Lia’s visit was a little more jolting, but if I had been in my right mind, I would have figured it was going to happen. After all, she had seen me carted off by a SWAT team and was taking care of my dog. It made sense for her to show up.
The third visit though—that one caught me completely off guard and was bound to end very badly for me.
Two men.
Dark suits.
They were escorted by a short, ginger-haired man I hadn’t met but still recognized as the prison warden. He looked from me to the other men but didn’t say a word as he leaned over, spoke into the guard’s ear, and then escorted him out of the room. As he walked near the door, he reached up and pulled the cord for the security camera out of the wall.
Shit.
I saw the red light on the side of the machine go dim and then watched the suits as they sat down at the table across from me. The cuffs holding me to the bolted-down chair scraped against the chains as my hands briefly clenched into fists and then released again.
The man on the right was in his late forties, and he just stared at me without any particular expression on his pale face. The lack of emotion wasn’t a natural thing for him—he was having to work at it pretty hard to keep it going. There was a spot on his cheek that twitched every few seconds, telling me he didn’t feel at all comfortable with trying to portray himself that way. He looked a little awkward in the chair as well but kept himself poised. His suit was tailored, but there were crumbs from a sandwich or something on the lapel, so he wasn’t used to being dressed as nicely as he was. He had salt-and-pepper hair and matching beard.
The other one, though—he was a puzzle.
He was big—really big. Bigger than Mario, even. His head had been shaved close with no marks around it to tell if he shaved it for the sake of the look or if he did it because he had already lost all of his hair anyway. He was in his mid thirties, maybe, and had dark, curly hair around his wrists that stuck out of his cuffs. His suit was also tailored but extremely neat. He even removed the jacket, folded it neatly, and laid it across the back of the chair before he seated himself and looked into my eyes.
His eyes looked familiar, but I was sure I had never met him before.
He smiled, and there was nothing the least bit friendly about the look. He reached his hand out toward me as he spoke.
“Mister Arden, my name is Agent Trent, and this is Agent Johnson. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Most adults, when offered a hand in greeting, reflexively hold out their right hand without question. Without a doubt, this was the response Trent was expecting. It was a calculated and cold move, given the current state of my bound wrists. If I had been the kind of guy who immediately responded in the most polite of ways, I would have fallen for the move and been noisily reminded of the chains attaching my arms to the chair.
I wasn’t that kind of guy, though, so I didn’t move. Trent narrowed his eyes the tiniest amount but recovered within a second. Completely relaxed again, the corner of his mouth turned up slightly as I raised a brow.
I was instantly glad I had managed to get some actual sleep. If I hadn’t, I might have missed his ploy and therefore misjudged him. With my mind back in the game, my perception was strong. I recognized immediately that he was definitely my opponent.
He wasn’t going to be a quick win, though, whatever the game was going to be. Regardless, he’d already made a mistake. The most interesting part of the short exchange was the obvious lack of research Trent had done. He was expecting me to act in a certain way, but he was wrong, and his initial mind-fuck was wasted on me. If he had done his research, he would have gone with another approach, like an officer’s uniform and a salute.
I probably would have responded to that.
Instead, I continued to eye him carefully. I made sure my expression was emotionless as I glanced from his outstretched hand to my bound right wrist and then up to his eyes. I raised my eyebrow again and waited.
“Ah, yes,” Trent said, “I suppose we’ll have to stick with a hello.”
He dropped his hand and tapped twice on the table as he settled in his seat. There wasn’t any reason for the tap, I was sure of that. If there had been any kind of “code” between the two men, Johnson obviously didn’t know about it. He glanced toward the sound, but his expression didn’t change. He was having too much trouble keeping up the façade for his expression to remain the same if he was being given orders of some kind.
What reason then?
To make me paranoid.
I was positive that I was right, and I felt my back stiffen a little as my body and mind went into a heightened state of alert. I had no idea what these two were about, but Trent was a definite threat.
“Time for things to change a little around here, Mister Arden.”
Nothing about this could possibly be in my best interest, so I braced myself and waited.
Chapter 5—Unavoidable Agreement
I wasn’t sure if I was waiting for a bullet or not, but I was a little surprised when Trent, the guy with the crazy smile, reached into his briefcase and pulled out a bunch of papers. I was not surprised by the FBI seals on both the papers and the envelopes inside the briefcase.
I was definitely on edge as he displayed the papers out on the table. Even if his first trap hadn’t managed to catch me, I was quite sure Trent wasn’t someone I could just ignore. I had the feeling talking my way out of this one wasn’t going to work either, and shooting my way out of it wasn’t an option.
Currently.
“Let’s see what we have here…” Trent let his voice trail off, cleared his throat, and then indicated a list of—appropriately enough—bullet points on the page. “Possession of unregistered firearms, public endangerment, unlawful discharge of firearms, inciting panic, and of course, the really good one—terrorism.”
I was taken aback but tried not to show it. That charge hadn’t been on the list of charges Moretti and Michael Beard had discussed when they came to see me.
