I never should have run my mouth off like that, he thought. Benson wasn’t an idiot; if he was looking for information, he’d been given a boatload of it when I did that.
He shook his head. It was too late to do anything about that now; what was done was done. He needed to focus on the future. To contain this thing before it got more out of hand.
That, of course, brought the problem around full circle. Without knowing Benson’s true motives it was hard to say what he would do next and not knowing what he would do next made it extremely difficult to decide how to handle the problem itself. It was a Catch-22.
Unless…
The idea was a bit out of the box, but that was why Limbus had put him in this position in the first place, wasn’t it? To come up with out-of-the-box solutions to the problems at hand.
Of course it was.
Suddenly energized, Recruiter 46795 sat up and began making plans to handle Benson in a way that was certain to keep him and the potential mess he represented from ever posing a problem in the future.
The page came in just after one a.m., startling Nate into wakefulness. He grabbed the PCD off his nightstand and squinted at the readout.
2:30, it read.
Shit! Now what?
He didn’t know. He’d spent the rest of the afternoon and the evening thinking about the things he’d seen and heard earlier that day, but hadn’t been able to come to a decision about what to do. As far as he could tell, Limbus had his nuts in a vice and he was pretty much screwed no matter what he did.
If he ran, they would catch him; he was pretty sure of it. That didn’t mean running was out of the question, just that he had to be ready to deal with them when they came. And come they would; he was certain of that. The question was with how much force? One, maybe two operatives he could handle. More than that would be a problem.
Of course that was only if they sent someone in his current timeline.
If Limbus was smart, they’d send someone back to an earlier point in his life and wipe him out before he even had a chance to become who he was today. That was the safest and most logical bet. It was what he would do, if he were in charge.
Given that possibility, running didn’t make much sense. They wouldn’t have to figure out where he was going, just find some place he’d already been. There were more than enough points in time where his presence had been public knowledge, like the time he’d been arrested for petty larceny when he was eleven or the date of his discharge from the armed forces, and either one of those would do.
He could drop off the face of the planet tomorrow and they’d still find him.
So running was out.
Nate didn’t mind that so much, truth to tell. He hadn’t run from anything in his life and hadn’t liked the idea of starting now.
Fine, then. He’d stick around. Work from the inside and see what he could learn.
Starting with this very assignment.
He dressed quickly, left his spacious new apartment behind, and headed downtown for the second time in twenty-four hours.
His recruiter was waiting for him in the prep room.
“Right on time, as usual,” the man said, smiling at Nate.
Nate didn’t find the expression, nor the man’s presence, reassuring in the least.
“No need to change today,” his recruiter told him. “It’s a quick in and out job. Shouldn’t take you more than an hour.”
Nate nodded. Tried to look at ease. Just do the job, he told himself.
He turned toward the farcaster, intending to get inside, when he heard his recruiter clear his throat. Looking back he found the other man watching him closely.
“Forgetting something?”
For a moment Nate didn’t know what he was talking about, but then his gaze fell on his open locker and the hypo sitting on the top shelf.
“Oh, damn! Thanks for reminding me,” he said, trying to appear earnest. “Guess I’m not quite awake yet.”
His recruiter smiled. “I understand. I’m not much of a morning person myself. That’s why I thought I’d be here to see you off this morning. Here, let me help.”
He picked up the hypo and walked over to Nate. “Give me your arm.”
Nate had no choice. He rolled up his sleeve and presented the underside of his left arm to the other man. The hypo was pressed against his flesh and there was a quick hiss and the mild sensation of something passing into his system — then it was done.
For a moment, he almost panicked. If they wanted to get rid of him, the injection would be the perfect opportunity. One quick shot and it was all over.
“There,” said the other man, “all set.” He glanced at the clock, saw that there were only a few minutes left to the deadline. “You’d better get going.”
Not trusting himself to speak, Nate simply nodded. He walked over to the farcaster, rolling his sleeve back down as he went, then he stepped inside the device and tried to get comfortable.
Outside, his recruiter pushed the door shut and waited for the locks to engage. Nate could see the man through the porthole, watched as he lifted a hand and waved.
“Good hunting,” his recruiter said, smiling.
Nate nodded—what the hell was that all about? — and then hit the green button.
He arrived in an empty apartment in a run-down tenement building, the farcaster set up in a back bedroom with peeling wallpaper and the smell of mold. A hard black case stood on the floor nearby.
Nate recognized the weapons case the minute he saw it. He set it flat on the floor and then used one hand on either side to trigger the latches. Inside was a disassembled Mark 56 sniper rifle, the exact weapon he’d carried while point man for his recon unit. It was capable of both single and burst fire, with a maximum range of just over one thousand meters. It had been designed for one thing and one thing only — killing people at a distance.
He should know; he’d killed more than his fair share with a weapon just like it.
A white card had been slipped into the case alongside the rifle. Nate pulled it out, read it.
The card listed a set of coordinates and below that, four simple words.
Terminate with extreme prejudice.
“You have got to be shitting me,” he said to the empty room around him.
It seemed that his journeyman days were over and he’d just graduated to the big time. First surveillance photographs, then breaking and entering, and now assassination. He wondered how much of that had to do with what he’d seen the day before. Did they trust him with the bigger jobs now that he had a sense of what was going on or were they just setting him up for a fall? Getting ready to hang him out to dry after he pulled the trigger?
He didn’t know.
To his surprise, he realized he didn’t care either. All he wanted to do was get the job over with and get home again.
He pulled out his PCD and checked his current location against the coordinates he’d been given, only to discover that the target was practically next door. He should be able to get a decent look at the place from the roof of the building he was in.
He picked up the case, exited the apartment, and made his way up onto the roof of the building via the rear stairwell. The tenement building was three stories high and built on the edge of a residential area. His target was in a ramshackle two-story house about a block down the street. It looked familiar and for a moment he hesitated, but then he swept his hesitation aside by telling himself that all slums looked familiar. From where he stood, he could see through several of the windows and into the rooms beyond.