CHAPTER NINE

THERE WAS only one living soul who knew of Shannon Richterson’s true fate. Only one man who knew how he’d really died eight years earlier. He knew because he, too, had come from Venezuela, farther down the same river that Shannon had fallen into after being shot. What he knew about the killers who had attacked the jungle that fateful day might have done wonders for Sherry Blake.

There was only one problem. Even if he had known about Sherry, he was not exactly the sensitive kind of guy who cared. In fact, he himself was a killer.

His name was Casius, and while Sherry was stomping out of Denver Memorial, he was standing at the end of a CIA conference table in Langley, Virginia, glaring at three seated men, suppressing a sudden urge to slit their throats.

For a brief moment, Casius saw a familiar black fog wash into his vision, but he blinked and it vanished. If they’d noticed, they hadn’t shown it.

They deserved to die, and one day they would die, and maybe, just maybe if things fell his way, he would do the killing. But not today. He was still playing their game today.

That was all going to change soon.

He turned away from them. “Let me tell you a story,” he said, walking toward the window. The thin one, Friberg, was the director of the CIA. He wore thin lips under a bald head. His eyes were dark.

Casius faced the group. “Do you mind if I tell you a story?”

“Go ahead,” Mark Ingersol said. Ingersol, the director of Special Opera- tions, was a heavyset man with slick, black hair. David Lunow, Casius’s handler, just stared at him with an amused glint in his eye.

Casius met Ingersol’s gaze. “Last week you sent me to kill a man in Iran. Mudah Amir. He lived in a rural house and spent most of his time with his wife and children, which made the task a challenge, but—”

“He was a monster,” Ingersol said. “That’s why we sent you.”

Heat flashed up Casius’s spine. Ingersol was right, of course, but he had no right to be right. Ingersol himself was a monster. They were the worst kind of monsters, the kind who killed without bloodying their hands. “Excuse the observation, but I don’t think you know what a monster is.”

“Anyone who blows up one of our embassies is a monster, in my book. Get on with it.”

“You send me to kill. Does that make you a monster?”

“We don’t send you to kill innocent—”

“The innocent always die. That’s the nature of evil. But it doesn’t take a man foaming at the mouth to fly a plane into a building. It takes a man dedicated to his war. An evil man, maybe, or a godly man. But evil is not exclusive to the Mideast. The monsters are everywhere. Maybe in this room.”

“And I’m a monster?” Ingersol said.

Casius ignored him. He turned from them and closed his eyes. “I had to wait two days for the wife and children to leave before I killed Mudah Amir, but that wasn’t the point.”