He took the thing out and let Dog have a sniff-spection of it. Evidently, there was an approval, because Dog gave it a nudge and curled up with a yawn.

Jim opened up the screen and hit the power button. Windows Vista loaded, and what do you know, when he went into the start menu and called up the Outlook that had been installed, he had an account. And his password was the same as his old one.

In the in-box, he found a welcome e-mail from Outlook Express, which he ignored, and two from a blank sender.

“God, Dog, every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in,” he said, not even attempting an impersonation of Al Pacino.

Jim opened the first e-mail and went right to its attachment—which turned out to be an Adobe file of…a personnel report that was a good fifteen pages long.

The picture in the upper left-hand corner was of a hard-ass Jim knew, and the details included the guy’s last-known address, his vital stats, his clearances, his honors, and his deficiencies. As Jim scanned and absorbed the intel, he was mindful of the time clock in the lower portion of the screen. It had started at five minutes, and quickly was down to two, and when the three digits separated by a colon read 0:00, the attachment was cyberdust, as if it had never existed. The same outcome occurred, only immediately, if he tried to forward, print out, or save the file.

Matthias was sharp like that.

So thank fuck for photographic memory.

As for the report itself? On the surface, it appeared as if there were nothing out of the ordinary; it was just your garden-variety rundown on a black-ops guy who was like the e-file—nothing but ether until he disappeared entirely. Except then there were the telltale three letters at the end next to the word STATUS.

MIA.

Ah, so that was the assignment. In the military branch Jim had been in, there was no such thing as MIA. There was AD, OR, or PB: active duty, on reserve, or pine box—the last being a term of art used unofficially, of course. Jim was OR—which meant that technically he was liable to be called back in at any moment and had to go or the letters DEAD were going to appear next to his status. And the truth was, he’d had to blackmail Matthias the fucker to even get into the reserves—although given what he had on the guy, he should have been able to stay there. If he hadn’t had to resell his soul.

Well…the assignment was clear-cut: Matthias wanted this man killed.

Jim quickly rescanned the report until he was certain he could close his eyes and read the text and see the picture on the backs of his eyelids. Then he watched the clock zero out and the thing disappear.