Etienne Pagnon, the man who had murdered his mother, but had also taken him under his wing and made from him a warrior without equal, was more than just a burnt-out soldier living for his next gulp of strong liquor. He was also a man of books and study, with an inquiring mind and a will to pass on his knowledge to his worthy pupil. He was a master when it came to the methods of killing men, and when he was sober—or only mildly inebriated—he sought to expand his knowledge further. Rickard had often found him with his nose in a book, normally ancient treaties on warfare; Sun Tzu’s The Art of War; Chanakya’s Arthashastra or Miyamoto Musashi’s Go Rin No Sho. If he hadn’t succumbed to his base weaknesses, he’d quite probably have become a great military strategist.

Of all the books that he studied, Etienne advocated Musashi’s Book of Five Rings, a seventeenth-century manual on sword fighting that was as applicable in modern warfare as it had been back in the days of the samurai warrior. Musashi said that technical flourishes were excessive and what was most important was simply the cutting down of one’s opponent without fearing for one’s own life. Etienne liked Musashi’s no-nonsense approach to killing and impressed this ethos on his young pupil. The great sword master also advocated practice in combat: you must experience much killing to achieve mastery over it. Etienne’s enthusiasm—put across in his accented psychobabble—had resonated within Rickard and he’d learned his trade well, following Musashi’s wisdom, basically learning to kill by killing.

He remembered his lessons clearly and would follow them to the letter. Etienne advocated crashing through the enemy’s defenses and cutting them down. So that, Rickard decided, was how he would approach his attack on the hospital. First, though, he had to get inside.

He traveled to within a mile of the Anhinga Key hospital in Wetherby’s Land Rover, leaving his betrayer and his two henchmen where they lay alongside the discarded Fireblade. There, after concealing the 4x4 from view, he dressed in the clothing supplied to him by Wetherby’s SWAT contact, the full tactical kit including body armor, gauntlets and helmet. There he also loaded the M–40A3 bolt-action rifle, and shoved more rounds in a pouch on his utility belt. Last, he screwed on the suppressor that was lodged in the Styrofoam interior of the black case.

Musashi favored the two-sword style, but he’d always taught that weapons should be interchangeable to suit the battlefield. Instead of the katana and wakazashi that the legendary sword master wielded in battle, Rickard had his gun and his ceramic knife. He felt ready for anything.

He jogged through the swampy terrain, eager to get started. The coldness in his gut demanded immediate release. Crash through their defenses, cut them down, he repeated the mantra in his mind.