On the other hand, if I’d left him unconscious along with the others, then he would be free. He could plead innocence and there was no proof he was involved in any crimes. At worst, he’d lawyer up, make bail, and then go dark.

No, the math was simple.

Except nothing is simple.

I leaned back against the cold shower tiles and let the hot water boil me. Last year, my lover, Junie Flynn, asked if I was becoming blasé about the killing that I sometimes have to do in my job. She was concerned that I was becoming unemotional about it. Detached.

I did a lot of soul-searching over that. But then, on a small island off the coast of North Korea, while leading Havoc Team on a mission to discover what had killed all the inhabitants, I had an epiphany. We found the body of a young woman. No ID, no way to ever know her name. She lay in an artless sprawl, her dress hiked up, body robbed of all life, all emotion and potential. Her senseless murder became the focal point for me. I swore to her that I would find whoever did this and tear their world apart. It was for people like her that I did this. It was because there were predatory monsters in this world who will kill the innocent for the political leverage it offered, for profit, for strategic gain, to make a point, or a dozen other criminally obscene reasons. I did not know then that I was hunting Santoro and Kuga.

We stopped that plot and another that was piggybacked onto it. Hooray for the good guys, right?

Not really. Everyone on that little North Korean island is still dead. As are more than half the population of a South Korean island hit by the second wave of that bioweapon. And scores of people at the D9 denuclearization summit in Norway. Thousands of innocent victims. And why were they killed? It wasn’t to prosecute a political or ideological agenda, and it wasn’t a religious crusade. No. The whole thing was to make a profit.

Kuga used the attacks on the two Koreas as a practical demonstration of the kind of mayhem his organization peddles. And the ruin of the D9 summit destabilized the global sense of safety, which in turn sent governments and private corporations scrambling to arm up because the shit was hitting the fan. Kuga’s black market for weapons ranging from bacteria to high-end combat drones had exploded with new sales.

Bottom line? He won.