Why am I doing this?
I don’t know.
Or, maybe I do.
Because there was a visceral level of genuine terror in Fowler’s voice as he begged me to spare my little brother’s life and family. The first true emotion I heard Fowler express during my brief time interrogating him.
Not that Fowler knows Carter’s my brother.
I’ve heard men break like that before, plenty of times.
Too many times, I’m afraid, it’s because I was legitimately threatening their family. For a subject who’s not some narcissistic sociopath, sometimes threatening their family—or pet—is the only thing that will break them.
Why do you think I’ve never allowed myself to have a long-term relationship?
I mean, besides the fact that I’m gay and deep in the closet to my family. My parents have suffered enough loss over the years. I refuse to add to their grief. Maybe they wouldn’t disown me for being gay, but living as a career military bachelor is an easy mask to maintain around them all. They think I’m now a civilian contractor and working overseas. It makes it easy to keep my private life hidden from them.
Why risk spilling that apple cart if I don’t have to?
After sweeping the space one last time for anything I left behind, and with Fowler securely covered by a tarp in the cargo area, I return to my SUV and race toward the border crossing where my guy is on duty and waiting to wave me through. In under two hours, I’ll be at my safehouse outside Bratislava.
I’ll be using it a lot longer than I first planned.
When I pull to a stop at the crossing to wait for the truck ahead of me to be given permission to continue, I fight the urge to get antsy or act overly nonchalant. I pretend to scroll through my phone so I don’t keep looking at my rearview mirror to see if Fowler’s awakened yet.
Then, it’s my turn. Yes, it’s my guy doing the talking. Fear makes my pulse pound as he gives my passport a perfunctory glance, swings his flashlight through the back windows as if looking for cargo, and then gives me a nod and waves me through the checkpoint.
It’s a struggle not to speed away from the crossing in a panic. I want the SUV safely parked in my safehouse’s garage well before dawn.
At that point, I’ll be able to breathe easy again while taking time to figure out my next steps. Because this is stupid and crazy andnotwhat I should be doing.
For starters, I should have followed orders, killed Fowler, and been done with it. But if he was in a relationship with Carter, I have stronger leverage against Fowler to get information out of him that I didn’t possess before.
That was a man who definitely gave zero fucks about his own life, but was in a panic at the thought he’d possibly put an old flame in harm’s way. He went from obviously not giving two shits about his own life to essentially throwing himself at my feet and groveling.
Fowler is far more useful to me alive than I dreamed possible, if I have that kind of leverage against him.
Maybe it’ll also finally give me an inroad where one has never existed before in bringing down a certain retired general.
Because orders or not, I have a vested interest in taking that fucker out. Not to mention how everything about this assignment hit me as fishy from the get-go.
Admittedly, that pisses me off. Especially considering nothing in Fowler’s dossier indicates he has ever tried to topple governments for funsies, unless our government assigned him to help do it. Either before he separated from the service or after, when he did quite a bit of freelance mercenary wet-work for various allies.
Hey, I’m not judgy, just stating the facts.
What adds to my unease is that this isn’t the first unusual liquidation assignment I’ve heard of in recent months, either. I know of three others that didn’t fall into my lap at the time, but now that I think harder about the dossiers I saw, I’m wondering if there was a common thread joining them.
Like perhaps retired General Coltrane Cunningham. Because Carter served under Cunningham when he ran the base in Germany, meaning Fowler served under Cunningham, too.
Cunningham might be retired, but he has a lot of friends, and even more dirt on people.
I don’t want to be the next one in the cross-hairs, if that’s the case. Just because the general isn’t active military any longer doesn’t mean his pull is any less strong with those who occupy the upper branches of those trees. I never served directly under him, so maybe I’m not on his radar, which works in my favor.
Maybe if I were twenty years younger I wouldn’t have looked too hard at all the details, or thought too much about these things and gone ahead and taken Fowler out.
But the more I learn about the larger picture, the angrier I grow about my chosen career path and how I might have been manipulated more than I ever believed, even as I was seeking long-overdue retribution.
Fowler may hold keys to that.
