The dark thoughts going through his mind right now were nearly as numbing as what he’d experienced in his last nights in a Vietnam jungle before his country had called it a war and gone home. Knox’s battalion had been one of the last to be sent to Southeast Asia. He’d been there all of eleven months and it had felt like eleven years. When he’d gotten back with a piece of shrapnel in his left thigh and a truck load of recurring nightmares as reminders of his time there, he’d decided that war was not a particularly smart way to decide global issues, especially when politicians rather than the grunts on the ground were calling the shots. That’s when he’d worked his way to the Defense Intelligence Agency and from there to the civilian side and CIA.

Now his official home was a specialized piece of that agency that John Q. Public had never heard of and never would. He had two sets of creds: one for the public that showed him to be with Homeland Security and was suitably intimidating; and another set that he showed only to certain fellow federal agents. That evidenced his association with OSM, the Office of Special Matters. It was made up of personnel from five of the major intelligence agencies, though it was controlled by a handful of folks at Langley. “Office of Special Matters” sounded a little hokey, Knox thought, but what they did was far from it. Knox had been up to his ass in “special matters” for years, often handling six crises of international meltdown range at once.

In fact he’d been involved in every major op OSM had been handed over the last decade, including some paramilitary action that had gotten him back into the field with a gun and lives to take care of, and others simply to take. He’d narrowly avoided the “WMDs that never were” fiasco and then had spent six years in the Middle East doing things he would never write down and had done his best to forget about since.

He’d been thousands of miles away when his wife had died from a brain hemorrhage. He got back just in time for the funeral to say a hurried, mumbled good-bye to his life partner, the only woman he’d ever loved. To this day he felt like he had cheated her.

Twenty-four hours after burying her, he was back in Iraq trying to figure out where the next suicide blast was coming from and paying yesterday’s enemies with good American cash so they’d kill extremists instead of U.S. troops. When the money eventually ran out Knox knew he didn’t want to be within five time zones of the place. Then he’d gone back to his safe room in the Green Zone and wept for the love of his life in the privacy of his own nightmares.