Brodie looked at Granger, whose hand was moving, almost imperceptibly, toward the cell phone trigger device. Granger looked at Brodie, as if daring the man to stop him.
Brodie could feel the edges of his vision begin to cloud, as if he were entering a dark tunnel. He kept his eyes on Charles Granger. On the man’s face. On his eyes. And in those eyes… those eyes…
There was too much life left in those eyes.
Do what has to be done.
Brodie steadied his aim, squeezed the trigger, and put a round through Granger’s left eye. The man’s head snapped back and he went slack and still.
Odin was dead.
Brodie expected the next shot to come from Captain Soliman, but it didn’t. Brodie dropped his pistol. Captain Soliman looked down at him in a moment of shock, then immediately crouched and applied pressure to Brodie’s thigh as he began shouting orders in German.
Brodie stared at Colonel Charles Granger as the world began to fade. Blood ran from Granger’s shattered eye socket.
Scott Brodie wasn’t religious, but he found himself saying aloud, “I hope you’re in Hell.”
Brodie was vaguely aware of what was happening around him. A lot of commotion and people speaking urgently. He heard the wail of an ambulance. His eyes landed on the canister that stood next to Granger’s corpse.
He looked up at Soliman, who was still applying pressure to his thigh as he looked around and waved someone over.
Brodie said to Soliman, “That… canister…”
Soliman looked at him. “What?”
“Hazmat… Explosives… Airborne plague…”
Soliman looked at the can, then immediately started issuing orders to people around him, likely to seal the area and get a biocontainment team and a bomb squad on-site.
Brodie looked again at the corpse of Colonel Charles Granger. Snowflakes settled on his dark coat and melted in the blood around his chest. Brodie now noticed a wedding band on Granger’s left ring finger. He wondered if the man had remarried or had kept it as a remembrance of his dead wife. He wondered how anyone could be capable of loving another person and still do what this man had done.
Brodie still had no real sense of this man, of what had turned him against his own country, and what had happened in the years between the Cold War and now to embitter him against the entire world order, to turn him into an avowed white supremacist. There probably wasn’t an answer—at least, not a single one, or a simple one. Colonel Granger had been on a four-decade road to Hell that began before Scott Brodie was even born. There were probably lots of twists and turns along the way, and maybe even a few off-ramps, but Granger hadn’t taken them. And maybe it didn’t matter anymore how Charles Granger’s soul had been poisoned. All that mattered now was that the son of a bitch was dead.
We got him, Harry. We got him, Anna.
Brodie realized at some point that Captain Soliman had left, and someone was applying a tourniquet around his upper thigh, and he was lifted onto a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. Someone put an oxygen mask to his face, and someone put a blood pressure cuff on his arm. The sirens wailed and the ambulance sped down the road, and he heard rapid-fire German among the EMTs surrounding him as someone placed an IV line in his arm and began administering fluids.
He thought of Taylor. He hoped she was okay. And David Kim.
He thought of the people who were not okay and never would be. Harry Vance. Anna Albrecht. Anna’s father, Manfred. The three other executed Stasi informants. The three murdered Syrian immigrants. The young Iraqi man, Hasan al-Kazimi. And the dead whose names were written on those blood vials.
Brodie pictured Odin’s corpse in the road, lying in the blood-drenched snow. The bastard was dead, but death was too easy an end for him.
He said through the oxygen mask, “He… deserved worse…”
An EMT put a hand on his shoulder and said, “You are going to be all right.”
Brodie assumed he meant physically. Mentally, maybe not so all right. Why else would he be doing this for a living? Justice. And there was enough injustice in the world to keep him employed for a long time. But that came with a cost.
He recalled a famous line from the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
That was the big trick.
CHAPTER 54
Scott Brodie sat alone in a hospital bed in a dimly lit room. Through the window he could see the hazy sky of nighttime Berlin. He listened to the white noise of the IV infusion pump and the occasional footsteps of doctors, nurses, and orderlies in the hallway outside the closed door.
Brodie—along with Maggie Taylor and David Kim—had spent the last forty-eight hours in a biocontainment facility on the outskirts of the city. For Brodie and Taylor, it was a precautionary measure. For David Kim, it was to save his life.
