop the myocardial infarction that was coming his way.

No doctor's visit for him, no stress test, no Lipitor, no Coumadin.

On that note, he lit up a cheroot and exhaled. No Chantix to stop smoking, either. He was going to go hard with the coffin nails until he dropped dead from the big one--God knew he'd tried to kill himself with that bomb in the desert, and that had been a giant fuckup. Much better to ease into his grave the old-fashioned way, through bad diet, lack of exercise, and addictions.

As a chiming alarm went off, he braced his palms on the arms of his chair and prepared himself for getting vertical. Pain meds would have eased him tremendously, but they also would have dulled his brain, so that was a no-go. Besides, physical agony had never bothered him.

Gritting his teeth, he pushed hard on the chair and hefted his weight onto his legs. Moment to steady. Reach for the cane. Deep breath.

That night in the land of sand when he'd been saved by Jim Heron had had repercussions, and a lot of them were the lead-and-steel kind--only not weapons. Thanks to that cocksucking soldier dragging him out of that ruined, dusty building and hauling him eight miles through the dunes in a fireman's hold, Matthias was now part man, part mechanics, a creaky, clunky version of the strong, powerful fighter he'd once been. Put back together with pins and screws and bolts, he'd wondered in the beginning whether it would be a turning point. Whether the pain and suffering he'd gone through with all the surgeries would open a door to his becoming . . . a human.

As opposed to the sociopath he'd been born.

But, no. All he'd had since then were these precursors of the heart attacks that ran in his family. Which was a good thing. Unlike the bomb he'd set in the sand and deliberately stepped on, he knew a coronary would do the job--hell, he'd watched his father die from one.

Actually his father had been his first kill, courtesy of Matthias knowing exactly what to say to cause his old man's ticker to seize up good and stop dead. He'd been fifteen at the time. Pops had been forty-one. And Matthias had sat on the floor of his bedroom and watched the whole thing, idly turning the knob on the radio that woke him up for school, looking for a good song among all the crap on the airwaves.

Meanwhile, his father had turned red, then blue . . . then faded out to gray.

Perverted fucker had deserved it. After all he'd done . . .

Pulling out of the past, Matthias drew on his coat, and as always the simple act of dressing was a production, his back straining to accommodate the shift of his arms. And then he was out of his office and walking the subterranean halls of the anonymous office complex he worked in, his body hating him for the ambulation.

His car and driver were waiting for him in the underground parking facility, and when he got into the rear of the sedan, he groaned.

Shallow breathing kept him conscious as the flaring pain grew volcanic . . . and then gradually subsided as the car eased forward.

From up front, he heard the driver say, "ETA eleven minutes."

Matthias closed his eyes. He was not entirely sure why he was making this trip . . . but he was being drawn to the northeast United States by a compulsion not even his rational side could deny. He just had to go, even as he was surprised at the need.

Then again, just as his number two had found his target, Matthias had also located the soldier he was after personally, and this long flight back over the ocean was because he wanted to look the man who had saved his life in the face for one last time--before the bastard's corpse was buried.

He told himself it was to confirm that Jim Heron had indeed died.

There was more to it than that, though.

Even if he didn't understand the whys . . . there was much more to this trip for him than that.