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  “I’m sure you would like to kill me,” Dale said. “This is impossible, of course. But if you try, you, your wife, and your son will be dead within the minute.”

  “Who are the targets?”

  “They are the two people who can save your wife and son by dying within the hour.” The man cut through the bonds around Carl’s ankles, then casually went to work on the rope at his wrists. “You’ll find some shoes and clean clothes outside the window.” With a faint pop, the last tie yielded to Englishman’s blade.

  Kelly whimpered, and Carl looked over to see that her eyes were open again. Face white, muted by horror and pain.

  For a long moment, lying there freed beside the woman he loved, Carl allowed a terrible fury to roll through his mind. Despite Dale’s claim, Carl knew that he stood at least an even chance of killing their captor.

  He wanted to touch Kelly and to tell her that she would be okay. That he would save her and their son. He wanted to tear the heart out of the man who was now watching them with a dispassionate stare, like a robot assigned to a simple task.

  He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry. He wanted to kill himself. Instead, he lay still.

  Kelly closed her eyes and started to sob again. He wished she would stop. He wanted to shout at her and demand that she stop this awful display of fear. Didn’t she know that fear was now their greatest enemy?

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” Dale said. “It’s quite a long run.”

  Carl slid his legs off the bed, stood, and walked to the window, thinking that he was a monster for being so callous, never mind that it was for her sake that he steeled himself.

  I’m in a nightmare. He reached for the gun. But the Makarov’s cold steel handle felt nothing like a dream. It felt like salvation.

  “Carl?”

  Kelly’s voice shattered his reprieve. Carl was sure that he would spin where he stood, shoot Dale through the forehead, and take his chances with the implant or whatever other means they had of killing him and his family. The only way he knew to deal with such a compelling urge was to shut down his emotions entirely. He clenched his jaw and shoved the gun into his waistband.

  “I love you, Carl.”

  He looked at her without seeing her, swallowed his terror. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He grabbed both sides of the window, thrust his head out to scan the grounds, withdrew, shoved his right leg through the opening, and rolled onto the grass outside. When he came to his feet, he was facing south. How did he know it was south? He just did.

  He would go south and he would kill.

  2

  Carl found the clothes in a small duffel bag behind a bush along the outside wall. He dressed quickly, pulled on a pair of cargo pants and black running shoes, and tied a red bandanna around his neck to hide the blood that had oozed from a cut at the base of his skull, roughly two inches behind his right ear. Odd to think that a single remote signal could take his life.

  Odd, not terrifying. Not even odd, actually. Interesting. Familiar.

  He snatched up the Makarov, shoved it behind his back, and set out at a fast jog. South.

  He was in a small compound, ten buildings in a small valley surrounded by a deciduous forest. Three of the buildings were concrete; the rest appeared to be made of wood. Most had small windows, perhaps eighteen inches square. Tin roofs. No landscaping, just bare dirt and grass. To the west, a shooting range stretched into the trees farther than he could see, well over three thousand yards.

  The day was hot, midafternoon. Quiet except for the chirping of a few birds and the rustle of a light breeze through the trees.

  On stilts, a single observation post with narrow, rectangular windows towered over the trees. There were eyes behind those windows, watching him.

  All of this he assimilated before realizing that he was taking in his surroundings in such a calculating, clinical manner. His wife lay on a bed with a shattered femur, his son was in some dark hole in one of these buildings, and Carl was running south, away from them in order to save them.

  Three miles would take fifteen minutes at a healthy jog for the fittest man. Was he fit? He’d run a hundred yards and felt only slightly winded. He was fit. As part of Special Forces, he would be.

  But why was he forced to rely on instinct and calculation instead of clear memory to determine even these simple facts?

  He brought his mind back to the task at hand. What were the consequences of entering a hotel and murdering a man and his wife? Death for the man and his wife. Orphaned children. A prison sentence for the killer.

  What were the consequences of allowing this man and his wife to live? Death for Kelly and Matthew.

  He was in a black hole from which there was no escape. But blackness was familiar territory to him, wasn’t it? A pang of sorrow stabbed him. There was something about blackness that made him want to cry.

  Carl ran faster now, weaving through the trees, pushing back the emotions that flogged him, and doing so quite easily. When the blackness encroached, he focused on a single pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, because only there, in the light, could he find the strength to hold the darkness at bay.

  He had no way to know with any certainty when the hour he’d been given would expire, but time was now irrelevant. He possessed limits and he would push himself to those limits. Any distraction caused by worry or fear would only interfere with his success.

  He crested a gentle hill outside the forest roughly fifteen minutes into the run. He pulled up behind a tree, panting. There was the town. Only one neighborhood in his line of sight contained multi-story buildings—the Andrassy would be there. After a quick scan of the country leading to the town, he angled for the buildings at a jog, slower now, senses keen.

  His shirttail hid the gun at his waist, but nothing else about him would be so easily hidden once he encountered people. Was Kelly right? Were they really in Hungary? He didn’t speak Hungarian but doubted he looked much different from any ordinary Hungarian. On the other hand, he was sweating from a hard run and his neck was wrapped in a bright bandanna—these facts wouldn’t go unnoticed.

