ONE
The Scope
WYATT
Wyoming wind cuts across the ridge. It carries the scent of dry sage and crushed granite. The temperature hovers just above freezing, stripping the heat from the stone beneath me. My muscles lock with the deep, settling stiffness of fifty hours holding the same position. I've trained my body to ignore the elements, to slow my heart rate down to a crawl so the crosshairs don't drift. I don't shiver. I don't move.
My right eye stays welded to the glass of the scope.
Two thousand, six hundred and forty yards. A mile and a half.
At this range, the world reduces to mathematics and windage, to the spin drift of a bullet and the curve of the earth. But the crosshairs rest over something entirely human. The front door of a secluded timber-frame house in the valley below.
The rifle stock bites into my shoulder. The McMillan TAC-338 is a heavy anchor. Familiar. Unrelenting. For fifteen years, this weapon served as my identity. First as a Ranger. Then Delta. And for the last four years, a freelance contract sniper.
A hitman for hire.
A pariah.
Frost's voice surfaces in the quiet spaces of my mind. Cold. Unforgiving.You killed an innocent man, Harrison. You're no brother of mine.
He's right. I pulled the trigger on a broker's word, and a federal witness died. He was caught in the crossfire of a hit I never should have taken. I carry his blood on my hands. I see his face every time I close my eyes. The stain doesn't wash out with time or distance. I'll carry it until they put me in the ground.
The exile Frost handed down is earned. The code is absolute, never harm an innocent.
I broke it.
The isolation of this mountain is my penance. I'm a morally bankrupt man hunting the men who made me a murderer. Every broker, every middleman, every handler in the Ares syndicate. I'll dismantle their network bullet by bullet until I find the man who gave the order.
Down in the valley, the front door of the timber house swings open.
Adelaide Hart steps onto the porch.
Addy.
She wears faded denim jeans and a gray thermal henley. A wet braid hangs over one shoulder, dripping water onto the dark wood of the porch. A Glock 19 rests on her right hip in a worn leather holster.
She carries it from the moment she wakes to the moment she lies down at night. She's a federal forensic accountant auditing a massive sanctions-evasion network, a woman who hides her gender behind the byline A.D. Hart. But out here, she's simply a woman living alone on land shared with wolves and coyotes. She refuses to be prey.
I adjust the magnification. The glass brings her close enough to count the stray hairs escaping her braid.
Fifty hours of overwatch. The MREs taste like ash. The water in my canteen is half-frozen. But I wait. Waiting for the broker's verifier to show up. Waiting to document his face, add him to the list, and climb one step closer to the top of the chain.
Fifty hours of watching Adelaide Hart live her life.
She doesn't know a killer haunts the high ground.
Yesterday afternoon, the temperature spiked, turning the valley floor into an oven. She walked down the dirt path to the creek behind the property. I tracked her movement through the scope, sweeping the tree line for threats.
Then she stopped on the rocky bank and stripped off her clothes.
She waded into the freezing, snow-melt waters and submerged herself completely.
I stayed on the glass. I should have looked away. I should have maintained the detachment that kept me alive for fifteen years.
But the late afternoon sun hit the water, painting the lines of her skin in gold. The light illuminated the swell of her breasts, her peaks pulling tight from the freezing current. It traced the inward sweep of her waist and the flare of her hips as she sank below the surface.
She's not a faceless target anymore. She's flesh and blood.
