Life crept back into his face and arms.

Just a few minutes more and he’d be on his way.

*   *   *

The elevator doors opened on the blood-spattered basement. René emerged through the fog of his own disbelief, blinking to ensure that what he was seeing was in fact real.

Spoiled blood dripping from tattered IV bags.

Medical machinery reduced to wreckage.

Dr. Franklin’s fragmented head resting on the sodden sheets of the gurney.

The tangle of images knocked around inside him, sharp edges slicing beneath the skin, rising up his throat until he bellowed his rage at the ruined medical lab. It was a roar of rage, yes, but laced with pain.

He sensed David and Manny shrinking away behind him, backpedaling to the walls, giving him space.

René’s chest heaved as he caught his breath. He’d relocated many times before, and he would relocate again. But this time he’d have to rebuild from scratch. New equipment. New doctor. New blood.

Amid the remnants of the once-glorious operation, the safe rose, gleaming and intact. René crossed to it, running a finger across a dimple in the chrome plating where a round had been repelled.

He said, “Unlock it.”

Manny stepped forward, fumbling at his key ring.

“Are you sure?” David said. “You swore you’d never—”

“Unlock it.”

Manny rammed the key home and turned the weighty dial. The lugs inside released with a clang, and the door parted from the frame on well-greased hinges.

Inside were several small glass vials and two filled syringes.

René removed a syringe, and Manny took a quick step back, as if what it contained was contagious, airborne.

It was not.

But it was scary enough to deter proximity.

René touched the pad of his thumb to the plunger. The power of the ages held in the span of his hand. He cleared the air from the syringe with a hint of pressure from his thumb.

Manny’s radio crackled, one of the trackers calling in: “—recogimos sus huellas. Quizá hay una fogata delante y—”

Footprints and a campfire. They were closing in.

René snatched the radio from Manny’s trembling hand and held it to his mouth. He regarded the gleaming tip of the needle. “Bring him to me.”

*   *   *

Evan kicked snow over the ashes, stomping out the embers. Feeling had returned to his extremities, and he didn’t want to risk lingering over the tiny flames any longer. Lowering his NVGs, he gave another spin, searching the mountainside.

A wink of reflected light caught his eye. Way up by the brink, ten or so klicks distant, a man lay prone on an outcropping of rock, angled slightly away.

The south sniper.

Evan’s last obstacle.

The man swept the rifle slowly back and forth, scanning the hillside below.