Was this getting me anywhere close to Santoro?

In a very weird way, I found that I almost didn’t care.

I was becoming weary of hate. That was something I didn’t think was possible.

My family was seven months in the ground. Nothing I did would change that. Not even their ghosts showing up.

I was probably clinically insane, and this course of action sure as shit wasn’t driving me in the direction of a cure. I wasn’t sure if I could finish this mission.

No, let me correct that, I wasn’t sure if I should.

Not that mission. Not finding and killing Rafael Santoro.

It took me a lot of hours pacing in my hotel rooms, walking Ghost, lying in bed staring at the ceiling to work it through. If this were a movie, I’d have covered a wall with three-by-five cards, Post-it notes, and colored pushpins, and tied everything neatly together with red string. But that was the movies, and this was my life.

The Darkness had receded further this time. I could barely feel it back there in some corner of my mind. Don’t know why; didn’t care. What mattered was the picture coming together from what I’d learned in Italy, Poland, South Africa, the Netherlands, and Germany. On some level, I was pretty sure I had nearly all of it.

The cybernetics.

High-end body armor.

Fighting machines with human drivers.

Some kind of mind-altering chemical compound that drove the Fixers mad while giving them extra speed and strength.

The suicide vests and whatever high explosive they were packed with.

Something called the American Operation.

Those pieces had all floated around loose because I’d collected them piecemeal here and there. And sometimes while in a fugue state.

But now, a bit more clearheaded, I could see how there was a sense to it. A cohesion.

Somewhere in America, Fixers with chemical enhancement, cybernetics, bulletproof armor, and advanced weapons were going to stage a strike. Knowing Kuga and Santoro, it was going to be big. Something that would draw a lot of attention, but at the end of the day, Kuga wanted to sell more weapons of conflict. Just as the Rage attacks in the two Koreas and at the denuclearization summit in Oslo were never really about unifying North and South Korea or stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Just the reverse. Kuga wanted to keep the world always on the brink of war, because when things are peaceful, no one’s buying as many guns.

This, quite simply, made sense.

I was here in Romania to see someone called Die Katze. The Cat. A salesman high in the Kuga organization. Someone who might actually know what this American Operation was. Or at least give me enough so I could keep going.

“Keep going,” I said out loud.

Did I want to? Need to? Have to?