Pickens had sensed it. The two friends had survived more close calls together than Jake could count, from muggings by street hoods to ambushes by Somali warlords. They had been threatened, kidnapped, and shot at, but the one constant through all of it was that they’d had each other’s back.

And now Pickens was gone too.

Jake stared out the open side of the Bajaj, completely skipping any sort of surveillance detection route, and took it directly to the safe house and walked inside. It was a reckless move after being the target of two assassination attempts in the past twenty-four hours, but Jake had reached a point where he just didn’t care anymore.

Not about himself.

Not about Yaxaas.

Not about anything.

Everything Jake had ever valued had been stripped from him. From his parents, to the life he’d rebuilt, to the friends he’d made working for the Agency, and ultimately, the women he’d loved.

They were all gone.

Death followed him everywhere.

Jake sat in the kitchen, staring at the Glock in front of him on the table.

It had a single round in it.

It would be enough.

The people closest to him always suffered the most. It didn’t seem fair that he should live when they were dead.

Jake stacked guilt on top of anger until their combined weight nearly suffocated him. He second-guessed every decision he’d made since coming to Africa, from meeting Yaxaas at the Bakaara Market, to involving Athena in his war with the pirates, to ignoring Pickens’s advice about engaging the men at the checkpoint.

And now Jake was alone once again. It was a crossroads he’d visited before, and each time he’d dug deep and fought the temptation to quit when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to do. Most people thought of evil as an abstract concept—the opposite of good. But true evil was more destructive, and Jake had seen it manifested more than once. Allowing Yaxaas to use the Iranian bioweapon would make Jake no better than the warlords.

And that was unacceptable.

Despite the pain, despite the frustration, it wasn’t what Jake stood for.

It wasn’t what the United States stood for.

It just wasn’t right.

He had been so focused on what he’d lost that he’d lost sight of what he still had.

Though both had been tested severely in the past few weeks, he still had his faith in God and country. Jake understood that he was not the center of the universe, but when pain was piled upon loss, it was easy to lose sight of the beliefs and ideals that put his existence in context.