Blending in among the other men heading for the back entrance, Jim searched for Isaac—in the unlikely event the guy had gotten out of jail and still wanted to fight. But more significantly, he kept his eyes peeled for someone who looked like a soldier: hard, tight in the head, and there to get a job done instead of play spectator.

He was after the one who was supposed to kill Isaac.

With the way the XOps team worked, it would be somebody they’d both worked with: Given the amount of screening and training and proving ground you had to go through to get on the team, there was a limited pool of guys who made it, and new recruits took years to develop. Jim had been out only about six months; he was going to know the assassin.

And so would Isaac.

“You guys head in,” he said to his boys as they came up to a door propped open by a cinder block. “I’m going to hang out here. Let me know if you see Rothe.”

Except he was going to bet they didn’t. If the soldier was here at all, he’d be hiding somewhere and scoping out who had come before making himself known. After all, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that getting popped by the police was tantamount to sticking a red flag in your ass.

Which was why in some respects, intercepting the assassin was even more important than running into Isaac.

As Eddie and Ad slipped through the fire door, Jim faded back so that he was standing in the lee of the building. Which was out of habit rather than necessity—no one could see him.

Another bene of being an angel: He could choose when he was visible to mortals.

Lighting up a Marlboro that he kept as hidden as his leather jacket and his combats, he tracked the crowd as it filed in. Tonight’s peanut gallery was made up of your standard-issue Joes: Lot of junior-varsity beer guts—that in another five years were going to be state champs. Patriots and Red Sox hats only. Couple of Chelmsford High School sweatshirts.

When the influx became just a trickle, he was ready to curse. Maybe he should have infiltrated the damn jail—although that would have been complicated. Lot of eyes, and even though he could pull off the not-there, if he had to kill somebody or save someone? He’d make any audience schizoid and probably show up in a blurry “Aliens Exist!” article in the National Enquirer—

A lone man emerged from the ring of trees. He was huge and the black windbreaker he wore did absolutely nothing to shrink the size of his shoulders. As he approached, he walked like the soldier he’d been trained to be, swinging his gaze around and keeping both hands in his pockets—likely gripping one or maybe two guns.