“Sure, but I can name a dozen other people he worked for, going way back, too, who weren’t killed during a shared operation. Point is, the deaths of some of his employers were not his doing or his fault. If anything, it was the excesses of people like Vox and the rampant insanity of Zephyr Bain that led to them being killed. Do you really want to tell me that if Hugo Vox was not at war with his own goddamned mother, he would be alive today? The Kings would still be out there making the world unsafe for widows and orphans, and you, my friend, would never have spent years in a black site prison.”

Santoro glared at Kuga but then settled back in his chair, composing his features through sheer strength of will. “We do not need him,” insisted Santoro. “We have the American Operation. We have the K-series exosuits, and we have R-33. And we have all of the formulae and technologies that are by-products of those things. We need a salesman, Kuga, not a monster. That man is too dangerous.”

“No,” said Kuga, “he’s just exactly dangerous enough.”

CHAPTER 5

TRSTENIK ISLAND

CROATIA

Top and Bunny found me and earned a wag of Ghost’s tail.

They were my closest friends on the job and had been with me since Church shanghaied me into joining. Top was a Black former army ranger from Georgia who had a tight salt-and-pepper goatee and eyes that could be fatherly and kind or cold and dangerous depending on the moment. Though right now, his face was hidden by the Scouts and a balaclava.

“What about the hostile you saw?” asked Top.

“I must have been mistaken,” I said. “No sign of him, no prints, and Ghost didn’t see him.”

Top looked at me. I couldn’t read his expression through the glasses and the gloom. He tapped out of the team channel and pulled down his balaclava.

“Not like you to jump at shadows, Outlaw,” he said quietly.

“Didn’t jump, Pappy,” I said. “Thought I saw something, checked it out, and I was wrong.”

“But you found the trip wire.”

“Yes. Right where the guy was standing.”

Bunny loomed over us. He was a huge slab of white boy from Orange County. Six feet six, with more muscles than is reasonable on any human being. He was a former top amateur volleyball player turned marine Force Recon turned SpecOps cave troll. Good-natured, but only to a point. The three of us had walked through the Valley of the Shadow too many times to count, and there is no one on God’s green earth I trusted as much.

“Are we talking a guard?” he asked.

“Wasn’t wearing a uniform,” I said. “No weapons that I could see. No kit or body armor.”

“Maybe he was a tech checking on the booby traps?” Bunny suggested.