“I don’t like your kind,” said the mercenary. He looked around and spat on the dirt floor. “But that’s personal. Someone screws us over? That’s business. They killed my boys because they didn’t want them to talk. Don’t know what we know that is so valuable, but I’m telling you what I know in hopes that it torpedoes their plans.” He paused. “Those men took my orders, and that makes their deaths personal.”
“I understand,” said Adam.
The other man frowned at him. “I’d heard that about you, that you wore the uniform.”
“Ranger,” said Adam.
The man examined him, taken aback.
“Doesn’t mean I’m not a monster,” Adam continued. “But I do understand how a soldier works. You follow orders, and in return, you expect the men above you to have your back while you risk your life. When they don’t …” Adam shrugged. “Something needs to be done.”
The other man nodded, took a deep breath. “That’s right. Okay. Folks pay us—we work for them all the way. We don’t take better money, we don’t talk. But our employers broke the rules. If they’re afraid of something getting out—well, maybe I think that might be a start on teaching them not to betray the soldiers who work for them. The folks giving us the orders—they’re regular government—Cantrip Agency. You know, the ones who are running around screaming that the fae and werewolves and all the rest are dangerous and need to be exterminated when their job was supposed to be learning about the supernatural world and acting as intermediaries between you and the government. The rhetoric they’re spouting is that they want the power to go wolf hunting before some other agency gets it. They’re tired of having to call the cavalry because they can’t have their own army.”
The mercenary frowned at Adam. “But you probably guessed that.”
“Most of the competent people end up elsewhere,” agreed Adam. “FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, National Security Administration, Secret Service, or one of a few other agencies. Cantrip has been a dumping ground for the screwups for years, and this has the same sort of FUBAR painted all over it that I’ve seen whenever desks try to run real operations.”
The other man grinned at him. “What you said. I’m going to repeat that to my superiors.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “But where is the money coming from? I know what Cantrip’s budget is; they don’t have enough of a black-ops slush fund to work this. Maybe if they all gave up their salaries, they’d be able to hire something like your operation without alerting someone. You guys are more likely to be out protecting some drug lord in South America or fighting the war when the Geneva Convention is too restrictive for the home troops.”