Shannon stood for a moment on the shore, his hands dripping limp at his sides. For the first time in eight years he had failed to kill a man he’d pursued. Abdullah had escaped.

He gripped his hands to fists, glanced up the mountain, and lumbered forward. He would finish this. It was all he knew, this drive to kill. And it wasn’t just about Abdullah, was it? He was showing them all.

The feeling couldn’t be too different from what a trapped animal felt, pounding relentlessly into a concrete wall, oblivious to the blood seeping from its head.

Shannon blinked the sweat from his eyes and crashed through the underbrush, not caring who heard him now. If this was his last mission, so be it. It would be a fitting end—to die having killed the one who had taken the life of his mother on the lawn.

Are you ready to die, Shannon?

Tanya.

Her face rose up in his mind, out of the black fog. A seventeen-year-old blonde, diving from the cliff into his arms. A twenty-five-year-old woman, running through the jungle at his heels. His vision blurred and he grunted.

You’re a fool, Shannon.

He pulled up and gripped his head, suddenly terrified. For a few long breaths he shook on the path. What was he doing? What had he done?

The black fog settled into his mind slowly.

A thought stuttered through his mind. An image of his blade crossing Abdullah’s neck. He shook again, this time with a familiar eagerness.

Shannon dropped his arms and ran. He would kill Abdullah and then he would kill Jamal.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

TANYA WAS sleeping dreamlessly when the blow caught her midsection. She instinctively coiled up, coughing. A voice screamed above her.

“Get up!”

Another blow slammed into her back and she scrambled to her knees. Above her, a figure slowly shifted into focus, backlit by the afternoon sun. Her head spun, and she thought she was going to faint. But the feeling passed, and she blinked at the man.

A man with the white wedge through his hair still stood over her, grinning with twitching lips. Abdullah. She knew him immediately.

He held a silver pistol in his right hand. A small aluminum skiff tied to a muddy stump bobbed on the current behind him. The man’s white shirt had been browned by river muck and his black shoes were caked with mud. He’d saved his pants by rolling them up above his socks to hairy, bony shins that looked as though they hadn’t seen the sun in years. The angry scar on his cheek curled with his grin. He’d come down the river from the plantation, which meant Shannon had failed to find him.