“That last one is the one I find most interesting, seeing as it is a matter of federal law, not just the state of Illinois. I had to pull a couple of strings to get that officially on the list. It was even more difficult getting the timing exactly right. I had to wait until your boss and his tricky lawyer thought they had everything under control. I suppose they wanted to leave your little display under vandalism or something. Anything to appease your boss, hmm?”
I remained completely still.
“At this point, your lawyer won’t see the new charge until after we’re done here. He’ll spend half the day getting it removed, but it won’t matter—I’m already here.” Trent shuffled some papers around in the briefcase. “Did I miss anything?”
“There’s also a woman from your neighborhood who wants to press attempted murder charges against you on behalf of Glenda, her Yorkshire Terrier,” Johnson added. “I honestly don’t think the judge plans to honor that one, though.”
“Fuck the bitch,” Trent said with a smile. “Get it? Bitch? The dog is a girl.”
Johnson laughed, right on cue.
“Anyway,” Trent continued, “with the terrorism charge in place, it opened the doors up wide for me to move in and check you out like I’ve never been able to before, and I have to admit it is a bit of a pleasure for me. You know—seeing you in chains.”
He waved his hand toward me and kept up the obnoxious grin.
“I know a lot about you, Mister Arden,” Trent said, “or should I call you Evan?”
I didn’t respond. This kind of game was best played with as little talk as possible.
“Lieutenant, possibly? No, not that. You really aren’t one anymore, are you?”
I remained silent and motionless.
“So tell me something,” he said. “Were you always a murderer, and that’s why you became a sniper in the first place, or did you learn it from the insurgents? I don’t see how you were in their hands for all that time without turning traitor, personally.”
My flesh went cold and my throat seized up.
I knew exactly what the asshole was doing, but that didn’t stop the blood in my veins from running cold, nor did it stop me from forming fists out of my hands and creating mental images of pummeling Trent into the cold cement floor.
He wasn’t the first to suggest it. In fact, the CIA had spent a good week questioning me when I returned from the Middle East. I answered their questions over and over again, finally losing my shit altogether. They had their suspicions about another Marine who had been rescued—one that had given up information and ultimately gave away my unit’s position—and wanted to pull me into it as well. Yes, Al Qaeda members tried to get me to turn. They tried every fucking tactic they could dream up, but I never gave in.
I never told them a damn thing.
Loyalty.
I closed my eyes, drew in a long, slow breath, and then looked back up at him. Like the handshake, he was doing all of this on purpose—trying to goad me into reacting stupidly. I wasn’t going to be that easy to break, though. I’d dealt with a lot worse than this asshole.
“Do you have anything you’d like to add to the list?” Trent asked as he smiled at me again and waved the paper around. “There have been an extraordinary number of deaths from long-range weapons since you moved into the area. Care to confess to any of them?”
I continued to watch Trent.
“Maybe he’d like a few names and pictures,” Johnson suggested.
“I’d like to contact my lawyer,” I said.
“Nah.” Trent shook his head. “Your lawyer can go fuck himself. I don’t talk to lawyers.”
Any thoughts I had that these guys might have been on the law-abiding side of the feds went out the window. Rinaldo had dealt with the feds plenty of times, but I had always been kept out of sight. He knew any information about me would be dangerous to him, so I was removed from any and all contact. When they were in town, I went underground until they left.
Johnson took some notes down on a pad of paper from the briefcase, and Trent leaned back in his chair and kept up the creepy smile.
“I’ve spent way too much time getting this close to you, Arden,” he said. “There’s no way I’d muddy the conversation with a lot of lawyer bullshit. Your boss always did a good job of keeping you out of sight, but he can’t help you right now. Your lawyer would just be in my way. Besides, lawyers hate it when I rough up their clients.”
He laughed, and Johnson cracked a smile. Trent leaned forward and raised his eyebrows.
“Sometimes I do it just for fun and not because you won’t answer my questions. I just enjoy that shit. Especially when it comes to trumped-up mafia shits who think they’re above and beyond any kind of reckoning, you know? Well, of course you know; you enjoy a little brutality now and again, don’t you?”
I knew it was coming. I didn’t need to watch his hand curl into a fist or follow its movements to my jaw. I couldn’t have moved enough to get out of the way, and with my hands restrained, I couldn’t defend myself, so I took it in silence.
The blow cut the inside of my lip on my teeth, and I dragged my tongue across the wound as I looked back up at Trent and waited for another blow. It came quickly, this time up close to my left eye. My head jerked to the opposite side as a dull throbbing in my temple blurred my vision enough that the next blow to my jaw caught me off guard.
I took a slow breath through my nose, gathered some of the blood in my mouth with my tongue, and spit it out onto the table right in front of Trent. With narrowed eyes, I watched for his next move.
He laughed.
“I suppose you got used to that kind of shit, didn’t you? All that time with a bunch of Jihad-happy insurgents smacking you around. Probably took it up the ass, too, didn’t ya?”
I stayed still though I couldn’t help the rapid flutter of my eyelids at the remark. If I had still been without sleep, I would have been dragged right back there to the desert and probably would have lost my mind for good. Instead, I just swallowed hard, focused on his face, and waited.
