She shook her head. “No. Within a short period of time, there was enormous demand for experienced military contractors. White Knight Security spun off a whole new division called White Knight Consultants. Edwin Parr was one of their first available combat zone experts. He did a tour in Afghanistan, and has now been in Iraq for twenty-five straight months.”

Luke was beginning to wish she would get to the point. The thought of Edwin Lee Parr in a combat theater, beholden to little or no chain of command, and making ten times the money of normal soldiers irritated Luke. To put it mildly.

“Twenty-five months?” Luke said. “What’s he doing over there? I mean, besides padding his bank account?”

“Edwin Parr appears to have gone rogue,” Trudy said.

She paused and looked away from the keyboard and mouse for a moment. “The next images are graphic.”

Luke stared at her.

“I think we can handle it,” Don said.

Trudy nodded. “Parr was fired by White Knight four months ago, despite having a five-year relationship with them. White Knight disavows knowledge of his activities or whereabouts. They disclaim responsibility for his actions.”

A new image appeared on the screen. It showed perhaps a dozen bodies strewn about some sort of market square. The bodies were almost not recognizable as human—they had been torn apart by a bomb or some type of high-caliber repeating weapon.

“Parr is operating in northwest Iraq, in what is known as the Sunni Triangle, beyond the reach of coalition troops. He has anywhere up to a dozen former or possibly present-tense contractors operating with him, as well as what we believe are one or two Marine Corps deserters. He is believed to be responsible for ordering a civilian massacre that took place in this Fallujah open air market, and it is believed that this is an image of the aftermath of that massacre. As many as forty people may have died in the attack.”

Luke was interested. “Why would he do that?”

A new image appeared on the screen. It showed two burned and headless torsos hanging from a bridge overpass.

“The bodies you see here have been identified as the remains of former American military contractors Thomas Calence, age thirty-one, and Vladimir Garcia, age thirty-nine. Their jeep was attacked by Sunni insurgents. They were captured, beheaded, and set on fire. When this happened, neither man was on any payroll as a military contractor. The massacre in the previous image appears to have been payback for the deaths of Calence and Garcia, as part of an escalating series of tit for tat attacks. Calence and Garcia had been operating with Parr.”

“What were they doing?” Luke said.

A new image appeared, a map of the so-called Sunni Triangle.