  The hotel was heavily guarded, Englishman had said. How could Carl possibly race into a completely foreign town, barge into a well-guarded hotel, shoot two possible innocents, and expect any good to come of it?

  Images of Kelly flooded his mind. She was strapped to the bed, right femur shattered, face stained with tears, praying desperately for him to save her. And Matthew . . .

  He ran past farming lots that bordered the blacktop entering the town from his angle of approach; past people milking a cow, raking straw, riding a bicycle, kicking a soccer ball. He ignored them all and jogged.

  How empty his mind was. How vacant. How hopeless. How disconnected from the details swimming around him, though he noticed everything.

  He slowed to a fast walk when he reached the edge of town and searched for a hotel matching Englishman’s description.

  None. No hotel at all. And time was running low.

  Carl flagged the rider of an old black Schwinn bicycle and spoke quickly when the older man’s blue eyes fixed on him. “Andrassy Hotel?”

  The man put his feet down to balance himself, looked Carl over once, and then pointed toward the west, spouting something in Hungarian.

  Carl nodded and ran west. On each side of the asphalt ribbon, people stopped to watch him. Clearly, he looked like more than a commoner out for an afternoon jog. But unless they represented an immediate threat, he would ignore them. For the moment they were only curious.

  Assault has three allies: speed, surprise, and power. Carl didn’t have the power to overwhelm more than a few guards. Speed and surprise, on the other hand, could work for him, assuming he was unexpected.

  The Andrassy was a square four-story building constructed out of red brick. A Hungarian flag flapped lazily on a pole jutting out from the wall above large revolving doors. Two long black Mercedes waited in the circular drive—possibly par
t of the guard.

  Carl veered toward the back of the hotel. A large garbage bin smelled of rotting vegetables. The kitchen was nearby.

  He bounded over three metal steps and tried a gray metal door. Unlocked. He pushed it open, stepped into a dim hallway, and pulled the door shut behind him.

  He followed the sound of clattering dishes down the cluttered hall and through a doorway ten paces ahead on his right. He grabbed an apron from a laundry bin against the wall and wiped the sweat from his face. He slipped into the apron. Barely there long enough to answer a casual glance from a passing employee.

  It was all about speed now.

  If he was right, there would be a service elevator nearby. If he was right, there would be guards posted outside the third-floor room that held the targets. If he was right, he had roughly ten minutes to kill and run.

  Carl took deep breaths, calming his heart and lungs. The soft ding of an elevator bell confirmed his first guess.

  Kill and run. Somewhere deep in the black places of his mind, a voice objected, echoing faintly, but his mind refused to focus on that voice. His mind was on the killings because the killings would save his wife and son.

  There were two ways to the third floor. The first required stealth—assuming a server’s identity on a mission to deliver room service, perhaps. He dismissed this idea because it was predictable, thus undermining his greatest allies, speed and surprise.

  The second approach was far bolder and therefore less predictable.

  Carl breathed deeply through his nostrils and closed his eyes. He’d been here before, hadn’t he? He couldn’t remember where or why, but he was in familiar territory.

  Unless the guards were exceptional, they would hesitate before shooting an unarmed man who approached them.

  There were towels in the laundry basket. Carl quickly pulled off his shoes, socks, apron, bandanna, and shirt, pushing them behind the laundry bin. With a flip of his fingers, he unsnapped his cargo pants, let them fall around his ankles, and tied the pistol to his thigh using the bandanna. He pulled his pants back up and rolled up the legs to just below his knees.

  Bare feet, bare legs, bare chest, bare back—no sign of a weapon, even to a trained eye.

  Satisfied, he draped a large white towel over his head and around his neck so that it covered the blood at the back of his neck and fell over his chest on either side. A man who’d just come from a swim or a shower. Unusual to be found walking through a hotel, particularly one that didn’t have a pool, which he suspected to be the case here, but not so unusual as to cause alarm. He had taken a shower upstairs, come down on a quick errand, and was headed back to his room.

  Carl grabbed the towel on each side, strolled down the hall, and walked into the open, whistling a nondescript tune.

  LASZLO KALMAN drummed his thin fingers on the table, a habit that annoyed Agotha more than she cared to admit. His uncut nails made a clicking sound like a rat running across a wooden floor. They were all firmly in this man’s grasp: she as much as his killers.

  Agotha loved and hated him. Kalman could not be defined easily, only because he refused to explain himself. But then, evil rarely did explain itself.

  Still, she could not ignore her attraction to the raw power that accompanied Kalman’s exceptional lust for death. He feared nothing except his own creations, killers who could slay a man with as little feeling as he himself possessed.

  Of all his understudies, Englishman was the one he feared most, although soon enough Carl might surpass even Englishman, a fact that wasn’t lost on anyone. It was this tenuous nature of the game that brought Kalman satisfaction, not the millions of Euros this X Group of his was paid for its assassins’ skills.

  “How much time?” Kalman asked.

  Agotha glanced at the wall clock behind them. “Thirty-five minutes. Perhaps I should call Englishman.”

  “He knows the price of failure.”

  “And if he does fail? We’ve come so far.”

