arms, legs, or fingers behind. The word
He hated looking in the mirror. He relived that day every time he caught a glimpse of himself. Not just that day, but the aftermath. The inquests. The way his superiors had let him down. The way he’d been mistreated and spat out by the system. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he then found out he’d been lied to. The whole country had. The war was a sham. A catastrophic sham. And then, to add insult to injury—literally—he watched as the same lying bastards who’d sent him to war, from the lowliest congressman to a war hero who’d come close to becoming president, were voting against funding increases for those who, like him, had come home with debilitating physical and mental injuries. He watched as soldiers were hauled in, tried for every minor trespass of the rules of engagement, and sacrified for political expediency by men who’d never been within a hundred miles of a firefight. And with each new revelation about the lies and manipulations behind the war—the ones that had cost his buddies their lives, and him his face—he got angrier. More bitter. More vindictive. And out of the anger and the bitterness came a realization that he had to take matters into his own hands if he was going to change anything.
His wounded status made it easier for him to set up shop. Before long, he had dozens of highly trained, properly equipped men on his payroll, working for him in the hellholes of Afghanistan, Iraq, or anywhere else people were paying him to send them. Doing jobs that no one else wanted to touch. Jobs no one wanted to be seen doing. Jobs where they weren’t subject to arbitrary rules drawn up by politicians sipping twenty-year-old Cognac. And somehow, with each new job, he found more solace, more satisfaction. It became a revenge fix he couldn’t live without. And despite the hundreds of thousands of dollars in government contracts and fees his little operation was pulling in, despite having a small army of trusted, battle-hardened men ready and able to do whatever he asked them to do, he was still out there, on the front line, with them. And when this job came up, he immediately realized it was one he couldn’t delegate. To be doing it was satisfying on a whole different level.
If this thing could really achieve what they thought it could, then he sure as hell was going to make sure nothing went wrong.
Still, Drucker didn’t sound thrilled by his news.
“I’m not comfortable with Sherwood out there, running around,” Drucker told him. “You need to put him away before it gets out of hand.”
“Shouldn’t take long,” Maddox assured him. “He’s a murder suspect. He doesn’t have too many options.”
“Let me know when it’s taken care of,” Drucker concluded, before ending the call.
Maddox set his phone down on his desk and stewed on the night’s events. Matt Sherwood had proven far more resilient than his brother. They were clearly cut from a different cloth, something Maddox had already known, given Matt’s record. All of which necessitated a more concerted approach.
His men were monitoring police communications, but that wasn’t enough. Matt Sherwood was taking impulsive, unexpected initiatives like breaking into Bellinger’s apartment. Unexpected initiatives that could prove to be a major nuisance.
Maddox cleared his mind and put himself in Matt’s shoes, replaying every step the ex-con had taken, trying to get a better feel for the way Matt thought. He extrapolated ahead, looking for the straws Matt would be grasping at, straws he needed to cut down before Matt got to them. He thought back to the reports his men had called in and decided to plow that field.
He turned to his screen and brought up the phone logs of all the peripherals linked to Bellinger and to Matt. His eye settled on the last entry—the phone call from a coworker of Bellinger’s by the name of Csaba Komlosy. He clicked on the small icon by the entry and listened to the phone call, a message left on Bellinger’s home phone. He listened to it a second time, then went back and listened to the first call between the two scientists. The one that had precipitated the previous evening’s confrontations.
The Bullet checked his watch and picked up his phone.
Chapter 25
Boston, Massachusetts
Larry Rydell stared blankly at his BlackBerry’s screen for a moment before setting it down on his desk. He’d just gotten off the phone with Rebecca. Again. Two calls from his daughter in less than twenty- four hours. Far more than he was used to. They were close, for sure, despite his divorce from her mother almost a decade earlier. But Rebecca was nineteen. She was wild and fabulous and free, in her second year at Brown, and although surprisingly grounded for someone with the world at her feet, regular phone calls to Daddy had—as expected—been increasingly crowded out of the whirlwind of activity that her life had become.
He loved chatting with her. Loved seeing her so excited, so enthralled, so curious about something, even with the undercurrent of fear in her bubbly voice. Loved hearing from her twice a day.
But he hated lying to her.
And he had. Twice now, in less than a day. And, no doubt, he’d have to go on lying to her—if all went well, for the rest of his life.
He felt a small tearing inside at the realization, then the tear widened as the bigger picture of what was going on hit him again.
It was out there now. There was no turning back.
The thought terrified and elated him in equal measure.
It had all seemed so surreal when he’d first considered the possibility, just four years earlier. And yet it had all come about so fast. The breakup of the ice shelf had been expected. They’d been monitoring it through satellite imagery, but it had come sooner than they projected. And they’d been ready. Ready to capitalize on it.
Ready to change the world.
He thought back to that fateful evening with Reece, three years earlier. A great dinner. A bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. A couple of Cohiba Esplendidos. A long, inspired late-night chat about the possibilities of the manufacturing breakthrough that Reece had achieved. The many and diverse applications it could be used for. The leaps of imagination that great minds sometimes conjured up and actually turned into reality. And then, the mere mention of a word.
One word. A catalyst that sent Rydell’s mind tripping into uncharted territory. Dark, mysterious, wonderful, impossible territory. And here he was, less than four years later, and the impossible had become a reality.
Reece. The brilliant scientist’s face drifted into his consciousness. Other faces materialized alongside it— young, talented, dedicated, all of them—and with them, a familiar cold, hard feeling deep inside him. He felt his very soul shrivel at the memory of that last day in Namibia. After the last test. After they’d all shared the elation of watching their hard work bear fruit in such spectacular, bone-chilling fashion. And then it all went wrong. He could still see Maddox, standing there beside him, pulling the trigger. He could hear himself shout, hear the bullet thumping into Reece’s back, see his friend’s body jerk before toppling into Danny Sherwood’s arms.
The sounds and images of that day had been gnawing away at him ever since.
He hated himself for not having been able to stop it. And despite what the others told him, none of the platitudes, none of the cliches about the greater good or about sacrificing the lives of the few for the lives of the many—none of it worked.
He hadn’t read them properly. He hadn’t realized to what lengths they were prepared to go. And it was too late to do anything about it. They needed each other. If everything he’d worked for was to succeed, he just had to swallow it all and keep going.
Which he did, even though it wasn’t easy. He could still feel it, deep inside, eating away at him, piece by
