As he stood there waiting, he cast his mind back over the events of the last few months. Was there anything, he wondered, that he could have done differently, that would have forestalled this moment? Anything that he or his people could have changed that would have brought these people home alive instead of in boxes? That would have brought their families together to celebrate instead of to mourn?

If there was, he couldn’t think of it now. Hindsight was usually all it was cracked up to be, but even in retrospect, he couldn’t think of a moment he’d wasted, a shred of information he hadn’t acted upon as soon as it had been verified.

Tragedy had come upon them all as silently as a mist in the night. It had drifted into their midst, burst upon them completely without warning. Set into motion half a world away by a handful of opportunists driven by greed and ambition and completely unrestrained by conscience or morality, it was too late to stop it, any of it, from the moment it had been conceived.

And the costs, God, the costs ...

Gordian ran a hand over his eyes.

Times Square had only been the beginning. Over a thousand people dead, many thousands more injured. All the families and friends who would never again share the simple pleasures of life with people they loved. The survivors who would never again be able to enjoy a day without pain, who were left broken in mind and body to pick up the pieces of their lives and go on as best they could. All because they had wanted to celebrate the glorious beginning of a new millennium.

Roger Gordian knew from hard personal experience just how high that price was.

But those people, as much as he mourned their passing and grieved for their losses, hadn’t been his. He had been diminished by their loss, but not directly responsible for their deaths. He had not personally sent them into harm’s way.

More than twenty people, working at his behest in places he had sent them to, were coming home in coffins. From his ground station in Russia. From Cappadocia in Turkey.

He knew most of them by name, some of them well. A few were among the small circle of people he counted as his dearest friends.

He’d sent them out to die.

He would never take a waking breath again without thinking of them.

He would never forgive himself.

And what had it all been about?

Politics.

Miserable, stinking, corrupt politics.

His people had died because some power-crazed demagogue had wanted to throw an election.

It made him physically ill, nauseous.

Every single one of his employees had been, each in his own way, a good person. Pedachenko wasn’t worthy to be in the same room with them. But with his grandiose plans of conquest, he had killed them all.

Oh, God, the pain ...