  Agotha rarely got involved in any of the operations directly. Her place was here, in the compound’s hospital. But now they were on the verge of something that even she struggled to understand.

  “Englishman won’t fail,” Laszlo said.

  “I was speaking of Carl.”

  Laszlo hesitated. “That’s your department. I don’t care either way.”

  Agotha bit her lower lip. To fail now would be a terrible setback. The shooting of two people was all that stood in the way. Correction: the shooting of two people by this one man who had been meticulously selected and trained was all that stood in the way.

  “There’s something different about Carl,” she said.

  Kalman looked at her without emotion. Without comment.

  He returned his gaze to the monitor and resumed clicking his fingernails on the wood.

  3

  Carl strolled toward the service elevator in bare feet, hoping that his wet bangs looked like the work of a shower rather than a hard run. In the event he raised an alarm prematurely, he would resort to force.

  He’d timed his approach by the elevator’s bell, but by the time he caught sight of it, the door was already closing. Empty or not, he didn’t know.

  At least a dozen people were staring his way from the main lobby on the right. Casual stares, curious stares. For the moment.

  Carl stopped his whistling and ran for the door—a man hurrying to catch an elevator. The towel slipped off his neck and fell to the ground. He reached the elevator call button, gave it a quick hit with his palm, and reached back for the towel as the door slid open.

  The car was empty. Good.

  He stepped in, pushed the button for the fourth floor, and resumed his whistling. The door slid closed, and he shut his eyes to calm his nerves.

  Who are you, Carl?

  He didn’t know precisely who he was, did he? He knew his name. Scattered details of a dark past. He knew that Kelly was his wife and that Matthew was his son, and he knew that he would give his life for them if he needed to.

  But why was his past so foggy? Who were his captors? Why had they chosen him to do their killing? Whatever they’d done to his head was more profound than a mere drug-induced effect.

  He grunted and shoved the questions aside.

  Do you believe?

  “I believe,” he said softly.

  What do you believe?

  “I believe that I will kill these two to save my wife and son.”

  Belief. Something about belief mattered greatly.

  The elevator bell clanged.

  He stepped onto the fourth floor, reached back into the elevator, pushed the button for the third floor, and was running toward the stairwell at the end of the hall before the elevator doors closed.

  Despite the absence of specific memories, he seemed to be able to access whatever information he needed for this killing business from a vast pool of knowledge without a second thought. For example, the basic fact that going to a target’s floor by elevator was unwise on two counts: First, because all eyes watching the elevator call numbers above the doors on any floor would know where it stopped. Second, because the elevator’s arrival was almost always preceded by a bell, which would naturally warn any posted guard.

  Better to take the stairs or the elevator to a different floor. Carl had chosen the elevator because that’s what would be expected of a nutty tourist who’d gone down to the lobby for a candy bar or something after a shower.

  These kinds of techniques didn’t require any thought on his part. His training in the Special Forces had clearly become instinctive.

  Carl ran down the stairs, pulled up by the third-floor access door, and waited for the sound of the elevator bell, heart pounding. This was it.

  Kill and run. What am I doing?

  The bell sounded. He pushed the door open and stepped into the third-floor hall.

  Two guards dressed in dark suits stood across the hall, twenty yards down. Neither sported a weapon. Their heads were turned away from him, t
oward the elevator.

  He hurried toward them, covered half the distance before the closest guard turned his way.

  Carl cried out in pain, doubled over, and grabbed his right foot. Without hesitation, he inserted his thumb between his second and third toes and dug his nail into the skin with enough force to draw blood.

  He pulled his hand away, red with a streak of blood.

  The guard demanded something of him in Hungarian.

  Carl ignored him. Examined his foot, feigning shock. Muttered loudly.

  Another question, this one from the second guard.

  He gave them a quizzical look. Both had their eyes on his foot. He hobbled toward them. “Sorry. Sorry, I just . . .”

  Carl was three paces from them when one of the guards reached under his jacket. Carl took two fast strides, smashed his left palm under the closest guard’s chin while stepping past him. The second guard had pulled a pistol clear of his coat when Carl’s right fist slammed into the man’s gun hand. Using his momentum, Carl propelled his head into the guard’s chin.

  No one else dies, Englishman had said.

  The first guard slumped, unconscious, hopefully not dead. The second stood dazed. Carl grabbed a fistful of hair and jerked the man’s head into his rising knee.

  The man grunted and dropped like a sack of coal. Carl broke his fall with his right leg. The tussle may have been heard inside, but he couldn’t change that now.

  One of the two should have a key card to gain access to the room if needed. He quickly searched both men, found the card in the second guard’s jacket.

  Hall still clear.

  No need for the Makarov tied to his leg. Carl retrieved both of the guards’ guns, shoved one behind his back and checked the other for a chambered cartridge, slipped the key card into its slot, and twisted the knob when a green light indicated he’d successfully unlocked the door.

  He stepped into the room, gun extended.

  THE ABSENCE of a bed indicated that the room Joseph and Mary Fabin had rented was a suite. He’d been prepared to shoot from the threshold if necessary—time was running short and there was a chance the guards would regain consciousness soon.