“Military hero,” Trent sneered. “What kind of hero gets his entire unit killed but somehow manages to survive himself? Where’s that report, Johnson?”
“Here you are.” Johnson handed Trent a collection of papers held together with a clip.
“Recognize this?” Trent held up the first page, which contained a Marine logo at the top and a CIA stamp on the bottom.
I did recognize it, but I didn’t answer.
“This report is from your interrogation after you were brought back to the U.S. There are a lot of questions about how you managed to survive for so long. Why did they keep you alive, dickhead? Was it because you were converted? Did you lead them to your location and get your unit killed off? Give up the other base running parallel to yours?”
“There was no such evidence,” I snarled back. “There were no charges. I was found in a fucking hole, you asshole! And that was a debriefing, not an interrogation!”
“Finally got a rise out of you, huh?” he smirked.
“Fuck you. No action was taken—no charges.”
Stop it, I told myself. This is what he wants.
“Yeah, yeah,” Trent said as he waved his hand dismissively. “There haven’t been any murder charges brought up against you either, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been on a killing rampage since you arrived in this city.”
I turned my eyes to the top of the table, refusing to be further engaged. I wasn’t planning on letting him get to me at all, and I definitely couldn’t let him get under my skin again. I had to keep myself prepared for more shit remarks about my capture or the debriefing.
He must have realized I wasn’t going to be further goaded because he finally got to the point.
“Here’s the thing,” Trent said as he leaned forward on his elbows. “I’ve been waiting a long time to actually have something I could use on you that your piece-of-shit boss couldn’t just talk or bribe his way out of it for you, and I finally have it.”
I wasn’t going to let myself be baited into asking what he meant, so I sat there and said nothing as Trent motioned to Johnson’s briefcase. Johnson opened it up and pulled out a stapled set of papers. The very first page had two boxes with images in them resembling a graphic equalizer display. There were rows of vertical bars with smaller horizontal bars going through the middle of them. Both boxes showed the exact same image.
“Do you know what that is?”
I actually had an idea—I’d seen enough crime shows on television, but I didn’t let on. With a shrug, I just looked back at him and waited.
“It’s a DNA report,” he said. “See how the two samples match?”
I shrugged again, and he pointed to one of the two images.
“This one here—this is from the swab they took from your mouth when you were booked,” he said. His finger moved over to the other image. “That’s a pretty common practice, you know. They even do it on dead bodies that are found lying around.”
He watched me, presumably looking for a reaction, but I gave him nothing.
“Guess where this one came from?” Trent pressed.
I didn’t answer. It could have come from a million places—I wasn’t overly careful about leaving shit like trace evidence behind—my kills were from afar. If this guy thought he was going to use DNA evidence to link me to a sniper shooting, he was crazy.
“This was taken from the dead lips of one Brad Ashton.”
Fuck me.
Of all the victims they could have tried to nail me with, they went after the most high-profile one they could possibly find. I’d been far more careful with him than I had with others because he was a well-known, highly paid movie actor and I was doing him up close. He also owed my boss a lot of money in gambling debts, which was all I really cared about. He knew Rinaldo was after him, and his security had made it very difficult to target him from afar, which was why I had to go a slightly less conventional route.
&nbs
p; Using his affection for well-built guys like myself, I came on to him, encouraged him, and led him off to a hotel room to drug and kill him. In the process, he’d made it to first base and had certainly made a grab for second. As a sniper, I usually didn’t get close enough to my victims to think about leaving DNA anywhere near the scene, but Brad had been best lured with my mouth. Thankfully, I hadn’t actually had sex with him, or the DNA evidence could have been even more incriminating.
I made a point of not reacting as I watched Trent and Johnson watch me. I didn’t see any reason to respond to them since anything and everything I said wouldn’t just be used against me in a court of law but here in this room right now.
“Must have used a condom,” Trent said with a smirk. “We didn’t find any cum on him. I’d heard you were an ass man. I guess that’s true, huh?”
Johnson snickered again as Trent wriggled his eyebrows at me. I tensed my fingers on the arms of the chair but kept my silence.
“I bet your mob buddies would get a kick out of all this, wouldn’t they? Finding out you fucked one of your kills, and a dude at that. What’s that, Arden? I can’t hear ya.”
Johnson snorted and shook his head a bit. He never made eye contact with me, though. He kept all his attention on Trent, awaiting his instructions. However, Trent seemed much more interested in harassing me instead of addressing his partner. He leaned back in the chair until the front two legs came up off the floor.
“So here’s the deal,” Trent said. “With this evidence, I own your sniper-happy ass. That means I call the shots, and when you get out of here, you’re going to go right back to Rinaldo Moretti’s business, and you’re going to help me bring him in.”
I couldn’t hold back any longer—I laughed out loud.
“Did you really think that after being in a hole for eighteen months you could threaten me with prison?” I laughed again. “Fuck you. Fuck you, your DNA evidence, and whatever other shit you think you have on me. None of it makes a fucking difference.”