settle down. He had fathered a child in South America, and though it
had been twenty years ago, he still sent support to the woman and his
daughter, whom he had seen several times secretly, but never officially
met. There were a couple of people he had deleted that he'd felt sorry
for, and wished he hadn't had to do them.
So he wasn't mentally disturbed or unstable, he had just gotten into a
line of work that involved terminal violence, and had happened to be
very good at it.
Of course, he had been in business long enough to realize that most
governments operated with the same kind of amorality he did in many--if
not most--areas. Certainly in those areas where public scrutiny wasn't
likely.
He had known federal prosecutors who had let multiple murderers go free
so that they could make a case against major drug dealers. He had
known intelligence officers who had looked the other way and allowed
whole villages of innocent civilians to be killed because to do
otherwise would have jeopardized some covert operation. He had known
boy-soldiers who had cranked up their assault rifles and hosed
grandmothers and babies into bloody pulp--for no other reason than
because they had been having a real bad day. All of these people had
convinced themselves they had been working for a greater good, that the
end justified the means. That what they had done was, in fact,
moral.
Ventura did not try to fool himself that way.
Protecting a man who had created some kind of mind-control device he
wanted to sell to a foreign power for a lot of money was not much in
the grand cosmic scheme of things. Ventura wasn't going to get any
piece of the man's action, nor did he want it. He was hired to do a
job, and he would do that. Money was not even a way to keep score, it
didn't mean anything, especially if you had enough of it tucked away to
live the rest of your life without ever lifting a finger. No, it was
the personal challenge, the achievement of goals you set for yourself,
that mattered. When he was hired to kill somebody, he killed them.
When he was hired to keep somebody alive, he kept them alive. Simple.
Up here in the woods where he could command the lines of fire around
his client, keeping him alive would be fairly easy. If another
birdwatching group showed up, Ventura wouldn't make any assumptions,
but he certainly would consider them a potential threat.
Outright assassination wasn't likely, not yet, anyway.
No, the worry would be kidnapping, torture, then execution.
And it would be a lot harder to protect the man once they went back to
civilization.
Well. Worry about that later. A man with his mind too far into
tomorrow was more likely to get blindsided by somebody today. You had
to consider the future, of course, but you didn't live there. Be in
the moment, that was the way of it.
Always.
The second man in the surveillance unit watched Ventura approach him
across the parking lot, lit by the yellow bug lights mounted on tall
