This was not the first time I’d seen ghosts. I just hoped moments like this didn’t get worse, because I was already close to the edge. I’d been fooling myself that because the Darkness was not in total control, it meant I was coming out of it. That I was edging back toward being sane.

Goddamn.

CHAPTER 93

DAS VERARBEITUNGSZENTRUM

WANNSEE, BOROUGH OF STEGLITZ-ZEHLENDORF

BERLIN, GERMANY

I came back to myself, but there was effort in that process. General or abstract thinking won’t get that done, so I forced myself to think about specific mission details. It helped, but I found myself not wanting to look at the screen on my tactical computer. I ground my teeth and looked anyway.

I checked the signal from the Busy-Bees again, but all they showed were more empty halls except where there were bored guards on patrol. Lots of locked doors. Only that.

Only that.

“Unclench,” I growled under my breath, “and get your screwed-up head out of your ass, Ledger.”

At any given time, I have three distinct personalities vying for control. The Modern Man is the idealistic optimist who is probably the person I would have become had it not been for a traumatic incident when I was a teenager. My girlfriend, Helen, and I had been jumped by a group of older teens. They beat me nearly to death and gang-raped Helen. Although we both technically survived that attack, we were never the same. I became psychologically fractured, retreating from who I truly was into a series of jagged-glass pieces of other personalities. Therapists helped me clean house, but three remained, of which the Modern Man was the purest. Then there was his polar opposite, the Killer. Ruthless and violent … but always directing his rage at the people who did the kinds of things that had been done to Helen and me. In defense of the innocents, he will do things I never tell my friends or Junie Flynn. It was the Killer, as much as any part of me, who’d kicked in Helen’s door when she’d not answered her phone in days. It was he who’d gathered her cold body into his arms and howled like some demented thing. And it was he who’d steered me first toward the army, then the cops, and then my wet work as a shooter, first for the Department of Military Sciences and more recently for Rogue Team International. He knew there was a war to wage and was constantly ready to take it to the bad guys under a black flag. Well … let’s call it a different kind of black flag. The Killer never hurts the innocent. Ever.

Most of the time, though, I was the Cop. Reasonable, informed, precise, thorough, and pragmatic. A solver of problems, a logician, and strategist. The Cop was the sense of order in my otherwise chaotic head.