He looked at the fly and saw all of his faces looking back.
“Yes,” he said as if in answer. “Yes, of course I will.”
Orson got out of the car. No umbrella, no hat, not even a collar turned up against the wind. He walked to the trunk, opened it, removed the brand-new Remington 20-gauge and the box of buckshot. The gun had a four-shot capacity. Orson didn’t think he’d need more than that, but stuffed his pockets with more shells.
He stood for a moment looking at the weapon. A Model 870, with a receiver machined from a solid billet of steel, with a custom-quality satin finish on both stock and fore-end and walnut woodwork. The receiver and barrel were richly blued and highly polished. The rain plopped on the gun, beaded, and rolled off.
“Nice,” said Orson aloud.
Before he racked the slide he watched the fly crawl down from his knuckle and flatten out against the back of his hand. It flattened and flattened and flattened until it was thinner than a dime, thinner than a postage stamp, and then no thickness at all. It was part of him. A tattoo of a fly on the back of his hand. The eyes, though, they were still mirrors.
“Nice,” he said again.
He did not bother to close the trunk. Nor had he turned off the engine or closed the driver’s door. None of that mattered. Orson slogged through the mud toward the house, climbed the steps, paused to wipe his feet, and then knocked on the door. When it was opened an inch, he saw an inquiring blue eye. A voice asked something, but Orson could not really hear her, or understand. That part of Orson was going away. Nearly gone.
He raised the barrel very quickly—a round black eye to stare into that blue eye—and then he fired.
There were screams from inside he did not hear. There were voices begging, but he couldn’t hear those, either. The shotgun boomed and boomed and boomed. A silence while he reloaded, and then a last boom.
The door stood open. The lights stayed on. The rain fell.
Everything else was utterly still.
22
Monk dreamed himself into hell.
There were a lot of nights like that.
Iraq had cooled off for months and there was a lot of talk about the United States pulling its troops out.
Talk. There was always a lot of that kind of talk. Mostly it was either someone on a campaign trail, some pundit misreading the political moment, or some handwaving to distract the public eye from something else no one wanted seen.
That was Monk’s world, once upon a time.
Back then, of course, Monk wasn’t Monk. Not yet. He was just Gerry, or Big Ger. Twenty-four years old. One of the youngest ever to join Delta Force, and they kept sending him to combat hot zones, mostly in the Middle East. Pulling triggers and cutting throats for Uncle Sam. When he walked away from that, he got picked up as a PMC-private military contractor. Running ops in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, and some off-the-books gigs in Syria, Yemen, and Iran. Small jobs, the kind that don’t make headlines in any way that reveal what really happened. Monk was part of a cleanup crew. Go in, eliminate a target, and wipe out all traces. Collateral damage was part of that.
He dreamed about the night before he left.
The op looked simple. Go into a small village and take out a team manufacturing a more sophisticated version of roadside IEDs. This new design was almost certainly Russian, though no one was ever going to be able to prove it. No materials traceable back to Russia were ever found. Instead, local teams used their own metals, plastics, ceramics, and explosives based on designs emailed to them from dummy accounts. All instructions were in Pashto, even down to idiomatic phrasing. These new explosives were made to look improvised but were actually quite sophisticated—a lethal subtlety—and they were racking up more kills than should be possible during a troop drawdown.
Monk’s team had a really good sniper and spotter on overwatch, nestled into a weedy cleft in the hills. The rest of the ten-man team went in by squads, moving like ghosts through the darkened streets, night-vision goggles turning the village into a funhouse of green and gray and black. The intel was that all civilians had been moved out more than a week ago, and that everyone here was a tango. A terrorist.
Although that made the job more dangerous, it simplified the math. No friendlies. No worries about collateral damage.
They deployed from their vehicles more than a kilometer out and then proceeded toward the objective—a large house off the town square—making maximum use of cover, following a route they’d memorized from the briefing. None of them were virgins about gigs like this. The entire team had done jobs exactly like this one eight times before. Not a single injury sustained and a body count of hostiles that kept the CIA and the officers higher up the food chain very happy.
The spotter’s voice came over the team channel and the lieutenant raised a fist. They all stopped and sank to one knee in banks of shadows thrown down by town walls, weapons tucked into their shoulders, fingers laid along trigger guards, eyes watching.
“Seeing two armed sentries on the top of the target building on the southeast corner of the square. Rifles slung.”
“Take them,” ordered the lieutenant.
Monk could not see the sentries from where he crouched behind a withered bush, nor did he hear the shots, muffled as they were by sound suppressors. But the spotter said, “Clear.”
And they moved on, entering the square and running along the sides, still clinging to the cover of the buildings. There were only a few small lights on inside the building, though they were likely left on all night. With the sentries on the roof, the people inside probably thought they were safe.
In some cases a target like this would simply be erased by a drone strike, but the orders were to bring back laptops, papers, cell phones, and at least one person with a pulse who might be induced to answer questions. Once the entire hostile presence was accounted for and eliminated, helos would come in for extraction. Charges would be remote detonated and good luck to whoever had to sift through the ashes to determine what the hell happened.
That was the plan.
Even while he slept Monk remembered that old phrase.
Man plans and God laughs.
Or maybe it was the Devil who laughed at what happened that night. The last night he had been truly Gerald Addison. The night before he began the journey to become who—and what—he was.
Monk, dreaming, twisted and writhed as memories tore at him.
The nightbirds on the telephone wires twitched at the sound of gunfire and explosions. And the awful screams from long ago and far away …
INTERLUDE FOUR
THE LORD OF THE FLIES
Owen Minor lay in a ball in the upper corner of his bed, which he’d pushed against the walls. He loved the security of that nook. There were a dozen pillows of various firmness, and big blankets. The TV was on, but he wasn’t watching it; he merely liked the noise and motion on the big flat-screen. Sometimes he had music playing on his iPad in the other room, and even the TV in the living room. He did not like silence. It scared him. Silence was when you thought about things, about people and places. About memories. And he had very few of those left. Already everything before his mother died was gone. Completely. Photos didn’t trigger even so much as a flicker or a shadow on the walls of his mind.
He had some school memories left, but only a fraction of what he knew he should remember. Pieces of those days seemed to peel like paint and flake off, falling away to leave bare spots in his life. There was a girl he liked once, a little redhead in the seventh grade. He searched for her on Facebook and found her page to see how she grew up. Very cute. Biggest green eyes. Owen saved some images from her photos section and printed three of them out. They were on his corkboard in the basement, but early last week he lost every memory of her that he ever had. All of it … just gone.