"It's Drama, it's fucking her, that fucking cunt is here, she's come to get him," he said quickly to the others. "She's fucking out there and she's taken the overwatch and you are going to find her and you are going to kill her."
They started moving all at once, Sean directing them. Two ran back to the house, the third staying close by. Bowles pivoted back towards me, kicking up snow as he did so. He grabbed hold of me by the Flexi-Cuffs around my wrists, shoved the gun against my temple.
"Get up," he told me. "Get on your knees!"
I struggled with it, and not only to buy time, but because most everything hurt, and those parts that didn't were silent only because they'd gone numb with the cold. I'd be dealing with frostbite in another few minutes, if I wasn't having to deal with it already. While Bowles muscled me to my knees, the two who had gone for the house reemerged, carrying three long guns and three sets of NVG between them. Everyone but Sean and Bowles got a long gun and the goggles.
Bowles rammed the pistol into the side of my neck.
"You don't want to do that," I told him.
"Shut up," Bowles snapped. "Shut the fuck up, call her, call-"
A third scream, more broken than the two that had come before, the voice issuing it already threading with strain. It sounded awful and piteous. It sounded like someone not only in agony, but in terror, and all of them heard it, and none of them liked it.
"Jesus Christ," one of them whispered. "That's Ryan. What the fuck is she doing to Ryan?"
Sean ran his free hand in a cutting motion across his throat, angry, indicating to all that he wanted them to shut the fuck up. They gave him his silence, and in it he flashed out a sequence of hand signals, deploying the three men. They began making towards the line of trees surrounding the cabin, and I'd been right about their pedigree. They moved well, spreading out to keep from bunching up while still keeping each other in sight enough to provide backup. Hand signals flashed between them, and maybe they had a line on the screams, where their friend Ryan was, because they seemed to know where they should go.
"Drop the gun," I told Bowles. "Listen to me."
He glanced down at me, then dug the barrel harder into the side of my neck. I was so cold it didn't feel like much other than pressure against my skin. "Call to her. Tell her to come out."
If I'd been able to, I would have laughed. As it was, I coughed and snorted all at once, ejecting more blood and mucus.
To my right, just at the edge of the cabin, one of Sean's men staggered at the same moment that the wooden wall behind him splintered, sprayed with a coat of gore and blood. The sound of the shot came at almost the exact same moment, the concussion of a Magnum round rattling the trees. The man fell to his knees, then dropped face-first into the snow.
"Seven o'clock!" one of the others shouted. "Muzzle flash, seven-"
The top of his head shredded before he could finish the sentence. The report chased after the echoes of the first.
Both Sean and the last of his men dove to the ground. Sean was smarter about it, staying clear of the cabin, using the deep snow. It was a good move; unless Alena had taken a position with elevation, and I knew that she hadn't, the snow would keep him out of her line of sight.
The last one wasn't as lucky, and when he went for cover, he tried to use the cabin, to get around the corner. He almost made it; if he'd been a little faster, or Alena had been a little slower, he would have.
But he didn't.
Bowles balked, then dug his pistol deeper against my neck. The thought of taking it from him, freeing myself, flicked through my mind, but I ignored it. The condition I was in, the posture I was holding, I'd never be able to manage it.
"I'll kill you, she doesn't come out." Bowles still wasn't looking at me. "I'll kill you."
"Then she's gone," I said. "If you get the shot off, she's gone. And you want us both, remember?"
He swore softly.
"Drop the gun," I said again. "Please, Matthew."
"Shut up! Sean! Sean, do you see her?"
"I need answers," I told him. "You can give them to me. Drop the gun, don't do this."
The pistol left the side of my neck, and for an instant I thought he'd seen reason, that he'd let it go. He backed away from me a step.
"I know you're there!" he shouted into the trees. "I know you're there, I'll kill him if you don't come out! Give yourself up!"
"Don't!" I shouted, as much to Alena as to Bowles, and I tried to get to my feet, tried to rise up and block the shot that I knew would come, because I knew what Bowles would do next.
He raised the pistol on me, leveling it with both hands at my head.
"You've got five!" Bowles shouted.
"Just put it down!"
"Four!"
"Dammit, Bowles-"
"Three!"
Then the hole opened in his chest, high on the sternum, and Matthew Bowles dropped like a marionette whose lines had been cut. Foamy blood blew out from his mouth, dripped over his lips, into the snow.
He rattled out the last of his air, and died.
"You stupid son of a bitch," I told him. "All we wanted was an answer."
CHAPTER
While you were always, in your way, alone, you were never on your own.
Always there were others, the people giving the orders or the people teaching the lessons or the people in support of the operation. At every stage, there was a network.
You may have been plucked from an orphanage in Magadan at the age of eight, or seconded from the SAS, or recruited from Detachment Delta. When it began is irrelevant. You were chosen, or you volunteered, or you fell into it by circumstance, but at some point a decision was made, and you went from soldier or guardian or child to assassin, and that was when the divorce took place. Partially, this was a psychological transformation, a necessary stage in your education as dictated by those who instructed you, a need to remove you from the herd. The wolf doesn't run with the sheep, after all, and even were it in the wolf's mind to do so, the sheep would have none of it.
It is a survival mechanism. What you do now, at the behest of your government or group or cause, is dangerous in the extreme. It must be performed in secrecy and anonymity, and the best way to be anonymous, to keep a secret, is to keep the number of people involved to one. You work alone.
Or you pretend that you do, because, in truth, you have support. Be it from your government or group or cause, there are people who stand behind you, people to secure the things that you need to do your job. They do this not because they like you or because they care about you. They do it because you are a tool, and you must be directed, and you must be properly employed. If you are their hammer, they don't simply point you at the board and say start pounding; they must provide you with the nails. That they pay you a wage-if they pay you at all-is incidental, just another means of directing the tool.
It cannot be stressed how vital this network is. They give you purpose, for without them, you would not be used. They designate your target. They provide the intelligence, the means, the wherewithal to reach it. Plane tickets and weapons, identification and money, maps and photographs, everything you require to perform your task. And should you complete the job they have given you successfully, they are there at the end, to tend your wounds, to continue honing your skills, to, in fact, maintain the tool so that it may be used again and again and again either until it is so worn as to be useless, or until it is lost to damage or circumstance.
You are alone, perhaps, but never on your own.
Until you decide, for whatever the reason, that what you do for government or group or cause is best done for yourself and yourself alone. Until the day that you find that the world has changed, that your usefulness is coming to an end, and that you are soon to become a liability. Until the day you discover that the wage you are paid for the task you perform is not commensurate with the risk you undertake. Until the day that you realize the only pleasure in your life lies in taking the life of another.