It takes more to kill me because as time goes on it becomes easier for me to take the first shot and to make sure that shot is the last one fired.
This is part of the cost of war. A warrior may take up his sword and shield because his ideals drive him to do it, and his love of family and flag may put steel into his arms and an unbreakable determination into his heart. I was like that.
That love, that passion, makes you dangerous at first, but it also bares your breast to arrows other than those fired by your enemy. The glow of idealism makes it easier for the sniper in the bushes to take aim.
And so you get harder. You shove that idealism down into the dark, you dial the passion down because you don’t want to draw the shooter’s aim. It casts you into a kind of darkness. A predatory darkness. In those shadows you change from someone defending the weak — the prey — to someone who is as much a predator as the enemy.
Your motives and justifications may be better, cleaner, but your methods are not. But while fighting monsters you risk becoming one. Nietzsche warned about that, too.
And yet….
And yet.
There is a line in the psychological sand that any person fears to cross, yet which pulls us toward it.
Loss.
Grief.
Call it what you want.
On this side of the line, you feel the full horror of a love lost. A friend, a brother-in-arms, a son or daughter. A lover. Someone who means the world to you. You will burn down heaven to protect them. You believe — truly believe — that you would march into hell to keep them safe. No matter what happens to you.
You take those risks because you believe that after all of the gun smoke clears, if you’re still alive, you and the person you love will have a life together. Both of you the same as you were before. You believe that, even while the world and the war try to make you a monster.
But when the person you love is taken and the war goes on….
Damn.
That’s where the real monsters are made.
When you have nothing left to love and the enemy still stands before you, grinning at your pain, feeding on your loss. In those moments, the grief can kill you. It can drive you to a final act of passion in which you throw everything away. You attack without skill or art, merely with fury. And you die without balancing any cosmic scales, without inflicting punishment.
Maybe you spend the rest of eternity in your own private hell, feeling your loss and realizing your defeat.
Or….
Or you don’t give into the passion of hate.
Instead you let that hate grow cold, and in the secret dark places of your soul you crouch over that unsavory meal and feed on it. You become a monster dining on the manna of the pit. On cold, cold hate. Knowing that with each bite you are less of the person who once loved. You are less of the person who, had you and your love survived, would have reclaimed joy and innocence and optimism.
That version of you wouldn’t know this dark and rapacious thing.
But it is the monster that survives.
It’s the monster that can survive.
I loved twice in my life. Really loved.
The first time was Helen. My first love, when I was fourteen and the world was filled with light and magic. Four older teenage boys trapped us in a deserted field and taught us about darkness and their own brand of sorcery. They beat me nearly to death, and while I lay there, bleeding and almost dead, I saw what they did to Helen.
Her heart continued to beat after that, after hospitals and surgeries and counseling. But she was dead. Years later when I found her at her place, the empty bottle of drain cleaner lying where it had fallen from her hand, I felt the darkness begin to take root in the soil of my soul. Flowers of hate have blossomed since.
Then last year I fell in love again. A woman named Grace Courtland. A fellow soldier, a fellow warrior against real darkness. A woman who saved the world. The actual world.
And died doing it.
I held her as she left me. I breathed in her last breath as all of the heat left her through a hole an assassin’s bullet had punched into the world.
My friends and colleagues tell me that I’ve made a great recovery since then. That I’m my old self again. That I look happy.
Which is all the proof I’d ever need of that philosophic belief that we each exist in our own reality, each inside an envelope of a completely separate dream.
I will never be my old self again.
Can’t be. That ship has sailed and it hit an iceberg.
And happy?
Sure, I can laugh. So do hyenas, and it means about as much.
My enemies don’t think I’m a happy guy. When they look into my eyes, they see the truth that my friends can’t see.
They see what I’ve really become.
I know this because I see the fear in their eyes when I kill them.
I used to be a nice man.
The world used to be a place of sunshine and magic.
Monsters, though, don’t thrive in the light.
Chap. 2
My boss, Mr. Church, called me into his office on a May Tuesday. It was one of those days that seems tailor-made for baseball, hotdogs and cold beer, and I was taking a half day to see if the Orioles could earn their paychecks. I had on new jeans and an ancient team jersey, sneakers, and a pair of Wayfarers on my head.
As I entered the office he slid a file folder across the desk toward me. It was a blue folder with a red seal. It looked official.
I said, “No way. I have tickets for a doubleheader, and as far as all of our billions of dollars of intelligence surveillance equipment says, it’s a slow day for the bad guys.”
“Captain….”
“Get someone else.”
He sat back and studied me through the lenses of his tinted glasses. Mr. Church is one of those guys who never has to say much to either piss you off or make you want to check that your fingernails are clean. Frequently both.
“This requires finesse,” he said mildly.
“All the more reason to get someone else. I am finesse-deprived today.”
“This requires your particular skill set.”
I stood there and glared at him. I could almost hear the crack of good wood on a hard ball, the roar of the crowd, the howl of the announcer as the ball arced high toward the back wall.
Mr. Church said nothing.
He opened his briefcase and removed a packet of Nilla wafers, tore it open, selected one. Bit off a piece and chewed while he watched me.
The blue folder lay where he’d put it.
I said, “Fuck.”
Mr. Church asked, “What do you know about the Koenig Group?”
“Yeah, a little.” I shrugged. “It was a think tank based in Jersey. Cape May, right? Alternate technologies…am I right about that?”
“They called it alternative scientific options. ASO.”
“Which means what?”
“A bit of everything,” he said. “They were originally a division of DARPA, but they went private as part of a budget restructuring. Private investors propped them up during the economic downturn in ’09.”
“But they closed, right?”
He tapped crumbs off his cookie. “They were shut down.”
“Why and by who?”
“They were under investigation by a number of agencies, including our own. Aunt Sallie had some people on it, and she lent a couple of agents to a joint federal task force that is a prime example of too many chiefs and not enough Indians. It’s become a jurisdictional quagmire.”
“Typical.” American politics are fueled by red tape. Anyone who says differently isn’t on the inside track.
“As to why this has happened,” Church continued, “we’d gotten some word that the administration there was a little too willing to consider offers from foreign investors.”